Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  They climbed the ladder back to the balcony level, Floyd leading. The building shook again, more of the ceiling coming loose. A gap as wide as a man had appeared in it, revealing severed wood and concrete, pipes and electrical wires. Motors roared overhead, revving and ebbing as the bulldozers surged back and forth. The cast-metal plinth of a lathe or a drill leaned precariously over the hole.

  “Move,” Auger hissed.

  They ran around the balcony until they reached the door into the stairwell. Floyd pushed on it, trying to coax it open. When it refused to yield, he leaned his entire bulk against it and pushed until his face was a mask of effort, but the door showed no sign of moving.

  “It’s stuck,” he said, gasping for breath.

  “It can’t be stuck,” Auger said. “We just came through it.”

  “It was stiff, though. The whole frame must have subsided. I can’t get it open.”

  “Why did you ever close it?”

  “I wanted to hear if anyone came after us. I figured they wouldn’t be able to get the door open without making a sound.”

  “I bet you’re regretting that particular bright idea now, aren’t you?”

  Floyd gave the door one last shove, but it was obvious that even their combined efforts would not be enough to get it open. “I can see you’re the kind of person who likes to say ‘I told you so,’ ” he said.

  “Only when people deserve it. Now what are we going to do?”

  “Find another way out of this building, that’s what.”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “Down the ladder again,” Floyd said. “Our only hope is that there may be doors at the other end of the room.”

  She looked at him dubiously. “And if there are, do you think we stand any more chance of getting them open?”

  “Until we’ve tried, we won’t know.”

  They hurried down to the floor, skirting around the sphere and the gas tank to reach the far end of the room. There were indeed doors there, twice as high as Floyd and wide enough to drive a truck through. The doors were obviously meant to slide back into the walls on either side, but when Floyd tried to part them, they remained as resolutely fixed as the door to the stairwell. Again he screwed up his face in determination and again the doors stayed put.

  “I think they must be locked from the other side,” he said, between heavy, panting breaths.

  “Then we’re really up shit creek without a paddle, aren’t we?”

  Floyd looked at her, somewhat stunned by her choice of words despite the desperateness of their situation. “Did you really just say that?”

  “I’m a little tense,” she said defensively.

  “Well,” Floyd said, “now that you mention it, a paddle would actually be quite useful. Or better still a crowbar.”

  “What?”

  “I think I can see a gap between these doors. If we could wedge something into it, we might be able to prise them open enough to squeeze through.”

  “Into another underground room?”

  “No—I think I can see daylight. Look around. There’s got to be something we can use.”

  There was another violent crash. With a drawn-out groan, the plinth and lathe finally slid through the hole in the ceiling, dragging several tons of masonry and metal with them. The mass of twisted metal hung above them, suspended by a few pipes and wires that had become wrapped around it.

  It was directly over the sphere.

  “That thing’s not going to stay up there much longer,” Auger said.

  “So let’s get out of here before it falls. You check the left side, I’ll check the right. Any piece of metal will do.”

  Auger started searching her side of the room, rummaging through the mess they had already created.

  “And be quick!” Floyd shouted.

  Auger’s hands fell on a piece of perforated metal framing. It was broken at one end, tapered to just the right shape to fit between the doors. “Wendell! I’ve got something.” She held the makeshift tool up for inspection.

  “Attagirl. That’ll do nicely.”

  She jogged back to Floyd as fast as her heels would allow and passed the piece of metal to him. He hefted it, like a hunter evaluating a new spear.

  “Hurry,” Auger said.

  He slipped the sharp end into the fine crack between the two doors and started levering, applying his full weight to the task. The huge doors creaked and groaned. Simultaneously, the room shook and the hanging lathe slipped down a good half-metre before jerking to a halt again, suspended even more improbably.

  “It’s working,” Floyd said. “I think it’s going—”

  Something gave a metallic crack and the doors sprang apart by a thumb’s width. A fan of dreary daylight sliced the room in two.

  “That’s a good start,” Auger said. “Now the rest.”

  “I’m working on it.” Floyd renewed his struggle, adjusting the position of his feet to optimise his bracing position. “But I’m not sure how long this thing is going to last. See if you can’t rustle up another one, in case this one buckles.”

  She stood rooted to the spot, desperate to slip through the crack.

  “Verity! Get searching!”

  Stumbling on her heels, she began to search the other side of the room. She felt her trousers rip against sharp metal and something cut into her knee. Tripping, she fell forward, her hand reaching out for support. Miraculously it closed around an iron bar.

  Picking herself up, barely registering the pain in her leg, she hefted the new prize. “Got something!”

  “Bring it here. I think this boy’s about to—”

  The fan of light widened. The gap in the door was now big enough to push a face through.

  Auger started making her way back to the double doors just as the room shook again, more violently than ever before. She halted in her tracks and looked up with a horrid sense of inevitability. The plinth and lathe eased through their flimsy restraints with a final squeal of freedom. Untethered, the equipment dropped through the air and landed on the upper surface of the sphere’s support harness, before sliding off and falling to one side with a deafening chime of metal on metal.

  The sphere rocked, but for a moment nothing more happened. Auger forced herself to move again, gripping the iron bar.

  Then she stopped and looked at the sphere again. There was a whisking, whipping sound as the guy line’s many constituent threads began to break, one by one. She only had an instant to register this before the entire line snapped, whiplashing against the harness with appalling force.

  The sphere dropped.

  It hit the floor and cracked wide open along its casting flaw like a piece of ripe fruit. Distorted now, not even approximately spherical, it still managed to roll, picking up momentum with each rotation.

  Auger followed its trajectory with horror: it was rolling towards the double doors, and Floyd. She opened her mouth to scream something—some useless warning, as if Floyd could possibly not have seen what was happening—but by then it was far, far too late. The mangled sphere trundled into the double doors, forcing them open and wedging itself in the gap. The metal emitted a horrible noise as it buckled. It almost sounded like a human scream, cut off with sickening swiftness.

  “No…” Auger breathed.

  Everything was suddenly very quiet. Even the demolition machines had stopped. She let go of the bar and heard it clatter to the ground in some distant corner of the universe. Auger slowed as she neared the doors, trying not to think about what she was going to find.

  Floyd was flat on the ground, lying perfectly still. His face was turned away from her, bright blood matting his scalp. His hat had rolled away into a corner.

  “No,” Auger said. “Don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead. You had no business being here. You didn’t have to get involved.”

  His body had fallen inside the doors, to one side of the sphere’s path, and it didn’t look as if it had rolled over any part of him. She took his head in her hands, very
gently, and turned it so that she could see his eyes. They were closed, as if he had fallen asleep. His mouth was slightly open and his chest was rising and falling, but with a worrying irregularity, as if each breath was a struggle.

  “Stay with me,” Auger said. “Don’t go dying on me, not now that we’ve come this far. Now that we’ve actually started to get somewhere. Now that I’ve actually started to like you.” She squeezed his head, her hands wet with his blood. “Are you listening to me, Wendell? Wake up, you sad excuse for a detective. Wake the fuck up and talk to me!”

  Laying his head gently on the floor, she stood, appraising the gap that the sphere had made in the doors. She could squeeze through it without difficulty, but there was no way she was going to leave Floyd to be buried alive. Sitting back on her haunches, she put an arm around his shoulders and slid another beneath his back and, groaning with the effort, she managed to arrange Floyd into a sitting position, balanced against the right-hand sliding door. His head lolled on to his chest, his eyes still closed.

  Leaving Floyd where he was, with his back to the door, she scrambled over the sphere and through the gap it had made as it wedged itself between the doors, catching an elbow on the edge of the door as she went through. Beyond, just as Floyd had predicted, was a sloping ramp leading up to ground level. The air swirled with the dust of collapsed buildings.

  She turned back to Floyd, reaching through the gap and grabbing him under the armpits. “Come on,” she said.

  Gritting her teeth with the effort, she managed to drag Floyd off the floor, so that he was halfway between a standing and a sitting position, but she could not lift him high enough to pull him through the gap. Exhausted, her arms feeling as if they were about to pop from their sockets, she fell back down on to the concrete of the ramp. Every instinct told her to get away now, before the machines caused the entire structure to cave in.

  She found some last gasp of strength. This time she managed to get his head and shoulders to the level of the gap. His shirt ripped on the edge of the ruined door as she felt his weight shifting towards her, and then suddenly he was falling through the gap, on to the concrete ramp. He landed in an undignified sprawl, arms and legs tangled, face squashed against the ground, his mouth open like a drunkard’s.

  Carefully rolling him over, she knelt beside him and took his face in her hands, gently smoothing his hair back from his cheeks and forehead.

  Floyd groaned and opened his eyes. He took a deep breath and wiped his tongue across his lips. “What did I do to deserve this?”

  “Thank God. You’re all right.”

  “All right? I’ve got a headache you could park the Hindenburg in.”

  “For a moment back there I thought you were dead.”

  “No such luck.”

  “Don’t say that, Wendell. I really meant it. I was worried sick.”

  He touched the back of his head and came away with a wet palm. “I guess I took a hit in there. Was it worth it?”

  Still cradling his head, she drew his face towards hers and lowered her own to meet his, and kissed him. He tasted of dust and dirt. But she held the kiss, and when she moved to pull away, Floyd gently stopped her.

  “It was worth it,” she said.

  “I guess it must have been.”

  She pulled away now, suddenly feeling awkward and silly. Floyd hadn’t rejected her, but she felt as if she had made a terrible misjudgement. She looked down and willed the ground to open up.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know—”

  Floyd raised a hand, tangling his fingers in her hair, and pulled her in again. “Don’t apologise,” he said.

  “I’ve made a fool of myself.”

  “No,” he said. “You haven’t. I think you’re wonderful. The only thing I can’t understand is what a nice girl like you would ever see in a crumpled old has-been like me.”

  “You’re not a has-been, Wendell. Crumpled, maybe. And you could lose a bit of weight. But you’re a good man who believes in finishing a job once you’ve started it. And you care enough about your friends to put your own life in danger trying to help them. This may come as a shock, but there aren’t that many people like you around.”

  “OK, but what about my good points?”

  “Don’t push your luck, soldier.” She eased back from him. “You think you can stand? We need to leave here before we get into any more trouble. I’m still worried about your head.”

  “I’ll survive,” Floyd said. “I’m a private detective. If I don’t get clouted on the head at least once a week, I’m not doing my job properly.”

  He got to his feet, wobbling a little, but able to make his way unassisted.

  “We’ll still need to get you checked out,” Auger said.

  “I’ll last until we’re back in Paris,” Floyd replied. He touched the back of his head again, but the bleeding had slowed. “Verity—there’s one thing I need to say.”

  “Go ahead, Wendell.”

  “Now that we’ve broken the ice a bit…”

  “Yes?”

  “From now on I’d really like it if you just called me Floyd.”

  “I will,” she said. “On one strict condition.”

  “Which is?”

  “You call me Auger. Back home, only my ex-husband calls me Verity.”

  “You sure about that, Auger?”

  “Damn sure, Floyd.” She helped Floyd up the gentle slope of the ramp, towards level ground. “You start seeing double, or feeling nauseous—I want to hear about it, all right?”

  “You’ll be the first to get the news. In the meantime, do you want to tell me what it is you figured out down there?”

  “I didn’t figure out anything.”

  “But when I rang the bell, it… rang a bell for you, didn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I thought for a minute…”

  “Thought what?” he prompted, as her voice trailed off.

  “The spheres are designed to ring. I’m pretty sure of that. The shape, and the specified accuracy of the machining, and the way they are meant to be suspended… everything points to the same conclusion. But they’re not intended to be rung like a bell. Nothing strikes them.”

  “Then what makes them ring?”

  “In my work,” Auger told him, “in the job I did before I got involved in this mess, we worked with a lot of sensitive equipment. I’m actually an archaeologist, for what it’s worth.”

  “Aren’t archaeologists supposed to be greying spinsters with half-moon glasses who never get to see daylight?”

  “Not the kind I hang out with,” Auger said. “We get our hands dirty.”

  “With this sensitive equipment?”

  “Thing is, in order to make it sensitive, we have to run a lot of it at very cold temperatures. We cool it down, really cold, so that it can work better.”

  “And when Altfeld mentioned cooling requirements—”

  “I started wondering if the spheres were part of some kind of detection apparatus, yes.” Auger bit her lip, focusing her thoughts. “And now I think I know what it is.”

  “So tell me,” Floyd said.

  “The spheres form a single machine, as wide as Europe, one part of it in Paris, one part somewhere in Berlin, another somewhere in Milan. But they’re really all part of the same instrument. It simply has to be that big for it to work.”

  “And this instrument is what, exactly?”

  “An antenna,” she said, “just like the one on a wireless. Only it isn’t radio waves it’s set up to detect. It’s gravity.”

  “And you figured all that out just by looking at that sphere?”

  “No. I’m good, but I’m not that good. We use tools for measuring gravity in my work as well. Sophisticated tools for peering through the ground, picking up the density changes caused by buried structures. Needless to say, we had to study the theory of how these things work when we were being schooled up, and that meant going right back to the early histor
y of gravity-wave detection.”

  “Maybe I don’t read the right newspapers,” Floyd said, “but I didn’t know there was a history of gravity-wave detection.”

  “There’s definitely a history,” Auger said, “but it isn’t your fault that you don’t know about it.”

  They had reached ground level. The ramp emerged in a narrow canyon formed by two long rows of partially demolished buildings, still standing to their first or second storeys. Pipes, conveyors, conduits and catwalks threaded the space over their heads.

  “Tell me what I need to know.”

  “This isn’t going to be easy for you to follow, Floyd.”

  “It’ll take my mind off my headache.”

  “Then I have to tell you about space-time. You ready for this?”

  “Hit me,” he said.

  “There’s an old saying amongst students of gravity: matter tells space-time how to bend; space-time tells matter how to move.”

  “It’s suddenly a lot clearer.”

  “The point is that everything we see is embedded in space-time. You can think of it as a kind of rubbery fluid, like half-set jelly. And since everything has a mass of some kind, everything distorts that fluid to one degree or another, stretching and compressing it. That distortion is what we experience as gravity. The Earth’s mass pulls space-time in around it, and the distortion in space-time around the Earth makes things fall towards the planet, or orbit around it if they have the right speed.”

  “Like Newton’s apple?”

  “You’re hanging in there, Floyd. That’s good. Now let’s move up a notch. The Sun pulls its own blanket of space-time around it, and that tells the Earth and all the other planets how to move around the Sun.”

  “And the Sun?”

  “Follows a path in space-time dictated by the gravitational distortion of the entire galaxy.”

  “And the galaxy? No, don’t answer that. I get the picture.”

  “You get half the picture,” Auger said. “What we’ve talked about so far is a permanent bending of space-time around a massive object. But there are other ways to bend space-time. Imagine two stars swinging around each other, like waltzers. You got that?”

  “Sure. I’m admiring the view as we speak.”