Free Engine City by Ken MacLeod Page B

up, so that over the years they’ve acquired a mottled texture like a lichen-covered boulder. The place is old and important enough to have its own tram stop, Aquarium. Inside, there’s an atmosphere of barely controlled frenzy: knots of people in white coats arguing in low or raised voices, technicians wheeling equipment down corridors with the urgency of hospital porters in Accident and Emergency. Susan leads Matt through it all. Anyone who gives her a puzzled look or starts to ask her business is tugged back at the elbow by someone else.
    At the end of a long corridor with shore-facing windows along one side, she marches into a room with rows of wide white-topped lab benches, aquaria and sinks and display cabinets around the sides, charts and diagrams papering the walls and a broad whiteboard at the far end, in front of which a woman is standing tapping a long pointer at multicolored scribbles and talking to the score of people sitting or standing around. It’s her voice Matt recognizes first, just before she recognizes him and interrupts herself.
    “Matt!” She walks toward him, arms opening.
    “Elizabeth, it’s good to see you. Salasso, Gregor . . . wow.”
    Of his old companions, only the saur Salasso is unchanged, his small thin lips stretched in what for a human would have been a wide grin, his long arms poking far beyond the cuffs of his standard and therefore ill-fitting lab coat. Elizabeth and Gregor have aged fifteen years since Matt last saw them, fifty years ago. As usual it’s a jolt but he can hardly see it as a deterioration. Elizabeth’s broad, angular features have tightened more than they’ve sagged, and her walk has gained poise. Her hair is better styled than he remembers and still black, though not (Matt bitchily notes, as she air-kisses beside his cheek) at the roots. She’s wearing a sharp, elegant grey trouser suit that looks like, and may even be, a uniform. Gregor’s handshake is harder, his thin face looks more worn, and his swept-back hair (which, like his face, distantly echoes Matt’s own) grows grey-flecked, and from farther back on his head; his clothes are as casual as ever. Salasso’s long hands grasp Matt’s shoulders, briefly. Matt smiles down into the huge eyes, black as though all pupil, and wonders if the saur can feel the faint reflexive shudder induced, against all reason, by his friendly touch. If he does, he gives no sign, and is probably wise enough to realize it’s just a reflex, not a reflection.
    Elizabeth turns back to the gaggle of scientists.
    “Take five—take ten,” she says. “We’ll bring Matt up to speed and get back in ten minutes.”
    They disperse, some into huddles around the room, others outside. As they depart, Matt sees a table previously obscured by their backs. There are bones on a black plastic sheet, tweezers around them like sated steel piranhas. Matt finds himself drawn toward the array like an abductee to a skiff.
    “Jeez H,” he says, so close that his breath moves dust. It’s the Holy Grail, right there before his eyes: physical evidence. He’s seen pictures; by the gods, he has seen pictures, but until this moment he has never seen real hard evidence of multicellular life of extraterrestrial origin.
    “That’s what we’ve all been thinking,” says Gregor dryly as Matt straightens, still fascinated, still tracing out in his mind how the thing hangs together. Gregor and Elizabeth take about one minute to recount their encounter with the selkies and their discoveries at Lemuria Beach.
    “You’re all sure?” says Matt, suddenly struck with a doubt. “You don’t think it could be just a new terrestrial phylum, I dunno, some kind of Burgess Shale survivor—”
    He keeps to himself his momentary hallucinogenic vision of a pre-Cambrian civilization, which had gone off into space and returned to Earth at the end of the Cretaceous, just in time to meet the ancestors of the saurs, tweak their genes and set them off on their travels after the gods’ wrath hit