“And now?”
“She has a fighting chance.” He stabbed the cigar forwards for emphasis. “Thanks to Auger.”
“I think Auger misjudged you,” Floyd said.
“She misjudged some of us. Concerning the others, she was—I regret to say—entirely correct in her opinion.”
Floyd had already told Tunguska all he could of the Slasher conspiracy. Doubtless he had some of the details wrong, and was vague about other things that Auger would have understood better. But Tunguska had nodded encouragingly, and had asked what seemed like more or less the right questions in the right order.
“What will happen now?” Floyd asked.
“With Auger? We’ll keep her under observation until we can identify a suitable new host for Cassandra’s machines. It’s not entirely clear what they’re doing to Auger, but I think we’d best leave them to their own devices for the time being.”
“But will she be all right?”
“Yes. Whether she will ever be quite the same, however… well, that’s a different question.”
Floyd cradled his drink and nodded. There was no point shooting the messenger, when Tunguska was doing the best he could. “Before we left Paris,” he said, “Cassandra said she’d given orders to intercept the escape vessel.”
“We received them,” Tunguska said.
“I was just wondering what the deal with that was. Did you boys make your kill?”
Tunguska glanced sideways, as if checking that no one else was in earshot. “Not exactly. It would seem that one of the interceptor ships was compromised. The one that had the best chance of catching the escape craft just… let it slip through the net.” He spread his fingers wide. “Unfortunate.”
“You can’t let that thing escape.”
“We did what we could, but there was another, faster ship waiting in translunar space, within one of our temporary sensor shadows. Very clever.”
“And this faster ship—how big is she?”
“Big enough to carry the antimatter device from the Twentieth Century Limited, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said. “We can’t be certain that it’s the same craft that was involved in the hijacking, but given all the other factors… well, it seems more than likely. Incidentally, we’ve connected that ship to Niagara.”
“You have to stop him.”
“Tricky, unfortunately. His ship’s already on a high-burn trajectory, heading towards the Sedna portal.”
“So shut it down,” Floyd said.
“We’ve already tried that. It would appear that Niagara’s allies have control of the portal. We’ll have a military presence there within the day—enough to oust the aggressors—but not before that ship makes it through to the hyperweb.”
“And then we’ll have lost her,” Floyd said heavily.
Tunguska shifted in his seat, the leather groaning as he resettled himself. “Not necessarily. We at least know that the ship’s headed to the Sedna portal, and we know where that portal comes out. There’s a triad of portals at the far end—Niagara will have to take one of them. If we can keep sufficiently hard on his tail, we may be able to read the signatures of portal activation and determine which rabbit hole he’s bolted down. At that point we’ll risk entering the hyperweb link while another ship is still in transit. This is an unorthodox procedure even for Polity ships, and we’ll have to override safety controls on the portals to attempt it at all. But at the very least we’ll be able to follow Niagara part of the way, if nothing else.”
“Much good that’ll do.”
“It’s better than turning away now. Niagara’s craft is a big ship, fast in a straight-line dash, but it won’t be able to make portal-to-portal transitions as fast as we can. That’s about our only advantage.”
“And you’ve still no idea what corner of space Niagara’s headed to?”
“None at all,” Tunguska said. “That, unfortunately, is the bit we haven’t figured out yet. I don’t suppose you’ve had any bright ideas?”
“If you want bright ideas,” Floyd said, “you’ve definitely come to the wrong guy.”
When they had finished their drinks, Tunguska led Floyd through a warren of panelled companionways to his quarters. “It’s not much,” the Slasher said, opening the door to a bedroom Howard Hughes could have used for landing practice.
“I’ll manage,” Floyd said, fingering the teak inlay of the door. “Is all of this real?”
“Perfectly so,” Tunguska said. “Ours is a large ship and we can afford to reallocate some resources for your comfort. If we need those resources back again, I’ll do my best to give you fair warning.”
“Thanks… I think,” Floyd said. “About Auger?”
“You’ll be notified as soon as anything happens.”
“I’d like to see her.”
“Now?”
“Perhaps in a little while.”
“She still won’t be able to talk to you,” Tunguska warned.
“I know,” Floyd said, “but I want her to know that someone cares.”
“I understand,” Tunguska replied, guiding him into the room. “You’ve made quite some sacrifice by coming here, haven’t you, Mister Floyd?”
“I’ve made worse.”
“But you must appreciate that there is no guarantee of your ever returning home.”
“I didn’t know that when I helped Auger escape.”
“Perhaps not. But would that knowledge have made any difference to your actions?”
Floyd thought about that for a moment, trying to answer truthfully. “Maybe not.”
“I doubt that it would have. I may not be an excellent judge of human character, but I suspect you would have made exactly the same choices even if you’d had full knowledge of the consequences.” Tunguska patted him gently on the back. “And I find that rather admirable. You would have thrown away everything—the world and the people you love—for the sake of another human life.”
“Well, don’t elevate me to sainthood just yet,” Floyd said. “I had an idea that it was a good idea to help Auger get home. That was a kind of selfishness. And there’s still a chance for me to make the return journey.”
Tunguska studied him intently for a few moments, one finger gently stroking the heavy undercurve of his chin. “If we pinpoint the location of the ALS, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s true enough. But there’s still the small matter of breaking inside. The aggressors will attempt to deploy their antimatter device, which may or may not be sufficient to crack open the ALS. We, on the other hand, will do all we can to prevent them from doing that. If we can detonate the antimatter device prematurely, that is what we will do.”
Floyd hadn’t thought things through to that level of detail. Tunguska didn’t need to spell it out any more clearly that this could well turn into a suicide mission, if that was the only way to prevent Silver Rain from reaching E2.
“I’m sorry,” Tunguska added, when he saw Floyd’s reaction.
“And there’s no other way inside for me, is there?”
“None that we know of. Of course, if the ALS is ever in our possession, we’ll have all the time in the world to find a way inside… but that’s the one thing you don’t have.”
“You must do whatever it takes to stop Silver Rain,” Floyd said. “That’s what Auger and I risked our necks for. It’s what Susan White, Blanchard and Cassandra died for, and all the other innocent people that got involved in this.”
“We can still hope for a satisfactory outcome,” Tunguska said, forcing a strained note of optimism into his voice. “I’m just saying that we ought to be prepared for the worst.”
Tunguska left Floyd alone in his quarters, while the ship raced across the system towards the compromised portal. Floyd roamed around the enormous room, exploring its parameters like a laboratory hamster. It was comfortable enough, and it was obvious that his hosts had gone to quite a lot of trouble to make him feel at home. But he had a nagging suspici
on that he would have been happier with the naked reality of the ship, as it presented itself to its usual occupants. Up close, the décor and furnishings of the room had the same sketchy quality as the parlour room. It was like walking through someone else’s vague daydream. Rather than relaxing him, it put him on edge.
There was a huge old upright wireless set by the writing desk, with a sunrise motif cut into the wood around the speaker grille. He turned it on, fiddled with the tuning dial. There was only ever one channel broadcasting. On it, a man delivered updates about the state of play in the system, with particular emphasis on the events in and around the portal towards which they were headed. The wireless announcer spoke with the speeded-up drawl of a horse-racing commentator, punctuating his monotone dialogue with little bells, whistles and xylophone jingles. It wasn’t a real news report—Floyd figured that much out for himself in very short order. It would have sounded dated and phoney in 1939. It was a digest of the real situation, packaged in a way that was meant to be soothing and reassuring for him.
He listened to the wireless for an hour or so, which was about as much as he could take. Niagara’s ship had reached the portal and made a successful insertion. Fears that the aggressors might attempt to collapse the portal after making their insertion turned out to be unfounded, at least for now. One theory was that the technical staff left behind had refused to follow the orders to collapse the throat. Another was that the throat collapse would be delayed until the last minute before moderates regained control of the portal, so that the collapse wave didn’t have time to catch up with and damage Niagara’s ship. A third possibility was that the aggressors had chosen to keep the portal open, despite the risk of pursuit. Closing it would have endangered the possibility of future access to the ALS, making their entire scheme senseless. They wanted to sterilise E2, and then bring everyone else around to the idea that this had been the right and proper thing to do. And then, presumably, they wanted to talk real estate.
Floyd turned off the wireless and thought about Auger again. It was less than a week since she had walked into his life. And yet he couldn’t imagine spending one moment of the rest of his life without her. Every other concern seemed thin and trivial when set against the necessity of her survival.
Presently, Tunguska came back to see him. “Good news, Floyd—Auger is making progress.”
“You’ve found another host?”
“Not yet, no. Cassandra’s machines seem quite keen to entrench themselves, for now at least. It may be that they’ve decided to stay inside Auger until this crisis is resolved.”
Floyd stood up. “Can I see her?”
“I said she was making progress,” Tunguska said, with a sympathetic smile. “I didn’t say she was lucid.”
“How long before she’s properly conscious?” he asked, slumping down on the bed again.
“We’ll be well inside the portal by the time she’s ready for visitors.” Tunguska held a box in his hands, jammed full of what Floyd at first took to be papers. “I’ll have to ask for your patience until then.”
Floyd accepted this information with as much grace as he could muster. “All right. I guess there’s no point in arguing.”
“None at all, I’m afraid. We have Auger’s best interests at heart, but we’re just as concerned for Cassandra’s wellbeing.” He walked over to the bed on which Floyd was sitting and placed the box at his feet. “In the meantime, I thought this might make your stay here a little more tolerable.”
Floyd looked down. The box was full of records: labels and sleeves he half-recognised. “Where did you get those from?” he asked incredulously.
“The cargo you brought back from E2,” Tunguska said, looking pleased with himself.
“But I thought we lost it.”
“We did. These are copies, reconstructed from scans of the original cargo. You can thank Cassandra for that particular piece of foresight.”
Floyd extracted one of the records. Seventy-eight r.p.m.: Louis Armstrong, with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, playing “Chimes Blues.” The original, on the Gennett label, was worth a ton of money in mint condition. Floyd had a scratched copy that was worth a bit less. All the same, he’d still played it a thousand times, trying to get his head around Bill Johnson’s bass moves.
This was a newer copy, on a reissue label, but still not one that Floyd had seen before. The sleeve was made of an odd, slippery material that felt like wet glass. “You made these?” he asked, rubbing the strange paper between his fingers.
“It was simple enough, given the available information.”
Floyd tipped the sleeve, letting the disc roll out into his hands. It was very light, as if pressed from cuttlefish bone. It felt as if it ought to snap into a thousand pieces at the slightest touch.
“I wasn’t even sure you people still listened to music. Auger didn’t seem very keen on it. Nor did Susan White.”
“Did Auger talk about that at all?”
“I kept meaning to ask her, but events got in the way. What’s the deal, Tunguska? Is music seen as a primitive art form here, like cave painting or bone carving?”
“Not exactly,” Tunguska said. “We still listen to music in the Polities, although it’s a rather different sort of music than any you’re likely to have experienced. But Auger and her compatriots simply don’t have the option of listening to music at all. It was all our fault, you see. We stole music from them.”
“How can you steal music, Tunguska?”
“You engineer a viral weapon. It can’t have escaped your attention what a central role music plays in the morale of a nation at war. Now imagine taking that away, in a single stroke. We’d already designed a viral weapon that could have killed them all, had it been allowed to infect a sufficient number of hosts. But we didn’t want to kill them: we wanted to turn them to our own ideology, so that our own numbers could be strengthened. Besides, a lethal virus is rather difficult to deploy across a wide sphere of battle. As soon as people start dying, quarantines are enforced. Brutal measures are taken to curtail its spread. So our thinkers went away and re-honed their weapon to attack the part of the mind associated with language, thinking that such a virus would have a better chance of spreading before its effects were noticed.”
“Nasty,” Floyd said.
“But still not satisfactory,” Tunguska continued, his voice as measured and untroubled as ever. “Our forecasts showed that the end result would still be tens of millions of deaths, as their habitat-based society unravelled due to lack of communication between key workers. So again our thinkers reworked the weapon. What they came up with was Amusica: a virus keyed to certain areas of the right brain hemisphere, analogous to those left-brain foci associated with the perception and generation of language. It worked beautifully. Victims of Amusica lose all sense of music. They can’t make it, can’t sing it, can’t whistle it, can’t play it. They can’t even listen to it, either. It means nothing to them any more: just a cacophony of sounds. To some it’s actively painful.”
“Then Auger… and Susan White?”
“Amusica spread through Thresher society very rapidly. By the time anyone had noticed what was happening, it was far too late to do anything about it. Even now there are mutant strains of the virus in circulation. And because of the way the weapon was designed, once you have it, you pass it on to your children… and your children’s children. That’s the future, Floyd: a world without music, for most of them.”
“Most of them?”
“It didn’t touch them all. One in a thousand escaped its effects, although we still don’t know why. They consider themselves very fortunate. They’re hated and envied in equal measure.”
“But if you can take music away… can’t you put it back?”
Tunguska smiled tolerantly. “We’ve tried, in a spirit of bridge-mending. But volunteers are naturally reluctant to submit to even more neural intervention. Most Threshers wouldn’t trust us to set a broken leg, let alone rewire their minds. And the few t
hat do volunteer… well, the results haven’t been startlingly successful. If they remember what music once sounded like, they complain that it now sounds pale and unemotional. They might be right.”
“Or they might just be feeling the way we all do,” Floyd said. “No one ever took music away from me, but I’m damned if it ever sounds quite as good as it used to when I was twenty.”
“I confess that was also my suspicion. But given the harm we’ve done, the least we can do is give these people the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps there is something missing after all.”
“What about your people? If this virus is everywhere, shouldn’t you have caught it by now?”
“We would have, except the machines swarming through our bodies and minds keep the virus at bay.” Tunguska hesitated. “Now that the subject has been broached, Floyd, I should warn you that, since you lack these machines yourself—”
“That virus could hop aboard any time it likes.”
“You’re probably safe at the moment,” Tunguska said. “You’d need to be exposed to more than one carrier before the virus has a chance of establishing itself. But if you were to remain in the system—moving freely in Thresher society—then the virus would eventually find you.”
Floyd looked at the disc, his own reflection gleaming back at him. “Then I’d lose music, just the way Auger did?”
“Unless you had the good fortune to be the one in a thousand who can resist the virus… then yes, I’d say it was more or less guaranteed.”
“Thanks,” Floyd said. “I’m glad you told me.”
Tunguska looked a little taken aback. “Thanks wasn’t exactly the reaction I was expecting. Hatred and condemnation, perhaps, but not gratitude.”
“Bit late for condemnation, wouldn’t you say? What’s done is done. I don’t get the impression you’re particularly proud of what you did.”
“No,” Tunguska said, sounding genuinely relieved. “We’re most certainly not proud. And if there was anything we could do to make amends—”
“Maybe once you get this small matter of a war out the way,” Floyd suggested, “then you can think about rebuilding some of those bridges again. But first we have to stop Niagara.”
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