Engine City Read Free Page B

Volkov’s heart sink. The stone crescendo that rose before his face was like some gigantic ship against whose bow history itself cleaved and fell back to slip along its flanks and leave a wake of churned millennia. And yet ultimately it was only an idea that kept it afloat and forging forward, a thought in millions of all-too-fragile skulls. Let them lose that thought, and in a year, the place would sink. Volkov had set himself the harder task of raising it, and at that, he felt weak.
    He heard and smelt Lydia behind him, and turned as she stepped up to the rail. She gazed hungrily at the city, transfixed.
    “Gods above,” she said, “it’s good to see it again.” She smiled at him wryly. “And good to see it hasn’t changed much.” Another, more considering, look at the city. “Except it’s higher.”
    “It’s impressive,” Volkov allowed.
    “And you want to change it.”
    Volkov jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the work being done behind them. “You’re the revolutionaries,” he said. “Bring in enough books and ideas, and the city will change itself. All I want to do is make sure it’s still there the next time you come back.”
    He grinned at her, controlling his features. His heart was making him shake inside. “If I believed in your people’s ideas of courtship, I would offer it for your hand. I would tell Esias that I could take this city and lay it at your feet.”
    Lydia, to his surprise, blushed and blinked. “That’s what Esias is afraid of,” she said.
    She stared away, as though weighing the city, and the suggestion.
    “Gregor offered more,” she added, “and he delivered it, too, but he didn’t want me after all. No, I’m not open to that kind of offer. Not after that.”
    “I see,” said Volkov. “I’ll just have to fall back on my fine physique and engaging personality.”
    Lydia laughed. “I can never tell if you’re joking or not.”
    “Neither can I,” said Volkov in a gloomy tone.
    She punched him lightly. “There you go again.”
    He turned to her, with a smile to cover his confusion, and even more to cover his calculation. He did not know how he felt, or what if anything his feelings meant. A few weeks earlier, his affair with Lydia’s mother, Faustina, had come to a mutually agreeable end. He got on best with women of his own apparent age, or older; preferably married, or otherwise unlikely to form a permanent—and from his point of view, all too temporary—attachment. He wasn’t in love with Lydia, or even infatuated with her. He didn’t think about her all the time. But whenever he saw her, he felt an electric jolt inside him, and he found it difficult to look away from her. It was embarrassing to find himself stealing glances like some besotted youth, but there it was.
    At the other end of the scale, almost balancing that, there was the knowledge that in terms of Nova Babylonian—and Trader—custom, they were potentially good partners. Marriage was a business, affairs an avowed diversion; issue, inheritance, and fortune the only serious matters, over which geneticists and astrologers and matchmakers kept themselves profitably occupied.
    In between, at the balance point, he and Lydia had developed a sort of tempestuous friendship, which every so often blew up in clashes in which his values and ideas appeared to her as a jaded cynicism, and her passionately held ethics to him seemed ancient prejudices, immaturely held. At the moment, their relationship was going through one of its calmer patches. He didn’t know whether a squall would have been better. More bracing, certainly; but there was no need to bring it on. It would come of itself soon enough.
    “Can we at least be friendly, for the moment?” She smiled back. “You may be sly, Grigory Andreievich, but I do like you. Sometimes.”

    The first skiff slid out of its slot in the rack and skimmed across the navigation pool and out of one of the ship’s side openings. It soared to an altitude of a couple of hundred meters and flew into the city, the other