by Paul McAuley
It was not until the restoration of history as a species of literature, by deployment of virtual theatre and probabilistic clades, that the idea of the worth of the individual was restored. Who can say if this view of history caused the collapse of democratic republicanism, or if republicanism's collapse changed our philosophy of history? But it is certain that the rise of nationalism and the restoration of half-forgotten monarchies, aided by supranational corporados which found it convenient to divide their commercial territories into quarrelling kingdoms and principalities, parallelled the return of the theory of the great man in history, a theory of which I, in my time, was an important champion.
In my time.
I had hoped that by coming to Paris, Dione, in the midst of reconstruction of a war scarcely ended, I would be able to secure my reputation with a final masterwork and confound my jealous rivals. But I soon discovered that the last days of the free collective of Paris, and of its leader, Marisa Bassi, were a tissue of echoes and conflicting stories supported by too few solid facts.
Those few surviving collectivists who believed that Marisa Bassi was dead could not agree how or where he had died; the majority, who foolishly believed that he had escaped during the hours of madness when special forces of the Three Powers Alliance had finally infiltrated the city, could not agree on how he had escaped, nor where he had escaped to. No ship had left Dione in those last desperate days except the cargo scow that, its navigation system driven mad by viral infection, had ploughed into Saturn's thick atmosphere and had either burned up or now floated, squashed to a two-dimensional profile by crushing atmospheric pressure, near the planet's metallic hydrogen core.
If history is a story told by winners, then the winners have the unconscionable burden of sifting mountains of dross for rare nuggets of pure fact, while the losers are free to fantasise on what could or should have been.
My commission should have been simple, but I found the demands of my employers, who did not trouble to supply me with assistants, were stretching my methodology to its breaking point. The corporados wanted to capture the psyche of a great rebel leader in a heuristic model, a laboratory specimen of a troublesome personality they could study and measure and define, as doctors begin to fight a disease by first unravelling the genetic code of the virus, bacterium or faulty gene that is its cause. By knowing what Marisa Bassi had been, they thought that they could prevent another of his kind gaining power in the half-ruined colonies.
After two months, I had a scant handful of facts about Marisa Bassi's life before the Quiet War, and a horrible knot of evasions and half-truths and lies about his role in the siege, a knot that became more complex each day, with no way of cutting through to the truth. I confess, then, that in the days following my first meeting with Demi Lacombe, I was more interested in the rumours and gossip about her and Dev Veeder than in my own work.
It was, you must understand, an interest born of concern for her safety: an almost paternal concern. There was our age difference – almost fifty years – and my devotion to the memory of my dear dead wife. No matter what others may say, I had only pure motives in taking an interest in Dev Veeder's assault on the heart of the young and beautiful environmental engineer.
At first, much of my information came from Cris DeHon, who told me how our head of security personally escorted Demi Lacombe as she surveyed and catalogued the ruined wildernesses and parklands and farms of the city, assiduously transporting her to wherever she desired, arranging picnics in a sealed house or in a bubble habitat laboriously swept clear of booby traps and biowar beasties by squads of troopers. And like everyone else in the claustrophobic shark-pool of Paris's diplomatic quarter, I saw how closely Dev Veeder attended Demi Lacombe at every social gathering, even though she spent most of her time with the science crews while he stood by impotently, unable to participate in their impenetrable, jargon-ridden conversations.
"It's a purely one-sided affaire," DeHon told me, when it caught me watching her at a party held by one or another of the corporados, I forget which, on the huge lawn at the centre of the diplomatic quarter, part of the parkland that both penetrated and surrounded the built-up area inside the quarter's pyramidal tent. As always, most of us were there, scattered across an oval of brilliant green grass webbed with tethers, the dozens of faint shadows overlapping at our feet cast by brilliant lamps hung from the high ridge of the quarter's roof, Saturn's foggy crescent tilted beyond like a fantastic brooch pinned to a sky as black as jeweller's velvet. In the shade of the efflorescent greenery of a sweet chestnut tree, that sprawled like a banyan in the low gravity, Demi Lacombe was talking earnestly with a couple of techheads; Dev Veeder stood close by in his dress uniform, watching her over the rim of the wine bulb from which, every now and then, he pretended to sip.
Cris DeHon said, "She's such an innocent: she really doesn't see how badly she is humiliating Dev. You've heard how he's increased the number of security sweeps in the general population? I do believe that it is a reliable index of his growing frustration. I think that soon there will be more public executions, unknowing sacrifices on the altar of our gallant police chief's unrequited love."
I said, perhaps a trifle sharply, "What do you know of love?"
"Love or lust," the neuter said, "it's all the same. Love is merely the way by which men fool themselves that they have nobler motives than merely spending their urges, a game sprung from the constant tension between the male's blind need to copulate and the female's desire to win a father who will help provide for her children. Our security chief is parading like a peacock because he knows he is competing against every potential suitor of the delicious Mademoiselle Lacombe. And how many suitors there are!" DeHon bent closer and whispered, "I hear she takes long night walks in the parkland."
Its breath smelt of milk and cinnamon: a baby's breath.
"That's hardly surprising," I said. "She is an environmental engineer. The gardens must fascinate her."
"I've heard she has a particular interest in the gardeners."
I laughed. "That would be obscene if it were not so ridiculous."
Cris DeHon's smile showed small pearl-white teeth. "Perhaps. But perhaps poor beautiful Demi seeks simple relief from the strain of being the focus of a killer's desire."
I suppose the epithet was not an exaggeration, although it shocked me then, as no doubt DeHon hoped it would. Dev Veeder had had a good war, and had risen quickly through the ranks of the Greater Brazilian Army. He was a war hero, although like many heroes of the Quiet War – at least, on the winning side – he had never engaged in combat. His specialty was debriefing; I suppose a more liberal age might say that he was a torturer, although his methods were as much psychological as physical. He once confided to me that showing a prisoner the instruments he proposed to use often had as much effect as application of the instruments themselves – especially if the prisoner had been forced to listen to the screams of others suffering hot questioning. Early in the war, Dev Veeder had interrogated an entire mining community on Europa, some fifty men, women and children; the intelligence he had wrung from them had helped bring a swift and relatively bloodless end to the siege of Minos. This and other exploits had won him his present position of head of security of Paris, which he prosecuted with diligence and vigour.
Dev Veeder was young, the youngest son of a good family with connections in both industry and government. He was fiercely ambitious and highly intelligent. He had a sharp black impatient gaze. His hair was combed back in waves from his high forehead and aquiline nose; his make-up was discretely but skilfully applied. A dandy from the pages of a seventeenth century novel, but no fool. I knew him well from the conversations we had had about history. He was very interested in my theories, and believed, like many middle-ranking military men, that he himself had something of the attributes of a great man. This vanity was his single serious weakness, although it was true that, like all tyrants, he believed himself both benevolent and pragmatic.
"If only I had ha
d the chance to really prove myself," he said to me more than once, showing that he really misunderstood my theory. For great men of history do prove themselves; the will to succeed, not luck or circumstance, is what makes them great. They rise to the occasion; they seize the day; they mould themselves to be all things to all men. Dev Veeder was too proud to realise this, and perhaps too cruel. He could only be what he was, and perhaps that is why I feared for Demi, and why I crossed him.
3.
Each day, I left the safety of the diplomatic quarter for the ruins of the city to interview the survivors of the siege, to try and learn what they knew or claimed to know about Marisa Bassi. In spite of my reputation and the letters of commission I carried, Dev Veeder did not think that I was important enough to warrant a proper escort – an impertinence for which I was grateful, for one cannot properly conduct interviews amongst a defeated population in the presence of troopers of the force that now occupies their territory. And so, each day, armed only with the blazer I kept holstered at my ankle, I set out to pursue my research in the refugee warrens.
It was my custom to wait for my guide in a small café at the edge of the small plaza just outside the diplomatic quarter. The place had once been the checkpoint for the quarter, with cylinder gates to control access and human guards on duty in case there was a problem the computer was not authorized to handle. On the night of the revolution, a mob had stormed the guardhouse and killed the guards, fried the computer and associated security hardware with an industrial microwave beam, and blown the gates. The diplomatic quarter had already been evacuated, but a small detachment of soldiers and minor executives had been left behind as caretakers; no one had expected the revolutionary committee to violate the diplomatic quarter's sovereign status. The soldiers killed half a hundred of the mob before they were themselves killed, the surviving executives were taken hostage, and the buildings looted.
After the war, the quarter was the first place to be restored, of course, and a memorial had been erected to the murdered soldiers and martyred hostages, virtually the only casualties on our side. But the ruins of the gates still stood to one side of the plaza on which half a dozen pedways and escalators converged, tall hollow columns gutted of their armatures, their bronze facings scorched and ghosted with half-erased slogans.
The guardhouse's airy teepee was slashed and half-collapsed, but an old married couple had set up a tiny kitchen inside it and put a scattering of mismatched chairs and tables outside. Perhaps they hoped to get the custom of those collaborators who had clearance to get past the security things, half dog, half bear, knitted together with cybernetic enhancements and armour, that now guarded the diplomatic quarter. However, I seemed to be their only customer, and I suspected that they were relatives of my assiduous guide; for that reason I never left a tip. That day, two days after the party, I was sitting as usual in a wire frame chair, sipping from a bulb of dark strong coffee and nibbling a meltingly sweet pain au chocolat, looking out across the vista of Paris's main dome while I waited for my guide.
Before the Quiet War, Paris, Dione was one of the loveliest cities in the solar system, and the largest of all the cities on Saturn's moons. Its glassy froth of domes and tunnels and tents straddled a ridge of upthrust brecciated basalt between Romulus and Remus craters. Since the twin craters are close to the equator of the icy moon's sub-saturnian hemisphere, Saturn stood almost directly overhead, cycling through his phases roughly every three days. The city had been renowned for its microgravity architecture, its wide, tree-lined boulevards and parks – much of its population was involved in the biotech industries – its café culture and opera and theatres, and the interlinked parkland blisters that stepped down the terraces of Remus crater along the waterfall-filled course of what had been renamed the Proudhon River during the revolution and now, after the end of Quiet War and the fall of the barricades, was the Little Amazon – or would be, once the pumps were fixed and the watercourse had been cleared of debris.
The main dome, like many others, had been blown during the bloody end of the siege. It was two kilometres across, bisected by a dry riverbed from east to west and by the Avenue des Étoiles, so-called because of the thousands of lanterns that had hung from the branches of its trees, from north to south, and further divided into segments by boulevards and tramways. Clusters of white buildings stood amongst the sere ruins of parks, while warehouses and offices were packed around its circumference. Although the civic buildings at its centre were superficially intact, their windows were shattered and their white walls were pockmarked to the third storey by the bullet-holes of the bitter hand-to-hand fighting of the bloody day in which eighty thousand citizens died defending their city from invading troops of the Three Powers Alliance. Every scrap of vegetation in the parks had been killed by exposure to vacuum after the blowout, of course, and now, with the restoration of atmospheric pressure, it was all rotting down to mulch. The air of the plaza where I sat, high above it all, held a touch of that cabbagy stink.
I was woken from my reverie by a light touch on my shoulder, the musk of roses. Demi Lacombe fell, light as a bird, into the wire chair on the other side of the little café table and favoured me with her devastating smile. She wore loose white coveralls; I could not help but notice that her breasts were unbound. I scarcely saw Dev Veeder scowling a dozen metres away, or his squad of burly, armoured troopers.
Demi Lacombe's left wrist was wrapped in a pressure bandage; when I expressed my concern, she explained that she had fractured it in a silly accident. "I overestimated my ability to jump in this lovely light gravity, and took a bit of a tumble. The clinic injected smart bacteria that will fix up the bone in a couple of days. I've seen this place so many times," she added, "but I didn't know that you were its patron, Professor-Doctor."
"Please, my name is Fredo. Won't you join me in a coffee? And you too, perhaps, Colonel Veeder?"
"There's no time for that," Veeder said brusquely. "You're a fool to patronise these people, Graves."
Inside the guardhouse's half-collapsed shroud, the old couple who ran the make-shift café shrank from his black glare.
I said boldly, "The psychologists tell me that enterprises like this are a healthy sign, Colonel. Even though it is, admittedly, on a microeconomic scale."
"You're being scammed," Veeder said. "I think I ought to re-examine the credentials of your so-called guide."
"History shows us, Colonel, that those defeated benefit from subsequent cultural and economic fertilisation. Besides, my sponsors would be unhappy if you disturbed my work."
Demi Lacombe said, "I think it's a nice thing, Dev. A little sign of reconciliation."
"Whatever. Come on. It's a long way to the tramhead."
"The trams are working again?"
"One or two," Dev Veeder said.
"Dev restored the tram lines which pass through some of the parklands," Demi said. "It really does help my surveys." For a moment, she took my hand in both of hers. "You're a kinder man than you seem, Fredo," she said, and floated up out of her chair and took Dev Veeder's arm.
I watched them cross the plaza to the escalators. Demi had only been in Paris a couple of weeks, but she had already mastered the long loping stride which worked best in Dione's low gravity. Only when they had descended out of sight did I look at the scrap of paper she had thrust into my palm.
I must talk with you.
My guide arrived hardly a minute later; I suspected that he had been watching the whole thing from a safe vantage. I suppose I should tell you something about Lavet Corso. The most important thing was that I never entirely trusted him, an instinctive reaction to which I should have paid more attention. But who does like collaborationists? They are despised by their own people for being traitors, and for the same reason are distrusted by those they are so eager to please.
Lavet Corso had once been something in the lower echelons in the city's government, and was studiedly neutral about Marisa Bassi. Although he had arranged many interviews, I had ne
ver tried to interview him. He had been widowed in the war and had to support a young daughter in difficult circumstances. While interviewing survivors of the seige, I had to endure the squalor of the warrens in which they lived. On my first visit, Corso had the temerity to complain about the noise, lack of privacy, dirt and foul air, and I had told him sharply, "You and your daughter are lucky. Fate saved you from a horrible death. If not for a chance which separated you from your wife, you could have been aboard that scow too. You could have fallen inside a tin can into Saturn's poisonous atmosphere, choking and boiling and flattened in the calorific depths. But you, Mr. Corso, were spared, as was your daughter. Life goes on."
I don't think he took my little homily to heart, but he didn't dare complain again.
Corso was a tremendously tall man, with a pock-marked face, dark eyes and black hair slicked back from his pale face with heavy grease. He was efficient and smarter than he mostly allowed himself to appear; perhaps too smart, for his flattery never seemed sincere, and he was too ready to suggest alternatives to my plans. That day, for instance, after I had told him where I wanted to go, he immediately proposed visiting another sector that was both easier to reach and in a far safer condition.
"It is my life if you are hurt, boss."
"I hardly think so, given the waivers I had to sign in order to do my fieldwork."
"And you have been there already, boss. Several times. Very badly damaged it is, not safe at all. And there are still many booby traps."
"I do remember, Mr. Corso, and I also remember that on each occasion you tried to dissuade me. But I will go again, because it is important to me. If we do get into trouble, the machines of the security force claim to be only five minutes away from any spot in the city."
"It's certainly what we're told," Corso said. "Perhaps it's even true."