by Paul McAuley
‘Perhaps we don’t pay as much attention as we should,’ Luiz said.
‘I don’t blame you, man. You have your work, and you have your family, too.’
‘I got lucky, I know.’
‘Hey, it’s okay,’ Cash said. ‘I’m not trying to get in a pissing contest. I screwed the pooch, sure. But I got over it.’
There was another stretch of silence.
Cash said, for something to say, ‘I still think the best sunsets I ever saw were the ones around Saturn. The sun dropping through the rings, burning down behind Saturn’s limb.’
‘A glorious sight,’ Luiz said.
‘Like a thousand H-bombs going off.’
‘Do you remember much of that stuff?’
‘You mean before I had my ticket cancelled? I really can’t tell any more. It’s like, I know me and Vera Jackson flew into Saturn’s atmosphere on that operation. Deep Sounding. I know those pirates - the ones who called themselves Ghosts? - sent drones chasing after our singleships, and we escaped a close encounter by blasting straight up into space. But that’s because I watched the video we shot over and over, hoping it would tickle some memory. Until one day I realised that I couldn’t tell the difference between remembering watching the video and remembering actually being there . . .’
‘You were there. Most definitely.’
‘You ever run into her, these days?’
‘Vera? I believe she went back to Europe. I don’t even know if she’s still flying.’ Luiz took a sip of his iced tea, said, ‘Did you ever have a close encounter with her?’
‘There’s something I’d definitely like to remember,’ Cash said.
‘I bet you tried,’ Luiz said. ‘I know the rest of us did. She was a glorious piece of work. Beautiful, yet fierce. All business.’
‘From what I’ve seen, she was definitely some kind of flier.’
‘She was. Like many of us, I had my doubts, bringing the Europeans into the programme. It was a political move, which meant that it was born out of some kind of compromise. Neither side getting what they really wanted and ending up with a deal that was neither one thing nor the other. And that might be fine in politics, but it doesn’t cut it when it comes to flying combat planes out in the real world - because as we know all too well there’s no grey area when you’re pushing at the very edge of the envelope. But although I wasn’t prepared to say it then, I have to say now that some of those Europeans knew their way around the sky. And Vera Jackson was better than the rest of them. Almost as good as us.’
‘And we were pretty good, back in the day. I remember that much.’
‘And here you are, still flying.’
‘It’s no J-2, but it goes where you aim it, and it’s light and quick - built from those new composites we stole from the Outers. Like something made out of cobwebs. Drawback is, unloaded, it’s so light you can forget about taking off in a strong headwind. And it has a pretty low absolute ceiling, around about four thousand metres. Which means you have to buck around in thermals when you fly over mountains, and if you run into a thunderstorm you have to fly under it and hope you don’t hit a downburst gust that nails you to the ground. But yeah, it’s still flying.’
Cash finished his beer and slung the long-necked bottle towards the trash can, smiled when it ticked the edge and rattled in. He was hanging loose, doing his best to think of this as purely a social visit, just another evening with the boys at the bar, kicking back and having a little fun. Telling stories of the long-gone. The long-lost. Nothing serious. Nothing that could come back and bite you.
He told Luiz, ‘The resupply work is mostly milk runs, but I do see a bit of action now and then. Like a couple of weeks back, I’m coming into this camp on the front line. Out at the edge of the desert, looks just like all the others. Trailers and tents pitched in the middle of nowhere, acres of bare soil sprayed with that halflife polymer they use to stop it blowing away, trees waiting to be planted, dew traps, new irrigation ditches . . . You have to land on the access road because there’s no airstrip. That’s one reason why the Wreckers Corps use these little courier planes, we can land just about anywhere. The wind is blowing into the desert for a change, so I come around to land in the headwind because that will bring me up nice and short. And as I’m circling around, barely a hundred metres above the deck, heading back in towards the line of trees, I see these scudders below me, get this, on horses. Like something out of the good old days. And they raise up and start shooting at me.’
‘These are the famous rebels you have here?’
‘The Freedom Riders? No, they don’t bother the Wreckers Corps. Far as they’re concerned, the men and women in the Corps are working stiffs like most everyone else. Doing good work too, reclaiming land from desert, making Texas and the rest of what we used to call the U.S. of A. what it once was. No, they don’t have a quarrel with us.’ Cash realised he was talking about what he’d promised Howard he wouldn’t talk about, and said, ‘To get back to my story, those scudders who shot at me, they were bandits plain and simple. I didn’t realise that was what they were doing until a round went through the side window, right next to my head. They put some rounds through the starboard wing, too, and it made me so mad I circled back and shot at the sons of bitches. I carry a pistol, in case I have to put down somewhere in the back of beyond. It isn’t just bandits you have to worry about, out in the wild. Fellow I know had to set down in hills south of here. He was flying a tiltrotor like yours, and the engine died on him. Instead of sitting by his bird and waiting to be picked up he tried to hike out, and got himself eaten by a bear.’
‘Rather ironic,’ Luiz said. ‘You bring back nature and nature bites you in the ass.’
‘I doubt the guy who was eaten saw the funny side,’ Cash said. ‘Anyway, I got on the radio and told the guys in the camp to break out their guns, they had bandits out beyond their perimeter, and then I came right back at the scudders who shot at me. I was about on the ground, so low I was flying in the middle of my own personal dust storm, and I held the yoke with my knees and I emptied the pistol out of the broken window. I knew I wasn’t going to hit anything, but I wanted to show them I wasn’t going to put up with shit like that. People in the camp started shooting at them too. Killed one and drove off the rest. The one they killed was just a kid. Fourteen, fifteen. Teeth filed to points, patterns of welts on his back, tattoos across his face. He was wearing a necklace of human ears, too, and he stank like a polecat.’
Cash reached down and fished another bottle from the icewater in the cooler. His fourth, but what the hell, he was talking with an old buddy he hadn’t seen for six, seven years. It was a special occasion.
‘You still have the edge,’ Luiz said. ‘That’s good.’
‘It was a dumb thing to do, but it felt like the right thing at the time,’ Cash said.
Man, the cold beer was fine going down, what with the heat and wind stripping the moisture right out of him.
‘When I first saw you, you know, I was worried you had given up,’ Luiz said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean your clothes.’
‘My clothes? This is how we are here, when we’re off duty. R&R #669 is a pretty relaxed crew.’
Cash was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and hand-tooled red leather boots - they were the most expensive things he owned, the boots. Luiz Schwarcz, who’d always been a piss-elegant little fucker, wore black silk trousers and a white, round-collared jacket under the cage of his exoskeleton - he’d spent most of the past six years on the Moon, and despite gene therapy and exercise regimes his muscles weren’t able to cope with Earth’s gravity. A pale yellow silk scarf was twisted around his neck; his moustache was waxed to sharp points and his head was shaved to a close stubble; his mirrored sunglasses reflected Cash and the sunset behind him.
‘If I flew out to some camp in the ass-end of nowhere dressed like you,’ Cash said, ‘the roughnecks’d probably shoot me. After they’d picked themselves up from laughi
ng so hard.’
Luiz smiled. ‘I was worried that you might have let yourself go. Now I see that you have gone native.’
Cash set his bottle of beer on the picnic table and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He was getting the first pangs of a headache. He had a lot of headaches these days, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about them.
He said, ‘I’m a working man, Luiz. I wear my uniform on the job, and afterwards I kick back with everyone else. Besides, I was born here. This is what I am. This is what I do.’
‘You are still a pilot. Vera Jackson was good, but you were better. As I should know, having flown with both of you.’
Here it was, the thing they’d been circling around since Luiz had touched down. Hell, since he’d gotten in contact, two weeks ago. Telling Cash he was coming back to Earth for his father’s funeral, he could jog over to Bastrop one day and they could catch up . . .
Cash said, ‘Vera didn’t get hit. And you didn’t get hit either. I did. You both had what I didn’t have: luck. And luck is what you need plenty of if you want to be the best there is.’
‘Some people say that a man makes his own luck,’ Luiz said. ‘But as far as I am concerned luck is just what happens to you, out in the world. For no one can control the world, and they are crazy if they think they can.’
‘I always thought you had your shit together,’ Cash said. ‘I mean, here I am with my funny little plane made of cobwebs, and there you are, still flying singleships.’
‘These days I most often fly a desk. I want to tell you,’ Luiz said, ‘that the charges they brought against you, attacking a ship against orders and all the rest, were the purest kind of bullshit. You were gone, man. You and Vera were dealing with the automatic defences planted on that chunk of ice, while I was hanging back, waiting to come in and lay my egg. I saw it all. You were attacked by drones, you took them down, but one blew up very close to your bird. You were hit, you lost control, you lost your comms, you went shearing off. I couldn’t raise you, and I couldn’t chase after you because by then Vera had dealt with the last of the defences and I had to get in close to the slab and set down the H-bomb. And after the bomb blew, Vera and I were busy chasing fragments and blowing them to dust before they hit Phoebe, and you were still veering off at something like four per cent maximum thrust. I put in a call for retrieval, gave them your delta vee and vector, and I assumed that’s why they knew where to pick you up. All of this, it is in the deposition I made when you were charged.’
‘I wish I could remember it,’ Cash said. ‘They told me the retrograde amnesia might wear off, but it never has. I guess that can happen when you have a hole bored right through your head.’
He meant it as a joke, but it didn’t seem to come out right. He pinched the bridge of his nose again, trying to snuff out the red pulse of his headache.
‘I know you got hit by shrapnel from that drone,’ Luiz said. ‘I saw it. And they say you managed to fix your bird and join in the war and then get hit again, by some ring fragment? It seems very unlikely to me.’
‘I guess I was having a shitty day.’
‘Well, you survived it,’ Luiz said. ‘Your real bad luck, that was when they decided to go after General Peixoto and wanted to use you as part of their case.’
‘They had a record of the messages he sent, Luiz. Telling me to back off from attacking that Outer tug. They had the flight recorder of my bird, too, showing that I brought it in from the edge of the Saturn system. And the fleck of basalt they recovered, it definitely wasn’t part of any drone. Oh, sure, they could have planted it. Made the whole thing up. But before you accept that, you have to ask one simple question - why would they bother? They had plenty of other stuff to use against the general. They didn’t need to make anything up. They didn’t need to fake up shit to show that I wasn’t the hero the general claimed I was. That he’d suppressed the real facts about how I was killed and brought back to life. No, it’s easier to believe it really happened.’
‘All I know is what I saw,’ Luiz said. ‘And if the action that took down that chunk of ice doesn’t make you a hero I don’t know what would. I was ready to speak for you, man. I would have done it. Vera would have done it too.’
‘I thank you for it,’ Cash said. ‘But you want to talk about luck, they never used my testimony because the general took the honourable way out. A room with a locked door, a bottle of brandy, a revolver. He knew his family would lose everything if he was disgraced by a court martial, so he killed himself to save them. And after he killed himself the whole thing fell apart. They were going to throw me to the wolves, and suddenly it didn’t matter. So after a while, they just let me go.’
‘He was a good man,’ Luiz said. ‘And a good soldier.’
‘Yeah. And he won the war, too. They can’t ever take that away from him.’
‘They tell us there’s another war coming. Maybe against the PacCom. For real, not like the last time.’
Cash and Luiz talked about that for a little while. They watched the wreckage of the sunset fade. Venus following the sun down to the west; the sickle of the Moon cocked eastward; the first stars pricking the wide sky as it darkened towards night. Cash found the steady yellow star of Saturn, asked Luiz if he thought he might ever go back there.
‘I don’t think so. We beat them, didn’t we?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Here on Earth, this is where the next war will be. The Outer System, it’s history,’ Luiz said. ‘Right now we’re building a prison on the far side of the Moon to accommodate the worst of the Outers - the ones who fought back. Word is that there are plans to ship all of them to the Moon eventually. No, they’re irrelevant. What is important now, the Pacific Community is pushing hard to assert itself. I’ve been hearing that those Freedom Riders and all the other rebel groups, they’ve been receiving clandestine help from PacCom infiltrators. Weapons, money, you name it. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to push back. We’re going to have us a real war.’
‘I’m ready for it,’ Cash said. ‘Think they’d take me back then?’
‘If they have any sense. I guess I better get going. I have many klicks to go before I sleep.’
They walked to Luiz’s tiltrotor, the little motors in Luiz’s exoskeleton tick-tocking, Cash’s bootheels clicking on slab concrete. Embraced each other, told each other to take care.
‘I can get you a full medical at Monterey if you want it,’ Luiz said. ‘They owe you that.’
‘I’m doing fine,’ Cash said. ‘Don’t be a stranger, you hear?’
Luiz climbed stiffly into the tiltrotor. The wash of its cruciform blades blew over Cash as it rose up, and then it put its nose down and buzzed away southwards.
Cash watched until the blink of the tiltrotor’s green and red running lights had dwindled into the twilight, then walked back to the hangar, stepped through the half-open door into the cool dark inside, and said, ‘Well, that’s that.’
Two men emerged from the shadows. Cash’s cousin, Billy Dupree, and his uncle, Howard Baker. Billy scratched a match alight on his thumbnail and cupped its little flame to his face and lit the jay, its end glowing bright as he pulled in smoke and said in a pinched voice, ‘I didn’t know whether to shit or run when you started talking about the Riders.’
‘He called them bandits. I felt I should qualify it,’ Cash said.
‘It wasn’t wise,’ Howard Baker said.
He was in his late sixties but still strong and straightbacked, in blue jeans, scuffed work boots, and a leather vest over a broad chest thick with white hair. He’d taken Cash in hand after Cash had agreed to quit the smuggling racket, and fast-tracked him into R&R Corps #669, a small transport unit that worked out of a base outside their home city of Bastrop. Sergeant Howard Baker had half his family working in the unit, and passed a cut of the profits from his various schemes to the base commander to make sure the man looked the other way.
Cash was carrying a beer bottle
by its neck, his fifth. He took a long drink and wiped his lips on the back of his hand and said, ‘It was just like I said it - he wanted to see how I was, and to shoot the shit about old times. No more, no less.’
‘Colonel Schwarcz may be your friend, and maybe he did come out here just to catch up and talk about old times, no other reason,’ Howard said. ‘But you can’t ever trust him. Not one hundred per cent. Not because he’s in the military, but because he isn’t blood. That’s the one thing we have in common with the great families. We trust blood before everything else.’
‘If someone wanted to find out, am I connected to anything bad,’ Cash said, ‘they wouldn’t send Luiz. It isn’t the kind of errand they give to someone of his rank. No, what they’d do is pull me in, start asking me hard and direct questions.’
Howard shook his head. ‘It’s always good policy to believe that your enemy is at least as smart as you are. To put yourself in their place and think of what you’d do, and then assume that they’ll do it. If I were them? I wouldn’t arrest you. Maybe I’d get something out of you if I did, maybe not. But I’d definitely learn a lot more if I let you run around, see who you met, who you talked to.’
‘If this was something more than a visit from an old service buddy I’d agree,’ Cash said.
‘Even if we could be sure that’s all it was, we still have to believe it wasn’t,’ Howard said. ‘How we turn a tidy profit without getting into trouble? We keep one step ahead of trouble, all the time. But in this case, I reckon you did all right. Apart from that little slip, bringing up the Riders, you were about note perfect.’
Cash took another drink of beer. ‘You heard what he said about the Riders, and PacCom infiltrators?’
‘That’s the line they’re using now,’ Howard said. ‘They put it about that the Riders are in cahoots with the enemy so the military, if they’re ordered to go after them, won’t have any qualms about attacking their fellow citizens.’