Century Rain Part 7

Peter spread his perfectly manicured hands. "I said I'd do what I can. Officially, I shouldn't even have

mentioned Ca.s.sandra to you."

"How did you find out?"

"Like I said, not all political contacts are necessarily a bad thing." He pulled out two stems and placed

them side by side on the table, like fallen soldiers. "If Caliskan offered you a deal, would you take it?"

"A deal? What sort of deal?"

"Just a thought, that's all." He pushed himself to his feet, smoothing out the creases in his suit. "I'd best

be going. It probably wasn't a good idea to come here in the first place."

"I suppose I should say thanks."

"Don't go breaking the habit of a lifetime."

"I'm sorry about Paula's birthday. I'll make it up to her. Tell her that, won't you? And give my love to

Andrew. Don't let them think I'm a bad mother."

"You're not a bad mother," Peter said. "You're not even a bad person. It's just that you've let that

planet...that city...Paris...take over your life, like some kind of possessive lover. You know, I think I could have handled things better if you'd actually had an affair."

"If I don't look after Paris, no one else will."

"Is that worth a marriage and the love of two children?" Peter held up his hand. "No, don't answer that.

Just think about it. It's too late for us."

The flat certainty of this rather surprised her. "You think so?"

"Of course. The fact that we're even able to have this conversation without throwing things around

proves that."

"I suppose you're right."

"But do think about your children," Peter said. "Go into that tribunal prepared to be humble and to tell

the truth, and say that you've made mistakes and you're sorry about them. Then I think you may have some hope of walking out of there."

"And of keeping my job?"

"I didn't promise miracles."

She stood up and took his hand, feeling it fit into her own with heartbreaking familiarity, as if they had been carved for each other.

"I'll do my best," Auger said. "There's too much work left for me to do. I'm not going to let those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds screw me over just to make a political point."

"That's the spirit," Peter said. "But remember what I said about humility?"

"I'll keep it in mind."

She waited until he was gone before taking the vase and all its dead flowers into the kitchen, where she tipped the flowers into the waste.

"Verity Auger?"

"Yes."

"Take the stand, please."

The preliminary hearing took place in a high vaulted chamber in a part of Antiquities she had never

visited before, but which had only involved a short escorted ride from her apartment. All around the room, vast photographic frescos cycled through scenes from pre-Nanocaust Earth.

"Let's begin," said the chairwoman, addressing Auger from a raised podium backdropped by the flag of the USNE. "It is the preliminary finding of this special disciplinary committee that your actions in Paris led to the death of the student Sebastian Nerval..."

Auger was the only one who did not turn to look at the boy, cradled in an upright recovery couch with a halo of delicate Slasher-manufactured machines still fussing around his skull, like so many attendant cherubim and seraphim.

"Objection," said Auger's Antiquities defence attorney, rustling papers on his desk. "The student is present in the room today."

"Your point being?" the chairwoman asked.

"My point being that he can hardly be said to have 'died' in any meaningful sense."

"The law makes no distinction between permanent and temporary death," the chairwoman replied, with the weary tone of someone who had already made this point on numerous occasions. "The boy only survived by virtue of the fact that Polity medicine was on hand. Since this cannot normally be counted upon, it will play no mitigating role in the hearing."

The defence attorney's round, molelike face was not in any way enhanced by the round, molelike spectacles he favoured. "But the simple fact of the matter is that he didn't die."

"Objection overruled," the chairwoman said. "And-if I might make a suggestion-you would be wise to familiarise yourself with the basic tenets of United States of Near Earth law before stepping into this room again."

The attorney rummaged through his papers, as if searching for the one half-forgotten clause that would prove him correct. Auger watched as the papers slid from the desk into his lap, spilling to the floor. He leaned forward to collect them, knocking his spectacles against the side of the desk.

The chairwoman ignored him, turning instead to the woman sitting to Auger's right. "Ca.s.sandra...that's the name you prefer to be known by, isn't it?"

"My preferred name is-" and she opened her mouth and emitted a complex, liquid trilling, a rapid sequence of notes and warbles. Genetic engineering had given all Polity citizens a sound-generating organ modelled on the avian syrinx, plus the necessary neural circuitry to generate and decode the sounds produced by that organ. Since it was now part of their genome, the Slashers would retain the capability for rapid communication even if they suffered another Forgetting or technological crash.

Ca.s.sandra smiled ruefully. "But I think Ca.s.sandra will do for now."

"Almost certainly," the chairwoman said, echoing the smile. "First of all, I'd like to thank you on behalf of Antiquities, and the wider authority of the USNE, for taking the time to return to Tanglewood, especially in these difficult circ.u.mstances."

"It's no hards.h.i.+p," Ca.s.sandra said.

Freed of any need to disguise herself, the woman was now unmistakably a citizen of the Federation of Polities. Her basic appearance was still the same: a small, una.s.suming girl with a lopsided fringe of dark hair and the pouting expression of someone accustomed to being told off. But now she was attended by a roving cloud of autonomous machines, their ceaseless movement blurring the territory of her body and mind. Like all Slashers, she was infested with countless droves of invisibly small machines: distant relatives of the microscopic furies that still ran amok on the surface of Earth. She wore plain white clothes of an austere cut, but the machines themselves formed a kind of s.h.i.+fting armour around her, a silver-tinged halo that glinted and sparkled at the edges. Doubtless, elements of her entourage had already detached themselves from the main cloud to improve her overview of the room and its occupants. It was entirely possible that some of those machines had even slipped into the bodies of those present, eavesdropping on thoughts.

"At the moment," the chairwoman said, "you are the only useful witness we have. Perhaps when the boy relearns language-"

"If," Ca.s.sandra corrected. "It's by no means guaranteed that our techniques will be able to reconstruct that kind of hard-wired neural function."

"Well, we'll see," the chairwoman said. "In the meantime we have you, and we have the film spools recovered from the crawler."

"And Verity's testimony," Ca.s.sandra said, fixing Auger with an expressionless stare from within her aura of twinkling machines. "You have that as well."

"We do. Unfortunately, it rather contradicts your own."

The girl blinked, then shrugged. "That's a pity."

"Yes," the chairwoman agreed. "Very much so. Auger argues that the Champs-Elysees site appeared to have been secured for human teams. Isn't that so?"

Auger said, "I believe you've read my statement, your honour."

The chairwoman glanced down at her notes. "a.n.a.lysis of the processed film reels shows that the excavated site had not been marked as safe for human visitors."

"The markings are often too faint to read," Auger said. "The excavators mark them with dye because transponders don't last, but the dyes don't last long either."

"Records confirm that the chamber had never been secured," the chairwoman repeated.

"Records are often out of date."

"That's hardly a good enough reason to go charging underground."

"With all due respect, no one charged anywhere. It was a cautious investigation that unfortunately ran into trouble."

"That's not what Ca.s.sandra says."

"No?" Auger tried to read something in the Slasher's expression, but failed. It was still difficult to make the mental adjustment to the fact that Ca.s.sandra was not a girl but a child-shaped adult, at least as clever and ambitious as Auger and probably more so.

"Ca.s.sandra says that the risks were apparent from the word go," the chairwoman said, "and that you took a calculated decision to ignore them. The in-cabin tapes-what we've managed to get from them- seem to back her up. You went down that hole, Auger, even knowing that you had two vulnerable children in your care."

"Begging your pardon, your honour: one child and one lying little s.h.i.+t. I should have been informed that we had a Slasher with us. The clouds knew, didn't they? They sniffed her out."

"Watch your step," the chairwoman warned. "This may only be a preliminary hearing, but I can still find you in contempt."

"Go ahead. It might save us all a bit of time." Auger leaned forward in the stand, resting tight fists on the wooden railing. For a while she had really tried to play it the way Peter had suggested, with honesty and humility. She could see him now, behind the narrow gla.s.s screen of the observation gallery, shaking his head and turning away from the proceedings.

"I'll pretend-on this one occasion-that I didn't hear that," the chairwoman said. "However, can I take it as read that you have not changed your position since submitting your written statement?"

"You can take it as read," Auger replied.

"Very well. We'll proceed with a full disciplinary hearing in five days from now. I need hardly remind you of the severity of this incident, Auger."

"No, ma'am. You need hardly remind me."

The chairwoman banged her gavel. "Hearing adjourned."

Auger folded the letter to her daughter, then popped the plastic seal on one of the in-bound cylinders. A paper map spilled out and flapped open. She slipped the letter into the empty cylinder, resealed it, then punched in the destination code for Peter's district of Tanglewood. The cylinder whisked away, speeding into the mind-boggling complexity of the pneumatic network. Depending on routing constraints, it stood a good chance of reaching Paula within a few hours. But when you were already more than week late with a birthday, Auger supposed, another few hours would make little practical difference, even to a nine-year-old.

Something caught her eye.

It was the map from the in-bound cylinder. She pressed it flat, puzzled by a missing detail. Where was the Peripherique? The ring-shaped motorway, with its elevated and underground sections, encircled Paris like a grey moat of prestressed concrete. Even with the city under ice, the Peripherique was still an important landmark. It was where Antiquities had established the high armoured barrier that served the dual purpose of holding back both ice and incursions by furies. Beyond the Peripherique, the mutant machines, in all their myriad forms, held absolute dominion. Field trips outside that boundary were even more hazardous than the one Auger had undertaken.

But there was no Peripherique on this map. At the time of the Nanocaust, the road had already been in place for more than a hundred years; rebuilt, realigned, widened and laid with guidance systems to cope with automated traffic, but still more or less recognisable, hemmed in by buildings and obstacles that prevented it from changing too radically. In the few physical maps that Auger had handled or examined, the Peripherique was always there: as much a part of the landscape of the city as the Seine or the many gardens and cemeteries.

So why wasn't it on this map?

With a mingled sense of curiosity and suspicion, she turned the map over and looked for details of when it had been printed. At the bottom of the map's card cover was a small copyright statement and the year 1959. The map had been printed more than a century before the end; even before the Peripherique had been finished. It was more than a little strange that there was no evidence at all of the motorway-not even any incomplete sections or ghostly indications of where they would be constructed-but perhaps the map had been out of date even when it was printed.

Why was someone sending her pointless facsimiles? If it was their intention to remind her of what had happened under the Champs-Elysees, she could think of less oblique ways of doing it.

Examining the map again, her eye picked out something else that wasn't quite right, another nagging detail that could not quite force itself into consciousness...but she refused to be drawn into someone else's tedious mind games. She folded the map and slipped it back into another tube, ready to be punched to a random destination.

"I don't need this," she muttered.

There was a knock at the door. Peter? But the knock was too sharp and businesslike to be his. She thought about ignoring the caller, but if it was someone from Antiquities they would, sooner or later, find a way into her home regardless. And if they had news of the tribunal, she would rather hear it now.

She yanked open the door. "What?"

There were two of them: a young man and a young woman. They were dressed in very dark, very formal business suits, offset with a flash of stiff white collar. They both had neat yellow hair gelled back in glistening rows, almost as if they were brother and sister. They gave off a taut energy, like a pair of highly compressed springs. They were dangerous and efficient and they wanted her to feel it.