by Paul McAuley
The flares floated higher. The chamber was easily twice the size of the Buddhist Temple in Phoenix, but she’d seen ones that were far bigger. They were common in the base of Europa’s icy crust, opened by tidal stresses and carved by intrusive currents until they grew too big, even in Europa’s low gravity, and collapsed. This one was floored with chunks of ice which had fallen from the ceiling high above and fans of ice rubble slumped from the fluted walls. The chunks had been worn as smooth as pebbles by currents of relatively warm water.
Something moved at the edge of the shifting shadows cast by the string of floating flares. The quick beat of Indira’s heart sharpened. Belatedly, she remembered to switch her sonar back on, saw a cluster of small signals, each about the size of a human child. Finn had killed a juvenile dragon, and its parent had killed him. But suppose it had spawned more than once . . . .
Then she saw the faint, regular pattern beyond the cluster of childsized creatures, and felt a wash of relief. It was a set of racks bolted to the ceiling of the chamber. They had started their own weed farm; the currents that flowed through the chamber were as rich in sulphides and ammonium as those in the open water.
A big signal suddenly angled down like a guided missile, brushing through the picket line of flares and sending them spinning. Indira barely had time to aim her spear gun. There was a very fine tremor in her arms but now it was happening she was quite calm.
The thing came on and she did not fire. It was so very fast! She did not fire, and at the last moment revved the scooter and shot under the monster as it swept past.
She rolled in its wake and brought up her spear gun again as she came around. The dragon had already turned. It hung there in the glare of her lights and the drifting stars of the flares.
She had seen pictures and brief video sequences of dragons, but she had never seen one in real life. No one had seen one in real life for more than ten years. Until now, she had not known how beautiful they were.
Its body was streamlined and compact, a long wedge of muscle twice her length, gloved in a flexible carapace of long black bony scales. Its fused rear flippers fanned out horizontally like a whale’s fluke, three, four metres across. Its pectoral fins fanned the water. Long bony fingers grew beyond the margins of the fins; tipped with long, sharp, black claws. Its mouth gaped wide in a humourless grin, showing rows of backwardstilted ripsaw teeth. Not for feeding – it had no digestive system, fuelled itself by pumping sulphiderich water through internal lamellae dense with symbiotic carbonfixing symbiotic bacteria – but for attack. Its forehead was humped and swollen, with a band of warty protrusions, electrical sensory organs on which it relied more than sight, although it kept one rolling blue eye on Indira. That eye was unnervingly human; she had the uncanny impression that someone was buried inside the monster’s carapace, peering out at her.
No, not at her, she realised. At the spear gun and the spear racked ready for firing, at the spear’s explosive hypodermic tip, its charge of tailored neurotoxin. Just a trace of neurotoxin could paralyse the dragon, and if it could not pump sulphiderich water over its symbionts, it could not generate energy, and after all this activity it must have depleted most of the energy stored in its battery muscles. Paralysis would quickly kill it.
Indira raised the spear gun and watched the dragon shift with precise flicks of its pectoral fins, keeping its rolling blue eye on the tip of the cocked spear. For the first time in her life, she saw that her quarry was not a monster, but an intelligent creature.
Slowly, carefully, she sculled downwards rolled and laid the spear gun amongst watersmoothed ice rubble on the floor. Came back rightsideup.
The dragon hung there, watching her. Smaller shapes gathered above and behind it, shadows moving to and fro against the guttering light of the flares, which floated amongst the hanging blocks of the ceiling. She could hear a faint chirruping of crosstalk.
Still moving with dreamlike slowness, she took the emergency bottle from her scooter and vented it. The dragon sculled backwards from the column of bubbles. Oxygen was poisonous to its symbiotic bacteria. But the bottle released only nitrogen, and the dragon eased back to its original position.
Still moving slowly, Indira took off her harness. She was careful not to tangle the hose which led from the one functional airtank to the regulator in her face mask. She vented nitrogen from the second tank. This time the dragon did not shy back.
It knew.
The regulator valve rattled more deeply each time she drew a breath. The airtank was almost exhausted. She hung in front of the monster, staring at its blue eye, small under the ridge of its swollen bony forehead. It must know she was not like its enemies. Her dry suit was white and her stab jacket was yellow: compared to the monks’ utilitarian black she was a tropical bloom. And all biowar macroforms had a good sense of taste. It must be able to tell that she was releasing a different set of chemical signals into the cold water, that she was not a man.
The regulator rattled and suddenly she could not breath. It rattled again and her rib cage fully inflated but she could not draw any air. She tried not to panic. She knew that she could hold her breath for more than three minutes. She tapped the regulator, tapped the airtank.
The monster watched, immobile, unfathomable.
Indira stripped off her face mask, spat out her regulator and clamped her lips against the pressure of the freezing water. She wanted so much to breath.
A rapid fire of clicks and chirps.
The cold salty water stung her eyes when she opened them. Something shot down, swooped between her and the dragon, dropped something and shot away again.
Finn’s harness and his air tanks.
Indira dove for them. The mouthpiece of the regulator was halfbitten through and the tank it drew on was empty. She prayed that Finn had not switched over to his second tank before the dragon had killed him, jammed the regulator in her mouth, tasting Finn’s blood and sputum, twisted the valve to the second tank, and drew a deep shuddering breath.
A bullet of freezing cold sulphurous water hit the back of her throat. She choked on it, bubbles leaking from her mouth, and then realised that she was breathing again.
More clicks tapped through the water. Small figures swooped down out of the darkness beyond and above the dragon. They hung in the black water either side of its smooth bulk, gazing down as she hooked the hose of Finn’s airtank to her face mask and turned it on full to purge the mask of water as she fastened it over her face. They were half her size – Alice’s size. Thick smooth coats of lustrous grey fur, sad brown human eyes, long vibrissae on either side of snouts swollen to the size of melons – they must rely on echo location as much as sight. They had the long, halffused rear flippers of seals, but short, stout human arms where their pectoral flippers should be, human hands with long, webbed fingers.
The farm workers. The creatures Rothar had engineered and used as slaves to increase the wealth of the monastery. The creatures which the dragon had freed.
They clicked to each other using the flat, grinding teeth in their narrow jaws. They did not have the symbionts that fed the biowar macroforms. They needed to eat weed. They had to stay near the farm. But the dragon had shown them how they could live free. How to steal racks of weed and use them to start their own farm.
The dragon moved forward. The long forefinger of one of its pectoral fins scratched something on a slab of ice. And then it flicked its body like a whip and shot away into the darkness. The workers trailed after it, kicking strongly through the water. One hovered for a moment, watching Indira, and then a sharp chorus of clicks sounded and it turned and followed its companions.
Indira was alone. Cold and dark pressed all around the little bubble of light cast by her scooter’s lamp. She finned over to the iceslab, traced the crude but legible letters the monster had gouged.
No more war.
* * * * *
Indira got back to the lock with less than half an hour’s air left. They had to let her in. She showed
Finn’s explosive charges to the cameras and mimed slapping them against the hatch to make it clear that she would blow her way in if she had to.
Rothar came to her as soon as she had cycled through. A burly monk stood just behind him. Indira was cold and exhausted, and her dry suit stank of hydrogen sulphide, but she straightened her back and looked right at Rothar. She did not bother to look at the bodyguard.
She said, ‘Finn is dead.’
‘I know.’
‘The dragon killed him. Your workers were accompanying it. They gave me Finn’s airtank. That’s how I survived your attempt to kill me.’
She glared at Rothar defiantly. He was looking at a point somewhere behind her left shoulder. The dark blotches on his white face were vivid in the red light of the chamber. Only a slight tremor in his jaw betrayed the effort with which he was suppressing his emotions.
‘You tried to steal my neurotoxins,’ Indira said. ‘And when you failed, you knew you would have to let me go after the dragon. And you wanted me out of the way after I saw the laboratory, but you couldn’t just get rid of me – too many people knew I was here. So you sent me out without enough air. Either the dragon would kill me and Finn would take my spear gun and kill the dragon, or I would kill the dragon and run out of air, and Finn would mutilate my body to make it look like I’d been fatally wounded by the dragon.’
Rothar told his bodyguard to stand outside the door, then turned back to Indira and said mildly, ‘If you had given us the neurotoxins or let us take them, none of this would have happened.’
‘You had to kill me after I found the laboratory.’
‘Not at all. We tried to open your luggage pod as soon as you went outside to use your phone, but it attacked us. So I was forced to implement a second plan. The only way to get your neurotoxins was to take them from you in the ocean, and the only way to take them from you was to kill you. I let you find the laboratory. In fact, I led you to it. Once they realised that you had discovered our secret, my community knew that you had to die.’
Indira was too tired to feel any hatred, or fear. She said, ‘You were certain the dragon would kill me. Fergus was supposed to video my death. And if I did somehow manage to kill the dragon, I wouldn’t have been allowed to live because it would have made a mockery of your creed. So whatever happened, I had to die.’
Rothar did not deny it.
‘Instead, the dragon took Finn. He fired an explosive charge into its lair, to draw it out. And it worked. But dragons are smart. It saw that he carried explosives and I didn’t, so it killed him. And perhaps it knew, somehow, that he had killed its child. Perhaps the workers told it. Anyway, it killed him, and I don’t know what happened to his body. It’s back there, I guess, in the ice.’
‘We will hold a service in memory of his soul.’
‘Your workers won’t be back. They’ve started their own farm.’
‘They will have to come back,’ Rothar said. ‘They require an amino acid that the weed cannot provide. They know this.’
Indira said, ‘An amino acid present in the human body?’
Rothar didn’t reply.
Indira said, ‘That’s why the dragon took Finn’s body, isn’t it?’
Rothar shrugged. ‘If they do not come back, I will raise more of them.’
‘And meanwhile your farm will fail. And perhaps your new workers will rebel and escape, too. How intelligent did you make them?’
‘Intelligent enough.’ Rothar paused. He said, ‘Not as intelligent as the dragons.’
Indira understood something. She said, ‘You were a gene wizard, on Earth.’
Rothar looked at her, looked away. He said, ‘I was part of a team, Ms. Dzurisin. Unfortunately, we did not have anything to do with designing the dragons, or I would not have needed your neurotoxin.’
‘But you used that knowledge to engineer your workers when you came here. Those blotches on your face – they’re from some kind of industrial accident, aren’t they? You couldn’t get it treated because then people would know that you had been working illegally. Finn killed a dragon, a juvenile. At first I thought you caught it because you wanted to learn the secret of how the macroforms can live off the ocean, but now I think he killed it because he could.’
‘Finn was a useful man, but his propensity for violence could not always be controlled. I did not need to learn any secret, Ms. Dzurisin. My workers are a type of macroform that was not used in the Quiet War. I merely tweaked them to make them dependent on the weed they grow.’
‘Finn killed a juvenile dragon, and its parent came looking for it. And found the workers. I didn’t kill it,’ Indira said. ‘But you’ll pay me anyway.’
Rothar said, with a note of amusement, ‘I do not think so.’
‘I do. Because you’ll need me to negotiate with it.’
* * * * *
The bus pulled away from the monastery and began to descend the road that switchbacked down towards the plain. By the clock, it was the middle of the night; on the surface of Europa, at 2ES 84EW, it was just after dawn. The small, shrunken sun stood just above the eastern horizon. Jupiter’s big, bright crescent hung in the west. Out there, on the patchwork plain of ice plates and triplebanded ridges, everything had two shadows.
The bus said, ‘Did you find the monster? Did you kill it?’
‘I found something else,’ Indira said.
She thought of her daughter and her dreams of sea gardens full of benign animals. She thought of all the children of Phoenix, their fascination with the limitless dark of the ocean. She thought of the workers, and the monster which had adopted them. It was smarter than its makers knew. Perhaps it had learned wisdom in the black depths of the sea. Who knew what thoughts, what philosophies, the dragons spun as they hung in the cold and the dark and pumped lifegiving water through symbiontrich lamellae? Perhaps one day Alice and her generation would find out.
Indira would have to talk with the other hunters. There must be no more hunting for dragons. No more war. Perhaps they could set up feeding stations where Rothar’s workers could get their dietary supplements of vitamins and essential amino acids. Perhaps they could learn the workers’ chattering patois. Make contact. Cooperate. And begin to make the ocean a place to live.
Indira said, ‘I think I might have found something that Earth can’t control.’
The bus didn’t understand. Indira wasn’t sure that she understood it either, but it didn’t matter. Alice and all the other children would.
Dead Men Walking
I guess this is the end. I’m in no condition to attempt the climb down, and in any case I’m running out of air. The nearest emergency shelter is only five klicks away, but it might as well be on the far side of this little moon. I’m not expecting any kind of lastminute rescue, either. No one knows I’m here, my phone and the distress beacon are out, my emergency flares went with my utility belt, and I don’t think that the drones patrol this high. At least my legs have stopped hurting, although I can feel the throb of what’s left of my right hand through the painkiller’s haze, like the beat of distant war drums . . . .
* * * * *
If you’re the person who found my body, I doubt that you’ll have time to listen to my last and only testament. You’ll be too busy calling for help, securing the area, and making sure that you or any of your companions don’t trample precious clues underfoot. I imagine instead that you’re an investigator or civil servant sitting in an office buried deep inside some great bureaucratic hive, listening to this out of duty before consigning it to the memory hole. You’ll know that my body was found near the top of the eastern wall of the great gash of Elliot Graben on Ariel, Uranus’s fourthlargest moon, but I don’t suppose you’ve ever visited the place, so I should give you an idea of what I can see.
I’m sitting with my pressure suit’s backpack firmly wedged against a huge block of dirty, rockhard ice. A little way beyond my broken legs, a cliff drops straight down for about a kilometre to the bottom of the graben’s e
normous trough. Its floor, resurfaced a couple of billion years ago by a flood of waterice lava, is a level plain patched with enormous fields of semivacuum organisms. Orange and red, deep blacks, foxy umbers, bright yellows . . . they stretch away from me in every direction for as far as I can see, like the biggest quilt in the universe. This moon is so small and the graben is so wide that its western rim is below the horizon. Strings of suspensor lamps float high above the fields like a fleet of burning airships. There’s enough atmospheric pressure, twenty millibars of nitrogen and methane, to haze the view and give an indication of distance, of just how big this strange garden really is. It’s the prison farm, of course, and every square centimetre of it was constructed by the sweat of men and women convicted by the failure of their ideals, but none of that matters to me now. I’m beyond all that up here, higher than the suspensor lamps, tucked under the eaves of the vast roof of fullerene composite and transparent halflife polymer that tents the graben. If I twist my head I can glimpse one of the giant struts that anchor the roof. Beyond it, the big, bluegreen globe of Uranus floats in the black sky. The gas giant’s south pole, capped with a brownish haze of photochemical smog, is pointed at the brilliant point of the sun, which hangs just above the western horizon.
Sunset’s three hours off. I won’t live long enough to see it. My legs are comfortably numb, but the throbbing in my hand is becoming more urgent, there’s a dull ache in my chest, and every breath is an effort. I wonder if I’ll live long enough to tell you my story . . . .
* * * * *
All right. I’ve just taken another shot of painkiller. I had to override the suit to do it, it’s a lethal dose . . . .
Christos, it still hurts. It hurts to laugh.
* * * * *
My name is Roy Bruce. It isn’t my real name. I have never had a real name. I suppose I had a number when I was decanted, but I don’t know what it was. My instructors called me Dave – but they called all of us Dave, a private joke they never bothered to explain. Later, just before the war began, I took the life of the man in whose image I had been made. I took his life, his name, his identity. And after the war was over, after I evaded recall and went on the run, I had several different names, one after the other. But Roy, Roy Bruce, that’s the name I’ve had longest. That’s the name you’ll find on the roster of guards. That’s the name you can bury me under.
