And so on. Pirius and Torec listened patiently to all this, for Nilis in his blundering way seemed to appreciate having someone to talk to. But it was hard to be sympathetic. To Pirius Red the bureaucratic problems of working at the higher levels of the Interim Coalition of Governance were somewhat esoteric.
On the day of the meeting, to their dismay, Nilis suddenly decided to take both ensigns with him.
Before they set off, Nilis insisted on checking over their uniforms. It did Pirius no good to point out that the smart uniforms took care of themselves better than he or Torec ever could; Nilis nervously examined every seam, every centimeter of beading.
“Anyway,” said Pirius, “I don’t see what we can add to a meeting with a Minister.”
“Oh, you’re my secret weapon,” Nilis said, smiling edgily. “You are unruly defiance made flesh! Even when tangling with the Coalition, you must never underestimate the power of psychology, Ensign.”
Nilis insisted that they were going to walk to the Ministry building — walk across the Conurbation, an Earth city, in the open air. It was a dreadful prospect, but Pirius knew by now that it was no use arguing with the Commissary when he had made up his mind.
Still, Pirius and Torec hesitated on the doorstep of Nilis’s apartment. Pirius had acclimatized to the point where he could sit out in the garden with Nilis, even eat in the open air, but Torec was further behind. And after all, to venture out of doors without a sealed-up skinsuit violated every bit of conditioning drummed into them since before they could talk.
“But it has to be done,” Torec said grimly.
“It has to be done.” Hand in hand they took the first step, out into the light.
Nilis strode off along a road that arrowed between the hulking shoulders of blown-rock domes,
straight to the heart of the Conurbation. His robe flapped, the watery sun shone from his shaven head, and a small bot carrying his effects labored gamely to keep up. For all his insistence on checking the ensigns’ appearance, Nilis himself looked as if he had come straight from his rooftop garden; he wasn’t even wearing any shoes.
He didn’t look back. The ensigns had to hurry after him.
The surfaces of the domes were smooth, polished, some even worked with other kinds of stone. One massive dome, coated with a creamy rock, gleamed bright in the sunlight. “The Ministry of Supply,” Nilis called over his shoulder. “Supplied themselves with marble readily enough!”
There wasn’t much traffic, just a few smart cars. But there were pedestrians everywhere, even off the ground. Walkways connected the domes, snaking through the air at many levels, in casual defiance of gravity and logic. People hurried along the ways, chattering; others were accompanied by shells of glowing Virtual displays, as if they carried their own small worlds around with them. In some places the walkways would tip up steeply, or even run vertically, but the crowds bustled over them blithely. The people were so immersed in their own affairs they didn’t even notice the unfailing miracles of inertial engineering that enabled them to walk without effort straight up a wall.
Torec was muttering under her breath, some comforting nonsense. But she kept walking. She was doing well, and Pirius felt proud of her — not that he’d have dared to tell her so. You didn’t look up at the open sky, that was the key. You didn’t think about how exposed you were to the wild. You concentrated on the manufactured environment; you kept your gaze on the smooth surface of the road, or on the buildings around you.
But at one point Torec stopped dead. Through a crack in the road surface a bit of green showed, a weed. It was a bit of raw life pushing through a hole in the engineered reality around them. Pirius was more used to green things than Torec, thanks to Nilis’s garden. But here in the wild it was an oddly terrifying sight.
As they pushed into the dense heart of the city, things got still more difficult for the ensigns. People started to notice them. They stared openly as the ensigns passed, and pointed, and peered down from the walkways. The ensigns’ uniforms didn’t help; their bright scarlet tunics stood out like beacons in the Conurbation crowds, who mostly dressed in plain black Commissary-style robes.
Nilis grinned. “They’ve never seen soldiers before. And you’re famous, Pirius!”
“Commissary, it wasn’t even me—”
Nilis waved a hand. “Never mind temporal hairsplitting. To these crowds you’re the kid who beat a Xeelee. Don’t let them worry you. They’re just human, as you are.”
Torec frowned. “Human maybe, but not like us.”
It was true, Pirius thought. In Arches Base everybody was the same — small, wiry, even with similar features, since most of them had been hatched from the same birthing tanks. “But here,” he said, “everyone is different. Tall, short. There are old people. And they’re all fat. You don’t see many fat people at the Front.”
“No,” Nilis said. “But that’s policy, you see. If you’re kept hungry, if everything in your world is shabby, you have something to fight for — even if it’s just an inchoate dream of somewhere safe and warm, and with enough to eat.”
Torec said, “So you let us fight for you, while you starve us and let us live in shit.”
Pirius was alarmed, but Nilis seemed to admire her outspokenness. “Like it or not, that’s the policy — and since very few frontline troops ever come here, to the heart of things, few people ever know about it…”
In the immensity of the city, Pirius tried to keep his bearings. The whole of human society was like a great machine, so he had always been taught, a machine unified and dedicated to a single goaclass="underline" the war with the Xeelee. The people around him, absorbed in their important and baffling bits of business, might seem strange, but they were parts of the greater machine too. He mustn’t look down on them: they were warriors in their way, just as he was, as was every human being.
But he thought of Nilis’s extraordinary ambition of ending this war. Perhaps he, Pirius, a mere ensign, would play a part in a revolution that would transform the lives of every human in the Galaxy — including every one of the confident, jostling crowd around him. In that case he had nothing to fear. Indeed, these people of Earth should fear him.
It was a deliciously non-Doctrinal thought. He always had wanted to be remembered.
“Ah, here we are,” said Nilis.
They stopped before another dome, as grand and busy as the rest. Nilis led them out of the glare of day into an antechamber. Much of this dome had been left open; there were partitions and internal walkways, but once inside you could look up and see the great rough sweep of the old Qax architecture itself.
They were subjected to a ferocious security check. Bots clambered over them, their identities were verified, they were scanned for implants, given quick-fire tests for loyalty and mental stability, and subjected to many other examinations whose nature Pirius couldn’t even recognize. Most of this was performed by automated systems, but a single human guard was there to overview the process, a blue-helmeted woman from the Bureau of Guardians. Nilis endured it silently, and Pirius and Torec followed his lead.
At last they were released. A small Virtual marker materialized before them and floated off. It led them to a roofless office, deep in the heart of the dome, with a long conference table and a nano-food niche. With a sigh, Nilis ordered hot tea.
“And now we wait,” he said to the ensigns. “We’re on time, but Gramm won’t be. It’s all part of the game of power, you know…”