Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds [Reynolds, Alastair]
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780575082496
Publisher: Gollancz
Published: 2009-11-12T20:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

Auger hailed a taxi on boulevard Saint-Germain. By then she had exchanged her ripped and soot-smeared coat for a hip-length black jacket, with a matching hat tilted low to disguise her grubby face and hair. She would not bear up to close inspection, but in the twilight of late afternoon the transformation was adequate.

“Gare du Nord,” she told the driver, before showing him the paperwork she would need to cross the river. “As quick as you can, please.”

The driver grumbled something about not being a miracle worker, but before very long they had crossed the river and were haring through the narrow backstreets of the Marais, dodging the thickening flows of Saturday traffic. Auger felt an absolute exhaustion looming over her like a crumbling precipice, ready to fall and crush her at any moment. She leaned her cheek against the rattling window of the taxi and through blurred eyes she watched the lights of shops, neon signs and cars slide by in hyphens of red, white, frigid blue and gold. The city looked as untouchable and unreal as a hologram; as fragile as the glass she was resting against. She was very tempted to think of it that way. None of it mattered, she told herself: nothing that happened here could have any consequence for her life, back in Tanglewood. There was no need to continue with the investigation Susan White had started, for nothing that came out of that investigation could possibly affect Auger’s existence back home. Even if something terrible did happen here (and she could not quite shake the feeling that something terrible was indeed going to occur), then it would be no more tragic than the burning of a book or, in the worst case, a library of books. E2 might be lost, but a month ago she had not even known of its existence. Everything and everyone she really knew would continue unaffected, and within a few months the ordinary grind of her life, with its ebb and flow of routine pressures and crises, would have reduced these memories to a thin, dreamlike paste. And it was not as if everything from E2 would be lost for ever if something bad happened, for much had undoubtedly already been learned from the documents that had been smuggled back to Antiquities. And though she would feel some sympathy for the people trapped in E2, the trick was to remember that they were not really people at all, but the discarded shadows of lives that had already been lived 300 years ago. Feeling sorry for them would be like feeling sorry for the images in a burning photograph.

Auger felt her resolve collapsing by the minute. She did not want to get on the overnight train to Berlin, not when there was the much simpler option of staying in Paris and waiting for the ship to return. She had been sent here to do a job, and she had done it to the best of her ability. No one could possibly blame her if she stopped now, and thought only of her own preservation.

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