Stories From The Quiet War

by Paul McAuley

  "Then lead on, Mr. Corso. I want to see this place today."

  A few minutes later, the whole of the main dome was spread beneath us. I sat behind Corso as he laboured at the pedals of the airframe, beneath the central joint of its wide, vivid yellow bat wings. I found this mode of travel quite exhilarating, for Corso was an expert pilot, and in Dione's meagre gravity we could fall a hundred metres and escape with only bruises and perhaps a broken bone or two.

  We swooped out above the cankerous, rotting tangles of parks, above streets dotted with half-cleared barricades, above white buildings and the blackened shells of buildings set afire in the last hours of the siege. One reason for the blowout had been to save Paris from its crazed citizens (riding behind Corso, with cold, stinking air blowing around me, I could imagine the dome's blister filling with swirling fumes, a smoky pearl that suddenly cleared when its integrity was breached; its huge diamond panes were still smudged with the residue of the suddenly snuffed fires). And then the little flying machine stooped and we bounced once, twice, and were down, taxiing across a wide flat roof above an avenue lined with dead chestnut trees.

  I had come here on my second day in Paris. I had insisted, and Dev Veeder had, with ill-grace, provided an escort. I had returned several times since, for here were the ruins of the office building, like a broken tooth in the terraced arcades of this commercial sector, from which Marisa Bassi had run his revolutionary committee. Since I had first visited the place, I had learned much more about those desperate, last days. From one of these terraces, bareheaded and in shirt-sleeves, Bassi had made his crucial speech to the crowds who had packed the stilled pedways and empty tram tracks. It was at an intersection nearby that he had organised the first of the barricades, and inaugurated the block captain system by which the building and defence of each barricade was assigned to platoons of a dozen or so citizens. How proud the survivors still were of their token efforts, singing out the names of the barricades on which they had served like captains recalling the names of their ships.

  Place de la Concorde.

  The Killing Field.

  The Liberty Line.

  For a long time, I stood at the remains of that first barricade and tried to imagine how it had been, that day when Bassi had made his speech. To insert myself, by imaginative reconstruction built on plain fact, into the life of another, is the most delicate part of my work. As I stood there, I imagined the plane trees in leaf, the heat and brilliant light of hundreds of suspensor lamps beneath the roof of the dome, like floating stars against the blackness of Dione's night, the restless crowd in the wide avenue, faces turned like flowers towards Marisa Bassi.

  An immigrant, he was half the height of most of the population of Paris, but was broad-shouldered and muscular, with a mane of grey hair and a bushy beard woven through with luminescent beads. What had he felt? He was tired, for he had certainly not slept that night. I was certain that he had had a direct hand in the deaths of his former government colleagues, and perhaps he was haunted by the bloody scenes. Murder is a primal event. Did the screams of his murdered colleagues fill him with foreboding, did his hands tremble as he grasped the rail and squared his shoulders and prepared to address the restless crowd? He had showered, and his hair was still wet as he let go of the rail and raised his hands (I had a photograph of his hands which I looked at often: they were square-palmed, the fingers short and stout, with broken nails – a labourer's rather than a murderer's hands) to still the crowd's noise, and began to speak. And in that moment changed history, and condemned most of his audience to a vainglorious death. Had he planned his speech, or did it come unprompted? Several of those I had interviewed had said that he had seemed nervous; several others that he had spoken with flawless confidence; all said that he had spoken without notes, and that he had been cheered to the echo.

  I walked about for an hour, every now and then dictating a few words to my notebook, impressions, half-realised ideas. Bassi did not yet stand before me fully-fleshed, but I felt that he was growing closer.

  One of the killing machines that patrolled the repressurized parts of the city stalked swiftly across a distant intersection, glittering and angular, like a praying mantis made of steel, there one moment, gone the next. I wondered if it or one of its fellows had caught the man who had painted the silly slogan, He Lives!, across the sooty stone of the building's first setback; I would have to ask Dev Veeder.

  I told Corso, "I'm pleased to see that our angels of mercy are afoot."

  "They might reassure you, boss, but they scare the shit out me. I've seen what those things can do to a man."

  "But not to you, my dear Corso. Not while you are under my protection."

  "Not while I have the stink of occupation upon me."

  "That's putting it crudely," I said.

  All of the occupation force and certain of its favoured collaborators had been tweaked so that their sweat emitted specific long-chain lipids that placated the primitive brains of the security things and killing machines.

  "I'm sorry, boss. This place weirds me out."

  "Bad memories, perhaps?"

  I was wondering if Corso had been there, that day, but as usual, he did not rise to the bait. He said, "I was on corpse detail, right after they repressurized this part of the city. The bodies had been in vacuum at minus two hundred degrees Centigrade for more than two months. They were shrivelled and very dry. Skin and flesh crisp, like pie crust. It was hard to pick them up without a finger or a hand or a foot breaking off. We all wore masks and gloves, but flakes of dead people got in your skin, and pretty soon all you could smell was death."

  "Don't be so gloomy, Corso. When the reconstruction is finished, your city will have regained its former glory."

  "Yeah, but it won't be my city any more. So, where do you want to go next?"

  "To the sector where he lived, of course."

  "Revisiting all your old favourites today, boss?"

  "I feel that I'm getting closer to him, Mr. Corso."

  We climbed back up to the roof, took off with a sudden stoop, and then, with Corso pedalling furiously, rose high above roofs and avenues and dead parkland.

  "I don't understand why you aren't grateful for the reconstruction, Mr. Corso. We could quite easily have demolished your city and started over. Or pulled out entirely, and brought you all back to Earth."

  "I was born here. This is where I was designed to live. Earth would kill me."

  "And you will live here, thanks to the generosity of the Three Powers Occupation Force, but you will live here as part of the human mainstream. The high flown nonsense about colonising the outer limits of the solar system, the comets and the Kuiper Belt, all of that was sheer madness. I have a colleague who has demonstrated that it is economically impossible. There will be a few scientific outposts perhaps, but the outer system is too cold and dark and energy poor. It is no place to live. Here though, will be the jewel of Earth's reconciliation with her children, Mr. Corso. I believe that the Quiet War will mark the beginning of the first mature epoch of human history, a war to end wars, and an end to childish expansionism. In its place will be as fine a flowering in the sciences and the arts as humanity has ever known. We are lucky to be alive at this time."

  "The Chinese might disagree. About an end to war."

  "Such disagreements as there are between the Democratic Union of China and the Three Powers Alliance will be settled by diplomacy and the intermingling of trade and culture. Men live for so long now that their lives are too valuable to be wasted in war."

  Pedalling hard, Corso said over his shoulder, "Old men have always used that as an excuse to send young men to war."

  "You are a cynic, Mr. Corso."

  "Maybe. Still, it's funny how the war started because we wouldn't repay our debts, and now you're pouring money into reconstruction."

  How do wars start? I suppose you could graph the rise in government debt against public resentment at the colonies funded by Earth's taxes until a trigger point wa
s reached, a crisis which had finally forced the governments of the Three Powers Alliance to act. That crisis was generally agreed to be the refusal by certain colonies to pay increased rates of interest on the corporate and government loans that had funded their expansion, an act of defiance which coincided with the death of the president of Greater Brazil close to an election, and the need by his inexperienced and unpopular vice president to be seen to act decisively. By that view, the Quiet War was no more than an act of debt recovery. Or perhaps one might suggest that the Quiet War was an historical inevitability, the usual reaction of colonies that had chafed under the yoke of an overstretched and underfunded empire until they could not help but demand independence: there were dozens of precedents for this in Earth's history.

  And yet the colonists had lost. The Three Powers Alliance had the technological and economic advantage, and superior access to information; the colonies, fragile bubbles of air and light and heat scattered in the vastness of the outer solar system, were horribly vulnerable. Apart from a few assassinations and acts of sabotage, almost no one had died on Earth during the Quiet War, but hundreds of thousands had died in the colonies on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, in orbital habitats and in spacecraft.

  Sartre wrote that because of technology we can no longer make history; instead, history is something that happens to us. It is an irony, I suppose, that Marisa Bassi's spark of defiance was extinguished because the very technology which sustained his city made it so very vulnerable.

  And yet certain important corporados were sufficiently worried about the futile resistance led by that one man, in one city on one of Saturn's small icy moons, to have sent me to profile him, as a police psychologist might profile a mass murderer.

  Was Marisa Bassi a great man who had risen from obscurity to fame but had failed? Or was he a fool, or worse than a fool – a psychopath who had hypnotised an emotionally vulnerable population and made them martyrs not for the cause of liberty, but for gratification of his inadequate ego?

  I still had too little material to make that judgement, and I confess that on that day, as I returned to places I had already trawled over, my mind was as much on the implications of Demi Lacombe's note as my work, and to Lavet Corso's undisguised relief I brought an early end to my labours.

  4.

  It was not easy to arrange a private meeting with Demi Lacombe, for the diplomatic quarter was small, and Dev Veeder's already keen eye was sharpened further by jealousy. I took to walking in the parkland after dark, even though I gave little credence to Cris DeHon's gossip, but I met only tame animals and, once, one of the gardeners, who for a moment gazed at me with gentle, mild curiosity before shambling away into the shadows beneath the huge, shaggy puffballs of a stand of cypress trees.

  I spent the next few days within the diplomatic quarter, interviewing wretches caught up in Dev Veeder's latest security sweep. They were either sullen and mostly silent, or effusively defiant, and in the latter case their answers to my questions were so full of lies or boasts or blusters that it was almost impossible to find any grain of truth. One wild-eyed man, his face badly bruised, claimed to have seen Bassi shot in the head in the last moments of the resistance, after the invading troops had blown the main dome and stormed the barricades. Several said that he was sleeping deep beneath one of the moon's icefields, and would waken again in Paris's hour of need – something I had heard many times already, unconsciously echoing the Arthurian legend just as the Bassi's revolution had so very consciously echoed the Parisian communes of the 19th Century (in our age, all revolutionaries worth their salt must pay fastidious attention to precedent).

  All worthless, yet I felt that I was growing near to understanding him. Sometimes he was in my dreams. But suddenly my work no longer mattered, for I contrived my rendezvous with Demi Lacombe.

  It was at another of the receptions with which the small community within the diplomatic quarter bolstered its sense of its own worth. It was easily done. By an arrangement I was later to regret, Cris DeHon diverted Dev Veeder into a long and earnest conversation with a visiting journalist about the anti-reconstruction propaganda that was circulating in the general population (in truth no more than a few scruffy leaflets and some motile slogans planted more to irritate the occupying troops than rally the vestigial resistance, but how Dev preened before the journalist's floating camera). I exchanged a glance with Demi Lacombe, and she set her bulb of wheat frappé on a floating tray and set off past the striped tents erected in the airy glade into the woods beyond. I followed a minute later, my heart beating as quickly and lightly as it had when I had set off on romantic assignations half a century ago.

  Ferns grew head-high beneath the frothy confections of the trees, but I glimpsed Demi's pale figure flitting through the green shadows and hurried on into the depths of the ravine that split the quarter's parkland. We soon left the safety of the trees behind but still she went on and I had to follow, although my eagerness was becoming tempered with a concern that we would be spotted by one of the security things.

  Yet how wonderful it was, to be chasing that gorgeous creature! We flew down a craggy rock face like creatures in a dream, over vertical fields of brilliantly coloured tweaked orchids, along great falls of ferns and vines and air-kelp. Birds lazily swam in the air; beyond the brilliant stars of suspensor lamps, beyond the diamond panes of the quarter's tent, Saturn blessed us with his pale, benign gaze.

  The pursuit ended in a triangular meadow of emerald-green moss, starred with the spikes of tiny red flowers and backed by the tall, ferny cliff of black, heat-shocked basalt down which we had swum. There was a steep drop to the dark lake at the bottom of the ravine at one edge, and a dense little wood of roses grown as tall as trees at the other. The wild heady scent of the roses did nothing to quieten my heart; nor did the way Demi pressed her hands over mine. The bandage on her left wrist was gone; those smart bacteria had worked their magic.

  "Thank you, Fredo," she said. "Thank you for this. If I couldn't get away from him now and then I swear I would go crazy."

  How can I describe what she looked like in that moment? Her silvery hair unbound about her heart-shaped face, which was mere centimetres from my own. Her pale, gauzy trousers and blouson floating about her body. Her scent so much like the scent of the wild roses. The viridescent light of that little meadow, filtered through ferns and roses, gave her pale skin an underwater cast; she might have been a nereid indeed, clasping a swooning sailor to her bosom.

  "Dev Veeder," I said stupidly.

  "He's declared his love for me."

  "You must be careful how you respond. You may think him foolish, but it will be dangerous to insult his honour."

  "It's so fucked up," the gorgeous creature declared. She let go of my hands and strode the width of the meadow in four graceful strides, came back to me in four more. "I can't work, the way he follows me around everywhere."

  "His devotion is exceptional. I take it that you do not reciprocate his infatuation."

  "If you mean do I love him, do I want to marry him, no. No. I thought I liked him, but I knew better than to sleep with him because I know what a big thing it is with you Greater Brazilians."

  I thought then that it might have been better if she had slept with him as soon as possible, since it would have instantly devalued her in Dev Veeder's eyes. She would have become his mistress, but never his wife.

  Demi said, "I think he's been out here too long. I've heard dreadful stories about him."

  "Well, we have been at war."

  "That he tortures his prisoners," she said. "That he enjoys it."

  "He is a soldier. Sometimes it is necessary to do things in war that would be unforgivable in peacetime."

  I did not particularly want to defend Dev Veeder, but I did not yet know what she wanted of me, and I was feeling an old man's caution.

  "He enjoys it," she said again.

  "Perhaps he enjoys carrying out his duty."

  "A Jesuitical distinction if ever I hear
d one."

  "I was educated by them, as a matter of fact."

  "So was I! Just outside Dublin. A horrible grey pile of a place that smelled of damp and floor polish and cheap disinfectant. Brr," she said, and shuddered and smiled. "I bet you had to endure that lecture on damnation and eternity. The sparrow flying from one end of the Universe to the other. . . ."

  "On each circuit carrying away in its beak a grain of rice from a mountain as tall as the Moon's orbit."

  "In our lecture the mountain was made of sand. And I guess your priests were men, not women. I still remember the punchline. Even when the sparrow had finished its task not one moment of eternity had passed. They knew how to leave a mark on your soul, the Jesuits. I learned to hate them because they scared me into being good."

  "I am sure that you needed little tuition in that direction, Dr. Lacombe."

  "Demi, Fredo. Call me Demi. Quit being so formal."

  "Demi, then."

  "They gave me a strong sense of duty too, the Jesuits. I came here to do a job. An important job."

  I began to understand what she wanted. I said, "Dev Veeder's attentions are interfering with your work."

  "He's an impossible man. He says that he wants to help me, but he won't listen when I try to tell him that he could best help by letting me get on with my work on my own."

  "He is from a good family. Very old-fashioned."

  "Right. He insists on going everywhere with me, and insists that I stay locked up in the quarter when he can't spare the time to escort me. So I'm way behind in my survey. I mean, I knew it would be a big job, but Dev is making it impossible. And it's so important that it gets done. This was such a wonderful place, before the war." She made a sweeping gesture that took in the roses, the falls of ferns, the bright green mosses. "It was all like this, then."

  "The restoration is an important symbol of political faith."

  "Well, there's that. But this city was a biotech showpiece before the war. It had more gene wizards than any other colony, and they exported their expertise to almost everywhere else in the outer system. There's so much we can learn from what's left, and so much more we can learn during the reconstruction."