by Paul McAuley
Most buildings had been damaged during the battle; few had retained integrity. There were bodies in apartments, in central court-yards, in basements. Fallen where they had been caught in the open, huddled around doors, in bed niches, inside airlocks. Those who had been wearing pressure suits when they had died were the easiest to deal with. The rest were statues frozen to the floor or to furniture or to each other, heads and hands swollen and blackened by pressure bruising, faces masked by blood expressed from ears and eyes and mouths and nostrils, eyes starting, swollen tongues protruding. Men and women and children. Babies.
The crew secured samples of frozen flesh for DNA analysis and logged and bagged any possessions, then pried the bodies free by using crowbars and wedges and loaded them onto sleds that were driven out of the city through airlocks whose triple sets of doors stood permanently open. Construction robots dug long trenches in the icy regolith beyond the eastern edge of the vacuum-organism fields, and the bodies were dumped into them without ceremony and covered with ice gravel. As if the Brazilians wanted the evidence of their atrocities to be erased as quickly as possible.
After all the bodies in public areas had been removed, the clearance work became a macabre treasure hunt. Searching through apartment blocks room by room. Looking in basements and service tunnels. In storage lockers and cupboards where people had sought refuge or had tried to hoard a last few sips of air. Everyone worked in a haze of exhaustion. They averted their gazes from the faces of the dead as they levered and pried and cut. They cursed the stiff and awkward corpses, sat down and wept, were chivvied back to work by the Brazilian guards.
There were dreadful stories of people finding loved ones, partners, parents, children, and in any case the work was an unceasing horror. Many people in the salvage crews committed suicide. A few dramatically, by unlatching their helmets or throwing themselves under the treads of one of the construction robots that were demolishing badly damaged buildings; most by finding some hidden spot and disabling their air scrubbers. It wasn’t so bad, people said. You became woozy as the carbon dioxide built up, and passed into merciful sleep.
The suicides went into the trenches, too.
One day, the spy was lined up with the rest of the crew near one of the big airlocks, everyone shivering with fatigue inside the shells of their pressure suits, waiting for their armed escort to march them back to the farm tube, when a sled glided by and something caught his eye. A woman lying on top of a pile of bodies, her unmarked face pale and hard as the face of a marble statue, a stiff banner of black hair, little tucks in the outer corners of her eyes, a small uptilted nose. It was her. It was Zi Lei. He broke ranks and chased after the sled and caught up with it, and with a shock of relief saw that the dead woman wasn’t Zi Lei after all. Then two guards crashed into him and knocked him to the ground. They hauled him away to the punishment block and stripped him and beat him half-heartedly and threw him in a cell and left him there all night without food or water. And in the morning gave him his pressure suit and put him back to work.
No one on the crew said anything to him about his moment of craziness.
The spy had been in the city for more than sixty days and still had no news of Zi Lei. By now a kind of telegraphic system had been established amongst the prisoners. Crews sometimes mingled while working on large projects and could exchange news by using a form of sign language to talk to each other right under the noses of their guards. Everyone asked after everyone else. Establishing a roll-call of the living and the dead and the missing. Zi Lei was one of the missing. No one knew anything about her. It was as if she had dropped off the face of the world.
Perhaps she had.
One day, the spy’s crew spent an entire shift searching for bodies and turned up only one. The following three shifts they found no bodies at all. And then, without warning, they were redeployed to work in the vacuum-organism fields.
Many of the city’s farm tubes and its microalgal and dole-yeast cultures had been destroyed during the war, and most of the crops that had been planted out in new or refurbished farm tubes were not yet ready for harvest, so tracts of vacuum organisms south and east of the city were being ripped up to provide CHON for the foodmakers that supplied the prisoners with basic rations. One day this work took the spy’s crew close to the little dome of the research station where Zi Lei and others in the peace movement had been held prisoner. He’d hiked there to save her, and that had been the last time he’d seen her. And here he was again, helping to scrape up stiff lichenous growths from dusty ice, with the dome sitting on a low ridge in the middle distance, gleaming against the black sky. Remembering what had happened there when he’d been someone else.
By now, the damage to the city’s tent had been repaired, and it was being repressurised by atmosphere plants that split water into hydrogen and oxygen, stored the hydrogen for fuel, and mixed the oxygen with reserves of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. At first, the carbon dioxide fell as snow, but it sublimed as the city slowly warmed, and then the temperature crept past the melting point of water-ice. The whole city began to thaw. What had once been a frozen morgue was now a ripening charnel house. Trees shed bark and branches as their icy cores melted. Every plant wilted and deliquesced into slime. Bacteria and fungi whose spores had survived the freezing vacuum multiplied tremendously and a great stink of rot and mould filled the tent. Drones equipped with methane probes located bodies that had so far escaped detection. The spy’s crew returned to their grim task for a few weeks, and afterwards were put to work repairing the surfaces of streets shattered by explosions during the bitter fighting, and clearing away the rubble of collapsed buildings.
It was a hundred and fifty days since Paris had fallen. Air pressure inside the city’s tent was now at four hundred millibars, thin but breathable. Power had been restored to most areas. The river was running again, fed by a waterfall at the top of the city and tumbling over the rocky watercourse that ran between slopes of dead trees and dead parkland in the slanted half of the city, flowing through the centre of the flat built-up area of the lower half and disappearing underground into pipes that recirculated it back to the top. The pace of reconstruction work picked up as more and more prisoners were brought in from outlying areas across Dione. Work crews cleared rubble and chopped down dead trees. Repaired the railway terminus at the top of the city, and the big airlock complex at the bottom. Patched up apartment buildings.
The spy’s crew was rehoused in one of the old square-built apartment blocks at the edge of the industrial zone, very similar to the block in which he had lived when he had first come to the city. Where he had first met Zi Lei. Other crews moved into neighbouring blocks. Only men at first, but then women and children. Families and friends fell into each others’ arms. Slowly, that quarter of the city came back to life. Entrepreneurs set up makeshift cafés on corners, serving tea and snacks, or cultivated small patches of herbs and vegetables. There were stalls where goods could be exchanged. An informal index of kudos was established. Along the banks of the river, people erected memorials to their dead, making little sculpture gardens from rubble and glass, setting plaques in the embankment wall, raising painted flags and pennants on wire-whip staffs that blew and doffed on cross-currents of air-conditioning. They painted murals across bullet-riddled walls. There was a fashion for embroidering tiny but elaborate abstract patterns on the sleeve-cuffs of standard-issue coveralls. There were poetry recitals, song-fests, discussion groups on science and philosophy.
But the bulk of the city was still shabby and battle-scarred. The halflife turf that paved streets and avenues was dead and crumbling to dust; parks and gardens had not been replanted; many buildings were still badly damaged and uninhabitable. Curfews and other restrictions were strictly enforced, power was cut in apartment blocks from ten at night until six in the morning, and Brazilian drones constantly patrolled the middle air between the high vault of the tent and the flat rooftops of the old part of the city. Deadly glittering things that moved with a lazy
hum, strobe lights blinking. At night, the red threads of their tracking lasers stitched empty streets and avenues. Sometimes Brazilian patrols would stage night raids on apartment blocks, waking everyone and searching rooms, confiscating possessions and tossing them down to the courtyard, trampling precious garden plots, making random arrests. Most people would return two or three days later, dazed with lack of sleep and the after-effects of veridical drugs. Some never returned at all.
The Brazilians had moved into the city too, zoning off everything west of the burnt-out ruins of the Bourse and the City Senate, turning the central part of the city and the sloping park beyond into a kind of fortress or forbidden zone inside a perimeter of heavy blast walls and tangles of smart wire. A tented and relatively undamaged apartment building that had retained its integrity when the main tent had been breached was converted into suites of offices and became the seat of the new government of the Saturn System. A regular traffic of tugs and gigs ferried Brazilian and European officers and civil servants to and from orbit, and they were conveyed at speed through the city to what was now called the Green Zone.
When Outers began to be recruited for menial tasks in the Green Zone, the spy began to ingratiate himself with his guards. Unlike most of the Outers he spoke fluent Portuguese, and in addition to his usual work he ran errands for the guards and pretended not to mind whenever he became the butt of their stupid practical jokes. At last, he was granted a brief interview with a security officer, and was put to work in the Office of Collateral Damage Assessment, checking translations of files recovered from the spex and slates of dead Outers.
As soon as he could, he inserted one of his little zoo of demons into the Brazilians’ net, a data miner that quickly returned with the results of its searches amongst the great registers of the living and the dead. Zi Lei’s name was not listed with the dead; nor was it on the lists of refuseniks and members of the general labour pool. And although the spy’s demon presented him with pictures of some twenty-three young women culled from files and security footage, none had more than a passing resemblance to Zi Lei, so it was unlikely that she was living under an assumed identity. It took a little longer, and deployment of two more demons, to break into the hardened and deeply encrypted communications system and send copies of his data miner to the administrations of the other moons under Brazilian control. Zi Lei was not registered on Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys or Titan.
The spy refused to consider the possibility that she was aboard one of the dead ships still in orbit around Saturn. No, she was alive. She must be. Perhaps she had escaped on one of the ships that had managed to head out to Uranus. Or perhaps she had fled to Rhea, or to Iapetus. Rhea was controlled by the European Union, and Iapetus by the Pacific Community: there was no direct connection with their nets. Or perhaps she was still on Dione, part of the active resistance movement whose members had infiltrated the city or lived in refuges not yet discovered by the occupying force. The spy inserted a demon in the Brazilian net and tasked it with scanning every frame of the city’s security camera footage for Zi Lei, and began to reach out to sympathisers of the resistance.
Every day brought rumours of some act of sabotage, or harassment of the occupying force. Squads searching remote refuges were ambushed; explosive devices were buried beside roadways; once, several civilian advisers in the Green Zone were killed by a remote-controlled bomb. The explosion was close to the building where the spy was working. The hard thunderclap knocked him out of his seat; when he picked himself up, he saw a column of black smoke unpacking in the air towards the roof of the city’s tent. Within an hour, soldiers swept through the offices and like every Outer working in the zone the spy was arrested, beaten, and briefly interrogated. His assumed identity held, and two days later he and the others were allowed back to work, although it now took more than an hour to navigate the increased security at checkpoints, and all workers inside the Green Zone were subjected to random stops and searches.
At first, the spy’s cautious inquiries about the resistance met only with dead ends and denial. A few men and women seemed sympathetic and told him that they would try their best to find out about Zi Lei, but no one ever got back to him. One day, on his way home from work, he was cornered by two men. Both wore fabric sleeves over their heads, with slits for their eyes and mouths. One held a knife at his throat while the other, much older, told him that he was making too much noise about things that were not his concern. He could have disabled or killed both of them inside thirty seconds, but he pretended to be shocked and frightened. He told the older man that he was desperate to find the woman he loved, that he had a position in the Green Zone and could be of help. He had access to useful information, he would do any kind of favour. All they had to do was ask.
The man shook his head. ‘That’s why we can’t trust you - because you work for them. Stay out of our business. Find your woman without involving us.’
The spy let the two men walk away, marking their gait. That was how he recognised the younger man a few days later. He followed him to where he lived and learned his name. He was still keeping track of the young man, hoping he would lead him to other members of the resistance, when the Brazilians arrested three women and claimed that they had planted the bomb in the Green Zone. There was a show trial, the accused were found guilty, and the next day every member of the general labour pool was assembled on the dead lawn of the city’s largest park to witness the execution.
The spy stood near the back of the crowd, watching the young man he’d been following, planning to follow him afterwards. The three condemned prisoners, barefoot and dressed in new blue coveralls, were led out onto a stage by Brazilian guards who moved with the delicate clumsiness of those unused to Dione’s low gravity. An officer read out a brief statement, warning that any further acts of treason or sabotage that threatened the reconstruction of the city and the restoration of order would be met with extreme force. The spy wasn’t listening. He didn’t even react when the three women were shot in the back of the head, one after the other. He had seen, on the far side of the great crowd, someone he knew. Keiko Sasaki, the woman who had been a friend and caretaker of Zi Lei before the war.
It was impossible. He’d mined the Brazilian records for information about everyone Zi Lei had known: Keiko Sasaki’s name was in the lists of the dead. And yet there she was.
As the shock of recognition faded, the spy realised that there could be only one reason why she was registered as dead and was living in the city under another name: she was a member of the resistance. Despite the risk, he decided there and then that he must talk to her as soon as possible.
It took him less than twenty-four hours to establish that Keiko Sasaki worked in the city’s hospital and lived in the same apartment block as the girlfriend of the man he’d been following. The spy doubted that it was a coincidence, and decided that it would be too dangerous to confront her there. Instead, three days after he’d seen her at the execution, he walked up to her in the hospital and slapped a narcotic patch on her neck and caught her when she collapsed and dragged her into a storeroom.
When she came around she struggled briefly against the plastic ties he’d used to bind her wrists and ankles to shelving, crucifixion style. Making noises behind the halflife bandage clamped over her mouth.
He showed her the knife he’d fashioned from a shard of fullerene, told her who he was, told her that he’d kill her if she screamed when he removed the gag.
‘I won’t tell the Brazilians that you are all part of the resistance. I don’t care. I only care about Zi Lei. Nod if you are willing to talk.’
Keiko Sasaki bobbed her head up and down. She was a slender woman who seemed to have aged ten years since the spy had last seen her. Her face was gaunt and her eyes were bruised and sunken, but her gaze was angry and bright, and she didn’t wince when the spy ripped off the halflife bandage.
‘I heard you’d died, Ken.’
‘And I heard that you had died. Yet here we are. Where is she?�
�
‘What have you done to your face?’
‘Where is she?’
Keiko Sasaki flinched when he dented the skin under her left eye with the point of his makeshift blade, said quickly, ‘I don’t know where she is, but she has family on Iapetus. I heard that after she escaped from prison she tried to get on one of the ships leaving Dione. Whether the ship reached Iapetus, or whether it was one of the unlucky ones, I don’t know. I do know that if she managed to reach Iapetus, if she’s still alive, she will be safe from you.’
‘She didn’t tell me that she’d come here from Iapetus.’
‘You didn’t know very much about her at all, did you? You didn’t even know that she was suffering from schizophrenia until I told you,’ Keiko Sasaki said. ‘You weren’t interested in her as a person. You were interested in her as an object of your obsession. You believed that you were her friend, that you were in love. But in truth you were two lonely and confused people who were thrown together in the middle of a crisis when emotions were heightened.’
‘You are trying to hurt me. It won’t work.’
‘I’m trying to tell you the truth.’
‘I want to help her.’
‘Wherever she is, alive or dead, she’s beyond your help. But listen. You can help us. You can join us. You obviously have the skill to create a false identity, and you obviously needed to do it because you’re on the Brazilians’ shit list. That means you can be useful to us. We need people like you, Ken. Resourceful people. Survivors.’
