High above it, dazzling lightning bolts lashed down repetitively against the protective force field dome, sizzling away to ground out along the top of the ancient valley. Clouds boiled along at a speed it had never seen before. They were thick and black, blotting out the sky as they unleashed monsoon-like downpours several times an hour. Rivulets formed across the force field, so heavy was the unnatural rain, carrying away the water to the saturated ground beyond. Whole tides of mud were slithering around the protected, sacrosanct valley.
The motile regarded the new weather intently, with one thought starting to dominate its mind: Nuclear Winter.
*
Paula Myo took the express from Paris direct to Wessex. She had a long wait in the CST planetary station there; the train to Huxley’s Haven only ran once a day. It was dark outside when she eventually went to platform 87B, which was situated in a small annexe on the end of the terminal. The train she found standing there was made up from four single-deck carriages being pulled by a steam engine that could have come straight out of a museum. She’d forgotten that the journey was on a historical throwback. On any other world such a contraption belching out thick black smoke from the coal it burned would have been prohibited under any number of anti-pollution laws; here on one of the Big15 nobody cared.
She climbed in to the first carriage and sat on one of the velvet bench seats. A couple of other people came in, and ignored her. Just before their scheduled departure time a guard walked down the carriage. He was dressed in a dark blue uniform that had bright silver buttons down the waistcoat, and a tall peaked cap with red piping.
‘Ticket, please, ma’am,’ he said politely.
She handed over the small pink hard copy the machine at the end of the platform had printed out for her. He produced a pair of clippers, and punched a small Z-shaped hole in the corner.
‘Won’t be long now,’ he said, and touched the peak of his cap.
The one hundred and fifty years of cynicism and cultural sophistication that formed her usual defensive shell wilted away. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said, and meant it. There was a great deal of comfort in a culture which was so honest and straightforward.
She held the ticket in her hand, looking at it as the steam engine tooted loudly and began to pull out of the station amid a cloud of pure white steam and clanking pistons. In theory, Huxley’s Haven represented home, though she felt no attachment of any kind to the planet and its people. Going back would seem to any observer (and she was sure Hogan would be keeping a virtual eye on her) as if she was running for cover, returning to the one place she would fit in.
There was the usual slow crawl across the planetary station yard. Other trains seemed to charge past, the lights from their carriage windows producing a smear of illumination. Signals were bright red or green points against the dark background, stretching away for miles like a thinly populated city. Every now and then the glaring front lights from a heavy goods train would flow across the silver rails, followed by the dark bulk of the wagons, eclipsing the rest of the yard.
Their gradual progress forwards took them into a pale amber light that washed across this section of the yard like strong moonlight. When she pressed her face against the window, Paula could see the gateways lined up ahead of them, over two thirds illuminated by the daylight of the worlds they led to. In front of them, the rails were full of trains. It was unnerving seeing how little distance there was between each one as the station traffic control arranged them in a continual sequence. Only the single track which the steam engine rolled along was empty ahead and behind. They curved round to face the gateway which glowed with a diffuse primrose light.
Paula experienced the usual tingle over her skin as they passed through the gateway’s pressure curtain. Then they were on another world and in full daylight, picking up speed across a rolling countryside that was made up from verdant chequer-board fields. Dense, neatly layered hedges were used to separate out the land, with the occasional drystone wall acting as a more substantial barrier. Native trees with reddish leaves were interspaced with terrestrial oak, ash, sycamore, and beech. All of them had been pollarded, their thick main trunks sprouting long vertical branches. The farms used the cut wood for fuel during the winter months, reducing dependence on fossil reserves. One of the benefits of using such simple mechanical technology was the low energy requirements; all of the planet’s electricity was easily supplied from hydro dams.
She could see farmhouses sitting amid the folds of land, big brick buildings with blue slate roofs nestled at the centre of Dutch barns and pig sties and stables and store sheds. Some of them had grain silos, tall clapboard structures painted dove-grey, which she knew were among the highest buildings on the whole planet. Single railway tracks branched off from the main line, snaking out to the silo yards through narrow cuttings and along embankments. The rails were rusty now, in early summer when the grains were still green in the fields; but later in the year when the harvest was gathered the grain wagons would make daily collections, the lines would be shiny again and the weeds coming up between the wooden sleepers would shrivel and die from the heat of the engines and blasts of steam. Paula had to admit, it looked every inch the bucolic idyll. She accepted now what she had so strongly rejected as a confused uprooted teenager, that the whole point of this society was that it didn’t change, that was what its people were designed for. The Human Structure Foundation had chosen a level of technology equal to the early twentieth century, prior to the electronic revolution; the kind of engineering and mechanics that was easily maintained. Nothing here needed computer diagnostics when it broke down; engineers could see what was wrong amid a machine’s cogs and cables. It was the same with information. There were no arrays, databases, or networks; offices of clerks and accountants kept books and files and rolodexes. The Foundation had designed people to work at specific jobs, and those jobs wouldn’t metamorphose with progress – there was no progress. Huxley’s Haven provided its inhabitants with the most secure stable society it was possible to have. She still couldn’t decide if the Foundation had been morally right to begin the whole project, but looking out at the trim neat fields and the picture-perfect farms, she had to admit now that it worked.
The train started to move through the outskirts of Fordsville, the capital. They were climbing up on a wide embankment now, giving her a view down on the streets of the outlying districts. Long rows of neat terraced houses stretched away in regular lines, their bricks all a rust red, with broad windows painted in every colour of the rainbow. Larger civic buildings stood high among them, sometimes as much as four or five storeys high, made from a dark grey stone. There were no churches of any kind, but then they didn’t have any religion here, this was a world where everyone knew they had been created by man, not God.
Even when the train moved through the centre of the city, the buildings were all the same uniform size; neat houses interspaced by the commercial buildings, and plenty of large parks to break up the urban sprawl. It was unlike other cities in the Commonwealth, where money and political power collected at the centre, and the architecture reflected that concentration. Here, equality reigned supreme.
Alphaway, the main station, was probably the biggest single structure in the city after the original Foundation clinic, with three long arched roofs of iron and glass, tall enough that the clouds of smoke from the steam engines dissipated upwards through the ridge vents. She walked down the platform and went out onto Richmond Square outside. The roads were busy with three-carriage electric trams riding down their rails in the central lanes; more numerous were buses, whose methane engines produced a high growl as they raced past; taxis and goods vans struggled for space among them. The only personal transport were the bicycles, which had two lanes to themselves on every street.
People on the pavement hurried past. Many of them gave Paula a surreptitious glance as they went, which she found amusing. It wasn’t fame that earned her the looks, nobody knew about her here, it was her plain business s
uit which marked her out as an offworlder. Contrary to Commonwealth comedians whose routine had everyone on the planet dressed in identical boiler suits, people were wearing just about every fashion the human race had ever come up with. The only thing they didn’t have was artificial fibre.
She crossed the square and went into the main tram station. There was no cybersphere for her e-butler to consult, no useful stored information about routes and stops. Instead, she had to stand in front of a big coloured map with the tram lines overlaid in primary colours, and work out for herself which one she needed.
Ten minutes later she was sitting in a tram heading out on its loop, which she hoped was going to take in the Earlsfield district. It was a very similar vehicle she’d used last time when she left Huxley’s Haven, though she couldn’t remember the route number. As they moved away from the centre the number of large shops and warehouses decreased, and the streets became more residential, with blocks of factories clumped together. Watching them go past, she was still convinced she had done the right thing by leaving all those decades ago. After an upbringing in the Commonwealth this world would have been too quiet.
Not for the first time, she reviewed her nuclear option: go for a rejuvenation and erase all her memories of life in the Commonwealth. Without that experience, the rich cultural contamination so beloved of her step-parents, she would be able to fit in here. It wasn’t something she could bring herself to do, not yet, anyway. There was still her first real case left to solve, though it had become inordinately difficult and complex now.
It had begun in 2243, a fortnight after Paula had passed her Directorate exams to qualify as a Senior Investigator. That was nine months after Bradley Johansson claimed he returned to the Commonwealth after travelling the Silfen paths, and set about founding the Guardians of Selfhood. As with any leader of a new political movement, especially one that waged armed conflict, he needed money to support his cause. As he no longer had direct access to the Halgarth family money, he hatched a simple plan to steal what he wanted.
On a warm April night, Johansson and four colleagues he’d recently liberated from the Starflyer broke into the California Technological Heritage museum. They ignored the marbled halls filled with giant aircraft and even larger spaceplanes, crept past the display cases full of twentieth-century computers, never even glanced at the first G5 PCglasses, avoided the original motility robots, the SD lasers, a stealth microsub, the prototype superconductor battery cell, and went straight for the dome at the heart of the buildings. Right at the centre was the wormhole generator which Ozzie Fernandez Isaacs and Nigel Sheldon had built and used to visit Mars. It had taken a lot of negotiation and political manoeuvring, but the museum had finally acquired the display rights.
When Johansson and his little team blew open the main door into the central dome, alarms went off and force fields came on. The duty guards responded swiftly, and had the dome surrounded in under a minute.
In order to prevent theft, the museum had laudably installed various force fields to isolate sections of the interior as soon as any form of criminal behaviour was detected. As the central dome contained what was arguably the most important, and therefore valuable, machine the human race had ever built, its force field enclosed it completely. When it came on, it trapped the intruders inside. So far, so good.
With over fifty armed guards outside the dome, the chief used the public address system to give those inside the time-honoured recital to throw down any weapons and come out with their hands up and their inserts deactivated. The chief then tried to switch off the force field. That was when they found that, on his way in, Johansson had burned through the force field generator’s main power cable, and the command links. The force field had come on automatically with the alarm, powered by its emergency back-up supply, but for now the guards couldn’t switch it off.
No real problem. They just had to wait five hours until the emergency back-up supply was exhausted. However, what no one in the museum had really thought through was the nature of the machine which the dome’s force field protected. Peering through the small gap provided by the wrecked door, the guards could see the intruders working frantically on the historical device inside. Johansson plugged in the niling d-sink his team had carried in with them, and slowly powered up the old wormhole generator. It might have been nearly two hundred years old, but its components were essentially solid state, and Nigel and Ozzie had built it with a large failsoft redundancy factor. After an hour, Johansson managed to open a wormhole. It didn’t reach over any real distance, not compared to its huge commercial descendants used by CST. That didn’t bother him, he didn’t want to go to Mars, or even the moon. All he wanted was to be two hundred and fifty miles away from the museum, in Las Vegas. To be precise, in the maximum security vault which served the eight largest casinos on Earth.
With the wormhole established inside the vault, the team walked through. Once again a barrage of alarms went off, triggered by their presence, and once again force fields came on around the outside, designed to confine any thief who had managed to get this far until the guards arrived. One of Johansson’s team used microthermal charges around the vault door to seal it from the inside. They then spent forty-nine minutes transferring bags full of banknotes back through the wormhole and into the museum. The casinos welcomed currency from every planet in the Commonwealth, and each bag contained notes to the value of five million Earth dollars. It took a team member on average one minute to grab a bag, take it through the wormhole, and go back for the next one.
Paula Myo arrived ninety minutes after the California Technological Heritage museum alarm was triggered. For the last week she had been working on the strange case of a niling d-sink stolen from a factory outside Portland. Nobody at the Serious Crimes Directorate could work out what anybody would want with such a thing; any company that had a requirement for one could afford one. Now they knew. She struggled through the hyped-up crowd of reporters, then had to get past the small army of LAPD and museum guards that had the criminals encircled. She pressed herself right up to the ruined door, which gave her a narrow awkward view into the dome where one side of the venerable wormhole generator was just visible. Squinting against the sheet of air hazed by the force field she could make out figures moving round.
Two weeks qualified, and she was actually watching the largest robbery in human history in progress.
Once the last bag was dropped into the dome chamber, Johansson moved the wormhole exit again, this time to an unknown destination. The team laboured for another fifty minutes taking the bags through. Then they left, and a simple software timer function powered down the wormhole genera-tor behind them.
Two hours later the force field shut down. Paula was among the first people into the dome, supervising the forensics team she’d called in. The Directorate wouldn’t give her the case, of course, she was still a first-lifer and way too junior (her abnormal heritage was never mentioned). Senior investigators with twenty years’ experience were brought in to head the case, and she was given a secondary role on the task force.
By morning the casinos had confirmed that one point one seven billion dollars had been taken. The media called it the Great Wormhole Heist. Senior Directorate officials assured their contacts that the investigators would soon be making arrests. It simply wasn’t possible to get rid of that much money unnoticed.
Johansson, though, had planned well. He spent his cash with the kind of people who asked no questions, and certainly didn’t make large unexplained deposits with banks. On Far Away the Guardians began to expand their numbers and activities, starting their campaign against the Starflyer in the form of its principal agents, the Research Institute; with the Halgarth family as occasional secondary targets.
The Directorate task force did manage to identify Johans-son’s DNA from samples of hair left in the dome. Though with a multitude of people walking through the museum every week, he was just one name in two and a half thousand confirmed samples. He did have a query on
his file, given the circumstances of his earlier disappearance from his family and job five years earlier. It was only when the acts of sabotage began on Far Away and the Guardians shotgunned the unisphere with their propaganda that the Directorate investigators finally put it all together. Catching Johansson was an altogether more difficult task. He only ever used front men to make his arms purchases, and Guardian members to release his propaganda messages. All the arrests they made were peripheral. They never got close to him.
Over the years, then decades, investigators left the task force or were reassigned, or simply retired from the Directorate. Paula moved up the hierarchy until she commanded the task force. Finally, however, even the task force was quietly dissolved and the Great Wormhole Heist case was down-graded. Even then, she kept the case active as part of the overall Guardians investigation. For over a hundred and thirty years she had not quit. She couldn’t.
The tram stopped at the end of Montagu High Street, and Paula stepped out. The town hadn’t changed, at least not from her vague first-life recollection of it. When she looked along the street with its small stores and hotels she could see it dipping down towards the cove at the bottom. There was a stone harbour on one side, she remembered, with fishing boats drawn up on the rocky bluff, and nets stretched out to dry. Flocks of big scarlet birds swirled overhead, tetragulls, whose oily feathers allowed them to swim almost as well as fish.
Mid-afternoon wasn’t a busy time for Montagu. Most people were at work, leaving the pavement sparsely populated, and the buses half-empty. The nearest shop had two large bay windows, displaying well dressed mannequins. There were no chains or franchises on Huxley’s Haven. Technically, the economy was market communism, with non-essential goods and products allowed to be supply led, which gave designers considerable liberty and innovation. The dresses on the mannequins were certainly attractive, as were the pashminas draped around them.