But at one point Torec stopped dead. Through a crack in the road surface a bit of green showed, a weed. It was a bit of raw life pushing through a hole in the engineered reality around them. Pirius was more used to green things than Torec, thanks to Nilis’s garden. But here in the wild it was an oddly terrifying sight.
As they pushed into the dense heart of the city, things got still more difficult for the ensigns. People started to notice them. They stared openly as the ensigns passed, and pointed, and peered down from the walkways. The ensigns’ uniforms didn’t help; their bright scarlet tunics stood out like beacons in the Conurbation crowds, who mostly dressed in plain black Commissary-style robes.
Nilis grinned. “They’ve never seen soldiers before. And you’re famous, Pirius!”
“Commissary, it wasn’t even me—”
Nilis waved a hand. “Never mind temporal hairsplitting. To these crowds you’re the kid who beat a Xeelee. Don’t let them worry you. They’re just human, as you are.”
Torec frowned. “Human maybe, but not like us.”
It was true, Pirius thought. In Arches Base everybody was the same — small, wiry, even with similar features, since most of them had been hatched from the same birthing tanks. “But here,” he said, “everyone is different. Tall, short. There are old people. And they’re all fat. You don’t see many fat people at the Front.”
“No,” Nilis said. “But that’s policy, you see. If you’re kept hungry, if everything in your world is shabby, you have something to fight for — even if it’s just an inchoate dream of somewhere safe and warm, and with enough to eat.”
Torec said, “So you let us fight for you, while you starve us and let us live in shit.”
Pirius was alarmed, but Nilis seemed to admire her outspokenness. “Like it or not, that’s the policy — and since very few frontline troops ever come here, to the heart of things, few people ever know about it…”
In the immensity of the city, Pirius tried to keep his bearings. The whole of human society was like a great machine, so he had always been taught, a machine unified and dedicated to a single goaclass="underline" the war with the Xeelee. The people around him, absorbed in their important and baffling bits of business, might seem strange, but they were parts of the greater machine too. He mustn’t look down on them: they were warriors in their way, just as he was, as was every human being.
But he thought of Nilis’s extraordinary ambition of ending this war. Perhaps he, Pirius, a mere ensign, would play a part in a revolution that would transform the lives of every human in the Galaxy — including every one of the confident, jostling crowd around him. In that case he had nothing to fear. Indeed, these people of Earth should fear him.
It was a deliciously non-Doctrinal thought. He always had wanted to be remembered.
“Ah, here we are,” said Nilis.
They stopped before another dome, as grand and busy as the rest. Nilis led them out of the glare of day into an antechamber. Much of this dome had been left open; there were partitions and internal walkways, but once inside you could look up and see the great rough sweep of the old Qax architecture itself.
They were subjected to a ferocious security check. Bots clambered over them, their identities were verified, they were scanned for implants, given quick-fire tests for loyalty and mental stability, and subjected to many other examinations whose nature Pirius couldn’t even recognize. Most of this was performed by automated systems, but a single human guard was there to overview the process, a blue-helmeted woman from the Bureau of Guardians. Nilis endured it silently, and Pirius and Torec followed his lead.
At last they were released. A small Virtual marker materialized before them and floated off. It led them to a roofless office, deep in the heart of the dome, with a long conference table and a nano-food niche. With a sigh, Nilis ordered hot tea.
“And now we wait,” he said to the ensigns. “We’re on time, but Gramm won’t be. It’s all part of the game of power, you know…”
This dome belonged to Gramm’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, he told them. Aside from its specifically military arms, like the Navy and the Green Army and the Guardians, mankind’s police force, and agencies with cultural goals such as the Commission for Historical Truth and the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, the three greatest Ministries at the heart of the Interim Coalition of Governance were the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Ministry of Supply, and the Ministry of Production.
Nilis chattered on, “Even though they all report in to a single Grand Conclave member — Philia Doon, the Plenipotentiary for Total War — to get anything done you have to deal with all three. Even Minister Gramm can’t deliver anything by himself. But Economic Warfare’s aim is to ensure the dedication of all mankind’s resources to the great goal. To some extent it acts as an intermediary between the other two. And that gives Gramm some leverage. He can be a difficult man, but I couldn’t ask for a more useful ally… Ah, Minister!”
Minister Gramm came bustling into the room. Even by the standards of Earth, Pirius thought, he was stupendously fat; his great belly pushed out his gray cloak so that it hung over his legs, and his fingers, clasped before his stomach, were tubes of pasty flesh. His scalp was shaven and his cheeks heavy, so that his head was like a round moon.
He brought two people with him, both women. The first he briskly introduced as Pila, a senior advisor, whom Nilis had evidently met before. Golden-haired, she was slim, beautiful, expensively dressed, and oddly detached, as if all this was somehow beneath her. She showed no interest in the ensigns.
The second person with Gramm was quite different. Small, round-shouldered, the shape of her body was hidden by the severe cut of her black robe. Her skin was an odd weathered brown, as if she had been irradiated. All her features were small, her nose a stub, her mouth pinched, and her hair was just a gray scraping over her scalp. Pirius found it hard to judge her age. The smoothness of her skin had nothing to do with youth; it was as if her features had been worn by time. Indeed, it wasn’t until she spoke that Pirius was even sure this was a woman.
Nilis bustled forward to greet the Minister, his hand extended, his big bare feet slapping on the polished floor. But the small woman spoke first.
“So here are our young heroes from the Front.” She stood before Pirius. Her eyes were deep and dark, hidden in sockets that seemed to have receded into her head. “I wish I could smell you — you have about you the burned-metal stench of vacuum, no doubt.” She reached out a small hand, and made to brush his cheek. To his shock her fingers passed through his flesh and broke into a swarm of blocky pixels. “Yes, I’m a Virtual,” she said. “An avatar, actually. I’m too many light-minutes from here to be able to contribute. But I couldn’t miss this.”
To Nilis, Gramm said uncomfortably, “This is Luru Parz, Commissary. My… ah… consultant.”
Pirius had absolutely no idea who this woman was or what she wanted, and it baffled him that Gramm didn’t even seem to want her here.
But there was no time to think about that, for now Gramm was looming over Torec. “What an exotic little creature. The color of her uniform — the texture of her flesh — why, she’s like a little toy.” He reached out and laid his fat fingers on her shoulder.
Torec endured this, expressionless. But when his hand slid down her shoulder to her breast, she grabbed his finger and bent it back.
He recoiled, clutching his hand to his crotch. “Lethe. I think she broke it!”