Century Rain Part 99

She stepped into the s.h.i.+p. He saw her face disappear, then her body, then her legs.

Then the ramp lifted up.

Floyd stepped back. The s.h.i.+p growled, spat fire and then slowly clawed its way back into the sky.

He stood there for many minutes, like a man who had lost his way in the fog. It was only when he heard a distant rumble of thunder that he turned around and began to make his way back to the city he knew; the city he felt some tenuous claim on.

Somewhere far above him, Auger was on her way home.

Tunguska had cleared a large area of wall and a.s.signed it to display a visual feed-suitably doctored to bring out detail and colour-of the closing wound in the ALS. They were through it now and back into empty s.p.a.ce, but the last hour of the escape had still been as anxious as any Auger could remember. The wound's rate of closure had surged and decelerated with savage unpredictability, mocking any attempts to predict its future progress.

"Things might actually have been worse than I feared," Tunguska said, his voice as slow and unperturbed as ever. "It might not just have been a question of our being trapped inside the sealed sh.e.l.l of the ALS. We don't know what will happen when that wound closes itself."

"I don't follow," Auger said. With Ca.s.sandra's guidance, she had fas.h.i.+oned a stool for herself, next to Tunguska's. "We'd have been trapped inside. That would have been bad, but it's not the worst thing I could imagine happening. There'd have been people on the outside who knew we were there, trying to find a way to rescue us..."

They were free now and it was easy to talk of such things lightly, no matter how terrifying they had seemed at the time.

"There's more to it than that," Tunguska said gently. "The ALS is entering a new state we haven't seen before, or at least one we haven't witnessed directly."

"Again," she said, "I don't-" "For the last twenty-three years there's been a connection between the interior matter of the ALS and the flow of time in the outside universe. I'm talking about the hyperweb link, of course. We know that it was activated-or brought to full functionality after a period of dormancy-during the Phobos occupation. Until then, Floyd's world had been frozen at the instant of the quantum snapshot. Presumably, it was the establishment of the link that caused time to flow forwards at the normal rate. Twenty-three years in our world, twenty-three years in Floyd's."

"Yes," she said slowly. "That much I get."

"But now there is no hyperweb link. It hasn't just been put into a state of dormancy, as was the case after the Phobos reoccupation until the rediscovery of the portal two years ago. It's been completely destroyed. There is no longer any detectable portal machinery in Mars...o...b..t."

"But we've been inside the ALS since then," Auger said. "We saw E2. We saw that it wasn't frozen in time."

Tunguska looked at her with infinite kindness and compa.s.sion in his heavily lidded eyes. "But that was before the closing of the wound," he said gently. "Now we have no idea what will happen to E2. Events may continue to roll forward at the normal rate...or the matter inside the ALS may undergo a phase transition back to its frozen state, as it was for more than three hundred years."

"No," she said. "That can't happen, because..." But even as she was speaking, she found herself unable to frame any plausible objection. Tunguska might be right, or Tunguska might be wrong. They simply didn't know enough about the ALS or its functioning to work it out.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I felt I needed to mention the possibility, no matter how remote."

"But if that's the case," she said, "then I've condemned-"

He placed his huge hand on hers. "You've condemned no one to anything. Even if the world freezes again, nothing inside it will have been lost. Three billion lives will just stall between one heartbeat and the next, as they did at the moment of the snapshot. They'll feel nothing. It will be kinder than sleep. And perhaps one day something will happen that will enable that next heartbeat. The world will wake again. We can only hope that when that happens, wiser minds than ours will intervene from outside to a.s.sist the world towards its destiny." He patted her hand. "But perhaps it won't happen like that anyway. Perhaps the world won't freeze. Perhaps, once awakened, it will always flow forward."

"We'll know one day, won't we? Floyd's people won't take long to open their eyes. They must have seen what the wound did to their sky. If they puzzle over that long enough, sooner or later someone's going to make the right connections."

"And then it'll be them knocking to be let out, rather than us knocking to be let in."

"Or they won't knock at all," Auger said. "Do baby birds knock to get the mother bird to let them out of the egg?"

"I confess I've never seen one," Tunguska said.

"An egg? Or a bird?"

"Either. But I take your point. The one thing we'd be very unwise to do is underestimate, the capacity of Floyd's people. Something very like his culture did, after all, give rise to our own."

"The poor fools," Auger said.

A little while later, they reached the outgoing portal. A chirrup from the automated monitoring station informed them that a real-time communication relay had been established with Polity s.p.a.ce.

"It's Maurya Skellsgard," Tunguska said. "Shall I put her on?"

"Please," Auger said.

The transmission quality was poor: routing the signal through multiple portal connections was difficult at the best of times, and almost impossible given the chaos back around the Sun. Skellsgard's image kept flickering or going sound-only.

"I'll keep this brief," she said. "We're only holding things together with spit and prayers at this end. These Slasher technicians are good, but they can't work miracles. If the link fails, we'll just have to catch up with each other when you make it back home. In the meantime, everyone's very proud of you. I heard about Floyd, too. I'm sorry it had to end that way for you both."

"I'm all right," Auger said.

"You don't sound it."

"OK, I'm a wreck. I was never fond of goodbyes, under any circ.u.mstances. Why the h.e.l.l did I have to like him, Maurya? Why couldn't he have been a p.r.i.c.k I couldn't wait to get rid of?"

"That's the way the universe works, honeybunch. Better get used to it, because it's going to be around for a good few Hubble times."

Auger forced out a laugh. "Just what I need-a sympathetic shoulder."

Skellsgard's voice became serious. "Look, the main thing is that the two of you are safe. Given the range of outcomes that were available to us a couple of days ago, I'd say that has to count as a result."

"I suppose you're right." Her thoughts kept returning to Tunguska's speculation about the quantum state of the ALS, but she didn't want to think about that now. "Anyway, it's good to know you're OK as well. I'm glad you made it. How are things back home?"

"Dicey."

"I'll need calibration on that. Is that better or worse than a day ago?"

"I guess you'd have to say it was better, by about the width of one of Planck's toenail clippings. The good guys on both sides have brokered some kind of...well, I hesitate to call it a ceasefire just yet. Call it a reduction in the scale of hostilities. That has to be something, right? And of course some of us have already managed to put aside our differences, or you and I wouldn't be having this long-distance chat."

"What about the Earth?"

"Tanglewood reined in the nuclear strikes. The place is going to glow nicely in the dark for a few centuries, but there should still be some ruins worth poking around in."

"I guess we have to take what we're given and be glad it's not worse. When all this is over, I'm still going to have to carry my begging bowl to the funding committees."

"Actually, Auger, that's the reason I called." Skellsgard's permanent scowl softened fractionally. "I have some news for you. Not quite sure what to make of it yet, but I do have my suspicions. This is, needless to say, about as preliminary as it gets."

"Tell me," Auger said.

"You know what they say about an 'ill wind?'" She waited a moment for Auger's reaction, but her face remained blank. "Well, never mind. The point is, we're all upset because we lost the Phobos portal. I've looked at the numbers, too-beefed up with some hot new Slasher know-how-and it really does look as if we've blown that particular connection."

"We shouldn't give up," Auger said firmly. "We should always keep trying to reinstate it. E2 is too valuable to give up on."

"No one's going to give up on it, not while there are still so many loopholes in the theory. But for the time being it may not be our highest priority."

The image fuzzed and gradually rea.s.sembled, block by block.

"What have you got?" Auger asked.

"When the Phobos portal blew," Skellsgard said, "something weird happened. We didn't notice it at the

time-our monitoring equipment just wasn't sensitive enough. But the Slashers? Different story. They had the whole system laced with sensors tuned to pick up portal signatures. For years they hadn't detected a squeak; nothing to hint that there were any portals other than the one on Sedna and the one in Phobos."

"And now?"

"When the Phobos link died, it must have given off some kind of death-scream vibration that drew a

sympathetic resonance from other dormant links in the vicinity. The sensors picked up faint signals from fifteen different locations around the system."

Auger wondered whether she'd heard Skellsgard correctly. "Fifteen?"

"That may not be the end of it. The weakest signals were at the limit of detection: could be there are

other sources they missed entirely. The whole d.a.m.n system could be riddled with portals we never even suspected were there. We'd never have found them by accident: they're all buried underground, on anonymous little iceb.a.l.l.s no one ever paid much attention to before."

"Jesus," Auger said.

"Jesus squared. I hope you're impressed."

"I am."

Skellsgard smiled. "I figured you needed cheering up. Like I said, it's preliminary. But as soon as things

simmer down around here, we're going to put together a joint expedition and dig down until we find one of these things. Then we're going to switch it on and see where it takes us."

"That's a big question."

"I know. Out into the galaxy? But what would be the point of that? We already have the Sedna portal for that. Me, I think they'll take us somewhere else entirely."

At first, Auger fought to keep the excitement from her voice. Then she decided she didn't care. What

was the point? Skellsgard knew exactly how she'd be feeling.

"Inside another ALS?"

"That's my best guess. We know there are a lot of them out there. We know one of them contained a snapshot of Earth from the twentieth century. Why not other spheres containing other snapshots? There could be dozens of Earths out there, all frozen at different instants in history. One portal might be our ticket into the Middle Ages. Another might put us into the middle of the Tria.s.sic."

"I need to be on that team," Auger said.

"I wouldn't have it any other way. Just remember to bring your best digging clothes: we're not likely to come out so close to a tunnel the next time."

"I hope you're right about this."

"I do, too," Skellsgard said, just before the communications link finally gave up the ghost. "But even if I'm not, I don't think either of us will have to worry about funding committees for a little while."

Floyd slowed his stroll, coming to a stop under a streetlamp. He reached out and took hold of the poster gummed to the lamp's fluted shaft and pulled it away, carefully this time, so as not to tear the thing in two. He held the sheet up to the light, peering at the printed image through a s.h.i.+fting veil of fog.

It was a picture of Chatelier. Except-now that he thought about it-the picture looked a lot like someone else he'd met recently. Not an exact likeness, but enough to raise the hackles of recognition. Not close enough to be the same man. But certainly close enough for them to be brothers.

Maybe it was just his imagination.

Maybe it wasn't.

He folded the poster and shoved it into his pocket. There was a telephone number at the foot of it for anyone who wanted to support Chatelier's political campaign. Floyd thought that maybe tomorrow he might think about paying Chatelier's people a visit. Just to ask a few questions. Just to make a nuisance of himself.

He carried on into the city, counting down the street numbers, looking for some essential landmark. Somewhere in the distance he heard a maritime foghorn blare into the night. A telephone kiosk loomed out of the void like a lighthouse. He stepped inside and closed the door, tried the money-return hatch and pulled out a single coin. His lucky day. Floyd fed the telephone and dialled a number in Montparna.s.se that he knew by memory.

Sophie answered.

"This is Floyd," he said. "I hope it's not too late. Is Greta there?"

"Just a moment."

"Wait," he said, before she stepped away to find Greta. "Is Marguerite still...?"

"She's still alive, yes."

"Thank you."

"I'll fetch Greta. She's upstairs."

He waited, drumming his fingers on the gla.s.s door of the telephone box. They hadn't parted on the best of terms. How was she going to take his coming back now, after all the time he'd been away?

Someone picked up the receiver.