by Paul McAuley
‘Of course he can.’ Sri paused, then said, ‘These are dangerous times, Berry. I think you should come back to the habitat for a little while. You’ll be safe there, and you can be a great help to me.’
She knew that Berry liked the military, its discipline and order, its fetishism of violence, and planned to have him help out with the habitat’s security. The seasoned ex-marine sergeant presently in command would look after him, teach him, set him straight. But when she started to explain it to him, he shrugged and said that he wanted to stay in Paris.
‘I have friends here. I have work.’
‘I’ve just seen some of your friends. I won’t ask who they are or why you have allowed them to trash the compound, but it breaks my heart to see you waste your life, Berry. You’re so much better than this.’
‘I’m not wasting my life. I have work here. My own club. A place where soldiers can hang out and kick back. I like doing it, I’m good at it, it’s what I want to do,’ Berry said, with the anxious look he always got when he thought that he was about to be punished, or something he treasured was going to be confiscated.
Sri tried to explain that, because the new president lacked supporters in the Senate, he’d been forced to form a coalition with senators belonging to the radical green faction. And they had not only pushed through a great deal of hardline legislation, but were also using their power to remove or diminish everyone who disagreed with their policies. ‘That’s why they targeted Alder. And that’s why you should move back with me, Berry. Just for a little while. In case someone decides to make an example of you because of your brother’s so-called crimes.’
‘Your crimes,’ Berry said. ‘That’s what this is all about. The things you did. That you made Alder do.’
‘He was doing good and necessary work. As was everyone at the research station. People you knew, Berry. People who may well now be dead.’
‘It’s all about you. It always is. I can’t go back to Earth because of what you did there. I can’t enlist. And now you want to ruin everything I’ve done here, like always.’
‘I should have taken better care of you,’ Sri said. ‘Paid a little more attention to you. I know that, and I apologise. And this club of yours, I’m pleased to hear that you’ve been able to find something you like. It shows initiative. Why not use that initiative to help me, and help Alder, too?’
They talked back and forth for half an hour, but it did no good. Berry went through his usual stages of denial - clumsy attempts to change the subject, irrational anger, finally a smouldering sulk. Sri lost her temper and told him to stop being so selfish, to think about where his brother might be now, the hardships he must be suffering; Berry said that he’d learned all he knew about selfishness from her. Nothing she said got through to him after that, and then, because her assistants hadn’t been able to obtain any useful information about the raid on the research station, she had to endure a brief meeting with Euclides Peixoto, who presented her with a list of casualties and watched her study it with a sly and eager shine in his gaze, no doubt hoping to suck up any morsels of grief.
There were three people missing, including Alder, and fifteen confirmed dead - names she knew, men and women she had recruited and trained, who had accepted Alder’s leadership without question after she had been forced to leave Earth, who had continued to do excellent and important work. Euclides said that the survivors would be held at an army camp in Tierra del Fuego until his family had decided what to do with them.
‘Frankly, this is something of an embarrassment to us. A black eye, politically. So they’ll probably have to sit in that camp until things are calmer and we can see a way forward. It might take some time. You should be prepared for that,’ Euclides said. ‘Oh, and I have been asked to ask you to forget about any legal manoeuvres. It will only embarrass the family further. If you do, there will be blowback. And if that doesn’t hurt you, it will certainly damage your people.’
‘In the end, “my people” were working for the family. And if the family had protected them to begin with, it wouldn’t be in this embarrassing position now.’
‘They were breaking the law. And the family can hardly condone that, can it?’
Euclides Peixoto, dressed in a tailored version of the blue tunic and trousers of the Air Defence Force, was standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of his office, his back to the view of the tree-clad slopes of the park and the river that cut through it. He was a handsome man mantled with the languid arrogance of someone who had never needed to exert themselves to get what they wanted, vain and foolish but possessed of a weaselly cunning and proven to be a survivor blessed with no small amount of luck.
Before the war, Euclides had fallen in with the faction in his family that had opposed the attempts by the green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos, Sri’s mentor, Euclides’s great-uncle, to promote peace and reconciliation with the Outers. Euclides had tried to use Sri in a plot to depose Oscar, but she had realised that she would almost certainly be killed afterwards and had made her own move, killing the green saint, escaping from Earth, giving herself up to Arvam Peixoto. But now Arvam was dead, and Sri was once again at the mercy of Euclides. He couldn’t punish her for Oscar’s death because of his complicity in the wretched and sordid plot, but he never missed an opportunity to remind her of how much he enjoyed having power over her.
When she suggested that the scientists and technicians from the Antarctic facility could be brought out to Saturn, where they would be of immeasurable help in sorting through the treasure trove of the Library of the Commons, he said that she wasn’t the only person doing research in that area, and besides, as he was sure she knew, the security of her position had been undermined by the recent unfortunate events in Antarctica.
‘No point going to the trouble of shipping people all the way out here, only to send them straight back if you’re recalled,’ he said, and changed the subject, stepping daintily across the room to a display case containing a pressure-suit chestplate decorated with an intricate painting. ‘It’s one of Munk’s Seven Transformations of the Ring System. The last in the series. You know him? Munk? He was one of the big artists out here, before the war.’
‘I don’t know much about art,’ Sri said.
‘Me neither. But this fellow Munk, I’d say he did a pretty good job on this. You’ll never guess who presented this to me. An old friend of yours and mine from way back when.’
‘Loc Ifrahim.’
‘Either that’s a good guess, or you know something I didn’t know you knew.’
‘It was a reasoned deduction. We have few people in common, and Mr Ifrahim is the only one who has ready access to looted works of art. I assume he is trying to ingratiate himself.’
‘I have to admit that he’s been useful now and again. The fellow that owned this used to be the military commander over on Camelot, Mimas. Colonel Faustino Malarte. Remember him? He was mixed up in a scandal involving smuggling stuff like this and selling it back home.’
‘I’m not interested in politics.’
‘I know. You don’t care about things that are important to other people; you only care about your work. That isn’t a criticism, by the way. In fact, it’s the one thing I like about you. It means I can talk to you about politics because I know you won’t make any use of what I let slip. Anyhow, good old Malarte, he was the subject of an intensive investigation. Our friend Loc Ifrahim was part of it - he started it up in fact, although he did it in such a sly way that most people didn’t notice. So Malarte was duly investigated and found guilty of abuse of his office. And then, while he was waiting to be sent back to Earth in disgrace, he was murdered by a couple of Outers. You really don’t know any of this? I guess not. Well, it’s a good story,’ Euclides said. ‘One of the killers was an associate of the member of Camelot’s senate who’d been helping Malarte get hold of the stuff he was smuggling to Earth. The other was Malarte’s mistress. Who’d started sleeping with him to save a couple of members of her family from
prison, but they went to prison anyway. Anyhow, Malarte was in so much trouble that when they killed him, they did him a favour - saved him the embarrassment of a court martial and the firing squad. Which I found kind of annoying, to be frank, since he was a scion of the Pessanha family, and we Peixotos don’t agree with them about all kinds of things. A juicy court martial would have been a nice black eye for them. Instead, they got a martyr. But that wasn’t why I had the killers executed. It was because we can’t have Outers killing our people, even if those happen to be liars and rapists and crooks.’
‘I suppose you are trying to make some point with this sordid little tale,’ Sri said.
‘I’m coming to it,’ Euclides said. ‘This chestplate was one of the choicest items looted by Malarte. Loc Ifrahim liberated it, and he presented it to me. Naturally, I had it checked out. And you know what? Turns out it’s a fake. See, Malarte’s mistress, she was a pupil of Munk’s. So either the Outers were swindling Malarte, selling him fakes, or Loc Ifrahim had the mistress cook up a fake in exchange for giving her the opportunity to get her revenge. Malarte was killed in the storage vault where he was keeping his loot before it was shipped out. The woman got hold of the code for its lock, and she and her accomplice ambushed him there. The investigation concluded that she had stolen the code, but I wouldn’t put it past Loc Ifrahim to have slipped it to her. The sly son of a bitch gets rid of Malarte, he gets hold of a very valuable work of art, and he makes it look like he did me a personal favour. And aside from all that, he swung it so his very close friend Captain Neves was made chief of security over in Camelot. That Ifrahim, he’s a player. But don’t worry, I’m keeping a very close eye on him. One of these days he’ll slip, and I’ll be there. Ready to present him with his own head.’
Sri was only mildly appalled by Euclides’s story. She’d long ago become habituated to the intrigue, rivalry, and criminal behaviour amongst the senior members of the TPA. And while diplomats, civil servants, contractors and senior officers of the armed forces systematically looted the cities and settlements of the Saturn System, Euclides Peixoto strutted and bullied like the worst kind of prison commandant.
Greater Brazil had played a major role in winning the Quiet War, but it had not been magnanimous in victory or charitable to those it had defeated. Cities whose governments had rolled over before the war and remained neutral still retained a degree of independence, but their citizens could not travel anywhere without first applying for permission that was hardly ever granted, they were constantly monitored and checked, access to the nets was limited, meetings of more than five people were banned, and so on and so forth. The situation was even worse on Dione, where almost all the Outers were by now penned in the prison camp of the so-called New City. Most of their possessions had been confiscated, they endured countless random inspections and interviews, and food and water and other essential supplies were strictly rationed. According to Euclides Peixoto, it was the most effective way of keeping them under control, but it was a constant source of friction between his administration and the governments of the free cities, and a pointless waste of the Outers’ expertise and skills.
And the political climate was growing ever more hostile to the Outers. Plans were being drawn up to ship so-called high-risk prisoners, including surviving members of Paris’s government, to a special camp on the Moon, and a full-scale test of a so-called ‘zero-growth initiative’ had just been implemented in the New City, where everyone above the age of twelve had been injected with contraceptive implants. The radical green faction in Greater Brazil’s government believed it was not enough to police and control the Outers: they should also be prevented from having children. There would be no death camps or mass executions, merely a slow, humanely controlled dwindling until the last genetically modified human being died and the anti-evolutionary threat posed by the Outers was ended for ever. It would take at least a century, but it was vitally important for the survival of the human race.
If Greater Brazil had defeated the Outers by itself, then the zero-growth initiative might already have been rolled out on all the other inhabited moons of the Saturn and Jupiter systems. But the European Union had moral objections to an enforced mass-sterilisation programme, and the Pacific Community had not only entered into a working partnership with the population of Iapetus but was also shipping in colonists from Earth, expanding its base on Phoebe and threatening to annex and settle several of the smaller moons whose few inhabitants had been forcibly removed after the war.
Disagreement between the three members of the TPA over the direction and aims of the occupation had developed into a kind of Cold War stand-off, prickling with mistrust and paranoia. And so, despite the increasing power of the radical greens, Greater Brazil wasn’t yet willing to give up exploitation of the Outers’ scientific and technological knowledge; at least, not while the European Union and the Pacific Community were still plundering it and there was the chance that they might stumble on a fragment of exotic physics, mathematics or genetic engineering that would become the cornerstone of a new technology as world-changing as aeroplanes or antibiotics. Radical green legislation meant that scientific research in Greater Brazil was now licensed and controlled by a new and fanatically fierce regulatory body, but work on the Moon and in the Outer System remained unfettered because it was deemed necessary for state security. Nevertheless, even though Sri and her assistants were able to explore Avernus’s gardens, reverse-engineer Outer biotechnology and mine the great archives of the Library of the Commons with only minimal interference from review boards and oversight committees, she was driven by an increasing sense of urgency, of time running out.
By now, Sri believed that she had a firm grasp of the principles that underpinned the design of the exotic gardens created by Avernus. She had interviewed many people who had known the gene wizard or had worked with her, and although attempts to construct an expert AI simulation had so far proved disappointing she had not yet given up on the idea. More data was needed, and further integration of existing data. Sri was developing algorithms that mapped the possibilities of what she called ‘biological information space’ and had learned a great deal about the way in which Avernus’s many and varied gardens maintained homeostasis - some had been cycling through a variety of states without ever exhibiting population crashes or extinctions for fifty years or more. She had also devised many new wrinkles in the design, function, and propagation of vacuum organisms, and used them to create strains that exhibited pseudosexual recombination of their basic instructions and stochastic inheritance of varieties of the pseudoribosomes that transcribed instructions and the pseudomitochondria that underpinned their metabolic functions: features that allowed variation between individuals, and therefore the potential for evolution by Darwinian selection.
And in addition to all of this, her most recent row with Berry had stimulated a new interest in the development of the human brain and the fundamental neurological mechanisms that generated and regulated emotion. It proved to be a useful distraction from her anxiety about Alder, and in her usual fashion when dealing with a field in which she had only a little basic knowledge, Sri read widely and digested and summarised what was known and made lists of important questions that had not yet been answered. Discounting Freudian fairy tales and dubious socio-anthropological comparisons with young, subdominant male chimpanzees, there seemed to be a consensus that adolescent misbehaviour - tantrums and sulks, inchoate rages, all the rest - was caused by changes in the brain during its final maturation at puberty. The effects of this rewiring were more pronounced in boys than girls because the changes were not only driven by huge doses of testosterone surging through the bloodstream, but were also compressed into a shorter time-frame, causing a radical disconnection between emotional states and higher consciousness.
At bottom, Sri thought, it was one of the side effects of the extremely conservative nature of brain evolution. Despite drastic modifications of body form, all vertebrates possessed the same basic structur
es - forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain - that carried out the same basic functions. Thus, although the neocortex had massively ballooned in mammals (and most especially in human beings), it was underpinned by a limbic system similar to those possessed by reptiles, amphibians, and fish. And it was in the limbic system that mechanisms regulating basic emotions such as joy, distress, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust were located.
These emotions, and the typical facial expressions associated with them, were universally recognised by every human culture. They were hardwired into the brain, they were often expressed within a few milliseconds of being triggered, and they were triggered via stimulation of the sensory thalamus without intervention of higher functions in the neocortex, so that people could be catapulted into states of fear or anger without first making a conscious, reasoned analysis of the trigger. In evolutionary terms this short-circuit was a survival technique that made perfect sense. If a lion jumped out at you, you had to start running at once; if you paused to think about whether or not you needed to run, you’d be killed and eaten. But because people no longer lived in the African savannah, many of the situations that triggered basic emotions had nothing to do with immediate survival, which meant that many human cultures and individuals exhibited heightened responses to situations that did not require heightened responses. And this was most pronounced in adolescent males - they went from zero to a hundred with no stages in between, and there was no point trying to reason with them because their reactions did not proceed from reason: conscious thought only became involved afterwards, producing post hoc justifications for irrational behaviour.
A second set of universal emotions - the blushings of love, guilt, shame, and embarrassment; the pricking thorns of pride, envy, and jealousy; the pleasurable feeling of acceptance by others that the Japanese called amae - were associated with higher cortical functions and took longer to build up and longer to die away than basic emotions. Some, like jealousy or shame, were shared by other primates, or even by other mammals. Others, like envy or guilt, appeared to be unique to human beings. There was much speculation about instances where primates or other mammals seemed to exhibit the latter emotions, but as far as Sri was concerned no one had ever produced any unimpeachable evidence. And all were fundamentally social, associated with interaction with peers rather than environmental stimuli, and because they took more time to develop than basic emotions, they were more amenable to the general background state or coloration of the brain - to mood - and could be altered by learned experience. Basic emotions like the fright/flight reflex differed from culture to culture by only a small degree, but higher cognitive emotions showed a great deal of variation.