Stories From The Quiet War

by Paul McAuley

  "And of course you want to play a part in that. It would set the cap on your career."

  "It was like a work of art," Demi Lacombe said. "It would be a terrible sin not to try and restore it. There's a man I need to see. Away from Dev."

  "One of the survivors."

  "Yagi Hakaiopulos. He was a gene wizard, once upon a time. As great a talent as Sri Hong-Owen or Avernus. He retired a long time ago, but he helped entrain the basic ecological cycles that underpinned everything else. I can learn so much from him, if I'm given the chance."

  "But he won't talk if Dev Veeder is with you."

  "The Parisians think that Dev is a war criminal."

  "If they had won the war, perhaps that's what he would have become. But they did not."

  "Will you help me, Fredo? You go out into the city alone. You interview the people there."

  "And you want me to interview this man about the city's ecosystems? I would not know where to begin."

  "No," Demi Lacombe said, her gaze bright and bold. "I want you to take me with you."

  "Without Dev Veeder's knowledge."

  "Under his nose."

  "He is the chief of police, Demi. No one can come and go without his knowledge."

  "I think I've found a way," Demi Lacombe said. She stepped back and put two fingers between her blood-red lips and whistled, a single shrill note so loud it startled me, and disturbed a flock of small brown birds which had been perching in the ferns overhead. As they tumbled through the air, a man stepped out of the roses on the other side of the little meadow.

  My heart gave a little leap, tugged by guilt, and I was suddenly aware of how much like illicit lovers Demi Lacombe and I must have looked. But the man was no man at all, merely one of the gardeners, the tutelary spirits of the parkland.

  Before the revolution, before the Quiet War, the government of Paris, Dione was an attempt to revive the quaint notion of technodemocracy, an experiment in citizen participation that on Earth had been dismissed long ago as just another utopian idea that was simply too unwieldy in practice. But it had briefly flourished in the little goldfish bowl of the colony city; every citizen could put a motion to change any aspect of governance providing he could enlist a quorum of supporters, and the motion would be enforced by the appropriate moderating committee if a sufficient majority voted it through.

  It was a horrible example of how lazy and misguided rulers, who should have been elevated above the mob by virtue of breeding or ability, devolve their natural obligations to ignorance, prejudice and the levelling force of popular taste. Imagine the time wasted in uniformed debate over trivial issues, the constant babble of prejudices masquerading as opinion or even fact! It had been a society shaped not by taste or intelligence but by a kind of directionless, mindless flailing reminiscent of Darwinian evolution. We have mastered evolution, and we must be masters of the evolution of our civilisation, too. Yet Paris's nascent technodemocracy had thrown up one or two interesting ideas, and one of these was its method of capital punishment.

  Like all democracies, it mistakenly believed in the essential perfectibility of all men, and so practised rehabilitation of its criminals rather than punishment. But even it had to admit that there were some criminals who, by genetic inheritance, parental conditioning or choice, were irredeemable. As thrifty as the rest of the energy- and resource-poor colonies of the outer solar system, Paris did not waste material and labour in constructing prisons for these wretches; nor did it waste their potential for labour by executing them. Instead, they were lobotomized and fitted with transducer and control chips, transforming psychopaths into useful servants, meat extensions of the control systems that maintained the parklands and wilderness and farms of the city.

  The gardener Demi had summoned from his hiding place had obviously been an untweaked immigrant, for he was no taller than me. Like the gardener I had encountered when wandering the parkland like a lorn, lovesick fool, hoping to encounter Demi Lacombe, he was sturdy, bare-chested and bare-foot, his white trousers ragged, his shaven head scarred by the operation which had transformed him, encircled by a coppery headband into which was woven a high-gain broad band antenna. Through this he was linked to both his fellows and the computers which controlled the climate of the parkland, its streams, its hidden machines, and even its animals, which all were fitted with control chips too. Several of the small brown birds that had fallen from the ferns fluttered about his head, calling in high excited voices, unnervingly like those of small children, before flying away over the edge of the meadow. With a rustling and snapping of canes, a pygmy mammoth emerged from the roses, its long russet hair combed straight and gleaming with oils, its trunk flexed at its broad forehead as the sensitive pink tip snuffled the air. Tools and boxes hung on its flanks, attached to a rope harness.

  The gardener scarcely glanced at me; his attention was on Demi Lacombe. I thought I saw a look pass between them, crackling with a shared emotion. Desire, I thought, and in that moment unknowingly sealed her fate, for I was suddenly, violently, unreasonably jealous of the poor child of nature she had summoned, believing that Cris DeHon's malicious insinuations may have been right all along.

  "He knows me," Demi Lacombe said softly. "I can speak with him."

  "Anyone can speak to them," I said. "I understand they are programmed to understand a few simple commands. But mostly they keep away from the people they serve. It's better that way."

  Demi Lacombe smiled and touched her left temple with her forefinger. "I mean that I can truly talk with him. I have an implant similar to his, so that I can access the higher functions of the machines which control the habitat. Through them, I can talk with him. Watch, Fredo! I can send him away as easily as I summoned him."

  She made no signal, but the gardener turned and parted the canes of the roses and vanished into them. The mammoth trotted after him. It was like magic, and I briefly wondered what else she might have commanded the brute to do, before crushing the vile image as a man might crush a loathsome worm beneath the heel of his boot.

  Demi said, "He showed me a way out of here that Dev and his troopers don't know about."

  I laughed, a trifle excessively I fear. I was not quite myself. Roses in a wild garden, a woman trapped by her own beauty, a compliant monster. I said, "Really, Demi. A secret passage?"

  "A stream was diverted when the layout of the parkland was redesigned twenty years ago. Its sink pipe wasn't sealed up because it lies at the bottom of the lake, down there." She stepped gracefully to the edge of the meadow. A light wind blew up the face of the cliff, stirring her long, silvery hair as she pointed downwards; she looked like a warrior from some pre-technological myth.

  I shuffled carefully to her side, and looked down at the long, narrow sleeve of black water that was wedged at the bottom of the ravine, between the base of the cliff on which we stood and the wall of bare sheetrock that rose in huge bolted slabs towards the foot of one of the tent's diamond panes, high above us.

  Demi said, "The pipe is flooded, but the gardeners can give me one of the air masks they wear when they clean out the bulk storage tanks. There's a pressure gate that must be opened – it fell closed when the main dome was blown. Then I'll be outside."

  "It sounds dangerous. More dangerous than Dev Veeder."

  "I've tested the pressure gate. I know it works. But I need help getting across the main part of the city." She had turned to me, her face shining with excitement. How young she was, how lovely! Her scent was very strong at that moment; I could have drowned in it quite happily. She said, "I need your help, Fredo. Will you help me?"

  For a moment, I quite forgot my loathsome spasm of jealousy. "Of course," I said. "Of course I will, my dear Demi. How could I refuse the plea of a maiden in distress?"

  5.

  We made our plans as we walked back through the shaggy exuberances of the cypresses towards the lights and noise of the party. We took care to return to it separately, from different directions, but still my heart gave a little le
ap when I saw Dev Veeder moving purposefully through knots of chattering people, hauling himself hand over hand along one of the waist-high tethers that webbed the lawn. He was making straight for Demi, and when he reached her she put her hand on his shoulder and her lovely, delicate face close to his and talked quietly into his ear. He nodded and smiled, and she smiled too, my cunning minx.

  "Now you can tell me all about it."

  I swung around so quickly that I would have floated above the heads of the chattering party-goers if Cris DeHon had not caught my wrist. The neuter's fingers were long and delicate, and fever-hot. It wore a white blouson slashed here and there to show flashes of scarlet lining, as if it were imitating the victim of some primitive and bloody rite. Its hair was dyed a crisp white, and stiffened in little spikes.

  "Tell me all about it," DeHon said. "What plot's afoot? Is it love?"

  I smiled into the neuter's sharp pale face. "Don't be ridiculous."

  "A marriage of summer and winter is not unknown. And if you're half the distinguished scholar you claim to be, you'd be quite a catch for a struggling academic from the most backward and impoverished country of the Alliance."

  "She was showing me some of the wonders of our gardens," I said, shaking free of DeHon's hot grasp. "This city is famous for its gene wizards."

  DeHon smiled craftily, looking sidelong through the crowd at Demi Lacombe and Dev Veeder. "I don't believe it for a minute, but I won't spoil the fun. The curtain has risen; the play has commenced. For your sake, I hope Dev Veeder will be in a good temper when he discovers your little plot."

  The night passed in a daze of half-sleeping, half-waking. I had never slept well in Dione's light gravity, and what sleep I had that night was full of murky dreams coloured by fear and desire.

  The next morning, I drank an unaccustomed second cup of coffee at the makeshift café and, when Lavet Corso finally arrived, I instructed him to fly us to the coordinates that Demi Lacombe had given me.

  He stared at me insolently, the seams in his face tightening around his mouth. "That's nothing but a park, boss."

  "Nevertheless, that is where we will go."

  And so we did, after a brief argument which I quite enjoyed, and which did more to wake me than the coffee did. I was beginning to suspect that Corso's protests were ritual, like the bargaining one must do in a souk when making a purchase. Now that the game was afoot, I was in a careless mood of anticipation, and did not complain at the pitch and yaw of the airframe as Corso slipped it through updraughts, spiralling down to the brown and black wreckage of the park.

  We swooped in low over the tops of skeletal trees that raised their white arms high above a wasteland of deliquescing vegetation. The stink was horrible. An eye of water gleamed in the shadow of a low cliff of raw basalt, and a small figure stepped from a cleft at the foot of the cliff and semaphored its arms. A flood of relief and renewed desire turned my poor foolish heart quite over. I tapped Corso's shoulder, but he had already seen her. The wings of the airframe boomed as they shed air, and we skidded across a black carpet of mulch.

  Demi Lacombe floated down from the cleft, from which a little water trickled into what had once been a lake, and ran to us with huge loping strides, sleek in silvery skinthins that hugged every contour of her slim body. An airmask and a small tank dangled from one hand. Her wet hair was snarled around her beautiful face, made yet more beautiful by the brilliant smile she turned on me.

  Corso gave a low whistle, and I said sharply, "Enough of that. Remember your poor dead wife."

  "You're late," Demi said breathlessly.

  "My guide has a bad sense of time."

  "It doesn't matter. Well, I'm ready. Let's go!"

  "You have not brought . . . more suitable attire?"

  Demi laughed, and cocked her hip. The silvery material was moulded tightly to every centimetre of her body. "What's wrong? You don't like this?"

  I liked it very much indeed, of course, and it was obvious that Corso did too. He was cranking up the prop, to give enough kinetic energy to assist takeoff. When I told him sharply to hurry up, he mumbled something about overloading.

  "Nonsense. You hardly expect my passenger to walk. Look lively! Every moment we stay here risks discovery."

  "I didn't sign up for adventure," Corso said. He straightened, with one hand to the small of his back. "Maybe you better tell me what this is all about, boss."

  "You just get us to the warrens," I said.

  "No," Demi said, "he's right." She stepped up to Corso and touched his arm and said, "You're Lavet Corso, aren't you? Professor-Doctor Graves has told me so much about the help you've given him."

  "And who are you?"

  "Dr. Demi Lacombe. I'm here to help reconstruct your wonderful ecosystem, and I want to talk to Yagi Hakiaopulos."

  "Really," Corso said, but I could see that he was weakening. "Why not have your boyfriend haul him in?"

  "My boyfriend?"

  "Colonel Veeder. You are the woman he's been escorting everywhere."

  "Well, that's true, but he isn't my boyfriend, and that's why I need your help."

  Corso locked the prop's winding mechanism and said, "You can try and talk to Yagi if you like, but you'll find he's immune to your charms. Climb on board now, both of you. Let's see if I can get this higher than the trees."

  Demi looked at the flimsy airframe and said, "I thought it would be safer to walk."

  "Not at all," I said. "It would take several hours, and we would be bound to encounter more than one of the killing machines, and they would report straight back to the security forces. But no one bothers to watch where we go."

  "You had better be right, boss."

  The airframe jinked across the rotten black carpet and bounded into the air. Demi, seated behind me, screamed loudly and happily. She had put her arms around my waist; the pressure of her body against my back, and her musky scent, almost as strong as the cabbage-stink of the rotten vegetation, awakened a part of me that had been sleeping for quite some time.

  Although Corso was pedalling hard, the airframe clambered through the middle air of the dome with the grace of a pregnant dragonfly. I leaned back and pointed out to Demi the remains of barricades across the avenues, the ruined hulk of the Bourse, like a shattered wedding cake, where the last of those citizens who had been in or near to pressure suits when the dome had been blown open had made their final stand. Once, I saw the silver twinkle of a killing machine stalking down the middle of the Avenue des Étoiles; Corso must have seen it too, for he veered the airframe away, scudding in towards one of the flat rooftops clustered around the edge of the dome.

  The place was an automated distribution warehouse of some kind, and although it would have been cleared of any bodies, the red-lit echoing emptiness of its storage areas and ramps was eerie. Demi kept close to me as Corso led us down a narrow street. I told her about Marisa Bassi's early days in Paris, Dione, when as an immigrant he had worked in one of these warehouses, rising quickly to become its supervisor, then moving on to become a partner in an import-export business of dubious legality, where he had made enough money to buy his citizenship.

  "And two years after that he became a councillor, and then the war came. The rest will be history, once I have written it."

  "Your history, maybe," Corso said.

  "All history belongs to the winners," I said, "so it will be your history too. If you know anything about Bassi, now's the time to tell me."

  "Nothing you need to know, boss," Corso said, with his maddening disingenuousness.

  Marisa Bassi had been living in this semi-industrial sector when the war began. Imagine his small, sparsely furnished room that evening, the sounds of the street drifting up through a window open to catch any stray breeze: a tram rattling through a nearby intersection; the conversation of people strolling about as the suspensor lights dimmed overhead; the smell of food from the cafés and restaurants. Bassi was sitting in a chair, flicking through page after page on his slate – he hated
the paperwork that went with his job, and was especially impatient with it now that the first move towards independence had been made – when he heard a distant thump, like a huge door closing. At the same moment the suspensor lights flickered, came back on. Bassi looked out of the window and saw people running, all in one direction, running with huge loping strides like gazelles fleeing a lion's rush. His heart felt hollow for a moment, then filled with a rush of adrenalin. He called out to someone he recognised, and the man stopped and shouted up that it was the parliament building, someone had blown it up.

  "It's war!" the man added, holding up a little scrap of TV film. Let's say that he was a Sicilian too, Bep Martino or some such rough hewn name, a construction worker. He and Bassi played chess and drank rough red wine under the chestnut trees in the little park at the end of the street.

  "Wait there!" Bassi said. "I'm coming with you!"

  It seemed that most of the population of Paris had converged on the ruins of the parliament building. It had neatly collapsed on itself, its flat roof draped broken-backed across the pancaked remains of its three storeys. People had organised themselves into teams and were carefully picking through the wreckage, chains of men and women passing chunks of fractured concrete from top to bottom, stopping every now and again while someone listened for the calls of those who had been buried. Living casualties were carried off to hospital; the dead lay in a neat row under orange blankets on the trampled lawns.

  Followed by his friend, Marisa Bassi restlessly stalked all the way around the perimeter of the building. Five killed, eighteen injured, a doctor told him, and probably more still to be found in the rubble.

  Bep Martino appraised the ruins with a critical eye and said that it was a professional job. "Charges placed just so, the walls went out and the floors fell straight down. Boom!" Every so often, he flattened out the TV on his palm and gave a report on what it was saying. Earth's three major powers had made good their threat, and were sending out what they called an expeditionary force to quell revolutionary elements in their outer colonies.