Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Once,” Skellsgard said. “And that was enough. It’s why I don’t go through that thing any more often than I need to.”

  “Jesus,” Auger said, shaking her head. “You might have told me this when I was on the other side. Now I have no choice but to go through it again.”

  “I just wanted you to know that if it does happen… which it probably won’t… you shouldn’t be afraid. Nothing bad will happen, and you’ll come out of it in one piece. It’s just a bit more than some of us can take.”

  “What were the minds like?” Auger asked, curiosity overcoming outrage, despite herself.

  “Distant, huge and unchanging, like a range of mountains.” Skellsgard smiled self-consciously, then shook her own head, as if trying to break a mental spell. “It never happened again. I got over it. We all have a job to do here. Talking of which, how do you like the set-up? This is effectively the nerve centre of E2 operations, the point from which we communicate with all the field agents.”

  Barton looked up from a folding table set with food and coffee. “Show her the Enigma.”

  “Her mission profile says she doesn’t need to know about that,” Skellsgard replied.

  “Show her anyway.”

  Skellsgard shrugged and led Auger to a skeletal shelf unit containing about a dozen of the black typewriters. “You recognise these things?”

  “Not really—they look like typewriters, but I’m sure they’re something more sophisticated than that.”

  “They’re Enigma machines,” Skellsgard said. “Commercial enciphering equipment.”

  “Made locally?”

  “Yes. The military use them, but anyone can buy an off the-shelf model for their own purposes. We use them to send secure messages to our field agents.”

  “Like Susan?”

  “Exactly like Susan. Before she left here, we gave her one of these machines and instructions for converting a commercial wireless to intercept signals on our chosen frequency. Once she’d set up home, she used local tools and parts to modify the wireless. From our end, we encipher signals using an Enigma machine with the appropriate rotor settings for the given day of the month. Susan had a list of the settings so that she could set up her own Enigma accordingly. The enciphered messages came through the wireless in standard Morse code, but would have been completely unintelligible to anyone without an Enigma to decipher them back into plain text.”

  “Wait,” Auger said, raising a hand. “I remember a little about these machines now. Didn’t they play a role in the Second World War? Something involving submarine warfare?”

  “Yes,” Skellsgard said. “Enigma was cracked, eventually. It required several cunning breakthroughs in cryptanalysis methods and electromechanical computing. In fact, the task of cracking Enigma pretty much kick-started the entire computer revolution in the first place. But none of that happened here. There was no Second World War on E2.”

  “I figured as much from the map Caliskan sent me, but I didn’t know what to make of it.”

  “Make of it what you like. Fact is, the E2 timeline diverges significantly from our history. On E2, the war fizzled out in nineteen forty. There was a brief front in the Ardennes, and then it was all over. The German advance stalled. A coup took out the leadership—Stauffenberg and Rommel were part of that—and within two years the Nazi party had collapsed from within. People still talk about a Great War here, because there was never a second to rival it. No Second World War, no massive endeavour to crack Enigma. Computing here is still stuck at the same level as in the nineteen thirties, which—to all intents and purposes—is pretty much the same as the eighteen thirties. And that’s both good and bad. On the downside, it means we can’t go out and steal computing equipment or any kind of sophisticated electronic hardware. There are no transistors, no integrated circuits or microprocessors. But we can be sure that no one on E2 is capable of deciphering our Enigma traffic.”

  “So you were using this thing to talk to Susan?”

  “Yes,” Skellsgard said. “But it was a strictly a one-way conversation. It’s one thing to build a radio receiver. It’s much more complicated to build a transmitter with the necessary range, and even more difficult to run it without drawing attention. Given time, she could have done it—we’d given her the instructions—but she was more interested in pursuing her own little investigation.”

  “The one that got her killed.”

  “I knew Susan. She wouldn’t have allowed herself to get into something unless she felt the risks were worth it.”

  “Meaning she was on to something? But according to Aveling…” Auger looked across to Barton, who had just raised his head, presumably on hearing Aveling’s name. She lowered her voice. “But according to Aveling, the only reason Caliskan wants those papers back is in case the locals get their hands on them.”

  “Don’t underestimate the danger of that,” Skellsgard said. “It would only take one nudge in the right direction for them to realise they’re inside an ALS. The illusion is good, but it isn’t flawless.”

  “Still, you don’t think that’s the only reason, do you? It seems as if everyone here had a good opinion of Susan. If she said she was on to something—”

  “Then maybe she was. But we won’t know what it was until we get those papers back. And then hope that there’s enough of a clue in them.”

  “There’s still one thing I don’t get,” Auger said, keeping her voice low. “Why me? If you know the territory as well, couldn’t you have posed as this long-lost sister instead of dragging me halfway across the galaxy instead?”

  “There’s a catch,” Skellsgard said.

  “Another one? But of course there is. You know, I’m thinking I should start a collection.”

  “For some reason, Susan wanted you to be the sister. We know this from the last postcard she sent us.”

  Auger frowned. Up to this point, she had never had anything more than a distant professional relationship with Susan White. Academic rivalry aside, she neither liked nor disliked the woman, but she didn’t really know her at all. “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “We didn’t get it either.”

  “Couldn’t one of you have just pretended to be the sister? A name’s just a name, after all.”

  “There’s more to it than that. She might have primed Blanchard with a physical description of you. She knew you by sight, didn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Auger admitted, remembering the times they had bumped into each other at conferences. “And we weren’t so different in appearance, now that I think about it.”

  “We can’t take the risk of sending in someone who doesn’t fit Blanchard’s expectations. If he gets suspicious—thinks he’s being set up—then we may never see those papers again. That’s why we need you.”

  “Then what Caliskan said was a lie. I was only ever the one candidate on his list.”

  “Guess he needed to appeal to your vanity,” Skellsgard said.

  “Guess it worked, too.”

  TWELVE

  Floyd continued his tour of the building in rue des Peupliers, knocking on doors and sometimes getting an answer. He worked methodically and patiently, turning on the charm when it was required. By the end of his enquiries, it was clear that at least two other tenants had seen the girl in the building, hanging around on the stairs. They couldn’t be specific about dates, but the sightings had all occurred within the last three or four weeks: consistent with there being a link to the White case. Once observed, the girl was not usually seen again by the same witness. Another tenant might have seen an odd child in the street outside, but he was insistent that this child had been a boy rather than a girl. Floyd and Custine had seen a strange girl leaving the Blanchard building the evening before, and Floyd had noticed what he thought was a different girl watching White’s window from outside earlier that day. Floyd still hadn’t spoken to the witness on the second floor, the one who had mentioned a child to Custine the night before.

  Floyd had no idea what to ma
ke of it all. Strange little children hadn’t figured prominently in any of his previous investigations. Perhaps he was latching on to any anomaly in the hope that it might break open the case. Maybe if he visited any similar apartment building in the city and asked a similar set of questions he’d get a similar set of responses.

  He was done by four. He walked back up to Susan White’s room and knocked on the door. His shirt was sticky around the collar. All that trudging up and down the stairs was making him sweat.

  “You get anywhere, chief?” he asked Custine when he opened the door.

  Custine let Floyd inside and closed the door. “No. There’ve been no further transmissions. I removed the back of the wireless again, thinking that one of my connections might have come loose, but all was well. The station is simply not on the air.”

  “Maybe they’ve gone off the air for good.”

  “Perhaps,” Custine said. “All the same, I shall try again tomorrow. Perhaps the transmissions only take place at a certain time of day.”

  “You can’t spend the rest of your life up here.”

  “One more day, that’s all.”

  Floyd knelt down next to Custine. “Show me what you got before.”

  “It’s incomplete.”

  “I’d like to see it anyway.”

  Custine removed a sheet of paper from the top of the wireless set on which he’d marked a sequence of dots and dashes in neat pencil. “You can see the pieces I missed,” he said. “Of course, there’s no guarantee that tomorrow’s transmission will be the same as today’s. But at least I’ll be ready for it tomorrow. I should be able to make an accurate transcription.”

  “If you haven’t got anything by the middle of the day, we close this line of enquiry.”

  “There is something going on here, whether you like it or not.”

  “Maybe there is, but we can’t waste Blanchard’s money just sitting around waiting for a transmission that may never return. There are other leads that need to be followed up.”

  “Generated by the material Greta examined?”

  “That, and something else.” Quickly he told Custine about the paperwork in the tin and what Greta made of it. “There’s a Berlin connection: some kind of heavy-manufacturing contract and what looks like a sketch of a blueprint.”

  “For what?”

  “Haven’t figured that out yet, but whatever it is, there are three of them.”

  “I hope you got more detail than that.”

  “Three large aluminium castings,” Floyd said. “Big, solid spheres.”

  “How big is big?”

  “I might be misreading the sketch, but it looks to me as if these things are at least three metres in diameter.”

  “Big,” Custine agreed.

  “Looks like they’re meant to be suspended from something, like a kind of gallows. One sphere gets shipped to Paris, another to Milan, while the third stays in Berlin.”

  “Perplexing,” Custine said, stroking his moustache. “What would this American girl have been doing involved with a contract like that?”

  “Greta and I talked about that. We figured that maybe it wasn’t her contract at all, but one that she was taking an interest in for some reason.”

  “Back to the spy theory, in other words.”

  “Sorry,” Floyd said, “but all roads really do keep leading to Rome.”

  “Where are you going to take things now? Did the box offer any other leads?”

  “We have the address and telephone number of the metalworks in Berlin.”

  “Have you called it yet?”

  “No, but I plan on doing so as soon as I get back to the office.”

  “Be careful, Floyd. If there is an espionage connection, poking your nose into things might not be your wisest move.”

  “And what do you think you’ve been doing all afternoon?”

  “That’s different,” Custine said dismissively. “All I’m doing is trying to intercept a wireless transmission.”

  “And no one would be able to tell that you’re doing that?”

  “Of course not,” Custine answered, but not with complete confidence. “Look, I’ll spend one more morning on this. Then I’ll put the wireless back exactly the way I found it and move on.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I know. And I understand. I think we’ve both convinced ourselves that there’s more to this than meets the eye, haven’t we?”

  “I guess Blanchard was right all along,” Floyd said, standing and stretching his legs.

  “Have you spoken to him again today?”

  “Not yet, but I intend to. I figure I need to tell him that we’re at least making a kind of progress.”

  “You mentioned another lead.”

  Floyd shuffled his feet awkwardly. “Look, don’t think me a fool, but I’ve noticed that strange little girls keep showing up in this case. There was that girl we saw—”

  “I know,” Custine said, waving his hand. “And the girl that the tenant on the second floor mentioned, and the girl you saw standing outside. Peripheral details, Floyd: no more than that.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  “I’m certain of nothing. But the one thing my years at the Quai taught me is that small children tend not to be prime suspects in murder cases.”

  “Maybe this isn’t your usual homicide case,” Floyd said.

  “Are you seriously proposing that a child murdered Susan White?”

  “If she was standing by the balcony rail,” Floyd said, “it wouldn’t have taken much of a shove to send her over. You don’t need much strength for that.”

  “If her position was that precarious to begin with, it’s entirely possible that she just lost her balance.”

  “André, you know as well as I do that she was pushed.”

  “I’m merely playing devil’s advocate, Floyd. Even if you can present a case to the Quai, the examining magistrate will still have to be convinced before the police will take matters further.” Custine took the paper upon which he had recorded the wireless transmissions and folded it twice before slipping it into his shirt pocket. “And there’s another problem with your child-as-murderer hypothesis.”

  “Which is?”

  “We know that whoever murdered Susan White sabotaged this wireless. Quite aside from the effort required to pull off the backing panel, they would also have needed the strength to drag the wireless away from the wall and then slide it back again.”

  “You managed it on your own.”

  “I had plenty of time,” Custine said. “There’s also the small detail that I am not a child. I can’t judge exactly how much effort was required, but I doubt that it was within the ability of a little girl.”

  “Then she had an adult accomplice.”

  “In which case,” Custine said patiently, “we may as well assume that the adult accomplice was the murderer.”

  “I still think there’s something significant about these children.”

  “Floyd, you know I have the utmost respect for you, but another valuable lesson I took away from my time at the Quai—back when solving crimes was its chief activity, rather than harassing enemies of the state—is that it is just as important to ignore certain details in a case as it is to follow up on others.”

  “You’re saying I’m barking up the wrong tree?”

  “The wrong tree, the wrong copse, perhaps even the wrong area of forestation entirely.”

  “I’m reluctant to rule anything out.”

  “Good: rule nothing out. But don’t be distracted by ridiculous theories, Floyd. Not when we already have concrete leads.”

  Floyd sighed, a moment of clarity intruding upon his thoughts. Custine was right, of course. Now and then, Floyd had a habit of pursuing blatantly unlikely lines of enquiry. Sometimes—even if all they were investigating was a minor case of spousal infidelity—they led to a critical breakthrough. More often than not, however, he needed a gentle reminder from Custine to return to the orthod
ox approach, and more often than not Custine’s stolid, honed, scientific methods turned out to be exactly what the case required.

  This, Floyd realised, was exactly one of those times.

  “You’re right,” he said. “If only one of those strange kids had shown up, I guess I’d have thought nothing of it.”

  “The central defect of the human mind,” Custine said, “is its unfortunate habit of seeing patterns where none exist. Of course, that is also its chief asset.”

  “But sometimes a very dangerous one.”

  Custine stood up, wiping his palms on his trousers. “Don’t feel bad about it, Floyd. It happens to the best of us. And there’s never any harm in asking questions.”

  Custine gathered his tools, hat and coat and together they walked down two flights of stairs and knocked on Blanchard’s door. Floyd delivered a sanitised version of events: yes, it seemed likely to him that Susan White had been murdered; it even seemed likely to him that she had been something other than an innocent American tourist.

  “A spy?” Blanchard asked.

  “Too soon to say,” Floyd answered. “There are still leads we need to look into. But you’ll hear from us as soon as we have something concrete.”

  “I spoke to one of the other tenants. It seems you have been asking questions about a little girl.”

  “Just ruling out any possible witnesses,” Floyd said.

  “What could a little girl possibly have to do with this?”

  “Probably nothing at all,” Custine interjected, before Floyd was tempted to expound his unlikely theories to Blanchard.

  “Very well,” Blanchard said, eyeing the two of them. “I must emphasize how important it is to me that you find Susan’s killer. I feel that she will not sleep soundly until the matter is resolved.”

  He said it as if he meant Susan White, but he was looking at the photograph of his dead wife.

  They drove back through thick Thursday-afternoon traffic, taking avenue de Choisy north to place d’Italie and then cutting through a darkening rat’s maze of side streets until they were on boulevard Raspail. Floyd turned the radio dial, searching for jazz, but all he got was traditional French accordion music. It was the new thing now. Traditional was in; jazz out. Chatelier himself had called jazz morally corrupting, as if the music itself was a kind of narcotic that had to be wiped from the streets.