by Paul McAuley
He watched as military vehicles drove up to the farm tubes that ran alongside the city. Figures in blue pressure suits - Brazilian soldiers - clambered out and moved towards the airlocks at the ends of the tubes. After a little while, people in Outer-style pressure suits emerged and were chivvied into lines by the soldiers, some marching off to the vacuum-organism fields pieced across the plain beyond the city, others marching through the freight yards towards the big airlocks at the eastern end of the city.
When all was quiet again the spy wormed his way closer and found a hiding place in a small crevasse close to the road between the city and the vacuum-organism fields. He dozed for several hours, came fully alert as lines of prisoners, shepherded by guards on fat-wheeled trikes, shambled past. As the last line went by, he rose up and tagged onto its end, following it along the road to the farm tubes. There were no headcounts or ID checks. He followed the Outers into one of the airlocks, the door guillotined shut, and that was it. He was back where he belonged.
4
Cash Baker was woken by degrees. Surfacing to a confusion of light and clamour, sinking back, surfacing again. He knew that he had been badly injured and that he was still gravely ill, but he didn’t remember what had happened. The surgeon in charge of his recovery and rehabilitation, Doctor Jésus McCaffery, told him that his singleship had been attacked by Outer drones. One of the drones had exploded close to his ship and a fragment of debris had punched through the ship’s hull and pierced Cash’s head. His ship had saved his life by putting him in hibernation; after he’d been rescued, Dr Jésus and his crew had kept him in an induced coma, repaired the damage by regrowing parts of his brain and modifying the artificial nervous system that had enabled him to fly combat singleships, and then brought him back to consciousness in a series of carefully managed steps.
Dr Jésus or one or another of his aides had to explain this several times. Cash would fall sleep and wake up and try and fail to remember what had happened to him. Sleep was dreamless. Waking was like being in a bad dream he was unable to escape. He didn’t know why he was strapped to a bed in a medical ward, and whole slabs of his life were missing, too. According to Dr Jésus, he was suffering from retrograde amnesia. The memories were still in his head, somewhere, but he had misplaced the codes that accessed them. As he recovered, some of his memories would gradually return, Dr Jésus said, but couldn’t or wouldn’t say how much would be forever lost.
Cash slept a lot, and spent most of his waking time striving to master the basic chores of body maintenance. The medical aides applauded him when he successfully voided his bowels or guided a spoon to his mouth without spilling more than half its cargo. Lavished praise on his ability to remember short strings of unrelated nouns, or to count backwards from one hundred in units of three or seven. He met every challenge with the same determination and vigour he’d applied to basic pilot training, the test-pilot school, and the J-2 test programme, and his recovery was astonishingly fast. Within days of being returned to full consciousness, he was out of his bed and testing his ability to walk in a straight line. He had a swirling limp and a tendency to drift to the right, but he gritted his teeth and got the job done in less than two hours, and then he slept around the clock.
An intelligence officer paid him a visit, told him that he was a hero, and showed him two files, crisply edited and saturated with brash patriotic fervour. The first documented the descent of a pair of singleships, one of them apparently his, into the atmosphere of Saturn. Operation Deep Sounding. A demonstration of the capabilities of the Brazilian J-2 singleships that had ended in a thrilling hair’s-breadth escape from a fiendish plan by the Outers to destroy them. The second followed the trajectory of a chunk of ice that a gang of Outers had flung across the Saturn System towards a base that the Pacific Community had established on Phoebe, the largest of the gas giant’s flock of eccentric outer moons. Cash and two other singleship pilots had been dispatched in hot pursuit. When they’d caught up with the rogue chunk of ice there’d been a brief but furious battle with its automated defences. Cash’s singleship had been damaged and he had been grievously wounded. According to the file, his noble sacrifice had allowed his companions to plant a nuclear bomb that had blown the ice to harmless fragments. And he had been rescued and, thanks to the intervention of skilled surgeons using the very latest technology, his life had been saved and now he was recovering from his injuries, a true hero of the Quiet War. The file ended with video of General Arvam Peixoto, commander-in-chief of the Brazilian/European joint expeditionary force and acting head of the Three Powers Authority, leaning solicitously over Cash lying in the bed where he was lying right now, asking him how he was feeling. Cash, watching, winced when he saw his lopsided smile, the obvious effort with which he lifted his arm, thumb quiveringly erect.
Cash didn’t remember the general’s visit and he didn’t remember the action against the chunk of ice or the descent into Saturn’s atmosphere. And he didn’t recognise some of the people who came to visit him, although they clearly knew him. He remembered his best buddy Luiz Schwarcz, sure, and Caetano Cavalcanti and a couple of other guys from the J-2 test programme, but he had no recollection whatsoever of several others, including the severely beautiful blonde woman, Colonel Vera Flamilion Jackson, who claimed to have flown with him on the two missions celebrated in the files.
When he asked Luiz Schwarcz about their bunky Colly Blanco, Luiz’s mouth turned down and he said that Colly was dead. He’d flown a rescue mission and he’d been shot down. The first casualty of the Quiet War.
Cash was a casualty of war, too. He was improving physically every day, but his head still wasn’t quite right. He suffered from violent headaches, was prone to sudden rage, crying jags, and depressions that leached everything around him of colour and value. Meanwhile, he exercised, did his level best to ace out every one of the memory and reasoning tests that Dr Jésus’s crew set him, and slept.
Luiz Schwarcz stopped by Cash’s little cubicle whenever he could. He smuggled in forbidden luxuries: a pouch of cachaça, squares of chocolate, a fresh peach. He also brought, at Cash’s request, a mirror. Cash had already seen himself in his sickbed at the end of the second file. He believed that he was prepared for what the mirror would reveal. But he wasn’t. The file must have been doctored. Cosmetically tweaked. He’d looked pretty bad in the file, but he looked even worse in the mirror. He looked like his father. He looked like his goddamned father in his last days, dying from a wildfire carcinoma that had turned his lungs to black slime.
‘You look like a man with a hole drilled right through his head,’ Luiz said. He was sitting on the edge of Cash’s bed because there was nowhere else to sit, a wiry man with coffee-brown skin and a hairline moustache, trim and poised in pressed blue coveralls. ‘You’re the only person I know stubborn enough to survive that.’
‘I’m not sure I did. I mean, I’m not who I used to be.’
‘You’re a certified grade-A gold-plated hero,’ Luiz said.
‘I’m a fuck-up who screwed the pooch.’
‘It was a hairy mission. And you went in close and took out the booby traps. The rail guns and the drones. If you hadn’t done that, we couldn’t have planted the nuke that blew the chunk of ice to dust and splinters. And if you want to talk about screwing the pooch, that would be down to Vera and me. Because we weren’t able to rescue you when your ship jagged off.’
‘No hard feelings on my part. You had to complete the mission,’ Cash said.
‘We completed it. And then we should have come after you—’
‘You did what you had to do,’ Cash said, riding a hot spurt of anger. ‘You had to leave me. Big deal. Get past it. Because I’m fucking sick of hearing you apologise.’
‘You’re tired,’ Luiz said. ‘I’ll come back later.’
‘Yeah, fuck off, why don’t you,’ Cash said. He knew that he was being unreasonable but was unable to stop himself. Hearing himself say, ‘It’s what you’re good at. Fucker.’
> It was like he was possessed. Like the women in church back home, collapsing when the preacher pressed the heel of his hand against their foreheads, writhing on the floor, speaking in tongues.
When Luiz came back the next day, Cash apologised, but his friend waved it off.
‘Não é nada.’
‘It ain’t nothing,’ Cash said. ‘I have to get past it. I have to get back.’
‘You will,’ Luiz said, although his soft sad gaze contradicted him.
They talked about the war. According to Luiz, it had started long before a gang of Outers who called themselves Ghosts had aimed that chunk of ice at Phoebe. And the military phase, the attacks on Outer cities and settlements and ships, had really been the last stage of a cunning and intricately planned campaign. Before the Brazilian/European joint expedition had arrived in the Saturn System, diplomatic and trade missions had persuaded some of the Outer cities to stay neutral. To give in; surrender without a shot. As for the rest, spies had infiltrated the cities and sabotaged their critical infrastructures. Crops packed tightly in greenhouse farms had begun to die, depriving the cities not only of supplies of food but also oxygen; water had been contaminated with psychotropic drugs, and air with influenza viruses; the information nets had been polluted with demons that denied service or saturated the nets with propaganda messages; power supplies had become untrustworthy. By the time the military phase of the war had begun, the populations of the cities had been demoralised, sick, and exhausted from dealing with faltering or failing life-support systems. Most had surrendered at once. Only Paris, Dione, had put up any kind of resistance, and it had fallen inside a day.
Luiz told Cash that he and the rest of the singleship wing had spent their time chasing down Outer ships that had been attempting to flee the Saturn System. Most of those had been unarmed; the rest had been no match for the singleships. Still, more than half the refugees had managed to escape. Right now they were hiding out at Uranus. And no one knew how many of them were out there, or what they were planning to do.
‘Why haven’t you gone away?’ Cash said.
‘Away?’
‘I mean after them.’
‘We’re too busy here,’ Luiz said. ‘We’re good at blowing things up. It’s what we trained to do. But we’re not so good at putting things back together again. And fixing the damage to the cities is child’s play compared to dealing with the Outers.’
Luiz told Cash that he’d been put in charge of a taxi service, shuttling marines and civilians and equipment between various moons. The Saturn System was now governed by the Three Powers Authority. The Pacific Community had established a small base on Phoebe and controlled the scattered settlements on Iapetus; the Europeans had been given charge of Rhea; Greater Brazil owned the rest. All the tiny and mostly uninhabited moons, as well as Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, and Titan.
‘Plus we’re arguing with the PacCom over who controls Hyperion,’ Luiz said. ‘No one lives there, but it’s become a sticking point.’
‘Bullshit politics.’
‘Remember we nearly went to war with them over Hawaii?’
‘I’m not that fucked up.’
‘They didn’t come here to help us out. We didn’t need their help. They came here for a piece of the action,’ Luiz said. ‘The question is, what are they going to do with what they have? And what else do they want?’
‘If there’s going to be another wart, another war, I need to make better fist,’ Cash said, and pretended that he didn’t see the quick tremor that passed across Luiz’s face.
One day, General Arvam Peixoto visited Cash in his hospital bed and presented him with a medal and his captain’s bars - that was when Cash found out that he had been promoted, and that he was going back to Earth. The general told him that people back home needed to know about how the war had been won. He wanted Cash to act as an emissary or ambassador for the expedition. To explain the heroic work being done here, and to tell his own story.
‘I don’t remember too much of it right now,’ Cash said.
‘Don’t worry about that. I have people who can help you. It’ll be a fine little assignment. You’re a hero, Captain, and you’ll be treated as one. You’ll tour the major cities, meet VIPs at parties and receptions, drink fine wines and eat steak each and every night. And women, Captain, I don’t have to tell you that women love a hero, eh? All you have to do is make a few speeches, answer a few questions. And my people will write the speeches and coach you, and because they will be asking the questions, you will know the answers. A fine assignment, yes? And one that you fully deserve. What do you say?’
5
Every day, the Brazilians brought more people to the dead city. Their search parties spread out across the face of Dione, entering and securing every garden habitat, oasis, and shelter, rounding up the inhabitants and transporting them to Paris for processing: a brief interrogation, confirmation of identity, injection with a subdermal tag. An industrial process, inflexible but efficient. The city’s net and every copy of its data base had been destroyed or corrupted during the war, but the Brazilians had assembled a list of malcontents by trawling news boards, public forums and private discussion groups, personal mailboxes, and registers in the nets of cities that had survived the war unscathed. Anyone who had ever been a member of any civic agency, had served on Paris’s council or any of its committees, or had spoken out against reconciliation with Earth, whether in private or in public, was dispatched to the maximum-security jail, formerly the city’s correctional facility and now much expanded. Of the rest, pregnant women and women or men nursing babies were sent to a maternity camp; everyone else was told that they could either work for the Three Powers Authority or spend the rest of their lives in a prison camp.
Almost half the prisoners supported the doctrine of nonviolent resistance and refused to work. At first, the Brazilians attempted to break their spirit. Refuseniks were subjected to public strip-searches, random beatings, solitary confinement, or even, in the early days, execution. The guard would order the prisoners to line up and then seize two or three of them and drag them to an airlock and cycle them through into vacuum, but this practice was abandoned when prisoners began to follow the guards and their victims, demanding to be cycled through too. If anyone in one of the barracks was refused rations, the rest went on hunger strike in sympathy. If the guards selected someone for a random beating, other prisoners would volunteer to take their place. And so on. At last, the Brazilians gave up on attempting to convert the refuseniks and left them to their own devices, supplying their barracks with minimal rations and life support, locking them down in quarantine.
The spy chose to work. People who practised nonviolent resistance might be honourable, principled, and brave, but they were also crazy. They would weaken and die in their isolated barracks, and their principles would die with them. In any case, it was nothing to do with him. He was neither an Outer nor a Brazilian. Neither prisoner nor occupier. He was a free man. He had given himself up to the Brazilians freely because it gave him the best chance of finding Zi Lei. He knew that it was a stupidly dangerous quest, but it gave his new life a shape and a destination. He had been trained all his life to be someone else: to wear the skin of an assumed identity and infiltrate the enemy population and carry out a secret mission. That was what he had done before the war, when, working in the skin of Ken Shintaro, he had sabotaged Paris’s infrastructure. And that was what he was doing now. Despite the deprivation and fear and hard work, he was quietly content.
In the first weeks, the spy and his fellow prisoners, all single, childless men, worked twelve hours a day every day in the ruins of the city. Supervision was minimal. They were left to their own devices when they weren’t working, and organised themselves into crews assigned a variety of housekeeping tasks: taking turns at cooking, laundry, and general maintenance, nursing those who’d been wounded in the battle for Paris and its aftermath, collecting and recycling urine and faeces, tending the fruit bushes packed into
the farm tube that served as their quarters, and sharing out harvested fruit to supplement their CHON food rations.
The spy was immediately welcomed into this little community. The Outers weren’t naive or credulous, but they were naturally hospitable and hadn’t yet learned to suspect and distrust strangers. And besides, it was obvious that, with his etiolated build, opposable big toes, and simple secondary hearts pulsing in his femoral and subclavian arteries, he was one of them, and his story about his search for his friend Zi Lei chimed with their strong sense of romance. He told them that she had been arrested and incarcerated before the war, that he had tried and failed to find her during the confusion of the attack on the city when battle drones and troops had fallen from the sky and quickly overwhelmed the defences that ringed the city’s perimeter, and that he had been searching for her ever since.
No one in the farm tube had known Zi Lei before the war, or knew if she had survived it. And the Brazilians kept men and women apart, so there was no easy way of discovering if she was a prisoner, in one of the work crews or, more likely, amongst the refuseniks. The spy bided his time. He had been taught how to be patient. But he couldn’t stop wondering where she was and if she was all right. He supposed that his tender helpless yearning meant that he was in love.
The spy’s work crew had been tasked with collecting the bodies of citizens killed when the Brazilians had taken Paris. The Brazilians had broken in at either end of the city’s tent and advanced towards the centre amidst fierce hand-to-hand street fighting. The city’s defenders had blown up and set fire to the public buildings in a last desperate stand, and then the tent had been ruptured and the city had lost its air. Half the population had died. Some ten thousand people.
The crew worked in the lower part of the city, amongst manufactories, workshops and blocks of old-fashioned apartment buildings. It was where the spy had lived as Ken Shintaro before the war, and he found it strange to return to it now. Power had been restored, but the city was still in vacuum and everything was frozen at -200° Centigrade. Trees stripped of foliage and branches by the hurricane of explosive decompression when the city’s tent had been ruptured stood naked and frozen hard as iron along the wide avenues. The halflife grass that turfed the avenues and the plants in the parks and courtyard gardens was frozen too, slowly bleaching in the stark light of the chandeliers.
