the window was tiny and the glass was thick. Susan Harkness pressed her forehead against it, gasping, heart pounding, and stared out until all she could see was the stars. She imagined she stood in a field on a very dark night, looking up at the constellations. The Musketeer was there, and the jeweled pleiad of the Thrown Net, and the Hind. She imagined a cool breeze in her face, and that the sough of the ventilation was its sigh. Gradually her breathing eased, the bands around her chest loosened.
She had expected a price for her reckless light-century leap into the dark: regret, sorrow, homesickness. Fear. She had thought them all worth paying, for the chance of life at this intensity, and of being present at moments that could not but become history. She had not expected claustrophobia. It had sneaked up on her from behind. She felt betrayed by her own mind. They had spent two days lurking in the system’s Oort cloud. It was absurd, but the thought of that cloud was actually making her sense of confinement worse, even though all it meant was a high probability that there was a piece of cometary matter within a few million kilometers.
Rolling in orbit around the selkies’ world had been different. The beauty and variety of that terrestrial planet from space, and the alien fascination of its gas-giant primary and its red-giant sun, had made living in the narrow ships feel anything but confinement. One’s attention was always turned to the outside. The skiffs had flitted from ship to ship, and she’d always been able to wangle a ride, always with a good reason: interviewing crew members, documenting discoveries. The only sense of confinement she had felt was the suffocating presence of her parents. That they were enlightened and meant well she knew, but they couldn’t help casting long shadows. Anywhere in the Bright Star Cultures, she would always be the First Navigator’s daughter, the Science Officer’s girl. On cold reflection it seemed mad to move a hundred and three light-years to get away from her parents, but analyzing the moment of impulse that had made her do it revealed no other explanation. She felt obscurely insulted that her mother had automatically blamed it on Matt, as though Susan had no will of her own. She was certainly not besotted with Matt, nor he with her, though she suspected that without the ulterior motive of their irregular attachment he would never have connived at her escape, or escapade. In that sense he could be blamed, but she knew that if she ever blamed him she would never forgive herself.
She stepped back from the porthole and groped for the light switch. The cabin she shared with Ramona Garcia, a Cosmonaut mathematician slightly more ancient than Matt, seemed tinier than ever. She ducked out of it into the corridor before that thought could close in again.
The corridor was wider than the room. She could stretch out her arms and not touch the sides. But with the lights on, the windows showed nothing. She walked up to the cockpit. The viewscreens and windows in there gave the illusion of space, or would have done if the cabin hadn’t been crammed with people: Matt, Salasso, and Delavar, the old Cosmonauts Mikhail Telesnikov and Ramona (who gave her a quick friendly smile), the Mingulayan captain Phil Johnson, and first mate Ann Derige, both of whom were an embarrassing year or two younger than she was and acted like they were about ten years older; and two of the Multis, the orange one and the blue one.
The Multipliers had spent the first day spinning a thirty-meter dish aerial and a complex receiving apparatus from a kilogram of scrap steel and some random bits of junk, and had detected a very faint microwave beam that swept across them every Nova Terran day. Just before her panic attack, Susan had heard an announcement that they’d extracted some information from it.
They were all staring at a rectangular patch on the viewscreen above the fore window. All except Matt looked delighted. Nobody told her what it was, and it took her a moment to recognize it as a map, a Mercator projection of Nova Terra. Maps in the Second Sphere were physical. The only imaginary lines on them were trade routes. This city, they told you, was linked with that. The map on the viewscreen was covered with imaginary lines separating patches of different colors, none of which looked as if they had anything to do with geography. “What is that?” she asked.
“It’s the first piece of information we’ve managed to crunch out of the microwave beam,” said Ramona. “It’s a world map, the logo of the official television station, New Babylon News. Presumably the beam’s a daily news update aimed at deep-space missions. Almost certainly military missions, because it’s encrypted. Matt doesn’t know if it’s worth the effort to crack—any news will be a year out of date anyway.”
“I know it’s a map, but—”
“What you’re looking at,” said Matt, “is the most obscene and disgusting thing I’ve seen for centuries. It’s a map of the world that happens to be a rectangular sheet of chauvinist shit. Every one of those barbarously, artificially carved-up fragments of the world is tagged with a little rectangle of its own, a bloody badge of shame—a flag! They’ve got nationalism down there. If they had a virulent strain of bubonic plague instead, I’d be happy for them. I’m still red in the face from explaining all this to the Multipliers.”
He was indeed red in the face, but he’d been looking flushed for the past day or so, and occasionally shivery. He’d brushed aside any enquiries. Just a cold or something. It hadn’t spread.
The Multipliers quivered slightly, perhaps embarrassed themselves. Matt simmered down a little.
“The good thing, though,” said Telesnikov, “is that we aren’t picking up any deep-space radar beams. I expect there’ll be some close in, but they’re unlikely to be probing out farther than the asteroid belt.”
“Nova Sol has an asteroid belt?” Matt asked.
“You don’t know the system?” Telesnikov sounded incredulous.
Matt shrugged. “All the descriptions I ever saw of it were Ptolemaic. Couldn’t get my head around the epicycles.”
Ramona snorted. The saurs looked slightly abashed. Their species had not thought it necessary to inform the Nova Babylonians about the heliocentric hypothesis, knowledge of which had in the past few centuries spread inward from Croatan to shatter the most horrendously complicated arrangement of crystal spheres ever devised.
“All right,” said Telesnikov. “Here it is in Copernican. Working in from here, and not counting contentious lumps of rock and ice which might be stray gods . . . we’ve got two gas giants, Juno and Zeus, about oh point seven and one point six Jupiter masses respectively. Both have a spectacular array of moons and rings—it’s a fair bet these are garrisoned, if we assume Volkov has succeeded. Which we must, on the basis that pleasant surprises are not to be counted on. Next there’s the asteroid belt, which is much richer than the Solar System’s, probably the richest in the Second Sphere. There’s nothing in the equivalent of Mars orbit, like our Raphael back home—probably never formed, hence the extent of the asteroid belt. Then there’s Nova Terra itself, with its two satellites, Ea and Selene, each about two-thirds the size of Luna and resulting in diabolically complex tides. Finally, you have one which is kind of like a big Mercury or a close-orbit airless Venus, a thoroughly nasty ball of hot rock with a high albedo. Named Lucifer, aptly enough.
“Now, if I were applying the doctrine of system defense which I learned in Moscow Cosmotech—”
“You learned Solar System defense!” Matt interrupted.
“Asteroid detection and deflection was the practical side,” said Telesnikov. He scratched the back of his neck. “The matter of repelling alien invasions was, ah, the speculative part. Anyway, I’m sure Volkov studied the same classified texts. The basics are the gas-giant moons, the asteroid belt—minimum of three armed and fortified mini-observatories cum missile or particle-beam stations, evenly spaced around it so you essentially have the inner system triangulated—and finally the home planet’s moon— moons, in this case—and low orbit. All likewise fortified, and with harder armor and hotter weapons the closer in you are. Anything that gets through all of that is a matter for air and ground defense. Or disaster recovery.”
“What about any inner planets?” Susan asked. “Didn’t Volkov go to Venus?”
“He did,” said Telesnikov. “But that was just a stunt. We never considered fortifying Venus! The great majority—I think historically, all—impact events come from the other direction, from outside Earth’s orbit. As for intelligent threats—well, there was one theoretical case, a slingshot approach round the sun and out to Earth on the daylight side. Obviously a very smart manoeuvre if you could pull it off—observation would be difficult, interception an absolute nightmare. But that would come in so fast that frankly your lunar and low-orbit defenses would have a much better chance of catching it.”
“Hmm,” said Matt, tipping back the gimballed chair he’d appropriated and looking as if he wanted to light a cigarette, “it sounds like the dark side of Lucifer would be a good place to lurk. We could jump straight into its shadow cone and stay there—safe from Nova-Solar radiation, and within easy listening distance of Nova Terra.”
“Provided it’s not in opposition at the moment—I mean, when we get there.”
The blue Multiplier jumped to the window and spread itself against it, like an expanding snowflake. Then it shrank its extensions back into its limbs and hopped back to its previous perch.
“It shall not,” it said. “If we were to jump now we would encounter Lucifer at thirty-eight degrees from Nova Terra.”
“Thank you,” said Matt dryly. “The next thing we need to know is whether Volkov got any cooperation from the saurs, and therefore whether or not he has lightspeeders and skiffs.” He looked hopefully at the alien. “I don’t suppose you can tell us that?”
“Our skiffs have instruments for detecting other space-bending quantum manifold devices in operation,” it said. “They can only be used when the skiff is in operation, which of course leaves them open to such detection themselves.”
Everybody turned to look at the saurs.
“Ours do not have such devices,” said Delavar.
“How do you avoid collisions?” asked the Multiplier.
“They just don’t happen,” said Delavar. “It’s a question of skilled piloting.”
“It is because of something called the Exclusion Principle,” said Salasso stiffly.
“Ah,” sighed the Multiplier, as though inhaling in order to say something, and then fell silent.
“Okay,” said Matt, in a tone of heavy patience, “and have your skiffs detected any other ships or skiffs in the system?”
The two Multipliers touched hands, conferring.
“One starship arrived two days ago,” said the orange Multiplier. “Another left yesterday. Some minor and local skiff activity accompanied them. That is all.”
“How about rocket exhausts?” asked Ann Derige.
“We have no instruments to detect them,” said the orange Multiplier. “Though doubtless,” it added in a hopeful tone, waving its limbs excitedly, “such instruments could be improvised.”
“Very difficult anyway,” said Telesnikov. “Fusion torches and such apart, and even they’d be almost invisible at this distance.”
“We seem to have arrived at a negative conclusion,” said Delavar. “The deep-space communication suggests a deep-space presence, the absence of evidence of antigravity or nuclear drives suggests that this has been accomplished with conventional rockets. This is more or less what we would have anticipated, if we had done any anticipating.”
Was this a dig at Matt? If it was, he laughed it off.
A day later, they jumped a year.
The dark side of Lucifer. Susan liked the idea; she knew that the Lightbearer was a dark power in some perverse mythologies. The interstellar flotilla, the Investigator and its five companions, hung in starlight a few hundred meters above the planet’s cracked surface. This was lower than many of its mountains; their chances of detection equivalently small—
“We’ve been pinged,” said Ann.
The two Multipliers pounced toward their apparatus. Their hands scrabbled over it and each other. Outside, the dish aerial moved, tracking.
“There appears to be a small artificial satellite in polar orbit.”
“We can improvise a control system to send one of your missiles toward it.”
“Within two of its orbits.”
Phil Johnson looked over at Matt. It was Phil who gave orders to the crew, but it had been well established that it was Matt who was leading this expedition.
“Go for that?”
Matt rubbed his nose. “No,” he said. “I have a better idea.”
He turned to the Multipliers. “Could you ask one of the skiffs outside to go after the satellite, catch it, and reinsert it in equatorial orbit?”
Even he could hardly have expected the speed with which his suggestion was carried out. The orange Multiplier tapped at the apparatus. Within seconds one of the skiffs riding alongside disappeared. Two minutes later, it was back.
“We have picked up and redirected the satellite. It was approximately one meter in diameter.”
“Fucking sputnik,” said Matt. “Now let’s shift a thousand or so kilometers out of the way.”
“Why?” asked Johnson.
“We’ve been spotted by what is probably a scientific satellite mapping Lucifer,” Matt said. “Within about one minute, the information will reach Nova Terra. If it’s a purely scientific probe, the likely result is that it won’t be processed for months. If it’s not, if it’s part of their space-defense network, we could be burned by a particle beam in about five or six minutes. So let’s move.”
They moved. It wasn’t a lightspeed jump, just a very fast move. The landscape below didn’t look any different.
“Right,” said Matt, “now we set up a jump to Nova Terra. Make it somewhere on the surface with plenty of cover and far away from any settled areas. Ann, could you patch up that map again?”
Matt peered at the map for a moment, then pointed at a zigzag line marking the northern border of the Republic of New Babylon. “There,” he said. “In the forests just north of the mountains, on the north side of the border. It looks pretty well uninhabited.”
Everybody just stared at him.
“I was wrong about Lucifer,” he said. “It’s not a safe place to lurk. The safest place I can think of is Nova Terra itself. If you’re watching for invaders from space, where’s the last place you’d look?”
“They’ll have spy satellites,” Telesnikov pointed out. “They’ll see something.”
“Yup,” said Matt. “I’m counting on it. I’m also guessing that the spy satellites are not likely to be those of”—he peered again at the map—“the Free Duchy of Illyria, and that it and New Babylon are not exactly friends.”
“And if you’re wrong?” said Phil.
Matt shrugged. “If I’m wrong, we’ll move somewhere else.”
Salasso stood up. “I am afraid,” he said, “that that is not an adequate answer. I think I see what you are trying to do, Matt, and I very much look forward to finding out how the Nova Terran news media cover—or cover up—the anomalous event of a satellite suddenly orbiting at ninety degrees to its previous orbit. I agree entirely that Nova Terra is the best place to lurk, now that we have found that even Lucifer is under observation. However, I strongly suggest that we make our base somewhere much less accessible and much less noticeable than a border region, however wild it may appear.”
He pointed to the map. “You will notice,” he went on, “that the lines depicting political divisions are only present on one continent, Genea, the one inhabited mainly by the hominidae.” He tapped a long finger on the other one. “The one inhabited mainly by saurs is still marked simply as Sauria.”
It was something so obvious that none of them had noticed it. Every planet in their experience had at least an island continent reserved for saurs, and they had taken this one’s for granted.
“I don’t think blundering into a saur city or manufacturing plant is going to make us any less conspicuous,” said Matt.
“Indeed not,” said Salasso. “But as the Multipliers have told us, there are no skiffs operational except around the occasional starship, presumably in the harbor of New Babylon. That suggests strongly to me that there are no, or very few, saurs present on the planet. If for any reason we are detected there, what could be more natural than for our skiffs to be taken for those of returning or remaining saurs? Also, Sauria includes extensive areas of rainforest, mountain ranges, temperate forest, ruined cities. One in particular has ruins more than adequate to conceal our entire expedition.”
“How do you know all this?” asked Susan.
The saur gave her his almost undetectable smile. “I remember it well,” he said.
At that moment, Susan noticed Matt looking at his watch. A moment later, a bright flare filled the windows on one side, and the viewscreens went into an unstable cycle of failed adjustments. Several alarms went off. It was as though the ship had drifted out of the shadow cone into the savage sunlight; except it was the wrong window, and the light was fading, not increasing.
Matt looked from his watch to the window. “Plasma-cannon strike,” he said. “Vaporized the ground just below where we were a few minutes ago. From lunar orbit, by my reckoning—shit, they must have something big up there, one hefty motherfucker of a death ray projector. Let’s jump.”
They jumped.
Rhododendrons and flying squirrels in a big square of blue. Susan staggered away from the foot of the Investigator’s stair ladder, mistiming her steps in the subtly different gravity, then found her feet and ran to the door of the hangar-sized megalithic structure within which the ship and the ships were parked. They’d come out of the lightspeed jump a thousand meters up and a few thousand meters away—the Multiplier navigators, and Salasso’s memory, were that precise. Strangely, the flying squirrels avoided the structure, which might have seemed a suitable roost; Susan noticed as she ran that the floor was thick with dirt, but clear of any animal droppings.
Out in the open she stopped, and breathed deeply. She was ecstatic with relief. Only now that she was out of the ship could she realize how confined she had felt inside it; how tightly she had screwed a lid down on that feeling of confinement. The air was colder than she had expected, and better than she had hoped. It carried a sweet-sour smell of vegetation. She was facing northward, the mid-morning sun high to her right. Ahead of her was an area of ground covered with short grass and rhododendron overgrowth, riotous with rotten flowers. After about a hundred meters, the ground dropped away sharply to a rainforest valley many kilometers across, on the far side of which a range of mountains raised jagged white teeth to the sky. The cacophony of whoops and the symphony of chirps from the various species and sizes of flying squirrel, and the buzz and hum of insects, were the only sounds, and they were enough.
She turned to look back at the great door, fifty meters in width and height, whose lintel cast the black shadow from which the others were emerging. The two saurs first, and the other eight humans, and a dozen Multipliers. The aliens, to her surprise, suddenly rushed past everyone else, past her, and leapt onto the tops of the rhododendron bushes and then away down the slope into the trees, chasing the startled flying squirrels into flapping, screaming flocks.
“Are you all right?” Matt asked.
“Zeus! Wow! Am I all right!”
Nobody else seemed to be having quite the same reaction. They all stepped out into the glaring sunlight cautiously, sniffing the air like prey animals; turned around at once to check the sky and the skyline; the saurs wandered off to examine the side of the entrance. Matt stood beside her and looked about with more enthusiasm than the others, but without abandon.
“Plasma rifles,” he said.
His high temperature seemed to have run its course; Susan noticed that she couldn’t see the tracery of subcutaneous scar tissue he’d ruefully pointed out when they’d first met. It must be something about the light.
“What?”
“We should keep them handy. There are dinosaurs on Sauria.” He laughed harshly. “Perhaps that’s what’s kept it from being colonized by humans. ‘Here be dragons.’ ”
“Assuming it has kept it,” said Telesnikov, coming up. “I can see a scramble for this continent as soon as the rival nation-states on the other one work themselves up to it.”
“Yeah,” said Matt vaguely. “The falling rate of profit, and all that.”
“I hope not,” said Susan. “Wow, it’s beautiful!”
Matt’s attention snapped back to her. “You’re very high,” he said.
“It’s, um, just good to be off the ship,” she said. “Uh, cabin fever, you know?”
“Oh, shit,” said Matt. ‘Wow I get it. You suffer from—”
“Don’t fucking say it!”
The two Cosmonauts laughed unsympathetically.
“Just as well you didn’t get the tests we went through—”
“You mean, the pipes we went—”
She grabbed his arm hard enough to hurt. “Don’t. Fucking. Say it.”
Matt gave her a warmer look. “All right,” he said. “Sorry. Christ, I’ve been worried about you. You haven’t cracked a smile since we jumped from Planet Selkie.” Then he ruined it all by adding: “Thought you were missing your parents or having PMS or something.”
She shrugged away from him. He looked at her helplessly for a moment, then turned away and called and beckoned everyone together.
“We have a couple of things to talk about,” he said. “Let’s get the first one out of the way while our friends are away enjoying themselves. Have any of you here taken up the Multipliers’ offer?”
They all shook their heads. Including the saurs, Susan noticed, as if the question might be relevant to them. Maybe it was.
“I didn’t know they could just do it, like, any time,” said Obadiah Hynde, the rocketeer. “Didn’t know we had the option, see.”
“Well, we do,” said Matt. “They don’t need machines. It’s like . . . an infection. They give it to you. I took it, when we were lurking out in the cometary cloud.”
“How could you do something so crazy and irresponsible?” said Ramona. “Oh, what am I saying? I am talking to Matt after all. Well, Matt, tell us what it is like.”
“That’s the trouble,” said Matt. “I don’t know if I can, because one part of it didn’t take. The orange Multiplier, the one who tried, said it was ‘like biting fruit and finding stone.’ They read your genes, then tweak them. I think that’s what they do. They could read mine but they couldn’t alter them, because they’ve been altered already by the process—whatever it was—that gave us longevity. But apart from that . . . yeah, I can tell you what it’s like. It’s like having an infection that doesn’t make you ill, then an infestation that doesn’t itch, and after that you remember things that never happened to you. That’s the most disturbing thing about it, I’ll give you that. But it’s not delusional . . . I remember them happening, but I don’t think they happened to me. I can remember doing things, without thinking that I did them.”
“What kind of things?” asked Ramona.
“Budding,” said Matt. “Seeing my hand break off and run away, and wishing it well. Sharing knowledge, knowledge of the world and knowledge of how my body was built. The pleasure of that.” He laughed. “Our friends have more fun than we know. And now I know more. Strange things. So anyway—is anyone else willing to try it?”
“So you’re telling us,” said Ramona, “that the Multis can give us the long life. Except for those who already have it. For the rest of us, it’s hardly an issue—I don’t think there’s one of us here who is over twenty-five, am I right? And besides that, they mess with your head. So what’s the advantage in taking the risk?”
“Its one big advantage,” said Matt, “apart from the long life, is that you do not fall sick, and that most injuries self-repair very fast. I do have that.”
“How,” asked Telesnikov, “if they could not alter your genes?”
“That part of it has nothing to do with genes,” said Matt. “It has to do with . . . some of the very small offspring of the Multipliers continuing to live inside you.”
“You stay infected?” Ramona Gracia took a couple of steps away from him. “No thanks.”
Matt shrugged and spread his hands. “I see I haven’t sold anyone on this. Well, you can all watch and see if I turn into something strange.”
(“You’re there already,” Ramona muttered.)
“The next thing we need to discuss is what we are doing. We didn’t have any detailed plan before we came here, because we didn’t know what we’d find. In a sense, we still don’t. We know they have separate states, and that at least one of them, most likely Nova—New Babylon, as it calls itself now—has some pretty heavy space defense. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy our chances going up against that kind of hardware with our fireworks. I’ve considered stunts like, you know, jumping a skiff or even the Investigator, right inside one of the orbital forts, but, well, I’d rather not rely on dumb luck or brute force. So.” He brushed imaginary dust off his palms. “Anyone got any bright ideas?”
“I had the impression,” said Ann, “that Salasso thought you already had one.”
“Well, kind of,” said Matt evasively, “but I want to hear other suggestions first.”
“I have one,” said Ramona. “Let’s brew up some goddam coffee and have something to fucking eat.”
Susan had never before heard Ramona speak coarsely. The mathematician met her surprised look with a sullen flush.
“He has that effect,” she said.
After the gunners and rocketeers had come back from the ship’s galley with hot coffee and cold rations, people began to feel less fractious. One light-year lightspeed jump, one crack at turning a mapping satellite into a blatant anomalous phenomenon, a near miss from a plasma bolt, and another lightspeed jump to ruins so old there were fossils younger—all made for a tense morning.
“The first thing we should do,” said Ramona, “is watch some television. Not as easy as it sounds—I doubt if even satellite broadcasting covers this continent.”
“There’s always radio,” said Susan. She remembered that she had a radio in her pocket. “Hey! Wait a minute.”
She switched the radio on and spun the dial slowly. Most of the stations played music. The scales were unfamiliar, the lyrics mostly in languages that had drifted from Trade Latin or never started from it, but the music was a reassurance of the planet’s humanity. Other channels carried news or discussion—without context it was difficult to make sense of it, but context could be built up. One wavelength was pure bedlam: a welter of voices and sounds, fragmentary phrases, strange noises. It wasn’t that she was picking up lots of stations at once; the more precisely she tuned it the weirder it got.
“Well,” said Matt, “the radio is something to work on. Susan, could you look after that and try to compile a picture?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. Anyone else?”
“I haven’t finished,” said Ramona. “I’ve been doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations. We have jumped from the selkies’ world to here, more or less in the shortest possible time. It appears that the normal trade routes have been severely disrupted, if the number of starships in this system at any given moment is one or less! The obvious explanation is that our people are supplanting the kraken-saur-Trader partnership. Assuming that the Multipliers have indeed been assimilated to the Bright Star Cultures, and that they are spreading from star to star with only a small delay to build more ships and navigate the next jump, they cannot be far behind us. We have at the very most a few years, at the very least a few months, before the first Bright Star Culture ships arrive. In that time—short at best—we have to arrange matters so that they are not blasted out of the skies. We have one lightly armed starship, one human-built skiff with antigravity only, and five jump-capable Multiplier skiffs. The other side have an extensive space defense capability, built to all appearances with rocket technology. Evidently they have been unable or unwilling to persuade or coerce the other species into sharing antigravity and lightspeed tech.”
She waved a hand at the dark interior of the enormous building. “All our advantage, such as it is, is right here. What we have to decide is how to use it.”
“Exactly,” said Mikhail Telesnikov. He stood up, incongruously gesturing with an empty coffee mug. “We have two basic options. One, and the most economical, is to make a direct approach to whoever is in power in New Babylon—presumably Volkov or his successors—and convince them that there is nothing to fear or fight. Considering that there are obviously no Multipliers here, and that some were on their way, it seems evident that the New Babylonians have already won such a fight and are unlikely to be persuaded that it was all a terrible mistake. I still say it should be our first option. The second—which the failure of the first might foreclose, so it’s not the second in time—is to approach one or more of the rival powers, who are more likely to be convinced, and who must surely fear the power of New Babylon. It is at least possible that they would agree to a military strike against New Babylon, if they have the military capacity and the hope of winning. If they have the former, we can provide the latter.”
“I don’t see how we could,” said Hynde. “Each of our missiles could take out a spy-sat. At close range. Maybe. That’s about all we could do, and it don’t sound like enough.”
“I was thinking more,” said Telesnikov, “that if the other powers have nuclear weapons, or even decent-sized conventional bombs, we could deliver them to the space battle stations very fast and unstoppably by lightspeed jump, then jump back out of the way.”
“Problem with that,” said Matt. “Do we want to destroy New Babylon’s space defenses? If the gods get angry, we might shortly need them ourselves.”
Susan jumped up. “We don’t need to put bombs on them!” she said. “We can put troops on them!”
“You can’t get many troops in a skiff,” one of the gunners said.
She glared at him. “I know that,” she said. “But you’re thinking of one trip. Think lots. Every Multiplier skiff can zap back and forth lots of times—say it can carry six soldiers at a time, it could shift dozens in minutes, just pour them in. And at different places in the battle station, too.”
Telesnikov was looking at her as though seeing her for the first time. “That’s a very good point,” he said.
By the time the Multipliers swarmed back from their cavort in the forest, the rest of the expedition was ready to explain their contingency plans. The Multipliers listened to Matt’s enthusiastic outline and announced that they would not hear more of it. They squatted around the circle of humans like so many miserable balls of fur, twitching slightly and occasionally stroking each other’s hands. At length Matt walked over to the orange Multiplier. Susan followed, discreetly recording.
“Do you have an ethical objection to taking life?” Matt asked.
The alien wrapped its limbs around its body and rolled away. After a tense minute it uncoiled and reached out to the nearest of its fellows. That one, magenta-furred, eventually stood up shakily and tottered into the center of the circle, near to the remains of lunch. It inspected spilled coffee grounds and bread crumbs and reconstructed a shrimp from a sliver of paste. The shrimp twitched and scrabbled, dying in the air. The Multiplier observed it with apparent curiosity, then ate it.
Then Mr. Magenta (a naming convention that Susan hit upon at that moment, and thereafter spread) waved a limb in a circle above itself and fixed, it seemed, its all-around gaze on everyone simultaneously.
“We are distressed,” it announced, “by your plans. They are inelegant. We were under the impression from our reading of the Matt Cairns that you all understood how to survey a planet and neutralize its defenses. You have had such beautiful examples. Why do you not follow them?”
“What examples?” Matt asked.
“You are the Matt Cairns,” said the alien. “You know. Please educate the others, and then we will be happy to make your invasion a wonder and delight for the ages, and give our descendants memories to warm them while they watch the stars turn to iron.”
By the time Matt was five minutes into explaining his contingency plan he was beginning to scare people.
“Do you know how many Multiplier skiffs were in our system in the years before we left? Two! And you know what they did to us! They had us thinking we were under constant surveillance! Thinking we were about to be invaded! For every real incident there were ten unreal incidents! We made them up ourselves! That’s what we have to do here! Make them doubt their concept of reality! Guerrilla ontology!”
He glared around like a lone gladiator facing a hostile colosseum.
“Fuck with their heads!” he shouted. “Fuck with their heads!”
That night Susan sat outside on a block around the side of the big building. The block was thirty meters long and five on a side. She had scrambled up the tough creeper that overgrew it. The air was cold and the sky was black. Fog lay over the forested valley, lit by the two small moons, both waxing gibbous, their surfaces so cratered that their terminators were visibly serrated even to the naked eye. Six comets were visible, low in the sky. She had never seen so much as one comet before. The Foamy Wake blazed a trail across the zenith. Every so often a meteor flared, and now and again what appeared to be a star would move steadily across the sky. These, she guessed, must be artificial satellites, like the spaceship yards that orbited around Mingulay.
After a while Salasso joined her. “That is a frightening sky,” he said. “The gods’ anger is written on it. Fortunately my anger is greater.”
“You don’t know what anger is,” Susan said. “What Matt has, now that’s anger.”
“I am angry with the gods,” said Salasso. “Matt is only angry with the saurs.”
“I thought he liked you.”
“He does,” said Salasso. “It is not personal. All of the old Cosmonauts are like that.”
“Ah!” Susan had a sudden insight. “It’s because of what the saurs were doing back in the Solar System. All that stuff about Greys and flying saucers, it must have been like a bad dream.”
“No,” said Salasso. “At the time when Matt and the others lived on Earth, almost all of that was decades in the past. I have studied the literature, if you can call it that, and I found no reported sightings, abductions, or anything untoward for many years. The old stories were not taken seriously except by students of popular delusion, and the deluded, and a very few stubborn investigators.”
“Oh! So it was the shock of finding that something they had dismissed was partly true after all—”
“Again, I fear not,” said Salasso. “They had no emotional investment in its dismissal. It was not a live issue, either way.”
Susan looked at the saur sitting beside her, gazing out over the valley in the double moonlight. His small shoulders were slumped, and his large head hung heavy.
“So why—”
Salasso turned to her. “Do you have your recording devices with you? Of course you do. I am telling you this because it is something I wish to be known after I . . . after all this is over. When the Bright Star Cultures come here, and find a welcome, I want this to be known. Not before. Will you promise me this?”
Susan clamped her hands on her quivering knees. “Yes,” she said. She fumbled, setting her apparatus, then turned to face the saur as though interviewing him.
“When the Bright Star arrived in orbit near Mingulay, three hundred—no, it is now four hundred—years ago, we were shocked and frightened. The crew claimed to have navigated here, and though we soon realized they were lying, that did little to allay our fears. We had no reason to think there might not be more ships. We knew that the Cosmonauts had received the instructions for the drive directly from a god. This suggested to us that the gods in the Solar System had lost patience with the saurs, and perhaps that the gods here had too.
“The saurs discovered how to manipulate genetic material many millions of years ago. With that discovery we built the manufacturing plant. This was an industry that did not disturb the planets, or displease the gods. With that knowledge we have been able to screen all the new arrivals from Earth, and to prevent the spread of diseases. We explained this to the Cosmonauts, and they agreed to be examined. They told us freely that they had taken life-extending drugs, and we soon found out why some of these drugs had worked. They modified a gene which is common to many species, including ours. In their case it was only somatic, not heritable, but it was still alarming. The effect of human longevity on the stability we had so carefully cultivated would be immensely disruptive—as indeed it is proving now, if Ramona is right, and I think she is.
“The effect of the knowledge in the ship’s computer libraries, and the machinery it had to replicate the computers and disseminate the knowledge, would have been even more disruptive. At the same time it was not in our nature to deny or destroy that knowledge. So we later allowed the computer libraries to be transcribed to the manufacturing plant, and subsequently printed in books—a necessarily slow process, which made assimilating the knowledge the work of centuries, still incomplete. But we did not allow the Cosmonauts further access to their ship, and only allowed them to take from it such machinery and computers as they could carry.
“Before we even allowed them off the ship, we took one further precaution. We took them one by one and subjected them to a second medical examination. It was traumatic and intrusive, and not merely physically. We did everything to them that they had jokingly told us saurs were supposed to do.” He looked away, then looked back. “We terrified the living shit out of them.”
Susan’s mouth was dry, her eyes wet. “Why are you telling me this, now?”
“Because I feel bad about it. And because as more and more people take up the Multipliers’ offer, these memories will be shared and passed around like diseases. It is important that people are able to make sense of these frightening fragments of memory.”
“You mean,” she said, “that they don’t find themselves fearing and hating the saurs for no reason they can understand.”
“That too, yes.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said.
“Nor do I,” said Salasso. He made a cutting gesture. She switched off her apparatus.
“Well, hell,” she said, “I think you’ve made up for it since, Salasso.”
“I wish you had recorded that,” said Salasso.
“I will say it again.”
They sat in silence for a while.
He took out his pipe. “Would you share a smoke?”
“Yes,” she said.
The hemp knocked Salasso into a twenty-minute trance, and left Susan to gaze at the Foamy Wake and imagine the Solar System on the far side of it, and wonder what had befallen the saurs and humans there.
Salasso came to himself with a start. In silence the woman and the saur, one after the other, descended the precarious ladder of creeper.
“What is this building, anyway?” she asked, as they headed back.
“Before the saurs learned how to make the manufacturing plant,” said Salasso, scuffing through the leaves beside her, “they constructed such buildings. This one, I believe, they used as a place to park their skiffs.”
Susan glanced back at the megalith, one of many strewn around, evidently surplus to the requirements of the gargantuan structure, which was built from blocks of similar or greater size.
“And they used the skiffs to lift the blocks up here, and move them into position?”
“Oh, no,” said Salasso. “That is physically impossible. They built enormous ramps of close-packed earth, and made ropes of the creeper vines, and tens of thousands of saurs dragged the blocks up.” He spread his long hands and shrugged his small shoulders. “But when you tell people that, they don’t believe you.”
In stealth mode the skiff was visible only to the insane, the users of psychoactive chemicals, the very young, and dogs. To anyone else it was something that could be glimpsed, perhaps as an unfeasibly large meniscus of water, but not directly seen. It was certainly invisible to the sober agents of national defense, security, and law enforcement.
It had been highly visible earlier, during the day, when its sonic boom was breaking windows and its radar trace was scrambling jet fighters right across Genea. Over the New Babylon subcontinent it had appeared as a fleet above a small town in the Massif, making lightspeed jumps back and forth between five separate points so quickly that it was seen as five separate ships. It had been even more visible late in the afternoon, when it had loomed over the brows of nearby low hills like an early rising Lucifer and confronted and confounded a number of isolated farm laborers and one latifundia chairman. The skiff’s occupants knew he was a latifundia chairman because they had followed him back to the biggest house in the village. He had kept looking back over his shoulder, unable to see the now stealth-mode skiff, but obviously feeling that he was being watched. His dog had dashed past him and barked at something outside the gate for a quarter of an hour.
Now it was barking again. Matt and Susan gave the dog a wide berth and walked up the short drive, their footsteps crunching in gravel. All the lights in the house were on. Under the lamp by the porch Matt gave Susan a critical look.
“Straighten your tie,” he said.
She and Matt were identically dressed in black suits, white shirts, black ties, and black hats.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” Matt confided as he knocked on the door.
The latifundia chairman peered around it, holding a shotgun just in view. His expression went from suspicion to terror the moment he saw them.
“Good evening,” Matt said, raising his hat. “There is no need to be alarmed. We’re from the government.”