PAUL J. MCAULEY
Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984 and has gone on to be a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Skylife, The Third Alternative, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere.
McAuley is at the forefront of several of the most important subgenres in SF today, producing both “radical hard science fiction” and revamped and retooled widescreen space operas that have sometimes been called new space operas as well as dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future. He also writes fantasy and horror. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His other books include the novels Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel, Life on Mars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, and Cowboy Angels. Confluence, his major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set ten million years in the future, is comprised of the novels Child of the River, Ancient of Days, and Shrine of Stars. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country, and Little Machines, and he is the co-editor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. His most recent book is a novel, The Quiet War; coming up is a new novel, Gardens of the Sun.
McAuley made his name as one of the best new space opera writers with novels such as Four Hundred Billion Stars and the Confluence trilogy, but in recent years he has created the Quiet War series as well, with stories such as “Second Skin,” “Sea Scene, With Monsters,” “The Assassination of Faustino Malarte,” and others, about the aftermath and the consequences of an interplanetary war that ravages the solar system.
In the quietly moving story that follows, he takes us to Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon, to examine more of those consequences, the rather unexpected ones.
Mark Griffin was convinced that there was something suspicious about the herbalist.
“Tell me who he is, Sky. Some kind of pervert murderer, I bet.”
Sky Bolofo was a hacker who had filled the quantum processor of the large, red-framed spex that perched on his nose with all kinds of talents and tricks. Right now, he had a look of focussed concentration, and the left lens of his spex was silvered over as it displayed something to him. He said, “No problem. My face recognition program picked him up straight away, and right now I’m looking at his public page. His name is Ahlgren Rees. He lives right here in the old city, he sells herbs—”
“I can see that,” Mark said. “What else?”
“He also fixes up pets,” Sky said.
“What about his private files?” Mark said. “What about the real dirt?”
“No problem,” Sky said complacently, and started tapping his fingers on the chest of his jumper—he was using the virtual keyboard of his spex, which read the positioning of his fingers from the silver rings he wore on fingers and thumbs.
Jack Miyata, whose idea it had been to visit the produce market, had the sinking feeling that Mark had spied an opportunity for some serious mischief. He said, “The man sells herbs. There’s nothing especially interesting or weird in that.”
“If he isn’t weird,” Mark said, “why is he living with the tweaks? He’s either crazy, or he’s up to no good.”
The man in question sat behind a small table at the edge of the market, selling bundles of fresh herbs and a dozen different types of herb tea whose virtues were advertised by handlettered signs. He was definitely an incomer. Native Xambans who’d been born and raised in Rhea’s weak gravity were tall and skinny, and most of them were Nordic, with pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. The herbalist was a compactly-built man of indeterminate middle-age (in the third decade of the twenty-fourth century, this meant anything between forty and a hundred), not much taller than Sky Bolofo, and had skin the color of old teak. He was also completely hairless. He didn’t even have eyelashes. As far as Jack was concerned, that was the only unusual thing about him, but Mark had other ideas.
Jack had brought his two friends to the produce market because he thought it was a treasure house of marvels, but Mark and Sky thought it was smelly, horribly crowded, and, quite frankly, revoltingly primitive. When makers could spin anything you wanted from yeast and algae, why would anyone want to eat the meat of real live animals like fish and chickens and dwarfed goats, especially as they would have to kill them first? Kill and gut them and Ghod knew what else. As they wandered between stalls and displays of strange flowers and fruits and vegetables, red and green and golden-brown streamers of dried waterweed, tanks of fish and shrimp, caged birds and rats, and bottle vivariums in which stag beetles lumbered like miniature rhinoceroses through jungles of moss and fern, Mark and Sky made snide comments about the weird people and the weirder things they were selling, pretended to retch at especially gross sights, and generally made it clear that this was very far from their idea of fun.
“Do you really think I want to know anything at all about people who eat things like that?” Mark had said to Jack, pointing to a wire cage containing rats spotted like leopards or striped like tigers.
“I think they keep them as pets,” Jack had said, feeling the tips of his ears heat up in embarrassment because the tall, slender woman who owned the stall was definitely looking at them.
“I had a pet once,” Mark had said, meeting the woman’s gaze. “It was a cute little monkey that could take a shower all by itself. Quite unlike these disease-ridden vermin.”
Which had made Sky crack up, and Jack blush even more.
The three of them, Jack, Mark and Sky, were all the same age, sixteen, went to the same school, and lived in the same apartment complex in the new part of Xamba, the largest city on Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon. Their parents were engineers, security personnel, and diplomats who had come there to help in the reconstruction and expansion of the Outer Colonies after the Quiet War. Unlike most city states in the Saturn system, Xamba had remained neutral during the Quiet War. Afterwards, the Three Powers Alliance which now governed every city and orbital habitat in the Outer Colonies had settled the bulk of its administration on peaceful, undamaged Rhea, and had built a new city above the old.
Fifteen years later, the city was still growing. Jack’s parents, Mariko and Davis, were thermal engineers who were helping to construct a plant to tap the residual heat of the moon’s core and provide power for a hundred new apartment complexes, factories, and farms. They’d moved to Rhea just two months ago. In that short time, Jack had explored much of the old and new parts of the city, and had also completed a pressure suit training course and taken several long hikes through the untouched wilderness in the southern half of the big crater in which Xamba was located, and from which it took its name. He’d even climbed to the observatory at the top of the crater’s big central peak. Although both Mark and Sky had been living here much longer, like many incomers neither of them had so much as stepped foot on the surface of the moon, or even visited the old part of the city. Jack had been eager to show them the produce market, his favourite part of old Xamba, but now he was feeling miserable because they had been so rude about it. He had been about to give up and suggest they leave when Mark had spotted the herbalist.
“That’s obviously a front,” Mark said. “How’s it going, Sky?”
Sky, sounding distracted and distant, said he was working on it.
“Maybe he’s a spy. Selling herbs is his cover—what he’s actually doing is keeping watch for terrorists and so-called freedom fighters. Or maybe he’s a double agent. Maybe he’s gone over to the side of the tweaks,” Mark said, beginning to get into his little fantasy. “Maybe he’s feeding our side false information to sabotage the reconstruction. There was that blow-out at the spaceport last month. They said it was an accident, but maybe someone sabotaged an airlock and let the vacuum in.”
“Air escapes into a vacuum,” Jack said, “not the other way around.”
“Who cares which direction the vacuum flows?” Mark said carelessly.
“And anyway, they said it was an accident.”
Mark raised his eyebrows. They were thick, and met over the bridge of his nose. He was a stocky boy with pale skin, jet black hair and a perpetual scowl who looked a lot like his policeman father. His mother was in the police too, in charge of security at the spaceport. “Of course they said that, but it doesn’t mean it really was an accident. What’s the word, Sky? What is this fellow hiding?”
“There’s a problem,” Sky said. His fingers were fluttering frantically over his chest, and he had a look of such intense concentration that he seemed to be crosseyed.
“Talk to me,” Mark said.
“He has really heavy security behind his public page. I had to back out in a hurry, before I tripped an alarm. Right now I’m making sure I didn’t leave anything that could lead back to me.”
Mark said, “So what you’re saying is that Ahlgren Rees—if that’s his real name—is hiding something.”
Sky shrugged.
Mark said, his eyes shining with sudden excitement, “I bet you thought I was kidding, but all along I had a feeling there was something wrong with this guy. It’s what the Blob—” that was his nickname for his rotunt and none too bright father—“calls gut instinct. My gut told me that Ahlgren Rees is a wrong one, my man Sky has just confirmed it, and now it’s up to all of us to find out why. It’s our duty.”
Jack should have told Mark that he wasn’t going to have anything to do with his silly fantasy, but his need for his new friends to like him (which was why he’d brought them to the market in the first place) was stronger than his conscience. Also, it was the school holidays, and his parents were spending most of their time at the site of the new power plant, a hundred kilometers northwest of the city, and were only at home on weekends, so he was pretty much on his own for most of the time. There was no way that the herb seller, Ahlgren Rees was either a spy or a criminal, so what harm could simply following him about actually do?
Jack spent much of the next three days following Ahlgren Rees, sometimes with Mark, sometimes on his own (Sky Bolofo, spooked by the experience of running up against Ahlgren Rees’s electronic watchdogs, had made a weak excuse about having to do some extra tuition for the upcoming new school year). It wasn’t hard; in fact, it was a lot of fun. The herbalist spent much of the day at the stall in the produce market, or tending the little garden where he grew his herbs, or simply sitting outside the door of his apartment, a one-room efficiency on a terrace directly above the market, drinking tea or homemade lemonade and watching people go by, but he also liked to take long walks, and every time Jack followed him, his route was different. Jack saw more of the old city in those three days than he had in the past two months.
The old part of the city was buried inside the eastern rimwall of the huge crater, and some of its chambers had diamond endwalls facing what was generally reckoned to be one of the most classically beautiful views in all of Saturn’s family of moons, across slumped terraces and fans of ice rubble towards the crater’s central peak which rose up at the edge of the close, curved horizon. Inside the old city’s chambers, apartments and shops and cafes and workshops and gardens were piled on top of each other in steep, terraced cliffs, linked by steep paths, chutes, cableways and chairlifts to the long narrow parks of trees and lawns and skinny lakes that were laid out on the chamber floors. There was no shortage of water on Rhea, which was essentially a ball of ice one and a half thousand kilometres in diameter wrapped around a small rocky core. A series of long, narrow lakes looped between several of the chambers, busy with skiffs and canoes paddling between floating islands and rafts and pontoons, and the main pathways were crowded with cycles and pedicabs and swarms of pedestrians.
The old part of Xamba was a busy, bustling place, and Jack had no problem blending into the crowds as he trailed Ahlgren Rees through walkways, parks, markets, malls, and plazas, even though most of its inhabitants were tall, skinny Outers, genetically engineered so that they could comfortably live in microgravity without the medical implants that Jack and every other incomer needed in order to stop their bones turning to chalk lace, their hearts swelling like pumped-up basketballs with excess fluid, and a host of other problems. Jack even plucked up the courage to chat with the woman behind the counter of the café where Ahlgren Rees ate his lunch and breakfast, which is where he’d learned that the herbalist was originally from Greater Brazil, where he had worked in the emergency relief services as a paramedic, and had moved to Rhea two years ago. He seemed well-liked. He always stopped to talk to his neighbors when he met them as he went about his errands, had long conversations with people who stopped at his stall. He was a regular at the café, and at several bars in various parts of the city. His only money seemed to come from selling herbs and herb tea and fixing broken pets.
“Which must mean that he has some other source of income,” Mark said.
“Maybe he has some kind of private income.”
“He has secrets, is what he has. Ahlgren Rees. We don’t even know if that’s his real name.”
The two boys were leaning at café counter in the produce market, sipping fruit juice from bulbs. Ahlgren Rees was sitting at his stall twenty metres down the aisle, reading a book (books printed on paper were a famous tradition in old Xamba), completely oblivious to the fact that the two boys were watching him and talking about him, licking his thumb every time he had to turn a page.
Jack said, “He’s a herbalist. He works at his stall. He works in his garden. He goes for long walks. Sometimes he visits people and fixes up their pets. If he has any secrets, I’m missing something.”
He was hoping that this would be the end of it, but Mark had a determined look, a jut of his heavy jaw like a bulldog gripping a bone it isn’t willing to let go.
“What we need to do,” Mark said, “is get into his apartment. I bet he has all kinds of things hidden there.”
Jack tried to talk him out of it, but Mark was determined. Jack was pretty sure that he didn’t really believe that Ahlgren Rees was a spy, but it had become a matter of pride to find out who he really was and why he had come to Xamba to live amongst the Outers. And Jack had to admit that the past three days of following the man had sharpened his curiosity too, and eventually they managed to hash out a plan that more or less satisfied both of them.
The next day was Monday, and the produce market would be closed. Mark told Jack that he would have to intercept Alhgren Rees at the café where he ate breakfast every day, and keep him occupied. Meanwhile, Mark would break into his apartment.
Jack said, “How are you going to do that?”
“Police tradecraft,” Mark said. “Don’t worry about it. Just make sure you keep him busy.”
Although Jack believed that he had a good idea about how to do just that, he slept badly that night, going over every part of a plan which seemed increasingly silly and flimsy, and he was very tired and nervous when, early the next morning, he and Mark rode train into the city. Mark wanted to know what was in the box Jack was clutching to his chest, and Jack told him with a confidence he didn’t feel that it was a foolproof way of keeping the man busy.
“I’ll tell you what it is if you’ll tell me how you’re going to break into his apartment.”
“I’m not going to break in, I’m going to walk in,” Mark said. “And I could tell you how I’m going to do it, but I’d have to kill you afterwards. Are you sure you can keep him talking for half an hour?”
Jack tapped the top of the plastic box, feeling what was inside stir, a slow, heavy movement that subsided after a moment. He said, “Absolutely sure.”
Actually, he wasn’t sure at all. This was a lot more dangerous than simply following someone through the city’s crowded paths. Following someone wasn’t against the law. Breaking into their private apartment plainly and simply was. Jack had the same sick, doomy feeling that had possessed him in the days before he and his parents had boarded the liner that had taken them from Earth to Saturn. He felt that he was about to do something that would change his life forever, and would change it for the worse if he failed at it. It was a very grown-up feeling, and he didn’t like it at all. There was a sharp edge of excitement, to be sure, but the muscles of his legs felt watery and his stomach was doing somersaults when, after spending half an hour with Mark watching Ahlgren Rees’s apartment from the cover of a little arbour made by the drooping branches of a weeping willow, he followed the herbalist to the café.
It was more or less on the same level as the apartment, a bamboo counter beneath the shade of a huge fig tree, with a bench long enough for a dozen customers and a hissing steel coffee machine that the owner, a white-haired wisp of a woman, had built herself, from a design centuries old. The food was prepared from what was in season in the garden behind the fig tree, and whatever came in trade—the citizens of old Xamba had a complicated economy based on barter of goods and services.
Jack took a seat next to Ahlgren Rees, the closest he had got to the man so far. He asked owner for the juice of the day, set the plastic box on the counter, and turned to the herbalist and said as casually as he could that he heard that he treated sick pets.
“Who told you that?”
Ahlgren Rees, hunched over a bowl of porridge flecked with nuts and seeds, didn’t look up when he spoke. He had a husky voice and a thick accent: the voice of a villain from some cheap virtuality.
“She did,” Jack said, nodding to the owner of the café, who was filling a blender with orange segments and a handful of strawberries.
“I did,” the woman said cheerfully, and switched on the blender.
“Stop by my place when you’ve had your breakfast,” Ahlgren Rees told Jack. “It’s just around the corner, past a clump of black bamboo. The one with the red door.”
The man was eating his porridge slowly but steadily, his elbows on the counter. In a few minutes he would be finished. He’d get up, walk back to his apartment, find the door open . . .
Jack pushed the box an inch towards the man and said, “I have it right here.”
“So I see,” Alhgren Rees said, although he didn’t spare Jack so much as glance. “And I have my breakfast right here too.”
“It belongs to my little sister,” Jack said, the little lie sliding out easily. He added, “She loves it to bits, but we’re scared that it’s dying.”
“Take a look, Alhgren,” the woman who owned the café said, as she placed the bulb of juice in front of Jack. “The worst that can happen is that your karma will be improved.”
“It will need much more than fixing a pet to do that,” Alhgren Rees said, smiling at her.
The woman smiled back. Jack was reminded of his parents, when they shared a private joke.
“All right, kid,” Ahlgren Rees said. “Show me what you got.”
It was a mock turtle, a halflife creature that produced no waste or unpleasant odors, and needed only a couple of hours of trickle charge and a cupful of water a day. It had large, dark, soulful eyes, a yellow beak as soft as a sock puppet’s mouth, and a fifty-word vocabulary. The color and texture of its shell could be altered by infection with simple retroviruses created using the simple RNA writer kit that came with it; this one’s was covered in thick pink fur. It didn’t belong to Jack’s imaginary little sister, of course, but to the youngest daughter of Jack’s neighbors, but it really was sick. Its fur was matted and threadbare; its eyes were filmed with white matter, its soft beak chewed ceaselessly and its breath was foully metallic.
Ahlgren Rees studied it, then took a diagnostic pen from one of the many pockets of his brocade waistcoat and tipped up the mock turtle and plugged the instrument into the socket behind the creature’s stubby front leg.
“Tickles,” the turtle complained, working its stubby legs feebly.
“It’s for your own good,” Ahlgren Rees said. “Be still.”
He had small, strong hands and neatly trimmed fingernails. There were oval scars on the insides of his thick wrists; he’d had plug-in sockets once upon a time, the kind that interface with smart machinery. He squinted at the holographic readout that blossomed above the shaft of the diagnostic pen, then asked Jack, “Do you know what a prion is?”
“Proteins have to fold up the right way to work properly. Prions are proteins that fold up wrongly.”
Ahlgren Rees nodded. “The gene wizard who designed these things used a lot of freeware, and one of the myoelectric proteins he used has a tendency to make prions. That’s what’s wrong with your sister’s pet, I’m afraid. It’s a self-catalysing reaction—do you know what that means?”
“It spreads like a fire. Prions turn proteins into more prions.”
Ahlgren Rees nodded again, unplugged the diagnostic pen, and settled the mock turtle in the box. “The myoelectric proteins are what power it. When they fold the wrong way they can no longer hold a charge, and when enough have folded wrongly, it will die.”
“Can you fix it?”
Ahlgren Rees shook his head. “The best thing to do is to put it to sleep.”
He looked genuinely sorry, and Jack felt a wave of guilt pass through him. Right now, Mark was breaking into his apartment, rifling through his possessions . . .
“If you like, I can do it right now,” Ahlgren Rees said.
“I’ll have to tell my sister first.”
Ahlgren Rees shrugged and started to push away from the counter, saying, “Sorry I couldn’t help you, son.”
“Wait,” Jack said, knowing that Mark must still be in the apartment. Adding, when Ahlgren Rees looked at him, “I mean, I want to ask you, how do you grow your herbs?”
“I suppose you told him about the herbs too,” Ahlgrem Rees told the woman, who blithely shrugged.
“I saw you at the produce market,” Jack said boldly. “And then I saw you here.”
Ahlgren Rees studied him for a moment. Jack felt a moment of anxiety, thinking he’d been found out, but then the man smiled and said, “I had the feeling I’d seen you before. You like the market, uh?”
“I’m interested in biology,” Jack said, speaking the truth because it was the first thing that came into his head. He was good at it, could solve genetic problems or balance a simple ecosystem without thinking too hard, and got pleasure from solving it. Before coming to Rhea, he’d lived with his parents in on the eastern coast of Australia, and one of the things he missed most, after leaving Earth, was snorkelling above the elaborate architecture of the coral reef and its schools of bright fish in the bay, and the aquarium he’d taken a whole year to get just right, a miniature reef in its own right. He added, “I’d like to know how you grow the herbs you sell.”
“In dirt, with water and sunlight.”
“That isn’t what I meant. I was wondering how the low gravity—”
Ahlgren Rees held up a hand. “I have a date,” he said. “If you stop at my stall, if I am not too busy, perhaps we can talk then.”
He said goodbye to the owner of the café, who with a smile asked him to have a good thought on her behalf, and then he was walking off down the path. Not towards his apartment, but in the opposite direction, towards the little funicular railway that dropped down to the floor of the chamber.
Jack wanted but did not dare to ask the owner of the café where he was going. After the woman had refused his offer to pay for his juice (“You can bring me some sour oranges next time you visit the market,” she said), he set off after Ahlgren Rees, and called Mark on his phone, told him about the conversation, and what he was doing. Mark said that he’d catch up, and arrived, breathless and excited, at the lakeside jetty just as Ahlgren Rees was climbing into one of the swan boats.
“Where is he going?” Mark said.
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “But he said that he had a date.”
“With a woman?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you sure you actually talked to him?”
“He said that he had a date, and he left. What was I supposed to do—make a citizen’s arrest.”
“No need to feel guilty. Our mission was successful.”
“You found something. What did you find?”
“He’s a spy all right.” Mark patted the pouch of his jumper, waggled his thick black eyebrows. “I’ll show you in a minute. First, we need a boat.”
There were several high-sided dinghies waiting at the jetty, rising and falling on the long, slow waves that rolled across the lake. Jack and Mark climbed into one, and Mark stuck something in a slot in the fat sensor rod that stuck up at the prow, told the boat that this was a police override, told it to follow the boat which had just left.
As the boat’s reaction motor pushed it towards the centre of the long, narrow lake, Jack said, “That’s how you got into his apartment, isn’t it? You overrode the lock.”
He was sitting in the stern, the plastic box with the mock turtle inside it on his knees.
Mark, standing at the prow, one hand on top of the sensor rod, glanced over his shoulder. “Of course I did.”
“I suppose you stole the card from one of your parents.”
“Sky made a copy of my mother’s card,” Mark said.
“If she finds out—”
“As long as I don’t get into trouble, she doesn’t care what I do. The Blob doesn’t care either. They’re too busy with their jobs, too busy advancing their careers, too busy making money,” Mark said. He had his back to Jack, but Jack could hear the bitterness in his voice. “Which is fine with me, because once they make enough, we’ll leave this rotten little ball of ice and go back to Earth.”
There was a short silence. Jack was embarrassed, feeling that he had had an unwanted glimpse through a crack in his his friend’s armor of careless toughness into his soul, had seen the angry resentment and loneliness there. At last, he said, “If we prove that Ahlgren Rees really is a spy, your parents will be proud of you.”
Mark turned around. “Oh, he’s a spy, all right. Guess what I found in his apartment.”
It was the kind of question you were bound to fail to answer correctly, so Jack just shrugged.
Mark smiled a devilish smile, reached into the pouch of his jumper, and drew out a small, silver gun.
Jack was shocked and excited at the same moment. He said, “Is it real?”
“Oh yes. And it’s charged too,” Mark said, pointing to a tiny green light that twinkled above the crosshatched grip.
He explained that it was a railgun that used a magnetic field to fire metal splinters tipped with explosive or toxin, or which sprouted hooks and knives after they hit their target, burrowing deep into flesh. He played campaigns based on the Quiet War on a wargaming network, knew all about the different ways the rebellious colonies had been pacified, and all about the guns and the various kinds of weapons used by both sides. Discovering the gun had not only confirmed his suspicions about Ahlgren Rees, but had made him bold and reckless too. He talked excitedly about catching the spy in the act of sabotage, about arresting him and whoever he was going to meet and making them talk.
Although Jack was excited too, it was plain that his friend was getting carried away. “This doesn’t change ours plan,” he said. “We follow the man and see what he gets up to, and then we decide what to do.”
Mark shrugged and said blithely, “We’ll see what we’ll see.”
“I mean that we don’t do anything dumb,” Jack said. “If he really is a spy, he’s dangerous.”
“If you’re scared, you can get off at any time.”
“Of course I’m not scared,” Jack said, even though he felt a freezing caution. “All I’m saying is that we have to be careful.”
The boat carrying Ahlgren Rees stopped three times, dropping people and picking up others, before it headed down a canal that ran through a long transparent tunnel between two chambers, Mark and Jack following two hundred meters behind it. The tunnel was laid along the edge of a steep cliff. It was the middle of Rhea’s night out there. Saturn hung full and huge overhead in the black sky like Ghod’s Christmas ornament, the razor-thin line of his rings cutting across his banded face, his smog-yellow light laid across terraced icefields below. Jack leaned back, lost in the intricate beauty of the gas giant’s yellow and dirty white and salmon pink bands, their frills and frozen waves, forgetting for the ten minutes it took to traverse the tunnel all about the gun in Mark’s pouch and following Ahlgren Rees.
At the end of the tunnel, the canal entered a lake with a rocky shoreline pinched between two steep slopes of flowering meadows and stands of trees and bamboos. There were no houses in this chamber, no workshops of markets, no gardens or farms. It was the city’s cemetery. Like all Outer colony cities, Xama recycled its dead. Bodies were buried in its cemetery chamber and trees planted over them, so that their freight of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorous and other useful elements could reenter the loop of the city’s ecosystem. It was a quiet, beautiful place, lit by the even golden light of a late summer afternoon. On one steep slope was the black pyramid, hewn from the crystalline iron of an asteroid, that marked the resting place of the people who had died in accidents during the construction of the old city; on the other was a slim white column topped by an eternal blue flame, the monument to the citizens of Xamba who had died in the Quiet War. For although the city had remained neutral during the war, more than a thousand of its citizens had died, almost all of them had been either passengers or crew on ships crippled when their nervous systems had been fried by neutron lasers, micro wave bursters, or EMP mines during the first hours of the invasion of the Saturn system. Otherwise, the woods and meadows seemed untouched by human hands, a tame wilderness where birds and cat-sized deer and teddy-bear-sized pandas roamed freely.
Ahlgren Rees and two women got off when the boat docked at a jetty of black wood with an red-painted Chinese arch at one end. The two women went off along the lakeshore; Ahlgren Rees started up a steep, bone-white path that wound past a grove of shaggy cypress trees.
Mark sprang out of the boat as soon as it nudged alongside the jetty and bounded through the Chinese gate and set off up the white path. Jack had to hurry to catch up with him. They slogged around the cypress grove, climbed alongside a tiny stream that ran over white rocks speckled with chunky black shards of shock quartz, and followed Alhgren Rees as he cut through a belt of pines. There was a lumpy heath of coarse tussock grass and purple heather and clumps of flowering gorse, rising in steep terraces to the place where the top of the slope met the edge of the chamber’s curved blue roof. The flame-topped white column of the monument to Xamba’s war dead stood halfway between the pines and the painted sky, and Ahlgren Rees stood in front of the column, his bald head bowed.
He stood there for more than fifteen minutes, still and obdurate as a statue. Crouched behind a pine tree, shoulder to shoulder with Mark, Jack was convinced that the herbalist really was waiting to meet another spy, that he and Mark really had stumbled over a conspiracy, that once they had learned enough they could turn their information over to the authorities. In excited whispers, he and Mark discussed what they’d do when Ahlgren Rees’s co-conspirator appeared, agreeing that they might have to split up and follow the men separately. But no one came. Big silver and gold butterflies tumbled over each other above a clump of gorse; one by one, rabbits hippity-hopped out of their burrows and began to nibble at the grass. At last, Ahlgren Rees turned from the monument and moved on up the slope, silhouetted against the solid blue sky for a moment when he reached the top, then dropping out of sight.
The rabbits scattered as Jack and Mark followed, making a bounding run up the rough slope, jinking from gorse clump to gorse clump. Mark quickly outpaced Jack, who still hadn’t quite mastered running in low gravity, waiting impatiently for him to catch up near the top of the slope, crouched amongst rocks spattered with orange lichens. There was a narrow stairway down to the floor of a long, narrow rock-sided gully. Ahlgren Rees was walking at his usual unhurried pace down the gully towards a steel door set in a wide frame painted with yellow and black warning chevrons—an airlock door.
“He’s going outside!” Mark said, and bounded down the stairs, the pistol flashing as he drew it, shouting a warning, telling the man to stop or he’d shoot.
By the time Jack reached them, Mark and Ahlgren Rees were standing a few yards apart, facing each other. Mark was pointing the pistol at Ahlgren Rees’s chest, but the stocky, bald-headed man was ignoring him, looking instead at Jack and saying mildly, “Tell your friend he has made a mistake.”
“Kneel down,” Mark said. He held the pistol in his right hand, was bracing his right wrist with his left hand. “Kneel down and put your hands on your head.”
Ahlgren Rees shook his head slightly. “I believe that is mine. How did you get it?”
“Just kneel down.”
“You broke into my apartment while your friend—” he looked at Jack again, who felt a blush heat his face “—kept me busy. What is this about? What silly game are you playing?”
“It’s no game,” Mark said. “We know you’re a spy.”
Ahlgren Rees laughed.
“Shut up!” Mark screamed it so loudly it echoed off the rough rock walls of the gully and the blue concrete sky that curved overhead.
Jack, clutching the plastic box to his chest, frightened that his friend would shoot Ahlgren Rees there and then, said, “You said you were meeting someone here.”
“Is that what this is about?” Ahlgren Rees said. “Yes, I visit someone. I visit her every Monday. Everyone knows that. Give me the pistol, son, before you get into trouble.”
“You’re a spy,” Mark said stubbornly. “Kneel down—”
There was a blur of movement, a rush of air. Mark was knocked into Jack, and they both fell down. Ahlgren Rees was standing a yard away, the pistol in his hand. He was sweating and trembling lightly all over, like a horse that has just run a race. He stared at the two boys, and Jack felt a spike of fear, thinking that he’d shoot him, shoot Mark, dump their bodies in some deep crevasse outside. But then the man tucked the pistol in the waistband of his green canvas trousers and said, “My nervous system was rewired when I was in the navy. A long time ago, but it still works. Go home, little boys. Go back to your brave new city. Never let me see you again, and I won’t tell anyone about this. Go!”
They picked themselves up, and ran.
On the boat-ride back, Mark blew off his nerves and shame by making all kinds of plans and boastful threats. He was scared and angry. He promised vengeance. He promised to find out the truth. He promised to bring the man to justice. He said that if Jack said so much as one word about this, he’d get into so much trouble he’d never find his way out again.
Jack kept quiet. He already knew that he was in a lot of trouble. Even if Ahldred Rees was a spy, there was nothing they could do about it because they were outside the law too. They’d broken into his apartment, stolen his gun and threatened him with it. Suppose Mariko and Davis found out. Suppose the police found out. It was a Mexican stand-off.
Jack spent the next week in a misery of fear and guilty anticipation. When his parents came home, he avoided them as much as he could, and refused their offer of a trip to the canyonlands to the north. If it had been possible, he would have caught the next ship back to Earth, leaving the whole horrible wretched incident behind him. As it was, he spent most of his time in his room, studying or half-heartedly fiddling with the virtual ecosystem he was constructing, or mooching around the apartment block’s mall.
That was where he met Sky Bolofo, and heard about Mark’s plan. Sky wanted to know what had made Mark so terminally pissed, and eventually got Jack to confess everything.
“Wow. You’re lucky the guy didn’t report you,” Sky said, when Jack was finished.
“Don’t I know it.”
They were sitting in the mall’s food court. The chatter of the people around them rose through the fronds of tall palms towards the glass dome. Sky studied Jack through his red-framed spex, and said, “Do you think he’ll really go through with it?”
“Go through with what? What has he been saying?”
That was when Jack learned that Mark was determined to prove that Ahlgren Rees was a spy, was determined to pay him back for the humiliating incident in the cemetery chamber. Jack tried to phone him, but Mark was blocking his calls, and wouldn’t answer his door when Jack went to his apartment. But by then Jack suspected what he was planning to do. Every Monday, Ahlgren Rees had a rendezvous with someone. They’d followed him to an airlock last Monday, which meant that it was probably somewhere outside the city . . .
Jack knew that he couldn’t tell either his parents or Mark’s about this. He was as guilty as Mark, and would get into as much trouble. He’d have to sort this out himself, and because Mark was refusing to talk to him he’d have to catch him in the act, stop him before he did something really dumb.
When he asked Sky to help him out, Sky refused at first, saying he’d heard what happened—Mark had been ranting to him too, he wanted nothing to do with it, thank you very much—but he quickly changed his mind when Jack told him that if Mark was caught, everything would come out, including the cloned override card. Sky had hacked into the apartment block’s CCTV system long ago, and told Jack he’d download the hack into Jack’s spex, and patch a face recognition program over it, so that Jack could use the CCTV system to follow Mark wherever he went in the public spaces of the big building. After Jack told him about what he thought Mark was going to do, Sky said that he’d add an AI that would alert Jack if Mark got anywhere near any of the apartment building’s airlocks.
“And that’s all I’m doing. And if anyone asks you where you got this stuff, tell them you made it yourself.”
“Absolutely,” Jack said. “I know all of this is my fault. If I hadn’t told him about the market, and the funny guy selling herbs—”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Sky said. “Mark would have got into trouble all by himself sooner or later. He’s bored, and he hates living here. It’s quite obvious that this whole thing, it’s a silly rebellion.”
“So do you,” Jack said. “But you didn’t break into someone’s apartment, and steal a gun.”
“I don’t care for the place and the people who live here,” Sky said, “but as long as I’m left alone to get on with my own thing it doesn’t matter. Mark though, he’s like a tiger in a cage. Be careful, Jack. Don’t let him get you into any more trouble.”
The AI woke Jack in the early hours of Monday morning. He’d worn his spex to bed. After he’d managed to shut off the alarm lay there in the dark, staring at a skewed view of Mark sitting in a dressing frame that was assembling a pressure suit around him, until he woke up enough to realize that this was it. That Mark really was going through with it.
The main airlock complex of the apartment building was an ancillary structure reached by a long slanting tunnel. By the time Jack reached it, Mark was long gone, but he remembered his training and after the dressing frame had fitted him with a pressure suit he carefully checked that its electronic systems and power and air reserves were fully functional before making his way through the three sets of doors.
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 boulderfields 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 a way 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 brough 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 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.
“I saw what she what she did then. I saw her fire her manouvering 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 Ahlgen 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 begun 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.