Life After Wartime

by Paul McAuley

  She imagined her father walking here, under this same sky. Alone in a moonscape where no trace of human activity could be seen.

  The last and largest crater was enclosed by ramparts of ice blocks three stories high and cemented with a silting of dust. Archie didn’t hesitate, climbing a crude stairway hacked into the ice and plunging through a ragged cleft. Lexi and Mai followed, and the crater’s bowl opened below them, tilted towards the plain beyond the curve of the ridge. The spark of the sun stood just above the horizon. An arc of light defined the far edge of the moonscape; sunlight lit a segment of the crater’s floor, where boulders lay tumbled amongst a maze of bootprints and drag marks.

  ‘At least we got the timing right,’ Lexi said.

  ‘What are we supposed to be seeing?’ Mai said.

  Lexi asked Archie the same question.

  ‘It will soon become apparent.’

  They stood side by side, Lexi and Mai, wavering in the faint grip of gravity. The sunlit half of the crater directly in front of them, the dark half beyond, shadows shrinking back as the sun slowly crept into the sky. And then they saw the first shapes emerging.

  Columns or tall vases. Cylindrical, womansized or larger. Different heights in no apparent order. Each one shaped from translucent ice tinted with pastel shades of pink and purple, and threaded with networks of darker veins.

  Lexi stepped down the broken blocks of the inner slope and moved across the floor. Mai followed.

  The nearest vases were twice their height. Lexi reached out to one of them, brushed the fingertips of her gloved hand across the surface.

  ‘These have been handcarved,’ she said. ‘You can see the tool marks.’

  ‘Carved from what?’

  ‘Boulders, I guess. He must have carried the ice chips out of here.’

  They were both speaking softly, reluctant to disturb the quiet of this place. Lexi said that the spectral signature of the ice corresponded with artificial photosynthetic pigments. She leaned close, her visor almost kissing the bulge of the vase, reported that it was doped with microscopic vacuum organisms.

  ‘There are structures in here, too,’ she said. ‘Long fine wires. Flecks of circuitry.’

  ‘Listen,’ Mai said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can’t you hear it?’

  It was a kind of interference on the common band Mai and Lexi were using to talk. Faint and broken. Hesitant. Scraps of pure tones rising and fading, rising again.

  ‘I hear it,’ Lexi said.

  The sound grew in strength as more and more vases emerged into sunlight. Long notes blending into a polyphonic harmony.

  The microscopic vacuum organisms were soaking up sunlight, Lexi said, after a while. Turning light into electricity, powering something that responded to changes in the structure of the ice. Strain gauges perhaps, coupled to transmitters.

  ‘The sunlight warms the ice, every so slightly,’ she said. ‘It expands asymmetrically, the embedded circuitry responds to the microscopic stresses . . .’

  ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  It was beautiful. A wild, aleatory chorus rising and falling in endless circles above the ground of a steady bass pulse . . . .

  They stood there a long time, while the vases sang. There were a hundred of them, more than a hundred. A field or garden of vases. Clustered like organ pipes. Standing alone on shaped pedestals. Gleaming in the sunlight. Stained with cloudy blushes of pink and purple. Singing, singing.

  At last, Lexi took Mai’s gloved hand and led her across the crater floor to where the robot mule, Archie, was waiting. Mai took out the pouch of human dust and they plugged it into the spray pistol’s spare port. Lexi switched on the pistol’s heaters, showed Mai how to use the simple trigger mechanism.

  ‘Which one shall we spray?’ Mai said.

  Lexi smiled behind the fishbowl visor of her helmet.

  ‘Why not all of them?’

  They took turns. Standing well back from the vases, triggering brief bursts of gritty ice that shot out in broad fans and lightly spattered the vases in random patterns. Lexi laughed.

  ‘The old bastard,’ she said. ‘It must have taken him hundreds of days to make this. His last and best secret.’

  ‘And we’re his collaborators,’ Mai said.

  It took a while to empty the pouch. Long before they had finished, the music of the vases had begun to change, responding to the subtle shadow patterns laid on their surfaces.

  At last the two woman had finished their work and stood still, silent, elated, listening to the music they’d made.

  * * * * *

  That night, back under the dome of the JonesTruexBakaleinikoff habitat, Mai thought of her father working in that unnamed crater high on the rimwall of Amata crater. Chipping at adamantine ice with chisels and hammers. Listening to the song of his vases, adding a new voice, listening again. Alone under the empty black sky, happily absorbed in the creation of a sound garden from ice and sunlight.

  And she thought of the story of Fiddler’s Green, the bubble of light and warmth and air created from materials mined from the chunk of tarry ice it orbited. Of the people living there. The days of exile becoming a way of life as their little world swung further and further away from the sun’s hearthfire. Green days of daily tasks and small pleasures. Farming, cooking, weaving new homes in the hanging forest on the inside of the bubble’s skin. A potter shaping dishes and bowls from primordial clay. Children chasing each other, flitting like schools of fish between floating islands of trees. The music of their laughter. The unrecorded happiness of ordinary life, out there in the outer dark.

  Barbara Allen And Sweet Billie

  When Barbara Allen stopped at Ceres to sell a load of janky machinery ripped from a derelict biome, she was visited by an eidolon of her first lover, Sweet Billie, who told her that he was dying. And she decided, what the hell, to pay him a visit. She’d grown up with him in the domes of New Old London, Pallas, they’d run away together to become junk peddlers, and she still had unresolved issues about the way he’d treated her while they’d been celebrating their first real coup on Tannhauser Gate, twenty years ago. When they’d been very young and everything had been new and intense, and love had so easily turned to hate, and they’d broken their partnership and each had sworn never to see the other again. And that was the first thing she told him, when she reached his dying bed on a terrace overlooking the cold blue waters of the Piazzi Sea.

  ‘The way you looked at other women when you were with me, it broke my heart,’ she said. ‘The way you looked at them, and praised their beauty. And the way you danced with them.’

  ‘I remember how cruel and foolish I was,’ he said, ‘and that’s why I invited you here. I lost you, and I’ve bitterly regretted it every day, and now I’m dying I want to beg for your forgiveness.’

  He was gaunt and naked, and the right side of his body had been transformed into coralline stone by mites he’d caught while fossicking in some old ruin in the outer belt.

  ‘You’re right about one thing,’ Barbara said. ‘You’re dying. But you will have to die without my forgiveness.’

  And she turned and left him and caught a rail car that travelled halfway around the little world, back to the elevator head in Stumptown. But she hadn’t gone more than a hundred kilometres when Sweet Billie’s eidolon appeared, and told her that he was dead. And she felt something cold and dark break apart inside her, and started crying.

  Some said that by the time she reached Stumptown, her right arm was paralysed and her skin was cold and growing hard and scaly. Either Sweet Billie had infected her in revenge for her heartlessness, or she had broken quarantine protocol and deliberately infected herself out of remorse. Within two weeks she died, calling for her dead lover, and was buried next to him in the great old graveyard on the cold stone plain beyond the domes of New Old London. And on her grave they planted a sunflower vacuum organism, and on Sweet William’s grave a vacuum organis
m that somewhat resembled a red briar. And in the long cold years the two vacuum organisms grew slowly and surely together, and twined in a true lovers’ knot, the sunflower and the red briar.

  But others said that was no more than an old song from the long ago, and that Barbara Allen did not fall ill after she left her old lover’s death bed, but went up and out to search for salvage amongst the thousand thousand ruins of the Belt, and either died in some accident, alone and unmarked, or made her fortune and bought an exoship and set out for one of the far colonies around a distant star, and is travelling still, dreamlessly asleep in a glass coffin.

  Ghost Of The Holloway

  As Saturn’s icy moons swung around the gas giant, their leading faces were bombarded with highenergy electrons that over thousands upon thousands of years compacted the original surfaces of fluffy waterice grains to hardpacked ice. Human beings following paths around the moons had altered their surfaces, too. Over the centuries, walkers wore down the ice and created holloways that in the most heavilytrafficked parts were depressed a metre or more beneath the original surface. Sunken paths or grooves with branching tributaries that linked present walkers to all the walkers of the past.

  The equator of every large moon was girdled with at least one holloway, worn by countless people who trekked around them on wanderjahrs, seeking adventure or enlightenment, or escape from the noisy crush of civilisation. There were races to circumnavigate the moons by foot or on various musclepowered contraptions, but most walkers set out on solitary pilgrimages. Sky Saxena was one such, a clever, headstrong man in his early twenties. After fleeing from his family and the obligations of his inheritance, he had decided to impose shape and order on his life by attempting to walk around the largest of Saturn’s regular, icy moons – Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Iapetus. A quest only a celebrated few had completed since the Saturn system had first been settled more than four centuries ago.

  Sky had set out from Camelot, Mimas, twentytwo days ago, travelling east. A straight path girdling the little moon’s equator would have been a little more than twelve hundred kilometres long, but there were no straight paths because Mimas’s frozen surface preserved the cratering caused by the period of heavy bombardment. One especially large crater, Herschel, was about a third of Mimas’s diameter and floored with a chaos of ridges and tabular mounts and canyonlands. There was no easy route across it; despite the help of his suit’s eidolon, Sky discovered that he had spent six hours trekking down a long and crooked canyon that ended in high cliffs impossible to climb. It was night. His air was low, barely enough to make it back to the shelter he’d set out from that morning, and a fault in the lifepack’s catalytic purger meant that the partial pressure of carbon dioxide was building to critical levels. Faint and dizzy, with twenty kilometres still to go, he sat on a block of pitted ice under the pitiless stars, and by starlight saw a shadowy figure beckoning to him from the top of a steep slope of tumbled ice blocks, and heard a faint voice on the common channel.

  Come with me if you want to live.

  With the last reserves of his strength and resolve, Sky followed the figure across a series of ridges like frozen waves to the lee of a cliff. There was a narrow passage, an airlock hatch, and a small, utilitarian shelter beyond: celllike rooms off an H of short corridors dimly lit by failing lamps, the air chill and stale but breathable. Sky’s rescuer was an old man with a shock of white hair and a bent back who moved restlessly amongst the shadows, instructing Sky on how to link his psuit’s lifepack with the shelter’s antique machinery, showing him where ration packs were stored. The shelter dated from the Quiet War, according to the old man, built by the resistance to the occupying powers from Earth.

  After he had eaten, Sky sat in a slingbed in one of the little rooms, and fell asleep listening to the old man’s stories of the war. When he woke, he was quite alone. The old man was gone, although his psuit remained in the airlock’s dressing frame, with his name, Leonardo Santos, stencilled across its stout, scarred chestplate.

  When Sky told the story of his rescue at his next stop, a farm tent, there was a short silence as the farmers studied him, and then one of them said that he’d been rescued by a ghost.

  ‘My mother told me that he had been a Greater Brazilian trooper in the old war,’ she said. ‘He and his comrades massacred twenty resistance fighters, and after the war he became a hermit, living in one of the old shelters, helping travellers. He died at least two hundred years ago, but people still claim to glimpse him now and then. He’s said to have led several people to safety after they became lost in the canyonland, but you’re the first to have met him that I know of.’

  There were rational explanations, of course. Sky thought long and hard about them as he walked on the next day. He had been suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning, and the old man had been an hallucination, or some kind of dream. In reality, his psuit’s eidolon had led to the shelter, or perhaps the eidolon of Leonardo Santos’s psuit had somehow reached out to him. But whether he found the shelter himself, or whether he had been led to it, Sky knew that owed the old man his life, and knew now that there was no need to define himself by solitary pilgrimages, no need to become a kind of wandering ghost. He was too proud to return to his family, but knew that he could find some good and useful work in the cities and settlements of the Saturn system, and walked on down the holloway in long bounding strides, light as a bird in the minimal gravity, the rugged little moon wheeling away beneath his boots.

  Heaven Is A Place

  On the evening of his second day in the Gulf of Ten Billion Blossoms, Rhea, Rickasht Chandrasekaran fell in with a crew who were taking a last break before heading out from the Saturn system to Uranus. This was in the guesthouse in one of the steep little villages that stepped up from the shore of the long lake. Rickasht had reached it late in the evening, tired and exhilarated after a long hike along a trail that switchbacked through dense semitropical forest, and had been given the last sleeping niche. The crew were a boisterous and talkative group of young men and women who sat in a circle on cushions and shaped stones on the guesthouse’s terrace, passing food back and forth and squirting wine into each other’s mouths and making toasts. Several small children bounced about. A man was nursing a baby. A woman played a dulcimer, and led a small group in songs that predated the colonisation of the Outer System. Rhythmic handclaps. Laughter. A torrent of happy chatter.

  Rickasht found he didn’t mind the crowd, the noise. He could disappear inside it. Nothing was expected of him. He smiled and nodded as two young, earnest men told him that they were going to tent over and landscape an embayment in one of the long, deep canyons that cut the icy surface of Uranus’s largest moon, Titania. The crew’s engineers were already out there, supervising the big construction machines that were pouring the tent’s foundations and fabricating the struts and panes of its diamondfullerene roof. The people here were mostly gardeners and farmers. It was a working holiday, the two men told Rickasht; they were studying the Gulf’s ecosystems, the kelp forests in its lake, the forests that climbed its walls, the heaths and sedge bogs of its upper reaches. The crew’s small tent and its simple biome was the beginning of an ambitious plan to tent the deep, long canyon section by section, and create a garden several dozen kilometres wide and more than five hundred kilometres long. The usual mad ambition of outers, limited only by their imagination.

  After a little while he noticed one woman in particular, neat and compact and quiet, long black hair teased into a cascade of ringlets. Almost certainly from Earth, Rickasht thought, and felt a pulse of the old familiar ache in his belly. She noticed his attention and smiled at him, and he looked away, pierced by stupid guilt, then looked back again.

  Her name was Nisha MinnotVarma. She had been born on Mars, the Hellas Basin tent. She’d come out to the Saturn system three years ago, and now she was going further out, like the rest of her companions sinking all her credit and karma into the venture. They talked about adjusting to life in t
he Saturn system. They talked about Rickasht’s childhood on Earth, in Brasilia; he apologised for knowing very little about Greater Brazil’s rainforests and grassy plains and great rivers. They talked about his work in the reclamation plant in Paris, Dione. They talked about Nisha’s work: she was a microbiologist, had been one of the supervisors of the soil manufacturing plant in Camelot, Mimas. In a way, she said, they were both in the recycling business.

  ‘You don’t need soil to farm, but it’s essential for stable ecosystems of any size. Everything passes through it at some point . . . . I am amazed by what they have built here in the Gulf. It’s a huge mosaic, yet fully integrated. Hellas was much bigger, but not as stable. We had a severe crash when I was a child; there was talk of evacuation. We had to wear masks that absorbed the excess carbon dioxide for a whole year. I’ve learned so much here, and now I will put it to practical use. You probably think we are crazy,’ she said, looking at Rickasht sidelong.

  Rickasht said something stupid about it being an adventure. She had large brown eyes, Nisha, and beautiful eyelashes. Slender hands, nails painted different shades of blue.

  ‘We will build a new world,’ she said. ‘A very exciting prospect.’

  Rickasht said it was a brave thing to set up a home in the unknown; Nisha said that it was a frontier, yes, but not unknown.

  ‘There are more than ten thousand people in the Uranus system. Too many already for some of the first pioneers, they are striking out for the Kuiper belt. I find it amazing,’ Nisha said, ‘at how skilled we have become at making ourselves at home out here. Three centuries ago the Saturn system was the frontier. And now there are cities and settlements, farms and gardens, wonderful parklands like this. All carved from ice frozen hard as granite, carbonaceous tars, comet CHON . . .’