Engine City by Ken MacLeod Page A

religions and unstable political system. This city’s pretty good at assimilating new ideas without changing very much. There’ve been times in the past few days when I’ve felt we’ve been away for two weeks, not two hundred years.”
    “That’s just the trouble,” said Esias. “Volkov can completely revolutionize Nova Babylonia—Nova Terra, come to that—without a revolution. The Academy and the Defense Committee have been skeptical of his plans. No doubt the Senate will be, too. But in each case, there was a minority whom he managed to fascinate. And that minority can take it to the populace. Once the ideas get out that people can be as long-lived as saurs, and that they can get into space without the saurs, and that there is a threat from space that the saurs can’t help us meet, then—well, frankly, I’m glad we’ll be out of here in a couple of months.”
    “So am I,” said Lydia. She twiddled ice in the bottom of her glass. “And back in a couple of centuries, by which time the dust should have settled.”
    Interesting, Esias thought, that she still didn’t take the prospect of an alien incursion seriously. Perhaps that instinctive skepticism would prove Volkov’s undoing in the long run. On the other hand, there was something else she wasn’t taking seriously, and it was a good deal more important and closer to hand.
    “Ah,” said Esias. “It won’t be the usual round trip this time. We could be back in one century, or even less.”
    Lydia frowned her puzzlement. “What do you mean?”
    “Ninety-six years have passed since we left Croatan. Fifty or so more will have passed before we are halfway back. Time enough, I think, for the Cosmonaut clans of Mingulay to build more starships, to extend their operations, to expand their range. Even allowing for a long time to calculate the navigation for each new jump, I should not be at all surprised to find that they have expanded far enough to meet us somewhere en route. And if they do”—he rubbed his hands—“here is the beauty of the deal I made with the Cairns family: They will have wares from the outer worlds that we can exchange for our Nova Babylonian commodities right then and there. We can then transfer to another merchant vessel on its return trip—for a suitable consideration, no doubt, but that shouldn’t be a problem, we can cut them in on the deal—and return to Nova Terra much sooner than expected, thus stealing a march on our competitors.”
    “Oh,” said Lydia, “very good!” She thought about it for a moment. “And what if they haven’t?”
    Esias shrugged. “Then we’re no worse off. We return in two hundred years as usual and, as you say, the dust should have settled by then.” He smiled wryly. “Assuming the aliens haven’t invaded, that is.”
    “What do you think of . . . all that?”
    “Consider the probabilities,” Esias said. “The Second Sphere has existed for thousands of years, to our certain knowledge. For millions, according to the saurs, and I believe them. Earth has existed on the other side of the Foamy Wake for even longer, according to the books in the Bright Star’s libraries, and I believe them, too. In all that time, there has been no evidence of any other space-traveling species than the saurs. In fact, the only scraps of evidence that Earth has been visited turn out to have been because of the activities of saurs, and the saurs originated on Earth. The god in the Solar System with which the crew of the Bright Star were originally in contact gave them no hint of any other space-going species.”
    “It didn’t tell them about the saurs, either,” said Lydia.
    “That’s a point,” Esias conceded, “but it doesn’t affect the argument I find most persuasive in my own mind, which is—given how long the situation has remained as I’ve said, how likely is it that a huge change in it should coincide with our brief lives? The chances are at least thousands to one against, I should say.”
    Lydia pondered this. “I suspect there’s a fallacy in that