Century Rain

THIRTY-THREE

Auger was picking her way through an orange when Cassandra reappeared, stepping through a curtained doorway that rippled in an imaginary breeze.

The girl-shaped Slasher made a chair appear from nowhere, then lowered herself into it. “How are you feeling?”

“This is the best fruit I’ve ever tasted,” Auger replied.

“The best fruit you’ve never tasted,” Cassandra said, correcting her with an amused smile. “It’s rather unfair, of course: how could any real food compare with direct stimulation of the taste centre?”

Being reminded that the orange was a figment of her imagination was enough to kill what little of her appetite remained. “Is this what it’s like for you every day?” Auger asked. Beside her, Floyd continued to attack a bunch of grapes.

“More or less.”

“I suppose you get used to it, in the end. Being able to experience anything you want, when and wherever you want to…”

“It has its attractions,” Cassandra said. “But so does unlimited access to candy, when you’re a child. The simple fact of the matter is that we learn to live with what we have, and the novelty begins to wear off after a while. The machines in my environment can reshape any room—any space—according to my immediate needs. If the machines can’t respond quickly enough, or there’s a conflict with someone else’s requirements, I can tell other machines in my head to achieve the same thing by manipulating my perceptions. If there’s a memory that troubles me, I can erase or bury it, or programme it to surface only when I need some reminder of my shortcomings. If there’s an emotion I find unpleasant, I can turn it off or lessen it.”

“Like anxiety about the future?”

“Anxiety is a useful tool: it forces us to make plans. But when too much anxiety freezes us into indecision, it needs checking.” Cassandra leaned back in her seat, making the wooden joints creak. She reached for an apple from a bowl on a nearby table and bit into it. “It’s a matter of balance, you see. These things may sound miraculous to you, but to me they’re simply part of the texture of my life.”

Floyd pushed aside his plate. “It sounds like Heaven to me. You can make anything happen, or at least make yourselves think it’s happened. And you live for ever.”

“Cassandra’s people have no past,” Auger said. “We don’t have much of one, but what we do have is sacrosanct.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Floyd said.

“Everyone alive today is a descendent of someone who was living in space when the Nanocaust hit,” Auger elaborated. “No one on the surface of the planet made it out alive, so we’re all descended from the colonists who had already begun to settle the solar system.” She looked at the Slasher. “True, Cassandra?”

“True enough.”

“But getting into space was difficult back then. Every gram had to be accounted for, argued over, justified at the expense of another gram. We didn’t bring books when we could make do with digital scans of the texts, preserved in computer memory. We didn’t bring films or photographs when we could more easily transport digital versions of them. We didn’t even bring animals or flowers, making do with transcriptions of their DNA.”

“It went the same way for both of our ancestral peoples,” Cassandra added. “The only difference being that Auger’s grouping—the ancestors of the USNE—embraced the digital with slightly less gusto than we did. They were cautious—rightly so, as it happened.”

“We brought some physical artefacts into space,” Auger said. “A few books, photographs. Even some animals. It cost us terribly, but we sensed that the storage of so much knowledge in the form of digital records—in the memories of machines—made us vulnerable. After the Nanocaust, when we’d seen machines go wrong on such a scale, we embarked on a crash programme to convert as much of that electronically stored information as possible back into solid, analogue format. We made printing presses to produce physical books. We burnt digital images back on to chemical plates. We had factories churning out paper as fast as our printers could swallow it. We even had armies of scribes copying texts back on to paper in longhand, in case the printers failed before the work was done. We did everything we could—everything we could think of doing—to make copies we could touch and smell, like in the old days. It almost worked, too. But we just weren’t fast enough.”

“We call it the Forgetting,” Cassandra said. “It happened about fifty years after the Nanocaust, when our respective societies had regained some measure of stability and self-sufficiency following the death of Earth. Even now, no one really knows what caused it. Sabotage is sometimes mentioned, but I’m inclined to think it was an accident—just one of those things waiting to happen.”

“The digital records crashed,” Auger said. “Overnight, some kind of virus or worm spread through every linked archive in the system. Texts were turned into garbled junk. Pictures, movies—even music—were scrambled into senselessness.”

“Some archives survived,” Cassandra said. “But after the Forgetting, we could never be certain of their reliability.”

“We lost almost everything,” Auger said. “All we had left of the past was fragments. It was like trying to reconstruct the entirety of human knowledge from a few books saved from a burning library.”

“What about institutions?” Floyd asked. “Didn’t they keep the originals of all this stuff?”

“They’d been falling over themselves to shred and pulp their paper collections for years,” Auger said. “They couldn’t do it quickly enough once they’d been sold on the idea that they could reduce all this cumbersome volume to a single sheet of microfiche, or a single optical disk, or a single partition in a flash memory array, or whatever was being hailed as the latest and best storage medium that week.”

“Perfect sound for ever,” Cassandra said, in the manner of someone reciting an advertising slogan. “That, at least, was the idea; it’s just such a shame that it didn’t actually work. You see now why our people have followed two paths. The Threshers believe that the Forgetting must never be allowed to happen again. To that end, they abstain from the very technologies that could offer them immortality.”

“No one’s immortal,” Auger said sharply. “You’re just immortal until the next Nanocaust, or the next Forgetting, or until the Sun blows up. And any one of us is free to defect to the Polities, if we don’t like living under the iron rule of the Threshold Committee.”

“A fair point,” Cassandra said. “We, on the other hand, have decided not to worry about the past. We’ve lost it once, so why worry about losing it again? We live in the moment.”

She extended her hand and made the room change, expanding it massively, the white walls racing away in all directions. Suddenly they were in a space the size of a cathedral, and then a skyscraper. It kept on growing, the walls receding until they were kilometres or tens of kilometres away, the ceiling rocketing into the sky until it took on the blue of the atmosphere itself, with a layer of clouds suspended just below it. The room’s open window now looked out into star-sprinkled night.

It was a bravura display of control, but Cassandra wasn’t finished. She narrowed her eyes and the distant walls flickered with vast, sculptural detail: fluted columns and caryatids as tall as mountains, buttresses and arches leaning across absurd reaches of empty space. She made stained-glass windows open into the walls, shot through with light in a spectrum Auger had never imagined. Cassandra must have been tweaking her brain on a fundamental level, altering her very perceptual wiring. Not only were the colours unfamiliar (and heart-wrenchingly beautiful), but she could hear them, feel them, smell them.

She had never known anything so lovely, so sad, so wonderful.

“Please stop,” she said, overwhelmed.

Cassandra returned the room to its prior dimensions. “I’m sorry,” she said to Auger and Floyd in turn, “but I felt that some demonstration was necessary to illustrate what I understand as living in the moment. That’s the kind of moment I mean.”

“I have just one question,” Floyd said. “If you can do this, if you can have everything you want, whenever and wherever you want it—then why are some of you so keen on getting your hands on Earth?”

“That’s a shrewd question,” Cassandra said.

“So answer it,” Auger said.

“We want Earth because it is the one thing we cannot have,” Cassandra said. “And that, for some of us, is intolerable.”

Cassandra was waiting when the veined lid peeled aside. “Well, Auger? Was the reintegration as painless as I predicted?”

“I’ll cope. Can you help me out of this thing?”

“Certainly.”

Another Slasher was already helping Floyd out of his casket. Auger looked around with bleary eyes while the last remnants of the blue fluid gathered into larger blobs and flowed back into the open maw of the casket.

“Come,” Cassandra said. “I’ll bring you up to speed. We’re very near Earth.”

They returned to the tactical room, which was almost as Auger remembered it except for the absence of any Slashers. “They’re still in their acceleration caskets,” Cassandra explained. “If we need to make a sudden movement, they’ll be better able to manage the tactical situation.”

“Are we still being chased by Niagara?”

“Niagara—or whoever was in that ship—isn’t a problem anymore. It ran into one of our missiles just before we reached the outer cordon of Tanglewood defences.”

“You mean he’s dead?”

“Someone’s dead. It may or may not be Niagara. If it isn’t, we’ll find him sooner or later.”

“You better had.”

“Perhaps if you told me exactly why it was so important to reach Caliskan, I might be able to do a little more to help you.”

“I’ve told you as much as you need to know,” Auger said firmly.

“You only told me half of the story.”

“And I’m not quite ready to trust you with the rest of it. Maybe when I’ve spoken to Caliskan… Are you close enough to send a tight-beam message to him?”

“There’ll always be a slight risk of interception… but yes, we’re close enough now.” With a flourish of her fingers—a gesture that Auger suspected was as much theatrical as anything else—Cassandra assigned part of the wall as a flat screen. For a moment it was blank, awaiting a response. “You may speak,” she said, prompting Auger with a nod of her head.

“What’s my location?” she asked.

Cassandra told her.

“Caliskan,” she said. “This is Verity Auger. I believe you wanted to hear from me. I’m alive and well, within half a light-second of Tanglewood. I’m aboard a Slasher spacecraft, so you’ll have to pull some strings to let me get any closer without all hell breaking loose.”

A second or two later, the assigned panel lit up with swathes of blocky primary colours, which quickly sharpened into a flickering, low-time-resolution pixel image.

“That’s Caliskan?” Floyd said, when the face of the white-haired man had assumed a recognisable shape.

“The man who sent me to Paris, and the only one who has a hope of sorting out this mess,” Auger said.

“Face looks familiar. It’s almost as if I know him,” Floyd said, peering more closely at the image.

“You can’t possibly know him,” she said. “You’ve never met him.”

Floyd touched the side of his head, as if in salute. “Whatever you say, Chief.”

Caliskan’s glasses flared light back at the camera. “Auger… you’re alive. You can’t imagine how much this pleases me. Please pass my thanks on to Cassandra. I didn’t dare believe you’d made it out of the Phobos catastrophe.”

“We made it, sir. Both of us did.”

She waited for the response. The one-second delay was just long enough to impose a certain stiltedness on the conversation, as if both of them were speaking a language neither felt comfortable with.

“Both of you, Auger? But Skellsgard said that the war babies had killed Aveling and Barton before you helped her escape.”

“And so they did, sir. I’m with a man called Floyd, who was born on E2.”

Behind Caliskan, she could make out the ribs, spars and instruments of a spacecraft cabin interior: a modern Thresher ship, but something much less advanced than the Slasher vessel she had woken up inside.

“That’s a serious development,” he said.

“There’s more we need to talk about,” Auger said. “Can you clear our approach with the Tanglewood authorities?”

“Check the news, Auger: there are no authorities. The Tanglewood administration’s made a run for the hills. I’m already having a hard time evading the pirates and looters, and I have a fast shuttle.”

“My children are in Tanglewood.”

“No,” he said. “Peter took them away a couple of days ago. As soon as Skellsgard came through, we began to fear that something bad was imminent. Your children are safe.”

“Where are they?”

“Peter thought it best not to tell anyone. He said he’d make contact with you as soon as the situation calms down.”

Auger closed her eyes and said a small, silent prayer of thanks.

“Sir,” Auger said after a moment, “I have important news. There’s something I really need to tell you. I know what Susan White was on to, and it’s big. You have to act now… use all your contacts to pull in assistance before it’s too late.”

“It’s all right,” Caliskan said. “We figured out most of the details from Skellsgard. It was remarkably brave of you to send her back the way you did.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yes, she’s fine. Safe and sound.”

That was another debt to add to the pile. Her children were safe and so was her small, scowling friend from Phobos.

“I still need to talk to you,” she said. “Can you suggest a suitable rendezvous point?”

“I already have a place in mind. It’s somewhere the pirates and looters won’t dare follow us. I suspect even the Slashers will have second thoughts.”

She knew exactly where he meant, and it scared her. “You’re not serious, Caliskan.”

“I’m more than serious. Does that ship you’re in have transatmospheric capability?”

She turned to Cassandra. “Well?”

“We can fly in. But there’s more to a trip to Earth than just flying in. A Thresher ship may be sufficiently robust for the furies not to pose an immediate risk, but we are rather more… susceptible.”

“I thought the Slashers had protection against furies now. Isn’t that why you’re so keen to get your hands on Earth?”

“Experimental countermeasures,” Cassandra said. “Which—I regret to inform you—this ship doesn’t happen to be carrying.”

Auger turned back to Caliskan. “No dice. She says the ship isn’t equipped to fend off furies. We’ll have to pick another RV point.”

“Tell her not to worry,” Caliskan said. “The fury count near my designated RV is low. I know because I have direct feeds from Antiquities monitoring stations in the vicinity. Our enemies won’t have this information, which is why they won’t be so keen to come charging in.”

Auger glanced at Cassandra. “Does that sound reasonable to you?”

“He spoke of a low count, not a zero one,” Cassandra said. “I can’t risk taking my ship deep into the atmosphere, especially with eighteen evacuees in my care.”

“This is very important.”

“In which case,” Cassandra said, “we’ll have to consider an alternative means of transportation.”

“You mean the Twentieth’s shuttle?”

“There isn’t much fuel left aboard, but it should still be capable of making the round trip.”

“Can it fly itself?”

“It doesn’t have to,” Cassandra said. “I can take care of that.”

Auger returned her attention to the screen. “We’re following you in, but we’ll need a few minutes to get our act together. Don’t get too far ahead of us.”

“Make it as quick as you can,” Caliskan said. “And if you have any cargo from Paris, now might not be a bad time to hand it over to me. Given what’s happened around Mars, it may be the last consignment we ever see.”

“There isn’t much,” Auger said. “Just a few boxes that the snake robot put on the transport before it sabotaged the link.”

“You’re still working for Antiquities. Bring what there is. Then follow my trajectory precisely, no matter how inefficient it looks.”

“Where are you taking us, sir?”

“For a dinner engagement,” Caliskan said. “We’re dining with the ghost of Guy de Maupassant. I just hope he doesn’t mind the company.”