Life After Wartime

by Paul McAuley

  ‘And outside it’s still cold and airless and lifeless. And a stupid accident can kill you in an instant,’ Rickasht said, and immediately regretted it. Because he didn’t want to talk about that. A year later, and he still missed Jen every day, her absence was a great wound ripped into his side, but he was tired of talking about it, tired of people’s sympathy.

  Nisha was saying something about the stark beauty of the moons, the time she’d walked out across Mimas’s surface the first time, and climbed a pressure ridge and stood for a long time looking out at the tumbled moonscape, under Saturn. She’d walked all the way around Mimas, had been to Enceladus and Iapetus and Titan.

  ‘I like to visit and study Avernus’s gardens,’ she said. ‘Do you know her work?’

  Rickasht said that he’d heard of her, of course.

  ‘She hid on Titan during the Quiet War, and created several extraordinary gardens there. So simple, so elegant, so strange. She was born on Earth, yet she had a complete understanding of the landscapes of the moons.’

  They drank a toast to the famous, longdead gene wizard. Rickasht confessed that this was the first time he’d left Dione, almost his first time he’d been anywhere outside Paris. They talked about places he should visit, gardens and cities, the great mountains of Iapetus. Sharing a bag of wine, sitting so close Rickasht could feel her warmth. It was late, now. Many people had retired; most of those left where clustered around the dulcimer player. Rickasht tingled with anticipation, tried to formulate an invitation that wouldn’t sound crass or clumsy, and then a young woman ankled over and sat next to Nisha, draping an arm around her shoulders with casual familiarity, and he knew with a plunging sensation how stupid he’d been, and after he’d been introduced he stammered something about needing to sleep, and left.

  But he couldn’t sleep, not in the shared dormitory. He couldn’t stay. He grabbed his day bag and set out up the village’s steep dark streets, finding his way by luminous dabs on the path and the yellow light of Saturn’s crescent, tipped beyond the high roof. He was drunk and angry, but when he reached the edge of the village he knew it would be crazy to try to find his way through the forest and the high bluffs, and crept under a great sprawling fig tree.

  He woke early, from a silly muddled dream of searching for Jen through endless rooms of a rambling house a little like the villa of his parents, and climbed a steep trail beside a slow fat stream that trickled amongst boulders in a slanting ravine. Hauling himself along tethers in Rhea’s minimal gravity was almost like flying (he’d watched fliers rising in slow spirals on thermals above the lake, but hadn’t dared to rent wings). He paused at a deserted camp site to use its shittery, picked a couple of apple bananas and a handful of figs from bushes alongside the stream, perched on a shelf of pitted siderite to eat his breakfast, went on. Climbed a vertical stair of spikes jammed in the sheer face of a cliff, topped out on a broad belt of grassland, drifted onward for several kilometres.

  He’d walk to the endcap, he told himself, and take one of the trains along the narrowgauge railway on the far side back to the locks, and go home. Back to Dione. Back to Paris and the empty apartment full of dead things and memory traps, and his work.

  There were no settlements on the strip of heath, and he saw no other people. The tether he’d been following soon ended, and he ankled on in the lowgravity gait he’d learnt long ago, moving only from the knees down. The land rose and fell. Swales of tussock grass. Low thorny trees. Industrious bees working patches of small sweetsmelling flowers as yellow as Earth’s sun. A lone bird piping somewhere.

  His shame and selfdisgust blew away on the warm breeze, dissolved in the quiet beauty of the land.

  Late in the afternoon, he found a nearvertical path down to another village. A teahouse, little more than a canvasroofed wooden platform jutted above the boulders tumbled along the shore of the lake. There were many like it along the lakeshore, but as Rickasht sipped his gyokuro he noticed the pleasant manner of the hostess as she talked to the other customers, the way she smiled at the badinage of her partner as he deftly fried snacks on a hotplate and boiled plump little savoury dumplings. The gyokuro was sweet and delicately perfumed and the food was simple but tasty; bamboo tubes hung under the edge of the roof gently clattered; there was a tremendous view across the tall, slow waves of the lake to the hazy panorama of the green forests and white cliffs of the far side.

  There was a flier high up, a red mote gliding close to parallel to the pine trees along the edge of the cliffs.

  Rickasht thought how much Jen would have liked this place, and the familiar pang was there and gone. Red lanterns under the canvas roof brightened as the chandelier light dimmed, and the hostess came over to Rickasht and asked if he would like more tea. He said why not, asked if there was a guesthouse in the village.

  ‘I think I’ll stay a while.’

  Life As We Know It

  It was a slow night at the Still Point. A little after midnight, Aeshma was thinking of closing up when an old man ankled up and slid onto one of the stools and asked for a shot of Bluewater Collective pear brandy.

  'You still carry that stuff don’t you?’

  ‘This is the only bar in Paris that does,’ Aeshma said, although yo had to root around at the bottom of the racks to find the dusty bottle.

  The old man closed his eyes after the first sip, saying at last, ‘That’s so like your classic Proustian moment it isn’t even funny.’

  He was dressed in red leggings and a black jumper cinched with an antique utility belt. A narrow seamed face, white hair shaved at the sides to leave a crest along the top of his scalp, in the manner of pilots a century ago.

  ‘I thought I’d stop by, like I did in the old days,’ he said, after taking another sip from his tube of brandy. ‘See if this place was still here. And here it is, exactly as I remember it. Amazing.’

  It was a small place, tucked into the corner of a cutthrough in the lowrise neighbourhood of bars, teahouses, restaurants, theatres and song clubs around the Central Market. A bamboo and canvas shack with a counter of polished impact glass and four stools, a little hotplate on which Aeshma prepared snacks, and bottles racked in front of a big mirror, many labelled with the names of regular customers. Aeshma’s grandsire had rebuilt it after the war and it had been handed down from sire to scion ever since.

  The old man introduced himself, Herschel Wu, and said, ‘I guess you must be Aeshma’s kid. Yo’s scion, as you people have it.’

  ‘You knew my sire?’

  ‘About a hundred years ago. No, closer to a hundred fifty. Before the Quiet War.’

  ‘Then you knew my greatgrandsire, Aeshma One. I am Aeshma Four.’

  ‘Yo didn’t call yoself “One”, but yeah. You look just like yo. I guess that isn’t surprising, the way you people do, but that robe of yours, that green leaf pattern, you wore one just like it. Aeshma, Aeshma One, is he still around?’

  ‘Yo died in the war.’

  ‘Yeah? I’m sorry to hear it. A lot of people did. And those that didn’t, most of my friends and relatives, mostly just died of old age while I was away. Back then, before the war, I was a free trader. Mostly lived on my ship. But whenever I was in Paris I’d come here, shoot the shit with your greatgrandsire, catch up on news, gossip, tips. And then the Greater Brazilians and the other political gangsters from Earth moved on the Outers, the Quiet War and all that, and some of us took off before they rounded us up or killed us. The Free Outers, we called ourselves. You heard of us, maybe.’

  Aeshma shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. It’s ancient history. We moved to Uranus at first, and then the Greater Brazilians caught up with us there, so we moved on to Neptune. And then to one of the Centaurs. Nepenthe. We built a nice little garden there. I raised a family, but my partner died and I got the itch to move on. Ended up doing a little tour of the Kuiper belt, which is why I’m here. A science jamboree wants me to talk about what I found out there, what some people call the proge
nitor bug. Maybe you’ve heard of it.’

  Aeshma apologised again, saying that he didn’t keep up with science.

  ‘No reason why you should, I guess. What are you drinking, Aeshma?’

  Aeshma hesitated. He didn’t like the way Herschel Wu had referred to ‘you people’, as if androgyne neuters were a separate species of human being, suspected that he harboured an ancient prejudice to neuters and their cloned lineages Outers had mostly forgotten. But the old man was an old customer of the Still Point, he’d known Aeshma One, and beneath his bluster he seemed lonely and a little lost. So Aeshma said that he would also have a brandy, and dispensed a shot into a fresh tube and refreshed the old man’s, telling him it was on the house.

  ‘That’s mighty kind of you,’ the old man said, raising his tube. ‘To your greatgrandsire.’

  They talked about Aeshma One, and Paris in the old days, the days before the war, before the defeat of Earth’s Three Powers and the reestablishment of the Outers’ hegemony.

  ‘They tell me this is a golden age of peace and prosperity,’ Herschel Wu said.

  Aeshma shrugged. ‘Business here is much as it always was.’

  ‘You always worked here?’

  ‘I helped my sire until yo retired, three years ago.’

  ‘And you’ve always lived on Dione, in Paris.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Never went on a wanderjahr, took off on a whim to some other city, some other moon?’

  ‘We are happy here. Life is good. Why change it?’

  ‘Something I asked myself a hundred years ago,’ Herschel Wu said, ‘when I decided that I’d grown too comfortable, in Nepenthe. That I hadn’t seen all I needed to see. Some of us had been to Pluto, in the old days, and we went back. But there were already people there, and I decided to go further out.’

  ‘To the Kuiper belt.’

  ‘There are people in the Kuiper belt, now. But back then, not so much. I plotted a grand tour, skipping from kobold to kobold all the way to the far edge of the belt, sleeping out the transits. I had a good motor on my ship, but distances between kobolds are very large out at the edge, and I used minimumenergy courses to conserve reaction mass. I visited eight in all, over the course of a hundred years. And on one of them I found this,’ Herschel Wu said, and conjured a small sphere of translucent plastic between finger and thumb. ‘The progenitor bug. Go ahead, take a look. It’s laminated. Quite safe.’

  Ghostly soapbubble structures flashed inside the plastic sphere as Aeshma turned it in the glow of one of the star lanterns strung along the fringe of the bar’s canopy.

  ‘It’s a bacterial cell,’ Herschel Wu said. ‘A specimen of a very big, very strange, very old species of bacteria. They grow in a little subsurface sea I discovered in one of the kobolds I visited. Place almost as big as Pluto, with a moon as big as Pluto’s biggest moon. The sea’s rich in ammonia, kept just the right side of freezing by warmth from tidal friction and residual radioactive decay in the kobold’s core. And these big old bacteria live there. Although strictly speaking they’re not really bacteria. They use RNA instead of DNA, like some viruses, a zoo of short RNA strands in a cytoplasmic matrix. They cleave hydrogen from sulphides, use the energy to fix primordial inorganic carbon dissolved in the sea. And they grow very very slowly, divide once in maybe a hundred thousand years. The scientists are very excited by them. Some claim they are the progenitors of all life in the solar system. You know how life was supposed to have started on Mars?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Mars is smaller than Earth, so it cooled more quickly after it formed, and life got started on it while Earth’s oceans were still boiling. And some of that life, Martian bacteria, fell to Earth inside rocks knocked off Mars by big impacts, and kickstarted Earth’s biosphere. Also Europa’s. So you might say that we’re all Martians. But then I discovered these RNA bacteria, and now there’s an argument about whether they’re a separate evolutionary domain, or whether they’re the true progenitors of life in the Solar System, unchanged because there’s no evolutionary pressure to change, in their cold little sea. That’s what this jamboree’s all about,’ Herschel Wu said. ‘I’m one of the keynote speakers. Funny how life turns out, uh?’

  ‘It’s quite a story,’ Aeshma said, and handed the plastic sphere back.

  ‘Isn’t it? And it’s better than most traveller’s tales because every word is true.’

  They sipped their brandies and talked a little more about old days Aeshma knew only by hearsay. After the old man had gone, Aeshma closed up the bar and drifted home.

  Halfway there, yo paused on a slender bridge that arched over the river that ran through the quiet, dark city. Yo was a little dizzy from the brandy, and the cool air above the black water was refreshing. Slow fat waves reflected the webs of little lights strung through the chestnut trees along the banks. Saturn’s big crescent gleamed through the tent’s panes, slanting above flat rooftops. Two people went by on the far bank, shadows under the constellations of the trees. One of them, a woman, laughed at something the other said.

  Two lovers in Paris, under Saturn. Aeshma thought of fat, sluggish globs of slime floating in a frigid sea under the icy skin of a planetoid in the outer dark, undisturbed for billions of years until Herschel Wu came along. Remote, ancient, strange, nothing at all to do with ordinary life, but why did yo find the thought of them so disturbing?

  Aeshma lived in a commune with yo’s scion, yo’s sire, and the members of four other androgyne neuter lineages. Yo perched on the edge of the sleeping niche of yo’s scion, watching the small child sleep. Three years old, cute as a bug, thumb socketed in yo’s mouth, stirring when Aeshma stroked yo’s fine blond hair. In the commons, Aeshma Three reheated some soup from the stockpot, asked about Aeshma’s day.

  ‘Oh, you know. The usual.’

  Space Fever

  The town was gripped by space fever. In cafés and markets, in bars and on street corners, people talked about the impending visit of the Outer diva and her concert with the town’s famous griot. Posters of the diva, Jupiter’s banded globe tilted at her left shoulder, were plastered on walls. Starshaped lights were strung around the perimeter of the main square and above the main streets. Children printed off plastic spaceships and ran with them held above their heads, making whooshing noises as they reenacted the old space battles around Europa and Dione.

  In schools, there were special lessons about the Outers and their strange tent cities. Pupils studied globes of the moons of Jupiter, discussed the brief occupation by Earth’s Three Great Powers. Afel’s little brother, George, brought home the project he’d been working on: a virtual model of a domed city fitted inside the rim wall of an actual crater on the Moon, with smaller domes inside it over buildings borrowed from cities around the world, and green parks and a canal system. He had working on it for a couple of weeks, but it was still pretty sketchy. Only his palace were modelled in detail, with fountains and huge rooms, a monorail and a zoo, and a secret passage running through the crater’s rim wall to a landing pad jutting out on the other side, cluttered with gigs and runabouts, most of them from space war epics.

  Afel praised it anyway, and so did their mother and father. Georges was ten years old, and full of fleeting but passionate enthusiasms. That month, he had decided that he wanted to be an architect when he grew up, just like his older brother. He had taken to going up on the roof at night, to watch stars and ships and satellites. He pointed out the space elevator terminal to Afel, a steady, bright star high in the southeast. It was a carbonaceous chondrite that had been set to Earth from the outer edge of the asteroid belt, George said: machines were mining its material and spinning a diamondfullerene cable that would reach all the way down to the new spaceport in Entebbe.

  Afel had studied fullerene construction techniques last semester, and told George something about the strong, lightweight frames that were being used in new buildings in the capital. George said that he wanted to build a real city on the Moon,
or a space hotel in orbit, or a place where space pilots could stop for coffee or tea or cola, and gossip and smoke their hubblebubble pipes, just like the family’s café.

  It was on the big road that cut past the eastern edge of the town, the café. The family had owned it for more than a hundred years, and for most of the time it had just managed to get by, but it was thriving now. Twenty years ago, an experimental project involving a collaboration between the government and a cabal of Outers had planted specially modified vacuum organisms the edge of the desert, several hundred kilometres north. The vacuum organisms, composed of multitudes of tiny, pseudocellular machines, absorbed sunlight like plants, and made copies of themselves. They grew very fast, extending their roots a kilometre down to ancient aquifers and drawing up the water. Afel had seen images: they looked like giant black baobab trees, each standing at the centre of a spreading oasis. The government was building farms and factories and villages on the reclaimed land, and planting many more vacuum organism trees. It was a special economic zone, and there was a constant traffic of landtrains and big trucks carrying workers and construction materials from the docks on the Niger River to the north.

  Three years ago, Afel’s parents had built a motel block and a big new extension to their house, and they could afford to send him to study architecture at the university in the capital. When he’d been George’s age, he’d wanted to be a mathematician. It came to him naturally and he loved arcane theories of geometries that couldn’t exist in the real world, and had come third in a national competition. But his father, a kind but strict man, had other ideas for his eldest son. No one ever made a fortune playing with numbers: it was far better to learn a trade, to make a useful contribution to society. And so it was decided that Afel would be an architect, and now he was in the second year of his studies, and finding all kinds of practical uses for the intrinsic beauty and structure of mathematics, from visualising complex, nonCartesian geometric shapes to calculations of the loadbearing capacities of beams and walls spun from exotic new materials.