World Engine

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘I’m sorry if—’

  ‘Hurt my daughter, Malenfant, and I will throw you back in the freezer myself.’

  And she turned and walked away, to where the flyer was quietly descending.

  9

  The bird landed at the summit of the hill, beside the statues.

  Malenfant, startled by Mica’s anger, tried to shake off his dismay and concentrated on the flyer. He was basically an engineer stroke pilot; this was the first piece of technology in this new age he thought he might have a chance of understanding.

  It rested on a set of wheels, fat tyres, but Malenfant noticed pontoons tucked up against the hull, no doubt for the water landings that must be common in this soggy age. The craft, fat, a little ungainly, had a bulbous hull that looked like it was made of the kind of ceramic that seemed to be the default material of choice here. The propulsion was evidently by means of big turning blades – two sets, one front, one back, with a vertical-plane rotor on the tail for control – and supplemented by apparently highly efficient jets, mounted on pods that swivelled.

  After the machine had settled, a big hatch opened, stairs descended, and what looked like the sole passenger within started to move in the shadows of the cabin.

  The party approached the flyer.

  Up close, Malenfant saw that the big hull, replete with windows, had no sharp edges. And when the blades stopped rotating they flopped, limp as flags when the wind died. ‘Everything built for safety, evidently, as well as longevity,’ Malenfant muttered.

  Mica stood beside him. ‘You said something, Malenfant?’

  Bartholomew smiled. ‘He’s just comparing the flyer to the lethal machines that filled the skies in his day.’

  ‘One of which,’ Mica reminded him, ‘almost killed you, Malenfant.’

  ‘At least the machines we built back then went places.’

  ‘Well,’ a new voice boomed, ‘now you have arrived here. For better or worse. I am Prefect Morrel Jonas. Welcome to my century, Colonel Malenfant.’

  The flyer’s passenger, climbing down from the open hatch, was a big, heavy man of maybe forty, who wore a loose robe of pale grey that swept down almost to his sturdily booted feet. And, over what looked like a bald scalp above a round face, the man wore a kind of cap, or helmet, the same pale grey as the robe but of some stiffer material, with a peak and cheek- guards.

  The robe bore no insignia, but Malenfant got the distinct sense this was some kind of uniform. It seemed too precisely made, too carefully looked after, too clean, not to be. And he wondered how hard that cap would prove to be, if he tried to throw a punch.

  A cop, for sure.

  The Prefect held out his right hand. ‘This is how people introduced themselves in your day, isn’t it? We lost the habit of bodily contact with strangers during the Chaos plagues – a bit of history I looked up.’

  That made sense; Malenfant remembered Mica’s reluctance to touch him. But the Prefect, he realised, was studying him with blank chilly blue eyes. With a kind of cold calculation, a look Malenfant recognised from every sports ground and locker-room confrontation he’d ever had. There was a tough cookie in there.

  Without hesitation, Malenfant grasped the extended hand. Firmly. He nearly crushed the guy’s fingers.

  The hand was withdrawn with a quickly concealed look of shock. So people were still people, Malenfant told himself, keeping a straight face.

  Bartholomew intervened quickly. ‘Speaking as his medical support, I’d urge you to forgive Malenfant for that, Prefect Morrel. For now, at least. While he is working through a historically epic case of culture shock.’

  Morrel kept his eye contact with Malenfant. But he said slowly, ‘Thank you, Bartholomew. I will be – patient. But this is a different age, Malenfant. Truly. In ways you don’t seem to understand. Among anybody over ten years old, aggression is – obsolete.’

  ‘Obsolete,’ Malenfant said. ‘Sure it’s obsolete. So why, in this different age, have you Eloi put me in the care of a cop as soon as I wake up?’

  Morrel’s frown deepened further.

  Bartholomew seemed to listen to the air. ‘The translation software isn’t keeping up with some of that. “Cop”. Archaic slang for police. Not respectful, but not necessarily aggressive.’

  Morrel nodded. ‘And Eloi?’

  ‘One of his pop-culture references. From a tale of decadent far-future post-humans.’

  Morrel glared at Malenfant, who glared back.

  Mica stepped away with a deliberate smile of her own. ‘Well, on that note, who fancies a flight off this soggy island, and back home?’

  The group broke up.

  But as they moved towards the flyer, Morrel walked with Malenfant, and whispered, ‘We’ll talk more on the flyer. But just between us.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t ever call me an Eloi.’

  Malenfant just grinned.

  10

  Inside, the flyer was probably capable of carrying ten, at a pinch. Couches and big armchairs swivelled to face the windows, or you could look inwards, into a cabin like a cosy living room. There was air conditioning, and Malenfant admitted to himself it was a relief to get out of the sticky heat of this suddenly tropical England. The seats had no belts, Malenfant noticed now. He imagined that if there were any problem these smart couches would sprout harnesses, or maybe just embrace the passengers in a big soft cuddle, like protective mothers.

  The flyer rose smooth and silent.

  Shadows shifted as they climbed.

  Malenfant, glancing out of the window, saw a flooded London open up, scraps of higher ground and taller buildings protruding from what looked very much like an inland sea, even if a curving track of deeper blue looked to him like the bed of the drowned Thames. The survival of structures above the surface seemed almost random: some abandoned highway bridges and interchanges – no, he remembered, this was Britain: motorways, junctions. Rail lines on high old bridges, looking like Roman aqueducts topped by ribbons of rusty metal. Rows of wind turbines, motionless, their long blades akimbo, still as scarecrows. Malenfant did glimpse some relics of development that must date from after his own age, such as what looked like a monorail, a track riding high and graceful on spindly pylons whose feet were drowned. And big, narrow-waisted cylinders, cooling towers presumably, that sprouted from the hearts of abandoned districts that were themselves barely visible under the shallow water.

  Once they moved away from London, much of the higher ground of England was forested, Malenfant perceived, somewhat to his surprise. A thick blanket of trees, broken by clearings where neat little towns nestled, or where stood what might once have been power facilities – huge windmills, a couple of dams that looked like hydroelectric plants, anonymous white spheres that could have been fusion reactors out of some futuristic movie made circa 1969. He thought of Sleeper. He didn’t see much that looked like industry, to him. But then, if you had old stuff that never wore out, you didn’t need a lot of new stuff. The forest itself was variegated, mottled, with some exotic-looking species, especially by the watercourses. Had oak forest been the natural state of Britain in his day? If so there were a lot of invaders in this warmer age.

  In the end, his impressions blurred. He’d always thought of Britain as a small, crowded island. Crowded with people. Not any more, not here anyhow. Now England was forest, with a scattering of people.

  Further to the north he saw a different kind of structure. Tremendous towers, clad in white, with, near their tops, sideways shafts greatly extended. The shafts made the buildings look oddly like Christian crosses. Or, he thought, like the control tower at Space City in Fireball XL5, even if they didn’t rotate.

  As the flyer rose higher, Malenfant saw there were many of these towers, kilometres apart, standing proud over the countryside. Malenfant thought they gave the landscape the look of a military cemetery on some giants’ battlefield.

  Deirdra told him the towers were called Pylons.

  ‘Ah. Where the theatr
es are.’

  ‘And other stuff.’

  ‘It’s like this all over,’ Morrel murmured, almost in his ear.

  Malenfant turned. The Prefect, silently, had come to stand over him. Leaning slightly, his head thrust forward, he looked over Malenfant’s shoulder through the windows, his heavy face intent. The man wouldn’t leave him alone.

  ‘It won’t be long before we come down at Birmingham. This funny-looking craft is probably faster than you think, Colonel Malenfant. Birmingham was once one of the highest-altitude cities in the country. Which was why the government decanted there from London in 2110 . . .’

  ‘What do you want, Morrel?’

  A wide shark grin. ‘Well, we didn’t get to finish our conversation. What I want – specifically, right now? To make sure you fit into my orderly society, Malenfant. More generally? To keep things calm. That’s what Prefects are for. I am a Prefect. I volunteered. I’ll serve five years, ten years tops, if I pass my assessments. Then step down and—’

  ‘And find something else to volunteer for.’

  He shrugged. ‘That’s what we do, Malenfant. I’ve looked up your time, a little. It may not look it to you, but we do have a constitution, we have laws, we have policy-setting and law-making bodies. And yes, we have a police force, or the nearest analogy, in the Prefects, and a hierarchy of crime-prevention and detection agencies, and legal, disciplinary and crime-prevention services above them.

  ‘Things are different now. We live in what the economists of your day would probably have called a post-scarcity society. I looked that up too, see? A society where nobody is forced to work, let alone commit a crime, to stay alive. Beyond the imagination of your generation, I would think.’

  ‘Well, not quite,’ Deirdra said now. ‘His generation started it, Prefect.’

  Morrel ignored her. ‘But it’s all – voluntary. And now you, Malenfant, have dropped on us like a meteorite from space. You’ve been granted citizenship. You have full rights of access to a stipend and food-printer output, of course.’

  ‘A stipend?’ A word he had heard before.

  ‘Sure. You just have to apply, when you’re ready. There is a place for you here, in this society. As there is for everybody. For every refugee. That’s where our custom of generosity comes from, you see. From generations of migration.

  ‘But you don’t fit. You’re all rough edges, Malenfant. And my job is to help you . . . fit in.’

  Deirdra, naively missing the subtext of the conversation, put in, ‘Or he could always just go find an Answerer.’

  That was the first time Malenfant had heard the term. Both Morrel and Mica glared hard at Deirdra; looking dismayed, she shut up.

  Malenfant made a mental note. Like the Codex, maybe, this was something else he wasn’t supposed to know about yet.

  Morrel tried to talk to him some more, but Malenfant, tiring, his mood swinging, becoming bored and morose, grew taciturn.

  Dissatisfied, Morrel went away.

  The flight wore on.

  Malenfant napped.

  And dreamed of Emma.

  11

  Bartholomew woke him with a gentle nudge, and a cup of fruit juice.

  Deirdra came to stand beside him. ‘Look, Malenfant, we’re coming down already.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Over Birmingham. Home. You’ve only slept a few minutes.’

  He gazed out of the window. His attention was immediately snagged by a tremendous circle, a ridge of concrete or rock, maybe, set in a swathe of green. Like a grassed-over lunar crater. This was, judging from the Sun’s position, to the north-east of a tangle of roads, broken down and fragmented, that surrounded what looked like the city’s historic centre.

  Much of the city looked abandoned, desolate. Most of the activity he could see, in fact, was around the periphery of that ‘crater’.

  Deirdra saw him looking. ‘That’s where we live, Malenfant. Outside the cooling shaft.’

  ‘Is that what that is?’

  Mica called over, ‘Once, Birmingham hosted the largest data-processing centre in Britain, mostly underground. And so it needed the biggest cooling system. The flue goes down half a kilometre. Where it’s above ground the shaft was faced with brick, and other stuff. We use that now to build houses and workshops and stores.’

  He felt utterly incurious. He looked away.

  His morale seemed to have collapsed while he slept.

  He didn’t want to be here.

  Deirdra put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Maybe not. I dreamed about her.’

  ‘Emma.’

  ‘I thought I had her back. And I’m only here, now, because she summoned me out of the ice.’ He laughed hollowly. ‘You know, my father always said I was a weird kid, born on a weird date. That was a February too – 5 February, 1960. Because that was the very day CERN started up. The first big particle accelerator. There was a belief, you see – or a fear, a superstition – that particle accelerators would be so energetic that they would cause a catastrophe, rip a hole in spacetime – create a black hole, or cut a gateway to someplace else, another location in the manifold of all possible universes . . . I was one spooky kid, Dad would say. Just kidding. But now, with this strange stuff about Emma and her message . . . Maybe Dad was right.’ He forced himself to look at her. ‘What I heard, the message from Phobos, seems impossible.’

  Deirdra squeezed his shoulder. ‘Impossible or not, it’s still Emma.’

  ‘Voice recognition proves that much,’ Bartholomew murmured, not unkindly.

  ‘It’s Emma, and she’s asking for you. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?’

  Malenfant thought that over. He said, ‘Hell, yeah.’

  ‘Mild blasphemy intended as emphasis,’ Bartholomew murmured.

  Nobody else spoke.

  The flyer descended smoothly and quietly towards the transformed city.

  12

  Another morning came around. Whether he liked it or not.

  When he couldn’t cling to sleep any more, when he finally gave in and opened his eyes, the light in his room was bright. But—

  ‘Time.’

  The bangle on his bedside table lit up with a watch face. The furniture was home-made, of wood. The one other object on the table was the ancient Shit Cola can he had found in drowned London.

  It was only a little after six a.m.

  ‘Christ.’ He’d been here a few weeks already, and he still didn’t want to be. And here he was at the beginning of another long day in this damn place, before he could expect to lose himself in the oblivion of sleep again.

  He glared at the bangle with unreasonable resentment. It wasn’t its fault. It had taken some coaching from Bartholomew before he had been able to instruct the gadget, useful as it was, to give him information in text form that he could read, like the clock face, rather than speak to him in a tiny, creepy voice – or worse still feed data direct into his head, like when it translated for him. A telepathic alarm clock. Wonder of the age.

  The one thing the bangle wouldn’t talk to him about, not yet, was Emma’s story. And nor would anybody else, not for now – not even Deirdra, under, it seemed, strict instructions from Morrel. He had to be ‘acculturated’ before they hit him with all that complexity. Every day he raged about that, one way or another. Did him no damn good.

  Not so far.

  He twisted the bangle so he saw the calendar display. First of March. He knew they had popped him out of the coldsleep pod on 2 February, so here he was in his second month in the future.

  And that was how come it was getting light in the mornings already. Despite the global warming, the Earth’s rotation hadn’t changed. In high-latitude Britain, you still had months of long days in the summer, months of short winter days – when, even if light-deprived, you were still warm, steamy hot. Even on Christmas Day, he’d been told. Or Yule, as they referred to it now. It would take some getting used to.

  Another day in paradise. Ah, qui
t the self-pity, Malenfant. You know the routine.

  He rolled out of bed.

  He used his small bathroom, washed his face, pulled on a loose jumpsuit.

  When he walked back into the bedroom, there was a knock at the door.

  ‘Come on in, Bartholomew.’

  In came the android medic, wearing a similar jumpsuit, similarly barefoot, carrying a couple of rolled-up yoga mats. Bartholomew glanced around, at the rumpled bed, at Malenfant. He asked cautiously, ‘Everything OK today?’

  Malenfant growled, ‘You ask that every morning.’

  ‘I do not,’ Bartholomew protested. ‘I take care to adjust my wording daily.’

  ‘What is there not to be OK about?’

  ‘You might have developed some new post-coldsleep syndrome. You might have had a disturbed sleep, some nightmare maybe. You might not have slept at all if your mood—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘Or you might be in the middle of some new manifestation.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of your trauma. The aftermath of your separation from your world.’

  ‘Just do what you have to do.’

  Bartholomew eyed him, and unrolled the yoga mats on the floor.

  They got the nasty stuff out of the way first. A scan, which Bartholomew performed by passing his arm, fist clenched, over Malenfant’s body. An injection in the back. Pills to swallow which evidently contained some kind of miniaturised ongoing-treatment agents. Nanomeds. The same every day.

  Then they began the morning physio, gently as always, with stretching exercises that morphed into yoga poses. Malenfant meekly followed Bartholomew’s lead. The medic was always thoughtful about it; at least this routine was subtly different each day, to address different parts of Malenfant’s battered physique, to gradually increase the challenge – and to keep him interested.

  Soon it was press-ups, squat thrusts, running on the spot.

  Malenfant accepted there was a lot to fix. In addition to the hangover of his long coldsleep, he had knitting bones and strengthening muscles, so he had to build up his strength and flexibility and general stamina. And he had a lot of scar tissue to deal with. Inside and out.