The circular bar held open shelves stacked with miniature braziers, smoking funnels and ornamental narghiles. It was tended by a hopfgeist in the shape of a tall, thin woman dressed all in black, with black, tied-back hair and dark, hooded eyes.
He walked towards the woman. She watched him, then beckoned him round to the rear of the bar, where there was a hatch cut out of the circle.
‘Sir, I was told long ago you might stop by,’ she said quietly. Her voice was flat and weary. ‘Have you anything to say to me?’
‘Yes, I have,’ he said. ‘Nosce teipsum.’
It was his most-secret code, the one he had thought of once, a long time ago, in his first ever life, in case he ever needed some already-remembered code quickly one day. It was one he had never committed to any other form of storage other than his own memory and never told to anybody else, except this woman, assuming his previous self had been telling the truth in the note he’d found in the hotel room in Oubliette.
The tall woman nodded. ‘That’s as it should be,’ she said, and sounded almost disappointed. She took a key from a chain round her neck and opened a small drawer set into the thickness of the bar counter. ‘Here.’ She handed him a small clay pipe, already charged. ‘I think this is what you desire.’ She put her hands on the counter, looking downwards.
‘Thank you,’ he told her. She nodded, not looking up.
He retreated to a dark, secluded booth lit by a small oil lamp set into the rock wall. He took a twisted paper spill from a nook to the side of the lamp and lit the pipe, drawing deeply on the thick, pungent smoke.
The bar faded slowly as though filling with smoke from the pipe. The murmuring rose to an ignorable roar; his head felt like a revolving planet, speeding up and shaking off its wrapping of atmosphere as if it was some excess piece of clothing, before disintegrating entirely and throwing him into space.
It was the day of the great curtain-wall road-race, held every year at the summer solstice. The race started from the western barbican, where the pits were housed and the majority of the great cars were garaged between race days. Banners and pennants flew from tents and caravans, temporary garage structures and anchored airships. A great crowd of people filled the network of scaffolded stands, bridges, stalls and viewing towers; cheers rang out across the marshalling areas and the smells of food drifted on the hot wind.
Sessine donned a light leather helmet and a pair of goggles and rolled down the sleeves of his shirt, fastening the cuffs to his sandskin gloves.
‘Best of luck, sir!’ the chief mechanic shouted, grinning. Sessine slapped her on the shoulder, then grasped the ladder and climbed, up through the damp smell of steam hissing from some venting valve, past the linking rods and the man-tall wheels, past the web of hydrogen pipes and hydraulic conduits webbing the main tank and on up to the curved top of the car. He waved down and the foot of the ladder was clipped up and secured.
He looked around, surveying the fifty or so cars and the barely controlled pandemonium of both the pits area and the stands beyond. Each of the mighty cars was fashioned after a particular model of steam railway engine from the Middle Ages; his was one of the first-marque machines, the largest and most powerful class in the race, created in the image of a 4-8-8-4 Mallet type used by the Union Pacific Railroad of North America, back in the twentieth century.
Sessine dropped into the Mallet’s cramped cockpit, offset to the left at the rear of the huge locomotive, above where the engineer’s cab would have been on the real thing. He strapped himself in, then ran through the instrument check. That done, he sat back for a while, breathing deeply and gazing round the stands and viewing towers, looking for where his wife would be sitting in the clan’s own tower and wondering if his latest lover was watching from one of the old airships. The voice pipe whistled; he uncorked it. ‘Ready, sir?’ said the muffled voice of the chief engineer.
‘Ready,’ he said.
‘All yours, sir. You have control.’
‘I have control,’ he confirmed, and recorked the voice pipe. His heart beat faster and he wiped sweat from his top lip with his shirt sleeve. He undid one glove and fished in a breast pocket for his ear plugs.
His hands were shaking, just a little.
The marshals’ airship hovered pregnantly over the tall, flag-bedecked archway leading to the starting grid. After what seemed like an eternity the flags hanging under the dirigible changed from red to yellow and the crowd cheered wildly.
Sessine slipped the brake, eased the regulator on and fed power to the Mallet’s wheels. The hydrogen engine shot a great detonating pulse of steam from its stack – easily twenty metres forward of where Sessine sat – hissed yet more clouds from the pistons below, and, with a great metallic groan and a crumping series of explosive steam-bursts within a cacophonous range of oiled clanking noises, the huge vehicle crept slowly forward, keeping station with the rest of the cars, all jetting steam and blasting whistles, spasmodically interspersing this symphonic din with the sudden racing solo of an engine briefly losing traction, sets of rubber-rimmed wheels slipping together on patches of oil, hydraulic fluid or water.
The race began half an hour later after various delays – every one of which seemed interminable – and much sweating and steaming and sweltering on the starting grid.
The huge cars started their charge round the wall-top roadway of Serehfa’s curtain-wall, a half-kilometre wide surface of smooth roadway behind the semi-cylindrical towers. Each lap was a hundred and eighty kilometres in length, a distance the leading vehicles would complete in an hour; each race was three laps. The cars were accompanied by the marshals’ airship and by a small cloud of camera platforms like swarming insects, feeding the spectacle to the implant and screen networks and the crowds watching from the viewing stands and towers.
Sessine took the lead when the clan Genetics’ Beyer-Garratt burst a series of tyres and skidded off into the outer parapet in a great long articulated explosion of steam, metal and stone (and Sessine thought coldly, Well, that’s old Werrieth out of the party tonight, and him onto his last life); debris spattered across the roadway in front of the Mallet but Sessine took the three hundred tonnes of car within metres of the flimsy inside wall, and missed the wreckage entirely.
He was in front! He screamed with delight, and was grateful that the noise was inaudible within the staggering racket of the racing car; the wide roadway spread out in a gentle curve before him, empty and welcoming and sublime. The marshals’ airship would be well behind the Mallet and the cloud of camera platforms just level with him. There were cameras and spectators on each of the towers, too, and more people – castlians and Xtremadurians – gathered in clumps on the outer walls, but they were blurs, irrelevant. He was alone; exulting and alone and free!
…He recognised the point, and was able to leave then, and so left his old self to drive, and slipped out of the seat, like a ghost, down through the hatch into the bellowing heart of the quivering machine where valves chattered and gases hissed and water gurgled and sweat popped from the skin in the oven-heat of the shrieking, vibrating engine.
And as he walked through the hammering din of the motor, he started to remember a little of what he had left here.
In a cramped corridor, on an open-work metal floor between great rods and levers darting back and forward like vast metallic tendons, he found his old first self, dressed in engineer’s overalls and squatting hunched over a small table on which sat a chess board set in mid-game.
He squatted down too. His younger self did not look up. He was staring at the white pieces, the tip of one thumb in his mouth.
‘Silician defence,’ the young man said after a while, nodding at the board.
Sessine nodded, outwardly calm but thinking furiously. He knew he was faced with some sort of test but he had no predetermined code to cover this meeting, only the fact that, once, he and this young man had been the same person.
Silician? Not Sicilian?
Silician; Silicia; Cilicia. It meant something. Somebody he’d heard of had been Silician. An ancient.
He searched his memories, willing some connection. Tarzan? Tarsus? Then he remembered some lines from an ancient poem:
Me Tarsan, you Jesus.
And the Silician never really changed.
Ah, yes.
‘Professor Sauli played it often,’ he said. ‘While working on the exclusion principle.’