The Quiet War, page 18
part #1 of The Quiet War Series
Dave #8 stood still, struck by the thought that he could follow the tracks eastward past the great ring of the Montes Cordillera and on, through the knobby hills and peaks of the Montes Rook Formation, to the Orientale basin at the very edge of the Moon's nearside. And see at last Earth hanging blue and white and lovely in the black sky. He was in the middle of a hike that was scheduled to last forty-eight hours. By the time the lectors realised that he was missing, he would be unlocatable. For a moment the thought was as strong as a muscle clenching, but then it faded. What would he do when he reached the nearside? Where would he go? How would he live?
Dave #14 had been wrong, he reflected, as he tramped back to his sled. He didn't have too much imagination; he had too little.
Now that the J-2 test programme was up and running, the pilots were rotated back to Earth on a regular basis for personal leave, morale-boosting visits to the plant where their birds were being assembled, consultation sessions with the designers of the new carrier ship, the Glory of Gaia, and meet-and-greet promotional junkets amongst higher echelons of the armed forces and the interlocked worlds of politics and the arms industries. Luiz Schwarcz returned from one of the latter with news that more pilots were going to be cut to fly the J-2, and some of them would be from the European Union.
“It makes all sorts of political sense,” he told Cash Baker and Colly Blanco a couple of days later. “The Europeans stood by us when it looked like we might have to go to war against the Pacific Community, we have deep and long-standing economic ties with them, and they like the Outers even less than we do. After all, they refused to participate in any of the nonsense about peace and reconciliation, despite strong incentives to do so. If we go to war against the Outers—”
“When we go to war,” Cash said.
“When we go to war, then, we will greatly benefit from their help,” Luiz said. “The Europeans are the oldest and richest power bloc. There's talk that they will help underwrite the costs of building the Glory of Gaia and the other long-range ships. In exchange, they get access to our technology—the new fusion motor, and the hyper-reflexive upgrades.”
“As long as the brass remembers that we're the first and best when it comes to taking the fight to the Outers, I don't mind who comes along for the ride,” Colly Blanco said.
“I hear that,” Cash said.
“You and me, we'll kick their asses,” Colly said.
He was the youngest pilot in the J-2 programme, just turned twenty-one, and a much better pilot than Cash had been at that age, although not as good as Cash was now, not quite. A fierce, fearless little tyke from a mining town in the foothills of the Andes, who claimed that he'd learned to ride a horse and rope a bull before he could walk, fly before he could read. He was leading the other two through the dark corridors and rooms of the old city's service levels: they were hunting rats, a favourite activity of the pilots when they were off-duty and confined to base. They wore night-vision goggles equipped with motion detectors, carried little pistols that shot taser darts.
At an intersection where two corridors crossed each other at oblique angles, Colly held up a hand, then pointed left. Thirty metres away, a fuzzy blotch pulsated like a slow and steady heart in the dim shadows. Twenty rats, easily. Maybe even thirty. Cash and Luiz flattened against the wall behind Colly, jumped out into the intersection when he did. The blotch split into a whirling flurry as rats scurried away in every direction. Cash picked a target and shot, saw bright sparks flare down the narrow perspective of the dark corridor as taser darts struck the floor and the walls.
A brief search turned up only one corpse. A lean brindled grandfather rat more than half a metre from its nose to the tip of its tail, fitted inside a hollow ball that had been shaped from a chunk of foamed wall insulation by careful nibbling. It had elaborate notchings in its ears that Luiz claimed were tribal or status markings. A piece of well-chewed plastic was slung around its neck by a loop of wire.
Cash and Luiz didn't argue when Colly said that it was his kill.
“Little fuckers're getting smarter,” Colly said, and booted the dead rat inside its ball of foam-armour into the shadows at the far end of the corridor.
“They're learning,” Luiz said. “Developing culture. One of the medics reckons those notches are some kind of graphic alphabet. She's trying to decode it.”
“Is that the woman who's giving you some?” Cash said.
“A gentleman never tells,” Luiz said. He was as dapper as ever, a red silk scarf knotted at the throat of his coveralls, black hair sleeked back from his narrow brown face.
They weren't bothering to keep quiet now. They knew that all around them rats were crouching watchfully in cavities inside walls, in ducts and cableways. That news of their presence was spreading on the rat bush telegraph. Still, they weren't quite ready to give up the hunt and return topside.
The corridor they were following made a bend through ninety degrees. A faint blue light flickered through an open doorway ahead. They crept toward it one after the other. Luiz held up his hand, counted down from three by folding his fingers and thumb. They swung into the doorway, pistols locked on the source of the light, an old photoframe which someone had left on a desk a century ago. It was playing a short clip of a man swinging a small child around and around on a beach. White sand and hot sunshine and the vivid blue ocean of a summer's day of the long ago, little sailboats out on the water. The old part of the base was full of mementos of abandoned lives like this. Clothes on hangers inside closets. Freezers stuffed with mummified food. A children's playground littered with toys.
Luiz picked up the photoframe, briefly studied it, then tossed it to Cash, saying, “Think they're still alive, on some moon or other?”
“The kid, you mean?”
“Maybe the man too. Some of those Outers live a long time. A lot more than a hundred-odd years.”
“You know what you should be asking?” Colly said. “You should be asking what switched that thing on.”
Luiz and Cash stared at him, and there was a sudden scratching and skittering overhead and ceiling tiles gave way and a blizzard of dried rat shit poured down. Colly swore vividly and fired his taser at the holes in the suspended ceiling, bolt after bolt lighting up the room with hot white sparks and sending shadows dancing wildly. Cash watched the shadows over the sight of his taser, looking for movement and finding none. Luiz was laughing.
“What's so fucking funny?” Colly said.
“They ambushed us,” Luiz said, and started laughing again.
“It could be worse—they could have used rocks instead of turds,” Cash said, barely getting the words out before he too was convulsed with laughter.
Colly glared at them in disgust, brushing commas of rat shit from his coveralls with abrupt motions, running his fingers through his cropped hair and violently shaking his head.
“These rats, they're getting very smart indeed,” Luiz said, as they walked back down the dark corridor. “They set a trap, so they must be able to think ahead. To plan. And they worked out what would lure us into their trap, so they must be able to think like us, too.”
Colly shook his head. “Smart rats, man. Who needs smart rats?”
“Sri Hong-Owen. The ancestors of those rats suffered so that we would not die in vain,” Luiz said.
“Don't riddle me, stringbean.”
“He means Sri Hong-Owen tested her stuff on the rats before she did us,” Cash told Colly.
“So you might say that, in a way, the rats are our brothers,” Luiz said.
“Your brothers, maybe,” Colly said, with the hard look he used when he believed that he was somehow being insulted or set up as the fall guy in a joke.
“We're definitely going to have to work on our game,” Luiz said. “If we can't get the better of a tribe of rats, we could get into some serious trouble when we go up against the Outers.”
“No way,” Cash said. “We're way better than any of those tweaks. They claim they're evolving into Homo superior, but we're already there. We're the real deal. When it comes to it, we'll kick their asses for sure.”
East of Eden, Ganymede, occupied a narrow crevasse at the southeastern edge of the dark and cratered terrain of Galileo Regio. The floor and sides of the crevasse were insulated and pressure-sealed with layers of fullerene composite and aerogel, and it was roofed with the same material, and the roof was covered in two metres of stony material, excavated from a nearby crater, to provide protection from the drench of radiation from the outer edges of Jupiter's radio belts. There was a small industrial zone at the southern end of the crevasse, and the rest was a pastoral landscape: meadows and groves of olive and citrus trees punctuated with narrow ponds and marshes along the floor; pine woods with an understorey of ceanothus, choisya, bearberries, myrtles, and other flowering shrubs climbing the terraced walls. Public buildings and small villages of apartment blocks sat amongst the steep woods under tents of transparent polymer stretched between fullerene struts, like giant models of the compound eyes of insects or exotic and jewel-like phytoplankton.
The settlement had been founded some fifty years ago by a group who believed that the other inhabitants of Jupiter's moons had grown too soft, too bourgeois. Although their home was pleasantly bucolic, East of Eden's citizens were austere and close-minded, keen on conformity, custom, and civic duty, and they prized the acquisition of scientific and philosophical knowledge and the virtues of artistic achievement above all else. They each spent several days a week helping to run the settlement's basic services and maintain its infrastructure, but as far as they were concerned their real work was scientific research without any clear aim or application beyond the gathering and cataloguing of esoteric knowledge for knowledge's sake, or the production of intricate sagas, operas, symphonies, plays, and other works of art. They had developed and refined new meditation techniques, revived the ancient black arts of psychoanalysis, tweaked decorative plants and animals, engaged in the study of abnormal mathematics and philosophy, worked in obscure corners of the sprawling tangle of theories left over from failed attempts to unify physics, and much else. And they spent at least as much time talking about their art and research as doing it, discussing strategies and plans with other members of art covens or research gangs, arguing with rivals in virtual workshops, even organising face-to-face conferences. Their government, a form of direct democracy similar to that of the city-states of Classical Greece or the early years of the Roman Republic, involved endless discussions, too. There were no elected representatives, no instant polls or referenda. Assemblies in which every citizen could debate and vote were held once a week in villages and once a month for matters concerning the whole city. Luxury was a crime; self-sacrifice a virtue. Everything that wasn't forbidden was compulsory.
As far as Macy Minnot was concerned, it was about as utopian as an anthill. She'd moved to East of Eden three months ago, immediately after her defection. The government of Rainbow Bridge, Callisto had insisted on it. Officially, it was for her protection. Unofficially, as she well knew, the Callistans were eager to be rid of an inconvenient reminder of an embarrassing incident.
East of Eden had volunteered to take her in not out of charity or sympathy, but because it discharged an obscure debt of honour it had long owed Rainbow Bridge. She'd been assigned a counsellor, a vinegary old man named Ivo Teagarden, and had been given work as a general labourer in East of Eden's farms, but her access to its net was restricted, she was forbidden to travel outside its limits, and she couldn't shake the feeling that she was part prisoner, part zoological specimen. Nevertheless, she was determined to make the best of it. She'd poured her energy into making over the studio apartment she'd been assigned, in the village of Lot's Lot: laying and polishing a bamboo-wood floor, painting the walls different shades of green and pink and playing with the lighting, retiling the little wet room, growing herbs and chili plants in pots on the flagstone patio, training a fig vine around the door. She told herself that she was settling into the first real home she'd ever had, but in her low moments the apartment seemed more like a cell, and East of Eden's inward-looking pocket utopia habitat a prison.
So far, she'd made few friends. Ivo Teagarden. The proprietor of her favourite café in Lot's Lot's refectory, Jon Ho. Sada Selene and her little gang of refuseniks. A nodding acquaintance with a couple of people who worked in the farm tunnels. Most citizens were frostily polite or indifferent; only a few went out of their way to express outright hostility. Chief amongst the latter was Jibril, a member of the self-styled Elohim transhumanism crew. Everyone else called them cosmo angels, because they used plastic surgery and trivial cuts to give themselves a weird stylised beauty and dabbled in all kinds of so-called mind-enhancing treatments, from colour therapy to tailored psychotrophic viruses. They were also androgyne neuters, because they had the fantastically old-fashioned notion that higher consciousness could be achieved only in the complete absence of every form of base, animal sex. They took the names of angels, erased their former identities from public record, and spent their leisure time hanging around public places, preening and fluttering like minor aristocrats. Most had something to do with the performance arts. East of Eden's best fado singer was a cosmo angel; so were several of its leading microentertainers. Jibril was a virtuoso of psychoactive theatre, and Macy had been on the receiving end of yo's performances ever since she'd first arrived in East of Eden, from sarcastic remarks or mocking questions made in passing to confrontational diatribes about base human stock compromising East of Eden's aesthetic totality, or the pollution of its gestalt. And every encounter was on camera, and edited versions were dumped on East of Eden's net for the delectation and entertainment of anyone who wanted to watch.
Back in the training barracks of the R&R corps, Macy had once called out a woman who'd been bugging her and they'd fought to a standstill behind the mess block, honour even. But after she made the mistake of trying the same tactic with Jibril, standing up to the cosmo angel and telling yo that there were plenty of places where they could work out their differences, the confrontation, which had ended with Macy stalking away in disgust from Jibril's fluttering mime of outraged sensibility, had quickly became the most popular of all the cosmo angel's pieces. Ivo Teagarden explained that cosmo angels suffered from an advanced but harmless state of narcissism, and said that Macy should think of these encounters as a contribution toward Jibril's therapy and a way of enhancing her own standing in the community. Jon Ho told her it didn't much matter, because most people didn't follow psychoactive theatre these days. Only the gang of self-styled refusenik kids took Macy's side, albeit mainly for ideological reasons.
“Cosmo angels confuse evolution with a lifestyle choice,” Sada Selene told Macy. She was the oldest of the refuseniks, a lanky and intense girl of fifteen. “What they do to themselves? It's about as radical as getting a tattoo. It's a mockery of all the wild and radical possibilities of true transhumanism. Something safe and codified, reinforced by constant self-policing. Which is just about typical of all that's wrong with this backwater, puritanical, head-in-the-sand place.”
“They pretend they're devoted to a high ideal, but they're really running away from their own true nature,” another refusenik said. “Like nuns. You ever heard of nuns?”
“She's from Earth. It's crawling with all kinds of religious weirdos,” a third refusenik said. “Green saints. They're a kind of nun, right?”
“Kind of,” Macy said.
“The point is,” Sada Selene said, “the cosmo angels don't threaten the status quo. That's why the system tolerates them, and why it hates us. Because we want to take control of the course of human evolution. Because true transhumans are always in flux, evolving in a hundred different directions. No so-called utopia can deal with that because by their very nature utopias are static. They hate change because it's a direct challenge to their fantasy of perfection.”
Macy liked the refuseniks because they were pretty much the only people in East of Eden with whom she could have a straightforward conversation. But although they claimed to be rebels without a pause, they were really just a bunch of alienated kids going through a difficult phase. Despite all their noise about living outside the law and their open contempt for the settlement's claustrophobic codes and customs, they hadn't ever attempted to change them, and it was unlikely that their boasts about leaving the settlement when they attained majority would come to anything. They refused to participate in civic life, but they camped out in empty apartments, lived on dole yeast and whatever they could cadge from passersby, breathed the settlement's air, drank its water, and used its net. Still, they were bright and challenging, and they supported Macy because she was their enemy's enemy. They posted favourable comments about her on Jibril's site, and told her that she could always count on them if she got into trouble.
Early one evening, Macy was sitting at the counter of Jon Ho's café when she saw Jibril and two of yo's acolytes coming toward her. The café was at one end of the refectory terrace that occupied the top of the biggest apartment block of Lot's Lot, with views through the hexagonal panes of the village's tent toward pine woods on the other side of the crevasse. A nice enough prospect, although the trees were dwarfed, no more than five or six metres high, and they were just a couple of hundred metres away, squatting under the grey-blue vault of the roof. It reminded Macy of the room she'd shared with Jax Spano during the brief spring of their love back in Pittsburgh: if you stood in the centre you could touch the walls on either side, not just with your fingertips but with the palms of your hands. The café was small, too. Nicely compact. A short counter topped with split bamboo polished to a mirror finish, a bench long enough for six customers, and a hissing steel coffee machine that Jon Ho had built from a design three centuries old.
The coffee wasn't exactly coffee—coffee bushes took up too much space in farm tunnels, so the Outers generally grew a species of moss tweaked to produce oily caffeine-rich nodules—but it was the best Macy had found since she'd left Earth, and Jon conjured up tasty snacks on a little hotplate and allowed customers to keep a bottle of their favourite liqueur or spirit behind the counter. He'd worked a spell as a ship's engineer, was more widely travelled and more tolerant than most of East of Eden's citizens. He liked to listen to Macy's stories about life on Earth, and she liked to talk to him about tweaking strains of moss to improve the quality of their coffee; the art of making minuscule metabolic changes to ensure an exact balance of dozens of different flavonoids, alcohols, aldehydes, and essential oils was very like adjusting the balance of microorganisms to produce the sweetest, liveliest mud.
