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The Hanging Libraries



the man came into Gaius’s office without knocking. Before Gaius could get up the stranger heeled the door shut behind him and sat down in the seat on the other side of the desk. He left his hat on. The plume fluttered slightly in the draft from the open window. None of this was good.

Gaius nodded at him, then at the door. “The sign says ‘Gonatus Aerospace,’ ” he said. “Not ‘Walk right in.’ ”

Ginger ringlets and a neat pointed beard, blue eyes behind eyelids like the slits in a shield. “My name’s Attulus,” he said, as though it wasn’t. “Pleased to meet you, too.”

He reached through one of the slashes in his blue padded jacket and withdrew a rolled piece of paper tied with a thin red ribbon. It made a hollow sound as it hit the desk.

“Read it.”

The Ducal seal was enough, but Gaius read it anyway.

“The Department’s number is in the book,” the agent said. “Feel free.”

“My export licenses are in that filing cabinet,” Gaius said. “Feel free.”

Attulus retrieved his commission and disappeared it. “That’s not what this is about,” he said. He pinched the bridge of his nose and gave his head a small shake, blinked and looked up. “We have reason to suspect that you, Ingenior Gonatus, are a loyal subject. Or a patriotic citizen, if you prefer.”

So they knew about that. But of course they knew about that.

“I’ve done my service,” Gaius said. “I understand that cancels out any youthful indiscretions.”

“It does,” Attulus said. “But—” He scratched his moustache. “There’s another bargain, which applies to businessmen who make a habit of trading with the other side.”

Again Gaius indicated the filing cabinet. “It’s called an export license,” he said. “On the other side, it’s called a bribe. Either way, my accounts are in balance.”

“Oh, but they’re not, Ingenior. You owe your country a little more than a fee and a docket.”

Gaius shrugged. “I’ve filed a report with the Department after every trip.”

“Indeed you have, and I’ve read them. Observant, informative, complete. Quite useful, as these things go.”

“Thank you.”

“But, as I say, not enough. Not if you wish to continue trading.”

“Continue trading with the other side?”

“Continue trading.”

That, thought Gaius, is the trouble with the invisible hand. It leaves you wide open to the invisible fist.

“No need for that,” he said. “Look, if you want me to spy for you, I’ll do it gladly.”

“That’s what I like,” Attulus said. “An enthusiastic volunteer. Sadly rare in the business community. And I didn’t even have to ask.”

And that was how it began.


Gaius Gonatus ran up a steep grassy bank and ducked through a rusted barrier to step onto the abandoned motorway. He walked onto the central lane and strolled up the intersection ramp for another hundred meters, until he was on the flyover. At its brow he looked around, remembered that the left-hand side afforded the better view—the other was cluttered by the small town and the striding pylons of the monorail—and crossed over to stand a pace or two back from the crumbled concrete of the parapet. It was at places like this that he felt most strongly the power and presence of the goddess. She alone had known how to call forth this mighty work, an overthrust of concrete implacable as rock. She alone had known to let it die, leaving it a twined green ribbon like the raffia knot on a wreath. Though the fancy pleased him, it struck him as too morbid, for the goddess had found a new use for the obsolete structure. Confined by the roadside crash barriers, flocks of sheep grazed along all the lanes, which formed strips of meadow through the forest and moorland. In the morning sun the smell of drying sheep droppings was faint above the smell of the grass and the trees. Far away a dog barked and a ewe bleated. At a further distance a sheep farmer’s autogyro buzzed, quieter than a bee.

Where Gaius stood was above the tops of the tallest pines, and he gazed out across twenty miles of forested plain and foothill to the mountain range on the western horizon. Their tops, as on most days, were covered by clouds. Somewhere up there, on most days, small bands of people would be making their way through those clouds, on the high passes. The frozen faces of those who had failed in the same passage would grin at them from the side of the road. Tomorrow, Gaius thought, he would look down on those clouds, and not even see the mountains.

The sound of another autogyro rose to the south. Gaius turned, squinting against the sun. A nearby flock of sheep scattered as the small craft sank toward the long green strip. It touched down and bumped along to halt a few yards from him, its prop feathering, its rotor beating in slower and slower cycles. The pilot dismounted and strode over, pulling off goggles and leather helmet and running his finger through the bushy hair thus released. He was a slim, small man in his mid-twenties with red hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His flying-jacket was incongruous over his blue and distinctly urban suit; likewise the canvas satchel and the shiny, thin-soled shoes, already sheep-shat.

“Good morning, Attulus,” said Gaius.

Attulus glowered. “Do you realize how inconvenient this is? And the cost to the Department?”

Gaius glanced over at the tiny flying machine and raised his eyebrows. “Lose it in the paperclip budget, why don’t you?”

“Hah!” snorted Attulus. “Why don’t you meet me in a cafe back in town?”

Gaius shrugged. “I like to keep our dealings out in the open.”

Attulus snorted again. “All right,” he said. “We don’t have much time. At least I don’t.”

He lifted the satchel’s flap and pulled out a thin sheaf of paper. Gaius folded it lengthways in half and stuck it in his inside jacket pocket, without looking.

“Don’t take them with you,” said Attulus, as though it didn’t need saying but he had to say it anyway. “They give the background of a man we want you to see. He looks like a good prospect for your sales pitch, but he isn’t. However, meeting him and stringing out the realization that he’s a seat warmer and buck passer should give you the chance to talk to the person we really want you to meet, one of his assistants who do the actual work, who might turn out to be a useful business contact, but that’s up to you. Full background on her, too. Her name is Lydia de Tenebre.”

“Let me guess,” said Gaius. “Old merchant family—”

“Fallen on hard times and working in the Space Authority. Yes. Also a malcontent, and part of a group.”

“How long has she been back?”

“Ten years. Her previous landfall was a hundred years earlier, our time.”

Gaius felt a chill. “She remembers old New Babylon.”

“Nova Babylonia, yes, she does indeed. Which is more than most of the malcontents can claim. It carries a certain cachet, in these circles.”

“How does she keep her job?”

Attulus grinned. “Competence counts. She has business skills the Modern Regime spent fifty years forgetting and another fifty trying to reinvent from first principles.”

“Or pretending to,” said Gaius. “They pirate our management textbooks, you know.”

“The Department makes sure they pirate the right ones.”

Gaius chuckled, under the misapprehension that Attulus was sharing a joke, then frowned. “Does she have access to any of their technical secrets?”

“Nothing like,” said Attulus. “Her security clearance is two ticks above zilch, which is why she’s stuck where she is.”

Gaius took a deep breath. “So what,” he said, “do you want me to talk to her about?”

Attulus stared away at the mountains for a moment, then asked abruptly: “Do you follow the litter press?”

“In an idle moment . . . the sports and television pages. The rest, well, I just look at the pictures.”

“Look at them carefully, next time you get the chance.”

“There’s a connection?”

“If you don’t see it,” Attulus said, “then we’ll have made a mistake, but apart from that, no harm will have been done. And if you do see it”—he smiled—“you’ll let nothing stop you. You’ll want to find out, and you’ll want to tell us.”

“You seem very sure of that.”

“You’ll do it,” said Atullus, “or die trying.”

He walked, then flew, swiftly away.

Gaius stared after the departing autogyro for a few minutes, until the dot was lost in the dazzle. Then he made his way back down the bank. He recognized rocks, now sinking into the grass, and trees, now reaching higher above it, that he’d used as handholds and footholds in boyhood scrambles. How well he had known that bank, known every tussock and hollow where a ball could come to rest or an ankle could twist. That intimate acquaintance and depth of detail had made it seem huge, even in his memory, and when he revisited it in dreams. How small it seemed now.


Gaius paid the visit to his mother that was the excuse for his trip, and took the monorail back to the city. He arrived at his office an hour before it was supposed to shut. He decided to call it a day. He put the phone on tape, locked up, and told Phyliss, the receptionist downstairs, to deflect any incoming calls until after the weekend. She looked up from her novel.

“You’re going away for ten days after the weekend.”

“So I am,” Gaius said. He dropped the key on her desk. “Water my plant?”

“Of course, Gaius.”

“Thanks. See you when I get back, then.”

She waited for a beat. “You’ve forgotten something.”

Gaius turned back, to see her holding out his airline tickets.

“As soon as I can afford a secretary . . . ” he said, taking them. He almost meant it.

“You’ll hire someone else,” she said. “And you’ll still rely on me. Happens all the time.”

“Have a good weekend,” he said.

Outside, the street was at the muggy end of autumn. Gaius slung his linen jacket over his shoulder and walked to the cafe on the corner. Inside, it was air-conditioned, which made it better than his office. In the old days it had been his office, and he sometimes regretted his move up in the world. Not that Gonatus Aerospace was much of a company. One office, one man, a lot of import-export deals. It looked like the sort of company a spy would set up as a front.

Gaius took a chilled coffee and cloves to a window table, scooping up abandoned newspapers as he went. Ten separate titles, all equally bad. Two glasses later he was cool, jumpy, and none the wiser. A dead kraken had washed up on a beach. The Duke’s third son had a new boyfriend. The established cults had quarreled over their share of the god-tax. A forester claimed to have seen a gravity skiff. Scientists said the saurs had not come back. Cloud people had rioted in an overcrowded holding camp. Defense and electronics shares were up. His fingers were black with cheap ink.

He remembered what Attulus had said, just after Gaius had mentioned looking at the pictures. This time he ignored the text and looked at the pictures. The news and publicity pictures were less interesting than the erotica. Some of the sexual positions looked as though they might be spelling out some kind of message, but he put that down to fatigue. His, not theirs. The only photograph all of the papers had in common was one taken by the forester, of something that might have been a thrown ashtray. He stared at it for a while, letting the grainy dots blur together. Under this crude enhancement it looked almost realistic.

It was a connection of a sort. A merchant’s daughter and a gravity skiff. Gaius had seen gravity skiffs, but only over the harbor of New Babylon, and then not for long. No one had seen a gravity skiff anywhere else in the past hundred years. If this was what Attulus had hoped would turn him into a fervent seeker after state secrets, it was a disappointment. All he felt was a tiny itch of curiosity.

There is this about that kind of a tiny itch, he thought. You do have to scratch.

Next he looked over the document Attulus had given him. It was a New Babylon Board of Trade handout. Not exactly deep background. David Daul sounded like a typical Modern Regime lower middle cadre. Son of a latifundia chairman. Farm school, military service, university, Society school, Space Agency. His current post was in technology procurement. He looked handsome in a spoiled way. Plenty of healthy sports, all with a military angle: skiing, martial arts, rifle shooting, hang gliding. He seemed exactly the man to approach with a sales pitch. Gaius almost regretted having not heard of him sooner.

The picture of Lydia de Tenebre had been taken at a long distance. She looked quite pretty. According to the briefing, she was about thirty years old. He’d have to allow for that. He scanned the background briefing, which was thin. Family large and conservative; former Traders usually were. No known political involvement, low profile, but she hung out with known malcontent artists and activists, and liked to mouth off about the good old days and the bad new ones. That was allowed. The Republic was a police state, but not totalitarian. You could think what you liked, and even say it. You just couldn’t print or broadcast it. It saved the state a lot of trouble. Mere tolerance made that sort of dissidence inconsequential.

It was the rest of Lydia de Tenebre’s background that was unusual. When he’d finished reading he could feel the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. The tiny itch of curiosity had become poison ivy.

He put the documents back in his briefcase, binned the papers, paid his tab, and left.


A bell chimed and Gaius refastened his seatbelt. Around him people stubbed out cigarettes. Uncollected litter rattled down the cabin floor as the airliner’s nose dipped. Gaius pressed his temple to the small ellipse of window and peered out. Within seconds the uniform white of the cloud broke into racing strands, and the land came into view below. First a brown and green checkerboard of logged or growing forest; then, as the aircraft passed over the foothills and above the long undulations of the Massif, the similarly uniform rectangles of collective latifundia, gridded with irrigation trenches, dotted with villages built on a uniform circular plan. After a while the Massif dropped away to the coastal plain. Here the farms were much larger, the fields many hectares of wheat and barley, and each village the hub of a wider and more natural-looking small town.

As the airliner banked to sideslip into its steep final descent—New Babylon Airlines was officially part of the air force, and all its pilots were jet-fighter veterans—Gaius glimpsed in some of the fields a regular series of elaborate whorls, as though the crops had been flattened by a tornado as precise as a drill. Some strange folk art or public display, he guessed, as the circles slipped out of sight. Perhaps it had something to do with lithomancy, a fad or cult in New Babylon—a row of lithomancy pylons stood on a nearby hill. Lithomancy had been another of the Modern Regime’s failures, a crackpot scheme of Volkov’s to contact the mind that he had supposed inhabited the lithosphere, much as the gods inhabited the asteroids and comets. If there was a mind in the world it was mad. Gaius himself regarded the whole thing as an artefact of radio noise, spillover and echo from the communications networks.

He’d never tired of seeing the city from the air in the last moments of the flight. The river divided around the island, stapled to each shore by numerous bridges. The industrial and residential suburbs on either bank rose smoothly like lower slopes around the peak formed by the island. The buildings on the island itself looked like columnar basalt, a stepped ascent for giants. Built over ten millennia, further built upon and blackened by one century’s industry. The tallest of the towers was the most recent. The Space Agency building was like an obsidian monolith that had been half-twisted while still hot. It was a bravura display of architectural skill, and an homage to the supposed shape of a lightspeed engine. It would have been more impressive if they’d actually built a lightspeed engine.

The city slid away under the wing and there was nothing but water below. The unmistakable shapes of oil tankers made him realize the aircraft was higher up than he’d thought—no matter how many times he’d seen New Babylon from the air, its scale didn’t register. Another sharp bank and they were heading straight for the city at a fast-dropping height, over a lonely star-ship lost in the harbor’s traffic, skimming masts, then above the long, projecting concrete finger of the airfield, and one wheel hit, then two, then with a jarring shudder the third, and they were down. He’d had more comfortable landings on carrier decks.

Gaius hauled his bag and briefcase from the overhead locker and joined the shuffling queue to the front. Half the passengers had lit up as soon as the seatbelt lights had gone off. After that landing, he couldn’t blame them.

In the customs hall the officer thumbed through his passport as if it was subversive literature. With its gaudy variety of visa stamps, maybe it was. Gaius gave him more reactionary propaganda in body language.

“Point of departure?” the officer asked.

“Junopolis, Free Duchy of Illyria.” I would like to shout this in your streets.

“Purpose of visit?”

“Business.” Who would come here for pleasure?

“Duration of stay?”

“Ten days.” Too long.

“Place of residence?”

“The Foreigners’ Hotel, Messana District.” Where else?

Lick, thumb, stamp. “Enjoy your stay.”

“Thank you.” This is not your fault.

At the Change Money, Gaius handed over a bag of Illyrian silver, and got in return a bale of paper and a fistful of nickel. Every note from the million up and every coin down to the hundred had been defaced—the paper with a pen, the base metal with a knife. The scribbles and scratches obscured the face of Volkov. Why the Regime had not simply replaced their worthless currency after the Great Engineer’s fall Gaius had never discovered. Perhaps it was for the same reason that they’d left the plinths of his statues standing.

Gaius stuffed it all in his wallet—his actual business would be conducted in hard money—and headed for the underground station. He had hand luggage only. The case of samples would go direct to the hotel. Nothing would be missing, but everything would have been taken out, shaken, turned over. And, no doubt, photographed for the Bureau of Technology Procurement, where it would do them no good whatsoever.

Public transport was one of the things that New Babylon did well. The stations were vaults of white tile. The trains had carriages of polished steel and seats of pale wood. Everything about it was good, and modern, and cool, except the passengers. Their clothes didn’t quite fit, their skins were missing a vitamin, their bodies wanted to be somewhere else, and their minds didn’t know where it was. Gaius sat with his briefcase on his knees and his bag between them, and stared straight ahead like everybody else. The intersections afforded other opportunities, in the long curving corridors of bright tile. Before he’d made two transfers he’d had three offers for his shirt. It wasn’t a good shirt.

By the time he’d walked the hundred meters from Messana East to the Foreigners’ Hotel, the shirt might as well have been flannel. After the hours in air-conditioning his pores opened to the street like storm drains. His shadow looked cut off at the knees. The traffic was a slow snarl of underpowered trucks and clanging bikes. The sidewalks were crowded but quiet. Everybody was hurrying to some place they didn’t want to go. One person in fifty was a cop, and one in a hundred wore a cop’s uniform. The hotel was at the top of a small rise. At the step Gaius paused and looked back, down the whole length of Astronaut Avenue, a smooth sweep from the five-story tenements and office blocks around him to the black canyon of the expensive end, and the blue slot of sky and sea, and the dark speck of the starship.

If the concierge remembered him from six months earlier she gave no indication of it. She took his passport and money and gave him a key for Room 503. The lift was out of order and the stair carpet was frayed, but for the air conditioning Gaius could forgive anything. He dropped his baggage on the bed just to hear the springs creak and opened a window. The room was nonsmoking, but not its most recent occupant. Gaius showered in a rusty trickle, dried on scratchy nylon, changed into a lighter shirt and thin trousers, and sat down on the bed. There was a table with a mirror and a phone, and no chair. The boy who brought up coffee stammered when Gaius tipped him ten million. This was their good stuff, their best foot forward.

Gaius carried the phone over to the bed and worked down his list of contacts, setting up appointments. Some were previous clients, others new possibilities. All of them were departments of, or suppliers for, the Space Agency. Under the post-Volkov economic reforms, they were supposed to compete with each other. In practice they bought each other off. Under the Ten-Year Plans the Trusts’ executives had competed fiercely, hitting each other with purges in the official system and hijackings and armed robberies in the unofficial system. Corruption was a step back toward civilization.

He put David Daul in about a third of the way down the list. The cadre was out but the woman who took the call made an appointment for the day after tomorrow. Gaius hoped the voice on the phone was that of Lydia de Tenebre, because it was a voice he wanted to hear again.

The thought kept him going for the rest of the afternoon and the rest of the list. By the end of it he had the next ten days blocked in. Most of the trusts had offices on Astronaut Avenue, and the Departments were of course in the Space Agency building. The few actual factories he had managed to arrange to visit were all close to the underground stations. His sample case arrived. Everything was there but in the wrong compartments.

He ate out in a local shop-front restaurant, another product of the economic reforms. There was a law about how many chairs it could have, so like most of the customers he ate standing up. Then he decided to go out and have a good time, so he went to the nearest public library.


The following day he made only one sale, but it was of one of his own inventions, a solid-state switching mechanism that would replace half a ton of diodes. It made the day a net plus but the trek around the offices left him drained. After dinner he just collapsed onto the bed and slept, and woke early and sticky. At this time in the morning the shower had enough heat and pressure to be refreshing. The underground railway journey undid all that, but Gaius still felt good as he strode in to the Space Agency building.

The guards were edgier than he’d expected. They ran his briefcase and samples through the scanner five times, patted him down thrice. He sweated calmly through it all, gazing at the murals around the reception area. Blow-up photos of rocket launches, orbital forts, plasma cannon, smiling astronauts. A blank space on the wall where once, he guessed, there had been a portrait of Volkov. The lift was shabby and its attendant had a pistol on his hip.

“Floor Twenty-seven, please.” He showed his pass, dated and time-stamped under laminate.

The cage door rattled closed, the lift doors thudded. Gaius smiled at the attendant, who looked right back through him.

“Floor Twenty-seven.” The attendant refused a tip, then took it in a deftly upturned palm as soon as his back was turned to the camera.

Daul’s office door bore his name and the legend “Small Parts Procurement.” Gaius let his smile at that carry over. The office was fairly large, with about a dozen people at small desks and one man at a large one in a glassed alcove at the back with a window. The rest of the walls were covered with trade advertisements and Agency or Regime posters. Typewriters and calculators clattered. It was a busy place; hardly anyone looked up as he came in. Most of the workers were in the modern suits favored by the Regime, a couple of the women wore old-fashioned wrap robes. With a jolt, he recognized one of them as the woman he’d come to meet. She seemed younger than he’d expected. The picture had done her less than justice. She didn’t look up.

Gauis walked through to the alcove and tapped. David Daul, looking slightly older and grainier than his picture, nodded him in. They shook hands.

“Good morning, Citizen—” Daul broke of to correct himself, smiling—“Mr. Gonatus. Make yourself comfortable.”

“Good morning, Citizen Daul. Thank you.”

As he pulled a swivel chair into position, Gaius took the opportunity to glance over Daul’s desk surface. It was cluttered with technical drawings and critical-path diagrams and work schedules, along with the predictable empty coffee mugs, full ashtrays, and chewed pencils, a pen holder, a small intricate mechanical calculator, and a slide rule. Daul rang out for coffee, which a brisk young man brought in; offered cigarettes.

“I’ve been looking forward to seeing you,” Daul said, preliminaries over. “Frankly, getting decent kit on time out of some of the bastards I have to deal with is a pain in the arse. If the foreigners can give me better, on schedule and under budget, bring ’em on, I say.” He cocked a grin at Gaius. “And don’t think I’m giving too much away at the start. There are other foreign salesmen on our case, and not just Illyrian.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Gaius. “However, I think you’ll find us competitive.”

“Great! Let’s have a look at what you’ve got.”

As Gaius worked through his well-researched and well-rehearsed pitch, Daul hit him with a succession of searching questions, not just on the technical side—which he’d expected— but costs and delivery dates, quality control, penalty clauses, and possibilities of undercutting or overperforming documented competing bids. Gaius found himself liking the man, and rapidly revising the assessment he’d been given by Attulus. In different circumstances, Gaius thought, Daul might have been the salesman, and he the bureaucrat.

Eventually they straightened their backs from leaning over the same diagram and looked at each other with a laugh that covered a certain mutual embarrassment—they’d been discussing a design problem as though they were on the same team.

“Well,” said Daul, “I think I can make you an offer. Can’t shake hands on it yet, I’m afraid—some paperwork has to be passed upstairs, forms in triplicate, you know the sort of thing. Call me back tomorrow and I can let you know if you’ve hit the mark.”

Was this the buck-passing he’d been warned about, or was it genuinely a busy and competent man doing his best in a bureaucracy? Gaius couldn’t be sure. Either way, Daul’s swift proceeding was leaving him without the chance to meet Lydia de Tenebre. He tried to think fast.

“Excellent,” he said. “I wish everyone I have to deal with were as prompt.” He glanced at his watch. “You know, you’ve just cleared hours off my schedule—given me a bit of free time this evening. I’d quite like to wander around with someone who knows the city, maybe take in a beer and a meal.”

Daul raised a hand. “Sorry, I can’t help you there—strict rules about favors and all that. Kind of you to offer, though. Cuts both ways too, dammit, or I’d show you a good time myself.”

“Oh, not at all, maybe another time.” He feigned disappointment and let his gaze drift to the window. “Quite fascinating, the buildings that remain from the old city. Bit of a hobby of mine, to be honest.”

“Ah,” said Daul, “you’re an old city man?” He punched his palm. “Of course, of course—you Illyrians. Bloody reactionaries to a man, eh? Well, you’re in luck there, I know someone who isn’t a buyer, so no rules bent, and who’ll be delighted to tell you all about it, if she’s free.”

He poked his head around the door of the alcove. “Lydia? A moment please.”

A young woman in an old-fashioned robe walked in. Gaius smiled, shook hands, and tried not to stare as Daul introduced him and explained his request.

“I’d be delighted,” said Lydia. Her voice sounded even better than it had on the phone. “Where shall we meet?”

Gaius suddenly realized that he didn’t know any good places. Well, maybe one. Call that two.

“What about the Library of Earth?” he said.

Lydia’s smile was more than polite, it was complicit.

“Perfect,” she said. “Seven after noon.”


You could forget nuclear-power stations, orbital forts, plasma cannon, space rockets, interplanetary ballistic missiles, the public health service, education, irrigation, sanitation, the collectivization of the latifundia and the electrification of the proletariat. The greatest achievement of the Modern Regime was its libraries. Downtown stood two gigantic marble edifices: the Library of Earth, and next door to it, the Library of New Earth. The latter was by far the older. Its earliest texts were on clay tiles, in cuneiform. You could buy plastic replicas of them in the foyer. The former came originally from a machine smaller than a single book. You could buy plastic replicas of it too, as paperweights. A cosmonaut’s pocket computer, it had the 2045 Library of Congress as a standard feature. It also had the libraries of the Vatican, the Kremlin, and the Academy of Sciences of Beijing. These were not standard. The manufacturer’s marketing department had added them as a sales gimmick. The cosmonaut was Volkov. By the time he’d arrived on New Earth the computer was dead metal, a sentimental souvenir; but in the early years of his life on Mingulay the saurs had reproduced these millions of stored books on paper in their manufacturing plant; and via the merchant families, at least a million of them had reached New Earth.

Copies of books from both collections circulated endlessly through the system of public libraries. It was the one source of information in New Babylon that had never been censored. The Modern Regime allowed anyone to read books whose writing would have got them hanged. In its early years, it kept the old scholars of the Academy happily occupied in compiling a digest of human knowledge, the endlessly fascinating and dubiously reliable Encyclopaedia Babylonica. Gaius had a cheap, Illyrian-pirated edition of its thirty volumes on a shelf back home.

Lydia turned up a few minutes late with six thick books under her arm. She’d changed her antique robe for an aggressive outfit of leather jacket and trousers, rips and zips, but she still astonished his eyes.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “The books slowed me down. Do you mind if we go in?”

“Not at all, this is one of my favorite places here.”

She looked hard at him as they emerged from the revolving doors. “Surprised I haven’t seen you before.”

Gaius laughed. “I don’t exactly come here often.”

“Oh, I know, but—”

The library’s vast hush silenced her.

She returned her books. He read their titles, side-on: Capital (three volumes); Theories of Surplus Value (two volumes); The Accumulation of Capital (one volume). He was impressed that she studied business methods in her spare time.

They went out. The street seemed loud, though it was far too quiet.

“I love the library,” she said, “but you can’t talk. And you don’t need me to show you around it. So—where would you like to go?”

To bed with you, he thought. Actually, no. Anywhere would do.

“Are there still beer parlors in the old business district?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’re not as good as they were, of course. Bureaucrats don’t drink like businessmen. At least not in public.”

She ran down the steps and swung into an easy pace, as though not caring if he walked beside her or not.

“The bars around here are bugged,” she said. “The staff are cops. So let’s get this over out here. You’re a spy, right?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Common sense and long experience. Any foreign businessmen who aren’t spies are too stupid to be recruited, and you’re not stupid.”

“You’re jumping to conclusions.”

“You’re not denying it.”

He couldn’t say anything to that.

“Let’s get one thing clear,” she went on. “I have my own opinions, but I’m a loyal citizen. More to the point, I’m a loyal employee. I like David Daul. If you’re looking for some inside track on your sale or you’re into industrial espionage, forget it.”

“I’m not interested in any of that.”

“Aha!” She stopped dead, throwing him a couple of steps forward. He turned back to face her.

“So what are you interested in?”

“You,” he said, more forcefully than he’d meant. “I’ve been asked to contact you. That’s all.”

She started walking again, making him catch up. If she wanted them to look like lovers quarreling she was doing a good job of it.

“There must be some context,” she said. “The name of the Free Duchy isn’t enough to make me go weak at the knees. What do you want?”

“There is a context,” he said. “Well, two.”

“Uh-huh. Tell me the first one.”

“Skiffs.”

She broke her stride, recovered.

“There’s the harbor.” She pointed. “Go down and ask a saur, if you can find one.”

“I’m talking about unidentified skiffs.”

“Fuck off.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Don’t try to jerk me around. If you want to know about the Bright Star Cultures you can ask me right out. You don’t need to pretend they’re here.”

“I don’t know if they’re here or not. All I know is that unidentified skiffs are being reported in our litter press.”

She turned on him a look of withering scorn. “Oh, that.

“I share your contempt for it,” he said.

“Glad to hear it. What was the other context?”

“I was given to understand,” Gaius said cautiously, “that you are known as a malcontent.”

Lydia stopped again. When he’d turned back he saw her smiling, for the first time since the library. It had felt like a long time.

“Oh boy,” she said, “have they ever sent you after the wrong girl.”

“You’re not a malcontent?”

“I am, just not the way you think.” Her smile became a baring of teeth. “I’m a Volkovist.”

They were standing outside a beer parlor. Gaius felt dizzy and slightly sick. He indicated the door.

“Shall we?” he said.

“I know somewhere better. Safer, anyway.”

She led him down to the end of Astronaut Avenue and sharply right along the waterfront to an area where the lights were orange and the buildings were long and low, warehouses and offices long since turned to other purposes. Outside one of them, a beer parlor by the sign if nothing else, Lydia paused, then crossed the road to look across the quay and the water to the starship. By the time Gaius had caught up with her, she was looking up, at an orange sky through which a handful of stars were visible.

“I miss the stars,” she said. “I miss traveling to them, but I miss seeing them even more. I’m a pantheist. Pollution is persecution.”

“I’m an agorist,” said Gaius. “Planning is sacrilege.”

She gave him a tight smile. “Let’s see you spend some money,” she said.

They went back across the street to the drinking dive.

The bar had too much dust, smoke, verdegris. The roof beams were low and bare, with bare electrical bulbs hanging from them. The tables had benches that might have been recovered from a demolished temple. The clientele, thin at this time, looked unrespectable. The beer was still good.

“You knew Volkov,” Gaius said “Is that safe to talk about?”

“Yes, and yes.” She raised her glass. “To the Republic.”

He moved a jug of water and lifted his glass above it. “The Republic.”

He’d seen malcontents do this. On the other side of the Half Moon Sea, and not a dozen kilometers from where they sat, was the Republic of Lapithia—another breakaway province, of impressive size but largely desert, its coastal fishing devasted by New Babylon’s industrial runoff. They exported mainly nurses, sailors, and mercenaries; imported exiles who sat in seafront bars and plotted till they died of drink.

She smiled. “Very good. The strait is patrolled. You have to go a long way up the coast to get past them, and by that point it’s actually quicker and safer to go over the mountains.”

“Cloud people.”

“Yes. It’s not illegal to emigrate, you know. Even the patrols are mainly to stop smuggling and raiding.”

“So why do people—”

“Because your precious Duchy doesn’t give visas. They’ll take a trickle of cloud people, oh yes. Legal immigration would be too much to handle, and wouldn’t supply sob stories for your litter press.”

“It’s a sore point,” Gaius conceded. “You were saying about Volkov?”

Lydia shrugged. “I went to bed with him a few times. He was all right.” She smiled. “Experienced.”

Gaius felt himself go red in the face. “That’s not what I was asking about.”

“What is there to say? You must have read about him and my family. We met him on Mingulay, we brought him here, we went away and came back. He was dead. We found what he had left.”

“Yes,” said Gaius. “The greatest city in the known universe, turned into this heap of shit.”

“It’s a heap of shit all right,” Lydia said. “But what he built was worth it.”

“You can’t truly believe that,” said Gaius. “He fought off the aliens, I’ll give you that.”

“You don’t need to,” said Lydia. “The aliens aren’t a threat anyway. I should know.”

“I know you encountered them,” said Gaius. “And the people who had been corrupted by them.”

“Yes, and none of that is a threat. The Bright Star Cultures are out there, and coming closer, and no doubt when they do arrive the SDF will fight them off. Or maybe not.” She chopped with her hand. “None of that matters.”

“So what does? If you don’t like the Modern Regime and you don’t fear the aliens, what did Volkov do that was so great?”

“He gave us back our pride,” she said. “He showed us we could be a great people, that we didn’t need to limit ourselves to what the saurs would accept. All but a few of them cringe before the gods. Volkov said we can go out to space ourselves, face and fight the aliens, and deflect anything the gods care to throw at us. The saurs went away, they stopped sharing their skiffs and the krakens stopped sharing their ships. New Babylon built rockets. For the first time in ten thousand years, people stopped traveling to the stars—but for the first time, they actually visited the planets of this system. The saurs stopped healing us, and thousands upon thousands died in plagues. Maybe millions on the planet as a whole. The Modern Regime built hospitals, invented medicines, expanded health services to fill the gap. We lost the trade with the saurs, and everything they produced in their manufacturing plant. The Modern Regime built factories. The provinces broke away under the burden of Volkov’s space defense taxes—and what are they now? They’re nations, like yours, independent centers of development, with the capacity—if not yet the will—to build rockets of their own. You have no idea, Mr. Gonatus, no idea at all how much of a triumph it is for Volkov that I’m sitting here talking to you—gods above, an Illyrian, uh, businessman, of all things! Without Volkov Illyria would still be a sleepy agricultural province, with nothing to sell but sheep, and a dozy patrician on the Senate of Nova Babylonia, who left every hard problem to his saur scribe!”

“We had to fight New Babylon to get independence!”

“Exactly,” said Lydia. “And my friends here”—she waved vaguely at the now-growing crowd in the bar, a rabble of types who looked like artists or musicians or criminals—“who talk about the glories of old Nova Babylonia are right—I remember it, and I loved it too. But we can’t go back to it, and we shouldn’t want to. The Modern Regime will fall someday. Madame President will die, the gerontocratic camarilla around her will fall out with each other and with the security forces, the Society will split, and the crowd will pour through the gap. Competent people, like my boss, will move to the top floor. The crowd will pull down all that remains of Volkov’s memorials, they’ll demolish the bloody plinths. A century later, two centuries, it doesn’t matter, their grandchildren will erect a modest statue of Volkov, the Engineer, maybe at the bottom of Astronaut Avenue, and nobody will think it strange.”

Gaius covered his confusion by buying another couple of drinks. Somebody had started playing a zither. Others, even more misguidedly, were singing. Gaius was grateful that the malcontent musical ethos eschewed electrical amplification. He returned and set down the drinks and slid himself into the high-backed bench beside Lydia, who was sitting on a stool at the head of the table with her back to the wall. The matter of Volkov, he’d decided, was best dropped. He was not sure whether Lydia had been corrupted by adaptation to the Regime, or had acquired an inhumanly long view of history from her earlier life as an interstellar traveler. He leaned forward a little and spoke in a low voice.

“Your ideas deserve a better discussion,” he said. “What concerns me at the moment is that the managers of my business back in Illyria clearly believe the unidentified skiff sightings are real, and that you know something which might explain them.”

Lydia looked down into her drink. Her lips compressed, her fingers pressed on her temples.

“I can’t begin to hope,” she said, “that the ships have got through. Unless . . . oh, I remember now. We’re such good navigators. Better than the kraken. Better than Gregor.”

Gaius stared at her. “Who’s ‘we’? Who’s Gregor?”

Her eyes were glazed. She wasn’t really looking at him. Then she blinked and recovered. “Gregor Cairns,” she said. “You know, the Mingulayan navigator.”

Gaius had heard of the Mingulayan navigator. News of what went on in the Mingulayan-dominated sector of the Sphere—the Bright Star Cultures, as its inhabitants called it—had arrived in approximate reverse order over the past few years. Gregor Cairns had also been referred to in the information that had arrived more than a century earlier, with Volkov himself. That Lydia had had some acquaintance with him was briefly alluded to in Gaius’s briefing.

“I know about Gregor,” he said. “You haven’t said who ‘we’ are.”

“I’ll show you,” she said.

She took a dinky pen knife from her pocket and opened it, and very deliberately made a small cut in the tip of her ring finger (which bore no rings). She squeezed out a drop of blood and let it fall on the table.

“What are you doing?”

Lydia pointed at the red drop. “Watch,” she said.




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