“Thanks,” Li tells the policewoman, the last to move away. She nods in acknowledgement. Edda gets into the driver’s side. I wait until the police are in their cars before stepping into the road. I don’t say anything until the door is closed. “What happened there?”
“They said they had reports.” Li watches the two cars pull away ahead of us. At the end of the street they drive off in different directions. “They wouldn’t say what they were about.”
Edda starts the engine.
“I don’t think we were in danger.” Li is still excited by the encounter with the police. “The one asking questions seemed to have problems. The others weren’t there in case we caused trouble; they were to stop him. Did you see the way they kept their eyes on him?”
Edda watches the road. “If he’d attacked us they’d have sided with him.”
“I don’t think so. They’d have stopped him. Or dragged him away.”
“If he’d attacked us they would have arrested us.” Edda is emphatic. “That’s what security services do. They don’t like admitting mistakes. Let’s see if we can get back without any more trouble.”
“I think I know why he was anxious,” Li says. “It’s the March for Humanity. It’s happening today. The government’s telling people who aren’t going to the march to stay at home. They’re saying there might be repercussions. That’s why the streets are empty.”
“They have demonstrations all the time,” I say. “They didn’t empty the streets like this.”
“This is different,” Li says. “This is big. They’re saying a million people. And the government is encouraging it. The media has been telling stories about extemps. That’s unusual. The Prime Minister has said enough is enough and lines have to be drawn. They’re saying they don’t care if it provokes us, they have to make a stand. They’re stirring up a lot of fear.”
“It’s theatre,” I say. Cantor’s description.
“It’s a mess,” Edda says. “Everything’s a mess. They pretend to make a stand; we pretend to back down. Your friend thinks he’s investigating your client. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s investigating him.”
“Cantor always liked elaborate conspiracies.”
“Well, he’s part of one now. I hope he’s happy. But he’s an idiot. I’m surprised they thought they could trust him. He shouldn’t have told us anything.”
“He’s a climate scientist. He doesn’t have the training. And I’m an old friend. He probably thought it was safe to tell me.”
“He was an idiot. He should have known better. You don’t tell people what’s going to happen. You don’t tell people you work for Awareness. He shouldn’t have mentioned them.” She frowns at the road. “They shouldn’t use people like him.”
“Perhaps they didn’t have a choice. He was at the airport. He had to be there. He was distraught. He had to watch somebody die.”
“I think he did more than watch. But we can’t report this, any of it. When Hayek asks what he said, tell him it was all climate science and you didn’t understand.”
“What did he say?” Li asks.
“We could save lives,” I say. “At least we could warn them about 52 and 71. We don’t have to say how we know. We could tell them it was a rumour.”
Li repeats, “So what did he say? Is something happening?”
“We can’t tell you,” Edda tells her. To me she says: “It would make trouble for everybody. If we say we heard a rumour do you think they’ll pay any attention? But when it happens, then they’ll remember what we said. And then they’ll want to know exactly where we heard this rumour.”
“We tell them. Awareness, Five South.”
“You can’t mention them. They’ll disown your friend. Look, they probably know about us already. You saw the equipment. How do you think they’ll react when they hear what he told us? The only way to avoid trouble is to say nothing and pretend you didn’t understand.”
“Understand what?” Li asks.
“That Five South and Two East are playing at espionage,” Edda says coldly. “And Five South is looking for an excuse to start a war.”
“Is that all?” Li is disappointed. “Don’t we assume they’re doing that anyway? What else did he say? Did he know about his brother?”
“He didn’t know. I’m sure if he knew anything he would have told us.”
“Did he say anything about what’s happening now?”
“He was the one who said it was theatre.”
We sit without talking until we’re back on the motorway. There are more vehicles on the road now. It’s closer to, but not quite, an ordinary day. My thoughts are going in all directions, none of them cheerful. Meanwhile there’s a noise that’s been disturbing me for a while, a chugging sound that has slowly been getting louder. It isn’t made by our vehicle. Then I look up. “Is that thing following us?”
Li looks up as well. “It’s called a helicopter.”
“If it’s just watching us I don’t mind,” Edda says. “We’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Right,” Li says. “Do you think that will make a difference?”
It is following us. It follows us all the way to the approach road for the resort. There are native vehicles—trucks, armoured vehicles—lined up on both sides of the road, but the road itself is clear. The men standing around them are obviously military. Whatever they’re waiting for, we’re not it. They glance at us as we pass but nobody tries to stop us. “Look, more theatre,” Li says. “Are they here to protect us? Or are they planning to storm the place?” She looks at them intently. “How many of them do you think have read that stupid novel?”
“What novel?” Edda keeps her eyes on the road. The flying contraption hovers overheard.
“How many do you think have finished it?” I say. “How does it end?”
“What do you expect? They win.”
The soldiers aren’t simply lined up by the road: they’re also spread across the surrounding fields. Many of them are facing the resort.
Not here to protect us, then.
But they don’t try to stop us. Possibly they prefer to keep us all in the same place. The outer gate opens as we approach. Once through the inner gate, in the dome itself, the usual Safety Team has been replaced by twenty-odd Millies, who sit or stand, as obviously bored as their counterparts outside. In the vehicle bay engineers are working on the coaches and cars. Ours is requisitioned as soon as we’re out of it. Naturally we go straight to Safety. Entertainment Area Two is now full of Millies, drilling in the open spaces or preparing their weapons. “This is ridiculous,” Li says. “This is the kind of thing that starts wars.”
Edda walks briskly, careful not to make eye contact. Individually, Millies are still human. Collectively they can be unpredictable. A sudden loud noise can trigger a response cascade like the one in City Four South, Sector Three. There’s a reason Millies have been kept away from civilians ever since. Nobody wants another Sector Three.
We leave Entertainment Area Two. There are Millies at every doorway. Li lowers her head. “Twenty years from now they’ll have more to blame us for. That’s when they could get more aggressive. Do you ever ask yourself if the NEE wasn’t something we wanted? Think about it. Who benefited from it the most?”
“The cockroaches,” Edda says. “Some viruses.”
“I’m just saying—” Li stops: we’ve reached the Safety Office. Hayek is in the outer room. His team have gone. There’s a man in his thirties sitting at the back, an obvious Millie despite a civilian jacket. Hayek looks grim. It isn’t hard to guess it’s because of the interloper in his domain. “Glad you could make it back,” he says, his voice flat. “Unfortunately, as you may be aware, communications were shut down for security reasons. We were unable to share your discoveries. Geneva has decided you will not be able to report at present. You will be on the next available translation. Until then you are to stay in your designated room.” He gives the Millie a carefully neutral stare.
Our design
ated room is in the client quarters, a family suite with four beds. A meal is delivered by a military caterer. Subsistence food. Edda decides to sleep. “I don’t know if we’ll have a chance for a while…” Translation, including the long walk at each end, usually takes about six hours and people who can sleep in a transport are rare. Reps’ advice to clients is always to get as much sleep as possible before leaving. When we say it we try to sound like experts, even if we’ve never yet made a return journey.
I stretch out on one of the beds, close my eyes and remain awake. Li, who’s made a return once before, paces up and down the room until Edda tells her to stop. Li sits on one of the beds between us. “So, Spens, you’re being sent back. And nobody has said anything about breach of protocol.”
I’d been thinking about our client and my parents and war with City Two East. If Cantor is in his thirties and has another two years before he returns (if he returns) and City Five South consults the other cities before taking action… By the time the war starts (if you can call it a war: against a state as isolated as City Two East it will be more like an execution) I’ll be in my forties, part of a kin, probably a career Happiness. Tri-Millennium and Resort Four will be a memory. And Riemann goes back a few years after that. He tries to change history and disappears in the approach.
My breach of protocol seems trivial. “We’re not home yet.”
“It’s an administrative excuse.” Edda can’t sleep either. “It’ll go on all our records as the reason we came back early. It sounds better than militarised panic response.”
“I don’t know,” Li says. “They’ll find a reason. You’ve had a bad few weeks. There’s all those locals you’ve attacked.”
“Self-defence.”
Edda joins in: “Withholding information from a Safety Chief.”
“Following orders.”
“Allowing a resort vehicle to be vandalised.”
“Not my fault.”
Edda has the winner: “Losing a client. Seriously, Spens, you’re lucky your record doesn’t say anything worse.”
None of us manage to sleep. Eventually there is a knock on the door. A Millie, bare-headed, unarmed, walks into the room, nods at each one of us to make sure we’re all present. “Time to go. Translation is in one hour.” Her tone has a don’t-blame-me edge without being apologetic. We’re civilians, after all. She doesn’t have to be polite.
We don’t argue. We follow her out of quarters, all the way to the approach, exactly like we’re clients who need to be shown the way. At this point we’d be making small talk, anything to reassure people and take their minds off what’s about to happen. Our guide does none of that. She’s not here to add the final grace note to our stay in the 21st. She’s here to make sure we get out of her resort. She leaves us at the entrance to the approach. “Don’t dawdle,” she says, as if we’ve been dragging our feet. “Translation is in fifty. You know the way.” She marches off, and is soon lost among all the other uniforms moving back and forth across the interzone. We enter the approach with the usual combination of boredom and foreboding. “I’ve made translation three times,” Li says. “I’ve never seen one as empty as this. We can’t be the only ones leaving. They wouldn’t go to this trouble for three people.”
“Militarised panic response,” Edda says. “It outranks budgetary considerations. But there’ll be other people. We’re probably just the last ones they’ve told.”
“It’s ridiculous.” Li walks quickly, in the way people do when they’re spooked. I wonder if she’s going to talk the whole way. Edda strolls at an exaggeratedly casual pace, another nervous response. My stump begins to tingle, which makes me check my pockets. I still have the tube of military-grade painkillers.
Despite the tingling, I feel a sense of lightness. We’re going home. Within a few hours, all of this—the militarised panic response, the questions about the records—will be history, a closed file, at best one of the minor disturbances in the slow run-up to the NEE. Soon the early 21st will be two hundred years in the past and I won’t have to worry about it again, at least until I reach my forties and the war against City Two East begins.
If there is a war. Perhaps Cantor doesn’t find the evidence. Perhaps…
The vending machines at the halfway point are empty.
Li talks the whole way. Nervous chatter. What did Cantor tell us? We can tell her now: nobody’s listening. What do we think the Millies will do? Have we made any plans for when we get back? From time to time Edda says yes or no, but refuses to tell her what we heard. She’s also distracted. We reach the cordon, where some people get headaches and some behave as if they’re drunk and others lose sensation in their fingers or find they can’t remember their names. Nobody likes crossing the cordon, even when the power is off. It’s a relief to reach the transport.
Edda was right. We’re not the only people travelling. There are two Safeties on seats at the back, older men, probably judged unfit for anything more dangerous than monitoring reports, allowed to stay this long because Hayek needed them and the Millies didn’t object. Erquist is sitting by himself nearer the door. He signals for me to join him. Edda and Li take seats in different rows in the opposite aisle.
The other two hundred and forty-four places are empty.
As soon as we’re strapped in place the doors close and the sequence begins. From here on there’s nothing any of us can do except wait, or listen to an entertainment.
Or talk. Erquist says, “I’ve never heard of anything like this.” He makes it sound as if being sent home early from his own resort is no more than a mildly interesting experience. “I was sorry to hear about your accident.”
“So was I.”
“The company will, of course, cover the full cost of any additional medical expenses.”
“Will I still be working for you?”
“We can discuss that once we’re back.”
There’s a low hum and a faint vibration. If it wasn’t for the transport’s shielding we’d be torn atom from atom. But the shielding holds, and energy that could destroy a medium-sized city causes no more than a vibration and a low hum. It will be like this for the next few hours.
“I was not impressed by the military,” Erquist says confidentially. “They seemed to be hoping for a confrontation. I overheard two of their senior officers talking about how long it would take to clear away those poor natives outside. One of them thought it would take thirty seconds; the other insisted it would be fifteen. They were gleeful, quite bloodthirsty.”
“Is anything likely to happen?”
“What concerns me is the possibility of an accident. Another Sector Three could cause a lot of damage.”
Typical Erquist: worried about damage to the resort. “I’m surprised you agreed to leave.”
“I didn’t at first. But you can’t argue with the military. Unless, of course, you’re Hayek. He’s connected to too many systems for him to leave. Did you know he’s a key component for a lot of the external surveillance? The military can’t replace him. He won’t go unless there’s a general evacuation.” He stops, possibly wondering if he’s told me more than he should. “But I’ve decided to treat this as a holiday, a chance to spend a few weeks in my old city, catch up with friends and family. I’ll be back as soon as it’s over. I expect the authorities will want to pretend this never happened. You?”
“New foot.”
“Of course, but afterwards? Would you come back?”
“Isn’t there my breach of protocol?”
Erquist is amused. “That always puzzled me. Of all our reps, you were the one I thought most likely to accept the blame for somebody else’s mistake. That said, you haven’t had a good record lately. And you missed a mandatory briefing with your section chief.”
“I was reporting to you.”
“That doesn’t mean you can just ignore the rules.” Erquist sounds regretful. “Unfortunately, that will have to be taken into consideration.”
He closes his eyes. Erquist is,
it seems, one of the rare people who can sleep. I stare at the ceiling for a few minutes before looking at the transport’s library. I finally decide to listen to Iphigenie auf Tauris, if only to see if my German is still functional. It’s a modern performance. The only drama Brink and Nakamura captured was the spoken passages in Der Freischütz. Iphigenie isn’t a favourite, but the transport’s selection under Theatre/Classic German is limited. They don’t even have Wozzeck.
Iphigenia has barely begun her opening monologue when the vibration becomes a shake and the hum becomes something closer to a rattle. It dies down after a few seconds and we stare at each other in bemusement and relief. Erquist goes back to sleep. Edda goes back to whatever she was listening to. Li remains unplugged: she doesn’t want to miss anything. She grins at me, the regular traveller amused by the beginner’s fears. I try to concentrate on what Iphigenia is saying. Doch immer bin ich, wie im ersten, fremd. From time to time there’s a judder, as if we’re in an earthbound vehicle that’s hit a bump in the road. In the old children’s entertainment the transport would always shake just before it stopped in some new era. I remember a teacher explaining to us that if a transport actually shook that much it would disintegrate, end up as dust scattered across some immense distance. “Remember, travel is always dangerous, even if it’s a fixed link.” Unbound travel, she said, was especially dangerous. You couldn’t be sure when or where you’d arrive and you’d need to build some sophisticated infrastructure before you could come back. The Siberian site Brink and Nakamura never reached needed fifty years and two transports of nothing but equipment and was never powerful enough to establish a fixed link. It was dismantled in 1832 and the parts buried. They weren’t retrieved until the 2020s.
We’re travelling between fixed points, which should be easier. “You could think of it as a lift,” I remember our tech teacher saying. “If you could imagine a lift travelling fast enough to enter a low orbit, make several circuits of the Earth, then land in the shaft of a building in another city while decelerating exactly enough to stop at the correct floor.” I remember liking the image. The teacher had then spoilt the mood by asking us to consider some equations. They were simple ones, baby steps towards full travel. Cantor once tried to explain them to me and nearly succeeded. He couldn’t understand why I found them so difficult. But as he couldn’t tell one piece of music from another and kept confusing Napoleon with Hitler it was clear we were starting to have less in common. He went straight into High Education. I had to prove I was useful in different ways.
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