in the old days, the scientists of the Academy used to demonstrate the spontaneous generation of life: flies from rotting meat, mice from stored grain. What Gaius was seeing looked very like that: a tiny red spider forming out of a drop of blood. What shocked him was that Lydia snatched it up and swallowed it.
He grimaced. “Good trick,” he said. “How did you do it?”
She picked up the knife and did it again. This time, she placed the spider—it was a different color, green—on his palm, and handed him a folding lens.
“Look at it carefully.”
He peered through the magnifier. It wasn’t a spider. “That’s a—”
“Don’t shout.”
“Gods above.” He held out his hand. It trembled a little. The minute Multiplier was turning around, as though looking for somewhere to run. He pushed his sleeve back from his wrist.
“Take it,” he said. “Eat it, if you must.”
“Swallow it yourself,” said Lydia, daring him. Her eyes were bright. “Why don’t you? It’ll make you young forever, or so I was told. It’s worked for me, so far.”
He could believe her. “Take it,” he pleaded.
She caught his bared wrist and kissed the bad thing away. “There,” she said. “Well, not many people even have the chance to pass up a chance like that.”
Gaius wiped his hands on his knees. “Is that how it works? How the Bright Star Cultures spread?”
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose I’m a Bright Star Culture person, come to think of it.”
“You haven’t—?”
“Proselytized?” She leaned back and smiled. “I wouldn’t tell you if I had, but . . . no.”
“Why are you telling me this? Why did you show me that?”
“Because you needed evidence. These things, they live in my blood, small as cells. When it spills there’s a sort of dog-eat-dog situation.”
He nodded, understanding what he’d just seen, and why she’d told him. Telling him was no risk to her—he could not denounce her to the New Babylonian apparatus without giving them an intelligence coup that would strengthen them against his own country; her secret was now his, and, if she was thinking ahead as fast as he was, Illyria’s. He had to get her out.
“Anyway,” she went on, “they pass on bits and pieces of memories. All sorts of memories, of their progenitors and of the organisms they’ve been in. That’s how I know that Multiplier navigation is precise enough to jump straight to a planet’s surface.”
“Why didn’t they do that back in the first invasion?”
“Oh, I don’t suppose they were expecting to be attacked. If it really is the Bright Star Cultures that are here now, they’ll be expecting trouble.” She smiled as if to herself. “The folks back on Mingulay and Croatan knew Volkov of old, and they knew he was coming here. They’ll know what to expect.”
“But what can they do?”
“With skiffs that can set up lightspeed jumps with an accuracy of a few meters? I can think of quite a lot they could do.”
“When you put it that way,” Gaius said, “so can I.”
And all of them would tip the military balance against New Babylon. Whatever happened—and he was finding his assumptions about the long-feared arrival of the Bright Star Cultures shaken by Lydia’s words and actions—it was surely better that Illyria should face it in a position of strength. If New Babylon’s space defenses were knocked out, and the Regime itself tottering, the opportunities would be huge. He had to return to Junopolis, and take Lydia with him if he could. He was just turning this over in his mind when Lydia reached out and caught his arm.
“Don’t move,” she said. She was looking past his face. “A couple of cops just came into the bar. They’re looking for somebody. Probably after one of the local loan sharks. Play it cool.”
A moment later two men in dark suits came over. Gaius looked up at them with what he hoped was an expression of surprised but not alarmed query.
“Lydia de Tenebre?” one of them said. “We’d like you to accompany us to—”
Gaius didn’t so much see as later reconstruct what happened next. Lydia heaved her end of the table upward, crouched down and grabbed the middle of both sides, and threw it straight at them. They both stumbled back and then fell over backwards as the table, which Lydia leaped on like a flying cat as it hit, crashed down on top of them. Arms and legs projected from beneath it. Broken glass slithered across the floor.
Gaius was still sitting on the bench, a glass halfway between his mouth and where the table had been.
Lydia turned on the upsided table like a dancer on a low stage, and reached out a hand. “I think we should leave,” she said.
They ran to the door, past people who were carefully not stopping them—whether out of hostility to the police, or to maintain their cover, or fear of Lydia’s suddenly revealed fighting prowess. Lydia looked both ways before going out.
“They’ll have backup,” she said.
A car parked a hundred meters down the road revved its engine and headed straight at them. Lydia led the way in a dash across the street. Gaius distinctly saw the car’s fender a couple of meters away as he followed. Lydia vaulted the wall. Brakes squealed. Gaius hesitated at a drop of three meters onto slippery boulders, heard running footsteps, rolled onto the wall, swung down, clung and dropped. Lydia was already on her feet and steadied him as he landed and slipped.
The tide was out. The shore smelled like bad breath. Lydia ran alongside the bottom of the wall, surefooted. Gaius stumbled after her. He glanced up and saw two heads bobbing along above the top of the wall, keeping pace easily. This was hopeless. When he looked ahead again Lydia had vanished. A few steps more took him to the mouth of the tunnel she’d vanished into. He saw her face, pale in the light from the harbor. He ducked in after her. The tunnel’s roof was low and its floor was a phosphorescent green stream. He tried not to stand in it.
“Industrial effluent,” said Lydia. “You can walk in it. Just don’t drink it. Come on.”
Behind him, he heard a couple of crunching thuds, followed by yelled curses, then footsteps. He ran.
She had a pocket torch, and the faint glow from the effluent provided a path. It didn’t last long. A few tens of meters in, Lydia turned off into a side tunnel just as voices echoed along from the entrance to the main one. There were other tunnels branching off, and Lydia led him through a maze of them. The voices and splashes of the pursuit faded after a couple more turns. Ten minutes later they reached a ladder up to a manhole and emerged in an alleyway off the lower end of Astronaut Avenue. Lydia rolled the heavy lid back into place, brushed her hands, and stood up.
“How the hells did you do that?”
“I’m not sure,” said Lydia. “I may have seen the drainage system map in the Library.”
“That’s not an explanation.”
“No,” she said.
She strolled to a standpipe—it was not obvious, but she moved like she knew where to find it—and ran the tap over her boots. Gaius looked down at his shoes and trouser cuffs and decided to do the same. Better to be wet with water than with that gunk. It looked vaguely acidic and its smell, as it weakened in the open air, was becoming more nauseating, like cheap gin on the sinuses. He took off his shoes and rinsed them, then his socks and feet. Even wrung out, his socks felt horrible.
“Where now?”
“First thing I’m going to do,” said Lydia, “is go to the nearest public phone booth and call home. See if the cops have come for them, too.”
There was a phone around the corner. Lydia put down the receiver after trying a dozen numbers.
“Nobody home. Not good.”
They walked on up Astronaut Avenue, pending some decision on what to do next. The streets were a bit livelier now, though not by the standards of Junopolis at this time of a fine night. No shops open, and few beer parlors or places of amusement. Three armored personnel carriers crossed a junction a few hundred meters ahead. Gaius desperately wanted to get off the street.
“Why did they come after you?”
“For the same reason as you did, I guess.”
Gaius thought about that. “Let’s get off the street,” he said. He stopped outside a beer parlor. “In here.”
“That’s a bureaucrats’ watering hole. One of the bugged bars I told you about.”
“All the better,” said Gaius. “We don’t need to worry about that anymore. We need to worry about being bundled into a van.”
The place was full of men and women in suits. Gaius was cynically unsurprised that nobody stared. He bought a brace of drastically overpriced stiff drinks and sat down with Lydia in an alcove. There was a menu on the table.
“Suddenly hungry?” said Gaius. Lydia nodded. They ordered grilled patties of minced beef, the main item.
“The seafood used to be wonderful,” Lydia sighed. The waiter went away.
“What do you want to do?” Gaius asked.
“Walls have ears,” said Lydia.
Gaius leaned back and sighed. “I know about surveillance here,” he said. “Believe it or not, I know more than you do. It’s used for evidence-gathering, not rapid response. Think about it. Unless there’s a general alert out for us, or for you, all that’s happening is that we’re being taped, and sometime in the next few days some bored policeman is going to listen to us. And then only if they have reason to think this place’s tapes are worth checking. Maybe a description of us has gone out to police patrol vehicles, but that’s to cars, not bars. Besides, dragging people out of places like this is not their style. It tends to upset the lower middle cadre. So relax.”
“All right,” she said. “What I want to do is find out what’s happened to my family.”
“Have you ever been pulled in before?”
She shook her head. “They interrogate all the humans coming off Trader ships, release them, keep an eye on us but that’s it.”
“Any others like you?”
“Maybe one or two,” she said, sounding evasive. She nibbled her lip. “I’ve checked this, I’ve asked around discreetly. The former Traders do sort of hang together, help each other out. It’s only because of that that we haven’t all ended up in a heap at the bottom.”
“That’s still a lot of people to check.”
“It was,” she said dryly. “But remember, most of the ships that come back haven’t been in the Bright Star Culture’s expanding sphere, and of those that have, very few have directly encountered the Mingulayans or the Spiders. We were one of the first to meet them, on Novakkad. Things were at a pretty early stage there. Mostly the krakens or the saurs pick up that something’s going on within minutes of coming out of the jump, and they don’t even land—they jump straight back. It’s like a squid reflex.”
Gaius was still smiling at this image when the waiter returned with two plates of food and three men with guns. Two of them looked bruised, and familiar. The third was a bit taller, older, and heavier, and acted like he’d had to take charge.
Lydia swallowed her drink and stood up. There could be no surprising them this time.
“Looks like there was a general alert out for me after all.”
“It was the remark about the seafood,” said the waiter.
Gaius held his hands out and stood up, sidling from the alcove.
“This lady is under the protection of the Free Duchy of Illyria,” he said. “She has just asked me for asylum. I demand you let us go to the Consulate.”
“The Consulate is closed,” said the largest of the three men. “She’s coming with us. And you, Mr. Gonatus, are persona non fucking grata. The only place you’re going is the train back to Illyria.”
“I have an airline ticket—”
“The airport is closed.”
“—and there are no trains back to Illyria.”
“Oh yes, there are,” said the big police agent. “Only they don’t go quite all the way. Just to the foot of the mountains.” He glanced at his watch and grinned nastily. “Consider yourself lucky. In a few hours you wouldn’t be expelled for activities incompatible. You’d be fucking shot. So move it.”
Gaius looked at Lydia. She was giving such a good impression of being unafraid that for a moment he wondered if she hadn’t been setting him up. He dismissed it. She was brave and stoical, that was all. And probably difficult to kill or permanently damage. That must help.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“There’s nothing more you can do,” she said. She was shrugging into her jacket, which one of the men had returned to her after searching it. “Just go.”
He thought about what the policeman had implied, and wondered if Lydia had picked up on it.
“See you after the war,” he said.
The train left an hour before midnight. The one thing for which Gaius felt thankful was that his clothes had been left undamaged in his ransacked hotel room. He might not have his samples, but at least he had dry socks. He had filled the empty sample case with bottles of water and as much food as he could carry, bought in a hurry from the station’s stalls and turning stale within hours. In every other respect he felt deeply ungrateful. The train was packed. He almost envied the people squeezed together on the wooden seats or sitting on the floor. The northwest train out of New Babylon was officially for latifundia peasants on their way to and from the official markets; and indeed there were quite a lot of peasants, mostly very old women, or men with faces red from sun and drink, snoring in cheap flashy suits. But unofficially, and blatantly, it was for emigrants. Tonight it carried far more than usual—refugees, he suspected, from the now widely rumored war. The cloud people carried more baggage than the peasants, and had better clothes, and before the week was out most of the baggage would be strewn along the passes, the clothes would be in rags, and some of the emigrants would be dead. Statistically, Gaius knew, he was looking at dead people, as surely as if he was riding a troop train heading for the front. Statistically, he also knew, he might be looking at a dead man reflected in the dark window.
The train rattled across the plain, labored up the long gradual slope, thundered across the Massif. Gaius, jammed upright by the press of bodies around him, jostled by the train’s rhythm and the more annoying, random jolts as people made their way to and from the inadequate and increasingly foul-smelling toilets, dozed fitfully, now and again woken by a sudden shift in the balance of forces or by his forehead hitting the window. The train stopped every hour or so. At each stop some peasants got off and Gaius hoped the pressure would ease; but always, even more people got on. Mostly young men—draft dodgers, Gaius guessed and, patriotically, hoped. They drank a lot, smoked regardless of protests and talked loudly in a thick dialect. Gaius couldn’t make out enough to gather any intelligence from them.
About three after midnight everyone on the train woke at once, as a shock and shouting ran through the packed carriages and all heads turned to the windows. Gaius found himself looking out through the yellow reflections then, as he managed to cup his hands between the glass and his face, directly, at a dozen slowly moving lights that suddenly changed color, loomed, flashed, and danced away. Minutes later, something fell from the sky and like lightning lit the rough land from horizon to horizon. Nobody slept much after that.
Dawn came up at five and a half after midnight. An hour later, the train halted at some crummy town: a water tower, a lithomancy pylon, a tractor depot, a straggle of houses. More peasants got off here, and mercifully few new passengers got on. Kids hawked papers along the platform: The morning edition of the Regime’s official and only newspaper, wired from the capital and printed locally, with a local name. Gaius tugged the window down and exchanged a handful of Volkovs for the Pergam Truth. Lots of other hands stretched out to do the same. Gaius found a space to sit down and read it.
ILLYRIA MUST ACT, SENATE WARNS
In an emergency all-night session, the Senate of the Democratic Republic of New Babylon warned that the Illyrian aristocracy’s criminal passivity in the face of recent incursions by Spider skiffs (see page 2) is a threat to the entire planet. The Defense Forces of the Republic stand ready to aid the Duchy’s small military establishment at a moment’s notice, but reserve the right to act unilaterally in defense of all the peoples of New Earth. Any rejection of this fraternal invitation to stand shoulder to shoulder against the alien menace will be regarded, by all reasonable people, as treachery to the species and collaboration with the enemy. The Senate strongly urged patriotic Illyrians, and in particular its brave though ill-equipped armed forces, to consider where their true loyalties lie.
A threat of war, and an incitement to treason. Gaius gritted his teeth and turned to page two, which gave—for the first time, as far as he knew—a quite sober account of the sightings and other strange events reported in his own country’s litter press. A few incidents were recounted from within the Republic, all of them—unlike those reported from Illyria—described as having been swiftly countered by air or space forces. The implication here too was that Illyria was implicated in the Spider incursion—there were a lot of heavy hints about decadent aristocrats selling out to the enemy, though quite what they were selling and what they were getting in return was not stated.
Gaius turned over more pages as the train pulled out. Editorials, interviews, maps bristling with menacing arrows, vox-pop rants . . . the hostility to Illyria was so venomous that he felt very glad he wasn’t instantly identifiable as Illyrian. Like most republicans in the Duchy, he followed the ancient fashion of short hair, and his clothes were by now as shoddy-looking as the locals’. One thing he’d expected to see in the paper, and that wasn’t there, was any reference to enemies within—no incitement to spy mania, no warnings about foreigners or Traders. They seemed an obvious scapegoat. He doubted that the Regime was simply missing a trick. It didn’t seem the sort of trick they would miss.
He opened his case, drank some tepid water and took out a curling sandwich. The very old woman sitting opposite him looked at it far more hungrily than he felt. He passed it over to her. She thanked him with a gap-toothed smile and munched it in a minute, wiped her hands on her already greasy black dress, and fiddled with something in her ear. Gaius noticed the wire that snaked to her clutched leather bag.
“You have a radio?” he asked. “Any further news?”
“Lithos is troubled,” she said. “Lithos is afraid.”
Gaius forced himself not to show his disdain. The old woman wasn’t listening to the news, she was listening to the meaningless babble from the lithomancy pylons. The cult was seductive to the old, and to the bereaved who heard their loved ones’ voices. “She hears rumors of war, she sends her engines of light to meet the Spiders. She weeps at the lost blood filled with Spiders, the blood of life. The Spiders are close, they crawl over us, they hang in the spaces between the stars.”
Gaius felt his skin go cold and his hair prickle. The old woman didn’t notice his response. The lithomantic trance glazed her eyes, and the rest of what she said was gibberish, vocalized no doubt from the atmospheric howls and mutterings of the lithosphere. Then she fell asleep, drooling slightly. The man sitting beside her, an emigrant in a smart and sweaty shirt, shifted uncomfortably and gave Gaius an embarrassed look.
“The peasants go in for that sort of thing,” he said. “Can’t say I blame them, with the President setting such a bad example.”
The man had recognized him as a foreigner, Gaius realized, hence the defensiveness. He smiled reassuringly and waved a hand, though his brain was buzzing so much that he could have done without a conversation.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Our own farmers are a lot of old pagans too, I must admit. They sacrifice mice to the new moons.”
The man chuckled. “You’re from—?” He nodded backwards, in the direction of travel.
“Yes,” said Gaius. “Just had to cut short a business visit.”
“You shouldn’t have,” the man said, defensive again. “You wouldn’t have had anything to worry about.”
“Hmm,” said Gaius, raising his eyebrows.
The man sighed, and sat back and lit a cigarette, without apology, not that it made much difference by this stage in the journey.
“Yes, I’m a fine one to talk,” he said. “I’m as patriotic as the next man, you understand, but when the Society’s goons turned up last night and told me my workshop had just become part of the national defense, I thought, to the hells with them.” He glanced affectionately at a woman and two teenage boys slumped in sleep on the adjacent seat. “And the lads, well, they’re both conscription age . . . ”
“I don’t think,” said Gaius gently, “that the passes are much safer. Or Illyria, for that matter.”
The emigrant looked gloomy. “You may be right,” he said. “But we’ve talked about it, and we’d rather die on the slopes than in this futile fratricide.”
Gaius resisted the temptation to point out that these possibilities were not mutually exclusive. “What about the Spiders?” he said.
The man snorted. “I don’t bloody believe it. If the Spiders were coming, do you think the Illyrians wouldn’t join with us at once? Or that our government wouldn’t ask them nicely? No, it’s just an excuse.”
“But last night we saw—”
“Some funny lights. Yes indeed. Let me tell you, my friend, funny lights over the Massif are not as uncommon as you may think. And in any case, who’s to say these skiffs people claim to have seen aren’t from Sauria—I’m sure there are a few saurs hanging on over there—or from a ship?”
“You may have a point there,” said Gaius. He wondered how widespread this skepticism was, and decided to change the subject. “Ah, what was it you said about the President?”
The emigrant smiled and stubbed out his cigarette on the side of the seat. “It’s a scandal, you know,” he said, leaning forward and speaking in a low voice. “Madame President is kept alive with wires and transfusions and gods know what, all because of that leprous camarilla around her which fears more than anything else what happens when she dies. The poor old woman is capable of little more than clacking her false teeth and listening to that lithomancy gibberish. In her lucid moments she makes decisions. It’s pathetic, it’s shameful, to tell you the truth.”
“How do you happen to know this?” asked Gaius. He thought himself well-informed on the Modern Regime’s crepuscular politics—the tensions between the Society, internal security, and the Defense Forces were well known, and avidly followed by Illyrian intelligence—but this was news to him.
“Rumor,” said the emigrant. He looked over his shoulder, then smiled as though at himself. “Malcontent scandal sheets circulate, you know.”
“So I’m told,” said Gaius, more dryly than he’d intended. Many of these sheets were, to his certain knowledge, drafted in Junopolis by the Department. Quite possibly this particular rumor had come from there in the first place. “Can’t say I’ve come across them myself. Interesting.”
“Yes,” said the emigrant. “I say, my friend, you’ve gone rather pale. Are you unwell?”
Gaius forced a smile and stood up. “I think I need to stretch my legs and stick my head out of a window for a bit. Uh . . . would you mind keeping my place?”
“Not at all,” said the emigrant, and put his feet up on Gaius’s vacated seat. “Take your time.”
Gaius made his way to the space at the end of the carriage by the door and wound the window down. He really did need fresh air. The lumpy landscape of the Massif crawled past, irrigated fields between outcrops and escarpments crested with olive groves and lemon trees, gnarled pines, windmill generators and lithomancy poles. What was really making his head swim was not the rocking motion and the smoky, fetid air of the carriage—though now that he thought about it, he wished he hadn’t—but the connections he’d made. Lithomancy, Spiders, blood of life, transfusions . . . the rounding up of Lydia and her family, and the absence of any sign of a round-up of anyone else, even the mistrusted Traders. Thinking about what the old lithomancer had said still gave him chills. The lost blood filled with Spiders, the blood of life—where in the hells had that come from? And what if the other old woman, the one in the top of the tower of the Ninth, had picked up the same electric rumor?
He was torn between the desperate fantasy of going back to New Babylon and (somehow) rescuing Lydia, a more sober assessment that she’d likely just end up on a train after having had a blood sample taken (and the desperate fantasy of waiting for her at the end of the line) and the urgent and practical need to get back to Junopolis. If Madame President had let herself be infiltrated, literally, by the enemy in her frantic clinging to life and hope of rejuvenation, then the opportunities for Ilyrian active measures were enticing indeed.
He wondered if there was a telephone still working at the station at the end of the line, and if he dared send his message through in clear.
Gaius wondered if the air was already noticeably thinner at this altitude. He stopped, leaned forward with his hands on his knees, and panted for a minute. Looking back, he could see the long straggle of emigrants behind him like a line of ants on the slope. Far below was the rail terminus and the cluster of houses around it, where a friendly peasant had taken his last money (real money) for enough water to fill his bottles and enough cheese and some kind of dubious-looking and worse-smelling wind-dried meat to fill his case, as well as (for a handful of Volkovs) the couple of meters of rope with which the unwieldy item of luggage was now lashed uncomfortably to his back. He had debated with himself whether to stick with the family he’d met on the train, and had decided against it—not that they seemed inviting. He had lost them while he’d been waiting in the queue for the telephone.
At this time of year the journey through the mountain pass was supposed to take two days, for a fit man, with only half of the second day above the snowline. For a fit man. Most of the emigrants he’d seen were, in one way or another, not fit men. They could count on three days, and a whole day going through last winter’s snow. Or this autumn’s, if the weather turned bad.
A pair of jet fighters from the southwest streaked across the Massif at five hundred meters, well below his vantage, flipped up and kept the same height as their bellies flashed by above him. They’d be over the mountains in seconds, above Junopolis in minutes. On the other hand, they might not come back.
A little while later the rough path took him along the bottom of a deep cleft, with a sharp upward slope. As he toiled up the slithering scree, he was aware, from the cliffs at either hand, of an inescapable sense of presence that made him look around, again and again, to see whether he was being followed, or watched. He was alone, and knew he was alone. There was no sound but the drip of water, no smell but the metallic scent of wet algae, no presence but the countless trillions of microorganisms and nanobacteria in all the crevices of the rockface; no communication but the radiation of their minute electrical potentials, and from the piezoelectric noise of the stresses in the rock itself. It was a natural and spontaneous lithomancy, and it carried no rumors to him.