by Paul McAuley
Rumours and counter-rumours about the campaign against the wildsiders swept through the little town. Every fresh arrival brought new horror stories. Wildsiders had set up an ambush on the Trans-Amazonian highway and destroyed thirty road trains, setting fire to them and shooting anyone who tried to escape. They strung the ears of their victims in grisly necklaces. They honoured those of their comrades killed in combat by eating part of them, and before going into battle drank blood taken from captives kept especially for the purpose. Their women were worse than their men, and tortured and humiliated soldiers with degrading sexual rites. They were savages, soul-drinkers, spirits of the forest come to take revenge on despoilers. And so on, and so on.
Ancient propaganda ripped from the matrices of the ship’s files, redeployed against the intruder into the Child’s dream of her becoming.
The R&R Corps had stopped all work and dismantled its front-line camps in the forest; only a skeleton crew remained in its depot. The army set up forward positions along the main highway, flitters and drones flew regular patrols above the renewed forest to the north, patrols scouted the hills and the lower slopes of the mountains, and plastic scout boats voyaged up and down the river, all to little purpose. The enemy was mostly unseen, setting traps and ambushes, engaging in brief fierce firefights and abruptly slipping away. It was like fighting ghosts. The army sustained casualties on a daily basis, but although it was certain that the enemy had been hit hard on several occasions no bodies were ever found.
Vidal Francisca hired a crew of mercenaries to protect the sugar-cane plantation. They were from the north, some with skin no different in colour from the browns and blacks of ordinary people, some pale as ghosts. One, a young woman, had red hair and bright blue eyes and freckled skin. Something that the Child had never before seen. It was interesting how very small variations in people’s genetic make-up could have such a pronounced effect on their appearance, and on other people’s attitude towards them.
Most of the mercenaries spoke little or no Portuguese, but they were quiet, efficient, and unfailingly polite. They patrolled the perimeter of the plantation and checked its buildings, escorted Vidal Francisca wherever he went, the man riding in his electric car in his white suit and straw hat like some minor potentate, and they escorted the Child and her mother whenever they travelled the short distance from the hospital to Vidal Francisca’s house. They wore tunics and many-pocketed trousers that were pale green in default mode and when activated bent light around the wearer, turning them into human-shaped distortions like the mirages that shivered above the roads in the bright hot afternoons. Mostly, they sat around the utility barn where they bunked down and had set up an immersion tank that showed a panoptic view of the plantation and the surrounding area, patched from drones which whispered high above.
The mercenaries tolerated the Child’s questions, let her play with the tank. The red-haired woman, Sara, showed her how to strip down her pistol and put it back together. It had two fat short barrels side by side and fired what Sara called SARs – slow autonomous rounds. They were the size of honey bees, possessed a propulsion system based on two chemicals that generated volumes of hot gases when mixed together, sprouted fins that could alter their trajectory, and were different colours according to the load they carried. One kind burst in sticky nets; another delivered powerful electric shocks; a third carried a mix of fluorescent dye and a chemical that according to Sara smelled like a corpse that had been kept in a trash can in the full sun for a week.
‘The dye and the stink are hard to wash off, so we can track and identify the bad guys if they get away,’ Sara told the Child. ‘If they’re stupid, they run back to their friends. And so by letting one fish go we catch many more.’
The mercenaries had weapons that fired deadly rounds, too, and the plantation’s perimeter was sown with smart pop-up mines and patrolled by armed drones. But it was better, Sara explained, to take down any intruders with non-lethal weapons. ‘We need to know what their disposition is. How they travel, how many of them there are, what kind of weapons they have, how many days of food and water they have, what their morale is like. All that stuff.’
‘But you haven’t found any yet.’
‘They know we’re here. And they know that we have better weapons than the army. So they keep away from us. Which tells us what?’
‘They’re smart.’
‘Also that they have good intel. From people embedded in the town, most likely.’
Sara spoke fair Portuguese, and was patient and good-humoured. She pretended to be interested when the Child talked about her small menagerie and the cell cultures she looked after, and she answered as best she could the Child’s questions about the north, and the mercenary life.
One day, the army mounted a big counterattack in the hills on the other side of the Rio Negro. Many of the townspeople climbed to the top of the Fortaleza hill to watch. They made an event of it. Picnics and barbecues, a small maracatú band. The Child went up there with Ama Paulinho and her family. People ate and drank and watched as, beyond the small grid of the town laid out across the promontory, beyond the bend of the river and the low slopes of forest, army flitters manoeuvred above hilltops and poured down streams of tracer-laced rounds or shot off drones that flew in long and controlled arcs towards unseen targets, terminating in satisfying eruptions of red flame and smoke. The Child used a pair of field glasses that she had liberated from Vidal Francisca’s house. At maximum magnification, their infrared feature showed tiny white shapes moving up the dry hills – soldiers, sweeping for any of the enemy who might have survived the aerial bombardment.
Gradually, a pall of smoke from explosions and fires set in the dry forest spread out and obscured the lower slopes of the hills. As the setting sun glowered through layers of smoke, cruise missiles began to slam into the tops of the hills and the folded valleys between, a chain of explosions that sent columns of black smoke rising high into the hot still air. And then fighters from the base in Barcelos screamed in from the east, flying between the hills and the mountains and flashing in the sun’s red light as they tore through columns and veils of smoke. Six, eight, twelve of them. Raptors, according to one of Ama Paulinho’s cousins. As the thin shriek of their engines reached the watchers on the Fortaleza hill, fire erupted in their wake, a long curtain of orange flame boiling through the folded landscape, falling back before flaring up again with renewed strength.
‘That’s that for the poor bastards,’ the cousin said, and along the brow of the Fortaleza hill people clapped and cheered, and the maracatú band struck up a military polka.
The fires on the hills across the river burned all night, and a filthy snow of carbon flakes fell on Saõ Gabriel da Cachoeira. The next day, army patrols combed the blackened hills across the river, and found not a single corpse. And so we continued our war against the intruder.
Meanwhile, the Child was preoccupied with her own private war. It was clear that Vidal Francisca was conducting his campaign of seduction on several fronts. Even Ama Paulinho was being seduced. Vidal Francisca had persuaded her father to join his committee of concerned citizens, and several of her cousins patrolled with the militia.
The Child, having learned hard lessons about power and the psychology of seduction, the uses of flattery and engaging self-interest, of indirectly buying your way into someone’s trust, of giving to receive, tried to make herself useful. She devised plans to test the river water for parasites and pathogens, drew up schemes to plant out gardens in what had been the futbol field to augment the refugees’ diet, and created a virtual prototype of a simple culture system for a tweaked strain of chlorella algae rich in vitamins and essential amino acids. She knew that these schemes would work, they were timely, they could save lives, but nothing came of them because she was a child, and no one took her seriously. Not even her mother, who praised her for her hard work, and said that she should focus all that energy on her education. Even worse, her mother showed the plans to Vidal Francisca,
who showered the Child with unwelcome and patronising flattery about her intelligence and vivid imagination.
At last, the Child finally mustered the necessary amount of courage to put the question she absolutely needed to ask. One pleasantly warm sunny morning at breakfast, she asked her mother if she was going to marry Vidal Francisca.
Her mother’s reaction was completely unexpected. She laughed.
The Child persisted. Now she was set on the path, she would see it through to the end. Saying, ‘It’s as if you are already married.’
Her mother looked at her with sober appraisal. ‘Because he acts as if he owns me, you mean.’
‘Because you spend so much time with him.’
It was as close as she could come to asking about whether or not her mother and Vidal Francisca were sleeping together. The idea sat inside her like a cold stone.
Her mother said, using a soft and reasonable tone of voice that the Child hadn’t heard for some time, ‘Do you know what emancipation means?’
‘It’s what happened to the slaves. They were freed from bondage. From the power of others.’
‘As were women. Once upon a time, women were the equals of men. Not only by law, although that was important, and the result of many hard-fought and difficult battles. But also by culture and by custom. Men came to accept that women should have the same rights of self-determination that they enjoyed. But then there was the Overturn, and the great crisis caused by sudden and catastrophic climate change. Famines, resource wars and plain ordinary wars. The collapse of the global economy and shifts in power.’
‘People went up to the Moon.’
‘The rich, yes.’
‘They fled to places like New Zealand at first,’ the Child said. She wanted to show that she knew all about history. ‘Places that weren’t badly affected by the Overturn. But there were too many refugees, so they went to the Moon. And then to Mars and to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We had a war with Mars.’
‘Yes, we did. And on Earth there was a war between men and women. And women lost. You won’t see it in the history texts, but it is true all the same. As true and real as any war fought over boundaries or oil or water,’ the Child’s mother said. ‘Women were free, and then they were not free.’
‘We’re free now, aren’t we? And the president, she’s a woman. She rules over everyone, man and woman.’
‘She was the wife of the president before her,’ the Child’s mother said. ‘When he died, it was useful to her family and his family that she took his place and continued to rule as he had. Continued to make sure that his policies and political positions were upheld. Also, she is very intelligent, and as cruel and ruthless as any man. She removed enemies who opposed her, and she married again so that she would seem to be under the nominal control of a man. Although her second husband is, like her first, much weaker than her. An exceptional woman in every way, yes. But hardly typical.
‘In times of crisis, the strong always take control of the weak. They are no longer constrained by law or by custom. They claim that they are protecting the weak, but they are in truth exploiting them. Using them. That’s what happened during the Overturn. The rich went to the Moon and abandoned the poor, here on Earth. And in Greater Brazil and elsewhere, democracy was overthrown. Gangsters took over, with the help of the military. Foreign interests. Although by then, the difference between the two was hard to distinguish. And that was the end of democracy, and two centuries of enlightenment and emancipation. Women were no longer partners of men. They became the property of men. Keepers of the houses of men. Incubators of the children of men. With no rights to property of their own, or to the children they gave birth to.’
‘Why? Why did they let it happen?’
‘They didn’t. Men took control by force. As men do, when unrestrained by what we like to call civilisation. Not all men, but a majority. Because they are stronger. Because they are unencumbered by pregnancy and maternal instinct. Because they are fundamentally irrational, by the standards of civilisation. Biological imperative makes them so, as biological imperative makes us irrational, in a different way. But we are smarter than men. Do you know why?’
‘Men don’t need to be smart if they are strong.’
‘It’s true. We must live by our wits. As the dispossessed must always do.’ Then the Child’s mother did something she rarely did, these days. Leaned across the table and took the Child’s hands in hers and looked into the Child’s face. Saying, ‘Always remember that. Whatever happens. Remember that we are smarter.’
There.
That’s done, at last.
The lesson the Child never forgot. The golden thread that ran through the warp and weft of her life. Inextricably bonded with her mother’s anxious gaze and her tight dry grip, the sunlight slanting through the window and falling on the table’s breakfast clutter.
The Child had talked about these things with her mother before, of course. She had been brought up in what was then called the old liberal tradition to believe that she was as good as anyone else, to believe that rank did not confer any especial intellectual or moral privilege, to believe that everything should be questioned, and nothing accepted until it had been throughly examined. But later in her life, whenever she thought of her mother and the things her mother had taught her, she always recalled that moment. It was the archetype of many such moments. So lives are shaped backwards, by what we choose to remember.
Maria let go of the Child’s hands now, leaning back, saying, ‘War changes everything. It shifts the balance from intelligence to strength and the willingness to solve problems by violence. That’s how it is here, you see. War makes it so, always.’
The Child thought about it, and said, ‘Daddy wasn’t like that.’
‘He was enlightened. It was coming back, enlightenment among men. And I was lucky to meet one who was more enlightened than most.’
‘Vidal Francisca isn’t like Daddy.’
Her mother looked at her for a long moment, then said, ‘He thinks he is. He thinks that what he is doing is for the best. The best for me, and for you.’
‘So you won’t marry him,’ the Child said, completing her chain of logic.
‘I’m protected,’ her mother said. ‘Because I’m a widow. If I was not, things might be different. As it is, Vidal must respect the memory of your father. Why? Because in a way I am still the property of your father, as far as Vidal is concerned. He can never completely own me because in his view I am already claimed.’
This didn’t entirely satisfy the Child. She wanted to believe her mother, but her suspicion and fear ran too deep. She believed that her mother had betrayed her own principles, had sought the help of Vidal Francisca because, despite all she’d said, she couldn’t protect herself. She was happier, yes, and the Child was happy that her mother was happy. But around Vidal Francisca her mother wasn’t her usual self. She too often talked about silly and trivial things, and listened to the man talk with respect he didn’t deserve. She seemed younger, somehow. She paid more attention to her appearance. Vidal Francisca bought her clothes and jewellery and perfume, and although she told him she couldn’t wear perfume because of her work – some of the sick couldn’t tolerate it – she wore the clothes and jewellery at dinner parties and other social events. Ama Paulinho commented on these changes with approval, but the Child disliked and feared them. Feared the loss of her mother’s proud stubborn independence, and the loss of her own freedom.
The Child vowed again that she would never marry. That she would never allow herself to be encumbered by children. That she would prove herself better than any man. She would protect herself. She would need no one but herself; she would never bind herself to any man. And for a long time she had kept to that vow, until she’d quickened an illegal clone in her own womb and raised him to become a useful ally and accomplice in her dealings with the world. Soon afterwards, out of political expediency, she’d seduced a scion of the Peixoto family and had allowed herself to fall pregnant by
natural means. But before they could formalise their relationship her lover had been killed in a silly little action against bandits, and their son had been a grievous disappointment, undisciplined, rebellious, dissipated.
She’d had many other children after that, but all were flesh of her flesh and radically tweaked and cut. Cohorts of servants helping her work towards goals they could not understand. We are no more than the latest iteration of her strange and wonderful family, as willing and unworthy as all the rest.
The mercenary, Sara, more or less agreed with the Child’s mother, saying that while it was true that women fought in the army and worked in manufactories and the R&R Corps alongside men, that did not mean that they were equal.
‘When there’s something worth having, men make sure they take most or all of it. They don’t stop to think about it. As far as they’re concerned it’s their God-given right.’
‘But you are like a man. You fight like a man. You work with them. Don’t they see you as a fighter first, and a woman second?’
‘I fight as a woman,’ Sara said. ‘Not as a woman pretending to be a man. You see the difference?’
The Child nodded. She liked that Sara didn’t care what other people thought of her. That she stood up for herself against men as well as women.
Sara said, ‘In the north, if you are poor and landless, you do what you have to, to survive. Doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, everyone is in the same shit, with only a few ways out.’
‘Men don’t try to stop you joining the army?’
‘There are more wildsiders in the north. More bandits. And there’s trouble in the cities, too. Too many poor people, too much discontent. And the bosses can’t get enough of the right kind of men. A lot of women can’t hack it, it’s true. The job is tough and men are stronger, mostly. Mostly, but not always,’ Sara said.
