Stories From The Quiet War

by Paul McAuley

  Sky Bolofo was a hacker who had filled the quantum processor of the large, red-framed spex that perched on his nose with all kinds of talents and tricks. Right now, he had a look of focussed concentration, and the left lens of his spex was silvered over as it displayed something to him. He said, "No problem. My face recognition program picked him up straight away, and right now I'm looking at his public page. His name is Ahlgren Rees. He lives right here in the old city, he sells herbs —"

  "I can see that," Mark said. "What else?"

  "He also fixes up pets," Sky said.

  "What about his private files?" Mark said. "What about the real dirt?"

  "No problem," Sky said complacently, and started tapping his fingers on the chest of his jumper – he was using the virtual keyboard of his spex, which read the positioning of his fingers from the silver rings he wore on fingers and thumbs.

  Jack Miyata, whose idea it had been to visit the produce market, had the sinking feeling that Mark had spied an opportunity for some serious mischief. He said, "The man sells herbs. There's nothing especially interesting or weird in that."

  "If he isn't weird," Mark said, "why is he living with the tweaks? He's either crazy, or he's up to no good."

  The man in question sat behind a small table at the edge of the market, selling bundles of fresh herbs and a dozen different types of herb tea whose virtues were advertised by handlettered signs. He was definitely an incomer. Native Xambans who'd been born and raised in Rhea's weak gravity were tall and skinny, and most of them were Nordic, with pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. The herbalist was a compactly-built man of indeterminate middle-age (in the third decade of the twenty-fourth century, this meant anything between forty and a hundred), not much taller than Sky Bolofo, and had skin the colour of old teak. He was also completely hairless. He didn't even have eyelashes. As far as Jack was concerned, that was the only unusual thing about him, but Mark had other ideas.

  Jack had brought his two friends to the produce market because he thought it was a treasure house of marvels, but Mark and Sky thought it was smelly, horribly crowded, and, quite frankly, revoltingly primitive. When makers could spin anything you wanted from yeast and algae, why would anyone want to eat the meat of real live animals like fish and chickens and dwarfed goats, especially as they would have to kill them first? Kill and gut them and Ghod knew what else. As they wandered between stalls and displays of strange flowers and fruits and vegetables, red and green and golden-brown streamers of dried waterweed, tanks of fish and shrimp, caged birds and rats, and bottle vivariums in which stag beetles lumbered like miniature rhinoceroses through jungles of moss and fern, Mark and Sky made snide comments about the weird people and the weirder things they were selling, pretended to retch at especially gross sights, and generally made it clear that this was very far from their idea of fun.

  "Do you really think I want to know anything at all about people who eat things like that?" Mark had said to Jack, pointing to a wire cage containing rats spotted like leopards or striped like tigers.

  "I think they keep them as pets," Jack had said, feeling the tips of his ears heat up in embarrassment because the tall, slender woman who owned the stall was definitely looking at them.

  "I had a pet once," Mark had said, meeting the woman's gaze. "It was a cute little monkey that could take a shower all by itself. Quite unlike these disease-ridden vermin."

  Which had made Sky crack up, and Jack blush even more.

  The three of them, Jack, Mark and Sky, were all the same age, sixteen, went to the same school, and lived in the same apartment complex in the new part of Xamba, the largest city on Rhea, Saturn's second largest moon. Their parents were engineers, security personnel, and diplomats who had come there to help in the reconstruction and expansion of the Outer Colonies after the Quiet War. Unlike most city states in the Saturn system, Xamba had remained neutral during the Quiet War. Afterwards, the Three Powers Alliance which now governed every city and orbital habitat in the Outer Colonies had settled the bulk of its administration on peaceful, undamaged Rhea, and had built a new city above the old.

  Fifteen years later, the city was still growing. Jack's parents, Mariko and Davis, were thermal engineers who were helping to construct a plant to tap the residual heat of the moon's core and provide power for a hundred new apartment complexes, factories, and farms. They'd moved to Rhea just two months ago. In that short time, Jack had explored much of the old and new parts of the city, and had also completed a pressure suit training course and taken several long hikes through the untouched wilderness in the southern half of the big crater in which Xamba was located, and from which it took its name. He'd even climbed to the observatory at the top of the crater's big central peak. Although both Mark and Sky had been living here much longer, like many incomers neither of them had so much as stepped foot on the surface of the moon, or even visited the old part of the city. Jack had been eager to show them the produce market, his favourite part of old Xamba, but now he was feeling miserable because they had been so rude about it. He had been about to give up and suggest they leave when Mark had spotted the herbalist.

  "That's obviously a front," Mark said. "How's it going, Sky?"

  Sky, sounding distracted and distant, said he was working on it.

  "Maybe he's a spy. Selling herbs is his cover what he's actually doing is keeping watch for terrorists and so-called freedom fighters. Or maybe he's a double agent. Maybe he's gone over to the side of the tweaks," Mark said, beginning to get into his little fantasy. "Maybe he's feeding our side false information to sabotage the reconstruction. There was that blow-out at the spaceport last month. They said it was an accident, but maybe someone sabotaged an airlock and let the vacuum in."

  "Air escapes into a vacuum," Jack said, "not the other way around."

  "Who cares which direction the vacuum flows?" Mark said carelessly.

  "And anyway, they said it was an accident."

  Mark raised his eyebrows. They were thick, and met over the bridge of his nose. He was a stocky boy with pale skin, jet black hair and a perpetual scowl who looked a lot like his policeman father. His mother was in the police too, in charge of security at the spaceport. "Of course they said that, but it doesn't mean it really was an accident. What's the word, Sky? What is this fellow hiding?"

  "There's a problem," Sky said. His fingers were fluttering frantically over his chest, and he had a look of such intense concentration that he seemed to be cross-eyed.

  "Talk to me," Mark said.

  "He has really heavy security behind his public page. I had to back out in a hurry, before I tripped an alarm. Right now I'm making sure I didn't leave anything that could lead back to me."

  Mark said, "So what you're saying is that Ahlgren Rees – if that's his real name – is hiding something."

  Sky shrugged.

  Mark said, his eyes shining with sudden excitement, "I bet you thought I was kidding, but all along I had a feeling there was something wrong with this guy. It's what the Blob – " that was his nickname for his rotund and none too bright father – "calls gut instinct. My gut told me that Ahlgren Rees is a wrong one, my man Sky has just confirmed it, and now it's up to all of us to find out why. It's our duty."

  Jack should have told Mark that he wasn't going to have anything to do with his silly fantasy, but his need for his new friends to like him (which was why he'd brought them to the market in the first place) was stronger than his conscience. Also, it was the school holidays, and his parents were spending most of their time at the site of the new power plant, a hundred kilometres northwest of the city, and were only at home on weekends, so he was pretty much on his own for most of the time. There was no way that the herb seller, Ahlgren Rees was either a spy or a criminal, so what harm could simply following him about actually do?

  Jack spent much of the next three days following Ahlgren Rees, sometimes with Mark, sometimes on his own (Sky Bolofo, spooked by the experience of running up against Ahlgren Rees's electronic wat
chdogs, had made a weak excuse about having to do some extra tuition for the upcoming new school year). It wasn't hard; in fact, it was a lot of fun. The herbalist spent much of the day at the stall in the produce market, or tending the little garden where he grew his herbs, or simply sitting outside the door of his apartment, a one-room efficiency on a terrace directly above the market, drinking tea or homemade lemonade and watching people go by, but he also liked to take long walks, and every time Jack followed him, his route was different. Jack saw more of the old city in those three days than he had in the past two months.

  The old part of the city was buried inside the eastern rimwall of the huge crater, and some of its chambers had diamond endwalls facing what was generally reckoned to be one of the most classically beautiful views in all of Saturn's family of moons, across slumped terraces and fans of ice rubble towards the crater's central peak which rose up at the edge of the close, curved horizon. Inside the old city's chambers, apartments and shops and cafes and workshops and gardens were piled on top of each other in steep, terraced cliffs, linked by steep paths, chutes, cableways and chairlifts to the long narrow parks of trees and lawns and skinny lakes that were laid out on the chamber floors. There was no shortage of water on Rhea, which was essentially a ball of ice one and a half thousand kilometres in diameter wrapped around a small rocky core. A series of long, narrow lakes looped between several of the chambers, busy with skiffs and canoes paddling between floating islands and rafts and pontoons, and the main pathways were crowded with cycles and pedicabs and swarms of pedestrians.

  The old part of Xamba was a busy, bustling place, and Jack had no problem blending into the crowds as he trailed Ahlgren Rees through walkways, parks, markets, malls, and plazas, even though most of its inhabitants were tall, skinny Outers, genetically engineered so that they could comfortably live in microgravity without the medical implants that Jack and every other incomer needed in order to stop their bones turning to chalk lace, their hearts swelling like pumped-up basketballs with excess fluid, and a host of other problems. Jack even plucked up the courage to chat with the woman behind the counter of the café where Ahlgren Rees ate his lunch and breakfast, which is where he'd learned that the herbalist was originally from Greater Brazil, where he had worked in the emergency relief services as a paramedic, and had moved to Rhea two years ago. He seemed well-liked. He always stopped to talk to his neighbours when he met them as he went about his errands, had long conversations with people who stopped at his stall. He was a regular at the café, and at several bars in various parts of the city. His only money seemed to come from selling herbs and herb tea and fixing broken pets.

  "Which must mean that he has some other source of income," Mark said.

  "Maybe he has some kind of private income."

  "He has secrets, is what he has. Ahlgren Rees. We don't even know if that's his real name."

  The two boys were leaning at café counter in the produce market, sipping fruit juice from bulbs. Ahlgren Rees was sitting at his stall twenty metres down the aisle, reading a book (books printed on paper were a famous tradition in old Xamba), completely oblivious to the fact that the two boys were watching him and talking about him, licking his thumb every time he had to turn a page.

  Jack said, "He's a herbalist. He works at his stall. He works in his garden. He goes for long walks. Sometimes he visits people and fixes up their pets. If he has any secrets, I'm missing something."

  He was hoping that this would be the end of it, but Mark had a determined look, a jut of his heavy jaw like a bulldog gripping a bone it isn't willing to let go.

  "What we need to do," Mark said, "is get into his apartment. I bet he has all kinds of things hidden there."

  Jack tried to talk him out of it, but Mark was determined. Jack was pretty sure that he didn't really believe that Ahlgren Rees was a spy, but it had become a matter of pride to find out who he really was and why he had come to Xamba to live amongst the Outers. And Jack had to admit that the past three days of following the man had sharpened his curiosity too, and eventually they managed to hash out a plan that more or less satisfied both of them.

  The next day was Monday, and the produce market would be closed. Mark told Jack that he would have to intercept Alhgren Rees at the café where he ate breakfast every day, and keep him occupied. Meanwhile, Mark would break into his apartment.

  Jack said, "How are you going to do that?"

  "Police tradecraft," Mark said. "Don't worry about it. Just make sure you keep him busy."

  Although Jack believed that he had a good idea about how to do just that, he slept badly that night, going over every part of a plan which seemed increasingly silly and flimsy, and he was very tired and nervous when, early the next morning, he and Mark rode train into the city. Mark wanted to know what was in the box Jack was clutching to his chest, and Jack told him with a confidence he didn't feel that it was a foolproof way of keeping the man busy.

  "I'll tell you what it is if you'll tell me how you're going to break into his apartment."

  "I'm not going to break in, I'm going to walk in," Mark said. "And I could tell you how I'm going to do it, but I'd have to kill you afterwards. Are you sure you can keep him talking for half an hour?"

  Jack tapped the top of the plastic box, feeling what was inside stir, a slow, heavy movement that subsided after a moment. He said, "Absolutely sure."

  Actually, he wasn't sure at all. This was a lot more dangerous that simply following someone through the city's crowded paths. Following someone wasn't against the law. Breaking into their private apartment plainly and simply was. Jack had the same sick, doomy feeling that had possessed him in the days before he and his parents had boarded the liner that had taken them from Earth to Saturn. He felt that he was about to do something that would change his life forever, and would change it for the worse if he failed at it. It was a very grown-up feeling, and he didn't like it at all. There was a sharp edge of excitement, to be sure, but the muscles of his legs felt watery and his stomach was doing somersaults when, after spending half an hour with Mark watching Ahlgren Rees's apartment from the cover of a little arbour made by the drooping branches of a weeping willow, he followed the herbalist to the café.

  It was more or less on the same level as the apartment, a bamboo counter beneath the shade of a huge fig tree, with a bench long enough for a dozen customers and a hissing steel coffee machine that the owner, a white-haired wisp of a woman, had built herself, from a design centuries old. The food was prepared from what was in season in the garden behind the fig tree, and whatever came in trade – the citizens of old Xamba had a complicated economy based on barter of goods and services.

  Jack took a seat next to Ahlgren Rees, the closest he had got to the man so far. He asked owner for the juice of the day, set the plastic box on the counter, and turned to the herbalist and said as casually as he could that he heard that he treated sick pets.

  "Who told you that?"

  Ahlgren Rees, hunched over a bowl of porridge flecked with nuts and seeds, didn't look up when he spoke. He had a husky voice and a thick accent: the voice of a villain from some cheap virtuality.

  "She did," Jack said, nodding to the owner of the café, who was filling a blender with orange segments and a handful of strawberries.

  "I did," the woman said cheerfully, and switched on the blender.

  "Stop by my place when you've had your breakfast," Ahlgren Rees told Jack. "It's just around the corner, past a clump of black bamboo. The one with the red door."

  The man was eating his porridge slowly but steadily, his elbows on the counter. In a few minutes he would be finished. He'd get up, walk back to his apartment, find the door open . . .

  Jack pushed the box an inch towards the man and said, "I have it right here."

  "So I see," Ahlgren Rees said, although he didn't spare Jack so much as glance. "And I have my breakfast right here too."

  "It belongs to my little sister," Jack said, the little lie sliding out easily. He add
ed, "She loves it to bits, but we're scared that it's dying."

  "Take a look, Ahlgren," the woman who owned the café said, as she placed the bulb of juice in front of Jack. "The worst that can happen is that your karma will be improved."

  "It will much need more than fixing a pet to do that," Ahlgren Rees said, smiling at her.

  The woman smiled back. Jack was reminded of his parents, when they shared a private joke.

  "All right, kid," Ahlgren Rees said. "Show me what you got."

  It was a mock turtle, a halflife creature that produced no waste or unpleasant odours, and needed only a couple of hours of trickle charge and a cupful of water a day. It had large, dark, soulful eyes, a yellow beak as soft as a sock puppet's mouth, and a fifty-word vocabulary. The colour and texture of its shell could be altered by infection with simple retroviruses created using the simple RNA writer kit that came with it; this one's was covered in thick pink fur. It didn't belong to Jack's imaginary little sister, of course, but to the youngest daughter of Jack's neighbours, but it really was sick. Its fur was matted and threadbare; its eyes were filmed with white matter; its soft beak chewed ceaselessly and its breath was foully metallic.

  Ahlgren Rees studied it, then took a diagnostic pen from one of the many pockets of his brocade waistcoat and tipped up the mock turtle and plugged the instrument into the socket behind the creature's stubby front leg.

  "Tickles," the turtle complained, working its stubby legs feebly .

  "It's for your own good," Ahlgren Rees said. "Be still."

  He had small, strong hands and neatly trimmed fingernails. There were oval scars on the insides of his thick wrists; he'd had plug-in sockets once upon a time, the kind that interface with smart machinery. He squinted at the holographic readout that blossomed above the shaft of the diagnostic pen, then asked Jack, "Do you know what a prion is?"

  "Proteins have to fold up the right way to work properly. Prions are proteins that fold up wrongly."