by Paul McAuley
‘There’s a slight problem,’ Newt said.
‘Is that the bad news?’
‘The bad news is, we lost some people,’ Ziff Larzer said.
‘The unconverted shuttles,’ Newt said. ‘The TPA hit them with missiles. Nuclear warheads.’
Macy’s entire skin felt as if it had turned to ice and for a moment everything seemed to drop away from her. She’d known the people who had volunteered to crew the shuttles. Myk Thorne, Tor Hertz, Darcy Dunnant, Hamilton Browne . . . Sixteen people, all gone.
Newt was studying her with soft concern; she told him she was okay and he said that she was far from okay.
Ziff Larzer gave up his couch. Macy was persuaded to clamber onto it and she accepted a pouch of lukewarm mint tea that Herschel Wu brought up from the living space: the sovereign remedy for every kind of illness, he said.
‘I’m not ill, just half dead,’ Macy said, but she sipped the tea and, yes, felt a little better. Strong enough to ask about the third piece of news.
‘It’s to do with where we’re headed,’ Newt said. ‘Seems there’s a bit of a problem.’
‘A big problem,’ Herschel Wu said.
‘There are already people on Triton,’ Ziff Larzer said.
‘Isn’t that good?’ Macy said.
‘They’re Ghosts,’ Newt said.
PART THREE
THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD
1
‘What you still haven’t learned after all this time,’ Frankie Fuente told Cash Baker, ‘is how to relax.’
‘I’m pretty relaxed right now,’ Cash said. ‘Maybe you should take a picture to remind yourself what it looks like.’
‘What you are right now is the exact opposite of relaxed. You’re wired so tight I could nail your head to one end of a plank and your feet to the other and play a tune on you. And you know what? You’re like that all the time.’
The two men were leaning side by side at the edge of an infinity pool, chest-deep in warm clear water, elbows resting on polished concrete, looking out across restored rainforest that stretched to the horizon under an enamelled blue sky pierced directly overhead by the white-hot nail of the sun. Behind them was the stone-and-glass saucer of the hilltop house owned by the governor of the Bernal family’s territory, set amongst manicured lawns and beds of tropical flowers. In a few hours, Frankie Fuente and Cash Baker would mingle with guests at a cocktail party on one of its broad terraces and give short talks about their role in the Quiet War, the plans for reconstruction, and the opportunities presented by opening up the Outers’ store of knowledge and exploiting their artistic, scientific, and engineering expertise.
Cash Baker was a bona fide gold-plated war hero, dividing his time between teaching cadets at the academy in Monterrey and public-relations tours: giving speeches at schools and universities and rallies, visiting research institutions, shipyards, factories and munition plants that supported and supplied the Air Defence Force wings at Jupiter and Saturn, and making nice to members of the great families that dominated the political and economic scene in Greater Brazil. It wasn’t a bad life. Teaching cadets was useful work; Cash tried to do his very best by them. And promoting the work out at Jupiter and Saturn, that was important, too, and surprisingly easy. He was able to draw on his deep reserve of lollygagging Texas charm to woo his hosts and their guests, and before setting out on the cocktail-and-chat circuit he’d spent a month being trained in public speaking and the finer points of etiquette and social chit-chat, from how to eat an oyster to the correct form of address for the wife of a foreign ambassador.
The benefits were all that anyone could ask for. He stayed at some of the best houses and hotels in Greater Brazil, enjoyed every kind of luxury and met with all kinds of important and famous people. He’d even toured the European Union, visited Paris, Rome, Berlin, Moscow . . .
But it wasn’t what he wanted, which was to get back to the job he’d won by training, hard work, and application of his God-given talent to the virtual exclusion of everything else: flying J-2 singleship space planes in combat. It was what he had been born to do. It was what he had been made to do, when he’d been fitted with the neural network that allowed him to interface directly with his bird. To become one with her. And although he knew that part of his life was over, he still ached for it every day.
Physically, he was almost fully recovered, apart from some weakness in his right side, and a slight, almost undetectable limp. But his head still wasn’t quite right. His brain had been pierced. The swathe clear-cut through its delicate, intricate forest had been regrown, but his memory was still full of holes: he couldn’t remember a thing about the mission that had nearly killed him, or much of anything else about the mission to the Saturn System. And despite a cocktail of psychotropic drugs, he suffered from wild mood swings. He’d be in the middle of some completely routine task - exercising, preparing a lecture, cleaning his shoes - and his vision would blur and he’d feel wetness running down his cheeks: tears, stupid tears. Or he’d be picking at his food during a banquet and would have to stamp on the sudden impulse to pick up the plate and throw it at the person opposite, or stab the bore next to him with his fork just to shut the fucker up. Or, and this was the worst thing, the world would suddenly go flat. As if colour and meaning had been sucked out of everything, leaving only stuff like poor imitations of the real thing, people like awkward robots: meat puppets spouting flat gibberish.
He’d been told to expect sudden alterations in his internal weather system; emotional lability was a condition commonly found in people recovering from violent traumas to the head. But no one had warned him about the awful feelings of flat unreality, worse than any species of depression or despair, and he’d suffered in silence because it was the kind of thing that crazy people must feel, and he didn’t want to be crazy because they’d never let him anywhere near a singleship or any kind of flying machine ever again, even if he was a war hero. So he hadn’t ever mentioned these spells to the psychologist who checked him every month, or told his best friend Luiz Schwarcz about them the one time they’d met when Luiz had come back to Earth for a spell of leave before lighting out for Saturn again, and he’d done his best to keep it hidden from his handlers and the men and women who partnered him on the PR tours - the other war heroes.
Frankie Fuente, his current partner, was a cheerful cynic who said that he took the world at face value so that he wouldn’t ever be disappointed or surprised by anything. A big man with dusty black skin and a genial manner, he’d been promoted from first sergeant to lieutenant after the accident that had put him on the PR circuit. He and Cash had been getting along just fine for the past three months. They’d both joined the Air Defence Force to escape the dirt-poor towns in which they’d been born, Cash in East Texas, Frankie in the arid badlands of Paiuí where plantations of Lackner trees soaked up excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and vultures flew with just one wing so that they could fan themselves with the other because it was so damn hot.
Frankie’s PR story was that he’d lost both his arms when he’d been trying to defuse a booby trap that an Outer saboteur had attached to a gig. Truth was, he’d confided to Cash one drunken night early in their partnership, he’d been high on three patches of rize while working in the maintenance bay of the Glory of Gaia, and his arms had been severed above the elbows when he’d accidentally triggered a hydraulic ram. He had artificial arms now. The fake artificial arm that covered the new arm growing from the high-cut stump of his left arm, and the real artificial arm that permanently replaced his right arm. The latter, woven from fullerene fibres and covered in halflife skin, could bend like a snake and had a mind of its own whenever he detached it, pulling itself about with its hand, hiding in dark places, and, according to Frankie, driving his lady friends wild in bed.
His real and fake artificial arms crossed on the wet concrete of the edge of the infinity pool, his chin resting on them as he floated in the water, Frankie told Cash, ‘Here we are with a view that
would make a green saint come, in the house of a man so rich and powerful he has, count ’em, not one, not two, not three, but four children. And I bet you aren’t enjoying any part of it because you’re thinking about your speech. Which you’ve given fifty times already, to my certain knowledge.’
‘Matter of fact, I was watching that bird soaring over yonder,’ Cash said.
It was a big bird, some kind of eagle maybe, silhouetted against the blue sky as it turned and turned in a thermal. Cash had been wondering what it would be like to hang out in the airy gulf so lightly and easily, heart pumping quick and hot in a cradle of hollow bones, broad wings outspread, fingering the air with big primary feathers, eyes sharp enough to pick out a mouse twitch a kilometre away. He was allowed to putter around in the little one-lunged two-seater prop planes used in basic training, and that was it as far as flying went these days, but he’d once soared like that eagle . . .
Frankie turned his head to look at Cash and said in a kindly tone, ‘You’ve been in a mood all day. And now that mood is turning into the mood you get before you have to speak. I wouldn’t mind that you can’t ever relax, Captain, except it makes it hard for me to relax around you.’
‘You have my permission to go relax somewhere else, Lieutenant.’
‘You flyboys are all the same,’ Frankie said. ‘You all concentrate on the thing you have to do next. That, and maybe the next thing, but no more than that.’
‘That’s what you have to do, if you want to survive in combat.’
‘Yeah, but that’s how you are all the time. You’re obsessing about your speech right now, even though it’s no big thing. Because, as far as you’re concerned, it’s not enough to go out and just do it. No, you got to go out and be the best you could ever be, time and time again.’
‘Better that than screw the pooch.’
Frankie grinned sideways at Cash. Sweat beaded the black skin of his broad forehead and shaven scalp. ‘That right there is what I believe they call the crux of the problem. Because what you don’t ever see, what you don’t ever believe, no matter how many times I tell you, we can’t ever screw this particular pooch. You give the best speech you can, Captain, and the punters will bathe in your righteous aura of manly courage and applaud your fine display of grace under pressure. Or you give the worst performance of your career, and the punters will still applaud, and feel sorry for you too, because you are so clearly fucked up by what happened to you in the war. You understand? The pooch, it is absolutely and positively no-two-ways-about-it unscrewable.’
Cash knew that Frankie Fuente was right, but it wasn’t in him to not try to give his best. So that night, dressed in his pressed blues and polished black knee boots, a rack of unearned medal ribbons on his chest and his peaked cap folded under his right arm, he made small talk with members of the Bernal family, industrialists and their uncannily beautiful wives, and a smattering of high-ranking civil servants, and then he gave his speech, hitting the keynotes with pinpoint precision. He told the story of how he had been wounded while attempting to deflect a chunk of ice aimed at a base on one of Saturn’s moons, described how the Quiet War had been so quickly and comprehensively won, explained that the cost of waging war around Jupiter and Saturn would be rewarded by exploitation of the Outers’ skills, technology, and knowledge base, and reminded his audience that the space industry was important both for the security of Greater Brazil and the health of the planet. Orbital sunshade mirrors had done much to ameliorate the effects of the massive amount of thermal energy pumped into Earth’s weather systems during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And moving industry off-planet, mining raw materials from asteroids and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and fully exploiting the Outers’ treasure trove of novel technologies, would make it possible to return Earth’s land and oceans and atmosphere to their primal pristine state and remake the planet into a pre-industrial paradise, Cash said, his voice soaring at the end like that eagle, just the way he’d been taught.
‘Man, I don’t know why you get so tense beforehand,’ Frankie Fuente told him afterwards. ‘You’re a natural.’
‘I reckon I scored 7.5 out of a possible ten. A definite could-do-better. ’
The next day, the two heroes flew in a tiltrotor to Caracas, where they did their thing at a big reception: a thousand high-ranking citizens partying in a gilt and marble hall with a ceiling so high it seemed to generate its own climate. There was a weird undercurrent to the glittering gathering. Soldiers and aides coming and going, knots of men talking in low voices, and then, halfway through the proceedings, an announcement by the host, Euclides Peixoto: he had been summoned to Brasília, but he hoped that everyone would be able to enjoy themselves in his absence. Cash and Frankie gave their speeches, but the applause was thin and half-hearted, and the reception broke up immediately afterwards.
Frankie had organised a couple of women anxious to sample the manly courage and righteous auras of genuine war heroes. Cash woke at dawn with a mouth full of cotton wool and panic tolling like a bell in his head. He sat up, heart racing, sweat starting across his flanks. The lithe young woman half-asleep beside him sighed and burrowed deeper into the silk pillows and sheets. A moment later, Frankie Fuente came into the room through the French windows that opened onto the balcony of their suite and told him to get his ass out of bed.
‘What’s up?’
Frankie was bare-chested and one-armed, his white shorts luminous against his black skin. ‘History is up, Captain. You best come see.’
On the balcony, Cash looked out across the grid of streets, giant apartment blocks, and tower farms. Grey in the chill pre-dawn. Spires of smoke rising here and there. The thin wail of sirens. Police drones shuttling through the deep shadows between the blocks and towers; police helicopters beating above the rooftops.
‘What is it, some kind of food riot?’ he said, but Frankie had already pushed through the billowing white curtains at the other end of the balcony, into his room. Cash followed. Frankie was kneeling low at the edge of his bed, hunting beneath it for his real artificial arm. The room’s memo space glowed in one corner, tiled with news feeds. Cash watched for a moment, then said, ‘She’s dead?’
Frankie stood up, holding his writhing right arm in the hand of his short and skinny left arm. ‘That’s what they’re saying.’
Cash said stupidly, ‘I met her last year.’
Frankie plugged the writhing snake into his stump and it grew rigid and he flexed it at elbow and wrist and there it was, his right arm. An everyday magic trick courtesy of Outer technology. He said, ‘I met her too. All us war heroes met her one time or another. But I guess that exposure to our manly auras wasn’t enough to save her.’
Every news feed was saying the same thing. Elspeth Peixoto, the president of Greater Brazil, was dead. She had died in her sleep yesterday evening; the news had been suppressed until all the members of her family had been informed. She had been president for more than sixty years. She had been one hundred and ninety-eight years old.
Cash thought of Euclides Peixoto last night, his hasty speech and his quick departure. He said, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of our little tour.’
The two men watched the mosaic of talking heads and archive clips that showed Elspeth Peixoto at every age.
Frankie said, ‘Remember when her husband died?’
Cash said, ‘I flew over his funeral service.’
‘Get out of here.’
‘Swear to God and Gaia. He was Commander-in-Chief of the Air Defence Force. We did a fly-by over the cathedral in Brasília. A wing of J-2 singleships in “missing man” formation.’
‘Remember how everything stopped for two weeks either side of the funeral?’
‘Not really. I was on the Moon.’
‘This is going to be ten times worse,’ Frankie said, and went into the bathroom and came out with towels and little bottles of unguents and lotions clutched to his chest. He stuffed everything into his ditty bag and started hunting through
the drawers of the chiffonier, tossing things onto the bed. When Cash asked him what he was doing, Frankie said that he might not get another shot at being a war hero, so he was taking what he could right now.
‘They’ll cancel the rest of our tour, no doubt. But there’ll be another one after things shake down,’ Cash said.
‘You got to see the big picture, Captain. Lose your flyer’s tunnel vision. Take a long hard look at what this means. The Peixotos are the chief supporters of the return to space, colonising the Moon, pushing back out into the rest of the Solar System. They tried to make nice with the Outers, and when that didn’t work they went to war with them. Sure, there were other families involved, they pulled the Europeans in with them, and the Pacific Community tagged along too because it didn’t want to miss out. But none of it would have happened without the Peixotos,’ Frankie said. He was folding up the top sheet of his bed into a tight square. ‘And the president, God and Gaia speed her soul to heavenly rest, she was a Peixoto. She was in power for sixty years, and now all the other families will be jostling for the top spot. It’s going to be messy, it’s going to change everything, and while it’s going on there will most definitely be no need for war heroes. We’re out of business, Captain. When I told you the pooch was unscrewable? I was wrong. We couldn’t screw it up, but this surely has. What do you think of that picture?’
‘I don’t think things will be as black as you’ve painted them.’
‘I mean the picture over the bed. I reckon it would look nice on the wall of my momma’s house. Come over here and hold it steady,’ Frankie said, pulling a folding knife from a pocket of his ditty bag, ‘while I cut it out of the frame.’
