Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “None of this makes any sense,” Floyd said. “If she was an American spy, why would she have needed a German firm to make those things, no matter what they’re meant for? There must be a hundred American firms that could have done the same work.”

  “Look,” Greta said, “just suppose for a minute that she was a spy. What do they do, apart from spying? They also keep tabs on the activities of other spies.”

  “Agreed,” Floyd said. “But—”

  “What if she was put here to keep her eye on another operation? White finds out something about the Berlin contract. She doesn’t necessarily know all the details, but she knows she has to find out more about it. So she writes to Kaspar Metals, posing as someone connected to the organisation that arranged the initial order.”

  “Possible,” Floyd allowed.

  Greta tossed some more bread into the duck pond. “Actually, there is another thing I should mention.”

  “Go on.”

  “The letter also covers costs for transportation and delivery of the finished goods. Now, this is the interesting part: it was broken down into three separate billing items. Somewhere in Berlin, somewhere in Paris and somewhere in Milan.”

  “I don’t remember seeing addresses in that letter.”

  “You didn’t. The man who wrote the letter must have assumed that both parties already had that information.”

  Floyd had been wondering where the Milan connection would come in. “Except we don’t have that information,” he said. “All we have is a couple of lines on a map of Europe.” He remembered the L-shaped figure, with the neatly marked distances between the three cities. “I still don’t know what the markings on that map mean, but they obviously relate to the work being done by that factory in some way.”

  “One last thing,” Greta said. “That train ticket. It was for the overnight express to Berlin, and it hasn’t been used.”

  “Is there a date on the ticket?”

  “Issued on September fifteenth for travel from Gare du Nord on the twenty-first. She’d reserved a sleeping compartment.”

  “She died on the twentieth,” Floyd said, recalling the details in his notebook. “Blanchard said that she gave him the tin on the fifteenth or sixteenth—he couldn’t be sure which. She must just have booked the ticket and never used it.”

  “I wonder why she didn’t simply get on the first train to Berlin, rather than book passage on one that wasn’t due to leave for four or five days?”

  “Maybe she had other business she had to attend to first, or maybe she’d called ahead and made an arrangement to visit the factory on a particular day. Either way, she knew she wasn’t getting on that train for a few days, but she also knew she was in danger and that the tin might fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Has it occurred to you, Floyd, that if someone killed her because of what was in that tin, they might do it again?”

  The party with the elderly man had retreated from the duck pond, the wheelchair crunching away across the gravelled promenade in the general direction of the Orangerie. Beyond the party, looming above the trees lining the Seine, the slick, wet roof of the Gare d’Orsay on the Left Bank shone in the sunlight. Despite its name, it was many years since the Gare d’Orsay had been a railway station. There had been vague plans to turn it into a museum, but in the end the city authorities had decided that the most effective use of the grand old building would be as a prison for high-profile political detainees. Seeing the prison, something tugged at this memory, some elusive connection waiting to be completed.

  He dished out the remainder of the bread to the few ducks that had stayed loyal. “I know there are risks. But I can’t just drop the case because some people might not want me to succeed.”

  Greta studied him carefully. “How much does this dogged determination have to do with what Marguerite just told you?”

  “Hey,” Floyd said defensively, “this isn’t about anything other than getting a job done for a client. A job that happens to pay pretty well, I might add.”

  “So that’s all it boils down to: money?”

  “Money and curiosity,” he admitted.

  “No amount of money will make up for a broken neck. Take what you have and go to the authorities. Give them all the evidence and let them piece things together.”

  “Now you sound like Custine.”

  “Maybe he has a point. Think about it, Floyd. Don’t get in too deep. You’re a big man, but you’re not a strong swimmer.”

  “I’ll know when I’m in too deep,” he said.

  Greta shook her head. “I know you too well. You’ll only realise you’re in too deep when you start drowning. But what’s the point of arguing? I’m hungry. Let’s walk to the Champs-Elysées: there’s a place there that does good pancakes. You can buy me an Esquimo ice cream along the way. Then you can take me back to Montparnasse.”

  Floyd surrendered, offering her a hand. They set off in the direction of the avenue, Floyd watching as the wind whipped up in the distance and hoisted someone’s umbrella into the sky.

  “How’s the band doing?” Greta asked.

  “The band ceased to exist when you left,” Floyd said. “Since then we’ve not exactly been snowed under with offers.”

  “I was only ever one part of it.”

  “You’re a damned good singer and a damned good guitar player. You left a big hole.”

  “You and Custine are both good musicians.”

  “Good doesn’t cut it.”

  “Well, then you’re better than good.”

  “Custine, maybe.”

  “It’s not as if you’re the worst bass player in the world, either. You always knew you could make it work if you only wanted it badly enough.”

  “I make the moves. I can lay down a pretty steady beat.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing. There are a hundred bands in Nice who could use a bass player like you, Floyd.”

  “But I can’t do anything you haven’t seen before. I can’t make it new.”

  “Not everyone wants it new.”

  “But that’s the point. All we ever do is play the same old swing numbers in the same old way. I’m tired of it. Custine can barely bring himself to take out his saxophone.”

  “So do something different.”

  “Custine keeps trying. You know how he was always trying to get us to play that fast eight-beat stuff, when all we ever wanted to do was stay in four-four?”

  “Maybe Custine was on to something.”

  “He heard a guy playing here a few years ago,” Floyd said. “Some heroin fiend from Kansas City. Looked sixty, but he was really about my age. Called himself Yardhound or Yard-dog or something. He kept playing that crazy improvisational stuff, like it was the wave of the future. But no one wanted to know.”

  “Except Custine.”

  “Custine said it was the music he’d always had in his head.”

  “So find a way to help him play it.”

  “Too fast for me,” Floyd said. “And anyway, even if it wasn’t, no one else wants to hear it. It’s not stuff you can dance to.”

  “You shouldn’t give up that easily,” Greta admonished.

  “It’s too late. They don’t even want straight jazz anymore. Half the clubs we played last year are out of business now. Maybe it’s different in the States, but—”

  “Some people won’t ever get it,” Greta said. “They don’t want to see black people and white people getting along, let alone playing the same music. Because there’s always a danger that the world might actually become a better place because of it.”

  Floyd smiled. “Your point being?”

  “Those of us who care shouldn’t give up that easily. Maybe we need to stick our necks out from time to time.”

  “I stick my neck out for no one.”

  “Not even for the music you love?”

  “Maybe there was a time when I used to think jazz could save the world,” Floyd said. “But I’m older and wiser now.”

>   Walking the gravel path, they passed the party with the elderly man again and something in Floyd’s head clicked like a key in a well-oiled lock. Maybe it was the conversation he’d had with Marguerite, or perhaps the juxtaposition of the man and the political prison across the river, but Floyd suddenly recognised him. The man lolled forward in the wheelchair, his jaw slack, a thin worm of drool curling down his chin. His skin was glued to his skull like a single layer of papier mâché. His hands trembled with some kind of palsy. Beneath his blanket, it was said that the doctors had hacked away more than they had left behind. Whatever trickled through his veins was now more chemical than blood. But he had survived the cancers, just as he had survived that assassination attempt in May 1940, when the advance into the Ardennes had come to an inglorious end. The shape of the face was still recognisable, along with the outdated, priggish little moustache and the vain swoop of thinning hair, white now where once it had been black. It was almost twenty years since his ambitions had crashed and burnt during that disastrous summer. In the carnival of monsters that the century had produced, he was only one amongst many. He’d talked hate back then—but who hadn’t? Hate was how you made things happen in those years. It was the lever that moved things. It didn’t necessarily mean he believed it, or that he would have been any worse for France than any of the men who had come after him. Who could begrudge him a morning in the Tuileries Gardens, after all the time he had served in the Gare d’Orsay? He was just a sad old man now, less a figure of revulsion than one of pity.

  Let him feed the ducks.

  “Floyd?”

  “What?”

  “You were miles away.”

  “Years away,” he said. “Not quite the same thing.”

  She steered him towards an ice-cream stand. Floyd dug into his pocket for a few coins.

  TEN

  Auger awoke to the rapid metallic popping of thruster jets, like a rivet gun. Her first thought was that something must have gone wrong, but Aveling and Skellsgard both looked alert and focused rather than alarmed, as if this was something they had encountered before.

  “What’s happening?” she asked groggily.

  “Go back to sleep,” Aveling said.

  “I want to know.”

  “We’re just dealing with some tunnel irregularity,” Skellsgard said, using her free hand to point to the contoured display in front of her joystick panel. She was flying now, while Aveling took a rest. The moving lines on the display panel were bunched and crimped together. “The walls are pretty smooth most of the way through, but every now and then we come across some structure or other, which we have to steer around.”

  “Structures? Inside a wormhole?”

  “It isn’t a wormhole,” Skellsgard began. “It’s a—”

  “I know: it’s a quasi-pseudo-para-whatnot. What I mean is, how can there be any kind of structures inside this thing, whatever it is? Isn’t it smooth space-time all the way through?”

  “That’s what you’d expect.”

  “You’re the theorist. You tell me.”

  “Actually, there’s a good measure of guesswork involved here. The Slashers didn’t tell us everything, and they probably don’t have all the answers themselves.”

  “So give me your best guess.”

  “OK. Theory one. You see these stress-energy readings? They relate to changes in the local tunnel geometry ahead of us.”

  “What are you sensing them with? Radar?”

  Skellsgard shook her head. “No. Radar—or any EM-based sensor, for that matter—doesn’t work too well in the hyperweb. Photons are absorbed into the walls or scattered chaotically by interaction with the pathological matter. And looking ahead is like trying to see sunspots with your naked eye. Neutrinos or gravity-wave sensors might work better, but there isn’t enough room for them in the transport. All that’s left is sonar.”

  “Sound?” Auger asked. “But we’re moving through a near-perfect vacuum, aren’t we?”

  “As near as dammit, yes. But we can persuade a kind of acoustic signal to propagate through the lining of the walls. It’s like the compression wave that the transport’s surfing, only about a billion times faster. It propagates through a stiffer layer, a different phase of pathological matter with a much higher rigidity. It’s how we send signals down the pipe, so that we can talk to the portal at the E2 end. Trouble is, it doesn’t work when a ship is in the pipe: we act as a kind of mirror, bouncing any signals back the way they came. But we can send our own signals up the line. They’re not strong enough to reach all the way to the far portal, but they do act as a kind of feeler, sounding out obstructions and irregularities in the walls.”

  “That still doesn’t tell me what causes those irregularities in the first place.”

  “Here, take a look at this,” Skellsgard said, directing Auger’s attention to a knot of very close contour lines oozing into view on the display. “This is the computer’s best guess at the shape of an approaching irregularity in the tunnel lining, based on the echoes from the sonar. If the contours were bunched together symmetrically, we’d be looking at a constriction, a narrowing in the tunnel ahead of us. But that isn’t what’s happening here. There are places where the tunnel lining looks as if it’s been etched away, and places where it bulges inward. Theory one says that this is symptomatic of some kind of decay of the basic fabric of the link, either due to lack of maintenance or not enough ships using it.”

  “Not enough ships?”

  “It could be that the ships are meant to perform some repair function when they pass through. That’s what we call the ‘pipe-cleaner hypothesis.’ ”

  “Fine. What about theory two?”

  “This is where it starts to get seriously speculative,” Skellsgard warned. “Some people studying the link have made records of these irregularities, accumulating data from many transits. Of course, the data is very noisy and subject to the interpretive vagaries of the navigation system. So then they take those records and feed them into maximum-entropy software to squeeze out any latent structure. Then they take the output from that process and feed it into another bunch of programs designed to sniff out latent language. One such procedure is called the Zipf test: it involves plotting the logarithmic frequencies of the occurrence of different patterns seen in the walls. Random data has a Zipf slope of zero, whereas the Zipf slope of the tunnel patterning is pretty close to minus one. It means that the signals in those walls are significantly more meaningful than—say—squirrel-monkey calls, which only get down to minus point six on a Zipf plot.”

  “Not conclusive, though,” Auger said.

  “But the researchers don’t stop there. There’s another statistical property known as Shannon entropy, which even tells you how rich the communications are. Human languages—English, say, or Russian—have Shannon entropies around the eighth or ninth order. That means if I say eight or nine words in one of those languages, you can have a pretty good stab at guessing what the tenth is going to be. Dolphin calls have Shannon entropies in the range of three to four, whereas the tunnel scrawls are up at seven or eight.”

  “Less complex than human language, in that case.”

  “Granted,” Skellsgard said, “but their true complexity might be masked by the errors we introduce in decoding the sonar images. Or the messages themselves may be blurred by erosion or some other process we don’t understand.”

  “So theory two is that the patterns are deliberate messages.”

  “Yes. They might be analogous to old highway signs: speed limits, temporary restrictions, that kind of thing.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “You haven’t heard anything yet, Auger. Want to hear theory three?”

  “Oh, why not?”

  “This is definitely not accepted wisdom, I should warn you. Theory three says that the tunnel patterns are a kind of advertising.” Auger opened her mouth to say something, but Skellsgard kept on talking. “No, wait. Hear me out. It makes a warped kind of sense when you thi
nk about it. Why wouldn’t a galactic supercivilisation have advertising? It seems to be pretty much glued to our culture, after all.”

  “But adverts…” Auger was finding it difficult to keep a straight face.

  “Think about it. Anyone travelling along one of these links is the perfect captive audience. They’re locked in, sucker bait. Got nowhere else to go, no other scenery to look at. What better place to put some advertising? Hell, I’d love to know what they’re selling. Maybe it’s planet-building services, or stellar renewal, or the option to trade in your old black hole for a new one.”

  Auger smiled. “A supernova can happen any time. Make sure your solar system is properly insured.”

  “How about: tired of the Milky Way? Why not look at some of our great properties in the Large Magellanic Clouds. The best views in the local group—and it’s still within commuting distance of the galactic core.”

  Auger chuckled, getting into it. “Expansionist primates infesting your stellar neighborhood? We have the pest-control solutions you need.”

  “Your old God not up to the job? Upgrade your deity now by calling…” Skellsgard started giggling.

  “You’re right—it’s almost believable, isn’t it?”

  “Almost,” Skellsgard said. “And I definitely prefer it to theory four.”

  “Which is?”

  “That the walls are covered in graffiti.”

  “Goodness.” Goodness. Had she really said “goodness?” Auger shook her head, like someone about to sneeze. “Are you telling me that somebody’s actually been paid to come up with that?”

  “Yes. It even makes sense based on the Shannon entropies, apparently. If you look at human graffiti—”

  “Enough, Skellsgard. I’d rather not hear about graffiti, human or alien.”

  “It’s a bit depressing, isn’t it?”

  “More than a bit.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it,” Skellsgard said, waving a hand dismissively. “Not many people take it very seriously. There’s the small problem that the tunnel patterns have a habit of changing, depending on stability conditions. Of course, it might be very clever graffiti—”