by Paul McAuley
"Note the possessive," Bassi said.
"Well, we voted to suspend payments," Martino said, "so I guess we're all revolutionaries now."
"This is our moment," Bassi said.
He stopped to talk with another councillor, a third generation tweak, very tall, and thin as a rail. Stooping, he told Bassi that the air conditioning had failed because of a virus, and software faults had shut down the fusion reactors; the city was running on battery power.
"We expected all this," Bassi said impatiently. "It is only a warning. We will get the systems back on line, we will clear this up. We will bury our dead and swear on their graves that they will not have died in vain."
He said this last loudly, for the benefit of the people who were gathering around the two councillors, felt a gleeful kick of adrenalin, and added, because he liked the phrase, "This is our moment."
"We did not expect them to send soldiers," the tall councillor said gloomily.
"We'll fight if we have to," Bassi said, his face burning with a sudden self-righteous anger. "We built this city; no soldiers can take it from us."
People were clapping and shouting all around him now. The councillor took his elbow and said quietly, "Be careful of the mob, Bassi. It'll eat you up, if you let it."
Surely someone would have told him something like that, but with the taste of concrete dust in his throat and his blood up, Marisa Bassi would have shrugged off any advice. It was not a time for moderation or conciliation. That was what he told the city's prime committee a day later, as they debated their response to the threats made by the Three Powers Alliance, and on that day at least, the council was with him, for it agreed to declare a state of war.
The stage was set. Soon, Marisa Bassi would dominate it.
The sector where he had lived was dead now; his entire city was dead. Corso, Demi Lacombe and I crept like mice in a deserted house along a walkway that plunged through the dome's rocky skirt (its diamond panes arching high above us, as if we were microbes trapped in a fly's eye). It was one of the many ways into the warrens where the survivors of the city's siege had hidden, walkways and passages and shafts linking insulated dormitories or hydroponic tunnels. One of the walkways actually ran a little way across the naked face of the ridge, and gave views to the northwest of the dark, rumpled floor of Romulus crater. The moon was so small that the far side of crater was well below the horizon, and we seemed to be standing on a high, curved cliff looking out across a sea frozen in the midst of a violent tempest. Saturn's banded disc of salmon and saffron was tipped high in the black sky, the narrow arc of his rings shining like polished steel.
There was the landing platform, two shuttles standing on top of it like toys on a cakestand. There were the orange slashes and dashes and squiggles, like ribbons of cuneiform code, of the vacuum organism fields. As I pointed these out to Demi, a huge trembling and translucent jellyfish rose up from the sharply drawn line of the close horizon, its skirts glittering in the harsh sunlight even as it began to lose shape and fall back towards the plain. It was where many of the surviving population of Paris had been put to work, excavating fragments of the iron-rich bolide whose impact had formed the twin craters. I had not finished explaining this when another jellyfish rose, writhing, into the sunlight, and a moment later the tremor of the first explosion passed through the walkway.
I told Demi, "It is an open-cast mine. They must be making it wider or deeper. The ice is so cold it is hard as rock, and that's why they must use explosives."
"Means two or three more people will die out there today," Corso said. "Or get badly hurt."
"Don't be impertinent," I told him. "It's important work, necessary work. The metals will aid in the reconstruction of your city."
"I only mean that Yagi might suddenly be too busy to have time to talk to the young lady, boss," Corso said.
"Keep a civil tongue in your head, Mr. Corso, or you might find yourself working in the mines. Or back on corpse detail."
"It would most likely be the mines," Corso said, "seeing as they've mostly cleared away the dead."
We passed through an antiquated airlock, a sequence of diamond slabs which had to be cranked open and shut by hand, into the noise and squalor and stink of refugee town. It had once been part of the city's farm system, first growing raw organics in the form of unicellular algae, and then, after vacuum organisms had been developed, cultivating fruits and vegetables for the luxury market.
Now, the wide, low-roofed tunnels, mercilessly lit by piped sunlight, divided by panels of extruded plant waste or pressed rock-dust, by blankets or sheets hung from wires and plastic string, were the crude dormitory quarters of the thousand or so surviving Parisians. Although many were off working two- or three-day shifts at the mines or helping to restore the vacuum farms (the city's vacuum organisms had been killed by prions that had catalysed a debilitating change in their photosynthetic pigments, and were slowly being stripped out and replaced), the wretched place seemed noisy and crowded. Everything was damp, and the hot, heavy air was ripe with the smell of sewage and body odour. A dubious brown liquid trickled under the raised slats of the walkway down which Corso led Demi and me. He walked several paces ahead of us, with a self-consciousness I'd not seen before, as he led us to the hospital where Yagi Hakaiopulos worked.
People were sitting at the openings of their crudely partitioned spaces. A few looked up and, with dull eyes, watched us go by. Old men and women mostly; one crone dandled a fretting baby whose face was encrusted with bloody mucus.
"Poor thing," Demi whispered to me.
War is cruel, I almost said, but her look of compassion was genuine and my sentiment was not. I had been here many times before to interview the unfortunate survivors about Marisa Bassi, and I confess that my heart had been hardened to the squalor to which their reckless actions had consigned them.
The hospital was another converted agricultural tunnel, beyond yet another set of tiresome mechanically operated doors. The reception area, where a dozen patients waited on stretchers or a medley of plastic chairs, was walled off by scratched and battered transparent plastic scarred with the lumpy seams of hasty welds. Corso talked with a weary woman in a traditional white smock, and was allowed through into the main part of the hospital, where beds stood in neat rows in merciful dimness – in there, the piped sunlight was filtered through beta cloth tacked over the openings in the low ceiling.
Most of the medical orderlies were missionary Redeemers, grey-skinned, tall and skinny, wrapped in bandages like so many of their patients, or Egyptian mummies come to life. They all had the same face. There were many badly burned patients, immobilized inside moulded plastic casings while damaged skin and muscles were reconstructed. A few people shuffled about, often on crutches; many were missing limbs. Corso passed between the beds into the obscure dimness at the far end of the hospital, and within a minute returned, leading a stooped old man in a white smock spattered with blood stains. As they came into the reception area, I understood what Corso had meant when he had said that Demi's charms might not work, for Yagi Hakaiopulos was blind.
The old gene wizard was congenitally sightless, in fact, having been born with an undeveloped optic chiasma, but he could see, after a fashion. Corso commandeered the hospital's single office, and stuck three tiny cameras to its walls; Yagi Hakaiopulos had an implant which transmitted the camera pictures as the sensation of needles on his skin, and so gave him a crude analog of vision. All this Yagi Hakaiopulos explained while Corso set up the cameras.
"It hurts to see," he said, smiling at us one by one when the system had been switched on, "which is why I do not use it most of the time. Also, I see little more than shapes and movement, and so for my work it is more convenient to use my other senses."
"A blind doctor!" I exclaimed. "Now I have seen everything."
"I am not a qualified doctor, sir," Yagi Hakaiopulos said, "but in these terrible times even I may be of some help." He turned his face in Demi's direction. "I understa
nd that you have come to talk with me, my dear. I'm flattered, of course."
"I'm honoured that you would interrupt your work to talk with me," Demi said.
"There's not much to be done now, except try and keep those well enough to recover from dying of an opportune infection, and to nurse those who are too ill to recover through their last days. And the Redeemers are far better at that than I am. You," he said, turning his face approximately in my direction, "I believe that you are the historian. The one who goes around asking people about Marisa Bassi."
"Did you know him?"
"No, not really. I had been long retired and out of the public eye when the war began, and I could hardly help in the defence of the city. I did meet him once, after his escape from the invaders, in the last hours of our poor city. He came to the hospital – not this one, but the one which lies in ruins in the main dome – to be treated for the gunshot wound he had received, but he was only there for a handful of minutes. A good voice he had. Warm and quiet, but it could fill a room if he let it."
"He was wounded in the side," I said.
"Yes," the old man, Yagi Hakaiopulos said, and touched the left side of his stained white smock, just under his ribs.
The dark, mottled skin of his face was tight on the skull beneath, his teeth large and square and yellow, his white hair combed sideways across a bald pate. He had an abstracted yet serene air, as if he was happy with the world just as he found it.
I said, "Some claim that he later died of his wound."
"I would not know, Professor-Doctor Graves, for I did not treat him." He turned his smile to Demi and added, "But I believe you have come here to talk of the future, not the past. I am afraid that I do not give much thought to the future – there's very little of it left for me."
"I am here to learn," Demi said, and suddenly knelt down in front of him like a supplicant, and took his hands in hers. She said, in a small, quiet voice. "I do want to learn. That is, if you will allow it."
The old man allowed her to bring his fingers to her face. He traced her lips, the bridge of her nose, the downy curve of her cheek. He smiled and said, "I haven't had a pupil for many years, and besides, I am long out of practise. My small contribution to the greening of the city was made long ago."
"Knowledge of the past can help remake the future," Demi said, with fierce ardour.
"Many of my people would say that the city should be destroyed," Yagi Hakaiopulos said.
"They certainly did their best," I said.
"Yes, indeed. At the end, many were possessed by the idea that they should destroy their city rather than let it fall into the hands of their enemies. They knew that the war was lost, and that if the city survived it would no longer be their city."
"But it will be," Demi insisted, "once it has been rebuilt."
"No, my dear. It will be like a doppleganger of a dear dead friend, living in that dead friend's house, wearing their clothes."
Demi sat back, and I was aware once more of the way her slim, full-breasted body moved inside the tight fabric of her silvery skinthins. She said, "Do you believe that?"
"I do not believe that the great, delicate systems we engineered, the animals and plants we made, can be brought back as they once were. Perhaps something equally wonderful might rise in its place, but I wouldn't know. I'm an old man, the last of the gene wizards. All of my colleagues are dead, from old age, from the war . . ."
"I have studied the parkland in the diplomatic quarter," Demi said. "I have talked with its gardeners, walked its paths . . . I think I understand a small part of what this city once possessed."
Yagi Hakaiopulos breathed deeply, then reached out and briefly caressed the side of her face. He said, "You truly want to do this thing?"
"I want to learn," Demi said.
"If you can endure an old man's ramblings, I will do my best to tell something of how it was done."
They talked a long time. An hour, two. I sat outside the office while they talked, and drank weak, lukewarm green tea, with Corso fretting beside me. He was worried that Dev Veeder would learn about our little escapade.
"Go and see your daughter," I suggested at last, tired of his complaints.
"She's in school, and her teacher is this fierce old woman who does not like her classes disturbed. It's okay for you, boss. Veeder can't touch you. But if he finds that I brought his girlfriend here —"
"She isn't his girlfriend."
"He thinks she is."
"That is true. She is cursed by her beauty, I think."
"She's dangerous. You be careful, boss."
"What nonsense, Mr. Corso. I'm nearly as old as your friend Yagi Hakaiopulos."
"He's a great man, boss. And she got him telling her his secrets almost straight away. It's spooky."
"Unlike most of you, I think he wants the city rebuilt."
"Spooky," Corso said again. "And she said she was talking with the gardeners?"
"Oh, that. She has had transducers or the like implanted in her brain." I touched my temples. The knife-blade of a headache had inserted itself in the socket of my left eye. The air in the warrens was bad, heavy with carbon dioxide and no doubt laced with a vile mixture of pollutants, and the brightly lit reception area was very noisy. I said, "She told me that she can interface with the computers that control the climate of the parklands and so on. And through them, she can, in a fashion, communicate with the gardeners. There is no magic about it, nothing sinister."
"If you say so, boss," Corso said. He fell into a kind of sulk, and barely spoke as he led us back through the warrens to the main part of the city, and the rooftop where he had left the airframe.
6.
Dev Veeder found me the next morning at the café, where I was waiting for Lavet Corso to make an appearance. The colonel came alone, sat opposite me and waved off the old man who came out of the half-collapsed guardhouse to ask what he wanted. He seemed amiable enough, and asked me several innocuous questions about the progress of my work.
"I find this Bassi intriguing," he said. "A shame he's dead."
"I hope I might bring his memories to life."
"Hardly the same thing, Professor-Doctor Graves, if you don't mind my saying so."
"Not at all. I am quite aware of the limitations of my technique, but alas, there is no better way."
"It's interesting. He was a fool, an amateur soldier who chose to stand and fight in a hopeless situation, yet he was able to rally the entire population of the city to his cause. But perhaps he was not really their leader at all. Perhaps he was merely a figurehead raised up by the mob."
"He was certainly no figurehead," I said. "The assassination of his fellow members of the government showed that he was capable of swift and ruthless action. He was tireless in rallying the morale of those who manned the barricades – indeed, when the invasion of Paris began, he was captured at an outlying barricade."
"The sole survivor amongst a rabble of women and old men. They were fighting against fully armoured troopers with hand weapons, industrial lasers and crude bombs."
"And he escaped, and went back to fight."
Dev Veeder thought about that, and admitted, "I suppose I do like him for that."
"You do?"
Dev Veeder was staring at me thoughtfully. His dark, almost black eyes were hooded and intense. I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was seeing through my skin. He said, "Marisa Bassi didn't have to escape. He didn't have to fight on."
"He would have been executed."
"Not at all, Professor-Doctor. Once captured, he could have sued for peace. If he truly was the leader of the mob, they would have obeyed him. He would have saved many lives; some might have even been grateful. The Three Powers Alliance wouldn't have been able to install him as head of a puppet government, of course, but they could have pensioned him off, returned him to wherever it was on Earth he was born."
"Sicily."
"There you are. He could have opened a pizza parlour, become mayor of some small t
own, made a woman fat and happy with a pack of bambinos."
"The last is unlikely, Colonel."
"But he stuck to the cause he had adopted. He went back. He finished the job. He may have been an amateur and a fool, Professor-Doctor Graves, but he had a soldier's backbone."
"And caused, as you said, many unnecessary deaths, and much unnecessary destruction."
I gestured at the devastation spread beyond the foot of the plaza's escalators: the rotting parks; the streets still choked with rubble; the shattered buildings. Dev Veeder did not look at it, but continued to stare at me with a dark, unfathomable intensity.
I made a show of peering at the empty air above the rooftops of the city and said, "My wretched guide is late."
"He'll come. He has no choice. This talk interests me, Professor-Doctor. We haven't talked like this for a while."
"Well, you've been busy."
"I have?"
"With your new prisoners. And of course, escorting Demi."
"Dr. Lacombe."
I felt heat rise in my face. "Yes, of course. Dr. Lacombe."
"Tell me, Professor-Doctor Graves, do you think that Marisa Bassi was one of your great men?"
"His people – those who survive – think that he was."
"His people. Yes. Do you know, many of them cry out his name in the heat of questioning?"
"I don't see —"
"Usually, those subjected to hot questioning scream for their mothers at the end. When they're emptied, when they've given up everything. Huge bloodied babies shitting and pissing themselves, unable to move because we've broken every major bone, bawling for the only unfailing comfort in all the world. But these people, they cry out for Bassi." Dev Veeder's right hand made a fist and softly struck the cradle of his left. He wore black gloves of fine, soft leather. One rumour was that they were vat-grown human skin. Another that they were not vat-grown. He said, "Can you imagine it, Professor-Doctor? You've been broken so badly you know you're going to die. You're flayed open. You've given up everything you've ever loved. Except for this one thing. Your love of the man who led you in your finest hour. You don't give him up. No, in your last wretched moment, you call out to him. You think he'll come and help you."
