Stories From The Quiet War

by Paul McAuley

  The airlock opened onto a flat apron of dusty ice that, trodden everywhere with cleated bootprints, reminded Jack of the snow around the ski lifts at the mountain resort where he and his parents had several times gone on holiday. It was six in the morning by city time, but outside it was the middle of Rhea's long day. Saturn's slender crescent was cocked overhead, lassoed by the slender ellipse of his rings. The sun was a cold diamond, a hundred times less bright than it appeared from Earth. Its light gleamed on the swept-back tower of the apartment block and on the other towers of the new city and the great curve of the scarp behind them, shone wanly on the crests of the rumpled ridges of ice that stretched to the close horizon.

  Ordinarily, Jack would have been transfixed by the alien beauty of the panorama, but he had a mission to accomplish. He tried and failed to pick up the radio transponder of Mark's pressure suit – presumably Mark had switched it off – but that didn't matter. Jack knew exactly where his friend was going. He crossed to the racks where the cycles were charging, and found every one occupied. Mark wasn't qualified to use a pressure suit (he must have used the cloned override card to force the dressing frame to give him one) and either he didn't know about the cycles, or he didn't know the simple code which unlocked them.

  They were three-wheeled, with fat diamond mesh tyres, a low-slung seat and a simple control yoke. Jack slid into one and set off along the road that headed towards the eastern end of the old city, feeling a blithe optimism. He was on a cycle and Mark was on foot. It was no contest.

  But the road bent wide to the south, skirting the fans of ice-rubble and fallen boulders at the base of the huge cliff of the crater's rimwall, and Jack quickly realized that someone on foot, taking a straight path instead of the road's wide detour, would have far less distance to travel. To his left, the rumpled plain of the crater floor stretched away to the cluster of the central peaks; to his right, the lighted circles of the endwalls of the old city's buried chambers glowed with green light in the face of the cliffs two miles away, like the portholes of a huge ocean liner.

  After ten minutes, Jack spotted a twinkle of movement amongst the boulder fields at the foot of the cliffs. He stopped the cycle, used the magnification feature of his visor, and saw a figure in a white pressure suit bounding in huge strides amongst tumbled blocks of dirty ice as big as houses. He tried to hail his friend, but Mark must have switched off the suit's phone as well as its transponder, so he drove the cycle off the roadway, intending to cut him off. At first the going was easy, with only a few outlying blocks to steer around, but then the ground began to rise up and down in concentric scarps like frozen waves, and the rubble fallen from the cliffs grew denser. Jack kept losing sight of Mark, spotting him only when he crested the tops of the scarps, and he piled on the speed in the broad depressions between them, anxious that he'd lose sight of his friend completely.

  He was bowling alongside a row of boulders when the inky shadow ahead turned out to be hiding a narrow but deep crevice which trapped the cycle's front wheel. The cycle slewed, Jack hit the brakes, everything tipped sideways, and then he was hanging by his safety harness, looking up at Saturn's ringed crescent in the black sky. He managed to undo the harness's four-way clasp and scramble free, and checked the integrity of the joints of his pressure suit before he heaved the cycle's front tyre out of the crevice. Its mesh was badly flattened along one side, and the front fork was crumpled beyond repair: there was no way he could ride another yard.

  Well, his suit was fine, he wasn't injured, he had plenty of air and power, and if he got into trouble he could always phone for help. There was nothing for it. He was going to have to follow Mark on foot.

  It took two hours hour to slog four miles across the rough terrain, clambering over piles of boulders, climbing down into the dips between scarps and climbing back out again, finding away around jagged crevices. Sometimes he could see Mark's pressure-suited figure slogging ahead of him – on Earth Jack could have shouted to him, but not even the sound of a nuclear bomb would carry in the vacuum here – but most of the time he had only his suit's navigation system to guide him. He was drenched with sweat, his ankles and knees were aching, and he had just switched to his reserve air pack, when at last he reached the road that led to the airlock of the city's cemetery, the place where he had guessed that Mark would lie in wait for Ahlgren Rees. He went slowly, moving between the rubble at the edge of the road, creeping from shadow to shadow, imagining the worst. Mark crouched behind a boulder with a gun he'd stolen from his mother or father, waiting for Ahlgren Rees . . .

  But there was no need for caution. Mark's white pressure suit was sprawled on the roadway, about two hundred yards from the airlock. Jack knew at once that something was wrong, adrenalin kicked in, and he reached the figure in three bounds. A red light flashed on the suit's backpack; its oxygen supply was exhausted. Jack managed to roll it over. Behind the gold-filmed visor, Mark stared past him, eyes half-closed and unseeing, skin tinged blue.

  Jack hit his suit's distress beacon and began to drag Mark's pressure-suited body towards the yellow-painted steel door of the airlock. He was halfway there when the door slid open and a figure in a pressure suit stepped out.

  "You kids again," Ahlgren Rees said over the phone link. "I swear you'll be the death of me."

  Three days later, after the scary confusion when Jack and Ahlgren Rees had dragged Mark's body inside the cemetery chamber and the medivac crew had arrived, after Jack had explained everything to Davis and Marika, after the visit to the hospital where Mark was recovering (when its oxygen supply had run dangerously low, his pressure suit had put him in a coma and cooled him down to keep him alive for as long as possible, but it had been a close run thing), Ahlgren Rees took him to see the place he visited each and every week.

  There was a kind of ski lift that carried them half a mile up a sheer face of rock-hard black ice to the rim of the huge crater's rimwall, and a path of steel mesh that followed the curve of a frozen ridge to a viewpoint that looked out across a cratered terrain. There was a steel pillar a yard high, with a plaque set into its angled top, and an induction loop that would play a message over the phone system if you pressed its red button, but Ahlgren Rees told Jack that there was no need to look at the plaque or use the loop because he wanted to explain why they had come here.

  It was early in the morning and the brilliant star of the sun low on the horizon, throwing long tangled shadows across the glaring moonscape, but the long scar that Ahlgren Rees had brought Jack to see was clearly visible, still fresh after fifteen years, a gleaming sword cutting through shadows, aimed at the western horizon.

  "Her name was Rosa Lux," Ahlgren Rees told Jack. "She was flying a small freighter. One of those freelance ships that are not much bigger than tugs, mostly engine, a little cargo space, a cabin not much bigger than a coffin. She was carrying in her hold a special cargo the mayor of the city of Camelot, on Mimas. He had been one of the architects of the rebellion that started the Quiet War. His city had fallen, and if he had reached Xamba he would have been granted political asylum. My job was to stop him. I was a singleship pilot then, part of the picket which orbited Rhea to prevent ships leaving or arriving during the aftermath of the war. When Rosa Lux's freighter was detected, I was the only singleship in a position to intercept her, and even then I had to burn almost all my fuel to do it. She was a daring pilot and had came in very fast, skimming the surface of Rhea just a mile up and using its gravity to slow her so that she could enter into a long orbit and come into land when she made her second pass. That was what she was doing when my orbit intercepted hers. I had only one chance to stop her, and I made a mess of it. I fired two missiles. One missed by several miles and hit the surface; the other missed too, but only by a few hundred yards, and it blew itself up as it zoomed past. It didn't destroy her ship, but it damaged its main drive and changed her vector – her course. She was no longer heading for Xamba's spaceport, but for the rimwall, and the city.

  "She what she did
then. I saw her fire her manoeuvring thrusters. I saw her dump fuel from her main tank. I saw her sacrifice herself so that she would miss the city. Everything happened in less than five seconds, and she barely missed the top of the rimwall, but miss it she did. And crashed there, and died. Rosa Lux had only five seconds to live, and she used that little time to save the lives of a hundred thousand people.

  "The funny thing was, the mayor of Camelot survived. He was riding in the cargo section of the ship in a coffin filled with impact gel, cooled down much the same way your friend was cooled down. The cargo section pinwheeled across the landscape for two kilometres, but it survived more or less intact. After the mayor was revived, he claimed asylum. He still lives in Xamba. He married a local woman, and runs the city's library."

  There was a silence. Jack watched the scar shine in the new sunlight, waiting for Ahlgren Rees to finish his story. He was certain that there would be a moral; it was the kind of story that always had a moral. But Ahlgren Rees showed no sign of speaking, and at last Jack asked him why he'd come to Rhea.

  "After the war, I went back to Greater Brazil. I left the navy and trained as a paramedic, and got on with my life. My children grew up, and then my wife died. I decided to make a last visit to the place where the most intense and most important thing in my life had happened, and bought a roundtrip ticket. And when I got here, I fell in love with someone. You have met her, actually."

  "The woman who owns the café!"

  "We were in love, and then we fell out of love, but by that time I had begin a new life here, and I stayed on. But what brought me here to begin with was a chance encounter with another woman – the bravest person I know about. A single moment, a chance encounter, can change everything. Perhaps you're too young to know it, but I think it's happened to you, too."

  Jack thought about this, thought about all that had happened in the past week, and realized that his new friend was right.

  Second Skin

  The transport, once owned by an outer system cartel and appropriated by Earth's Pacific Community after the Quiet War, ran in a continuous, ever-changing orbit between Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. It never docked. It mined the solar wind for hydrogen to mix with the nanogram of antimatter which could power it for a century, and once or twice a year, during its intricate gravity assisted loops between Saturn's moons, maintenance drones attached remora-like to its hull, and fixed whatever its self-repairing systems couldn't handle.

  Ben Lo and the six other members of the first trade delegation to Proteus since the war were transferred onto the transport as it looped around Titan, still sleeping in the hibernation pods they'd climbed into in Earth orbit. Sixty days later, they were released from the transport in individual drop capsules of structural diamond, like so many seeds scattered by a pod.

  Swaddled in the crash web that took up most of the volume of the drop capsule's little bubble, Ben Lo watched with growing vertigo as the battered face of Proteus drew closer. He had been woken only a day ago, and was as weak and unsteady as a new-born kitten. The sun was behind the bubble's braking chute. Ahead, Neptune's disc was tipped in star-sprinkled black above the little moon. Neptune was subtly banded with blue and violet, its poles capped with white cloud, its equator streaked with cirrus. Slowly, slowly, Proteus began to eclipse it. The transport had already dwindled to a bright point amongst the bright points of the stars, on its way to spin up around Neptune, loop past Triton, and head on out for the next leg of its continuous voyage, halfway across the Solar System to Uranus.

  Like many of the moons of the outer planets, Proteus was a ball of ice and rock. Over billions of years, most of the rock had sunk to the core. The moon's icy, dirty white surface was splotched with a scattering of large impact craters with black interiors, like well-used ash trays, and dissected by large stress fractures, some running halfway round the little globe.

  The spy fell towards Proteus in a thin transparent bubble of carbon, wearing a paper suit and a diaper, and trussed up in a cradle of smart cabling like an early Christian martyr. He could barely move a muscle. Invisible laser light poured all around him – the capsule was opaque to the frequency used – gently pushing against the braking sail which had unfolded and spun into a twenty kilometre diameter mirror after the capsule had been released by the transport. Everything was fine.

  The capsule said, "Only another twelve hours, Mr. Lo. I suggest that you sleep. Elfhame's time zone is ten hours behind Greenwich Mean Time."

  Had he been asleep for a moment? Ben Lo blinked and said, "Jet lag," and laughed.

  "I don't understand," the capsule said politely. It didn't need to be very intelligent. All it had to do was control the attitude of the braking sail, and keep its passenger amused and reassured until landing. Then it would be recycled.

  Ben Lo didn't bother to try to explain. He was feeling the same kind of yawning apprehension which must have gripped ninety year old airline passengers at the end of the twentieth century. A sense of deep dislocation and estrangement. How strange that I'm here, he thought. And, how did it happen? When he'd been born, spaceships had been crude, disposable chemical rockets. The first men on the moon. President Kennedy's assassination. No, that happened before I was born. For a moment, his yawning sense of dislocation threatened to swallow him whole, but then he had it under control and it dwindled to mere strangeness. It was the treatment, he thought. The treatment and the hibernation.

  Somewhere down there in the white moonscape, in one of the smaller canyons, was Ben Lo's first wife. But he mustn't think of that. Not yet. Because if he did . . . no, he couldn't remember. Something bad, though.

  "I can offer a variety of virtualities," the capsule said. Its voice was a husky contralto. It added, "Certain sexual services are also available."

  "What I'd like a chateaubriand steak butterflied and well-grilled over hickory wood, a Caesar salad, and a 1998 Walnut Creek Cabernet Sauvignon."

  "I can offer a range of nutritive pastes, and eight flavours of water, including a balanced electrolyte," the capsule said. A prissy note seemed to have edged into its voice. It added, "I would recommend that you restrict intake of solids and fluids until after landing."

  Ben Lo sighed. He had already had his skin scrubbed and repopulated with strains of bacteria and yeast native to the Protean ecosystem, and his GI tract had been reamed out and packed with a neutral gel containing a benign strain of E. coli. He said, "Give me an inflight movie."

  "I would recommend virtualities," the capsule said. "I have a wide selection."

  Despite the capsule's minuscule intelligence, it had a greater memory capacity than all the personal computers on Earth at the end of the Millennium. Ben Lo had downloaded his own archives into it.

  "'Wings of Desire,'" he said.

  "But it's in black and white! And flat. And only two senses —"

  "There's colour later on. It has a particular relevance to me, I think. Once upon a time, capsule, there was a man who was very old, and became young again, and found that he'd lost himself. Run the movie, and you'll understand a little bit about me."

  The moon, Neptune, the stars, fell into a single point of light. The light went out. The film began.

  Falling through a cone of laser light, the man and the capsule watched how an angel became a human being, out of love.

  The capsule skimmed the moon's dirty-white surface and shed the last of its relative velocity in the inertia buffers of the target zone, leaving its braking sail to collapse across kilometres of moonscape. It was picked up by a striding tripod that looked like a prop from The War of the Worlds, and carried down a steeply sloping tunnel through triple airlocks into something like the ER room of a hospital. With the other members of the trade delegation, Ben Lo, numbed by neural blocks, was decanted, stripped, washed, and dressed in fresh paper clothes.

  Somewhere in the press of nurses and technicians he thought he glimpsed someone he knew, or thought he knew. A woman, her familiar face grown old, eyes faded blue in a face wrinkl
ed as a turtle's. . . But then he was lifted onto a gurney and wheeled away.

  Waking, he had problems with remembering who he was. He knew he was nowhere on Earth. A universally impersonal hotel room, but he was virtually in free fall. Some moon, then. But what role was he playing?

  He got up, moving carefully in the fractional gravity, and pulled aside the wall-to-floor drapes. It was night, and across a kilometre of black air was a steep dark mountainside or perhaps a vast building, with lights wound at its base, shimmering on a river down there. . .

  Proteus. Neptune. The trade delegation. And the thing he couldn't think about, which was fractionally nearer the surface now, like a word at the back of his tongue. He could feel it, but he couldn't shape it. Not yet.

  He stripped in the small, brightly lit sphere of the bathroom and turned the walls to mirrors and looked at himself. He was too young to be who he thought he was. No, that was the treatment, of course. His third. Then why was his skin this colour? He hadn't bothered to tint it for. . . How long?

  That sci-fi version of Othello, a century and a half ago, when he'd been a movie star. He remembered the movie vividly, although not the making of it. But that was the colour he was now, his skin a rich dark mahogany, gleaming as if oiled in the lights, his hair a cap of tight black curls.

  He slept again, and dreamed of his childhood home. San Francisco. Sailboats scattered across the blue bay. He'd had a little boat, a Laser. The cold salt smell of the sea. The pinnacles of the rust-red bridge looming out of banks of fog, and the fog horn booming mournfully. Cabbage leaves in the gutters of Spring Street. The crowds swirling under the crimson and gold neon lights of the trinket shops of Grant Avenue, and the intersection at Grant and California tingling with trolley car bells.