Scale, p.5
Scale, page 5
When the truck reached the first crossroads, it turned to the east, heading toward the edge of the city. Loretta was beginning to feel the heat from her exertion; as if to mock her it began to rain Scale Zero, with droplets the size of her fist but as insubstantial as bubbles, hissing and squeaking as they slid over her shoulders and down her arms. She stopped and slaked her thirst on the real stuff, watching the lights of the truck receding but confident that she could catch up with it again.
By the time she did, the rain had died away, and she was out in the desert. With no trees or shrubbery she was more exposed, and though there were no streetlights, the low clouds above were like a pale canopy, lit up by the rainbow city to the west. The road here wasn’t in great repair; not only were there plenty of existing potholes, there were weak patches where her footfalls were enough to make dents of their own.
The truck turned off onto a small road running north. Loretta followed it for a few seconds; she was beginning to wonder if it was going to weave back and end up on the outskirts of D6, but then she saw a hint of fixed lights ahead.
She slowed her pace and raised the binoculars. The building was low and sprawling, with no fence or protective trees; it looked a bit like a warehouse. The truck stopped beside it, and the driver got out. Two other figures emerged from the warehouse with trolleys, and they began taking the barrels inside. Loretta managed to count seven barrels this time, for whatever that was worth. Seven barrels of drugs, or seven barrels of waste. Or seven barrels of drugs hidden in waste.
She was afraid the truck would drive back along the same route, forcing her either to race ahead of it all the way to the city, or trudge off into the sand and hide behind a rock while it passed. But once the barrels had all been moved and the doors at the back of the truck were closed, the driver accompanied the other two workers into the building.
Loretta stood and watched for a while, but there was no more activity. She started down the road again, warily. There didn’t seem to be any kind of guard post, so either the contents of the building was of very little value, or its owners didn’t wish to advertise its true worth.
If it was the latter, there might well be lookouts monitoring the approach from some kind of blind. Reluctantly, she left the road and began circling around toward the side of the building, sinking ankle-deep into the desert sand, wishing she’d thought to bring the kind of spread-shoes whose prints Sam Mujrif had found on Cara’s boat. Her calves began to ache from the unaccustomed gait; apparently there were athletes of her own scale who did this sort of thing by choice, but she’d always been content to leave any terrain that tried to swallow her to people whose weight was naturally diffuse enough to spare them that fate.
From the side, the building was dark; all the exterior lights were around the entrance, but here there was not even a glimmer showing through a window. In fact, as she drew nearer, Loretta realized that there were no windows at all. That wasn’t necessarily suspicious; if you had a building full of barrels of waste, rather than a warehouse full of useful stock that was constantly being removed and replenished, why bother about the degree of natural lighting? Maybe Generation Eight’s sole guilty secret was that they had yet to devise a method for treating the waste. But they weren’t dumping it in the river, so they weren’t breaking any laws or causing any harm, as far as she could tell.
Loretta kept her distance, but continued the arduous circumnavigation. A light wind had begun to blow, speeding the flow of sand back into the hollows she was leaving, so she felt no great anxiety about anyone stumbling on her tracks. The rear of the building was as inscrutable as the side: one long, plain, uninterrupted wall.
Not quite uninterrupted. There was a small door at the far end, maybe some kind of emergency exit. Loretta approached it, slowing her pace even further, trying to quieten the phut of her shoes sinking into the sand, or at least make it a bit less rhythmic. She heard a rustling sound, and looked up to see a rootlife dragonfly, twice her size, gliding down toward her. She ignored it and continued on her way, hoping it wouldn’t be so confused by her presence in a place that her scale mostly shunned to injure itself trying to bite her head off.
There was a paved rectangle beside the exit, and a narrower strip that formed a path alongside the wall. She approached the edge of the rectangle and squatted down, just as the dragonfly reached the bottom of its arc and veered away. She took out her flashlight and examined the ground, making sure to position her body so as to shield the illuminated patch from view, as much as possible. There were bits of rind and peel half-buried in the sand, and the shells of at least three kinds of nuts, all Scale Seven; clearly workers came out here to get some air now and then, and have a snack. It looked like the product of a lot more people than the three she’d seen, but maybe it had just accumulated over time.
As she probed the miniature garbage dump gingerly with one finger, she felt something pierce her skin. She pulled her hand up and stared at the drop of blood oozing out from the tiny wound, reluctant to comply with her usual instinct to suck her finger to disinfect it. There must have been a thorn buried in the sand – or, more disgustingly, a piece of bone. Throwing orange peel on the ground was one thing, but who ate meat like that then just discarded the remains?
She was inclined to take the hint and walk away, but as she played her flashlight over the ground one more time, something glinted for a moment in the beam. She kneeled down for a closer look, and saw a small, jagged shard of what appeared to be metal. She prodded it carefully, with a different finger; it was as heavy as bone, and felt sharp enough to have been the cause of her wound. But to the eye, it looked more like a tiny scrap of steel – the kind of thing that sometimes peeled off a can of soup if she operated the can-opener carelessly. Steel couldn’t pierce her skin, though. And steel was nowhere near this heavy.
Loretta took out her handkerchief and tried to pick up the fragment with it. She succeeded in trapping it, but as she lifted the handkerchief the fragment fell out, having cut itself free. Scale Five fabric was pleasantly soft on her nose, but whatever this was made short work of it.
Reluctantly, she fished out a piece of old banana skin from the surrounding refuse and wrapped the fragment in that, then she tied her handkerchief around the whole malodorous package and jammed it into her pocket.
She switched off her flashlight and looked around, as if her find itself might have set alarm bells ringing, but the desert was empty and the building was as silent as ever. She walked across the sand back to the road, then broke into a run, not stopping to catch her breath or slake her thirst until she reached the city.
Chapter 9
Dahlia eyed the fragment skeptically, then applied a gentle push with her fingernail, enough to make it slide half a millimeter or so across the tabletop. “It certainly is heavy,” she conceded.
Loretta poured a glass of water, then dropped the fragment in. It sank straight to the bottom. “Have you ever seen metal that doesn’t float in our water?”
“No.”
“It’s Scale Seven,” she declared bluntly. “Scale Seven metal.”
Dahlia grimaced. “Then why did everyone tell us there’s no such thing?”
“Because there wasn’t, before. Or so little as to make no difference.” Loretta picked up the chemistry book she’d borrowed from the library, and reopened it at the last page she’d bookmarked. “‘The nucleus at the center of an atom of iron must contain at least twenty-six protons,’” she read. “‘The odds of twenty-six protons ending up matched, purely by chance, with twenty-six leptons that all happen to be of the heaviest kind is one in eight to the twenty-sixth power. Energy considerations improve the odds, but not by much, since the ore would rarely have been exposed to a chemical environment that allowed for a complete exchange of leptons.’”
“So they’re taking natural iron, and purifying it?” Dahlia suggested. “Picking out the rare Scale Seven atoms?”
Loretta shook her head. “If they were, this speck would cost quintillions of dollars, and they wouldn’t have let someone tramp it out on their shoes.”
“Then ... how?”
“They must be un-shuffling the leptons. Pulling all the lighter ones away and replacing them with the heaviest kind. We know that’s possible, because life’s been doing it with other chemicals for millions of years; every molecule of Scale Seven water, and all the Scale Seven components of air, were made in a plant or an animal or a bacterium, at some point.” She flipped back through the book. “The very simplest atoms can end up missing the lighter leptons, purely by chance. And there are certain reactions, driven by radiation in the upper atmosphere, that can skew the numbers away from the usual mix. But other than that, it’s all thanks to biology. Generation Eight might have gone looking for pharmaceuticals, but they ended up figuring out how life creates the scales – and understanding the process well enough to start extending it.”
Dahlia said, “Metal that sinks isn’t that exciting. But I guess it would be nice to have metal knives, like the larger scales do. Bone knives are so macabre, if you think about it.”
“Knives, sure,” Loretta agreed. “But what about twelve-story office towers, like they have in D1? What about ... Scale Seven car engines burning Scale Seven fuels? It’s not just a matter of tougher materials; Scale Seven life packs more energy into every molecule. What if every machine in D7 could do the same?”
“That just sounds weird to me,” Dahlia confessed. “I can see how it might be valuable in some ways, but ... I don’t know, I quite liking having tougher skin and stronger muscles than any machine.”
Loretta was bemused. “You wouldn’t like a train that moves faster than you can run? Like everyone down to Scale Five has? What about bringing movies beyond Scale Two?”
Dahlia shrugged. “‘Movies’ are just a gimmicky optical illusion; even if they could speed them up fast enough to fool us, why would we want them to?”
“Well, Generation Eight must think this is worth something.” Loretta fetched a spoon and fished the fragment out of the glass. “At the very least, they’re keeping quiet about it while they develop the process.”
Dahlia said, “Maybe they’re worried about the politics.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re already too fast for some people’s liking,” Dahlia suggested. “You think they’ll be overjoyed in D1 if it turns out we really can do everything at sixty-four times their pace, in a four-thousandth of the area?”
Loretta laughed uneasily. “You don’t think they’ll just be glad that this finally makes the Treaty of Holroyd seem reasonable?”
“They can never make up their minds what they want from us,” Dahlia replied. “Innovations are fine, but only so long as they can be adapted to their own needs, and don’t give us too much of an advantage. They like us hemmed in and under control, tucked away in our little corners, cranking out novelties to amuse them.”
Loretta was surprised at how bitter she sounded. “Have you ever met anyone from D1?”
“Don’t try to paint me as some kind of bigot,” Dahlia protested. “I’m sure they’re all perfectly charming, in person, for anyone with the patience to interact with them. But every other scale lives on their terms, tiptoeing around their insecurities. If we’d wanted to burrow into their houses and kill them all in their sleep, we could have done that a long time ago, but however peaceful and friendly we are, they still treat us like some kind of half-domesticated insects that they’re happy to keep around for the sake of a few useful products, but can never be allowed to get out of hand.”
Loretta didn’t actually spend much time fretting over Scale One’s view of Scale Seven, but maybe Dahlia had a better sense than she did of how the situation might be perceived. “What if Cara got hold of the details of this process,” she suggested, “and tried to blackmail Generation Eight into doing the translation research she wanted? What would their worst fears be? People in D1 thinking it was all about new kinds of weaponry, and either trying to put a stop to it, or using it as a pretext for hostilities?”
“I’d worry that it might head that way,” Dahlia replied. “It’s inevitable that the news will get out eventually, but who can blame them for wanting to consolidate their position first?”
“You mean, ensure their commercial advantage against competitors? Or prepare to defend the whole district in a war?”
Even Dahlia seemed reluctant to put it so starkly. “Maybe they just wanted a chance to demonstrate how widespread the benefits would be.”
“Killing a citizen of District One so you have time to make fun new toys for everyone would certainly be a masterstroke of public relations,” Loretta responded dryly.
“So maybe they didn’t kill her,” Dahlia decided. “Maybe they’ve just put her somewhere safe and comfortable for a few weeks; that’s no great chunk out of her life, but it could be long enough for them to reach the point where they were planning to go public all along.”
Loretta had never ruled out kidnapping, but it had always struck her as a lot more challenging than simply throwing Cara overboard. “Where do you hide someone whose volume of flesh is about as much as everyone in D7’s, combined?”
“Not in D7, I guess,” Dahlia replied. “That building in the desert ... ?”
“No. It was ordinary height; even if she was lying down, they would have needed to dig a massive pit to hold her.”
“So not really living up to the safety and comfort benchmarks.”
Loretta found the act of kidnapping itself as difficult to imagine as the destination. “If they took her off the boat, they must have put her on another one. I mean, even in D4 they couldn’t have dragged her through the streets.”
“Not without diverting all the other traffic and passing her off as a carnival float,” Dahlia joked.
“But whose boat?” Loretta persisted. “What scale was it? If it could fit a Scale One woman on board, why did no one notice it coming into the harbor?”
Dahlia didn’t reply, but after a moment she reached across the table, picked up the metal fragment and dropped it back into the glass of water. “If you made a submarine out of Scale Seven steel, how deep could it go?”
“Deeper than any other kind,” Loretta supposed. “But ... who builds a submarine just to kidnap someone?”
Dahlia sighed. “You’re the one who was getting all excited about trains, a second ago. If Generation Eight is serious about ushering in the shiny new Scale Seven future, and their shiny new steel can stand up to the pressure at any depth, why wouldn’t they build a submarine? And if they want everyone to feel included, they really should have made it big enough to hold at least a couple of passengers of any scale.”
Loretta was not convinced. “No one needs submarines for transport. And as a demonstration project to show off their technology, it seems like an awfully expensive choice. I mean, where’s the payoff? Whatever the merits of oceanography as an academic discipline, why would it be a priority for G8?”
“So you think they killed her?”
“I’m not saying that.” But then how had Cara been spirited away in broad daylight? “I’ll ask Sam to go back to the docks and ask around,” Loretta decided. “Maybe he’ll find something that can rule the whole submarine idea in or out.”
“You think he’ll take it seriously, himself?”
“I’ll tell him about the metal, and he can make up his own mind.”
Dahlia was horrified. “You’ll tell him about the metal?”
Loretta said, “I’m not going to start keeping things from him. Imagine if he’d known what G8 was up to, but didn’t bother telling us.”
“But what if it all gets out?” Dahlia pressed her. “Do you really want to trigger whatever it is that G8 were trying to avoid?”
“Sam’s subject to the same ethical code as we are.”
Dahlia frowned. “Meaning what, exactly? Is he free to tell Jessica the same trade secrets that Jake refused to dig up for her sister?”
Loretta hesitated. “I think that would depend on whether he needs to disclose them in order to get Cara back safely; it’s not as clear cut as espionage for its own sake. But whatever we’ve all been dragged into, I’m not going to send him stumbling around in the dark.”
Dahlia wasn’t happy, but she seemed resigned to the decision. “You’ll be careful, though? Not to tip off G8?”
Loretta said, “I was careful bringing you in, wasn’t I?” But she had no prior arrangements with Sam, and she’d never needed to communicate securely across districts before. This was going to mean jumping through a lot more hoops.
Chapter 10
Sam couldn’t recall ordering anything from the bookshop recently, but when the parcel came he signed for it and left it on the table to sort out later. He was about to depart for the office when it struck him that the letter his cousin Shehbaz had brought over a minute earlier – addressed to the wrong S. Mujrif, and containing heartfelt expressions of gratitude from a client about a case that Sam had never actually worked on – might make more sense in the light of both puzzling deliveries than it did alone.
He opened the package. It contained what appeared to be two slipcased hardback volumes on Mediarchan history, but only one of them was a real book. The other case concealed a small machine: a radio transceiver melded with some elaborate clockwork.
Sam wasn’t sure whether he should be amused, or alarmed; maybe it was wise of Loretta to start taking precautions, but did she really think the people behind Cara’s disappearance would be capable of listening to their phone calls? Then again, maybe she was in a better position than he was to judge the state of the technology available to their adversaries.
He had never used a device like this before, but he was aware of the general principles. He brushed the fake client’s letter with vinegar, and the invisibly treated patches dissolved and fell out of the paper, leaving a pattern of holes. Then he wiped the letter clean and wrapped it around the left-hand drum in the guts of the machine.
