by Paul McAuley
He slept around the clock. When he woke, he found that his demons had established a back door into the net controlled by the European occupation force. Like their Brazilian allies on Dione, the Europeans had cleared everyone from habitats and oases scattered across the face of Rhea and moved them into its only city. A basic search string brought up Zi Lei’s records in a couple of seconds. She was registered as a refugee who’d been transported from an oasis called Patterson’s Curse some two years ago, shortly after the end of the Quiet War. She shared an apartment with other refugees, worked in a communal kitchen, had never been cited for violating security regulations. The spy read the brief entry several times. He felt cool and alert but not especially excited. He was already planning what he had to do.
The tag he’d been given in Paris, when his crew had begun salvage work in the city, was still embedded in the humerus of his left arm. One of the demons copied the tag’s biometrics into the Europeans’ database and faked up an entry that established the spy’s stolen identity, Felice Gottschalk, as a bona fide resident of Xamba.
Getting into the city wasn’t a problem. All the farm tubes were linked by cut-and-cover tunnels to a central hub, and a short railway line ran between the hub and Xamba’s northernmost chamber. The spy arrived at the city’s railway station at six in the morning; the soldiers in charge of security had just changed shifts. The spy explained to the pair at the station’s checkpoint that he’d been called out to fix a problem with the central air-conditioning plant at the farm tubes; they checked the log entry that his demons had faked up, showing that he’d left the city three hours earlier, and waved him through.
The city’s five fat chambers were buried side by side in Xamba Crater’s eastern rim, linked by pedestrian tunnels and a canal system. A second pair of soldiers examined Felice Gottschalk’s ID before allowing him to use the long tunnel - floor turfed with halflife grass, curving walls decorated with mock-heroic murals featuring hordes of figures in ancient lobster-style pressure suits constructing tents and vast spaceships or battling unlikely monsters or flying mankites through Saturn’s storms - that led to the neighbouring chamber, where Zi Lei lived.
Apartments, shops, cafés, workshops and gardens were piled on top of each other in steep, terraced cliffs either side of the chambers, rising above a park filled edge to edge with tents that housed the overspill population of refugees and cut down the middle by a narrow lake where high-sided boats bobbed on slow, fat waves. The chandelier lights were still dimmed and only a few early risers were out and about. A work crew was opening up a communal kitchen set up at one end of the lake. At the end of a jetty, a group of old men and women were moving from one t’ai chi position to another.
Zi Lei’s apartment was on a high terrace close to the big transparent endwall that looked out across Xamba Crater. It was night out there, and the crammed tiers rising either side of the central garden were dimly reflected in the endwall’s patchwork of construction-diamond panes.
The spy sat under a fig tree that sprawled across the wall at the far end of the terrace, where he had a good view of the door to Zi Lei’s apartment and could watch everyone who came and went. He sat there for a long time, cross-legged, unmoving, ignoring the glances of passers-by. He couldn’t send Zi Lei a message of any kind because the occupying force’s security AIs monitored every call and text. And he didn’t want to knock on the door of the apartment because she shared it with six people. When they reunited - this was how he thought of it now - he wanted to speak with her alone. He wondered if she would recognise him beneath his plastic surgery; wondered if she would run to him with a cry of joy; rehearsed what he would say, what he imagined she would say . . .
Karyl Mezhidov had once asked him if he loved Zi Lei or if he was in love with her. He hadn’t understood the distinction then. He did now.
Two people, a man and a woman, came out of the apartment. The spy’s heart thumped in his chest, and then he saw that the woman wasn’t Zi Lei.
He told himself that in ten minutes he’d give up waiting and go and knock on her door; told himself ten minutes later that he’d give her ten minutes more. And so time passed until a woman came out of the apartment and ankled across the terrace to the cableway that connected it to lower levels. It wasn’t her. It was. He knew it was. Zi Lei, slender as a reed in a yellow tunic and white trousers. She’d grown out her hair and it was braided in a gleaming black rope that hung down the small of her back. She was carrying something in a sling that went between her breasts. A baby. She was cupping its head tenderly, stepping onto one of the cableway’s little platforms, descending out of sight.
There’d been nothing in her file about a baby; it must belong to someone who shared the apartment with her.
The spy followed her down to the floor of the chamber. When she went into the communal kitchen, he walked straight past, crossed a bridge that arched over the lake and went up one level and stood at the edge of a terrace that had a clear view across the water to the kitchen. Zi Lei was sitting at a long table with the man and woman who had come out of the apartment earlier. She had unbuttoned her tunic and taken the baby out of its sling and was cradling it in the crook of her left arm as it sucked greedily at her breast.
‘A lovely picture of ordinary human life,’ a man said behind the spy.
He turned, and the man smiled and said, ‘Hello, Dave.’
Before he’d been given the skin of Ken Shintaro and sent to work in Paris, Dione, the spy had been called Dave. And all his brothers had been called Dave too. He had been Dave #8. The man smiling at him was Dave #27. Dave #27 had been the smartest of them all, and he’d also been Dave #8’s best friend. Saying now, ‘You took long enough to find her. I was beginning to think that you were dead.’
‘I was in Paris,’ the spy said. ‘And then I was on Iapetus.’
‘We looked for you in Paris, of course. You did a very good job, hiding from us.’
‘I was a dead man.’
‘You were Felice Gottschalk. You’d changed your appearance, too,’ Dave #27 said. ‘Not a bad job, either. Just enough to fool us.’
‘I was lucky. The city’s records were futzed during the war,’ the spy said.
‘And now your luck has run out,’ his brother said.
They were both pale and thin, and exactly the same height, but Dave #27 had blond hair and the spy’s was black, altered by treatment with a retrovirus that had also darkened the tint of his irises. His face was rounder, too, and his nose broader and flatter.
‘If you wanted to kill me, I would already be dead,’ the spy said. ‘I suppose you want me to come back. Well, I won’t.’
‘We were beginning to think you’d died,’ Dave #27 said. ‘But then we arrested a woman named Keiko Sasaki. She was part of the resistance. During her interrogation she gave up many names, including yours. Or rather, she gave up Felice Gottschalk. She told us that he was really Ken Shintaro, and that he was looking for a woman named Zi Lei. Of course, we searched Paris all over again, from top to bottom. And checked everybody’s DNA against their biometric records, a very tedious job. We found the false records you had inserted, but we couldn’t find you. We looked in the other cities we control, and we looked here. We found Zi Lei, but still we couldn’t find you. Because all that time you were on Iapetus, the one place we couldn’t search. The Pacific Community is supposed to be our ally, but it wouldn’t help us look for a poor lost soul who had foolishly defected from his honourable mission. We tried our best to search for you, anyway, but the PacCom administration is careless and arrogant. Its records are incomplete, and the population of Iapetus is still widely scattered . . . So we set a trap here, because we were certain that you would eventually find out where your woman was living, and come to her.’
The spy didn’t say anything. He was using his peripheral vision, trying to spot people who might be watching. He was sick and frightened and excited too. Hyperalert. Everything around him bright with its own particularity.
�
��Don’t worry,’ Dave #27 said. ‘I’m alone. I was sent here to monitor the general situation in Xamba. Yesterday, one of my demons spotted your activity in the Europeans’ net. I dropped everything else to keep a close watch on your friend. And here we are.’
‘Do the Europeans know that you are here?’
‘If you mean, am I here officially, no. They believe that I am a refugee. I am sorry to tell you that you came here too late,’ Dave #27 said. ‘After she arrived here, Zi Lei spent a little time in hospital. She hadn’t been taking the drugs that controlled her illness - her schizophrenia. She tried to kill herself. She failed, and fell in love with another patient. They handfasted last year. And as you can see, they have a daughter. Born just five weeks ago.’
The spy knew now why there’d been no mention of the baby in Zi Lei’s file. It had been erased so that it wouldn’t frighten him away. So that he would walk unknowing into his brother’s trap.
He said, ‘I’m glad that she’s safe.’
Dave #27 smiled and shook his head.
‘It doesn’t change anything,’ the spy said. ‘I have my own life.’
‘You made it your mission to search for her. And now you’ve found her, and your mission is over.’
‘I defected. I can’t undefect.’
‘There’s nothing for you here. The woman is fasted to another man and they have a child. And whatever it is you think you feel for her, it’s part of the false identity given to you before the war. It isn’t part of who you really are.’
‘I’m still finding out who I really am.’
‘You can’t have the woman. What else is there for you?’
How could the spy explain how he had been changed by working with the crew in Paris, by the companionable days spent with Karyl Mezhidov rolling across the dark plains of Iapetus, by sharing food and work and long conversations about nothing in particular with strangers? How could he explain that he could never go home because he was no longer the person he had once been, before the war?
Anyone else would have missed Dave #27’s tremor of intent, but the spy had trained in every kind of combat with his brother for almost three thousand days and he had always been a little faster and a little stronger. He swung up his left arm, blocking the punch that Dave #27 aimed at his throat, and chopped at Dave #27’s elbow with the heel of his right hand, striking the point where the nerve ran outside the ball of the joint. Dave #27 dropped the syrette he’d palmed and spun and kicked the spy in the hip.
Then they were fighting seriously, countering each other’s blows with dazzling speed, each trying to find a weakness in the other’s defences. The spy, driven towards the edge of the terrace, jumped onto the railing and kicked Dave #27 in the chest and flipped backwards, landing lightly in one of the boats tied up at the edge of the lake, leaping away like a grasshopper as Dave #27 floated down towards him, running down the length of the string of boats with his brother at his heels. The boats rode high in the water and rocked wildly beneath them as they bounded along. Fat low-gravity waves ran out to the far shore where people stood and watched and cheered them on, no doubt believing that the fight was a piece of street theatre.
The spy kicked off from the stern of the last boat in a long, high parabola aimed towards the terrace. He swung sideways over the rail, took five long, bouncing steps down the terrace, and caught hold of the scaly trunk of a palmetto tree and swung around and saw his brother standing just a few metres away. Smiling at him, wagging an admonitory finger back and forth. The spy snapped a shard from the rim of the big plastic pot in which the palmetto was planted, held it up like a knife, and told his brother to stay right where he was.
‘I’ll leave,’ the spy said. ‘Right now.’
‘Yes, you will. With me.’
‘Alone. I’ll leave alone. Leave this city. This moon. You can tell them I was never here.’
They were both breathing hard. Down the terrace, two men in the trim blue uniforms of the European Army were moving towards them.
Dave #27 saw the soldiers too, said, ‘Come with me if you want to live.’
The spy stepped backwards, ready to turn and run, and his brother lunged at him and the spy hit him hard with the hand holding the shard of plastic. It was wrenched out of his grip as Dave #27 reeled back, blood spouting between the fingers clamped on his neck. The spy saw the shock in his brother’s eyes and remembered the only man he’d killed. One of the lectors. Father Solomon. He’d been ordered to do it, but he had never forgotten the shame and self-loathing he had felt afterwards. How it had set him apart from his brothers. All this tumbling through his mind as Dave #27 tottered and slowly and carefully sat down.
When the one of the European soldiers stepped forward and tasered him, the spy was trying to staunch the spurts of arterial blood from his brother’s neck. He came around briefly as he was hauled off, fastened upright to a kind of wheeled stretcher. He tried to turn his head against the strap across his forehead, looking for Zi Lei in the crowd that had gathered. And was glad, so very glad, that he couldn’t see her.
5
The motor crew had worked up detailed plans for the exploration of Neptune and several of the dwarf planets at the edge of the Kuiper Belt, but after the expedition to the Pluto system returned to Miranda the Free Outers voted against further trips. Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, was a highly promising piece of real estate, to be sure, but it had been comprehensively mapped by human visitors and robot probes, and at present Neptune was on the opposite side of the Solar System. There was no urgent need to go there just yet, and it would be a waste of resources and time better used to improve and expand the settlement on Miranda, and to equip the rest of the Free Outers’ little fleet with the fast-fusion motor.
Newt Jones wasn’t disheartened by the vote against further expeditions. In fact, he was energised by defeat, convinced that sooner rather than later he would be proven right. He worked long hours on the conversion programme, discussed refinements to the design of the motor with his crew of tech wizards. Macy Minnot returned to her work with the biome crew, tweaking and improving and enriching the habitat’s ecosystem. And then, just sixty days after the expedition returned, everything changed.
All the Free Outers spent time on the surface of Miranda. Escaping the close common air of the habitat. Exploring the fantastically varied moonscapes on solo trips or with their friends or families. Making the unfamiliar familiar. Laying down hiking trails across heavily cratered terrain and smoother, younger plains, and along the broken floors of the valleys in the parallel grooves at the edges of coronas. Setting up routes that descended deep within the enormous grabens that cut across every kind of moonscape, where rugged cliffs stepped up ten or twenty kilometres to a black sky thick with stars, and setbacks and terraces could comfortably hold small cities. They navigated by global positioning and left only a few traces: pitons hammered in ice cliffs; splashes of pigment that marked paths through the abrupt ridges and interlocked hills and rubble fields of chaotic terrain; a small number of carefully hidden refuges.
Most of the surface of Miranda was water ice, but early in its history the upwelling plumes or diapirs of soft warm ices that had created the massive upthrust domes of coronas had dragged with them significant amounts of mantle material. The survey crew had located several sources of palagonitised silicates, as well as ores rich in magnesium and aluminium, and drifts of valuable phosphates and nitrates. Newt and Macy made several trips out to the ancient cratered terrain of Bohemia Regio, where deposits of ammonia-rich smectite clays had been discovered, and to the northern edge of Arden Corona, where robots were mining seams of silicate rock. Although crops and herbs were grown hydroponically and the habitat’s big commons was floored with halflife turf, the biome crew had plans to develop pocket parks, with copses of trees and flowering bushes. Macy lacked pedon tables and other equipment necessary for the manufacture of proper soil, with its horizons and domains and complex interplay of every kind of microbiotia, but the clay from Boh
emia Regio, cloddy and highly alkaline in its native state, made a nicely friable compost after it had been modified in a reactor and mixed with humus from the waste digesters. A fine example of how even this apparently inhospitable moon could yield material that could support life in all its rich variety. The silicate rock, on the other hand, was for purely decorative purposes.
On the day that everything changed, Macy and Newt had travelled a quarter of the way around Miranda to Arden Corona, a routine trip of some four hundred kilometres. They flew in Elephant. Newt piloted the tug with careless skill, swooping low over bright, gently contoured plains lightly spattered with small craters, then soaring out across a sudden transition zone where the moonscape slumped and heaved in a broken quilt of hills and valleys, a vast frozen landslip tilted towards the foot of a fault scarp more than a kilometre high, its looming face cut by massive vertical grooves - slickensides - that had been incised by friction as the block face had been pushed upwards by massive tectonic forces when the moon had cooled.
Newt flew parallel to the scarp’s grooved face for more than twenty kilometres, until it fell back in a huge cirque created by an ancient meteorite impact that had excavated billions of tons of dirty water ice, vaporising some, throwing the rest across the face of Miranda or beyond the feeble grip of the little moon’s gravity into orbit around Uranus. Newt applied retrojets to brake Elephant’s free-fall trajectory. As it dropped towards the base of the cirque, Macy saw a black animal racing across the bright ground below: the tug’s shadow, growing larger as they fell to meet it, attitude motors popping as they feathered in to a perfect landing within the cirque’s half-circle.
