Life After Wartime

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Copies.’

  ‘We won’t think of ourselves as copies.’

  ‘Even though that’s what you are. What you’ll be. They’ll open your skull, pare down your brain micron by micron, and rip its structure and activity into a viron inside that little can of a ship. The process destroys the original, so all that’s left will be the copy. The ghost of a dead man.’

  ‘You can’t talk me out of it.’

  ‘I know. I never could talk you out of anything, and I’m not about to try now.’

  ‘So what are you trying to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Introduce a note of realism into your fantasy, perhaps.’

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ he said. ‘And even though you won’t admit it, I know it’s important.’

  She didn’t reply. They sat quietly for a little while. The woman looking off at the view of the lake and the islands, the hills stark against the naked black sky. The man ran silky sand through his fingers, glancing now and then at the woman. She had aged well. Slim as ever, hair white now, pure white hair in a bowl cut, lines of course, a certain stringiness at the throat, but the same squarish tip to her slender nose, the same small bow of a mouth, the mouth he’d once loved to kiss and rekiss.

  He said, ‘Okay, I admit that this is part of it. Saying goodbye to your family and your friends. To the people who were important in your life. Who are important. Doing it, being able to do it, I admit: it’s a tick mark. But I would have come here anyway.’

  She said, ‘You always did find it easy to say goodbye.’

  ‘Now who’s trying to pick a fight?’

  ‘You were never satisfied. Never content with what you had. You always wanted something else. My mother warned me, but I never listened.’

  ‘Your mother? I always thought she liked me.’

  ‘She liked you, but she knew you. My father didn’t like you, and didn’t care to think about why.’

  ‘Well. Maybe they were right.’

  ‘Don’t. Don’t indulge me.’

  Another silence. Small waves ran up to the beach, over and over. A bird slipped sideways on the warm breeze, dipping low over the water, gliding on.

  ‘I never asked for forgiveness. I always admitted that I was wrong to go. But I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t give you what you wanted kids, stability . . . . I wanted more than that. Lovely though this place is, I was dying here,’ he said, smiling at his own hyperbole.

  ‘There are all kinds of cities and settlements right here on Callisto,’ she said. ‘And cities and settlements on Ganymede and Europa, too. Ten thousand gardens and habitats in the Belt. There’s Earth and the Moon. There’s Mars. Mercury. All the places further out, Saturn and Uranus and Neptune. Pluto and Charon, kobolds, the centaurs, the scattered disc . . . . And that’s not enough?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘I’m trying to understand.’

  ‘I’m trying to explain. I thought I had explained.’

  ‘It was a nice little speech. Leaving the cradle. The brave pioneers, the brave new worlds.’

  ‘Maybe it’s people. I think sometimes it’s that,’ the man says. ‘Everywhere you go, people are much the same. They make a big deal about little local differences in customs and protocols that really aren’t a big deal. And everywhere the same conversations about art and politics and the economy, the same gossip, the same ways of earning kudos . . . . It’s all the same, everywhere. But out there, it’s blank. It’s new.’

  ‘Except other people are already out there, aren’t they? One of the first ships to light out, isn’t it headed where you’re headed?’

  ‘It’s old tech, that ship. A big, old, slow multigeneration ship that can’t make more than a fraction of a percent of light speed. It left more than a century ago, and we’ll overtake it inside a year after we launch. We’ll get there centuries before it does. But that won’t be a problem because we don’t want what its crew and passengers want. They want the planet. The exoearth. We want the asteroid belts. The two belts, the comets . . .’

  ‘As if you couldn’t find a rock of your own here.’

  ‘And in ten or twenty years, the neighbours come calling. There’s nothing new, in the Solar System. I don’t mean that’s a bad thing for you. You like things the way they are. But for me . . .’

  ‘You always had a low boredom threshold. I liked that, once upon a time. Your love of life, your fearlessness. The kid from Earth, coming all the way out here just because you wanted to see what it was like. You made everything into an adventure.’

  ‘We had some good times together, didn’t we?’

  ‘We had the wanderjahr.’

  ‘Driving along the equatorial mountains of Iapetus.’

  ‘Camelot, Mimas. Paris, Dione—’

  ‘We’ll always have Paris,’ he said, and smiled, but she didn’t understand the reference. ‘We had some high old times. But I couldn’t hack life here. I said I was sorry then. And I’m sorry now.’

  ‘No, you aren’t,’ she said neutrally. ‘You know your problem? You can’t change.’

  ‘I can’t change?’

  ‘You’re still that kid, looking for thrills. You haven’t grown up. You can’t grow up.’

  ‘If you ask me, it’s overrated.’

  ‘Kids go on wanderjahrs because it helps them find out who they are,’ she said. ‘The experiences, the new places, the different people. It all gives a certain perspective. But you just liked to travel.’

  ‘Maybe I already knew who I was.’

  ‘You see? Same as you ever were.’

  ‘Not for long, according to you.’

  She looked sideways at him. ‘Perhaps that’s why they chose you. People like you. People who can’t change. Perpetual adolescents.’

  ‘People who want adventure. Who are willing to risk everything to create something new.’

  ‘Say you get there. You survive the journey. Then what?’

  ‘We find CHON and metals, build the machines that build the really big construction machines. And we quicken kids, and teach them what to do. We’ll be like the guardians, the guides. And they’ll build new habitats and settlements, new cities. New ways of living around a new star.’

  ‘And then? When that gets old?’

  ‘There are always more stars. One thing about uploading into a viron, you don’t ever have to die. I’ll be have a frontrow view of ten thousand years of history. A million years.’

  ‘Like anyone who hasn’t ever grown up, you really do fear death, don’t you?’

  ‘Uploading is dying, according to you.’

  ‘It’s a kind of death, but not the real death. And not real life either.’

  ‘Compared to this?’ The man gestured, meaning the lake and the islands, the trim little villages scattered around the rim of the tent.

  ‘People find who they are,’ the woman said. ‘They move on from childish things. Small things, ordinary things, everyday things, they become important. Hard things like raising kids become important. Work becomes important. My work on quantifying morality, you don’t think anything of it, but it’s not only important to me, it has mass, it has significance. It has made a significant contribution to setting a universal standard of kudos. Part of it is incorporated in every bourse in the system.’

  ‘I don’t mean to dismiss what you do.’

  ‘But you do. You did. You walked away from it. And now you’re walking away from everything else, into this awfully big adventure of yours. And you’ll keep running away.’

  ‘I’ll keep moving on. I’ll always want to find out what’s over the next horizon. And I will find out, too.’

  ‘You’ll keep on running. And never look back, never come home. Never stop to think why you’re running.’

  ‘I should have known that you wouldn’t understand.’

  The woman studied him with a look of unquantifiable sadness. She said, ‘You are what you are. I am what I am. And sometimes I tend to slip into the formal mode of academic discourse w
hen it isn’t appropriate. I’m sorry.’

  When she stood, the man reached for her, saying, ‘I’m not angry or anything. Listen, I have a couple or three hours before the flitter leaves for Rainbow Bridge. We could hang out here a while, call up a picnic, maybe, you know, say goodbye properly . . .’

  The woman laughed. ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ she said, and turned and walked off across the breast of the little island, its rabbitcropped turf and scattered trees vivid and green against the black sky and Jupiter’s slanted pastel crescent.

  ‘The frontrow view of a million years of history,’ the man called out, but the warm wind took his words and the woman walked on to the little skiff beached on the far side of the island, to the life she’d made, to her home.

  The Paladin

  The Trues had conquered Ceres, the Koronis Emirates, and half a hundred lesser kingdoms and republics, and as they began to probe the defences of Mars the Czarina dispatched twenty of her paladins to search for the armill of one of her ancestors, which was believed to augment the wisdom of its wearer and control secret caches of powerful weapons and squads of shellback troopers from the long ago.

  After adventures in the deserts and mountains of the red planet, fighting bandits, dust ghouls, and rogue gene wizards and their monstrous offspring, the paladin was riding through the trackless forests of the Hellas Basin when she discovered a circular lake with a slim, bonewhite tower rising from its centre. As she approached the slender bridge that arched between shore and tower, another rider came out of the trees and challenged her: a rogue paladin whose armour, like hers, had lost its devices and beacons to battledamage and sandstorms. They drew their vorpal blades and spurred their chargers and headlong into combat. Their chargers bit and mauled each other and collapsed; the paladins fought on into the night. Sparks and flames from their clashing blades lit up the lake and the tower, and the red rain of their blood speckled the stones of the shore. Both were grievously wounded, but neither would yield. At last, the paladin dispatched her enemy with a killing thrust, but when she wrenched off his helmet she discovered that he was her own brother. As she wept over his body a man dressed in black furs appeared. He gathered her into his arms and carried her across the bridge, into the tower. She glimpsed the armill, a slim platinum bracelet set on a bolster inside a crystal reliquary; then its guardian carried her down a spiral stair to a basement room, stripped off her damaged armour, and lowered her into the casket of an ancient medical engine.

  When the paladin woke, she was hungry and thirsty, and very weak. The room was dark, the stairs were blocked by rubble, her armour was gone. After she clawed her way out, she discovered that the tower was in ruins. There was no sign of the reliquary and its guardian, and the lake was dry and the forest all around was a wasteland of ash and charred stumps.

  She had been asleep for a century. Mars had fallen to the Trues. The Czarina and her family were long dead; her battalions and her ships were destroyed or scattered. The last paladin dug up the grave of the brother she had killed, put on his armour, and went out into the world and waged a long and terrible war against the conquerors of Mars. She was a fierce and relentless enemy, driven by remorse and guilt. She killed everyone who pursued her, including five suzerains, and raised an army of brigands and sacked the ancient capital. But nothing could atone for the mortal sin that had derailed her quest. When she and the tattered remnant of her army were at last cornered in the Labyrinth of the Night by five squadrons of elite shock troopers, she died with her dead brother’s name on her lips.

  Beauty

  On Saturn’s giant moon Titan, a young woman discovered one of the fabled gardens created by the great gene wizard Avernus, hidden inside a bubble habitat buried at the bottom of a deep rift. When she cycled through its airlock the young woman found that it was still lovely and perfect centuries after the gene wizard’s death: groves of slender birch trees standing amongst black rocks and lawns of thick black moss, lit by bright chandeliers. But as she walked through it, it began to die. Chandelier light dimmed to an eldritch glow. Her psuit boots left white prints in the moss that began to grow like puddles of spilt milk. The fresh green leaves of the birches around her darkened, turned red, and began to fall, a red snow fluttering down across the dying, piebald lawns. And the paperwhite bark of the trees began to darken too, turning black as soot. The young woman realised that she had triggered the garden’s death, that she had become Avernus’s collaborator in a work of art. That she was the sole witness to its transient beauty. The spills of white widening across the floor. The red leaves fluttering down. The skeletons of the leafless trees blackening as if consumed by an invisible fire. She sat in the middle of the garden, aching with sorrow and wonder and awe.

  An exclusive extract from Evening’s Empires.

  Evening’s Empires

  by

  Paul McAuley

  Published by Gollancz, July 18 2013

  A young man is stranded on a barren asteroid. His ship has been stolen, his family kidnapped or worse, and all he has on his side is a semiintelligent spacesuit. The only member of the crew to escape, Hari has barely been off his ship before. It was his birthplace, his home and his future. He's going to get it back.

  ‘Paul McAuley’s balanced grasp of satire and literature, always a rare attribute in the writer of prose fiction, is combined with the equally rare ability to look at today’s problems and know which are really problems, and what can be done about them.’ William Gibson

  ‘Few writers conjure future as convincingly as McAuley.’ The Guardian

  ‘If you haven't read Paul McAuley’s novels, YOU ARE MISSING OUT.’ Charles Stross

  1.

  It was a remote and unremarkable Ctype asteroid, a dark, dustbound rock pile with a big dent smacked into its equator by some ancient impact. There were thousands like it in the Belt. Hundreds of thousands. It was mostly known by its original name, 207061 Themba, the name it had been given when it had been discovered in the long ago. It lacked significant deposits of metals or rare earths, and its eccentric orbit, skirting the outer edge of the Belt, didn’t bring it within easy reach of any centres of civilisation. Even so, it had been touched by human history.

  About a thousand years ago, for instance, towards the end of the Great Expansion, someone had seeded it with a dynamic ecology of vacuum organisms. Its undulating intercrater plains were mantled with pavements of crustose species; briar patches of tangled wires spread across the floors of many of its craters; tall spindly things a little like sunflowers stood on wrinkle ridges and crater walls. A cluster of sunflowers up on the rim of a large circular crater stirred now, the dishes of their solar collectors turning eastward as the horizon dropped away from the sun. Boulders scattered across the upper slopes of the crater threw long shadows. Sunlight starred the needlepoint caps of a cluster of silvery spires and gleaming streaks shot down their tapering flanks as darkness drained away, shrank to overlapping pools cast around their footings.

  One spire near the edge of the little crowd had been painted black. A small movement twinkled at its base. A door dilating, a circle of weak yellow light framing a human shadow. The only inhabitant of these ruins, of this ordinary rock, stepping out into another day of silence and exile.

  It was fortytwo days after Gajananvihari Pilot had woken in a crippled lifepod on the cold hillside of the crater’s inner slope, one hundred and seventyfour days after he had escaped from the hijack of Pabuji’s Gift. He’d been aimed at the first of a chain of waypoints that would help him reach Tannhauser Gate, had been sinking into the deep sleep of hibernation, when the motor of his lifepod had suffered a nearcatastrophic failure and lost most of its reaction mass. The lifepod’s little mind had recalculated its options, used the waypoint to change course and establish a minimumenergy trajectory to Themba.

  Repair mites had patched up the motor while the lifepod was in transit, but the asteroid was a long way from anywhere else. Hari was grievously short of reaction mass, and could
n’t call for help because the outer belt lacked a general commons, and a distress signal might attract the attention of the hijackers or some other villainous crew. Besides, he’d been taught to distrust everyone but his family. His father, his two brothers, Agrata. All most likely dead, now. Murdered, as he would have been murdered if he hadn’t escaped.

  He was nineteen years old, alone for the first time in his life.

  He’d channelled his grief and anger into a singleminded determination to save himself. He’d synched his internal clock to Themba’s fourteenhour day, established a strict routine. Waking just before dawn, drinking a protein shake while examining the latest products of the maker and checking his comms (picking up only the ticking of distant beacons; no general traffic, no threats or warnings from the hijackers). Hauling on his pressure suit and leaving his cosy little nest in the spire, climbing a friction track laid down by the spire builders, following it over the crater’s rim and through sunflower thickets to the plains beyond.

  That day, like every other day, Hari paused at the far side of the sunflowers and used his pressure suit’s radar and optical systems to survey each quarter of the visible sky. As usual, the psuit’s eidolon manifested beside him. A shadowy sketch of a slim young woman in a white onepiece bodysuit and an unlikely bubble helmet, her eyes smudged hollows in which faint stars twinkled.

  ‘There appears to be nothing out there,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing but stars and planets and moons and rocks,’ Hari said. ‘Garden habitats. Various kinds of human civilisation. Pabuji’s Gift, if the hijackers didn’t destroy her.’

  ‘No ships. No immediate danger.’

  ‘No hope of rescue, either.’

  It was more or less the same exchange they had every day. Like most QIs, the eidolon wasn’t fully conscious. Her conversations were shaped by decision trees and phatic responses.