“Help me remove the tray,” she said, guessing that there was going to be no attempt to recover the entire crawler.
They extracted the sample tray, carried it to the nearest rescue crawler and slid it into a vacant slot.
“Now the film reels,” Mancuso said.
Auger walked around the leaning vehicle, throwing latches and sliding out the heavy black cartridges, clipping them together as she went for ease of transport. Once all twelve of them had been assembled, including those from the cabin monitors, she handed the bulky package to Mancuso. “I want these shot straight to the lab,” she said.
“That’s the lot?” he asked.
“That’s the lot,” Auger replied. “Now can we deal with Cassandra?”
But when she looked back into the glow of the cabin, she saw no sign of the girl. “Cassandra?” she called, hoping that the channel to the crawler was still functioning.
“It’s OK,” the girl said. “I’m right behind you.”
Auger turned around to see Cassandra standing on the ice in the other child-sized environment suit.
“I told you to stay inside,” Auger said.
“It was time to leave,” Cassandra replied. She had, as far as Auger could tell, made an efficient and thorough job of donning her suit. Auger was impressed: it was difficult enough for an adult to put on an environment suit without assistance, let alone a child.
“Did you make sure—” Auger began.
“The suit is fine. I think it’s time we were leaving, don’t you? All this activity may have alerted the furies. We don’t want to be here when they arrive.”
Mancuso touched Auger’s shoulder with a power-amplified glove that could have crushed her in an eyeblink. “Girl’s right. Let’s get the hell out of Paris. Place always gives me the jitters.”
Auger peered through the ceiling porthole of the rescue crawler, willing the red and green lights of the dropship to burn through the clouds and hoping that the clouds themselves would not become even more agitated. There was something wrong with the clouds tonight. Their talk was normally a slow and serene form of communication, revealed by changes in their shape, colour and texturing. Vast circuitlike structures of hard-edged blue-grey would take form over many minutes; these forms would gradually stabilise and then slowly fade. Tens of minutes later, new patterns would begin to emerge from the doughy grey of unstructured cloud. Such movements were merely the basic units of an exchange that might take hours or days to complete.
But right now the clouds were bickering. The patterns formed and decayed at an accelerated rate, with lightning a kind of emphatic punctuation to the dialogue. The clouds fissioned and merged, as if renegotiating age-old treaties and alliances.
“They do this sometimes,” Cassandra said.
“I know,” Auger replied, “but not on my watch, and not right over the city I happen to be investigating.”
“Maybe it’s not just happening over Paris,” Cassandra mused.
“I hoped so, too. Unfortunately, I checked. There’s a major argument in the weather system centred right over northern France, and it started thickening up at about the time we arrived.”
“Coincidence.”
“Or not.”
Lightning illuminated the scene outside, picking out a linear obstacle course of blocks, ramps and deep, smooth-sided trenches, all cut from pale-blue ice with laser-precision. On either side of the Champs-Elysées, the collapsed forms of buildings were glazed with thin traceries of the same pastel ice, neatly stepped and edged where the Antiquities Board’s remote-controlled excavators had halted when they sensed fragile masonry, steel and glass. Auger thought about the controllers who directed those machines from orbit and felt a growing desire to be up there with them, away from the hazards of the ground.
“Hurry up,” she said, sotto voce. “This stopped being fun hours ago.”
“Was it really worth it, for a single newspaper?” Cassandra asked.
“Of course it was worth it. You know it was. Newspapers are amongst the most valuable Void Century artefacts we can ever hope to find. Especially late editions, updated in the last few hours before it all ended. You wouldn’t believe how few of those survived.”
Cassandra pushed aside the curtain of black hair that had a habit of falling over her left eye. “What does it matter if there are some details you still don’t know, if you can still make out the bigger picture?”
Movement caught Auger’s attention: through the ceiling porthole she saw a squadron of dropships lowering down through the clouds on spikes of thrust.
“It means we stand a chance of not making the same mistakes over again,” Auger said.
“Such as?” Cassandra asked.
“Screwing up the Earth, for instance. Thinking we can fix one technological mess by throwing yet more technology at it, when every attempt to do that already has just made things even worse.”
“Only a kind of superstitious fatalism would say that we shouldn’t keep trying,” Cassandra said, folding her arms across her chest. “Anyway, how could things possibly be any worse than they are now?”
“Use your imagination, kid,” Auger said. She felt the rescue crawler tremble as the thrust from the nearest dropship washed over it. Bright light played over the cabin, followed by a lurch as the recovery cradle grabbed hold of the rescue crawler. Then they were airborne, pulled into the sky as the dropship gained altitude. Through the side windows, Auger saw the Champs-Elysées fall away, the slumped buildings on either side soon hiding it from view. She made out the surrounding streets, unable to turn off the part of her brain that insisted on identifying them. Haussmann to the north, Marceau and Montaigne to the south.
“How could we make it worse?” Cassandra said. “People can’t live down there. Nothing can, not even bacteria. Surely that’s as bad as it gets.”
“We scored today,” Auger said. “We came back with a piece of the past—a window into history. But there’s a lot more down there we haven’t found yet. Gaps in our knowledge waiting to be filled. There’s so much we forgot, so many things we’ll never know unless we find the truth down there, preserved under the ice.”
“The Polity plans don’t threaten any of that.”
“Not on paper, no, but we all know that the plans are only a prelude. Clean up the furies and stabilise the climate, then we can begin the real work: terraforming.” She said the last word with exquisite distaste.
As the clouds thickened around the rescue crawler, Auger caught a brief glimpse of the sinuous track of the Seine, a flawless ribbon of white ice dotted here and there with cordoned dig sites. Further away, picked out in darkling glints from hovering airships, she made out the lower two-thirds of the Eiffel Tower, bent to one side like a man struggling against a gale.
“Is it such a crime to want to make the Earth liveable again?” Cassandra asked.
“In my book it is, because we can’t do it without erasing everything down there, severing every single thread back to the past. It’s like whitewashing the Mona Lisa when there’s a blank canvas next door.”
“So you advocate the terraforming of Venus instead?”
Auger felt close to tearing out her hair. “No, I don’t advocate that, either. It’s just that if I’m forced into making a choice…” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m having this conversation with you, of all people!”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Because you’re one of us, Cassandra—a good little Thresher, a good little citizen of the USNE. You’re even studying to work under Antiquities. I shouldn’t have to explain any of this stuff to you.”