Stories From The Quiet War

by Paul McAuley

  Karyl told her he would think about it, although it was the last thing he wanted to do. Rescuing these people had been the right thing to do, but he didn't feel especially heroic. It was a kind of burden, in fact, a responsibility he didn't want. He would slip out as soon as he could, head out to his cache in Latium Chasma, get back on track. There were other rolligons at the oasis, and the place could easily absorb the ecological load of five more people. They could stay here. They didn't need him.

  Also, the sight of the dead man in the temporary grave had shocked and sobered him. Death was rare. People lived a long time, a hundred and fifty years or more, thanks to universal access to longevity treatments, medichines in their blood that monitored their health, and every kind of medical intervention was available. And the rescue of the railcar passengers had brought home just how small Dione really was, and how universal the war was. It had only just started, and he was already involved in it. And everywhere was a target. There was no escaping it.

  Perhaps Aida sensed some of this; she certainly noticed that he was quiet and withdrawn during the big communal meal, and afterwards caught up with him when he retreated to the edge of the oasis.

  The oasis at Dvoskin's Knoll was old, planted with banyans that had spread their branches, broad and flat-topped, like so many paths, edge to edge across the width and height of the hemispherical tent. A great green maze, every level connected to every other by slides and ropeways and ladders, safety nets hitched like spider webs. Little rooms and pods and platforms of every size had been grown from living wood by use of viruses; the crotches of branches contained epiphytic gardens; drip terraces stepped down tree trunks like giant bracket fungi. A hundred species of bird lived there, and sloths, chameleons and snake rats, and the small troop of monkeys, tweaked for intelligence and docility, and equipped with opposable thumbs, that gardened it. Near the top of the multilevel canopy was a big terraced platform some fifty metres across, knitted from branches that had been fused together, with a pool in its centre and lawns all around; at the base of the trees, amongst the forest of their prop roots, fungal gardens recycled organic matter; and all around the edge of this intricate little forest were small platforms and bowers sculpted from the living wood, bright little gardens elevated above the bare and empty moonscape.

  Karyl was sitting on the edge of one of these gardens when Aida found him. It was high up in the canopy, hung right at the edge of the tent's sandwich of diamond and polymers and aerogel insulation, and gave a tremendous view east, with the fluted cliff of the abutment dropping straight below, and rolling territory of what were obviously ancient lobate flows, cratered everywhere, riven with lightning forks of stress crevasses, stretching out to the horizon, which at this elevation was easily fifteen kilometres away. Karyl sat cross-legged on flower-spangled turf in a kind of shallow dish knitted from terminal branches, freezing vacuum a metre away outside the pane, a warm breeze caressing him, at his back a dense canopy of hand-sized leaves floating at every level, and the broad arms of branches and here and there the great columns of trunks. All this in green shadow, and now a shadow moving towards him, gaining definition: Aida swarming along a ropeway slung overhead and dropping neatly beside him, handing him a flask of the strong beer one of the oasis's permanent inhabitants brewed.

  They shared the beer and talked. Aida was ten years younger than Karyl but experienced and strong and confident. She got that from her father's mother, she said, who'd been part of the famous commune that had for a while inhabited an oasis on Uranus's largest moon, Titania. She was gifted with no nonsense common sense, too, Karyl thought, and a certain amount of charisma besides. A natural-born leader. She'd organized her companions, helped them escape the battle. led them on the two long hikes. When he told her that it was she, not him, who had saved their lives, Aida shrugged and said she'd done what she'd had to do, anyone would have done the same.

  "Not just anyone."

  "It's surprising what people can do. What they can find in themselves. One good thing about this, it's going to make us all stronger."

  "If it doesn't kill us first."

  Oops. She'd lost a friend, and he was making a joke.

  "Nietzsche," she said. "I have a lot of time for that old German."

  "I'm sorry about your friend."

  Which was just as clumsy.

  There was a short silence and they drank more beer, and Karyl found himself telling Aida about how he'd grown up in Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, how he'd come to Saturn, how he happened to become a gypsy prospector. She was interested in how he roved from place to place, and he nearly told her about his plan to get out of here as soon as possible and hole up in his cache site. The beer was pretty strong and he was wrung out from all that had happened. He'd felt every emotion he'd ever felt, stronger than he'd ever felt them before, fear and grief and so on. He was a little bit in shock, some detached fragment of himself observed. Aida told him that he should find his ex-partner and make sure she was all right, so that he wouldn't feel guilty about not doing it. She offered to massage his back, and one thing led to another and they made love on the platform. Well, had sex, really, loud and rough. Losing themselves in the animal moment. Aida was pretty dominant, showing him how to hold off his organism, telling him what she wanted him to do to her, but he didn't mind. He was stupid with lust. They fell off at one point, dropping with swooning slowness in Dione's slight gravity, revolving around each other, into a safety net. As he climbed back up a ropeway, with Aida's white buttocks glimmering above him, Karyl felt thick desire grip him from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.

  Eventually they fell asleep, and when Karyl woke Aida was gone and a loud voice was echoing through the oasis's dome. He was dopey with spent lust and a hangover from the beer, and the voice had a strong accent that made it pretty hard to understand, and every bird in the oasis was screeching and calling, and the troupe of monkeys were trashing and hooting in distress up in the highest branches of the banyans. But the voice kept repeating itself, over and over, and at last Karyl realized that someone was telling him to surrender.

  5.

  The Brazilians had arrived in two squat turtle-like vehicles, aimed an X-ray laser cannon at the oasis's tent, and attached a vibrating pad to one of the panes, turning it into a giant loudspeaker. They told the inhabitants that they had knew that fifty-three people were inside, they had thirty minutes to suit up and get outside, or the tent would be holed. And that was it, Karyl was a prisoner along with the owners of the oasis and the refugees. But there was no sign of Aida and her crew. They'd slipped away at night, stealing one of the rolligons. Karyl wished that they'd stolen his: the Brazilians confiscated it, along with the others, and it broke his heart to see it driven away. He'd lived a good portion of his life inside it. He never saw it again.

  Karyl and everyone else were taken to Paris. He learned from his brief interview with an intelligence officer that the Brazilians had been searching for certain people who had gone missing during the battle for Paris. The bellicose mayor, Marisa Bassi, was one of them; the venerable gene wizard Avernus was another. Patrols had followed the trans-equatorial railway east and west; the patrol that had taken Karyl prisoner had discovered the body of Aida's friend and followed the tracks of his rolligon to Dvoskin's Knoll.

  So that was that. Karyl was injected with an arfid tag and allocated a place in one of Paris's farm tubes that had retained its integrity. For a week, he and his fellow prisoners, all single, childless men, were more or less left alone, fed minimal rations which they supplemented from the fruit bushes packed in the tube. They organized themselves into crews, collecting their urine and shit and used it to fertilize and water the plants, sharing out rations, tending those who had been wounded in to battle for Paris and its aftermath, pooling information, watching Brazilian gigs and shuttles arrive and depart at the spaceport beyond the frosted ridge of the city's ruptured tent.

  At last, brusque and brutal Brazilian soldiers marched in ahead of a cart
carrying a load of bright yellow pressure suits. An officer told the prisoners to organize themselves into shifts, they would work around the clock to clean up and repair the city. Karyl was assigned to a gang that collected the bodies of citizens killed in the battle or when the tent had lost its integrity. It was grim work. Half the population of Paris, some ten thousand people, had died when the Brazilians had invested the city. One half of Paris's long, tubular tent slanted against the low and rounded slopes of the rim of Romulus Crater; the other ran out across the floor of the crater. The Brazilians had broken in from either end and advanced towards the centre, where the tent flexed like an elbow. The defenders had blown up the public buildings there in a last desperate stand, and the tent had been ruptured. Many had died then; many more had been killed by Brazilian battle drones, on the streets, or in refuges in sealed buildings.

  Karyl's gang worked in the level, lower part of the city, amongst the manufactories and workshops and the blocks of old-fashioned apartment buildings. Power had been restored but the city was still in vacuum and everything was frozen hard. The river that ran through the city was a long block of ice. Trees, stripped of most of their leaves during the explosive decompression when the city's tent had been ruptured, stood iron-hard along the streets. The grass that turfed the street and every plant in courtyard gardens was frozen hard, colours slowly bleaching in the stark light of the chandeliers.

  Every building had suffered damage in the fighting. Few had retained integrity. There were bodies in apartments, in central courtyards, in basements. Fallen where they had been caught in the open, huddled around doors, in bed niches, inside airlocks. Some wore pressure suits and were the easiest to deal with. Everyone else was a statue frozen to the floor or to furniture, heads and hands swollen and blackened by pressure bruising, faces masked by blood expressed from ears and eyes and mouths and nostrils, eyes starting and tongues protruding. Men and women and children. Babies. All wearing the same cartoon mask of horrified surprise.

  The work gangs had to pry them free using heated, diamond-edged wedges and load them like so many awkward statues onto wagons that carried them out of airlocks whose double sets of doors permanently stood open, to great trenches blasted into the icy regolith to the east of the city. Ordinarily, the dead were cremated and the ash dug into a cemetery park where their nitrogen and phosphorous and all the other nutrients could reenter the slow cycles of the city's ecosystem. But the Brazilians simply had the bodies dumped in long mass graves and covered over with ice gravel, as if they wanted the evidence of their atrocities to be erased as quickly as possible.

  Karyl and the others assigned to the work gangs worked twelve hours a day for more than twenty days. Towards the end, when all of the bodies in public areas had been cleared away, it became like a macabre treasure hunt. Searching through apartment blocks room by room. Looking in basements and service tunnels. In storage lockers and cupboards where people had sought refuge, or tried to hoard a last few sips of air. Everyone worked with a kind of grim numbness. Everting their gaze from the faces of the dead. Trying to pretend that the bodies were awkward and detestable objects that had never lived and laughed and loved.

  One day, Karyl was waiting with the rest of his work gang near one of the big airlocks, waiting for their armed escort back to the farm tube, when a cart rolled by and something caught his eye. A flash of red amongst the stiff statues. Red hair. Immediately, he thought of the crazy woman, Shizuko, who had argued so strongly for armed resistance against the Brazilians and Europeans in the oasis in the long ago time before the war. He remembered her warmth and scent, her vivid golden gaze as she'd touched his arm in the oasis's garage, and told him that gypsy prospectors like him could be useful. It probably wasn't her, but as the cart ground past on its way to the airlock and the burial trenches outside, Karyl felt a great pang of sorrow pass through him, and he wept that night, his sorrow bitter and unquenchable.

  No one said anything to him. Everyone wept sooner or later. There were horror stories of men and women finding loved ones, partners, parents, children. Several people committed suicide. A few dramatically, by unlatching their helmets or throwing themselves under the treads of one of the giant construction robots. Most by finding some hidden spot and sitting there until their air ran out. They all went into the trenches too.

  Then the tent was repaired and slowly repressurised by huge machines that electrolyzed water into hydrogen and oxygen, and diluted the oxygen with reserves of nitrogen and argon. A low pressure mix at first: four hundred millibars, forty per cent oxygen, barely breathable. The city was slowly warmed, too, and things immediately became a hundred times worse. Before, it had been a frozen morgue; now it was a ripening charnel house.

  Branches exploded from trees as ice expanded and turned to water. Every plant wilted and deliquesced into slime. Bacteria and fungi whose spores had survived the freezing vacuum multiplied tremendously and a great smell of rot spread through the city. Every kind of foodstuff rotted too, and so did those bodies which had not yet been found by the work gangs. More than a hundred surfaced as the water in the river melted. As did great shoals of rotting fish. Others were hunted down by drones equipped with methane probes, and pried loose from their hiding places and carted away. Some forty days later, when Karyl and the rest of his work gang were put to working on repairing the surfaces of streets shattered by explosions during the bitter fighting, bodies were still being found.

  Every day he was marched into the city with the rest of his work gang, and worked under the supervision of a pair of soldiers. The Brazilians were curt and casually brutal, frightened perhaps because they were outnumbered ten to one, even though they were armed and there were battle drones stalking everywhere, ready to put down with fatal force any sign of rebellion. And although many of the prisoners were docile and compliant, there were an equal number who cleaved to the doctrine of nonviolent resistance. They refused to work, and still refused when one in ten of them were taken out and exposed to vacuum. The Brazilians killed ninety per cent of the prisoners in one farm tube who refused to cooperate, and locked up the survivors and switched off the tent's air conditioning and left them to strangle as carbon dioxide built up. And then another tent rebelled. At last, the Brazilians divided the prisoners into those who would cooperate and those who wouldn't. Those who did were given better rations, and clothing and other items looted from the city. The rest were dumped in prison tents.

  Karyl worked. He wasn't as cynical as many of his workmates, who despised the refuseniks. He supposed he would be a better person if he refused, but what difference would refusal to work make? The Brazilians were bringing in people from other cities on other moons to help with the reconstruction work; amongst the survivors of the battle of Paris, those who engaged in nonviolent resistance numbered more than fifty per cent, but the proportion was much lower elsewhere, and in the cities of Camelot, Mimas, and Xamba, Rhea, which had attempted to make a peaceful reconciliation with the invaders from Earth from the first, it was almost non-existent. There was a rumour that the scattered settlements of Iapetus, under the rule of the Pacific Community, had reached a peaceful alliance, that there was a refuge there if it could be reached, but it was a hopeful rumour only; the Brazilians had almost gone to war against the Pacific Community, on Earth, and although they were allied in common cause against the Outers, they remained bitter rivals.

  6.

  One day, about a hundred days after the war, Karyl was summoned to the Office of Volunteer Labour. This was in the warren of offices that the Brazilians had set up in a tented and relatively undamaged apartment building at the edge of the city centre. It was surrounded by chevrons and tall tangles of smart wire, and Karyl spent two hours passing through a sequence of checkpoints. At last, a soldier locked a bracelet around Karyl's wrist and told him to follow the yellow line and that if he strayed the bracelet he would be given a shock.

  He went up a series of ramps that spiraled between the blocks of rooms that jutted from the s
pine of the building, getting views through the building's diamond tent of the broken and blasted buildings at the city's centre where work gangs crawled like ants over rubble slumps. Beyond, what had been parkland on either side of the river was sere and blackened, slanting up under the high ridge of the tent towards the top of the crater's rim. He waited a long time on a bench in a short corridor. Soldiers and civilians didn't spare him a glance as they went past. Robots glided by, balanced like acrobats on their ball drives. It was warm and the air was filtered and nothing smelt of death.

  Karyl fell asleep. And was kicked awake by a civilian aide, who led him into an office where a Brazilian officer told him that he was a lucky man, he could stay here and work until the end of his sentence in six years time, or he could have his sentence commuted to two hundred days service in the orbital junkyard where ships damaged during the Quiet War were being decommissioned or salvaged.

  That was the first time Karyl knew that he'd been tried and convicted, in absentia, by a military court. For harbouring wanted war criminals, apparently.

  "We need your answer now," the officer said.

  As far Karyl was concerned the offer was a no-brainer. Sure, salvage work meant that he would be collaborating with the Three Powers Authority, but if he was already collaborating with them. So he told the officer that all he needed was an answer to one question: what was the survival rate of people working on the salvage gangs?

  "The work is important. And the number of people who have the right kind of experience is limited, so we do everything to minimize risks," the officer said.

  "That isn't exactly an answer," Karyl said.

  "You're not exactly in a position to ask that kind of question," the officer said.

  He was young, with a skinny moustache and a curt manner that made it easier for Karyl to dislike him.