Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Oh, Floyd,” she breathed. “I wish it wasn’t happening like this. I wish there was some other way. But when she’s gone, I don’t want to spend a minute longer in this city than necessary. There’ll be too many sad memories, too many ghosts, and I don’t think I want to spend the rest of my life feeling haunted by them.”

  “You shouldn’t,” Floyd said. “And you’re right to make this move. Go to America. You’ll knock them out.”

  “Oh, I’m definitely going,” she said, “but I won’t be truly happy unless you come with me. Think about it, Floyd, will you? Think about it like you’ve never thought about anything in your life. It could be your chance as much as mine.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Floyd said. “Just don’t expect an answer before morning.”

  He thought about making love to her—he had been thinking about it since the moment he opened her letter. He had little doubt that she would let him, if he tried. He also had little doubt that what she most wanted from him was to be held close, until, emotionally and physically drained, she fell into a shallow and uneasy sleep. She muttered things in German that he didn’t understand, imprecations that sounded urgent but which might have meant nothing at all, and then gradually she fell silent.

  At three in the morning, he eased her into the bed, pulled the covers over her and walked out into the rain, leaving her alone in the room where she had grown up.

  SIX

  Auger found it uncomfortable to be alone in the same room as Thomas Caliskan, as if she had wandered into an obscene and sticky trap. He was a very thin man with a neatly groomed sweep of collar-length silver hair brushed back from an aristocratic forehead. He favoured costumes of silk and crushed velvet with long-tailed jackets, elaborate and carefully anachronistic. He wore owlish spectacles of blue-tinted glass. He often closed his eyes while speaking, as if attending to some very distant, very quiet melody, and when he moved his body, his head seemed momentarily reluctant to follow, as if anchored to a particular point in space and time.

  “Do you mind if I continue playing for a moment? I find a little finger exercise focuses the mind wonderfully.”

  “They say the same thing about execution.”

  “Have a seat, Verity.”

  Auger sat down. The chair was a chaise longue upholstered in dimpled green velvet. She suspected it was exactly as authentic and valuable as it appeared.

  In front of the chaise longue was a small coffee table, upon which rested a flat, square object with an elaborate printed design on it. While Caliskan resumed his playing, Auger picked up the object, recognising it as the cardboard—processed wood pulp—sleeve for a gramophone recording. There was something inside it. She tilted the sleeve, letting the recording slip into her fingers. It was a thin black disc made of a heavy plastic-like material, engraved on both sides with a complex spiral pattern.

  The disc was typical of millions that had been manufactured between the ends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was pressed from shellac, which she recalled was some kind of insect-derived resin. The spiral grooves contained encoded sounds designed to be read by a diamond-tipped stylus as the disc was spun at a few dozen rotations per minute. The playback caused a steady deterioration in the quality of the recording, as the stylus wore away the grooves and embedded tiny particles of grit in the disc itself. Even the original recording had been captured by a chain of analogue processes, each of which introduced random structure into the sound.

  But it was also a true analogue artefact, and therefore of immense historical value. A recording stored in the volatile memory array of a computer system could be erased or doctored in an eyeblink, and the evidence trail artfully concealed. A recording like the shellac disc could be destroyed, but it could not easily be altered. Forgery was equally difficult, due to the complex chemical make-up of the disc and its packaging. When such items survived to the present day, therefore, they were regarded as extremely reliable windows on the historical past, pre-Nanocaust, pre-Forgetting.

  Auger examined the label, reading that the disc contained music by the composer Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde. Auger knew very little about composers in general, and even less about Mahler in particular. All that she remembered was that he had died well before the beginning of her period of interest.

  Caliskan stopped playing and returned the viola and bow to their stand. He watched her studying the disc and asked, “Intrigued?”

  Auger put the delicate black disc back in its sleeve, and returned the sleeve to the table. “Is that what you were playing?”

  “No. That was a little Bach. The Sixth Brandenburg Concerto, for what it’s worth. Unlike the Mahler, neither the score nor the original recording were ever lost.”

  “This is an original recording,” Auger said, fingering the record sleeve. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but until very recently none were known to have survived. Now that we have that recording, someone somewhere is trying to reverse engineer Mahler’s original score. A hopeless enterprise, of course. We’ve more chance of unearthing an intact one.”

  She still had that prickly sense of being tested or led into a trap. “Wait. I’m missing something. You’re telling me that this piece of music was completely lost?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you’ve found an intact recording?”

  “Exactly so. It’s a cause for great celebration. The record you just examined was recovered from Paris only a matter of weeks ago.”

  “I don’t see how that can be,” Auger said, careful not to accuse him outright of lying. “Nothing bigger than a pinhead comes out of Paris without my knowing about it. I’d definitely have heard if something as significant as that had been unearthed. In fact, I’d probably be the one who found it.”

  “This is something you missed. Shall I tell you something else very interesting?”

  “Oh, why not.”

  “This is the original, not a copy. This is the actual artefact, exactly as it was recovered. No restorative work has taken place.”

  “That’s also highly unlikely. The disc might have survived three or four hundred years with relatively little damage, but not the packaging.”

  Caliskan had returned to his monstrously large desk. Sitting behind it, he looked like a little boy visiting his father’s office. He steepled his fingers, peering over them owlishly. “Go on. I’m listening.”

  “Paper doesn’t last, especially not the wood-pulp paper they were using in that era. Ironically, the cotton-pulp paper from much earlier lasts a lot better. Not as easy to bleach, but the alum they used in the wood-pulp process undergoes hydrolysis and produces sulphuric acid.”

  “Not good.”

  “That’s not all. There are metal tannins in the inks that also lead to deterioration. Not to mention airborne contaminants. Then the glues dry up. The labels come off and the sleeve begins to come apart at the seams. The dyes fade. Lacquer on the card turns brown and cracks off.” Auger picked up the sleeve and examined it again, certain she must have missed something. “With the right methods, you can correct a lot of that damage. But the resultant artefacts are still incredibly fragile—far too valuable to be handled like this. And this one definitely hasn’t been restored.”

  “As I just told you.”

  “All right. Then it must have spent three-hundred-odd years in a vacuum chamber, or some other preserving agent. Someone must have taken deliberate steps to keep it intact.”

  “No special measures were taken,” Caliskan insisted. “As I said, it’s exactly as we found it. Here’s another question: if you suspected the recording was a fake, how would you prove it?”

  “A recent fake?” Auger shrugged. “There are a lot of things I could try. Chemical analysis of the shellac, for one thing, but of course I wouldn’t want to touch it until we’d laser-scanned the grooves and got the whole thing on magnetic tape.”

  “Very sound methodology. What else?”

  “I’d run a radiocarbon analysis on the cellul
ose fibres in the paper.”

  Caliskan rubbed his nose speculatively. “Tricky, for an object suspected to be only three or four hundred years old.”

  “But doable. We’ve made some refinements in the calibration curves lately. And I wouldn’t be trying to date it exactly, just establish that it wasn’t recent.”

  “And your anticipated conclusions?”

  “I try not to anticipate conclusions, but I’d put good money on that artefact being a clever hoax, no matter how watertight its provenance.”

  “Well, you’d be right,” Caliskan said. “If you ran the usual tests, you’d conclude that the artefact must have been manufactured very recently.”

  Auger felt a curious sense of deflation, as if she had been excited about something without quite realising it. “Is there a point to this, sir?”

  “The point is, it still sounds like Mahler to me.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Auger said.

  “Do you miss music?”

  “You can’t miss what you’ve never known, sir.”

  “You’ve never known rain, either. Not real rain, falling from a real sky.”

  “That’s different,” she said, needled that he knew so much about her. “Sir, do you mind if I ask what this is all about? What are you doing here, so far from Antiquities? What business do you have dragging me halfway across Tanglewood?”

  “Careful, Verity.”

  “I have a right to know.”

  “You have no right to know anything. However, since I’m feeling generous… I take it you were told about the Contingencies Board?”

  “Yes. I also know there’s no such thing.”

  “There is,” Caliskan said. “And I should know—I happen to run it.”

  “No, sir,” she said. “You run Antiquities.”

  “That, too. But my sideways promotion into Antiquities was only ever a matter of expediency. Two years ago, something dropped into our laps. A find…” He paused before correcting himself. “Two finds, if you like—both of staggering strategic value. A pair of linked discoveries that have the potential to change our entire relationship with the Polities. Discoveries that could, in fact, alter our entire relationship with reality.”

  “I don’t like Slashers,” Auger said. “Especially after what happened in Paris.”

  “Don’t you think we should let bygones be bygones?”

  “Easy for you to say, sir. You weren’t touched by Amusica. You didn’t have that taken from you.”

  “No,” Caliskan said. “The Amusica virus didn’t touch me, just as it didn’t touch one person in a thousand. But I lost something rather dearer to me than the mere perception of music.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I lost a brother to Slashers,” he said, “in the final stages of the Phobos offensive, when we were trying to retake the Moon. If anyone has a right to hate them, I do.”

  She didn’t know that Caliskan had even had a brother, let alone that he had died in the last war. “Do you hate them, sir?”

  “No. I treat them as what they are: a commodity to be exploited, as and when it suits us. But hatred? No.”

  She decided it might be time to listen. “And the connection with Antiquities?”

  “A very profound one. As the nature of the second discovery became clear, we realised that we needed to work with Antiquities on a more fundamental level. The simplest solution was to replace DeForrest with myself, so that I had an absolute overview of all Earth-based activities.”

  “I always said it was a political appointment.”

  “But not in the way you meant it.” His tinted spectacles caught the light, like two little windows into clear blue sky. “Now I want to ask you about the maps.”

  She prickled, realising that she had been under surveillance all along. She should have known they would keep their eye on her. “Were you responsible for sending them? Were the maps some pointless test, like the Mahler recording?”

  This seemed to amuse him. “They warned me about you.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “That you’d speak your mind. I already knew from personal experience that you have little respect for authority.” His tone softened. “They also told me you have a good eye for detail. Now tell me what you made of the maps.”

  A small inner voice told her that more depended on her answers than was immediately apparent. She felt her voice catching in her throat, her usual fluency deserting her. “I only looked at one, and there was something about it that didn’t make sense.”

  “Continue,” Caliskan said.

  “According to the copyright information, the map was printed over a century before the Nanocaust, yet it was in excellent condition—just like the Mahler recording.”

  “Did the period of the map strike you as significant in any way?”

  “No,” she said. “Only in so far as it just about falls within my frame of interest.”

  “Only just?”

  Auger nodded. “Yes. I’m pretty good on Paris in the Void Century, up to twenty seventy-seven. Things get a bit foggier if you go back to nineteen fifty-nine. It’s not that I don’t know anything about that period, just that I’m much less familiar with it than I am with the later decades.”

  Caliskan pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Let’s say I wanted to talk to someone who was an avowed expert on precisely that period. Given your network of academic contacts, who would you suggest?”

  Auger thought for a moment. “White,” she said. “Susan White. I’m sure you’re familiar with her work. She authored that report on the EuroDisney excavation last year.”

  “Know her well, do you?”

  “Not especially,” Auger said. “We’ve exchanged a few messages and had the odd conversation at academic conferences. I may have refereed one of her papers; she may have refereed one of mine.”

  “You consider her a rival, don’t you?”

  “We’re both fighting for the same research budget. It doesn’t mean I’d scratch her eyes out.” Sensing that her usefulness to Caliskan was coming to an end, she said, “Look, I’m sure I could put you in touch with her.”

  “Actually, we’ve already contacted her.”

  Auger shrugged, her point made. “Well, then, what do you need me for?”

  “There’s a problem with White. That’s why we’ve come to you.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I can’t tell you, I’m afraid.” He clapped his hands together and showed her the palms. “That’s a matter for the other candidate. Don’t feel bad about it, Auger: you were always our second choice, but as a second choice you came very highly recommended.” Caliskan dipped his head towards his desk, picked up a massive black pen and began to make an entry of some kind in a journal, the nib scratching against high-quality paper.

  “And that’s it?”

  He looked up momentarily from his writing. “Were you expecting something else?”

  “I thought…” Auger stopped.

  “You thought what?”

  “I failed, didn’t I? I didn’t get whatever it was you wanted me to get.”

  Caliskan’s pen halted its scratching. “I’m sorry?”

  “There was something in the map I was supposed to see.” Committed now, she felt a heady rush of certainty as the elusive detail she’d been missing clicked into place. “Well, I did see it. I just didn’t know what to make of it.”

  Caliskan returned the pen to its inkwell. “Continue.”

  “The map doesn’t make any sense, even for one printed in nineteen fifty-nine. It’s more like a map of Paris from the twenties or thirties, masquerading as one from thirty years later.”

  “In what way?”

  “The street names. There’s no Roosevelt; no Charles de Gaulle; no Churchill. It’s as if the Second World War never took place.”

  Caliskan closed his journal and slid it to one side. “I’m very glad to hear you say that,” he said. “I was beginning to thi
nk that perhaps you weren’t the right woman for the job after all.”

  “What job?” Auger asked.

  From a desk drawer Caliskan produced a ticket, embossed with the Art Deco flying horse of Pegasus Intersolar. “I need you to go to Mars for me,” he said. “Some property has fallen into the wrong hands and we’d rather like to have it back.”

  The name of the ship was the Twentieth Century Limited. Auger glimpsed bits of it—never the whole thing—as she was being processed aboard, led from one pressurised embarkation point to the next. It was a huge vessel by Thresher standards, six or seven hundred metres long, but the liner was making its run to Mars at much less than normal capacity. With the increase in tensions across the system, people had cut back on unnecessary travel. So far the hostilities had been confined to dissenting elements amongst the Slashers, but two USNE ships had already been caught in the crossfire, resulting in the loss of civilian lives. Inessential outposts had been mothballed and a number of intersolar transit concerns had declared bankruptcy.

  When she had finished her drink in the observation lounge—watching Earth and Tanglewood recede—she checked the local time and made her way back to her cabin. She had opened the door and was moving to flick on the light when she realised that the light was already on and the cabin occupied. Auger flinched—for a moment she thought she had opened the wrong door—but then recognised her luggage and coat on the end of the bed.

  It was her room, and the two people sitting on the edge of the bed were Ringsted and Molinella, the Securities Board agents she had already met in Tanglewood.

  “Verity Auger?” Ringsted asked.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Of course it’s me.”

  “Check her out,” Ringsted said.

  Molinella stood up and pulled out something that looked like a pen. Before Auger could react, he had expertly pinned her against the door and was holding one of her eyes open and aiming the end of the pen into it. Intense blue-green light zapped her retina and sparked painfully across her brain.