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High Strangeness Incidents



this won’t hurt,” said Mr. Magenta.

He puffed some spores over Susan. She inhaled them and immediately went into a spasm of coughing and sneezing.

“That is good,” said Mr. Magenta. “It drives the small offspring into your sinuses.”

Susan found herself breathing more calmly. She stepped away from the side of the hangar and looked around at the others, who stood at a safe distance.

“My mother said she was going to do it.”

Even to her, it didn’t sound like a good reason.

“And it hasn’t harmed Matt.”

“Hah!” said Ramona Garcia. “How could anyone tell?”

In truth there was a sort of fatalism to Susan’s decision. Her own curiosity, if nothing else, would sooner or later drive her to it. The Multipliers would not force their infection on anyone, but sooner or later almost everyone was going to accept it. She might as well get there first.

It still didn’t sound like a good reason.


The guerrilla ontology campaign, as Matt persisted in calling it, was into its second week. A sort of routine had become established. The Investigator, concealed in the hangar, remained the base camp and headquarters. The Multiplier skiffs were used to conduct operations. Apart from piloting the skiffs, the Multis foraged. They followed the saurs’ advice about which fruits and seeds were nutritious and which were not, but they also—more or less at whim—synthesized new foods. They could make beef from a pile of grass, a process that as Matt pointed out was also regularly accomplished by cows, but that still seemed like a miracle.

The skiffs’ missions varied from spectacular or subtle displays of their presence, to stealth missions for the sole purpose of information gathering. The latter sometimes shaded illicitly into shopping expeditions—not even the Multis could assure a supply of coffee and tobacco reliable enough for those addicted to them.

Gradually a picture of the world had been built up, from talking to people—whether in Matt’s MIB stunts or more discreet contacts—and from books and newspapers, and from radio. The discovery that Volkov was dead—had been killed in a palace coup by his own security detail on the orders of his lover, the President—had left the Cosmonauts who’d known him shaken but, Susan thought, not altogether surprised. It didn’t fundamentally alter the big picture.

Working inward:

The closest contact with the Bright Star Cultures had been from about fifty light-years away. These contacts reported an evidently stable and productive relationship between the Multipliers and at least the saurs and the hominidae. The most recently arrived information, ironically, came from farther away, as merchant ships jumped straight from the emerging Cultures on the home planets, Mingulay and Croatan, to Nova Babylonia, arriving shortly after others who had jumped fifty-odd years later but from fifty-odd light-years closer.

The Bright Star Culture wavefront was, of course, only intersecting the Second Sphere from one side. Traffic in the other sides of the great volume was becoming just as disrupted, as the majority of saurs and krakens broke off cooperation with New Babylon, or recoiled from the news of the new alien-human alliance. To an ever-increasing extent, New Earth—and, it would seem, all the other planets—were becoming isolated from interstellar trade.

The fortifications of the Nova Solar System were almost entirely the work of the Republic of New Babylon, and were much as Telesnikov had projected—his only mistake had been to assume that they extended to the gas-giant moons. There were three forts, as he’d supposed, in the asteroid belt, and orbital forts in the cislunar region to meet incoming starships. All of this cost money and resources, and some of the costs were met by the former provinces—when you have system defense, as the Cosmonauts pointed out, it wasn’t that difficult to persuade other powers to contribute to the system defense budget. This was the cynical bottom line—there was genuine widespread support in the other states for the common defense, and although the supposed Multiplier invasion was fading from living memory, the suspicion of what was going on in the Bright Star Cultures was renewed with every panicking starship that arrived. The Cosmonauts, however, remained convinced that some of the other powers were approachable.

The Republic of New Babylon had expanded from its initial position as a hegemonic city-state to become a nation-state of the entire subcontinent. Its nearest neighbors, Illyria and Lapithia, were implacably hostile—Illyria as a richer power, Lapithia as a poorer. Beyond them lay a checkerboard of small states, really no more than the olden cities with their hinterlands, each with its own unique proportion of hominid species and its own fiercely local patriotism, somewhat mitigated by their economic union and defensive alliance as the grandly named Genean League. The diplomacy of the other powers consisted largely of manoeuvres designed to split the League or play its members off against each other. There was a sort of logarithmic relationship between the states—New Babylon outweighed Illyria and Lapithia together, and these three major powers about balanced the League as a whole, if not in wealth and firepower then in population and difficulty of conquest. The hominid population of Genea had increased from about a hundred million to about five hundred million in the last century.

This increase was more than balanced by a far steeper decline in the population of Sauria. If any saurs remained they hadn’t been spotted by the Multis’ stealth-mode overflights, which had returned with pictures and descriptions of invading jungle and of manufacturing plant gone to seed. A small fraction of this decline was attributable to the departure of those saurs who were willing to cooperate with the Modern Regime. The rest had fled to the stars.

Some few were left, though none had been seen—small bands that must be living in the forests, the only evidence of their presence some recently slaughtered dinosaurs, clearly deliberate forest fires, and traces of strange rituals—tree trunks piled into conical pyramids, dinosaur skulls mounted on hilltop poles like some magical early warning system. What this signified, the saurs with the expedition were unable or unwilling to divulge, and reluctant to discuss.


Susan felt the fever coming on her. She took a couple of tablets to bring down her temperature, and carried the bottle of water with which she had washed them down with her out of the hangar. The sun cast long shadows among the enigmatic ruins. Pushing through underbrush, jumping over long cables of creeper, she made her way to a part of the abandoned city that might once have been a public square. She sat down on one of the long, low steps that beveled the square’s perimeter and sipped some more water. The blood moved in her veins like trickling sand.

As the sun set, the colors around her first became more vivid, the purple shadows seeming to have neon behind them, the greens and yellows of the foliage glossy like the skins of frogs; then they faded out to a silvery monochrome. The moons, now waning, became visible and as bright as the sun, though looking at them did not hurt. One by one, as if somewhere switches were being flicked, the planets and the brightest stars blinked on, then the steady procession of the satellites, and with a rush that made her gasp, the bright path of the Foamy Wake.

She leaned back against the steps behind her, the little steps of the saurs, so incongruous with the gigantism of the rest of their architecture, and gazed up at the crowded sky. After a while, one of the stars became a light that shone brighter and brighter until it was visibly growing bigger and then—in a sudden shocking shift of perspective and involvement—coming closer. Susan sat forward, and tried to stand, but her knees betrayed her. They would not, could not lock. She sat back heavily. The moving blood was a roar now, a rhythmic pulse that at first she mistook for the sound of her breathing, then realized that, slow as it was, her breath was slower still.

The light became the familiar lens shape of a skiff, picked out in the small lights at its top and bottom and around its rim. A few tens of meters above her it went into falling-leaf motion, and settled on the square in front of her on its tripod of landing legs. By this time the lights had disappeared, or been incorporated into the general glow of its surface. It was definitely a saur skiff—it didn’t have the roughness of the ones humans built, nor yet the liquid-mercury gloss of the Multipliers’ craft.

This was confirmed when the hatch opened, the ladder extended, and a saur descended. The way he walked across the overgrown ancient flagstones toward her was peculiar, as though he wasn’t quite touching the ground—no, it was as though he was walking on a moon with a much lower gravity, rising too high and drifting down. But she only had seconds in which to form that impression, because by then he’d stopped and was standing about three meters away from her.

“Who are you?” he said in English.

The accent was Mingulayan, like Salasso’s.

“Susan Cairns Harkness,” she said.

“Why are you here?”

“We’re here to stop a war,” she said.

“That’s good,” he said.

The saur rose slightly off the ground and returned to the craft without further movement, like an image shrinking in a zoom lens. The hatch closed behind him, still looking straight at her; then all the gear retracted and the skiff rose into the sky—again, more like an image shrinking than something actually moving away. Within a minute it was once more an indistinguishable light among the stars.

She heard a footstep behind her and jumped up, stumbling and struggling to keep her balance as she went down the steps five at a time. Down in the square she stopped and whirled around.

A saur stood at the top of the steps, regarding her.

“It’s all right, Susan,” he said, in English with a Mingulayan accent, but she recognized the voice.

“Oh, Salasso!”

She bounded up the steps as fast as she’d fled down them and hugged the saur, holding his head to her midriff.

Then, slightly embarrassed, she released him and stepped back.

“Did you see that?” she cried.

“I saw a light through the trees,” said Salasso.

The following morning she had a bad sunburn on her face and the backs of her hands. The Multipliers told her this was not a symptom of the infection. Neither were hallucinations. Their skiff-detecting instruments had detected nothing, and nobody but Salasso had seen any light. Susan dragged Matt to the square and pointed triumphantly to three indentations in the crushed vegetation. He was unusually quiet on the way back.


“For the next three days,” Matt announced, “we’re not going to make any manifestations. No daylight disks, no crop circles, no funny lights in the sky, no MIB. We’ve got to plan some trips, but all in stealth mode, and any EVA has to pass for local. In fact EVAs are going to be our main activity. We need to find out, on the streets, what effect we’ve been having.”

Susan sat and shivered. She’d been tempted to give the early morning planning meeting in the hangar doorway a miss. The pain in her skin was easing off, the red was fading. She hadn’t slept well, and she couldn’t even remember the dreams which had woken her, except one, which was of being tiny and being stepped on. She could remember the tread pattern on the sole of a descending boot.

“I have another suggestion,” said Ann Derige. “If we’re going to do stealth surveys, why not sneak up on some of the space installations?”

“Because we don’t want to,” said Matt, over a murmur of enthusiasm for Derige’s idea—the gunners and rocketeers were getting impatient. “We don’t want to give the slightest impression that we’re interested in the space installations.”

“We won’t, if the stealth tech works,” said Ann.

Mr. Orange waved a limb. “If I may,” it said. “The stealth technology works against radar observation, and visual in most circumstances. It is not invisible to modes of detection outside the electromagnetic spectrum.”

“Such as what? Telepathy? Smell?”

“Smell, yes, in the sense of ionized particles. Telepathy we know nothing about. More to the point, there are instruments for detecting minute variations in gravitational fields, instruments well within the capacity of this civilization’s technology, and useful in space. The gravitational anomalies caused by the near presence of a skiff in stealth mode are more than minute.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” said Ann, who clearly didn’t.

“All right,” said Matt, after they’d thrashed out a schedule for visiting various towns, timed for just before the dawn crept over the western continent. “Volunteers?”

Everyone stuck up a hand, or several.

“No saurs on EVA,” said Matt dryly. “And nobody who’s just taken the Multiplier treatment. Sorry, Susan.”

“Didn’t stop you making decisions,” Ramona muttered.

Matt heard. “It was all right for me,” he said. “I used to do drugs.”

You get used to the weirdest things, Susan thought, as one by one the five Multiplier skiffs vanished from the hangar, leaving the Investigator alone in the middle, and her with Mr. Sort-of-Rainbow, Obadiah Hynde the rocketeer, Salasso, and Delavar.

“Drawn the short straw,” said Obadiah, a cheerful young man with black hair and big hands. He peered at her over the flare as he lit a cigarette, a habit Susan was glad not to have. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” said Susan. “I feel kind of weird. Light-headed.”

“That is because of the very small offspring moving among your neurons,” said Mr. Sort-of-Rainbow.

“Thanks,” Susan glared. “That image is just what I need to calm me down.”

“That was my intention,” said the Multi, and scuttled off out to forage.

Obadiah looked down at the detritus of breakfast. “Might as well clean up,” he said. “Give the old ship a good going over while I’m at it.”

“We have decided,” said Delavar, “to spend the day studying the information retrieved earlier.”

Susan looked around. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just not up to anything right now. I’ll just go and sit in the door.”

“That is strongly recommended,” said Salasso.

Susan dragged a log from the area in front of the hangar to the side of the entrance and sat down on it, leaning against the wall. She closed her eyes and watched the Catherine wheels and rockets for a while. Then she opened her eyes and looked at the incredible intricacy of the lichens on the log, and contemplated the molecular machinery of the leaves on the trees. The insects moving about in the grass communicated by throwing little molecular machines at each other. She could almost understand what they were saying. She closed her eyes again. The sheer amount of information in front of her was too much to take in. She had to think about it.

When she opened her eyes again an inordinate amount of time had passed. The sun was a little higher in the sky. Mr. Sort-of-Rainbow emerged from the trees, jeweled with droplets of water, each of which refracted the light and reproduced the colors of his fur. He strolled up to her on four legs, the other four forming a mesh in which he held a great variety of fruit.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “All is well. God,” she giggled helplessly, “is in everything.

“Yes,” said the Multiplier. “Did you not know?”


Oh gods but this was a drag. People had come back, skiffs emerging inside the hangar as usual, and everybody was scurrying about and jabbering and ignoring her and she was tired like she had been working hard all day bloody hell she had been working hard all day she had gathered all this information and nobody was fucking interested and she had bloody spiders crawling out of her nostrils and nobody wanted to look at her and she just wanted to die. She heaved herself to her feet and trudged to the Investigator and climbed the ladder and crawled to her bunk and went out like a burnt filament.


“Good morning,” said Matt, crouched over the electric heater and a coffeepot. “Welcome back.”

Susan felt all bouncy and clean as though she had just had a shower, although she hadn’t. Even her clothes felt clean, although she had slept in them.

“Oh, yeah, thanks.” The previous day was a blur, but she distinctly remembered going away. “Everyone went away yesterday, didn’t they?” She paused, puzzled. “Where did I go?”

He handed her a coffee. “Off on a little trip of your own.”

Everything came crashing back. “Oh, God,” she said.

“Well, quite,” said Matt. “That was some sermon you gave us.”

Susan felt like putting her head in her hands. “But it’s still true,” she said. She looked out through the wide doorway at the early morning landscape. Through the fog over the valley the sun was a red, coppery circle somewhat like a penny, and . . . 

“Look at the sun!” she said.

“Yup,” said Matt. “ ‘A great multitude of the heavenly host crying, “Glory, glory, glory to the Lord God Almighty.” ’ Well, something like that. You’ll get used to it.”

“It doesn’t go away?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Matt. “I understand it has something to do with an irreversibly increased awareness of the information density of reality. According to the Multis, anyway. Think about it. Your brain has been walked over by beasties that can feel atoms.

Susan snapped out of a contemplation of the steam rising from her cup. She examined the skin on her arms. “Speaking of beasties—where are they?”

“Crawled out of your bodily orifices, cleaned up your skin and clothes, and gone trooping back to Mr. Magenta.”

“How embarrassing.”

“Speaking of embarrassment . . . ” said Matt. Elsewhere in the cavernous hangar, people were beginning to stir. “I think it might be best if we agree not to talk about, um . . . ”

“All that infinity in a grain of sand shit?”

Matt grinned. “It’s good to find someone whose mind is cruder than mine.”

She smiled conspiratorially back, then very deliberately turned her attention to other things.

“Do you think I’m ready to go out on reconnaissance today?”

“Yeah,” said Matt. “Just don’t let your mouth hang open, and you’ll pass for normal.”


The inside of the Multiplier skiff was remarkably like the inside of every other skiff Susan had been in. She and Telesnikov sat side by side on the circular bench around the central engine fairing, and Mr. Blue squatted on a stool in front of the control panel. It was only when the Multiplier turned on the viewscreen that a major difference, or refinement, became apparent. The hull was all viewscreen. It was like sitting in midair. Susan grabbed the edge of the seat and smiled self-consciously at Telesnikov.

The view changed—the inside of the hangar was instantly replaced with dark-blue sky above and a wide stretch of Genea below. She looked down between her feet and saw greens and browns and the white of clouds, the fractal line of the coast, the semicircle of Half Moon Sea. After her first intake of breath her second emotion was a pang of nostalgia for Mingulay—she’d seen her home planet from space many times, on the way to or from her family’s orbital factories where the saurs brought the exotic components—black hole atoms, unusual stable elements with atomic weights in the hundreds—for the engines and drives.

Instantly the view changed again. They sat a couple of hundred meters above the surface—they didn’t want to leave crop circles—then descended to hover above damp grass in a field by a metaled road. A hundred or so meters away were low slope-roofed houses, which if Mr. Blue had got it right were on the edge of Junopolis, the capital of Illyria.

“Over by the hedge,” said Telesnikov. The skiff glided to the bushes. Twelve eyes surveyed the surroundings. No eyes looked back. The hatch flowed open—the only way Susan could tell was by the air on her face—and the two humans jumped out. By the time they’d walked a dozen steps the skiff was nothing but an unease-inspiring shimmer in the air.

Their clothes would pass as Illyrian, though plain. Short hair was not so uncommon as to be noticed. Their pockets were stuffed with Multiplier-copied Illyrian money. Each of them had a legal weapon—in the Duchy, wearing a knife was practically compulsory—and a small radio, of local manufacture but with Multiplier enhancements in its innards, most significantly an emergency alarm to call for a skiff and a tracking device to tell the skiff where to go.

They found a tram stop after walking a few hundred meters through the waking suburb—dogs barking, children running for buses—and rode into town accompanied by sleepy commuters.

Several people left newspapers on their seats; Telesnikov and Susan each casually picked one up.

Their reading did not stay casual for long. The front pages of both papers—the sensational New Morning and the sober The Day alike—showed a clear photograph of a daylight disk over Junopolis. The captions agreed on the date and time of the sighting—the middle of the afternoon of the previous day. The Day’s headline was “Mystery Skiff Evades Fighters.” The New Morning’s was “SPIDER SKIFF STUNS CITY!”

Susan turned over the rest of the pages. The sighting over Junopolis was only the biggest of many similar stories. Editorials screamed for action; when she silently swapped papers with Telesnikov, she read that the country’s elected representatives were doing the same. Buried in the longer articles were references to earlier official denials of various odd events of the past fortnight, at some of which she had been present herself. The independent confirmation of the “Lucifer Probe anomaly” had resulted in a particularly embarrassing climb-down, it seemed.

Susan folded the paper glumly and looked out the windows. The day was heating up. Fall in this hemisphere, spring at the base in Sauria—the contrast was fierce. Junopolis looked like a town well adapted to seasonal change. From the depth of the recesses of windows she could see that most walls were thick, at least on the older buildings. Garish color washes were the fashion, or tradition—it was hard to say, because compared with her hometown even the new buildings looked old-fashioned, solid and ornate. Clothes were colorful, hair and beards generally long, with a sprinkling of clean-shaven cropheads who also tended to wear duller clothes.

At the tram’s terminal in the center of town Susan bought copies of every paper on sale—all of which led with the same photo—and she and Telesnikov made their way to a big low-ceilinged cafe with lots of marble and mirrors and took their coffeepot and cups to the most isolated table they could find. They puzzled over the papers for a while.

“Is it possible,” Susan asked, in careful Trade Latin, “that one of our teams made a big mistake yesterday?”

Telesnikov shook his head, almost angrily. “We’re the first team into Junopolis,” he said. “Last night I checked every report, every image brought back. There is no question about it—whatever this was, it wasn’t us.”

“Is it even thinkable that the . . . that our friends are lying to us? That they did this without our knowing?”

“I suppose it’s thinkable,” said Telesnikov. “But that way madness lies. If we can’t trust them we should abandon the operation right now.”

“If we don’t know what’s real and what’s—” She stopped. “This is what Matt said would happen!”

“ ‘Guerrilla ontology,’ ” Telesnikov said heavily. “ ‘Make people question their concept of reality.’ The trouble is, it’s happening to us.

Susan sat back and watched the surrounding salarymen and women scoffing their breakfasts, reading the papers with expressions she could not read, talking animatedly in a dialect she could not quite follow at that volume and speed. She had missed crowds, she realized, and new faces.

“I’m not so worried about us,” she said. “I saw something myself that we couldn’t explain, and Salasso saw a light, and Matt saw the prints. Whatever it was it didn’t seem hostile. But whatever is going on here seems hostile to them.”

“To the people here? Yeah, you could say that. And no doubt to the security apparatuses as well. But what’s even more worrying is how this appears to people in New Babylon, and their security apparatuses. This is much more blatant than anything we’ve done.”

“So who’s doing it?”

Telesnikov shrugged. “Relict saurs? Other Multipliers we don’t know about? The—uh, our own folk? Arrived here without our knowing? Or even a local power that has developed or gotten hold of skiff technology? Or something altogether unknown? You can bet all of these possibilities are exercising some very bright minds right now.”

“And the minds of very frightened people.”

“Hell,” said Telesnikov, “I’m very bright, and I’m very frightened.” He swept his hand over the pile of newspapers. “What do you say we just head back?”

“No,” said Susan. “I don’t think the newspapers are enough. We have to talk to people.”

“But how do we do that?”

“It’s easy,” Susan said. “I’m a journalist.”

And with that she stood up and and wandered over to the other tables and started talking to people. It was easy. She was a journalist.

“Good morning,” she said to a fat, anxious-looking middle-aged man with bags under his eyes and a cigarette between his knuckles, ash drifting on to a greasy plate. His greying hair was tied back in a ponytail and his coat and weskit were rumpled. “Mind if sit down?”

“Go ahead.”

“Thanks. My name’s Susan, I’m a journalist, from the—”

He held up his hand. “Don’t tell me. The Dorian Daily News, right?”

“Yes,” she said. Doria was one of the smallest and most remote of the lesser republics of the Genean League. It seemed a safe enough cover. “How did you guess?”

The fat man wagged a finger. “Your accent, young lady. Can’t hide it. And I doubt if Doria can support more than one paper.”

“True enough,” she said, sounding regretful. She smiled brightly. “And your name, sir?”

“Horace Kamehan,” he said, sticking out a hand. “And what can I do for you?”

She waved a battered black notebook. “I’d like to, uh, wire back a few comments from Junopolitans about the latest events.”

Kamehan pushed his empty plate away and sipped his coffee. “Oh, right,” he said. “Well, I don’t think you’ll find much disagreement. We should hit the bastards with everything we’ve got.”

“How can we be certain that they are bastards?”

He blinked and frowned. “Maybe it’s easy to be all even-handed if you’re sitting out there on your rocks in Doria, but from where I’m sitting it’s not. It’s quite clear who’s making the threats, and frankly I don’t think our government should stand for it. Which I don’t think we will, I hasten to add. The Duke’s got a bit of spine, thank the gods.”

Susan struggled to hide her confusion by nodding, smiling, and scribbling a note of what the man had said.

“And if it comes to it,” Kamehan went on, “I’m not too old to bloody sign up myself.”

“Sign up?”

He gave her another puzzled look. “For the army—maybe you don’t have that expression in Doria? Not surprising.”

“But Mr. Kamehan,” she said, “how do you expect to fight aliens?”

“Aliens?” He stared at her as though she’d just come from outer space. “Aliens? The Spiders? Who believes in this palpable nonsense? Not even you lot, I hope.”

“But the papers—”

“The papers? Don’t you listen to the bloody radio?”

“Of course, of course,” said Susan desperately. “It’s all very disturbing.” She stood up. “Well, thank you, Mr. Kamehan, for your comments. All the best.”

“Gods look after you,” Kamehan said. “Because gods know, you need them to.” He muttered something under his breath about fishermen and foreign correspondents.

“Thank you,” she said, and retreated as fast as she could to the table where Telesnikov sat mulling over the papers. On her way she noticed something that the fashion for long hair had concealed—almost everyone was wearing earphones. She sat down, nodded to Mikhail, and worried her own earpieces in. She set the little radio on the table in front of her and thumbed the dial slowly. The fingers on a wall clock were climbing to third before noon—the cafe was not emptying, although it seemed a likely time for office hours to begin, and people were looking at the clock or at their watches, listening intently. Susan kept tuning, trying to identify the sound of a program coming to an end, or some hint that an hourly news bulletin was about to—ah, there it was.

She turned the radio toward Telesnikov and pointed to the spot on the dial, and to her ear. He took the hint.

There was a sound like a series of splashes, which puzzled Susan until she realized that it was the station’s signature, intended to represent an archaic water clock. The announcer’s voice was grave, his Trade Latin more formal than the spoken dialect or the fretful rancorous rant of the press.

“Junopolis Calls, third hour before noon, eleventh day of Frugora, Anno Civitas ten thousand three hundred and forty nine. Reports are coming in of serious damage and an unknown number of deaths and injuries in the coastal town of Palmir. Witnesses have described a ‘bolt from the sky’ followed by fires and explosions. The Duke’s Minister of Defense has just stated that emergency assistance is being rushed to the stricken town. An urgent investigation is to begin immediately. He refused to comment when asked whether the disaster is linked to the warning issued earlier this morning by New Babylon. More information will be available from Palmira shortly.

“Meanwhile, in a further deterioration of relations with our southern neighbor, the Ducal Palace has made public a note delivered to the Consul of New Babylon. Junopolis Calls is authorized to read the note in its entirety:


Your Exellency: The warning issued by the Senate of New Babylon, and reported on your country’s radio stations at six before noon today, is viewed with great concern by Us, Our Ministers, and Our People’s Representatives. We reject, in the strongest terms, any suggestion that hostile forces are operating in or above Our nation’s territory, and will regard any action taken by your esteemed and respected country’s forces on, around, or above that territory as an attack upon Our sovereignty and upon the sacred and inviolable territory of the Free Duchy of Illyria. In the presence of the indifferent gods and in the shadow of Our ancestors, We remain, your Excellency’s humble correspondent, Duke Leonid the Second.

The roar that followed from the customers in the cafe—and the passengers in the terminal—drowned out whatever was said next.

VEE—DOO! VEE—DOO!

“What are they shouting?”

“Long live the Duke, I think,” said Telesnikov. “Doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, it means war. Let’s get out.”

They gathered their armful of now-outdated but possibly still-useful papers and made their way through the standing, chanting crowd. Their path to the door was suddenly blocked by Kamehan. Two younger men stood shoulder to shoulder with him.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Kamehan demanded.

“Excuse me,” said Susan. “We have a story to file.”

“I’ll bet you do,” said Kamehan. “With the Dorian Daily News, huh?”

“Yes,” said Susan.

“Now ain’t that odd?” said the young man at Kamehan’s right. “ ’Cause I’m the News’s Junopolis correspondent. Maybe you’d do better filing your story with my friend Mr. Kamehan, of the Junopolis—”

Telesnikov slugged him in the stomach, punched Kamehan in the face and shoved both of them hard against the third.

“Run!” he shouted.

Susan pushed through a sudden domino-effect of people flailing and stumbling and ran out the door onto the concourse. Telesnikov caught up with her a moment later. He had dropped the papers and was clutching his radio.

“Nearest open space,” he gasped, and sprinted for the tramline marshalling yard, which opened onto the two open sides of the terminal. Susan followed. Behind her she heard someone yelling “Spies!” and the cry being taken up. Diagonally across from her she saw a man in uniform running to head them off. Telesnikov saw him too and swerved. Susan took the opposite direction and the man dithered and lunged ineffectually. Then they were past him and in an area of metal grooves and overhead sparks and quietly gliding death that could come from any direction.

A tram loomed in front her, blue paint and polished brass, the startled face of a driver. She leapt across the parallel tracks and spun around on her next step, then grabbed a stanchion and swung onto the running board. The driver had just released the brake and hadn’t seen anything beyond the fact that he hadn’t run her down. She glanced back along the track. Telesnikov, with the uniformed man a few meters behind in hot pursuit, raced behind the tram and with a surge of speed caught up with it and jumped onto the rear platform.

The driver heard the thump and glanced in his mirror. The brakes squealed again. Susan felt a terrific wrench in her shoulders. She clung on, to see Telesnikov tumbling past as he was sent sprawling down the vehicle’s aisle. As the tram slowed the policeman caught up and jumped aboard at the back. He ran forward just as Susan came through the open central door. She had time to see that he was not stopping—the deceleration pulled him forward—just before she ducked across his path. He tried to jump over her and succeeded only in kicking her in the ribs as he tripped over her back.

Telesnikov scrambled to his feet at the same moment as she did. The driver, almost thrown against the front of the cab, turned around and grabbed for him. Telesnikov caught his arm and slammed it on the half-door at the side of the driver’s seat, then jumped down out of the door at the front, Susan following via the one she’d just come in by.

They both barely avoided stepping in front of another tram. When it had passed they saw they were outside the back of the terminal on a wide-open space of tarmac. Gleaming lines snaked to low sheds between rusty mounted wheels with coils of metal cable, like fishing reels for Leviathan, paired bare levers, buffered barriers. Telesnikov rounded the obstacles to the least-cluttered area, waving his arms above his head. Susan ran behind him, glanced back over her shoulder and saw the persistent policeman being helped to his feet by the driver. A few more uniforms ran in from various directions.

She turned her head forward again. Telesnikov had disappeared. Then she saw him, uncannily suspended a meter up in the air right in front of her, and Mr. Blue behind him. He was crouched down and reaching out. She jumped, they caught each other’s forearms, and he hauled her into the skiff. They ended up sitting on the bench with their backs to the engine fairing. The sounds from outside abruptly ceased. The pursuers had stopped, and were looking at each other and at where they were. From the side of a wall about twenty meters away an old man in a bundle of rags staggered forward, pointing and shouting.

The scene changed to sky and the blue and white levels of air.

Telesnikov laughed harshly. “I’d like to see how they report that in tomorrow’s papers.”


Matt was indulging in one of his rants. For the Multipliers, he said at some length, speech was a distinctly secondary mode of communication. They shared knowledge through their fingertips. They tended to assume, he suggested, that more had been shared than had actually been said. As for the saurs, they volunteered so little about themselves that getting information out of them was like getting blood from a fucking stone.

The humans in the crew listened with embarrassment. The Multipliers formed a big circle and quivered and fingered each other. The two saurs stood together and shuffled occasionally. The day’s missions had been hastily recalled. The sun was high and the hangar’s interior was all in shadow. In the background a radio prattled away. Skiffs were still being sighted all over the place, and here and there were being chased by New Babylonian jet fighters or zapped by New Babylonian space-based plasma cannon, to the evident annoyance of every other power from Illyria to Doria. More details were coming through of extensive destruction in Palmir, apparently from a plasma-cannon bolt.

“So,” said Matt in a chillingly reasonable voice, “do any of you have anything to tell us that you might not have thought worth mentioning?”

Salasso stepped forward and turned to face the others.

“There is something,” he said, “which I hesitate to mention, but it may be relevant. Some of the very old legends of my people say that when they first came to the worlds of the Second Sphere, they met saurs who were already here. Saurs who flew in skiffs and behaved in . . . an enigmatic fashion, both intrusive and elusive. The rational explanation, which is usually given to the young of the species when they are told of these legends, is that different parties of saurs arrived on the various planets at different times, perhaps separated by centuries or millennia, and their first encounters were confusing on both sides. But I must admit that these stories . . . came to my mind when Susan described her encounter.”

“Very good,” said Matt. He laid a hand on Salasso’s shoulder and looked down at the saur with a sort of troubled affection. “So you guys have Greys and flying saucers too, huh? Well, there’s something nobody told me before. And, ah, just in case you’ve missed something out—have such stories been told about more recent events?”

“No,” said Salasso. “These legends are of a time tens of millions of years ago. No such stories are of more recent date.” He paused. “Other than literary pastiches, of course.”

“Of course,” said Matt. “Literature too, huh? We’re advancing by leaps and bounds here.”

“That is all I have to suggest,” said Salasso.

“Thank you,” said Matt. “Anyone else?”

Mr. Orange detached himself from a busy tangle of limbs and scuttled over.

“We do not understand and are distressed by the anger of the Matt Cairns. The invasion is proceeding according to plan. The mind of the world New Earth is responding as we expected it to. The humans of the world New Earth are misdirecting their defenses and in conflict with each other. Soon it will be possible to—”

“Excuse me,” said Matt, waving a spread hand up and down. It was a way of getting the Multipliers’ attention that often worked. “What was that about the mind of the world?”




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