It took him a moment to realize that if this was true, then somewhere—maybe not even far away—Angela and Lissy were alive too, waiting patiently for him at home, oblivious of the nonexistent war. Not starving to death in a relocation camp, not buried in unmarked graves hidden under mountains of rubble. Alive.
God, now he knew what he had been drafted for. Not to be a real soldier, but to play out simulations, perfect computer simulations of possible battle scenarios. The people he’d fought, the ones he’d fought with, weren’t real. They needed to know how he’d hold up under stress, how any average American would hold up. They needed the data to make their computer simulations work. He was fighting this war so that, in real life, no one would ever have to fight a war.
He was a pawn.
But was he a pawn of the Americans? Or the Russians? What if the Russians needed to know the reactions of American soldiers, too? What if they really were planning an invasion?
That was ridiculous.
He started to shake his head, first left, then right, watching for a timelag in the video response. It started making him dizzy, but he refused to stop. “Let me out!” He shook his head harder, faster. The other prisoners stared at him. “Stop the simulation! I quit, I tell you! I’m quitting!”
His head hurt, and the world was no less real. He clenched his teeth and slapped himself on the side of the head, ignoring the pain. Blood started to flow down his cheek on the third or fourth punch, but now he thought he could see something, a blur of black-anodized aluminum, out of focus in front of his eyes, the raster-head of a retinal laser-scanner. He shook his head more violently, left and right, up and down, and he could see it more clearly, with the lenses and sensors that kept it focused on his eyes. It had slipped slightly off to the side, and the reeducation camp was the part out of focus now, two-dimensional, the view from each eye skewed. He tried to pull it off his head, but his hands felt nothing. He shook his head harder. The moment before he passed out, the head-mounted display slipped entirely away, and he could see the room, and the computers, and the figures of three doctors bending over him with expressions of alarmed concern.
8.
The man from the Selective Service thanked Rorvik, reminded him of the penalties for talking to any person at any time about his service experiences, and then shook his hand. Rorvik could see Angela waiting for him at the door. The house looked different; smaller, the paint dingier than he remembered. He’d only been gone a week.
Stop that. If it were a simulation, they would have used photographs of the house; it would be perfect in every detail.
He scanned the bushes aromatically, looking for the glint of sun from drone lenses, wishing he had his IR-augmented vision. Then he caught himself, forced his muscles to relax. There was no war, no hiding drones.
The government car drove off, and Lissy darted from behind Angela and scampered out to greet him. He spread his arms to receive her, and she almost knocked him over with her enthusiasm. “Daddy! You’re home! I missed you!”
He picked her up and swung her around. She was bigger than he remembered. Could she have grown so much in a week? Her hair was darker, her face thinner and more ordinary than in his memories.
“I missed you too, Tiger-cub,” he said.
She looked up at him, growling like a tiger but with a wide smile, and he hugged her. Then he nuzzled his face up under her ponytail, and purred at her as loud as he could. She giggled and purred back.
They couldn’t possibly simulate that. He opened his arms. Angela joined them, and he hugged them both at the same time. “I missed you, too, Daddy-cat,” Angela whispered.
It was real this time.
He was home.
Real.
SECOND SKIN
by Paul J. McAuley
Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. He is considered to be one of the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well) who are producing that sort of revamped, updated, widescreen Space Opera sometimes referred to as “radical hard science fiction,” and is a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel; two collections of his short work, The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The Invisible Country; and an original anthology co-edited with Kim Newman, In Dreams. His acclaimed novel, Fairyland, won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His most recent book is Child of the River, the first volume of a major new trilogy of ambitious scope and scale, Confluence, set ten million years in the future.
In the suspenseful and richly inventive story that follows, he takes us on a journey across space to the farthest reaches of the solar system, beneath the frozen surface of the moon Proteus, for a tale that demonstrates that sometimes the most effective warfare is not waged with armies or high-tech weapons, and that sometimes the most dangerous battlefield of all may be the human heart.
* * *
The transport, once owned by an outer system cartel and appropriated by Earth’s Pacific Community after the Quiet War, ran in a continuous, ever-changing orbit between Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. It never docked. It mined the solar wind for hydrogen to mix with the nanogram of antimatter that could power it for a century, and once or twice a year, during its intricate gravity-assisted loops between Saturn’s moons, maintenance drones attached remoralike to its hull, and fixed whatever its self-repairing systems couldn’t handle.
Ben Lo and the six other members of the first trade delegation to Proteus since the war were transferred onto the transport as it looped around Titan, still sleeping in the hibernation pods they’d climbed into in Earth orbit. Sixty days later, they were released from the transport in individual drop capsules of structural diamond, like so many seeds scattered by a pod.
Ben Lo, swaddled in the crash web that took up most of the volume of the drop capsule’s little bubble, watched with growing vertigo as the battered face of Proteus drew closer. He had been awakened only a day ago, and was as weak and unsteady as a new-born kitten. The sun was behind the bubble’s braking chute. Ahead, Neptune’s disc was tipped in star-sprinkled black above the little moon. Neptune was subtly banded with blue and violet, its poles capped with white cloud, its equator streaked with cirrus. Slowly, slowly, Proteus began to eclipse it. The transport had already dwindled to a bright point amongst the bright points of the stars, on its way to spin up around Neptune, loop past Triton, and head on out for the next leg of its continuous voyage, halfway across the solar system to Uranus.
Like many of the moons of the outer planets, Proteus was a ball of ice and rock. Over billions of years, most of the rock had sunk to the core, and the moon’s icy, dirty white surface was splotched with a scattering of large impact craters with black interiors, like well-used ash trays, and dissected by large stress fractures, some running halfway round the little globe.
The spy fell toward Proteus in a thin transparent bubble of carbon, wearing a paper suit and a diaper, and trussed up in a cradle of smart cabling like an early Christian martyr. He could barely move a muscle. Invisible laser light poured all around him—the capsule was opaque to the frequency used—gently pushing against the braking sail which had unfolded and spun into a twenty kilometer diameter mirror after the capsule had been released by the transport. Everything was fine.
The capsule said, “Only another twelve hours, Mr. Lo. I suggest that you sleep. Elfhame’s time zone is ten hours behind Greenwich Mean Time.”
Had he been asleep for a moment? Ben Lo blinked and said, “Jet lag,” and laughed.
“I don’t understand,” the capsule said politely. It didn’t need to be very intelligent. All it had to do was control the altitude of the braking sail, and keep its
passenger amused and reassured until landing. Then it would be recycled.
Ben Lo didn’t bother to try to explain. He was feeling the same kind of yawning apprehension that must have gripped ninety-year-old airline passengers at the end of the twentieth century. A sense of deep dislocation and estrangement. How strange that I’m here, he thought. And, how did it happen? When he’d been born, spaceships had been crude, disposable chemical rockets. The first men on the moon. President Kennedy’s assassination. No, that happened before I was born. For a moment, his yawning sense of dislocation threatened to swallow him whole, but then he had it under control and it dwindled to mere strangeness. It was the treatment, he thought. The treatment and the hibernation.
Somewhere down there in the white moonscape, in one of the smaller canyons, was Ben Lo’s first wife. But he mustn’t think of that. Not yet. Because if he did . . . no, he couldn’t remember. Something bad, though.
“I can offer a variety of virtualities,” the capsule said. Its voice was a husky contralto. It added, “Certain sexual services are also available.”
“What I’d like is a Chateaubriand steak butterfried and well-grilled over hickory wood, a Caesar salad, and a 1998 Walnut Creek Cabernet Sauvignon.”
“I can offer a range of nutritive pastes, and eight flavors of water, including a balanced electrolyte,” the capsule said. A prissy note seemed to have edged into its voice. It added, “I would recommend that you restrict intake of solids and fluids until after landing.”
Ben Lo sighed. He had already had his skin scrubbed and repopulated with strains of bacteria and yeast native to the Protean ecosystem, and his GI tract had been reamed out and packed with a neutral gel containing a benign strain of E. coli. He said, “Give me an inflight movie.”
“I would recommend virtualities,” the capsule said. “I have a wide selection.”
Despite the capsule’s minuscule intelligence, it had a greater memory capacity than all the personal computers on Earth at the end of the millennium. Ben Lo had downloaded his own archives into it.
“Wings of Desire,” he said.
“But it’s in black and white! And flat. And only two senses—”
“There’s color later on. It has a particular relevance to me, I think. Once upon a time, capsule, there was a man who was very old, and became young again, and found that he’d lost himself. Run the movie, and you’ll understand a little bit about me.”
The moon, Neptune, the stars, fell into a single point of light. The light went out. The film began.
Falling through a cone of laser light, the man and the capsule watched how an angel became a human being, out of love.
* * *
The capsule skimmed the moon’s dirty-white surface and shed the last of its relative velocity in the inertia buffers of the target zone, leaving its braking sail to collapse across kilometers of moonscape. It was picked up by a striding tripod that looked like a prop from The War of the Worlds, and carried down a steeply sloping tunnel through triple airlocks into something like the ER room of a hospital. With the other members of the trade delegation, Ben Lo, numbed by neural blocks, was decanted, stripped, washed, and dressed in fresh paper clothes.
Somewhere in the press of nurses and technicians he thought he glimpsed someone he knew, or thought he knew. A woman, her familiar face grown old, eyes faded blue in a face wrinkled as a turtle’s . . . But then he was lifted onto a gurney and wheeled away.
Waking, he had problems with remembering who he was. He knew he was nowhere on Earth. A universally impersonal hotel room, but he was virtually in free fall. Some moon, then. But what role was he playing?
He got up, moving carefully in the fractional gravity, and pulled aside the floor-to-ceiling drapes. It was night, and across a kilometer of black air was a steep dark mountainside or perhaps a vast building, with lights wound at its base, shimmering on a river down there . . .
Proteus. Neptune. The trade delegation. And the thing he couldn’t think about, which was fractionally nearer the surface now, like a word at the back of his tongue. He could feel it, but he couldn’t shape it. Not yet.
He stripped in the small, brightly lit sphere of the bathroom and turned the walls to mirrors and looked at himself. He was too young to be who he thought he was. No, that was the treatment, of course. His third. Then why was his skin this color? He hadn’t bothered to tint it for . . . how long?
That sci-fi version of Othello, a century and a half ago, when he’d been a movie star. He remembered the movie vividly, although not the making of it. But that was the color he was now, his skin a rich dark mahogany, gleaming as if oiled in the lights, his hair a cap of tight black curls.
He slept again, and dreamed of his childhood home. San Francisco. Sailboats scattered across the blue bay. He’d had a little boat, a Laser. The cold salt smell of the sea. The pinnacles of the rust-red bridge looming out of banks of fog, and the fog horn booming mournfully. Cabbage leaves in the gutters of Spring Street. The crowds swirling under the crimson and gold neon lights of the trinket shops of Grant Avenue, and the intersection of Grant and California tingling with trolley car bells.
He remembered everything as if he had just seen it in a movie. Nonassociational aphasia. It was a side effect of the treatment he’d just had. He’d been warned about it, but it was still unsettling. The woman he was here to . . . Avernus. Her name now. But when they had been married, a hundred and sixty-odd years ago, she had been called Barbara Reiner. He tried to remember the taste of her mouth, the texture of her skin, and could not.
* * *
The next transport would not swing by Proteus for a hundred and seventy days, so there was no hurry to begin the formal business of the trade delegation. For a while, its members were treated as favored tourists, in a place that had no tourist industry at all.
The sinuous rill canyon which housed Elfhame had been burned to an even depth of a kilometer, sealed under a construction diamond roof, and pressurized to 750 millibars with a nitrox mix enriched with one percent carbon dioxide to stimulate plant growth. The canyon ran for fifty kilometers through a basaltic surface extrusion, possibly the remnant of the giant impact that had resurfaced the farside hemisphere of the moon a billion years ago, or the result of vulcanism caused by thermal drag when the satellite had been captured by Neptune.
The sides of the canyon were raked to form a deep vee in profile, with a long narrow lake lying at the bottom like a black ribbon, dusted with a scattering of pink and white coral keys. The Elfhamers called it the Skagerrak. The sides of the canyon were steeply terraced, with narrow vegetable gardens, rice paddies, and farms on the higher levels, close to the lamps that, strung from the diamond roof, gave an insolation equivalent to that of the Martian surface. Farther down, amongst pocket parks and linear strips of designer wilderness, houses clung to the steep slopes like soap bubbles, or stood on platforms or bluffs, all with panoramic views of the lake at the bottom and screened from their neighbors by soaring ginkgoes, cypress, palmettos, bamboo (which grew to fifty meters in the microgravity), and dragon’s blood trees. All the houses were large and individually designed; Elfhamers went in for extended families. At the lowest levels were the government buildings, commercial malls and parks, the university and hospital, and the single hotel, which bore all the marks of having been recently constructed for the trade delegation. And then there was the lake, the Skagerrak, with its freshwater corals and teeming fish, and slow, ten-meter-high waves. The single, crescent-shaped beach of black sand at what Elfhamers called the North End was very steeply raked, and constantly renewed; the surfing was fabulous.
There was no real transportation system except for a single tube train line that shuttled along the west side, and moving lines with T-bar seats, like ski lifts, that made silver lines along the steep terrace slopes. Mostly, people bounded around in huge kangaroo leaps, or flew using startlingly small wings of diamond foil or little hand-held airscrews—the gravity was so low, 0.007g, that human flight was ridiculou
sly easy. Children rode airboards or simply dived from terrace to terrace, which strictly speaking was illegal, but even adults did it sometimes, and it seemed to be one of those laws to which no one paid much attention unless someone got hurt. It was possible to break a bone if you jumped from the top of a canyon and managed to land on one of the lakeside terraces, but you’d have to work at it. Some of the kids did—the latest craze was terrace bouncing, in which half a dozen screaming youngsters tried to find out how quickly they could get from top to bottom with the fewest touchdown points.
The entire place, with its controlled, indoor weather, its bland affluent sheen, and its universal cleanliness, was ridiculously vulnerable. It reminded Ben Lo of nothing so much as an old-fashioned shopping mall, the one at Santa Monica, for instance. He’d had a bit part in a movie made in that mall, somewhere near the start of his career. He was still having trouble with his memory. He could remember every movie he’d made, but couldn’t remember making any one of them.
He asked his guide if it was possible to get to the real surface. She was taken aback by the request, then suggested that he could access a mobot using the point-of-presence facility of his hotel room.
“Several hundred were released fifty years ago, and some of them are still running, I suppose. Really, there is nothing up there but some industrial units.”
“I guess Avernus has her labs on the surface.”
Instantly, the spy was on the alert, suppressing a thrill of panic.
His guide was a very tall, thin, pale girl called Maria. Most Elfhamers were descended from Nordic stock, and Maria had the high cheekbones, blue eyes, blond hair, and open and candid manner of her counterparts on Earth. Like most Elfhamers, she was tanned and athletically lithe, and wore a distractingly small amount of fabric: tight shorts, a band of material across her small breasts, plastic sandals, a communications bracelet.
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