Life After Wartime

by Paul McAuley

  Life After Wartime

  More Quiet War Stories

  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 image courtesy of NASA and NASA/JPLCaltech.

  ‘Sea Change, With Monsters’ was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Dell Magazines, 1998. Copyright © 1998 Paul McAuley. All rights reserved.

  ‘Dead Men Walking’ was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Dell Magazines, 2006. Copyright © 2006 Paul McAuley. All rights reserved.

  ‘Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, The Potter’s Garden’ was first published in Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Solaris, 2012. Copyright © 2012 Paul McAuley. All rights reserved.

  All other stories in this collection are copyright © 2013 Paul McAuley. All rights reserved.

  The extract from Evening’s Empires is copyright © 2013 Paul McAuley. All rights reserved.

  Other titles by Paul McAuley, available on Kindle

  Novels

  Four Hundred Billion Stars

  Eternal Light

  Red Dust

  Pasquale’s Angel

  Fairyland

  Cowboy Angels

  The Quiet War

  Gardens of the Sun

  In the Mouth of the Whale

  Evening’s Empires

  Short Story Collections

  Stories of the Quiet War

  Little Machines

  Stories

  City of the Dead

  Dr Pretorious and the Lost Temple

  Prisoners of the Action (with Kim Newman)

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Sea Change, With Monsters

  Dead Men Walking

  Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, The Potter’s Garden

  Barbara Allen And Sweet Billie

  Ghost Of The Holloway

  Heaven Is A Place

  Life As We Know It

  Space Fever

  Prometheus Warps the F Ring

  The New Neighbours

  Monoliths

  Dragon Lady

  Same As It Ever Was

  The Paladin

  Beauty

  An exclusive extract from Evening’s Empires.

  Introduction

  I started writing about the Quiet War future history, or universe, or sequence, back in 1996, with the short story ‘Second Skin’ (collected in Stories From The Quiet War). I wanted to write something about the actual landscapes of the moons of the outer planets, and about the lives of individuals caught up in large movements of history, two big topics that inspired further stories and then two linked novels: The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. The first novel was about the processes that culminated in a quick, asymmetrical war between powerful political blocs on Earth and peaceful scientific utopian communities on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn; the second described the consequences of the war for both victors and vanquished, and a hopeful reconciliation.

  Two of the stories in this collection, ‘Sea Change, With Monsters’ and ‘Dead Men Walking’ are set in the period of Gardens of the Sun; ‘Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Running, Fiddler’s Green, the Potter’s Garden’ is set a couple of decades afterwards, at the beginning of a long, slow, peaceful period of colonisation of the solar system. Most of the fourteen fragments or micro-fictions collected here are set in that golden age: snapshots of ordinary life in a hopeful future. Just one, ‘The Paladin’ hints at a new cycle of turbulence and violence. The last two novels in the Quiet War sequence, In the Mouth of the Whale and Evening’s Empires, are set in the aftermath of the rise and fall of the True Empire, some 1500 years after The Quiet War. These stories are the deep background of their history.

  Sea Change, With Monsters

  She made it clear that she was taking the job as a favour.

  Vlad Simonov pretended to be slighted by her reluctance. He said, ‘But Indira, why is there a problem? It is a fantastic job, and it is not as if you are working.’

  ‘I have been working,’ Indira said. ‘Now I’m resting.’

  She had spent two weeks supervising the clearance of an infestation of urchins at the perimeter of a farm collective. It had been difficult, dangerous, tiring work, and she had nearly been killed in almost exactly the same way she had nearly been killed on her first job, when she hadn’t really known what she had been doing. She had come full circle. She was beginning to believe that she had killed enough monsters.

  Vlad snapped his fingers and leaned close to the camera of his phone. ‘After that picayune little job you need to rest? That kind of thing I do as an exercise. I do it for relaxation. I do it in my sleep, after a real day’s work. You know what your problem is?’

  Indira smiled. ‘I know you’re going to tell me.’

  They went all long way back, Indira and Vlad. He was one of the first generation of hunters, one of the few to have survived the early days of tracking the biowar macroforms, the monsters, which had been set loose during the Quiet War. Indira had started out as his apprentice.

  ‘You are getting bored,’ he told her. ‘Urchins, spinners, makos, they are all the same to you. Routine, routine, routine. It hurts me to see you like this. If you are not careful, one day you find yourself old and tired and wondering what happened to your life.’

  ‘We are all getting old, Vlad,’ Indira said. ‘Even you.’

  A pod of urchins had ambushed her towards the end of the last job. She had been finning down a long flaw in pure water ice, leading her diving buddy, a nervous farm worker. The flaw had been polished smooth by methane seep. It had reflected her lights in a bluewhite glare that had prevented her seeing very much of what was ahead. The urchins had fallen down on her from a crevice. She had doubled up, knocking two urchins off her face mask – their spines left deep scratches in the glass – and had started firing her flechette pistol even as she kicked backwards. Her diving buddy had been frozen with fear, blocking her escape; the urchins had bobbed towards her through a dancing dazzle of reflected light. She had coldly and methodically killed every one in a zenlike calm that had thawed to violent trembling as soon as the slaughter was over.

  ‘The monsters do not get old,’ Vlad said. ‘Another reason why I do you a favour, getting you this job. Because while you are resting, socalled, while you sit around in your nice, warm, comfortable apt, the monsters are out in the cold and the dark, pumping sulphides, getting strong. So you need some pep in your life, yes? To make you think again. To get you out of your routines.

  ‘Indira, listen. The people who commission this job are some kind of funny monks who know nothing about the value of money. I would take it myself, it is so good, except already I am already committed to three other contracts. So I give it to you. With my usual finder’s fee of course, but the terms are so generous you will not notice the little I have to take to feed my children.’

  ‘What’s the catch?’

  ‘It is not exactly a catch. These monks, they claim it is a dragon.’

  ‘A dragon? Are you sure?’

  No one had seen a dragon for years. Only a few had been released, in the war, and most hunters believed that they had all been accounted for.

  ‘I am not one hundred per cent certain,’ Vlad said. ‘In our work, we can never be one hundred per cent sure of everything, can we? But I after I listen to their story, I think there is maybe a fifty per cent chance it is a dragon. You have never hunted one, but you are my best pupil, I know you can do it. That is why I ask only you. What do you say?’


  ‘I can’t go solo against a dragon. If it is a dragon.’

  He said, ‘You won’t need to go solo. The monks have a big weed farm and their workers will help you. Anyway, it may be no more than a mako. The monks see something lurking just beyond their perimeter and make it bigger than it is. Let me tell you what I know.’

  * * * * *

  Indira’s daughter, Alice, came in two hours later. She found her mother in the workshop, the luggage pod open on the floor. She said, ‘You only just came home.’

  ‘I know, sweetie.’

  Alice stood in the doorway, bouncing up and down as gently as a tethered balloon. Seven years old, smart and determined. She wore baggy shorts and a nylon vest with many pockets and an iridescent flared collar that rose above her head like a lizard’s ruff. Fluorescent tattoos braided her thin brown arms. She had changed them since she had gone off to school that morning. They had been interlocking lizards and birds then; now they were long fluttering banners, red and violet and maroon. Her hair was done up in tight cornrows and decorated with little tags that flashed in random patterns of yellow and green.

  Alice said, ‘Have you told Carr yet?’

  Indira didn’t look up. She was fitting her dry suit into the pod, taking great care not to crease it. She said, ‘He’ll be home soon. How was school?’

  ‘I’m doing a project.’

  ‘Tell me all about it.’

  ‘It’s a secret.’

  A pause. Indira knew that her daughter had been down to the service levels of the city again, at the bottom of the ice. She had beeped Alice’s location after she had finalised the contract with Vlad. And Alice knew that she knew. She watched solemnly as her mother checked the weapon cases. They were flat metal shells with foam plastic bedding inside. The smallest contained three kinds of tailored neurotoxin in glass snaptop phials. Indira made very sure that these were packed properly.

  At last, Alice said, ‘Did you know that the city once had another name?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It was called Minos. Why was that?’

  ‘Because Minos was one of the sons of Europa. Of Europa and Zeus.’

  When Alice stamped her foot she bounced a metre into the air. ‘I know that! It means creature of the moon. He was the king who built a maze under his palace. But why did it change?’

  ‘Politics.’

  ‘Oh. You mean the war.’

  Alice had been born ten years after the Quiet War. Like all of her generation, she couldn’t understand why the adults around her spent so much time talking about it when it clearly made them so unhappy.

  ‘Yes, the war. Where did you find this out?’

  ‘I saw a sign.’

  ‘A sign? In school?’

  Alice shook her head. ‘Of course not in school. The Goonies –’ which was the latest nickname for the soldiers of the Three Powers Occupying Force – ‘have changed all the signs they know about. But they don’t know everything.’

  ‘Then where was it?’

  Alice said, ‘Carr will be cross because you’re going away so soon.’

  ‘That’s because he loves me almost as much as he loves you. Where was this sign, Alice?’

  ‘It’s to do with my project. So it’s a secret until my project’s finished.’

  Indira closed the luggage pod. It made a little whirring noise as it sealed itself up. She did not want an argument just before she went away but she did not want Alice to think that she could disobey her. She said, ‘I think we had better have a little talk, you and I.’

  Later, Carr said, ‘There’s nothing to harm her down there.’

  ‘Don’t take sides,’ Indira said.

  ‘I’m not. I’m trying to be realistic. Kids go down there all the time. They like staring out into the dark.’

  ‘She dresses like a Ring smuggler. Those lights in her hair . . .’

  ‘All the kids her age dress like that. They get it from the sagas. It’s harmless.’

  ‘Why are you so fucking reasonable?’

  ‘It’s a talent I have.’

  Indira snuggled closer to him. They were just made love and were both sweating on the big bed, beneath a simulated starscape. Carr liked to keep their room warm and humid. Bamboos and ferns and banana plants surrounded them. The walls were set to show misty distances above a moonlit rainforest. Carr had been born on Earth. His family had migrated from Greater Brazil to Europa a few years before the Quiet War. He was part of the city’s ecological maintenance team; once upon a time he would have been called a gardener. He was a strong, solid, and dependable. He and Indira had been a couple for nine years now; several months ago they had started to buy tickets in the child lottery for the second time.

  Carr said, ‘I think it’s nice that she wants to make gardens under the ice. A little bit of me, a little bit of you. Did she show you her drawings?’

  ‘Of course she did. Once we had made up after the argument about her going down to the service levels. All those friendly crabs and fish.’

  Carr stretched luxuriously and asked the bed’s treacher for a glass of water. ‘Citrous, fizzy, ice.’ He told Indira, ‘She wants to think that one day there might be a world without monsters.’ He took a sip of water. He said, ‘She wants to be a gene wizard.’

  ‘She wanted to be a tractor driver last week.’

  ‘That was two months ago. She has been asking all sorts of questions about bioengineering. She asked me why there weren’t any fish out there in the ocean. You know, I think sometimes she tells me things because she knows I’ll tell you.’

  ‘She’s smart.’

  Carr sipped his water. After a while he said, ‘Why do you have to go away so soon?’

  ‘Because of a monster. One of the angry fish Alice wants to replace with happy, smiling fish.’

  ‘There are other hunters.’

  ‘You knew what I did when we met, Carr. That hasn’t changed. And we need the money to pay for the lottery tickets.’

  Carr put his water down and folded his arms around her. The hand which had held the glass was cool on her flank. He said, ‘I didn’t even know there was a nunnery on Europa.’

  ‘It’s a monastery. For monks. Male nuns. Vlad was a bit vague about them and I can’t find anything about them on the net. They’re some kind of Christians, but not any of the mainstream sects.’

  ‘Whatever. Tell me again why they can’t kill this monster for themselves.’

  ‘I think they tried.’ A silence. She took a deep breath and said, ‘I haven’t told you everything, and it’s only fair that you know. Vlad thinks it might be a dragon.’

  Carr said, ‘They’re extinct, aren’t they?’

  ‘The last time one was killed over ten years ago. No one has seen once since. But absence of evidence —’

  ’Is not evidence of absence. So Vlad the Impaler wants to send you out against a dragon all by yourself.’

  ‘We’re not certain it is a dragon. And I won’t exactly be alone. There will be the monks.’

  * * * * *

  Indira had met Vlad Simonov almost twenty years ago, just after the end of the Quiet War. She had been a construction diver then, helping build the city’s first weed farm. Biowar macroforms were getting past the sonar and electrical barriers that were supposed to keep them away from the city’s underside, and Vlad had been hired to clear out a nest of urchins. The things had learned to drift passively through the barriers on currents and reactivate in the lights of the construction site. They were etching away support pylons, and in those days there were still a few of the kind which manufactured explosive in their cores. Two construction workers had been killed.

  Indira volunteered to assist Vlad, and they quickly located the place where the urchins were breeding. It was five kilometres east of the weed farm, downstream of the currents driven by the upwelling plume. It was an area of rotten ice eroded by the relatively warm water of the upwelling, riddled with caves and crevices and halfcollapsed tunnels, rich in precipitat
ed sulphides. Indira did not panic when urchins started dropping out of crevices in the ice. They seemed like harmless toys, spiny, fistsized black balls that wobbled this way and that on pulsed jets of water. She forgot that some could be carrying explosive charges and coolly and methodically killed them with neurotoxintipped flechettes, not wasting a shot. Afterwards, Vlad said that he liked her style, and that evening they got drunk together to celebrate their victory. She thought no more about it, but a few weeks later he called her up to ask if she would like to help out again.

  The engineered biowar macroforms had been delivered to Europa’s ocean by penetrator probes during the Quiet War. Viruses had destroyed the food yeasts (and incidentally had caused the extinction of the indigenous microbes which had lived around the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean); the macroforms had wrecked the yeast reactors, the mines and the cargo submarines, the heat exchangers and the tidal generators.

  Earth had not expected to win the Quiet War quickly. The Three Powers Occupying Force had made no plans to decommission the monsters they had set loose, and no one knew how many there were now. They reproduced by parthenogenesis, and they had contained dormant embryos when they had been released. Hunters like Vlad Simonov made a good living protecting settlements and farms from their attacks.

  The second job was against a mako which had been systematically destroying mine intakes at Taliesin. Vlad and Indira spent a dozen hours hanging by the probe of one intake, following it as, like a giant articulated proboscis, it moved this way and that in the black water, tracking mineralrich currents. The mako came in hard and fast out of the darkness, straight at Indira. She held steady and Vlad hit it with his second shot. Afterwards, he offered her a permanent job, and she accepted.

  Vlad cultivated a buccaneering image. He had two wives and five children. He drank brandy and smoked huge cigars. He had a wild mane of black hair and a beard he liked to braid with white ribbons. He wore a long leather coat made from the hide of a dragon he’d killed. He kept all his scars, and was missing two fingers on his left hand. But there was no safer or cautious hunter in all of Europa’s ocean, and he taught Indira everything he knew.