by Paul McAuley
‘Do they have security clearance?’
‘They respect and admire Avernus’s work, and they’ve been extremely useful in every way,’ Sri said. ‘To give just one example, they helped me to find this place. If you want to find something big in Greater Brazil, Mr Ifrahim, you follow the money trail. Here, you must examine the records of the bourses of the various cities for large exchanges of kudos. Two of my assistants discovered that Avernus borrowed a crew of mining machines some twenty years ago, and further investigation led me here.’
‘Some say that you’re hiding. That you are scared that Euclides Peixoto will send you back to Earth.’
‘They couldn’t have won the war without me,’ Sri said, with a flash of brittle defiance. ‘And they seem unable to understand what they have won until I explain it to them, and show them how they can use it and make money from it. I’ve been “down here” for the past hundred days because I have been working. But I will admit that I’ve been out of touch lately. Perhaps you can tell me something of the great changes that have been happening out there in the wider world. Tell me about Arvam. Tell me how he looked when you last saw him.’
It was very nearly a pleasant conversation. Loc realised that they were no longer enemies because they had nothing in common any more. Sri Hong-Owen had her gardens and her obsession with Avernus; Loc had temporal needs that couldn’t be satisfied by knowledge for knowledge’s sake: neither had anything that the other wanted or needed
As they talked it grew darker outside, and rain began to fall. As it did for an hour at the beginning of every night, Sri said. But the rain quickly grew harder, a heavy drumming on the taut material of the tent, and at last Sri used her spex to talk to one of her assistants, a brief and irritable argument about the garden’s climate control.
‘I must deal with something,’ she told Loc, and rose and left without another word.
Loc stepped to the entrance of the tent, saw her talking briefly with two of her assistants. When the three of them walked off into the rainy dark he followed, certain that something was up. The big cushions of moss gave off a steely luminescence, glowing like the ghosts of small clouds, enabling him to pick his way along a path that had turned into a small stream. Cold water flowed as sluggishly as mercury over his feet, and enormous drops of low-gravity rain drifted down all around; when one smacked down on Loc’s head, it was as if he’d been drenched with a pailful of water, doing Gaia knew what damage to his carefully braided hair, soaking his face, slicking straight off his suit-liner. He knuckled water from his eyes, spat and snorted, saw the shadows of Sri Hong-Owen and the two assistants float past a shoulder of luminous moss towards the lake.
Loc groped his way to the bridge and pulled himself along it. Fat, slow raindrops smacked against the water below. Braids dripping, cold air stinging his wet face, he crept through the green light of the sloping passageway towards the red glow of the gallery and the echo of loud voices. Sri Hong-Owen was talking to her son, who hung his head and shrugged and snuffled. One of the assistants, the neuter, was nursing yo’s eye; the other was bent over the memo space, where virtual screens tiled in the air showed paths smashed through cloudy thickets of wires and a fleet of paper-thin fins, showed from several angles the spindly robot pacing in mindless circles amongst the wreckage of a candle-copse. It seemed that Berry had not only managed to get into the climate controls of the moss garden; he’d also sent the robot on a rampage through the polychine garden.
Sri Hong-Owen suddenly turned around, called Loc before he could shrink away, told him that she had changed her mind. He was no longer needed here, she said. He could leave immediately. ‘Berry is my responsibility. I will deal with him.’
Loc couldn’t resist a parting shot. ‘I hope he has not done too much damage, ma’am.’
‘It isn’t serious. And it might even yield interesting results. Go now,’ the gene wizard said. Her icy disdain had returned in full measure. ‘Go. There’s nothing for you here.’
‘It’s a classic case of acting out,’ Loc told Captain Neves later that day, back in Camelot. ‘The only way the boy is able to express his frustration is to smash something.’
‘You ask me, sometimes people do bad things because they’re bad,’ Captain Neves said. ‘And Berry is a bad seed, no doubt about it.’
‘He certainly drew the short straw in the genetic lottery,’ Loc said. ‘I understand that the other son, the one left behind on Earth, takes after his mother.’
‘Not that that’s any kind of advantage. I mean, it hasn’t done her much good, has it?’
‘I almost feel sorry for her. She believes in the supremacy of logic and order. She believes that science is our only salvation. That only science can make sense of the world, and ourselves. Most of all, she believes in control and determinacy. Those weird things in that garden, their unique, unrepeatable configurations, run counter to all of that. They are a game with no purpose or utility, yet she believes that she can prove herself better than her enemy by attempting to control something that, by its very nature, cannot be controlled. It’s funny,’ Loc said. ‘She can waste as much time as she likes there, but in the end she’ll be no nearer to understanding Avernus.’
‘So you didn’t find anything useful out there. Perhaps you should ask me what I found out about Marlene,’ Captain Neves said.
‘I’d almost forgotten about the good colonel. I’m going to have to find a way of explaining that garden to him. It will be like trying to teach calculus to a donkey. Well, what have you been up to?’
Captain Neves explained that she had plugged into the military police rumour mill and learnt that Colonel Malarte was employing one of the city’s senators, a mountebank named Todd Krough, to help him acquire the works of art he was shipping back to Earth. As for the chestplate decorated with the last in the series of Munk’s Seven Transformations of the Ring System, the colonel had taken it in exchange for guaranteeing the release from prison of the woman who was presently his mistress.
‘And probably a spy for the rebels,’ Captain Neves said.
‘Well, this is all very useful,’ Loc said. ‘Something good has come out of this trip after all.’
‘You have a plan, don’t you? You’re going to can the colonel’s ass.’
‘Malarte is a greedy and stupid man who’s a danger to everyone around him. It would be a public service to expose his crimes, but that isn’t possible because of his consanguinity. He’s a fool, but he’s the Pessanha family’s fool. We can’t move against him directly. But we can move against those around him. Not the senator: he might be useful. But the colonel’s mistress, on the other hand . . .’
‘It would be very humiliating for the colonel if she was exposed. It would definitely weaken him,’ Captain Neve said, clearly liking the idea. ‘Only problem is, there’s isn’t any hard evidence that she’s a spy. It will take time, and we’ll be working on the colonel’s turf.’
‘We’re not going to expose her. We’re going to threaten to expose her, and to send her family back to prison. Where they no doubt belong.’
‘And use her to spy on the colonel.’
‘Exactly. Also, I would be interested in finding out how much she learnt from Munk when she was his pupil. I’m thinking of giving Euclides Peixoto a little welcoming present.’
3
After the publicity tour was cancelled Frankie Fuente went home to the state of Paiuí, where he planned to buy a share in a carnaúba palm plantation and spend the rest of his life watching other people make money for him. Cash Baker went back to the academy, and teaching.
At first, little seemed to have changed. There was a month of mourning after the state funeral of the president - flags at half-mast, black armbands, water instead of wine served at meals in the officers’ mess. In a short address at his inauguration, the new president, Armand Nabuco, promised a smooth transition and a continuation of the policies that had made Greater Brazil a power for good in an imperfect world. Flare-ups in wildsider activ
ity in the Andes, the Great Desert, and along the border of the northern territories were quickly suppressed; renewed calls for independence by banned nationalist groups like the Freedom Riders came to nothing; anti-government posters were torn down, graffiti was scrubbed away, links to clandestine sites on the net were purged. And then, the day after the official period of mourning ended, the Office for Strategic Services removed thousands of civil servants and government officials from their posts, and it was announced that General Arvam Peixoto, leader of the expeditionary force at Saturn and acting head of the Three Powers Authority, would be returning to Earth after he had handed over command to Euclides Peixoto.
Many of the officers in the academy wanted to know what Cash thought this meant: after all, he’d not only served out there, but he’d also met the general, more than once. Was Arvam Peixoto the kind of man who’d give up power easily? Had he overstepped the mark when he’d ordered a strike against the rebels out at Uranus? Was he being forced out because he posed a threat to the new administration? Or did it have something to do with the debt that the new president owed to the radical greens, who wanted to pull back from the Outer System, who believed that the ongoing occupation of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn was a waste of resources that would be better deployed on rewilding the planet? Cash said that it all sounded like politics to him, and he didn’t do politics. Sure, it meant that the military forces at Saturn would now be under the direct command of a civilian, but the war was over and, like the president said, this was an important step in the normalisation of the situation in the Outer System. He was sorry that the general had lost his command - he was a stand-up guy and a fine leader, and he deserved better - but those were the breaks, up on the exposed and lonely peaks of high command. Sometimes you ate the bear, and sometimes the bear ate you. As far as the people who’d served under the general were concerned, the people who did the actual work of peacekeeping and reconstruction, life would go on much as before.
Cash was quickly proved wrong. A few days after Arvam Peixoto was deposed, everyone in the armed services was asked to sign a loyalty oath to the new president. There was a lot of angry talk amongst the officers in the academy. Some said that it was nothing more than a trivial formality; others pointed out that they’d sworn an oath of loyalty to their country when they had been commissioned, and if they had to make a further declaration of support it should be to the office of president, not to the man who temporarily held it. Arguments grew so fierce that Major-General Lorenz, the commander of the academy, had to forbid all political discussion in the mess. Some people refused to talk to those they disagreed with; two junior lieutenants called each other out in a duel. They fought with knives in the gymnasium and after they’d sliced each other a few times the fight was declared a draw and the two men shook hands and went off to hospital together.
Cash continued to tell anyone who asked that he wasn’t interested in politics, refused to take sides, and duly signed the loyalty oath, along with everyone else. Several weeks later, he was shaken awake early one morning and discovered an OSS captain standing over him with two troopers behind, the three men making a crowd in Cash’s bare little room.
The captain told Cash that he wouldn’t be arrested as long as he cooperated. Cash, feeling amazingly calm, said that he’d be happy to cooperate once he knew what this was about.
‘I’m required to deliver you for debriefing,’ the captain said.
‘They asked you to pick me up but they didn’t tell you why, huh? Has my commanding officer been told about this?’
‘Of course. You have ten minutes to pack, Captain.’
‘No problem,’ Cash said. ‘I guess I can shit and shave on the way.’
‘If it comes to that,’ the captain said, ‘we can probably find you a shower, too.’
A tiltrotor flew Cash from the academy to the big air base on the other side of Monterey, where he was put on board a fat transport plane. A Tapir-L4, the bird he’d flown on resupply missions east of the Great Lakes some thirteen years ago, right after he’d been given his wings and bars. Cash was locked in one of the travel capsules used by high-ranking officers and VIPs- there was a bed, a refrigerator packed with snacks and juice, and a toilet and a shower: that captain had known what he was talking about - and the transport flew him south to Brasília. He arrived close to midnight, and was driven in a government limousine to a government hotel right in the centre of the city and escorted to a room up on the top floor, with a big bed and floor-to-ceiling windows with a view across the parklands of the Eixo Monumental to the white crown of thorns of the Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida, floodlit like a spaceship about to ascend into the big dark. Cash supposed that he wasn’t going to be taken out and shot. Not yet, anyhow. But he still didn’t have clue one about what they wanted from him, or who they were.
The next day he was driven ten blocks to the Ministry of Information, where a pair of taciturn OSS troopers escorted him through the service entrance at the rear and rode up with him in an elevator to an open-plan office crowded with uniformed personnel and civilians working at desks and memo spaces. Not one of them looked at Cash as he was led to a small windowless room tucked into a corner at the far end. He was told to make himself comfortable behind the scarred table, and one of the guards brought him a waxed paper cup of iced tea. The room was unremarkable: pale green walls, black resin floor. No traces of blood spray, no handcuff bolt fixed to the table, no visible surveillance. Nevertheless, Cash felt fragile and apprehensive, sitting there with the guards standing outside the open door. As if everything in his life had funnelled down to this moment, this place. A crux not of his own making. One he might not survive.
He’d been sitting there for more than an hour when an OSS officer and a civilian came in, shutting the door behind them. The OSS officer, a colonel, returned Cash’s salute, told him to sit back down, and took one of the chairs on the other side of the table. He was a trim man in his fifties and ugly as a toad, with small dark eyes, pockmarked cheeks, and a squashed nose that had taken a few knocks in its time. He swept off his black-billed hat, revealing a shaven scalp with a knotted scar over one ear, set the hat upside down on the table, and said, ‘I just need you to answer some questions, Captain. Think you can do that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Cash knew better than to ask what this was about. He’d know soon enough.
‘Ever worn an MRI cap?’ the colonel said.
‘No, sir.’
‘You’re going to wear one now. It will tell us when you’re telling the truth and when you aren’t.’
‘I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can, sir.’
‘You were wounded,’ the colonel said, and touched his forehead with the tip of his index finger.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you have a faulty memory as a result.’
‘Sir.’
‘So perhaps you don’t always know when you aren’t telling the truth. Because you don’t always remember what is true and what is not true. Because of your wound. But the MRI cap, it will help us know if that happens.’
‘I guess I don’t have any choice.’
‘Of course you do.’ The colonel’s smile hadn’t changed, but there was steel in his dark gaze.
‘I can volunteer for questioning under the cap, or you’ll put me in irons.’
‘You’re a fast learner. That’s good.’
‘Well I guess you better bring it on,’ Cash said.
The cap was a snug fit over Cash’s crew cut. The civilian switched on a slate, put on a pair of spex, asked Cash a series of anodyne questions, and at last told the colonel they were ready. For the rest of that day they talked about Cash’s career before the Quiet War. Flying transport planes, flying combat planes out across the Pacific during the war of nerves with the Pacific Community, testing the Jaguar Ghost space plane, the J-2 singleship programme. The next day they talked about the expedition to Saturn, and things got harder.
Cash st
ill didn’t remember everything that had happened out there. He drew a complete blank on Operation Deep Sounding and the mission he’d flown to divert the chunk of ice aimed at Phoebe. There were plenty of other holes in his memory, too, and the colonel attacked them from every angle while the civilian technician watched the patterns of activity in Cash’s brain on a slate and Cash popped sweat and tried to think around a nauseous throbbing that had established itself behind his left eye. The colonel called a break and Cash was given a pill that took the edge off his headache, but then they started over and he still couldn’t think straight, growing angry and frustrated as the colonel bored in, asking over and again about the mission against the rogue chunk of ice.
Cash told him everything he knew. He could remember being briefed about it by General Peixoto, and he knew he’d flown the mission with Luiz Schwarcz and the European Union pilot, Vera Jackson. He remembered Luiz telling him about it, but he didn’t remember anything from the mission itself. He didn’t remember the flight out; he didn’t remember the action against automatic defences installed on the ice; he didn’t remember being hit, or what had happened afterwards. His headache beat behind his eyes. A knot of frustration growing tighter and tighter. He was angry at himself, angry at what had happened to him, angry at the colonel’s insinuations and relentless questions, and at last he boiled over and slammed his fists on the table, shouted that he’d been trying to remember what had happened ever since he’d been rescued and revived and he couldn’t because the memories just weren’t there any more.
The colonel leaned back and studied Cash, fingers steepled against his chin, then told the civilian tech to show the video to Captain Baker.
The man turned his slate around, angled it so that Cash could see the full-screen picture of a chunk of pitted ice slowly revolving around its long axis amidst a thinning fog of debris.
‘I remember seeing this,’ Cash said. ‘It’s after we took out its rail guns and its motor. I just don’t remember being there.’
