No high-tech security device on the door; hopefully no booby traps inside.
Stairs went up to the second floor probably living quarters, if they were still useable. Benny checked for doors. The kitchen, unlocked; a cupboard, unlocked; the front door, a mesh of boards covering it on the outside.
Basement door, locked. She flinched as she opened it, but nothing vaporized or otherwise killed her.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the new lighting. There was a gentle glow coming from the basement, illuminating the foot of the stairs. A reddish-green glow. A slow, pulsing sound.
'If you want me,' she muttered, 'I shall be in the spleen.'
She hesitated half-way down the stairs. The walls were covered in thick, green gunk. Nodes of it gave off bright green light. There was a constant rustling, a whispering, the sound of jungles or forests. Patches of the floor were still flagstones, but ridges and layers of the living stuff had reached across it. Around the walls there were massive pods or maybe blisters. Great sacs filled with softly luminescent green goo, taller than she was.
As she came closer, she saw that the sacs were translucent. She could make out shapes inside them. Heads and limbs and . . .
There was a bench in the centre of the room, a small pile of folders at one end. Tiny sacs were growing all over the bench. There were shapes inside them as well, hands and heads and embryos, but also irregular, coiling things, no part of the human body. Nicolas had left his burden on the bench. A soldier, a man from the Garde Nationale, the bloodstain on his jacket already gone black with time.
'Right,' said Benny. 'I flatly refuse to throw up. I deny all nausea. Otherwise I'm going to be useless for the entire rest of this adventure.'
Ace shrugged and fidgeted, stuffed into one of Mme Thierry's dresses and into the back row between two women who were knitting. The room was packed with women. Most of them were wearing red belts, some with pistols stuck into them. Children milled about as best they could between the tight seating, or howled in their mother's laps.
The two knitter's elbows moved back and forth, nudging Ace. She could barely see the front of the room for cigarette smoke. A table was piled with books and papers. Several women with red belts and sashes, faces drawn and concentrated, sat there.
170.
Ace closed her eyes. She was tasting the dust of the desert again, the dust of history: how many of these people would be alive in a week's time? The Doctor had called it La Semaine Sanglante La Semaine Sanglante, the Bloody Week, and it was going to start tonight. Why had she even bothered to come to this meeting?
'Men are cowards!' The speaker was young, angry, with large eyes and long brown hair. 'They say they're the rulers of creation, and then they complain they have to fight. Well, let them go and join the traitors at Versailles, and leave the defence of the city to us! We've got more to lose than they have.
We've got petroleum, we've got axes, we've got strong hearts. We'll be the ones on the barricades. We'll show them that they can't tread us down any more!'
She sat down, breathless. There was scattered applause and murmurs. The woman on Ace's left snorted a huge pinch of snuff.
Ace opened her eyes again. She startled. The young woman was looking right at her no, she was just looking into the crowd, to see who had clapped and who disagreed. She couldn't be twenty yet. And she'd be lying in the gutter by Friday, her anger silenced.
Another woman had taken the stand. 'It might not be necessary to fight on the barricades. But we won't make our grandmothers' ghosts ashamed of us. We'll bring the wounded soldiers back home, and save their lives. We'll cook and sew for them. We'll make sure the Versaillais won't be able to live off the sweat of our backs any more. For too long, we've all been cogs in the machinery: soldiers, workers, women, literally parts of the machines in their stinking factories. Now the Versaillais must be made to understand that they cannot treat us like machines!
' Citoyennes Citoyennes!' boomed a third woman. 'This is all so much hot air. What we need is action, immediate action. Get your men to follow the right track, to fulfil their duties. We must put our backs into it! We must strike without mercy and destroy those who are undermining the Commune! Men must cooperate or be shot! If tomorrow we sent a hundred cowards before the firing squad, you can be sure that the next day a thousand would come forward to serve the Commune.'
'You don't have the day after tomorrow,' said Ace loudly. 'You don't even have tomorrow.'
There were shouts and murmurs. The women on either side of her stopped knitting. 'Order!' someone called from the table at the front.
'And you know it. You know there's no time left. No one's made proper plans to defend the city. What have you managed to accomplish? What about all the incompetence, all the screwing around? What have you really done?'
'War widows have been adopted by the Commune, married or not they won't starve,' said one of the women behind the table.
171.
'There are plans for a girl's industrial school. Plans for nurseries, so that poor mothers can earn a crust. Plans to organize women workers so that they can share in the profits generated by their labour.'
'Plans, plans,' said Ace. 'If the Commune disappeared tomorrow, all your plans would be forgotten.'
'That doesn't excuse us from the duty of making those plans.' The young speaker got to her feet.
'What's the point?' Angry murmurs were moving through the crowd, but it didn't matter. None of it mattered. 'It's like Akhenaten, it's all going to be torn down anyway. What's the point if you're all going to be shot?'
And now she saw the weariness in the young woman's eyes, felt the desper-ation of the crowd. 'If that is our destiny, we cannot escape it.' said the young citoyenne citoyenne quietly. 'No matter. One day there will be schools for women. One day we will be able to work as we please, and be no-one's slaves. Even if we die, we will not be forgotten.' The crowd hushed. 'The Commune may not last one more day, even one more hour. But it has already planted the seeds of a hundred revolutions. Even if it is only a temporary arrangement, that makes it no less valuable. Not unlike life itself, Mademoiselle.' quietly. 'No matter. One day there will be schools for women. One day we will be able to work as we please, and be no-one's slaves. Even if we die, we will not be forgotten.' The crowd hushed. 'The Commune may not last one more day, even one more hour. But it has already planted the seeds of a hundred revolutions. Even if it is only a temporary arrangement, that makes it no less valuable. Not unlike life itself, Mademoiselle.'
There was another smattering of applause. The women were getting up, picking up hats and children and heading for the doors. 'She knows her stuff, that one,' said the woman on Ace's right, packing away her knitting.
Ace sat down, closed her eyes again, tasting the dust of the desert. Even if Even if it is only a temporary arrangement, that makes it no less valuable. it is only a temporary arrangement, that makes it no less valuable. It did count. It did count.
It did matter.
The young citoyenne citoyenne was surprised when the was surprised when the Anglaise Anglaise came up to her, a rifle slung across her back. 'So,' she said, 'what's the plan?' came up to her, a rifle slung across her back. 'So,' she said, 'what's the plan?'
Kadiatu came down the stairs, cradling the child's body in her arms. Hiding it in the bolt of tarpaulin had seemed like a pointless exercise. The bloodbath that would start tonight would make counting corpses just as pointless, moral nitpicking.
The child had been dead a day; the sooner she got it into storage, the better.
She unrolled the little girl from the tarp, picked her up by the scruff of her shirt and stuffed her into an empty sac hanging from the wall. Green liquid overflowed down the walls of the blister, lifting the girl's tiny hands, soaking into her dirty clothes and highlighting her painfully thin face in a soft reddish glow.
Kadiatu sealed the blister, strode to her research bench, reached down behind it and twisted her fingers in Benny's hair.
The woman was trying to dart aside, moving like a hologram with the play-back speed set too slow. Like an insect caught in treacle. That was happening 172 more often, more easily. Would there come a time, Kadiatu wondered as Benny struggled in slow motion, when she saw everything at this unnatural speed, when it took her a week to have a conversation?
She let reality wind back up to normal. It would only take a moment to kill Benny in any case, a flick of the wrist that would snap her neck. 'Do it!
Why don't you do it!' the woman was shouting trying to turn to look at her assailant. 'It'll just be another dead body!'
'Don't you judge me,' growled Kadiatu. 'Don't you dare judge me. You have no idea of what's going on. No idea at all.'
She let go of the woman's hair. Benny stayed still in a half-crouch, but she couldn't stop the words. 'You're killing people!'
'Our roles are reversed.'
'Is that it, then? Are you possessed by some alien? By Ship?'
Kadiatu rubbed the back of her neck. 'Not possessed. One of Ship's posses-sions. But not any more.'
She backed away, giving Benny space to straighten up. 'You've made some kind of deal with it, haven't you!' said Benny. 'You're killing people for it!
Killing children!'
Kadiatu looked at the little girl, floating in her vegetable womb. 'She died of starvation. I bought the body from her mother. The money might keep maman maman alive, if she survives the alive, if she survives the Semaine Semaine.'
'Why?' insisted Benny. 'What for for?'
'Ship showed me how its technology works because it needed help from a time traveller. It downloaded so much stuff into me, so much information.
And then it put something in my neck. Around my brainstem. So it would know what I was doing.'
'A bug?' said Benny, horrified.
'I can talk to you now,' said Kadiatu, 'because I've killed it. Ship built this lab so I could work on solving its time travel problem. We built the littleboy; we anchored the rifts so the Ants would emerge on Earth instead of the middle of space. But that turned out not to be as efficient as taking spacecraft.'
'My father disappeared in space,' exploded Benny.
Kadiatu just raised a hand. 'Shut up,' she said. 'I don't have long to talk. I also created a virus specific for Ship's tissue.'
'Did it work?'
'I injected myself with it. I'm full of virus. It killed the implant. I should kill you.'
'Why?'
'If Ship catches you, it'll know everything you know.' Kadiatu raised a hand.
Benny flinched, backed up against the bench, trying to look her in the eyes.
173.
'I didn't think it would be like this,' said Kadiatu. 'I didn't think it would be so complicated.' She lowered her hand, slowly.
Benny breathed out, hard. 'Why did you do it, then? Why build a time machine?'
'Why do you travel with him?'
Benny pushed her sweat-soaked fringe out of her eyes. 'To see the universe.
But you always get caught up in something along the way. There are always Ants to spoil the picnic.'
'The Ants exist because of me. That's why I have to destroy them, destroy Ship.'
The fear had gone from Benny's face. 'I want to talk to you,' she said.
'Properly.'
'There's no time. There's never been any time. They've always been watching.'
'What is it they want?'
'Ship wants to carry out its program. It wants to process everyone.'
'Everyone?'
'Everyone.'
' Everyone? Everyone? ' '
'Everyone.'
'But why? What's the point?'
'There is no point. Ship's just running on automatic.'
There was a soft puff of air. Benny whirled. There was an Ant standing behind her.
Kadiatu picked her up and hurled her at the wall.
Benny rebounded from the spongy stuff and rolled onto the floor. The Ant scrambled over the bench at Kadiatu, its forelegs rearing up. She grabbed them, wrenched them apart. She was tired of fighting. She couldn't be bothered to fight. But she had to keep up appearances.
The Ant's antennae reached for her face. She let the itching in her brain build until it filled her up, static blotting out everything.
The Doctor had his distant face on. Ace found herself peering into shadows and straining her ears. The enemy was listening. But they weren't in the shadows. They were lodged in the Doctor's shoulder, over his collarbone. He was bugged, but it didn't seem to bother him.
Benny waited impatiently at the top of the stairs. Ace stifled a sneeze. The Doctor was peering about, not focussed on anything, as though trying not to give away what he was really interested in by being interested in everything.
He absently held on to Kadiatu's lab notes, the folders full of dog-eared pages, filled with scribbly student writing.
174.
'Fascinating cult, the Setites,' he muttered, around a couple of barley sugars.
'They kept going until the early twentieth century, you know, passing the little bits and pieces of Osiran technology down the line.'
'Yes, yes,' said Bernice, almost stamping her foot with impatience.
'Sutekh killed the last of them. And then I killed him. He wasn't forgotten, though. Set-worshippers turn up again in California in the seventies, on Eri-dani in the twenty-fourth century.' The Doctor ran his finger along the top of the counter, coating his fingerprint with thick dust. 'The enemy. The outsider.
A powerful archetype.'
'It depends,' said Ace, 'on what you're the enemy of of.'
The Doctor swivelled. 'You ended a sentence with a preposition. You can't do do that.' that.'
Ace slowly grinned.
They had reached the top of the stairs. 'It's a sort of laboratory,' said Benny.
'Kadiatu said she had developed a virus.'
'No, she didn't look well.'
'No. She planned to '
The Doctor held up a finger. 'Loose lips sink ships,' he said. Benny frowned, but stayed silent.
They looked at the bodies and the body parts, the blisters of green fluid, the writhing things and the growing things.