by Paul McAuley
For a moment, a glint of naked contempt showed behind the mask of Loc Ifrahim’s handsome face. Then he smiled and said, ‘Good luck with your work, madam. I hope that you find what you are looking for. Truly I do. But if you cross my path again, if you ever interfere with what’s properly mine, I will take you down.’
‘I promise you that I’ll do my very best to stay away from you.’ Sri was too tired and too upset to be angry at his presumption. Besides, he was a fool, so what was the point of trying to teach him any kind of lesson? She turned to the woman who stood at his elbow, a homely young thing with a bristling black crew cut and captain’s bars on the breast of her blue coveralls, and advised her to stay away from Mr Ifrahim. ‘His bad luck has a way of transferring itself to everyone around him,’ she said, and moved on.
Loc Ifrahim called after her - he had to have the last word - but she didn’t look back.
Two days later, aboard a shuttle bound for Titan, Sri was still wondering about Yuli’s steely resolve. The young girl had almost reached one of the emergency airlocks when the drones had cut her down. Her shock collar had been working perfectly, but when one of the guards had triggered it she’d somehow blocked the pain. Which meant that she could have blocked it while she was being questioned, but Captain Doctor Gavilán’s brain scans and bloodwork showed that she had not. She had endured exquisite agony for day after day so that her captors would believe that they could control her with pain. And she had allowed herself to be shocked at least twice before taking her revenge on the man who had ordered her torture, and making her escape bid. She had been a monster all right, but oh, what a monster!
Sri hadn’t told Yuli that she had discovered who her father was. There had been no opportunity to speak privately and Sri hadn’t wanted Arvam to know what she knew. But there was one person who deserved to know, and after the shuttle touched down on the pad outside the Brazilian base in Titan’s high northern latitudes, she drove straight to Tank Town.
Gunter Lasky heard out the story of Yuli’s escape attempt and her death without once interrupting. When Sri had finished, the old man said, ‘Did she suffer at all?’
‘She died quickly.’
There was no need to tell him about the torture that Yuli had endured. It would be a needless cruelty, and it would also be potent ammunition for the resistance.
‘Why did you tell me? It doesn’t make any difference now.’
‘You deserve to know. I didn’t come here to trawl for information.’
‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ the old man said again, with a little more force. ‘It doesn’t make me like you any more, or like Avernus any less. You’ve come blundering into our lives, trampling over everything we’ve built, a century of history you don’t understand. That you can’t ever understand. That’s why you’ll lose this war, you know. Because you don’t understand us.’
Another silence. They were both staring through the big diamond window at the charcoal fields of vacuum organisms that sloped away into the sullen orange haze, but for the first time Sri realised that they weren’t seeing the same landscape. That she still had so much to learn about Titan, and all the other moons where Avernus had made her gardens.
She said, ‘I want to understand. That’s why I’m here.’
‘Last time we met, I said that you were a little like Avernus. I think I was wrong.’
‘I want to be better than her.’
‘You’re certainly more human. That’s meant to be a compliment, by the way,’ Gunter Lasky said. ‘But I doubt that you’ll take it as one.’
Sri left the old man with his grief for the daughter he had never known, and flew halfway around Titan to the volcanic dome and the garden that her crew was still exploring. She had plenty of work to do there. No end to it . . . But she was learning so much. The old man had said that she’d never understand the Outers, much less Avernus. He was wrong. He underestimated her. She would prove that she was Avernus’s equal by creating her own masterpiece.
As she worked with her crew, unpicking the secrets of the underground kingdom of polymorphic prokaryotes, Sri thought long and hard about Avernus and Yuli, and began to sketch out the preliminary details of her great work.
PART TWO
THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT
1
Uranus’s axis of rotation is tipped at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic: while the other planets in the Solar System spin around the sun like tops, Uranus rolls around it like a ball. When the refugees from the Quiet War arrived, Uranus’s south pole was aimed at the sun, and the retinue of moons rotating about its equator inscribed paths like the circles of an archery target, with the blue-green ice giant and its slender graphite rings at the bull’s-eye. One by one, a ragtag procession of ships dropped around it and swung out around one or another of the five largest moons in spiralling periapsis raise manoeuvres to achieve a common equatorial orbit. An erratic and shell-shocked flock of the dispossessed cleaving close in the lonely dark, chattering each to each, trying to decide what to do next, where they should make their home, how long they should stay.
It was a bitter irony that the Quiet War had driven them to the place where they had long dreamed of establishing new settlements and exploring new ways of living: the three major political blocs on Earth had gone to war against the peoples of the Jupiter and Saturn systems precisely because the Outers, evolving away from so-called base human stock, diverging in unpredictable directions, had been threatening to expand into every part of the Solar System and create a patchwork diversity of posthumans changing human destiny in unimaginable ways, relegating Earth to a powerless and unsophisticated mudpuddle. The Quiet War had been a war against evolution, an attempt to bring every faction of the Outer community under the leash, to put an end to uncontrolled exploration and development, to establish Earth’s hegemony over the entire Solar System.
The refugees had managed to escape all that, but they knew that they had won only a temporary reprieve. A year. Maybe two. They were not only an affront to Earth’s desire for control and order, but they also possessed stolen technical data about the new fast-fusion motor that, developed by Greater Brazil, had enabled Earth to win the Quiet War. Uranus was twice as far from the sun as Saturn, but it was not far enough to guarantee their safety.
Meanwhile, their ships were low on fuel and their inventory of supplies and equipment was haphazard and short on many items essential for long-term survival. They needed to take stock of their situation, replenish their consumables, and work out what needed to be done to protect themselves from attack.
Uranus’s largest moon, Titania, had been briefly occupied some twenty-five years ago. Isolation and internal tensions had broken up the commune and its members had moved back to the Saturn System, but the AI of the tented habitat that they had abandoned in place had kept the THOR fission generator and basic environmental systems ticking over. It would have taken only a little work to make the place comfortable, but it was an obvious target. It was on the map and in the history books, and it was sitting in plain view on a broad flat plain close to the centre of Titania’s sub-uranian hemisphere. So the refugees stripped it of everything useful, unloaded the small and widely scattered fleet of robot cargo shells which, having been dispatched at irregular intervals to Titania when it had become clear that war with Earth was inevitable, stood like random megaliths on the plain around the habitat’s angular tent, and hauled their loot to Miranda.
Most of Uranus’s thirty-plus moons were small chunks of ice or carbonaceous material. One group orbited just outside the outer edge of the ring system; another occupied distant and irregular orbits, wanderers captured by Uranus’s gravitational field. And between these two shoals of tiny moons were five massive enough to have achieved hydrostatic equilibrium, contracting into spheres under the force of their own gravitational fields. Four were much alike, balls of dirty ice wrapped around silicate cores, spattered with impact craters, dusted by dark materials flung outward by the chains of collisio
ns that had created the ring system, fractured by varying degrees of ancient geological activity. But the smallest of the larger moons, Miranda, was not only the strangest of Uranus’s family of satellites, it was one of the strangest moons in the Solar System: a patchwork of cratered, banded and ridged terrains broken by mountainous ridges and monstrous fault canyons up to twenty kilometres deep, as if hammered together from pieces of half a dozen different bodies by some inept god who’d afterwards slashed and hacked at his botched creation in a fit of rage. An early theory about its formation suggested that it had been shattered several times by massive impacts and the larger fragments had randomly clumped together, exposing sections of the core in some places and sections of the original surface in others, but later research showed that its haphazard topography was the result of intense geological activity driven by tidal heating at a time in the deep past when it had possessed a far more eccentric orbit.
Stretched and kneaded every time it swung close around Uranus, Miranda had bubbled and blistered and cracked like a snowball wrapped around a hot coal. Eruptions of icy magma had flooded older terrain and created smooth plains. Coronae, huge domes edged with concentric patterns of ridges and grooves, had grown at the top of upwellings of warm ice that penetrated and deformed overlying strata. And after it had settled into its present orbit, it had cooled and frozen through and through. Its surface had contracted and tectonic activity had scored it with deep grabens formed by extensional faulting, while compressional strain had raised systems of ridges and valleys and thrown up escarpments several kilometres high.
This violent geological history had created a varied and chaotic moonscape that, patched with varied terrain, cut by the rifts and grooves of transition zones and gigantic scarps and grabens, provided a wealth of hiding places. The refugees elected to settle in the deep groove of a narrow chasm in the high northern latitudes, and put to work the two crews of construction robots they’d brought with them.
Uranus’s moons were somewhat colder than the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but their surfaces were similar in composition and the refugees were able to draw on a vast wealth of experience in low-temperature construction techniques and biome design developed during the colonisation of the Jupiter and Saturn systems. They located and mined carbonaceous deposits and set up reactors that transformed the tarry material into construction diamond, fullerene composites, and every kind of plastic. Their crew of construction robots - powerful, versatile machines capable of carrying to completion in only a few weeks engineering projects that human labour would have taken a decade to finish - excavated a chain of cut-and-cover tunnels close to one of the chasm’s steep walls, beneath a bulging overhang that would hide them from casual optical, radar and microwave surveys. The THOR fission generator from the old habitat on Titania supplied ample power; the tunnels were efficiently insulated; residual heat that leaked through their layered walls was captured by superconducting mesh and piped away to a point several kilometres beyond the edge of the chasm, creating a pocket lake buried deep beneath the surface that not only provided a supply of potable water but could also be electrolysed to provide oxygen.
Like the rest of Uranus’s moons, Miranda was presently orbiting at right angles to the rest of the Solar System, with its south pole pointing towards the sun and the inner planets and its north pole pointing towards the outer dark at the edge of the Solar System. So the site of the refugees’ new home was not only hidden from everywhere else in the inner Solar System by the bulk of the moon but was also sunk deep in the permanent darkness of a winter that would not lift until Uranus had rolled halfway around its orbit and its axis of rotation and the axes of rotation of its moons tipped over towards the sun. But that was some forty years in the future, and the future was all but unknowable. The refugees, now calling themselves the Free Outers, settled into their new home and began to rebuild their lives and make tentative plans about what to do next.
To begin with, the Free Outers lived mostly on dole yeast and CHON food harvested from Titania’s vacuum-organism fields. Transformed in various imaginative ways by foodmakers, this was more than sufficient to supply their physiological needs, but like all Outers they believed that growing their own provender was a psychological and spiritual necessity. An assertion of the primacy of life over mere matter. An immediate connection with the web of life from which they had come. So the tunnels were fitted out as hydroponic farms from end to end, and people slept in tents and wickiups amongst dense plantings of wheat and maize, rice and potatoes and yams, tomatoes, lettuce and spinach, two dozen species of beans, fruit bushes, tiers of tea and coffee mosses, and an abundance of herbs. There were the usual setbacks and fluctuations in supply to begin with, but after six months of hard work the ecosystem of the underground settlement was reasonably stable.
The Free Outers kept only a few ships on active duty; the rest were stored in pits dug into the floors of neighbouring grooves and valleys and covered with rigid fullerene skins and layers of ice gravel. Desperately short of fuel, they cobbled together a shoal of robot airframes equipped with ramscoops that ploughed the middle reaches of Uranus’s atmosphere like basking sharks, sieving tonnes of hydrogen every hour for deuterium and tritium isotopes and pumping them into storage tanks that, when full, separated from the airframes and ignited chemical motors that gave them just enough escape velocity to spiral outwards in minimum energy orbits to Miranda, where tugs intercepted them.
Small automated observatories were established at the south poles of Ariel, Umbriel and Titania; these moons orbited further out than Miranda, and except for very brief periods at least one of them was always visible in the sky of its northern hemisphere. The observatories forwarded live video of the inner Solar System and raw unfiltered radio transmissions from the occupied moons of the Jupiter and Saturn systems to a monitoring station in a bunker a couple of hundred kilometres north of the tunnel system, where an AI analysed and catalogued everything, and at least one human supervisor kept watch at all times, sifting nuggets of useful information from the general chatter. A small number of clandestine newsloggers transmitted at irregular intervals compressed bursts around ten megaHertz that unpacked into video and text messages, providing information about the activities of the occupying forces and the arrival and departure of ships, updating casualty lists and rolls of those arrested and working in labour camps, and passing on messages from relatives and friends. It was an important link with the cities, settlements, and people that the Free Outers had left behind, but most of the news from home was relentlessly grim. Aided by Quisling governments, the Three Powers Authority was tightening its grip everywhere. The mayor of Paris, the centre of resistance to Earth’s incursion, had died defending his city. Many of his supporters had been killed; most of the rest were in prison. Sporadic acts of sabotage were punished by swift show trials and executions. Habeas corpus and other civil rights had been suspended, every city and major settlement was ruled by martial law, and most small settlements had been forcibly evacuated. Gene wizards and other specialists were being forced to collaborate in the systematic plundering of the great archives of scientific and technical knowledge. A century of enlightenment, utopianism, and experiments in every kind of democracy had fallen dark.
The Free Outers could do nothing to help those who had been left behind because they were outnumbered and outgunned by Earth’s Three Powers Alliance: they couldn’t even reply to messages by relatives and friends, because the risk that the TPA would trace any kind of transmission was too great. And the small radio telescope they’d set up at Miranda’s north pole failed to pick up any replies to signals aimed in turn at Neptune and the dwarf planets at the outer edge of the Solar System - Pluto, Enka, Sedna and so on, places where other refugees might have settled. As far as they knew, they alone had survived to tell their tale. Burdened with the responsibility of preserving the knowledge and traditions of their home, of keeping a little candle of democracy flickering in the outer dark, they hunkered down, kept watch
for enemy ships or probes, and engaged in intense discussions about their future.
Many wanted to stay where they were. To keep quiet. To stay out of sight. The TPA had not yet come after them and perhaps it never would, for it was clear that winning the peace was proving to be very much harder than winning the war. But a vociferous minority objected to the idea of spending the rest of their lives squatting in burrows, in perpetual fear that at any moment their enemy might shark in from the starry sky. Besides, most of the Free Outers were in their twenties and thirties, and many wanted to start families. Several babies had already been born on Miranda; others were on the way. Expansion of their present refuge, or setting up new refuges elsewhere, would soon become a necessity, and it would increase the risk of discovery. No, they could not hope to stay hidden for ever; instead, they should move on as quickly as possible, spread into the farthest reaches of the Solar System. To Neptune, whose largest moon, Triton, had an ocean of liquid water wrapped around its mantle. Or to Pluto and its trio of moons - one of which, Charon, also had liquid water beneath its surface. Or even further out, to one of the many other dwarf planets of the true Outer System and the Kuiper Belt. Places impossible for the TPA to attack because the supply lines would be too long and too fragile to support any sustained campaign.
Chief amongst this group was Newton Jones. He commanded a tug and possessed considerable kudos because he and his partner, Macy Minnot, had not only helped Avernus escape, but had also stolen the technical data about the Brazilians’ fast-fusion motor. And he was also the son of Abbie Jones, a famous pilot who’d been amongst the first to explore the Neptune System, had been the first person to land on Enka, and had undertaken a solo expedition to the edge of the cometary zone, travelling farther from the sun than any other human. After her great adventure in the outer dark, Abbie Jones had been one of the founding members of the commune that had briefly colonised Titania - Newt had been born there - and after the commune had failed she’d helped to build the garden habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan. She’d been the senior member of the clan, a powerful matriarch, before the Quiet War, and now she was a famous political prisoner.
