Alastair Reynolds - Century Rain

“Begging your pardon, your honour: one child and one lying little shit. 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 glass 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 Périphérique? 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 Périphérique 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 Périphérique, 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 Périphérique 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 Périphérique 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 Périphérique 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-Elysées, 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.

“Verity Auger?” the woman asked.

“You know exactly who I am.”

The woman flashed a badge in Auger’s face, bright with foils and holographic inlays. Beneath the stars and stripes of the USNE, a picture of the woman’s head and upper body rotated through 360°. “Securities Board. I’m Agent Ringsted. My colleague is Agent Molinella. You’re to come with us.”

“I have another five days before the tribunal,” Auger said.

“You have another five minutes,” Ringsted said. “Is that enough time for you to get ready?”

“Wait,” Auger said, standing her ground. “My tribunal is a matter for Antiquities. I may have screwed up down there—that isn’t an admission, by the way—but even if I did, there’s no way it’s an issue for Securities. I thought your remit was protecting the interests of the entire community. Haven’t you got anything better to do than waste your time making my life even more difficult?”

“Have you heard that Transgressions is on your case?” Ringsted asked. “Word is they want your head. They say procedures are getting too lax. People think they can just waltz around down on Earth as it suits them, without considering the consequences.”

Molinella nodded in agreement. “Transgressions says that a criminal conviction and a robust punishment may be just the signal they need to send.”

“By ‘robust punishment,’ do you mean the kind that ends in the obituary columns?” Augur enquired caustically.

“You get the idea,” Ringsted said. “The point being, at this juncture you may prefer to deal with Securities rather than Transgressions.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be working for the same government?”

“Theoretically,” Ringsted allowed, as if it was a concept that had only just occurred to her.

“This is too surreal. What am I supposed to do?”

“You’re supposed to come with us,” Ringsted said. “We have a ship waiting.”

“One other thing,” Molinella said. “Bring the maps.”

The ship was a blunt, unmarked shuttle of businesslike design. It powered away from the docking port nearest to Auger’s home, cutting through local traffic on the kind of express trajectory that required high-level government authorisation. Soon they were moving through outlying precincts, skimming perilously close to the exclusion zone around Earth. They were obviously taking a short cut to the other side of Tanglewood, rather than going the longer, more fuel-efficient way around.

When Auger was alone—the agents sat up front with the crew, leaving her by herself in the passenger compartment—she took out the one map that she had brought along for the ride. She had stuffed it into her jacket, still rolled inside the tube she had put it in. Some contrary impulse had made her refuse to bring the others after being told to do so, but there was something about this particular map—the last to arrive in the hopper, and the only one that she had examined properly—that tugged at her curiosity. It had felt like a goad before, but now she began to wonder if it served some other function. She examined the map again, to make sure that she had not been mistaken the first time. But there it was: the same subdued colours, the same absence of the Périphérique, the same copyright date of 1959 and the same puzzling sense that something else was not as it should have been. She stared at the map, turning it this way and that, hoping that the thing that was troubling her would become apparent. In the calm of her study, she might have identified the detail after a few minutes’ patient examination. But as the shuttle veered and surged, her thoughts kept being derailed. She was at least as anxious to know where she was being taken as she was to solve the mystery of the map.