Jiang saw her looking. He smiled. ‘All this beauty will still be here this time tomorrow, I’m sure of it.’

‘Nobody can be sure of any damn thing,’ King muttered. ‘Not even the Chinese, whatever they’re planning. They’re playing with huge energies, the energies of an interplanetary culture, and bringing them down to the Earth. Kind of irresponsible, even if it’s just to frighten us. I mean, one slip . . .’

Gunshot. A sharp crack. Everybody in the car ducked, even the security goons.

Everybody but King, who laughed. ‘Don’t sweat it. Just sound effects.’

Penny raised her head cautiously. They were rolling across a bridge to the Île de la Cité; she saw the hulk of the cathedral off to her right, and that big old banyan tree dangling in the Seine that she remembered from her last visit. And she glimpsed people running over the bridge, in peculiar silvery suits speckled with pink dots. They looked to be carrying guns, or heavier weapons, bazookas. They ducked between patches of cover, fired their guns, ducked back, and again she heard the crack of weapons firing, presumably simulated.

The car glided on smoothly through all this. The security guys looked embarrassed to have reacted.

‘Sound effects,’ King said again. ‘Background really, to fill out what the individual players are being fed.’

‘Players?’

King pointed at the combatants in the silver suits. ‘Asgard. The latest craze. A game, or a series of games, set in the historic centres of the old cities. Those characters don’t see what you and I see. They are living in a virtual reconstruction of a Paris in 1945, when allied troops are moving in to lift the Nazi occupation of the city. The rules are strict, kind of. You’re allowed to get killed, once a day. The next morning you come back and you can run around and start fighting all over again.’

Jiang was frowning. ‘My history is uncertain. Did the allies have to fight for Paris?’

‘No, not street to street. There was an agreement to protect the city; the Germans withdrew. It’s a game, a quasi-historical fantasy. There are similar games going on all over the world. There’s a major campaign going on in Londres to defend the city against a Nazi invasion, and that didn’t happen either. The most popular, I’m told, is the Battle of Stalingrad, that’s been running continuously for – well, I forget. And in America, the Civil War—’

‘I get the picture.’ Penny glanced up at the sky, looking for the Splinter. ‘This is how people spend their time, while that big rock comes sailing in towards the Earth? Isn’t it kind of decadent?’

King shrugged. ‘Everything might end tomorrow. What else is there to do? You can’t blame them for escaping.’

The car rolled on, heading north over another bridge, leaving the island behind. In the quasi-tropical sunlight of a post-Jolt Paris, more game players dashed across the road to hide in shadows, fighting out a non-existent war three centuries out of its time.

CHAPTER 72

The car pulled into a lot under the sprawling roof of the Gare du Nord, once one of the city’s main railway stations. Penny discovered that after various transport revolutions, the station had long been retired, turned into a museum, and ultimately converted into a somewhat ramshackle shopping area and living space, with lanes of apartments set out along what had once been platforms beside the rail tracks – and now even that had been abandoned. The station was a relic flattened under layers of history, even if that elderly nineteenth-century roof was still impressive.

Today the old station seemed to be empty, Penny observed, as the security guys hurried them through from the car, looking around suspiciously. Everybody was hunkered down, in Paris as elsewhere, waiting for the show in the sky to come to its climax.

They were led to a newer installation, tucked in one corner of what appeared to have once been the main station concourse. This was just a cube of what looked like smart concrete, a few metres to each side, inset with a massive steel door. There were no controls, no visible cameras, but when King stood before the door the steel plate slid down into the ground. Penny found herself looking into an elevator car, a brightly lit metal box. King looked back at the others, beckoned, and led the way in.

There were no controls in the car, no markings on walls of metal broken only by a few strip lights, a handrail around the wall. When the door sealed up it was as if they had all been confined in some high-tech coffin. A subtle lurch told Penny that the car was dropping. There was no sound save for their own breathing, the soft rustling of their clothes. Penny, feeling very elderly, resisted grabbing the handrail.

‘If ever you suspected you had claustrophobia,’ King said with a slightly malicious smile, ‘this is where you find out.’

Penny shrugged. ‘In spacecraft and dome colonies, that stuff gets beaten out of you.’

‘Suit yourself.’ But King looked slightly nervous himself. When the descent slowed, he took a firm grip of the handrail. ‘You might want to grab on for the next part – you particularly, Jiang, if you’re not steady on your feet in this gravity.’

They all followed his lead.

There was another lurch. Now Penny could sense that the car was no longer dropping, but accelerating steadily forward. Still there was no noise, nothing but the abstract sense of motion. She said, ‘I feel like I’m in some Einstein thought experiment.’

Jiang forced a smile. ‘Yes. I recall from high school. A person in an elevator car cannot distinguish between acceleration due to motion and acceleration due to gravity.’

King growled, ‘Well, you’re in somebody’s thought experiment all right, but not Einstein’s. If only.’

Jiang was standing slightly awkwardly, and Penny heard the creak of his exoskeletal support. ‘I think perhaps on the return journey I will request a chair to sit on.’

‘Good for you,’ King snapped. ‘If there is a return journey.’

At last the car glided to a halt. The door slid down into a slot in the floor. Penny peered out, curious, at a chamber, a kind of tunnel, very wide, very tall, a curved roof panelled with fluorescents. She had an increasing sense of unreality, of detachment.

And in the foreground there was Earthshine, in the guise in which she and Stef had first met him at Solstice, many years ago – or, according to Stef, her alone, in some lost timeline. He was tall, slim, dapper in a black, uncluttered business suit, with that engraved granite brooch in his lapel. With artfully greying hair he looked about fifty. Ageless where the rest were ageing, but in reality far older than any of them.

‘Welcome to my latest underground lair,’ he said. He smiled, but his expression was complicated – distracted, Penny would have said. But she reminded herself that everything about the figure she saw was an artifice. He beckoned, and walked ahead. ‘Please – join me.’

They stepped out of the cage, following him. Penny saw now that this tunnel, a wide circular bore, stretched off into the distance, dead straight; the walls, panelled with some kind of ceramic, curved over a smooth floor laid along the centre line of this big cylindrical volume, and heavy doors led off to side chambers. The central space was full of rows of white boxes, computers and other equipment. Small servo-robots moved everywhere, and Penny glimpsed human operators. The air was surprisingly cold, though that was a welcome change after the heat of a Parisian spring day, and there was a faint scent of ozone.

Earthshine hurried them along, though Jiang and King struggled to make progress. ‘I’m sorry not to give you the guided tour. There have been developments . . .’

‘This is a computer-processing facility,’ Jiang Youwei said, looking around. ‘And an expensive one, by the look of it.’