“The thing is,” Tunguska said, “I was rather hoping you’d come with us. There’s also the small matter of you now being Cassandra’s custodian, and I would like nothing better than for her to return to Polity space.”
Floyd leaned over, straining against his harness. “She’s keeping that appointment, Tunguska.”
“Floyd…” Auger said.
“Start your limp home,” Floyd told Tunguska, “but be prepared to pick up this shuttle at the last minute. As soon as Auger’s dropped me off, she’ll be on her way back to you immediately.”
“Telemetry suggests you have sufficient fuel,” Tunguska said guardedly. “If you begin your return journey practically as soon as you land. If you delay, there are no guarantees. I hope I make myself clear.”
“In Technicolor,” Floyd said.
It was a strip of vacant ground between two abandoned churches, somewhere south of the Longchamp Hippodrome. If anyone had seen the shuttle lower down through the fog, screaming out of the night on vertical thrust, they had elected not to stay around for the end of the performance. Perhaps a few vagrants, drunkards or gypsies had seen it arrive… before scratching their heads and deciding that this was really not the kind of thing they needed to be involved in, especially given the city authority’s usual attitude to people poking their noses where they weren’t welcome. Whatever it was, they would have concluded, it was very unlikely to be there in the morning.
Now the ship sat on its lowered undercarriage, gleaming in reflected lamplight like a chromed egg, the fog swirling around its hot exhaust ports in curious little eddies, while the ship ticked and cooled like an old oven. The flying-horse logo of Pegasus Intersolar seemed to strain towards the sky, anxious not to spend a minute longer on the ground than necessary.
Floyd and Auger stood under the ship, at the base of its lowered access ramp.
“Did you remember the strawberries?” Auger asked.
Floyd held up the little bag. “As if I’d forget.”
“You never did tell me who they were for. Or the UR you persuaded Tunguska to give you.”
Floyd fingered the little glass vial in his pocket. It contained a harmless-looking silvery-grey fluid, tasteless and odourless. But slipped into the right person’s diet, it would infect their body with a billion tireless machines, which would identify and cure almost any illness known to Slasher science. It was bottled immortality.
Well, not quite. Tunguska had quailed at the thought of giving him the kind of full-strength UR that would keep someone alive for ever. At the time he had handed over the gift, they were, after all, still trying to prevent someone else from introducing a plague of tiny machines into E2. The UR would heal someone of any illnesses they had at the moment of ingestion, and the tiny machines would endure long enough to steer them to full health and through a period of grace thereafter. But then they would quietly disassemble, flushing themselves from the person’s body as so much microscopic metallic dust. That person might go on to live for many more years, but by the same token they might fall ill of some other complaint a month later. If they did, the machines would not be around to save them a second time.
So it wasn’t immortality. But from where he was standing, it was a lot better than nothing.
He took his hand out of his pocket, leaving the vial where it was. “You have to go now, Auger.”
“What if I said I was staying?”
He smiled. She was putting on a brave face, but deep down he knew she had made her mind up. He just needed to make her feel better about it.
“You have a life back home.”
“This can be my home.”
“You know it can’t. Not now; not ever. It’s a nice dream, Auger. It was a nice vacation. But that’s all it was.”
She pulled him closer and kissed him. Floyd kissed her back, not letting her pull away, embracing her there in the fog as if by force of will he could hold back time, as if time itself might make a compassionate exception in their case.
Then, gently, he pulled away from her. She was crying. He wiped her tears away with his sleeve. “Don’t cry.”
“I love you, Floyd.”
“I love you too, Auger. But that doesn’t change anything.”
“I can’t just leave you like this.”
“You have no choice.”
She looked back at the waiting ship. He knew what she was thinking—how every second now counted against her escaping from the ALS. “You’re a good man, Floyd. I will see you again. I promise you that. We’ll find another way in, another way back to Paris.”
“Maybe there is no other way.”
“But I won’t stop looking for one. Not just for you, but for the other agents stuck here—the people you and I have never even met. They’re still out there, Floyd: still somewhere in the world, in America or Africa, unaware that there is no way home. Maybe some of them got enough of a warning to start their journeys back to Paris… but they won’t have got here yet. Some of them won’t arrive for weeks or months. When they do, they’ll make their way to Cardinal Lemoine, or Susan’s apartment… anywhere they think they might find an answer. They’ll be confused and scared, Floyd. They’ll need a friend, someone who can tell them what happened. They’ll need someone who cares, someone who can give them hope. Someone who’ll tell them we’re coming back, no matter how difficult it is, no matter how long it takes.” She pulled him closer, but it was just a hug this time. It was past the time for kisses.
“You should go,” he said at last.
“I know.” She let go of him and took one step on to the ramp. “I meant what I said, about not regretting a minute of this.”
“Not even the dirt, and the bruises, and the part where you got shot?”
“Not a damned minute.”
Floyd lifted a finger to his brow, in salute. “Good. That’s exactly how I feel. Now please—would you get the hell off my planet?”
She nodded, saying nothing more, and walked back up the ramp, keeping her face turned to him. Floyd took a step back, his eyes welling with tears now, not wanting her to see them. Not because of some stupid male pride in not crying, but because he didn’t want to make this any harder on the two of them than it already was.
“Floyd?”
“Yes?”
“I want you to remember me. Whenever you walk these streets… know that I’ll also be walking them. It may not be the same Paris, but—”
“It’s still Paris.”
“And we’ll always have it,” Auger said.
She stepped into the ship. He saw her face disappear, then her body, then her legs.
Then the ramp lifted up.
Floyd stepped back. The ship growled, spat fire and then slowly clawed its way back into the sky.
He stood there for many minutes, like a man who had lost his way in the fog. It was only when he heard a distant rumble of thunder that he turned around and began to make his way back to the city he knew; the city he felt some tenuous claim on.
Somewhere far above him, Auger was on her way home.
Tunguska had cleared a large area of wall and assigned it to display a visual feed—suitably doctored to bring out detail and colour—of the closing wound in the ALS. They were through it now and back into empty space, but the last hour of the escape had still been as anxious as any Auger could remember. The wound’s rate of closure had surged and decelerated with savage unpredictability, mocking any attempts to predict its future progress.
“Things might actually have been worse than I feared,” Tunguska said, his voice as slow and unperturbed as ever. “It might not just have been a question of our being trapped inside the sealed shell of the ALS. We don’t know what will happen when that wound closes itself.”