It’s done, he thought.
Now that the ship was on its way, now that he had assisted Clavain in his mission, he had finally done the one incontrovertibly good act of his life. It was not, he supposed, adequate atonement for all that he had done in the past, all the cruelties he had inflicted, all the kindnesses he had omitted. It was not even enough to expiate his failure to rescue the tormented grub before the Mademoiselle had beaten him to it. But it was better than nothing.
Anything was better than nothing.
The balcony extended from one black side of the building, bordered by only the lowest of walls. He walked to the very edge, the warm breeze—it was not unlike a constant animal exhalation—gaining in strength until it was not really a breeze at all. Down below, dizzying kilometres below, the city splayed out in tangled jetstreams of light, like the sky over his home town after one of the dogfights he remembered from his youth.
He had sworn that when he finally achieved atonement, when he finally found an act that could offset some of his sins, he would end his life. Better to end with the score not fully settled than risk committing some even worse deed in the future. The power to do bad was still in him, he knew; it lay buried deep, and it had not surfaced for many years, but it was still there, tight and coiled and waiting, like a hamadryad. The risk was too great.
He looked down, imagining how it would feel. In a moment it would be over save for the slow, elegant playing out of gravity and mass. He would have become no more than an exercise in ballistics. No more capacity for pain; no more hunger for redemption.
A woman’s voice cut across the night. “No, H!”
He did not look around, but remained poised on the edge. The mesmeric city still pulled him towards itself.
She crossed the balcony, her heels clicking. He felt her arm slip around his waist. Gently, lovingly, she pulled him back from the edge.
“No,” she whispered. “This is not how it ends. Not here, not now.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“There’s the getaway car,” said the swarthy little man, nodding at the solitary vehicle parked on the street.
Thorn observed the slumped shadow behind the car’s window. “The driver looks asleep.”
“He’s not.” But to be on the safe side, Thorn’s driver pulled up next to the other car. The two vehicles were identical in shape, conforming to the standard government-sponsored design. But the getaway car was older and drabber, the rain matt against irregular patches of repaired bodywork. His driver got out and trudged through puddles to the other car, rapping smartly on the window. The other driver wound down his window and the two of them spoke for a minute or so, Thorn’s driver reinforcing his points with many hand gestures and facial expressions. Then he came back and got in with Thorn, muttering under his breath. He released the handbrake and their own car eased away with a hiss of tyres.
“There aren’t any other vehicles parked on this street,” Thorn said. “It looks conspicuous, waiting there like that.”
“Would you rather there was no car, on a piss-poor night like this?”
“No. But just make sure the lazy sod has a good story in case Vuilleumier’s goons decide to have a nice little chat with him.”
“He’s got an explanation, don’t worry about that. Thinks his missis is cheating on him. See that residential apartment over there? He’s watching it in case she shows up when she’s supposed to be working nights.”
“Maybe he should wake up a bit, then.”
“I told him to look lively.” They sped around a corner. “Relax, Thorn. You’ve done this a hundred times, and we’ve run a dozen local area meetings in this part of Cuvier. The reason you have me work for you is so you don’t have to worry about details.”
“You’re right,” Thorn said. “I suppose it’s just the usual nerves.”
The man laughed at this. “You, nervous?”
“There’s a lot at stake. I don’t want to let them down. Not after we’ve come so far.”
“You won’t let them down, Thorn. They won’t let you. Don’t you realise it yet? They love you.” The man flicked a switch on the dashboard, making the windscreen wipers pump with renewed vigour. “Fucking terraformers, eh? Like we haven’t had enough rain lately. Still, it’s good for the planet, or so they say. Do you think the government is lying, by the way?”
“About what?” Thorn said.
“That weird thing in the sky.”
“Good evening,” Thorn said. He planted both hands on the podium and leaned forward. “Thank you for coming here tonight. I appreciate the risks that you have all taken. I promise you that it will be worth it.”
His followers were from all walks of Resurgam life except the very core of government. It was not that government workers did not sometimes attempt to join the movement, nor that they weren’t occasionally sincere. But it was too much of a security risk to allow them in. They were screened out long before they ever got near Thorn. Instead there were technicians, cooks and truck drivers, farmers, plumbers and teachers. Some of them were very old, and had adult memories of life in Chasm City before the Lorean had brought them to Resurgam. Others had been born since the Girardieau regime, and to them that period—barely less squalid than the present—was the “good old days,” as difficult as that was to believe. There were few like Thorn who had only childhood memories of the old world.
“Is it true, then?” a woman asked from the front row. “Tell us, Thorn, now. We’ve all heard the rumours. Put us out of our misery.”
He smiled, patient despite the woman’s lack of respect for his script. “What rumour would that be, exactly?”
She stood up, looking around before speaking. “That you’ve found them—the ships. The ones that are going to get us off this planet. And that you’ve found the starship too, and it’s going to take us back to Yellowstone.”
Thorn didn’t answer her directly. He looked over the heads of the audience and spoke to someone at the back. “Could I have the first picture, please?” Thorn stepped aside so that he did not block the projection thrown on to the chipped and stained rear wall of the room.
“This is a photograph taken exactly twenty days ago,” he said. “I won’t say where it was taken from just yet. But you can see for yourselves that this is Resurgam and that the picture must be quite recent—see how blue the sky is, how much vegetation there is in the foreground? You can tell that it’s low ground, where the terraforming programme’s been the most successful.”
The flat-format picture showed a view down into a narrow canyon or defile. Two sleek metallic objects were parked in the shadows between the rock walls, nose to nose.
“They’re shuttles,” Thorn said. “Large surface-to-orbit types, each with a capacity of around five hundred passengers. You can’t judge size very well from this view, but that small dark aperture there is a door. Next, please.”
The picture changed. Now Thorn himself stood beneath the hull of one of the shuttles, peering up at the formerly tiny-looking door.
“I climbed down the slope. I didn’t believe they were real myself until I got close. But there they are. So far as we can tell they are perfectly functional, as good as the day they came down.”
“Where are they from?” another man asked.
“The Lorean,” Thorn said.
“They’ve been down here all that time? I don’t believe it.”
Thorn shrugged. “They’re built to keep themselves in working order. Old tech, self-regenerating. Not like the new stuff we’ve all grown used to. These shuttles are relics from a time when things didn’t break down or wear out or become obsolescent. We have to remember that.”
“Have you been inside? The rumours say you’ve been inside, even got the shuttles to come alive.”
“Next.”
The picture showed Thorn, another man and a woman on the flight deck of the shuttle, all of them smiling into the camera, the instrumentation lit up behind them.
“It took a long time—many days—but we finally got the shuttle to talk to us. It wasn’t that it didn’t want to deal with us, simply that we’d forgotten all the protocols that its builders had assumed we’d know. But as you can see, the ship is at least nominally functional.”
“Can they fly?”
Thorn looked serious. “We don’t know for sure. We have no reason to assume that they can’t, but so far we’ve only scratched the surface of those diagnostic layers. We have people there now who are learning more by the day, but all we can say at the moment is that the shuttles should fly, given everything that we know about Belle Époque machinery.”
“How did you find them?” asked another woman.
Thorn lowered his eyes, marshalling his thoughts. “I have been looking for a way off this planet my entire life,” he said.