L’Ange du Foyer, talking to a small, old-looking man she took to be MP Renoko. No one was sitting down. There was a lot of gesticulating and raised voices. Antoyne waved Toni Reno’s paperwork about and said something; the small man shook his head no. He wore a shortie single-breasted raincoat over a yellowed woollen singlet and tapering red trousers which ended halfway down his calves; black loafers. His agreement with Toni Reno, he said, was that no one got paid until all the items were delivered to an as-yet-undetermined location. He had the second one here now. That was the way it was. Irene snatched the paper off Antoyne, made eye contact with MP Renoko and tore it in half. He smiled and shrugged. She put the pieces down on one of the aluminium tables with exaggerated care before walking off.
Liv Hula, unwilling to become involved, avoided everyone’s eyes and went into L’Ange, where she ordered frozen yoghurt.
Irene came in behind her and said, ‘I’ll have one of those too, but I’m getting vodka in mine.’ They sat down and watched Fat Antoyne and MP Renoko walk off towards the edge of the landing field, still arguing.
‘Who does that little shit think he is?’ Irene asked.
Liv said she didn’t know. ‘Well I do,’ the mona said, as if she had won an argument. ‘I do.’
‘I don’t like the beard he has.’
‘Who does?’ said Irene. ‘I suppose you had a good time last night?’
When Liv smiled and looked down at her yoghurt it was already full of flies. Later, the three of them stood in the
‘There should be a viewing plate,’ Antoyne said, ‘but I don’t find it.’
You saw these things in all the old travelling shows, MP Renoko had explained. They were pressure vessels. The carnie narrative was they contained an alien being: people paid to stare in, maybe their kids would bang on the tank with a stick, everyone went away happy. This one, riveted like an old zinc bucket, had streaks of corrosion, sublimated sulphur and char along its sides, as if it had been through a recent low temperature fire or failed industrial process: some event, Fat Antoyne said, with barely enough energy to boil a kettle. After that it had been stored in damp conditions. It was more work to move about than the first one. And if you put your hand underneath it — which he didn’t recommend anyone did that — it would be microwaved.
Liv Hula shivered.
‘Sometimes I hate it in here,’ she said.
Irene laughed darkly. ‘“As-yet-undetermined”,’ she said. ‘That cunt Toni Reno has let us in for it again.’
NINE
Emotional Signals Are Chemically Encoded in Tears
Last practitioner of a vanishing technique, with specialisms in diplomacy, military archaeology and project development, R.I. Gaines — known to younger colleagues as Rig — had made his name as a partly affiliated information professional during one of EMC’s many small wars. He believed that while the organisation was fuelled by science, its motor ran in the regime of the imagination. ‘Wrapped up in that metaphor,’ he often told his team — a consciously mongrelised group of policy interns, ex-entradistas and science academics comfortable along a broad spectrum of disciplines — ‘you’ll always find politics. Action is political, whether it intends to be or not.’
Some projects require only an electronic presence. Others plead for some more passionate input. Today Gaines was in-country on Panamax IV, where the local rep Alyssia Fignall had uncovered dozens of what at first sight seemed like abandoned cities. Microchemical analysis of selected hotspots, however, had convinced her they were less conurbations than what she loosely termed ‘spiritual engines’: factories of sacrifice which, a hundred thousand years before the arrival of the boys from Earth, had hummed and roared day and night for a millennium or more, to bring about change or, more likely, hold it off.
‘Close to the Tract,’ she said, ‘you find sites like these on every tenth planet. You can map the trauma front direct on to the astrophysics.’
They stood on a low hill, planed to an eerily flat surface about five and a half acres in extent, thick with dust despite the scouring summer winds, and covered with the rounded-off remains of architecture. There were pockets of vegetation here and there in the avenues between the ziggurats — clumps of small red flowers, groups of shade trees under which Alyssia’s people gathered each mealtime to rehearse their sense of excitement and optimism. They were discovering new things every day. A white tower of cloud built itself up in the blue sky above the mountains to the south; smoke rose from an adjacent hilltop which seemed to be part of some other excavation. In the end, Gaines thought, anything you can say about ritual sacrifice is just another act of appropriation. It reveals more about you than about history.
‘So what’s different here?’ he said.
Alyssia Fignall glanced away, smiling to herself. Then she said: ‘It worked. They moved the planet.’
Suddenly she was looking direct into Gaines’ eyes, deliberately seeking out his soul, making contact, her own eyes wide with awe. ‘Rig, everyone has been so wrong about this place. That’s why I called you! A hundred thousand years ago, using only sacrifice — mass strangulation, we think, of perhaps half the population — these people moved their planet
‘Possibly they had some regrets,’ Gaines suggested.
‘Not in the way I think you mean.’
They stared silently across the hilltop, then she added, ‘They were some sort of diapsid.’
‘Alyssia, this is a result.’
‘Thank you.’
‘What do you need?’
She laughed. ‘Funding.’
‘I can get you more people,’ he offered.
He received a dial-up from the Aleph project. Alyssia moved away a little out of politeness, her feet kicking up taupe dust with a high content of wood-ash and wind-ground bone. Her people were finding thick bands of the same substance in polar ice cores; there, it was glued together by fats.
She was still excited. That morning, aware she would be seeing Rig again after so many years, she had picked out a short sleeve knit sweater in red botany wool, fastened with a line of tiny fauxnacre buttons along one shoulder; pairing it with a flared calf-length skirt of faded green cotton twill. Her thin tan feet said she was in her forties, but the sunshine and the clothes celebrated only enthusiasm and youth. Gaines stared at her with a kind of absent pleasure, while spooky action at a distance filled the FTL pipe and a voice he recognised said:
‘About an hour ago we got uncontrolled period doubling then some kind of convulsion in the major lattices. It’s jumped to another stable state.’
‘Is it still asking for the policewoman?’
‘Like never before.’
‘Anything else?’
An embarrassed pause, then: ‘It wants to know everything about domestic cats. Should we help it with that?’
Gaines laughed out loud ‘Tell it what you like.’ So many years in, and they didn’t even know what the Aleph was. They could be programming a computer, they could be talking to a god. They weren’t even sure who they were working for at EMC. But Gaines had the complex professional philosophy of any good fixer. ‘Keep going,’ he ordered. ‘In a situation like this all the benefits are at the front end. Later we find a way out of the consequences.’ Most projects seem minor, irrelevant: big or small, cheap-and-cheerful or funded the planetary level, they always remain oblique to the real world. Others flower when you least expect it. They become your own. They lodge right in your heart.
‘Get me a K-ship,’ he said.
