by Paul McAuley
‘They’ll feed you a mess of grey info and naked propaganda while subtly pumping you for useful information. And besides, you’re a valuable asset,’ Arvam said. ‘I’d look like a damned fool if I let you go there and you decided to defect.’
Sri couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. ‘I’m sorry that you think I’m too naive to be trusted.’
‘You’re the most intelligent person I know. But you don’t know much about people. One of my aides is writing a summary report about your tête-a-tête with Mr Tommy Tabagee. Check it over, add any comments you feel necessary, sign it off, and have it on my desk tomorrow morning,’ Arvam said. ‘Oh, and you can tell me how you plan to fix up our hero pilot. It’s about time you started earning your keep.’
3
Some fifty days after he’d defected, the spy at last returned to Paris, Dione.
It had not been an easy journey. He’d fallen from orbit in a stolen dropshell, skimming through a hole in the Brazilian surveillance-satellite network, landing inside a small impact crater in the high northern latitudes of Dione’s sub-saturnian hemisphere, walking away across a frozen, gently undulating plain. He was short of air and power and had to reach a shelter or an oasis as quickly as possible, knew that his former masters would be searching for him and that he faced disgrace and execution if he was captured, yet in those first hours of freedom his heart floated on a flood of joy. All around, beyond the shell of his pressure suit, with its intimate chorus of clicks and whirrs, the tide of his breathing and the thud of his pulse, the moonscape stretched silent and still, lovely in its emptiness. The dusty ground glimmering golden-brown in the long light of the low sun. Saturn’s swollen globe looming half-full above the curved horizon, bisected by the black scratch of the ringplane, which printed crisp shadows across smoggy bands of butterscotch and peach and caught fire with diamond light as it shot beyond the gas giant’s limb towards the tiny half-disc of one of the inner moons. He felt as if he was the emperor of all he surveyed. The only witness to this pure, uncanny beauty. And for the first time in his brief and strange life, master of his fate.
He’d been shaped before birth, moulded and trained and indoctrinated during his strange childhood, dispatched to Dione before the beginning of the war on a mission to infiltrate Paris, sabotage its infrastructure, and soften it for invasion by Brazilian forces. He’d carried out his mission to the best of his considerable abilities, but his sojourn amongst the Outers had changed him. He had fallen in love, he’d begun to understand what it meant to be truly human, and then he’d betrayed the woman he loved for the sake of his mission. But now he was free of every obligation and duty towards God and Gaia and Greater Brazil. Free to be anything he wanted to be. Free to find Zi Lei, and save her from the aftermath of war.
And so he bounded along in exuberant kangaroo hops, chasing his long shadow across the plain. Several times he misjudged his landing and tumbled and fell amongst spurts of dust, wrenching his wounded shoulder. It didn’t matter. He bounced to his feet and bounded on, eager and happy, reaching a shelter some sixty kilometres from his landing spot late in the long afternoon.
Hundreds of these tiny unmanned stations were scattered across the surfaces of the inhabited moons, insulated fullerene shells buried in ice and surrounded by fields of tall silvery flowers that transformed sunlight into electrical power, providing basic accommodation where hikers and other travellers could stop for the night. The spy ate a hasty meal, fed a little sugar solution to the halflife bandage that covered the raw bullet wound in his shoulder, then swapped his Brazilian military-issue pressure suit for the shelter’s spare - it fit his lanky frame better, and its lifepack had a longer range - and filled a slingbag with supplies and hiked on towards a crater rim that stood at the horizon. He walked up the long apron of the slumped ridge and near the top found a good hiding place in a deep cleft between two house-sized blocks that had been shattered and overturned by the ancient impact, and unrolled an insulated cocoon and climbed inside it and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. He slept for sixty hours, through Dione’s long night and most of the next day, and woke and headed out to the next shelter, where he showered and ate, recharged his suit’s batteries and topped up its air supply, and walked on.
He travelled like this for more than forty days.
The land dropped in a series of broad, benched terraces into Latium Chasma, a long linear trough carved by a catastrophic flood of ammonia-rich meltwater early in Dione’s history, before the little moon had frozen to its core. He hiked along the broad plain of the chasma’s floor, moving from shelter to shelter, sleeping in shallow crevasses or in the deep shadows of embayments in the gouged and pleated cliffs of the trough’s eastern wall. He was certain that he was still being hunted, but although Dione was only a little over a thousand kilometres in diameter it had a surface area of four million square kilometres - half the size of Australia - and the Brazilian forces were small in number and would be mostly deployed around Paris. Even so, he would now and then spot in the black sky swiftly moving points of light crossing from west to east, and feel as exposed as a bug crawling across a microscope slide.
Every day the spy risked tuning into the military band for a few minutes, listening to chatter, trying to work out how the occupation of Dione was unfolding. The Brazilian flagship was still in orbit around the moon, and Brazilian marines were free to move everywhere on its surface, challenged only by a few deadender holdouts - and these were being eliminated one by one. Paris, the self-proclaimed centre of resistance, had been badly damaged. Its tent was ruptured and most of it lay open to freezing vacuum. More than half of its population had been killed; the rest had either fled or had been taken prisoner. And now the Brazilians were rounding up Outers from oases and habitats scattered across Dione and transporting them to temporary prison camps outside the stricken city.
If he was going to find Zi Lei, the spy thought, he would have to go to Paris. It was his first best hope of finding her, and if she wasn’t there he would look everywhere else.
One day he climbed the rim of a big crater that cut across the trough and at the top saw, far across the great circle of the crater’s floor, a steep-sided pyramid of construction diamond panes and fullerene struts lit up within and crowded with tall trees. Another day he walked past the outer margin of fields of vacuum organisms like pages of dark and twisted characters printed on the pale land.
His wound healed and he wrapped up the halflife bandage and folded it away.
At last, the cliff of the eastern wall slumped downward and the floor of the trough rose, cracked in blocks and little ravines. He’d reached the southern end of the chasma. He’d walked almost a quarter of the way around the little moon.
Someone had cut a trail through the chaotic landscape. The spy followed it across the tops of broken blocks and over ravines bridged by elegant spans of fullerene composite. He walked around the broad, uneven ridge at the edge of a small crater and climbed a natural ramp of consolidated debris onto the rolling, cratered plain beyond.
When he reached the next refuge, he found that it had been cleaned out and left open to vacuum. Tyre tracks and bootprints marked the dust all around, and the vacuum-organism flowers had been chopped down. Certain that the Brazilian occupying force were responsible for this despoliation, feeling lonely and hunted, he walked on. He had no choice.
Four hours later, he was approaching an oasis whose angled tent was pitched on the low rim of a crater some five kilometres across. There were no lights inside and the three sets of doors of the main airlock stood open and the gardened interior was dark and frozen. The spy believed that the place had been raided and cleared out by the Brazilian occupiers some time ago, and although he was by now low on air and power he spent a good hour scouting its perimeter before he dared walk in.
He found spare batteries and air in the airlock of one of the outlying farm tubes. Better still, he found a rolligon hidden under camouflage cloth in a shallow pit dug at the edge of a broad f
ield of tangled black spikes. He spent the time interrogating the vehicle’s AI, but it couldn’t tell him anything useful, so he dozed until shadows had everywhere crept out to cover the moonscape, and then he started up the rolligon and drove up the shallow ramp at one end of the pit.
Navigating by the soft light of Saturnshine, scarcely brighter than starlight, the spy drove due south, with the ramparts of Eumelus Crater doubling the horizon to the west. Using the rolligon was a big risk, but not as big as hoping to rely on resupply from refuges and caches that the occupying force was now targeting. At last he picked up a road that stretched away in a dead straight line towards the equator, the usual graded construction of ice gravel laced with fullerene mesh, thirty metres wide, absolutely level, and with transponder guides set along one edge so that he could surrender control to the rolligon’s AI. He performed a set of stretches and isometric exercises to loosen the rigid bar across his shoulders, went into the galley and steeped a sachet of lemon tea in a beaker, and returned to the driving chair and saw a line gleaming at the horizon.
It was the railway that girdled Dione’s equator, a single track elevated above the plain on pylons like a tightrope bridging the western and eastern horizons. Built, like the road, by the patient and unceasing labour of gangs of construction robots. The spy took back control of the rolligon and stopped a little distance from the elevated track, looking all around, wary again. The railway was important. It could be a target. Something could be watching it . . .
To the east, far off, a faint light gleamed. A star perched at the vanishing point of the railway’s ruled line. The spy used the zoom function of the rolligon’s monitor. The star dimmed as it expanded; details emerged. It was a bullet-shaped railcar, its rear capped with a cargo space, its nose a diamond canopy over a pressurised cabin. It had been heading west, away from Paris. Now it sat flat on the superconducting magnetic track and the door of its cabin gaped open.
The spy sipped lemon tea as he thought things through. The power had cut off and the railcar had grounded and its passengers had climbed out. That much was clear. But where were they now? And who were they? Brazilian or Outer? At last, with less than an hour before dawn, the spy took the wheel of the rolligon and bumped off the road and drove across the dusty ground parallel to the elevated railway, towards the stationary railcar. The nape of his neck and his palms were prickling, but he couldn’t not look. He was hoping that someone else’s bad luck would give him what he needed.
He spotted a muddle of bootprints around the base of the support pylon closest to the grounded railcar and stopped the rolligon and pulled on his pressure suit and climbed out and cast around. The bootprints resolved into a path that followed the railway east, in the direction from which the railcar had come. Five sets of tracks either side of something that had left a broad trail in the icy dust.
The spy called up a map, realised that the railcar’s passengers must be heading for the nearest station, some fifty kilometres away at the rim of Mnestheus Crater. He looked towards the horizon but nothing moved there. Everywhere was as silent and still as it had ever been.
He climbed the rungs stapled to one side of the pylon and walked down the track to the railcar and stood at the open door for a little while. One of the floor panels was missing and there was blood on another part of the floor and on two of the big cushions that had served as seats. The blood frozen and black in the cold vacuum.
Someone had been wounded, then. And his companions had taken the floor panel and used it to drag him along with them. The spy wondered how much air they’d had, wondered if their wounded comrade had survived the trip.
There was only one way to find out.
A few minutes after he’d started up the rolligon and set off parallel to the railway, the sun sprang above the horizon directly ahead, as bright and sharp now as it would be at noon because there was no atmosphere to attenuate or diffuse its harsh white light. The railway strode straight on, its pylons stepping amongst a string of small impact craters and growing taller as it crossed a broad and shallow depression. The spy lost sight of the track left by the railcar passengers when it bent to the north, around the outer edge of the craters. He backtracked, spotted a bright yellow cannister someone had discarded, picked up the trail and went on.
After a few kilometres, the trail of bootprints and scrape marks bent north again and crossed the low rim of a medium-sized impact crater. The spy stopped the rolligon and looked all around, the elevated railway skylined behind him, the moonscape all around utterly still and empty. He locked his helmet over his head and climbed down and followed the bootprints up the crater rim to the top, where a flat sheet of fullerene composite, the missing section of railcar floor, stood upright at one end of a mound built of loose ice-rock rubble. He unpacked the rubble at the foot of the sheet and uncovered a helmet, its faceplate blind with frost.
The pressure suit had been powered down and the body inside was frozen solid. The spy had a little trouble unlatching the helmet, felt relief wash through him when he saw that the corpse was male, its face white and hard as marble. He uncovered the body down to its waist and jacked his patch cord into the pressure suit’s service port and studied the personal files stored in its memory. The dead man was Felice Gottschalk, born in a garden habitat called Dvoskin’s Knoll and currently a resident of Paris, an apprentice architect and sonic artist, twenty-three years old, no children. Perfect.
He did not give another thought to the dead man, or to the people who had dragged him with them until he had died and then had buried him here in the hope that they could one day come back to retrieve his body, or tell others where to find it. He did not wonder whether they had reached the safety of the station or had run out of air or power and died somewhere out on the empty plain. His curiosity was strictly practical. With the exception of Zi Lei, he was interested in people only inasmuch as they were useful or dangerous to him.
So without ceremony or second thoughts he carried the corpse to the rolligon, stashed it in an external locker, and drove south and east. The railway sank beneath the horizon behind him. When he saw the long gleam of an ice cliff at the horizon he turned towards it.
The cliff, created by tectonic fractures when Dione had cooled and its icy crust had contracted, was more than a hundred metres high. Part of it had collapsed, forming a small, shallow basin. The spy drove up a lobate apron of consolidated mass-wasted rubble and parked in the shadows under the grooved face of the basin and interred Felice Gottschalk’s corpse deep in the dusty rubble, where no one would ever find it.
He microwaved and ate a portion of rice, black beans, and shiitake mushrooms, then set to work, merging his biometric and DNA profile with the biographical data in Felice Gottschalk’s files and porting everything to the ID chip in his pressure suit. This fake identity would pass any casual check made by the occupying forces, and if he could reach one of the caches he’d set up while he’d been living in Paris he would be able to alter his appearance and change his fingerprints with injections of halflife collagen. The spy dozed in the driver’s seat, luxuriating in idle but pleasurable fantasies about Zi Lei until nightfall, and then he drove on towards Paris.
He was certain that he would find Zi Lei there. If she’d managed to escape from the immediate vicinity of the city during the war she would by now have been caught in the occupying force’s sweeps and transported to one of the prison camps. And even if she had managed to evade capture so far, if she was hiding out in some remote oasis or shelter, he would find her. Even if it took the rest of his life, he would find her.
Now, at last, the spy had reached the dead city.
He’d driven as close to Romulus Crater as he dared and hiked in over the rim some thirty kilometres west of Paris, to one of the caches he’d set up before the war. He’d subjected himself to a few minor cosmetic alterations and altered his ID accordingly, picked up a memory needle containing back-up copies of his demons, and after night had fallen he’d snuck across the ancient landslips
and fans of mass-wasted material to a vantage point just two kilometres from the city’s perimeter.
The long tent slanted down the inner slope of the crater’s rim and ran out across the flat terrain beyond. Buildings stood up inside it, starkly lit. The farm tubes were dark and the land all around was dark too - apart from the spaceport, which seemed to float in the glare of hundreds of floodlights. Three Brazilian shuttles stood on landing pads. Beyond them, a crew of giant construction robots were working on a skeleton of new tent.
The spy dozed until the sun’s tiny disc appeared at the horizon and the moonscape was immediately tangled with shadows. He looked all around, alert and eager, and spotted a tiny gleam to the northeast. It was the dome which housed the research station where Zi Lei and other members of the peace movement had been held prisoner. The healed wound in his shoulder itched. His body, remembering.
Zi Lei had come to him for help after martial law had been declared and the city’s wardens had begun to arrest prominent members of the Permanent Peace Debate. He’d drugged her, forced her to swallow a transmitter, and betrayed her to the city’s wardens because he’d needed to find out where the peaceniks where being held - he’d been instructed to locate the gene wizard Avernus and the traitor Macy Minnot, both prominent supporters of the peace movement. Although he’d been wounded while escaping from the city at the beginning of the war, he’d managed to reach the makeshift prison, sabotage its security system, and deal with the guards . . . but then things had gone badly wrong. Someone had knocked him down with a tranquiliser dart, and he’d been left behind when Zi Lei and the other prisoners had escaped. He had a hazy memory that she’d bent over him as he’d faded into unconsciousness, that she’d whispered that she knew that he was a good man. He hoped it was true. He hoped that she would forgive him when he found her.
