Thalia felt the elevator slowing.
“We are arriving now,” the metal owl said, just as the view outside switched from distant vistas to the interior of a windowed landing stage. The door opened; Thalia disembarked. Her legs felt like springy concertinas in the half-standard gravity. Across the platform, with their backs to the window, stood a motley-looking welcoming committee. There were about a dozen of them, men and women of all ages and appearances, dressed in what appeared to be civilian clothes. Thalia looked around helplessly, wondering who she should be talking at.
“Hello, Prefect,” said a plump woman with apple-red cheeks, stepping forward from the group. There was a nervous catch in her voice, as if she was not accustomed to public speaking. “Welcome to the halfway house. We’d have met you at the hub, but it’s been a long time since any of us were in zero-gravity.”
Thalia put down the cylinder. “It’s all right. I’m used to making my own way.”
A lanky, stooping man raised his hand. “Did Miracle Bird tell you everything you needed to know?”
“Does the owl belong to you?”
“Indeed,” the man said, beaming. He raised an arm, bent at the elbow, and the owl flapped out of the elevator, crossed the space between Thalia and the party and made a precision touchdown on the man’s sleeve.
“I’m an excellent bird,” the owl said.
“It’s my hobby,” he said, stroking the creature under its segmented neck. “Making mechanical animals, using only techniques available to the PreCalvinists. Keeps me off the streets, my wife says.”
“That’s nice for you,” Thalia commented.
“They were going to go with one of Bascombe’s automata until they remembered what happened the last time one of them malfunctioned. That’s when Miracle Bird got bumped to the top of the list.”
“What list?” Thalia looked at the peculiar gathering. There was nothing ragged or untidy about any of the individual members of the group—everyone was well dressed, colourful without being gaudy, well groomed, respectable in demeanour—but the cumulative effect was far from harmonious. Like a circus troupe, she thought, not a civic delegation. “Who are you people?”
“We’re your reception committee,” the plump woman said.
“That’s what the owl told me.”
Another individual stepped forward to speak. He was a severe-looking gentleman in an ash-grey skin-tight suit with deep lines on either side of his mouth and a shock of stiff grey-white hair shaved close at the temples, his long-boned hands knitted together. “Perhaps one of us should explain. You are inside one of the most egalitarian states in the Glitter Band.” He had a very low, very reassuring voice, one that made Thalia think of dark knotted wood, polished smooth by generations of hands. “Comparatively few states practise true Demarchist principles behind their own doors, in the sense of abolishing all governmental structures, all formalised institutions of social control. Yet that is absolutely the case in House Aubusson. Possibly you were expecting a formal reception, attended by dignitaries of varying rank and pomposity?”
“I might have been,” Thalia allowed.
“In Aubusson, there are no dignitaries. There is no authority except the transparent government of the collective will. All citizens wield a similar amount of political power, leveraged through the machinery of democratic anarchy. You ask who we are. I’ll tell you, beginning with myself. I am Jules Caillebot, a landscape gardener. Most recently I worked on the redevelopment of the botanic gardens in the quarter adjoining the open-air theatre in Valloton, a community between the fifth and sixth windows.” He gestured towards the plump woman who had been the first to speak.
“I’m an utter nobody,” she said, with a kind of cheery defiance, her earlier nervousness no longer apparent. “At least some people in Aubusson have heard of Jules, but no one knows me from Adam. I’m Paula Thory. I keep butterflies, and not even very rare or beautiful ones.”
“Hello,” Thalia said.
Paula Thory nudged the man who’d made the owl. “Go on, then,” she said. “I know you’re itching to tell her.”
“I’m Broderick Cuthbertson. I make mechanical animals. It’s my—”
“Hobby, yes. You said.” Thalia smiled nicely.
“There’s an active subculture of automaton builders in Aubusson. I mean real automaton builders, obviously. Strictly PreCalvinist. Otherwise it’s just cheating.”
“I can imagine.”
“Meriel Redon,” said a young, willowy-looking woman, raising a tentative hand. “I make furniture out of wood.”
“Cyrus Parnasse,” another man said, a beefy, red-faced farmer type with a burr to his voice who could have stepped out of the Middle Ages about five minutes ago. “I’m a curator in the Museum of Cybernetics.”
“I thought the Museum of Cybernetics was in House Sylveste.”
“Ours isn’t as big,” Parnasse said. “Or as flashy or dumbed-down. But we like it.”
One by one the others introduced themselves, until the last of the twelve had spoken. As if obeying some process of collective decision-making that took place too subtly for Thalia to detect, they all turned to look at Jules Caillebot again.
“We were selected randomly,” he explained. “When it was known that an agent of Panoply was to visit, the polling core shuffled the names of all eight hundred thousand citizens and selected the twelve you see standing before you. Actually, there was a bit more to it than that. Our names were presented to the electorate, so that our fitness for the task could be certified by a majority. Most people voted ‘no objection,’ but one of the original twelve was roundly rejected by a percentage of citizens too large for the core to ignore. Something of a philanderer, it seems. He’d made enough enemies that when his one shot at fame arose, he blew it.”
“If you call this fame,” Parnasse, the museum curator, said. “In a couple of hours you’ll be out of Aubusson, girl, and we’ll all have returned to deserved obscurity. It is that kind of visit, isn’t it? If this is a lockdown, no one warned us.”
“No one ever warns you,” Thalia said dryly, not taking to the grumpy undercurrent she had heard in the man’s voice. “But no, this isn’t a lockdown, just a routine polling core upgrade. And whether or not you think being part of this reception party is something to be proud of, I am grateful for the welcome.” She picked up the cylinder, relishing its lightness before she returned to full gravity. “All I really need is someone to show me to the polling core, although I can locate it myself if you prefer. You can all stick around if you want, but it isn’t necessary.”
“Do you want to go straight to the core?” asked Jules Caillebot. “You can if you like. Or we can first take some tea, some refreshments, and then perhaps a leisurely stroll in one of the gardens.”
“No prizes for guessing whose gardens,” someone said, with a snigger.
Thalia raised a calming hand. “It’s kind of you to offer, but my bosses won’t be too happy if I’m late back at Panoply.”
“We can be at the core in twenty minutes,” Jules Caillebot said. “It’s just beyond the second window band. You can see it from here, in fact.”
Thalia had been expecting the core to be buried in the skin of the world, like a subcutaneous implant. “We can?”
“Let me show you. The new housing’s rather elegant, even if I say so myself.”
“That’s one opinion,” Parnasse rumbled, just loud enough for Thalia to hear.
They led her to the window. The remaining two kilometres of the endcap curved away below her to merge with the level terrain of the main cylinder. Caillebot, the landscape gardener, stood next to her and pointed into the middle distance. “There,” he said, whispering. “You see the first and second window bands? Now focus on the white bridge crossing the second band, close to that kidney-shaped lake. Follow the line of the bridge for a couple of kilometres, until you come to a ring of structures grouped around a single tall talk.”
“I’ve got it,” Thalia said. Sin
ce it lay directly ahead, the stalk was aligned with her local vertical too closely to be coincidence given the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree curvature of the habitat. She had presumably been directed down the appropriate elevator line for a visit to the polling core.
“Remind you of anything?” Caillebot asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Milk splashing into milk, perhaps. That ring of stalks, with the little spheres on top of each one, and then the tall one in the middle—”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Parnasse said. “A perfect representation of a physical instant. That’s the original Museum of Cybernetics. Then the Civic Planning Committee got it into their heads that what it really needed was a gigantic single stalk rising from the middle, to house the polling core in the sphere on top. Completely ruined the purity of the original concept, needless to say. You can’t get a central stalk and a ring of stalks from a single splash, no matter how hard you try.”
“Why did the core need a new housing?”
“It didn’t,” Parnasse said, before anyone else had a chance to contribute. “It worked fine the way it used to be, out of sight and out of mind. Then the Civic Planning Committee decided we needed to celebrate our embracing of true Demarchist principles by making the core a visible symbol that could be seen from anywhere in the habitat.”
“Most people like the new arrangement,” Caillebot said, with a strained smile.
Parnasse wasn’t having it. “You’re only saying that because they had to rip out the old gardens to accommodate the new stalk. The ones put in by your rival. You’d feel differently if you actually had to work there.”
Thalia coughed, deciding it was best not to take sides at this point. Moving a core was hardly routine, but Panoply would have been consulted, and if there had been any technical objection it would not have been permitted. “I need to see it close up, no matter what the controversies,” she said.
“We’ll be there in no time at all,” Caillebot said, extending a hand back towards the wall where a row of elevator doors stood open. “Would you like some help with that equipment? It’ll be heavier on the surface.”
“I’ll cope,” Thalia said.
Miracle Bird opened its metal beak and emitted a raucous mechanical chime as it took flight and led the way towards the elevators.
CHAPTER 12
Dreyfus held his breath, still anticipating an attack despite the evidence from the scans. The corvette’s sensors had probed the rock’s embattled surface and revealed no further evidence of active weaponry, although he considered it likely that there were still guns buried in the other hemisphere. The same scans had pinpointed a likely entry point, what appeared to be an airlock leading to some kind of subsurface excavation. The scans could only hint at the depth and extent of the tunnel system. The corvette now lay with its dorsal lock positioned over the surface entry point, separated by only a couple of metres of clear space.
“I can do this alone,” Dreyfus said, ready to push himself through the suitwall. “We don’t both need to go inside.”
“And I’m not babysitting the corvette while you have all the fun,” Sparver replied.
“All right,” Dreyfus said. “But understand this: if something happens to one of us down there—whether it’s you or me—the other one gets out of there as fast as he can and concentrates on warning Panoply. Whatever we’re dealing with here, it’s bigger than the life of a single prefect.”
“Message received,” Sparver said. “See you on the other side.”
Dreyfus pushed himself through the grey surface of the suitwall. As always, he felt ticklish resistance as the suit formed around him, conjured into being from the very fabric of the suitwall. He turned around in time to observe Sparver’s emergence: seeing the edges of the suit blend into the exterior surface of the suitwall and then pucker free. For a moment, the details of Sparver’s suit were blurred and ill-defined, then snapped into sharpness.
The two prefects completed their checks, verifying that their suits were able to talk to each other, and then turned to face the waiting airlock that would allow entry into the rock. Nothing about it surprised Dreyfus, save the fact that it existed in the first place. It was a standard lock, built according to a rugged, inert-matter design. The lock had been hidden before the engagement, tucked away near the base of one of the slug cannons. A concealed shaft must have led down from the surface before the cannons deployed.
There was no need to invoke the manual operating procedure since the lock was still powered and functional. The outer door opened without hesitation, admitting Dreyfus and Sparver to the lock’s air-exchange chamber.
“There’s pressure on the other side,” Sparver said, indicating the standard-format read-out set into the opposite door. “There’s probably no one inside this thing, but there might be, so we can’t just blow it wide open.”
It was a complication Dreyfus could have done without, but he concurred with his deputy. They would need to seal the door behind them before they advanced further.
“Close the outer door,” Dreyfus said.
The lock finished pressurising. Dreyfus’s suit tasted the air and reported that it was cold but breathable, should the need arise.
He hoped it wouldn’t.
“Stay sharp,” he told Sparver. “We’re going deeper.”
Dreyfus waited for the inner door to seal itself before moving off. Common lock protocol dictated both inner and outer doors be closed against vacuum unless someone was transitioning through.
“I can’t see a damn thing,” he said, knowing that Sparver’s vision was at least as poor as his own. “I’m switching on my helmet lamp. We’ll see if that’s a good idea in about two seconds.”
“I’m holding my breath.”
The helmet revealed that they had arrived in a storage area, a repository for tools and replacement machine parts. Dreyfus made out tunnelling gear, some spare airlock components, a couple of racked spacesuits of PreCalvinist design.
“Want to take a guess at how long this junk’s been here?” Sparver said, activating his own lamp.
“Could be ten years, could be two hundred,” Dreyfus said. “Hard to call.”
“You don’t pressurise a place if you’re planning to mothball it. Waste of air and power.”
“I agree. See anything here that looks like a transmitter, or that might send a signal?”
“No joy.” Sparver nodded his helmet lamp towards the far wall. “But if I’m not mistaken, that’s a doorway. Think we should take a look-see?”
“We’re not exactly overwhelmed with choices, are we?”
Dreyfus kicked off from the wall and aimed himself at the far doorway, Sparver following just behind. Doubtless the rock’s gravity would eventually have tugged him there, but Dreyfus didn’t have time to wait for that. He reached the doorway and sailed on through into a narrow shaft furnished only with rails and flexible hand-grabs. When the air began to impede his forward drift, he grabbed the nearest handhold and started yanking himself forward. The shaft stretched on far ahead of him, pushing deeper into the heart of the rock. Maybe the shaft had been there for ever, he thought: sunk deep into the rock by prospecting Skyjacks, and someone had just come along and used it serendipitously. But the tunnelling equipment he’d already seen didn’t have the ramshackle, improvised look of Skyjack tools.
He was just pondering that when he caught sight of the end of the shaft.
“I’m slowing down. Watch out behind me.”
Dreyfus reached the bottom and spun through one hundred and eighty degrees to bring his soles into contact with the surface at the base of the shaft. Up and down still had little meaning in the rock’s minimal gravity, but his instincts forced him to orient himself as if his feet were being tugged toward the middle.
He assessed his surroundings as Sparver arrived next to him. They’d come to an intersection with a second shaft that appeared to run horizontally in either direction, curving gently away until it was hidden beyond the limit
of the illumination provided by their helmet lamps. The rust-brown tunnel wall was clad with segmented panels, thick braids of pipework and plumbing stapled to the sides. Every now and then the cladding was interrupted by a piece of machinery as rust-brown and ancient-looking as the rest of the tunnel.
“We didn’t see deep enough to map this,” Dreyfus said. “What do you make of it?”
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