Century Rain

TWENTY-SIX

Floyd made out a softening of the darkness ahead, like the first suggestion of day in the final hour before dawn. The voices of the search party did not sound far away, as if they were close to the other side of the door. Auger was right: it wouldn’t take them long to find their way through, especially if they thought they were going after killers.

“So who sent these children? Who are they working for?”

“I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t briefed on that part. My people sent me here to do a simple job, which was to recover Susan White’s box of papers. They didn’t tell me there’d be complications.”

“But they knew there would be?”

“My bosses? Yeah. I’d say there’s a pretty good chance they knew more than they told me.”

“Sounds as if you were sold down the river, Auger.”

“That’s more or less my conclusion.”

“You ready to tell me who you are yet, and who your bosses are? They weren’t straight with you, after all, so you don’t owe them anything.”

“If they’d been straight with me, I’d never have come here.”

They reached the source of the light. There was a heavy door set into one wall of the shaft, huge and thick and circular, like the door to a safe or one of the armoured hatches on a tank. The pale light spilled through the crack where the door had not been fully closed. It had a wavering quality, like reflections from a swimming pool.

“This isn’t good,” Auger said. “That door should be closed by now.”

“What’s happened to those friends of yours?”

“I was expecting them to be here by now—a few reinforcements, at the very least. Until last Friday we had a whole team here.”

“What happened on Friday?”

“The children penetrated the shaft, broke in via a tunnel of their own. Killed Barton and Aveling, two of my colleagues. Skellsgard took a hit, but she was all right. I got her out of here, told her to send help back for me. I had to leave the door open when I left since there was no one left on the other side to lock it.”

“When were you expecting this help to arrive?”

“It should have taken sixty hours, minimum. The earliest the cavalry could have arrived was sometime around midnight last night, but there may have been a delay at the other end before anyone could set out on the return journey. They would have arrived on the other side of that door, able to shut it properly.”

“Maybe if we go through that door, we’ll have a better idea of what’s happened.”

“You’re not going to like what’s through that door,” Auger warned.

“I’m in for the rest of the game. Let’s do it.”

They nudged the door open wide enough to squeeze through. Floyd helped Auger up on to the metal lip, into the raised area beyond. He followed her, squinting against the strange, shifting light that filled the chamber.

“Now help me close the door,” she said.

They worked the door into its seal, then Floyd turned the hefty wheel that locked it from the inside.

“That’ll keep them out for a good few hours,” Auger said. “They’ll need to bring cutting gear down into the tunnel, and there’s no telling how long it will take them to break through even when it arrives.”

“But they’ll get through eventually.”

“Yes, but you only have to hold out down here for three days or so. By that time, we’ll have sent people through to help you get back to safety. You’ll find provisions and water in the next room.”

“What next room?”

The chamber they were in was the size of a one-car garage, its walls gouged from dark, glistening rock. The floor was scratched metal. Several cabinets and work benches were arranged around the perimeter, set with what Floyd recognised as wireless transmitting equipment. There was a lot of it, and it was wired together in surprising ways, but there was nothing that looked like super-secret spy gear of the kind he had expected. The only odd thing in the room—and it was, admittedly, more than a little odd—was the peculiar plaque or mirror hanging against—or rather set into—the rear wall. It was the source of the light: a perfectly blank, flat surface as tall as a man that none the less conveyed a subtle, queasy sense of depth and shifting perspective. The surface was framed by a heavy construction that merged seamlessly into the walls of the cave. The frame was moulded from a translucent material like dark honey, twinkling with a suggestion of shimmering machinery buried deep within it.

It looked like nothing he had ever seen in his life.

“This is the censor chamber,” Auger said, peeling away the sticky wad of Floyd’s jacket that was serving as a bandage, rearranging the fabric and then pressing it hard against her wound. “There’s first-aid gear here, but we’ll have more to choose from on the other side of the censor.”

“The what?”

“That thing,” she said, pointing to the source of the wavering light. “We call it the censor. It’s like a checkpoint. It lets certain things through, and stops other things. I think we’ll both be safer on the other side of it.”

“Keep talking,” he said, transfixed by the shifting, resonating surface.

“We don’t know exactly what rules it applies,” Auger said, a remark that did nothing to reassure him. “It’s pretty strict about what it lets into Paris. But it doesn’t seem to be so picky about the things it allows through the other way.”

“You’re talking as if you don’t even know how that thing works.”

“We don’t,” she said simply. “We don’t even know who made it, or how long ago.”

“This is getting way too strange for me,” Floyd said.

“Then turn back and face those men.” Auger nodded at the censor. “I’m not even sure it will let you through anyway.”

“Will it let you through?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been through it three times already, no harm done. But we’re not the same. What applies to me won’t necessarily apply to you.”

“How different can we be?”

“More than you know. But there’s only way to find out. I’ll go through first and wait for you on the other side. If you haven’t come through after a minute or two, I’ll…” But Auger could not finish whatever it was she meant to say.

“What is it?” Floyd asked.

“It isn’t that easy. We’ve never seen the censor refuse a living thing. I don’t know what it will do if it decides not to let you through.” Auger swallowed. “It might not be pretty. When we tried to bring machines through from the other side—weapons, communications gear, that kind of thing—it usually didn’t allow it. That’s why we call it the censor.”

Floyd began to feel as if he had walked into a parlour game with only a vague idea of the rules. “It blocked them somehow?”

“Destroyed them,” Auger said. “Turned them into useless lumps of metal slag. Randomised them on the atomic level, erasing even any microscopic structures. Nothing worked any more. The only things it let us bring through were simple tools. Digging equipment. Knives. Clothes. Paper money. That’s why there’s nothing fancy in this room. Everything you see had to be found in Paris, smuggled in here and then cobbled together to serve our needs.”

Floyd stared at the flickering surface, hypnotised by it. He had been pushing Auger for answers since he had met her, always with a certain preconception in his mind, and now that he was getting the truth—in measured, drip-fed doses, admittedly—it was nothing like what he had imagined. It was the kind of truth that made him want to shrivel up and hide under a stone. The worst part was that there was a weary conviction in her voice that told him that none of this was a hoax. She was being straight with him now, or at least as straight as she dared.

There was something under Paris that had no right to exist, and Auger wanted him to step through it.

“Will I like what’s on the other side of that thing, if it allows me through?”

“No,” she said. “You won’t. I’m pretty damn sure of that. But you’ll be safer there than here. Even if those men make it into this room, they’ll need some persuading to step through the censor. I think you can hold out until I return with help.”

“Then let’s get it over with. You go first. I’ll see you on the other side.”

“You’re ready for this?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“I’ve got to go, Floyd. I hope you make it through.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Now off you go.”

She pushed herself through the censor, awkwardly swinging by her good arm from a rail positioned above it to give her momentum. The glowing membrane stretched at first like a sheet of rubber, resisting her progress. Then it snapped around her until she appeared embedded in it, only the back of her head and one elbow and heel showing. Bruiselike ripples surrounded her form. Then she was gone completely, the membrane flexing and rebounding like a trampoline, and Floyd was alone.

He pushed a finger experimentally against the drumlike surface and felt the faintest electrical tingling. He pushed harder. The tingling intensified. He stopped, removed his finger and pulled a toothpick from his pocket. Holding the toothpick by one end, he pushed the other tip into the surface until he felt that tingling again. He pulled out the toothpick and held it up for inspection. It appeared unharmed in any way, and when he slipped it into his mouth it tasted like all the others he’d ever chewed. Something still made him throw it away.

He pushed his finger in again, up to the quick at the base of his fingernail, and ignored the tingling as it sank into the surface as if into wet clay. The layer flexed back, until he had pushed a depression into it as deep as his forearm. Suddenly fearful, he released the pressure before the membrane could snap around him.

“Just do it,” he said, and threw himself at the surface.

Floyd came through. He fell in a crashing sprawl on the other side, smashing his bandaged head against cold metal flooring. All he could do, for at least a minute, was lie perfectly still as multiple pain signals hit his brain, where they were filed into pigeonholes, like letters in a sorting office. There was pain from his head, where he had hit the floor. His mouth hurt like hell—he must have bitten his tongue or the inside of his cheek, or something. There was pain from his knees and one elbow, and from the bruises on his back where he had fallen against the rails. His arm hurt where the child had pressed its shoe, holding him to the ground. But there was no shrill agony of amputation. He might have lost a finger or two, perhaps: he could believe that. But when he flexed his hands, even his fingers seemed to be more or less intact. Bruised and raw, certainly, but he could still play something, even if it had to be the maracas from now on.

He eased his head from the floor, then peeled the rest of his body into a sitting position. He looked around and found Auger sitting in a chair, slumped into it with exhaustion, but still awake.

“Floyd?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

“Copacetic,” he said, rubbing his head.

“When you went through that thing… how was it?”

Floyd spat out a bloodied tooth before answering. “It’s funny. I’m sitting here now and it seems like it was only a couple of seconds ago that we were on the other side. But to another part of me, it feels as if I haven’t seen you for half a lifetime.”

“So it happened to you,” Auger said. “The thing that never happened to me. You got it, on your first trip through.” She sounded impressed and envious at the same time.

“All I remember,” Floyd said, “is that I felt as if I was made of glass, and there was light shining through me. It was as though I was hanging in that shaft of light for the whole of eternity. I wondered if it was ever going to end. Another part of me didn’t want it to end, ever. I saw… colours, colours like I’d never imagined before. And then it was all over, and I was lying here with a pain in my mouth. You know, if you could bottle that sensation…” He managed a self-deprecating shrug. “Guess the damned thing isn’t so picky after all.”

“Did you feel a mind? More than one mind?”

“I felt very small and very delicate, like something being looked at through a microscope.”

“It was an experiment,” Auger said flatly. “No one like you has ever come through before. It was something no one had ever tried. I just didn’t expect you to have that experience on your first trip.”

“Lady, one trip through that thing is enough for me.” He looked around, taking in the complexities of the room in which he had landed. Unlike the last chamber, this one at least looked something like the underground spy lair he had been imagining. It was very large, filled with machines and equipment that he could not begin to identify. “Please tell me this is some kind of film set,” he said, steadying himself against the edge of a desk.

“It’s all real,” Auger said, strugging to her feet. “The only problem is that my friends aren’t here yet. But there’s good news, too.”

“There is?”

“The ship’s back. I just don’t understand why no one else came with it. They’d only have had to keep one seat vacant.”

Floyd dug into his mouth, extracting the last few chips of his ruined tooth. Somehow, dentistry was the least of his worries. “Did you just say ‘ship?’ ”

“That thing,” Auger said. She pointed to the central feature of the room, the thing you couldn’t miss. It was a giant glass bulb, as wide across as a house, suspended at eyelevel over a kind of pit filled with more machinery, equipment and desks. The bulb was encased in an arrangement of curving metal struts, bracing it to the walls of the chamber. On the other side from where they were standing, the bulb’s surface extended out, forming a cylindrical shaft that pushed through the wall. Where the shaft met the wall, there was a thick, intricate crusting of the same weird substance Floyd had already seen framing the censor. As he looked more closely, he realised that the crusting covered the interior walls of the chamber completely with a dense, twinkling plaque. Portions of it had been sheeted over with metal panels, but large areas were still exposed.

There was something inside the bubble. It was a dented and battered object about the size of a truck, seemingly formed from sheets of metal that had been hammered into shape by enthusiastic cavemen. It was cylindrical, with a bullet-shaped nose. It had windows and was covered with odd projections—most of them bent and mangled—and unfamiliar symbols in faded and scorched paint, and the whole thing was encased in a kind of harness, like the cradles used to load bombs into aircraft.

“It’s taken a beating getting here,” Auger commented.

“That’s a ship?” Floyd asked.

“Yes,” she said. “And don’t sound so disappointed. It happens to be my ticket out of here.”

“It looks as though it’s been around the block a few times.”

“Well, things must be getting pretty hairy for it to have accrued that much damage in one trip. I just hope it can cope with the return leg.”

“Where will it take you?” Floyd asked. “America? Russia? Somewhere I haven’t even heard of?”

“It’ll take me a long way from Paris,” Auger said evasively. “Right now that’s all you need worry about. I’ll be back in just over sixty hours, or if not me, then someone else you can trust. Whoever it is will have reinforcements—enough help to get you back to the surface in one piece.”

“Is that a promise?”

“It’s the best I can do. Right now, I don’t even know if that thing is going to hold together long enough to get me home.”

“Is there an alternative?”

“No. That ship is my only way out of here.”

“Then we’d better hope Lady Luck’s on your side.”

Floyd looked around the rest of the room, his attention skating from one unfamiliar object to the next. The many desks were all inlaid with arrays of typewriter keys, but grouped densely together, with many more keys than seemed necessary. They had cryptic codes marked on them—arrangements of letters, numbers and childish scribbles. There were many switches and controls of a kind he didn’t recognise, made of some sort of smoky, translucent material. There were flat, upright sheets of tinted glass arranged on the desks like sunshades, upon which text and illustrations—charts and diagrams—had been printed in bright, luminous inks. There were grilles and lights and slots, and racks holding oblong things that might have fitted into the slots. There were microphones on stalks—those at least he recognised—and clipboards, left strewn across some of the desks. He picked up the nearest clipboard and leafed through sheets of silky paper marked with rows and rows of gibberish, but gibberish clearly laid out according to some careful scheme, interspersed with elegant, sloping cascades of brackets and other typographic symbols. Another clipboard held pages and pages of labyrinthine, gridlike diagrams, like the street map of some insane metropolis.

“Who exactly are you?” he asked.

“I’m a woman from the year twenty-two sixty-six,” Auger said.

“You know, what really worries me is that you sound as if you believe it.”

But Auger wasn’t listening. She had moved to the side of what was perhaps the strangest thing in the room, other than the ship and the censor. It was a kind of sculpture composed of many dozens of shiny metallic spheres organised into a pyramidal spiral that reached almost to shoulder height. In the lobby of a company building, it wouldn’t have merited a second glance. But here, amidst so much equipment that was obviously designed for a specific technical function, it was bizarrely out of place, like a Christmas tree in an engine room.

Auger touched the topmost sphere. She mouthed a “What…?” and the thing moved, partially uncoiling until Floyd saw that it had the form of a snake made from many linked spheres. Auger took a nervous step backwards as the snake rose up, curving its body into a high, threatening arc.

Floyd pointed his automatic and clicked off the safety catch.

“Easy,” Auger said, raising a hand in his direction. “It’s just a robot. They must have sent it over in the ship.”

Guardedly, Floyd let the automatic drop. “Just a robot?”

“A Slasher robot,” she said, as if this made a difference. “But I don’t think it means us any harm. If it did, we’d be dead by now.”

“You’re talking about robots as if they’re something you see every day.”

“Not every day,” Auger said. “But often enough to know when I should be afraid, and when I don’t need to be.”

The robot spoke in a rapid, piping voice. “I recognise you as Verity Auger. Please confirm this identification.”

“I’m Auger,” she said.

“You appear to be injured. Is this the case?” While it spoke, the snake swayed the blank sphere of its head from side to side, like a charmed cobra.

“I’m injured, yes.”

“I am detecting a foreign metallic object lodged near your shoulder.” The robot’s voice sounded the way Floyd imagined Disney might make a talking kettle sound. “Do you authorise immediate medical intervention? I am programmed with the necessary routines to perform an operation.”

“I thought the bullet went through you,” Floyd said.

“Maybe there was more than one,” Auger answered.

“Do you authorise medical intervention?” the robot repeated.

“Yes,” Auger said, and almost immediately the snake moved, its spheres scraping against the floor. “No,” she said sharply. “Wait. There isn’t time for a full operation. I want you to stabilise me, make sure I can last until we get back to E1. Is that possible?”

The snake paused, appearing to weigh the options. “I can stabilise you,” it said thoughtfully. “But my recommendation is that you allow an immediate operation. Otherwise there is a significant risk of death unless you consent to UR therapy.”

“I’ll consent if it gets me out of here,” Auger said. Then she turned to Floyd. “I’ve just had an idea, now that they’ve sent the robot.”

“I’m listening,” Floyd said.

She snapped her attention back to the snake. “Are you Asimov-compliant?”

“No,” the robot said, with a sting of indignation.

“Thank God, because you may actually have to hurt some people. Recognise this man as Wendell Floyd. Got that?”

The robot’s blank round head swung towards him. He felt a weird interrogatory chill, as if he had been stared at by a sphinx.

“Yes,” the robot confirmed.

“I’m authorising you to protect Wendell Floyd. People may enter this chamber via the censor and attempt to harm or abduct him. You are to defend him, using minimum necessary force. Do you have nonlethal weapons?”

“I have weapons that may be deployed in both nonlethal and lethal modes,” the robot said proudly.

“Good. I want you to use whatever force is necessary to keep Floyd alive, but keep the body count down. No killing, unless you have to.”

“It understood all that?” Floyd said.

“I hope so, for their sakes.” She addressed the robot again. “Eventually—somewhere around sixty or seventy hours from now—someone will return in the ship. They will assist Floyd in returning to the surface. You are not to obstruct them. Understood?”

“Understood,” the robot said.

“Good. Were you given any special orders? Who put you aboard?”

“I was given special instructions by Maurya Skellsgard.”

“Skellsgard made it?” Auger clenched her fist in obvious relief. “Thank God. At least something went right, for once. Can I talk to her? Is the communications link working?”

“The communications link is active, but unreliable.”

“Can you patch me through to Skellsgard, if she’s on shift?”

“One moment.”

Elsewhere in the room, movement caught Floyd’s eye. Across all the desks, the text-filled shades became clear as the luminous letters and diagrams vanished. Symbols jumped across the panels, followed by a jumble of numbers and diagrams that flickered past too fast to make out. Then the picture cleared to reveal multiple images of the same woman, looking at him from different angles around the room.

“Auger?” the face said. “You there, sister?”

The snake robot was already attending to Auger’s injury. It had curled part of itself around her, forming a kind of couch upon which she was gently supported. The larger spheres, Floyd noted, were capable of bulging and softening to form cushions. Other spheres, clustered near the head, had opened little doors in what had appeared to be seamless metal. Many jointed arms had emerged through these doors, tipped with all manner of sharp, glinting devices.

“I’m here,” Auger said. “I’m glad you made it back safely.”

“All thanks to you,” Skellsgard replied. “I owe you one, and I wish I was there to help. But the link’s become too unstable since I made it back to E1. There was no guarantee we’d be able to get a ship back to you, let alone return.”

“I noticed that the ship took a hammering,” Auger said. The robot was nibbling away layers of her clothing, doing so with an astonishing gentleness. It reminded Floyd of a mantis chewing away at a leaf.

“It’ll probably be even rougher on the way back. I wanted to come for you, but Caliskan refused to risk any more lives. That’s why we sent the robot. Hope you weren’t too surprised.”

“I take it the Slasher conflict has become more extensive?”

“You could say that. Look, no point in beating around the bush. The news at this end isn’t good: you’re coming back to a war zone. The aggressive parties have finally made their move. Moderate Slashers are doing their best to contain them, but it’s not clear how long they can last. We’re not sure how long we can hold Mars, let alone Earth.”

Auger glanced awkwardly in Floyd’s direction. “There’s a complication at my end as well. I’ve brought someone into the chamber.”

“I hope whoever you’re bringing back is already in the loop.”

“I think it’s fair to say he’s pretty fucking out of the loop. Remember that detective I mentioned?”

Skellsgard grimaced and closed her eyes, like someone waiting for a balloon to pop. “I’m not hearing this, Auger.”

“I couldn’t shake him. He’s what you’d call tenacious.”

“You can’t do this, Auger. The censor—”

“The censor let him through,” Auger said. “He’s already seen the ship, and the robot. The damage is done.”

“You have to send him back.”

“I’m planning on it. But we’re in a siege situation here. Floyd can’t get back to the surface, and more than likely people are already trying to break through into the outer chamber. I’m not sure whether they’ll try to get through the censor, but I’ve tasked the robot to protect Floyd until we can send back a ship with reinforcements.”

Skellsgard’s image broke up, then reassembled. Her voice sounded thin, like someone speaking through a comb. “Caliskan won’t OK it.”

“I’ll deal with him. I’ll come back myself if I have to. I’d send the damned robot out to take Floyd all the way to the surface if the censor would let it through.”

“May I say something?” Floyd asked.

“Go ahead,” Skellsgard replied.

“Auger isn’t giving you the whole picture. Fact of the matter is, she’s pretty badly hurt.”

“He telling the truth?” Skellsgard said, turning her perceptive gaze on Auger.

“It’s nothing serious,” Auger said, then immediately winced as the robot began to examine the wound. Even Floyd had to look away: he had never been very good with injuries, and it had been as much as he could do to clean and bandage the wound for her earlier.

“That doesn’t look like ‘nothing serious’ to me,” Skellsgard said.

“I’ll keep until I’m home. At least this way I can stay conscious for some of the trip. The robot’s patching me up. Can the ship take care of itself?”

“No,” Skellsgard said. “Ordinarily it could, but not with the way the link is now. The existing routines aren’t designed to cope with the changing geometry. We uploaded patches before we sent it out, but the robot had to do a certain amount of hands-on piloting to get the ship to you in one piece.”

“No problem, then. Just get the robot to do the same thing on the return leg.”

“There won’t be a robot,” Skellsgard said, wondering whether pain and blood-loss were affecting Auger’s short-term memory. “Even if you hadn’t volunteered it to protect your detective, we’d need it to stay behind at the E2 end to stabilise the throat and ramp down the power after insertion. You remember how tricky it was to send me back without the throat collapsing catastrophically?”

“Yes,” Auger said.

“Well, it’ll be twenty times more difficult now, and there isn’t anyone warm to stay behind to manage the throat contraction. That’s what we need the robot for.”

“Damn,” Auger said.

“If we could have squeezed two robots in, we’d have sent two. I was kind of hoping you’d be sharp enough to fly her back.”

“I think I’m going to be a little woozy,” Auger said. “The robot talked about pumping me full of UR.”

“If the robot says you need UR, I’d trust the robot.”

“Absolutely, but I might not be conscious the whole way back.”

“In that case,” Skellsgard said, “we have ourselves a problem.”

“Not necessarily,” Floyd said.

Auger looked at him. The faces on the screens looked at him, in perfect unison. Even the robot glanced at him, its blank sphere of a head somehow managing to evince polite scepticism.

“You got something to contribute?” Skellsgard said.

“If Auger can’t fly the ship, then I’ll have to.”

“You have no idea what’s involved. Even if you did… shit, man, you don’t know a wormhole from your butthole.”

“No, but I can learn.” Floyd directed his attention at the nearest floating image.

“Fine,” Skellsgard said. “You can begin by telling me what you already know about matter/exotic matter coupling parities, and we’ll go from there. I take it you do have some passing familiarity with the basic principles of pseudo-wormhole engineering? Or am I going too fast for you?”

“I can change a spark plug,” Floyd said.

Auger let out a small, pained yelp.

“I am going to administer a local anaesthetic,” the robot said. “There may be some temporary loss of mental clarity.”

“Bring it on,” she said.