Free Engine City by Ken MacLeod Page A

it.”
    “They had to cut it short and come home in a hurry.”
    “Why?”
    Her eyes widen. “Haven’t you seen the papers?”
    He shakes his head, thinking, Don’t tell me they’ve reinvented war while I’ve been away . . . 
    Susan runs her thumbnail across the top of her bag. It opens in a way he can’t quite see and she pulls out a bundle of news-flyers, hours old and already tattered. Matt spreads them out to see that they’re all downmarket—their money pages cover the lottery rather than the stock exchange—and their front sides all have articles and headlines and photos of odd phenomena: a flattened whorl in a wheatfield, a waterspout, the face of a worried-looking man in dungarees, and something that might have been a thrown ashtray. There’s a sketch of two grim-faced men in the Puritan-style suits affected by scoffers, the clergy of the local irreligion, captioned: “Sinister visitors—Heresiarchy denies knowledge.”
    “ This rubbish?” Matt says.
    “It’s true,” says Susan. She leans forward, voice dropping. “That’s what Elizabeth and Gregor found out. The aliens are here. We’re being invaded.”
    Matt sighs, clasps his hands at the back of his head and tilts back the flimsy chair. He’s been expecting this for decades, ever since the expedition to the gods, but it still pisses him off. Through the glass roof he can see a couple of silvery lens-shaped skiffs scooting overhead. A couple of tables away, two small grey-skinned figures with large bald heads and big black eyes are canoodling over a shared bloodshake. The blonde person who’d served him at the stall has just shuffled through a spilled sticky drink and is leaving forty-centimeter-long footprints. There’s a good chance that several of the commuters striding past had an ancestor on the Mary fucking Celeste. Three hours ago by his body clock, he was four light-years away. And it was early morning. He’s a hundred thousand light-years from Earth and he’s hundreds of years old and he feels every meter and minute of it.
    “Aliens,” he says, looking up again. “Unidentified flying objects. Crop circles. Men in black. This is too fucking much.”
    He swings forward, his gaze still focused on the middle distance, and he has a sudden hallucination that he can see right through Susan’s T-shirt to a glowing green hologram of her naked torso. He blinks as the chair settles, and it’s gone, there’s just that pattern of colorful stitchery. He looks away and back, covertly, then meets her eyes. She’s smiling.
    “Stereogram,” she says. “Computer-generated. You just let your eyes go—”
    “I know,” says Matt. “That’s the most indecent garment I’ve ever seen.”
    “You haven’t seen the skirts.”
    Matt stares at her face as though it too were a stereogram, and something clicks into focus. He knows she’s attractive but he isn’t attracted to her. To attribute this to the incest taboo would be absurd—intellectually, there’s nothing to it, she’s generations removed from him, and emotionally there is no way that inhibition would have had a chance to lock on—it depends on childhood imprinting of siblinghood, as far as he knows. It must be something else. He has the body and brain and appearance of a man in his early twenties, but mentally, inside, he is just too old. That must be it: Susan is too young for him. She’s sucking a strand of her frosted fair hair, and tiny fragments of her matching lipstick are clogging the tips. As though realizing what she’s doing, she flicks it away.
    “Anyway,” she says, “Elizabeth and Gregor want to see you.”
    “Up at the castle?”
    “No. Too busy up there. For the merchants, this place is becoming a bit of a culture shock. Along the shore, at the marine biology lab.” She stands. “We can walk.” She sees his duffel, and his look. “Or take a tram.”

    The laboratories are single-storey blocks with wide windows, and walls whose pebbledash and roughcast have fallen off in great flakes here and there and mostly been patched