Stories From The Quiet War

by Paul McAuley

  Stories From the Quiet War

  by

  Paul McAuley

  The right of Paul McAuley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

  Cover by Michael Marshall Smith. Images courtesy of NASA and NASA/JPL Caltech.

  ‘Introduction’ was first published in this ebook collection. Copyright © 2011 Paul McAuley. All rights reserved.

  ‘Making History’ was first published by PS Publishing. Copyright © 2000 Paul McAuley. All rights reserved.

  ‘Incomers’ was first published in The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Copyright © 2008 Paul McAuley. All rights reserved.

  ‘Second Skin’ was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Copyright © 1997 Paul McAuley. All rights reserved.

  ‘Reef’ was first published in Sky Life, edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski. Copyright © 2000 Paul McAuley. All rights reserved.

  ‘Karyl’s War’ was first published in this ebook collection. Copyright © 2011 Paul McAuley. All rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Making History

  Incomers

  Second Skin

  Reef

  Karyl's War

  Introduction

  ONE OF THE STORIES COLLECTED here, ‘Second Skin’, was the first short story I wrote in what would become the Quiet War sequence. Written way back in 1996 and published a year later, it contains several of the signature tropes of the sequence – the setting on an obscure little moon of one of the outer planets in the aftermath of a war between Earth and outer system colonists, vacuum organisms, the pursuit of the gene wizard Avernus, weaponised biotech, huge construction projects built by robots, and so on.

  In the stories, the war was pretty conventional, triggered by a failed attempt by colonists to free themselves from the control of powerful interests on Earth. The novels reworked that history, turning the ancestors of the inhabitants of the outer system into refugees whose growing ambitions to spread out through the Solar System and push human evolution forward threatened a fragile peace between themselves and the political powers on Earth. But the novels shared with the short stories my interest in how the large movements of history affect the lives of those caught up in them (and vice versa), and my fascination with the fantastically varied landscapes of the moons of the outer planets. That fascination was first sparked by the images captured by Pioneer 11 and the two Viking spacecraft as they sped through the systems of the outer planets. Here were sulphur volcanoes, icy landscapes cratered by ancient bombardments, a moon with bright and dark hemispheres, a moon whose jigsaw surface might hide a vast ocean of liquid water, shepherd moons embedded within a vast ring system, and so on, and so on. The kind of exoticism that science-fiction writers traditionally mapped on to planets of far stars, right on our doorstep. The Galileo and Cassini-Huygens spacecraft sharpened those images and revealed fresh wonders – the geysers of little Enceladus, the rivers and lakes of Titan. Here were real places, named, mapped in detail. All I had to do was insert figures in those landscapes. But how did they live there? How did living there affect them? What were their dreams, their ambitions?

  I wrote nine ‘Quiet War’ stories over a period of about ten years, extending the history of the war, and exploring various locations on and inside the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and eventually took the plunge and wrote a pair of novels, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. The first was about the causes of the war and the long build-up to final act of violence; the second was about the consequences of the war for both victors and vanquished. Gardens of the Sun, set like the stories in the aftermath of the war, borrowed from several of them heavily modified settings and characters. The four stories republished here weren’t reworked into Gardens of the Sun, but the previously unpublished story, ‘Karyl’s War’, is a modification of an unused opening sequence of the novel and, like the novel, it contains rewritten passages from an earlier story (‘The Passenger’). It was intended to give a new perspective on the quick and violent conclusion to the long game of the Quiet War, but in the end I didn’t use it because I decided that I didn’t need to introduce a new character; the five main characters of The Quiet War were perfectly able to carry the various strands of the narrative forward.

  The Quiet War sequence has now been extended 1500 years into its future. A new novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, is a self-contained story set at the edge of the dust ring around the star Fomalhaut, where one of the characters from The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun arrives in the middle of a war over control of the star’s single gas giant planet. There’s a big dumb object floating in atmosphere of that gas giant, probing for signs of life. Thistledown cities and an archipelago of engineered worldlets. A vivid dream of childhood that begins to unravel. A secret hidden in the cityscapes of a virtual library. The termitarial mindset of an ancient cult. Visions of cul-de-sacs in human evolution, and an exploration of the costs of longevity . . .

  ‘Second Skin’ and the other stories collected here are where all this began. The first steps on a long exploration of strange worlds, and the people who live there.

  Making History

  The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?

  Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  1.

  I believe that I first saw Demi Lacombe at the gala reopening of the theatre. She had arrived in Paris, Dione a week before, but I am sure that, had I passed her in one of the gardens or arcades of the diplomatic quarter, or glimpsed her at one of the receptions or soirées or cocktail parties or conversations, I would have remembered her, for in an age where beauty could be cheaply bought, hers was a rare and natural wonder, and not easily forgotten.

  So I am certain that we first met that night, at the touring company production of Don Giovanni. The theatre of Paris, Dione, was one of the first buildings in the city's main dome to have been restored after the end of the siege. Although the gala performance that marked its reopening was an overt symbol of the occupation force's power, it was the first time many of the force's executives and officials had ventured outside the diplomatic quarter. It was preceded by speeches made more to the media (represented by a single journalist and a dozen remotes) than to the audience, for it was the kind of event that politicians fondly believe will enhance their status, but which usually wins not so much as a footnote in the pages of history.

  The theatre was a roofless bowl modelled in miniature on Rome's ruined Coliseum. Tiers of seats and private boxes rose steeply all around the circular stage to the rim, where armoured troopers and angular killing machines patrolled, tiny shadows against the artificial night. The colonists, who had fought to the death for freedom from Earth's rule, had kept to the twenty-four hour diurnal cycle of their home planet; the panes of the dome, high above, were polarized against the wan light of Dione's midday, and the suspensor lamps were turned down to mere stars.

  On the stage's glowing dish, the cast flitted and swarmed through a web of wires and stays like a flock of gaudy birds, freezing in emblematic tableaux during the great arias. The lack-lustre production had been foolishly gussied up in modern dress, with the Commendatore a robot, Don Giovanni a dispossessed captain of a Kuiper Belt habitat driven mad by a bioweapon symbiont, his servant Leporello an ambitious neuter who borrowed something of Iago's malevolent glee at the ordinary human weaknesses of its extraordinary master. From the vantage of my fifth tier box, I paid as much attention to the audience as I did to the familiar allegory of the priapic Don's damnation, and two people in a box on the same level as mine quickly caught my eye. One was someone I had come to know well, Cris DeHon, head of the
team that was reconstructing the city's information network; DeHon's companion was as breathtaking as she was incongruous. After the statue of the Commendatore had sprung to life and consigned the Don to his doom amidst flares of flame and writhing, red-skinned demons, after the ritual of applause and encore, DeHon found me at the post-performance party which, in truth, was more important to most of the audience than the opera's choreographed histrionics.

  "Dr. Lacombe has an interest in history," DeHon told me, after it had made the introductions. Like Leporello, the Don's servant, Cris DeHon was a neuter, one of the few people in the room who could not be affected, except in a purely aesthetic sense, by Dr. Lacombe's beauty. And like Leporello, it was consumed by a feverish delight in fomenting intrigue. Perhaps intrigue was to it as sex was to most men and women. It was a brilliant and vicious gossip, and a generous source of unreliable information.

  "Indeed," I said, helplessly, foolishly smiling at DeHon's companion. I confess that, like most men in the chamber, and not a few women, I could not take my eyes from her. She was so unspeakably lovely, swaying gracefully in the low gravity about the anchor point of her sticky shoes like a nereid on some sea's floor. When I dared to lift her gloved right hand by the tips of her fingers, and bent over her knuckles, the gorgeous creature actually blushed. She was young, and seemed to have not yet grown into her beauty, for she wore it as carelessly as a child costumed in some fabulously antique robe, and was simultaneously embarrassed and amused by the reactions she provoked. Perhaps even then she had a presentiment that it would be the cause of her death.

  She said, so softly I had to lean close to hear her, "I am no more than an amateur of history. But of course I have heard of your work, Professor-Doctor Graves."

  Her Portuguese had a soft, husky lilt. A subtle perfume, with a deep note of musk, rose from the cleft between her breasts, which were displayed to their advantage by the blood-red folds of her spidersilk blouson. A wide belt of red leather measured the narrowness of her waist; red silk trousers, cuffed at the ankles, gathered in complex pleats around her long, slim legs. Her hair was silver and frost; her eyes beaten copper flecked with green.

  "Demi is too modest," DeHon said. "Her monograph on the conceptual failures in design of early orbital habitats is something of a classic."

  I noted that the ghost of a double chin appeared when Demi Lacombe dipped her head in quiet acknowledgement of DeHon's compliment, and that her bare arms were plump and rosy. I thought then that if she ever had children the natural way, she would have to take care not to grow fat, and it was a relief to realise that her beauty was only mortal.

  She said, "Cris is probably the only one, apart from myself and my thesis supervisor, who has read all of it."

  "I like to keep up with our cultural guests," DeHon said.

  "I'm really more of an engineer," Demi Lacombe told me. "What they did here, with the city parklands, that was true artistry."

  I learnt that she was an environmental engineer, brought to Dione by the Three Powers Occupation Force to survey Paris's damaged ecosystem and to suggest how it could be reconstructed.

  When I expressed interest, she deflected it automatically. "I am not here to do anything radical. Just to figure out the best way to make the city habitable again. But for a historian to find himself right at the centre of history in the making must be tremendously exciting."

  "The war is over. This gala performance was deliberately staged to make the point. I'm merely picking over its ruins."

  "Is it true that you go out into the city without any guards?"

  "I have a guide. I need to talk to people when they are at their ease. Bringing them to the diplomatic quarter has unfortunate implications."

  "Arrest," DeHon said, with a delicate, refined shudder. "Interrogation."

  I said, "I do carry a weapon, but it's as unnecessary as the guards who patrol the perimeter of the theatre. The survivors of the siege are by now quite inured to their fate. It's true that many areas of the city are still dangerous, but only because of unrepaired damage and a few undiscovered booby traps."

  "Do you believe," Demi Lacombe asked, boldness making her eyes shine, "that he still lives?"

  I knew at once who she meant, of course, as would anyone in Paris. I said, "Of course not."

  "Yet I'm told that many of the survivors think that he does."

  "It is a frail and foolish hope, but hope is all they have. No, he willed his death from the beginning, when he assassinated the rest of the emergency committee and despoiled the diplomatic quarter, and he sealed his fate when he killed his hostages and the diplomats sent to bargain for peace. He was not the kind of man to run away from the consequences of his actions and so, like most of those he briefly commanded, he would have been killed in the siege. His body has not yet been identified, but the same can be said for more than half of those killed."

  "You are very certain."

  "I have studied human nature all my life."

  "And would you classify him as one of your great men?"

  "I'm flattered that you know of my work."

  Demi Lacombe said, "I wouldn't lie for the sake of politeness, Professor-Doctor Graves."

  "Please, Mademoiselle, I think we might be friends. And my friends call me Fredo."

  "And so shall I, because I don't really get on with this false formality. I know it's the fashion in the Pacific Community, but I'm a hick from Europe. So, Fredo, is he a great man?"

  The delicate suffusion of her soft cheeks: alabaster in the first light of morning.

  I bowed and said, "The corporados think so, or they would not have sponsored my research. However, I have not yet made up my mind."

  As we talked, I was aware of the people, mostly men, who were watching Demi Lacombe from near and far. The architects of the cities of the moons of the outer planets, imaginations stimulated by the engineering possibilities of microgravity, made their public spaces as large as possible, to relieve the claustrophobia of their tents and domes and burrows. The theatre's auditorium, a great crescent wedged beneath the steep slope of the seats, could easily have held two thousand people, and although almost everyone in the diplomatic quarter had come to the gala opening, we numbered no more than three hundred, scattered sparsely across the vast, black floor, which our shoes gripped tightly in lieu of proper gravity. Diplomats, executives and officials of the ad hoc government; novo abastado industrialists, sleek as well-fed sharks, trailed by entourages of aides and bodyguards as they lazily cruised the room, hoping to snap up trifles and titbits of gossip; officers of the Three Powers Occupation Force, in the full dress uniforms of half a dozen different armies; collaborationists in their best formal wear, albeit slightly shabby and out of fashion, mostly en famille and mostly gorging themselves at the buffet, for rationing was still in force amongst Paris's defeated population.

  There was a stir as, in full costume and make-up, Don Giovanni and Leporello escorted Donna Anna and Donna Elvira into the huge room. The actors half-swam, half-walked through the web of tethers with consummate ease, acknowledging the scattering of applause. At the centre of the auditorium's crescent, one man, sleek, dark-haired, in an immaculate pearly uniform, had not turned to watch the actors but was still staring openly at Demi Lacombe. It was Dev Veeder, the dashing colonel in charge of the security force. When Demi Lacombe looked up and saw him watching her I thought I heard the snap of electricity between them.

  DeHon nudged me and said loudly, for the benefit of everyone nearby, "Our brave colonel is smitten, don't you think?"

  2.

  I should not have allowed myself to become involved, of course. But like Cris DeHon (although I was neutered by age and temperament rather than by elective treatment), I had a bystander's fascination with human sexual behaviour. And, frankly, my assignment, although lucratively paid, was becoming tiresome.

  I had been in Paris, Dione for two months, commissioned by a consortium of half a dozen Greater Brazilian corporados to write an official history of
the siege of the city, and in particular to contribute to a psychological model of Marisa Bassi, the leader of the barricades, the amateur soldier who had kept off the forces of the Three Powers Alliance for twenty days after the general surrender which had brought an end of the Quiet War elsewhere in the solar system.

  I knew that I had been chosen because of my position as emeritus professor of history at Rio de Janeiro rather than for my ability or even my reputation, tattered as it was by the sniping of jealous younger colleagues. Historians cannot reach an agreement about anything, and most especially they cannot agree on the way history is made. Herodotus and Thucydides believed that the proper subjects of history were war and constitutional history and political personality, times of crisis and change; Plutarch suggested that history was driven by the actions and desires of exemplary characters, of great men. The Christians introduced God into history, a kind of alpha great man presiding over a forced marriage of divine and human realms, and when the notion of an epicurean God was shouldered aside in the Renaissance, the idea that history was shaped by forces beyond the control of ordinary men remained, although these forces were no longer centred on extraordinary individuals but were often considered to be no more than blind chance, the fall of a coin, the want of a nail. Like a maggot in an apple, chance lay at the heart of Gibbon's elegant synthesis of the philosophical studies of Voltaire and the systematic organisation of facts by rationalists like Hume and Montesquieu; it was the malignant flaw in Leopold von Ranke's (a distant ancestor of mine) codification of history as a neutral, non-partisan, scholarly pursuit; and it was made explicit in the twentieth century fragmentation of the history of ideas into a myriad specialities and the levelling of all facts to a common field, so that the frequency of dental caries in soldiers in the trenches of the First World War was considered as important an influence of events as the abilities of generals. Great men or small, all were tossed alike by society's tides.