Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Verity,” she chided herself. “You silly, silly girl.”

  Shaking her head, Auger returned her attention to the papers.

  “You knew what this was about,” she said, addressing Susan White’s imagined presence, which she pictured brooding like herself over the tableau of harmless documents. “You knew what this was about and you knew that it was worth someone murdering you for.”

  Auger reached out and examined the largest of the maps. It was the first time she had paid proper attention to it. Why had it ended up in the woman’s collection of papers, when others like it could be bought cheaply at almost any stationery shop? A similar map was almost certainly amongst the items White had already passed through the portal.

  Auger opened the map fully, laying it gently over the other documents without disturbing them. Covering half the bedspread was a political and geographical map of Europe, with lines marked on it in a dark-blue ink. Auger scratched gently at the lines with her fingernail, as Floyd had done, satisfying herself that they were not part of the original design. They formed a tilted “L” shape, with one arm reaching from Paris to Berlin and the other from Paris to Milan. Inked circles surrounded the three cities, and neat digits above the lines indicated—Auger was certain—the distances between them in kilometres. But beyond this observation, the meaning of the markings eluded her. What was so critical about the distances between these cities that this map had to be smuggled out of E2 at all costs, when that information was readily available in the archives back home?

  Auger folded the map, taking pains not to damage the thin paper upon which it was printed. As she returned it to its place amongst the other documents, her attention was drawn to a railway ticket. It was for an overnight sleeper train to Berlin, purchased not long before Susan White died, but dated for travel just after her death.

  Auger scanned the other documents looking for a German or Italian connection. It did not take her long to find an official-looking letter from a heavy-engineering concern located in a suburb of Berlin. The letter was printed on very good paper, with an impressive letterhead in scarlet ink. Her newly installed German crunched through the text with machinelike efficiency.

  The letter was in response to an earlier query—evidently part of some longer chain of correspondence—concerning the manufacture of a number of specialised items. From what Auger could gather, this contract involved the forging and machining of three large metal spheres at the Berlin works of Kaspar Metals. The letter also referred to the transportation and installation of these aluminium spheres in Berlin, Paris and Milan, together with a number of associated parts. The fact that the spheres were large and heavy was obvious from the attention that the letter placed on their delivery. They would require specialised arrangements and were much too heavy to be flown, even given the distances involved. The letter went on to stress the difficulty of delivering the objects without damage, according to the instructions of the “artist,” and that this would incur additional costs.

  Metal spheres. What, she wondered, was that all about?

  Auger searched through the other documents and pieces of paper, looking now for anything related to the German contract. Almost immediately she found a carefully executed sketch of a sphere hanging from a heavy-duty gantry or support cradle, attached to it by many delicate springs or wires. The sphere was marked as being more than three metres in diameter.

  Auger wished that she had access to the historical archives back in E1. Although they were not exhaustive, they would have given her some guidance as to whether the spherical objects were also part of the E1 historical timeline. Perhaps some ambitious artist had indeed commissioned the forging of such aluminium spheres, and Susan White had simply got the wrong end of an innocent stick. Auger couldn’t count on it, but a detail like that might just have survived the Forgetting.

  But even if that was the case, Auger reminded herself, this was E2, where the timeline had already swerved twenty years away from E1 chronology. The chances of an artist pursuing the same project in two very different histories were small indeed. The same thinking applied even if the spheres were part of some clandestine military or scientific project being conducted by the E2 locals. Even if it had a traceable analogue in E1, it was very unlikely that a similar initiative would have been undertaken in the altered Europe of E2. But not, she had to admit, unthinkable: if there was a good enough strategic reason for something, then it might crop up in both the E1 and E2 chronologies, despite the altered political landscape. What seemed less likely was that something would be developed in E2 and not E1, especially if that something depended on a scientific underpinning. The scientific worldview of E2 had barely advanced since 1939.

  There was, Auger realised, a more troubling possibility: the project Susan White had uncovered might not have anything to do with the locals at all.

  In which case, who was running it? And what were they planning to do? She didn’t have an answer yet, or even the beginnings of one, but she did have the sense that she was on the right track. She could almost feel Susan White’s ghost nodding in frustrated encouragement, desperately willing her to make the next—and incredibly obvious—deductive leap.

  But Auger couldn’t do that; not yet.

  She looked at her watch. It was nearly eleven, which gave her just over an hour to make it to the Métro tunnel before the juice was cut.

  Hastily, but with care, she gathered the documents, wrapped them in a sheet of writing paper from the desk and returned them to her handbag. She would have liked the time to look at all the other things in detail, but she didn’t have that luxury. And with Aveling’s warnings about the unreliability of the link, Auger was more than anxious to make a safe return to the other side. As much as this living memory of Paris entranced her, as much as she longed for all the time in the world to explore it, she did not want to become its prisoner.

  Auger pulled aside the filmy net curtains covering the window. Since she had returned to the hotel, it had started raining: a soft October rain that muffled the city’s sounds to a muted hiss of late-morning traffic. She stood there for a moment and watched the pedestrians below, scurrying along under dark umbrellas and glossy raincoats. It was impossible not to see them as living beings, with their own interior lives. Yet their very existence was still a kind of sham.

  Skellsgard had spoken of this world being like a photographic exposure, a snapshot of a moment in time that had, for reasons unclear, continued to evolve forward in time from that instant, while preserved in the armoured shell of the ALS. There was no guessing the means by which that snapshot had been taken, or whether anyone alive on the real Earth had felt the slightest hint that it was happening… the smallest interruption in their thoughts, the merest instant of collective déjà vu. Perhaps the event had gone completely unnoticed.

  But thereafter the two histories had diverged. The real counterparts of the people moving around in E2 had gone on to live out genuine flesh-and-blood lives in the historical timeline of the real E1. The snapshot could not have been taken later than May 1940, nor could it have been taken very much earlier than that, for events in E2 leading up to the Ardennes advance seemed more or less to follow the E1 timeline. The real world, E1, had shortly thereafter been plunged into a catastrophic war. Many of those who had been alive at the instant the snapshot was taken would certainly have died during that war, or during the miserable conflict-filled decades that followed. Even if they had somehow slipped through the historical cracks and avoided death by war, or famine, or political oppression, then many of them would have lived lives blighted and lessened by the brutal circumstances of those years.

  And yet, as grim as those lives might have been, as squalid and miserable and tragic, they had been played out according to the right script. It was the lives of their counterparts on E2 that had followed a deviant path. And almost everyone born on E2 since the timelines diverged would either not have existed at all on E1, or would have been very different people. In every sense they
were living on borrowed time. And not just “on” it, but “in” it.

  For a moment, a repugnant idea flashed through Auger’s mind. How much simpler would it be, how much neater, if these lives had never happened? If the snapshot had preserved only Paris and the rest of the world, but not the people in it. If it had been like one of those nineteenth-century photographs of the city, the exposure necessarily so long that the people blurred themselves out of existence, leaving only spectral traces.

  The thought made her shiver, but she could not quite erase it from her mind.

  Glancing at her watch, she gathered her coat and left the hotel room. As she teetered out through the lobby, still not quite steady on her heels, the concierge raised an eyebrow. But the telephone on his desk chose that moment to ring, and by the time he answered it he had forgotten all about the awkward American woman, and the hurry she seemed to be in.

  SEVENTEEN

  At the Métro station on rue Cardinal Lemoine, Auger bought a one-way ticket and entered the midday crush of passengers. People took lunch seriously in Paris, and thought nothing of crossing half the city to meet with a colleague, partner or lover in some well-regarded brasserie or restaurant. Auger could not be certain whether or not she had been tailed from the hotel on Emile Zola, but she took every advantage of the flood of travellers to make herself difficult to follow, jostling her way through the crowds and racing up and down stairs and escalators in an effort to shake off any pursuer. Even so, when she reached the underground platform, she slowed her progress and let the waiting train whisk away without her. The platform was not quite deserted once the train had left, but that would be too much to hope for. There were always people who seemed to have nothing better to do than loiter in Métro stations, oblivious to the passage of the trains and the urgent schedules of the other commuters. A young man in a checked jacket and flat cap was reading the racing news, a cigarette balanced on the edge of his lower lip. A plump but pretty young woman was attending to her make-up with the aid of a little brass mirror, her expression a pout of absolute concentration.

  Auger looked at her watch again, anxious to get the next part over with. But it was still a couple of minutes to noon, and the electricity in the rails would not yet have been turned off. She pressed her handbag closer to her, observing the slow drift of new passengers on to the platform. She had moved to the very limit of the platform, where the rails disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. At one minute to noon, she saw the lights of another train pick out the rails snaking out of the tunnel at the other end of the platform, and then the train arrived in a commotion of brakes and wheels. She looked at her watch again, willing the train to depart. The last thing she needed was for the train to get stuck in the tunnel between the station and her entry point.

  The train moved off. It was very nearly noon. A few more people arrived on the platform, and then the hand on her watch said it was time to go. There was no visible change in the condition of the rails, but she had no intention of touching them to test Aveling’s attentiveness. She would know soon enough if he had done his job.

  Auger made her move as quickly as she dared. In one fluid movement, she knelt on the edge of the platform, swung her legs over and then lowered herself on to the grimy concrete upon which the rails were laid. Her hands were already filthy with soot and oil, and doubtless her rump was covered in the same black dirt. It didn’t matter: if all went according to plan, she would never emerge from this tunnel again, and there would be no one to wonder why a smartly dressed young woman had allowed herself to get into such a state.

  Someone cried out. She looked back in time to see the man with the racing paper raise a hand towards her, the cigarette dropping from his lip, while the plump girl lowered her mirror to see what all the fuss was about. But by then Auger had slipped into the concealing darkness of the tunnel, keeping the wall to her left and the closest rail to her right. Once she had gone more than a few metres into the tunnel, she knew that no one would be able to see her. Unfortunately, she could also see very little ahead of her, and this time she didn’t have the brightness of the station to guide her. Moving as quickly as she could, Auger kept her back to the wall for support and walked crab-fashion into the blackness, trying not to think about the mice and rats that were undoubtedly scurrying near her feet, or the lethal voltage that might still be coursing through the rails. She had about a hundred metres to cover, and rather less than two minutes in which to do it.

  Something shone in the darkness ahead of her: a blood-red light, very dim, but moving. For a horrifying moment, she thought it was a train approaching her through the tunnel, even though any trains should have arrived from behind, not ahead of her. Then her sense of perspective shifted and she realised that the light was a torch being shone in her direction by someone further down the tunnel.

  “Hurry, Auger,” she heard a voice call out. “The juice has to come on again in thirty seconds, and the trains will be moving not long after that!”

  “Aveling?”

  “Keep moving,” he said in reply. “We really don’t have much time.”

  “I think a man saw me go into the tunnel.”

  “Don’t worry about him.”

  As she moved forward, the red light gradually grew brighter. Very faintly, she began to make out the dark outline of a figure crouched close to the wall. It seemed much further away than she had been expecting: voices carried very well down the tunnel.

  “Move, Auger,” he hissed.

  “I’m doing my best.”

  “Good. Don’t trip now, because the rails are electrified.”

  “You didn’t have to tell me that. If anything it’s even more likely to make me trip.”

  “You have the goods?”

  “Yes,” she said, clenching her teeth. “I have the goods.”

  As she picked her way forward, the figure with the torch gradually became clearer and, now that her eyes were becoming better adapted to the dark, she could make out a gap in the wall immediately next to him.

  “Hurry now. We’re picking up a current draw on the line.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “That trains are already running again. They won’t waste much time after an intermittent fault, not during the midday rush.”

  At last, Auger could see the outline of Aveling’s features. She sped up for the final dozen metres, grasping for the sanctuary of that dark gap in the wall.

  “I think I see a train entering Cardinal Lemoine,” Aveling warned.

  “I’m nearly there.”

  “Train’s moving again. Hurry up, Auger. I’m not standing here for much longer.”

  With little attempt to preserve her dignity, he pushed Auger through the crack in the wall, into the darkness beyond. The squeal of the approaching train grew louder, reverberating off the tunnel walls. “Help me with this door,” Aveling said. “We have to get it back into place.”

  He guided her hands on to the old wooden door and she felt it shift under the pressure they were applying. The door crunched back into place at the last moment, with the lights of the train shining through the narrowing gap.

  “That was close,” Aveling said.

  “Do you think anyone on the train saw us?”

  “No.”

  “What about the man on the platform?” She described him briefly.

  “Like I said, don’t worry about him. He’s a confidence trickster, spends all his days on that station snooping for victims. He won’t be reporting anything to the authorities.” He turned off the red torch, then immediately switched on a much brighter white one. Auger squinted against the sudden glare, recognising the cramped and filthy gullet of the access tunnel.

  “I repeat: you have the goods?”

  “Yes,” she said, wearily. “Like I already told you.”

  “Good. I was beginning to worry that you weren’t going to complete your mission. I’m glad to see you’ve decided to act sensibly. Give me the papers.”

  “They’re safe wit
h me.”

  “I said give them to me, Auger.” Before she could argue, he snatched her bag and flashed the torch on the bundle of documents within. “It doesn’t look like much, does it? Not for all the trouble you’ve gone to.” He pulled the papers out and returned the bag to her.

  She thought about Susan White’s likely suspicion that there was someone on the team who couldn’t be trusted. Maybe it was Aveling, maybe it wasn’t, but as long as Auger kept the papers in sight, she reckoned that no immediate harm could come to them. All she had to do was ensure that they made it back to Caliskan.

  “I don’t know what any of this is about, Aveling. Right now I’m not even sure I want to know. Can we just get this over with?”

  “You won’t be able to return just yet,” he said. “We’re still having some difficulties with the link.”

  Another train rumbled through the nearby tunnel, the vibration of its passage dislodging dust from the ceiling of the access shaft.

  “Due to the temporary problem you said would be fixed by now?”

  “It’s proving to be a little less temporary than we were hoping.” Aveling stopped and shone the torch ahead of them, aiming the beam along the gentle curve of the shaft.

  Auger saw his frown. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I just thought I heard something.”

  “Probably one of your own people at the portal end,” Auger suggested.

  Aveling unzipped his jacket and slid the papers snugly inside. “Come on. Let’s move on.”

  Auger couldn’t help noticing that he had slipped an automatic out of his jacket at the same time as he hid the papers. The locally made weapon gleamed an oily blue in the torchlight.