The survivors of the siege are by now quite inured to their fate. It"s true that many areas of the city are still dangerous, but only because of unrepaired damage and a few undiscovered b.o.o.by traps."
"Do you believe," Demi Lacombe asked, boldness making her eyes shine, "that he still lives?"
I knew at once whom she meant, of course, as would anyone in Paris. I said, "Of course not."
"Yet I"m told that many of the survivors think that he does."
"It is a frail and foolish hope, but hope is all they have. No, he willed his death from the beginning, when he a.s.sa.s.sinated the rest of the emergency committee and despoiled the diplomatic quarter, and he sealed his fate when he killed his hostages and the diplomats sent to bargain for peace. He was not the kind of man to run away from the consequences of his actions and so, like most of those he briefly commanded, he would have been killed in the siege. His body has not yet been identified, but the same can be said for more than half of those killed."
"You are very certain."
"I have studied human nature all my life."
"And would you cla.s.sify him as one of your great men?"
"I"m flattered that you know of my work."
Demi Lacombe said, "I wouldn"t lie for the sake of politeness, Professor-Doctor Graves."
"Please, Mademoiselle, I think we might be friends. And my friends call me Fredo."
"And so shall I, because I don"t really get on with this false formality. I know it"s the fashion in the Pacific Community, but I"m a hick from Europe.
So, Fredo, is he a great man?"
The delicate suffusion of her soft cheeks: alabaster in the first light of morning.
I bowed and said, "The corporados think so, or they would not have sponsored my research. However, I have not yet made up my mind."
As we talked, I was aware of the people, mostly men, who were watching Demi Lacombe from near and far. The architects of the cities of the moons of the outer planets, imaginations stimulated by the engineering possibilities of microgravity, made their public s.p.a.ces as large as possible, to relieve the claustrophobia of their tents and domes and burrows. The theater"s auditorium, a great crescent wedged beneath the steep slope of the seats, could easily have held two thousand people, and although almost everyone in the diplomatic quarter had come to the gala opening, we numbered no more than three hundred, scattered spa.r.s.ely across the vast, black floor, which our shoes gripped tightly in lieu of proper gravity. Diplomats, executives and officials of the ad hoc government; novo abastado industrialists, sleek as well-fed sharks, trailed by entourages of aides and bodyguards as they lazily cruised the room, hoping to snap up trifles and tidbits of gossip; officers of the Three Powers Occupation Force, in the full dress uniforms of half a dozen different armies; collaborationists in their best formal wear, albeit slightly shabby and out of fashion, mostly enfamille and mostly gorging themselves at the buffet, for rationing was still in force amongst Paris"s defeated population.
There was a stir as, in full costume and make-up, Don Giovanni and Leporello escorted Donna Anna and Donna Elvira into the huge room. The actors half-swam, half- walked through the web of tethers with
consummate ease, acknowledging the scattering of applause. At the center of the auditorium"s crescent, one man, sleek, dark-haired, in an immaculate pearly uniform, had not turned to watch the actors but was still staring openly at Demi Lacombe. It was Dev Veeder, the dashing colonel in charge of the security force. When Demi Lacombe looked up and saw him watching her I thought I heard the snap of electricity between them. DeHon nudged me and said loudly, for the benefit of everyone nearby, "Our brave colonel is smitten, don"t you think?" I should not have allowed myself to become involved, of course. But like Cris DeHon (although I was neutered by age and temperament rather than by elective treatment), I had a bystander"s fascination with human s.e.xual behavior. And, frankly, my a.s.signment, although lucratively paid, was becoming tiresome. I had been in Paris, Dione for two months, commissioned by a consortium of half a dozen Greater Brazilian corpora- dos to write an official history of the siege of the city, and in particular to contribute to a psychological model of Marisa Ba.s.si, the leader of the barricades, the amateur soldier who had kept off the forces of the Three Powers Alliance for twenty days after the general surrender which had brought an end of the uiet War elsewhere in the solar system. I knew that I had been chosen because of my position as emeritus professor of history at Rio de Janeiro rather than for my ability or even my reputation, tattered as it was by the sniping of jealous younger colleagues. Historians cannot reach an agreement about anything, and most especially they cannot agree on the way history is made. Herodotus and Thucydides believed that the proper subjects of history were war and const.i.tutional history and political personality, times of crisis and change; Plutarch suggested that history was driven by the actions and desires of exemplary characters, of great men. The Christians introduced G.o.d into history, a kind of alpha great man presiding over a forced marriage of divine and human realms, and when the notion of an epicurean G.o.d was shouldered aside in the Renaissance, the idea that history was shaped by forces beyond the control of ordinary men remained, although these forces were no longer centered on extraordinary individuals but were often considered to be no more than blind chance, the fall of a coin, the want of a nail. Like a maggot in an apple, chance lay at the heart of Gibbon"s elegant synthesis of the philosophical studies of Voltaire and the systematic organization of facts by rationalists like Hume and Montesquieu; it was the malignant flaw in Leopold von Ranke"s (a distant ancestor of mine) codification of history as a neutral, nonpartisan, scholarly pursuit; and it was made explicit in the twentieth century fragmentation of the history of ideas into a myriad specialties and the leveling of ah1 facts to a common field, so that the frequency of dental caries in soldiers in the trenches of the First World War was considered as important an influence of events as the abilities of generals. Great men or small, all were tossed alike by society"s tides. It was not until the restoration of history as a species of literature, by deployment of virtual theater and probabilistic clades, that the idea of the worth of the individual was restored. Who can say if this view of history caused the collapse of democratic republicanism, or if republicanism"s collapse changed our philosophy of history? But it is certain that the rise of nationalism and the restoration of half- torgotten monarchies, aided by supranational corporados which found it convenient to divide their commercial territories into quarreling kingdoms and princ.i.p.alities, paralleled the return of the theory of the great man in history, a theory of which I, in my time, was an important champion. In my time. I had hoped that by coming to Paris, Dione, in the midst of reconstruction of a war scarcely ended, I would be able to secure my reputation with a final masterwork and confound my jealous rivals. But I soon discovered that the last days of the free collective of Paris, and of its leader, Marisa Ba.s.si, were a tissue of echoes and conflicting stories supported by too few solid facts. Those few surviving collectivists who believed that Marisa Ba.s.si was dead could not agree how or where he had died; the majority, who foolishly believed that he had escaped during the hours of madness when special forces of the Three Powers Alliance had finally infiltrated the city, could not agree on how he had escaped, nor where he had escaped to. No ship had left Dione in those last desperate days except the cargo scow which, its navigation system driven mad by viral infection, had ploughed into Saturn"s thick atmosphere and had either burned up or now floated, squashed to a two-dimensional profile by crushing atmospheric pressure, near the planet"s metallic hydrogen core. If history is a story told by winners, then the winners have the unconscionable burden of sifting mountains of dross for rare nuggets of pure fact, while the losers are free to fantasize on what could or should have been. My commission should have been simple, but I found the demands of my employers, who did not trouble to supply me with a.s.sistants, were stretching my methodology to its breaking point. The corporados wanted to capture the psyche of great rebel leader in a heuristic model, a laboratory specimen of a troublesome personality they could study and measure and define, as doctors begin to fight a disease by first unraveling the genetic code of the virus, bacterium or faulty gene which is its cause. By knowing what Marisa Ba.s.si had been, they thought that they could prevent another of his kind gaining power in the half-ruined colonies. After two months, I had a scant handful of facts about Marisa Ba.s.si"s life before the uiet War, and a horrible knot of evasions and half-truths and lies about his role in the siege, a knot which became more complex each day, with no way of cutting through to the truth. I confess, then, that in the days after my first meeting with Demi Lacombe, I was more interested in the rumors and gossip about her and Dev Veeder than in my own work. It was, you must understand, an interest born of concern for her safety; an almost paternal concern. There was our age difference-almost fifty years-and my devotion to the memory of my dear dead wife. No matter what others may say, I had only pure motives in taking an interest in Dev Veeder"s a.s.sault on the heart of the young and beautiful environmental engineer. At first, much of my information came from Cris DeHon, who told me how our head of security personally escorted Demi Lacombe as she surveyed and cataloged the ruined wildernesses and parklands and farms of the city, a.s.siduously transporting her to wherever she desired, arranging Picnics in a sealed house or in a bubble habitat laboriously swept clear of b.o.o.by traps and biowar beasties by squads of troopers. And like everyone else in the claustrophobic sharkPl of Paris"s diplomatic quarter, I saw how closely Dev Veeder attended Demi Lacombe at every social gathering, even though she spent most of her time with the science crews while he stood by impotently, unable to partic.i.p.ate in their unpenetrable, jargon-ridden conversations. "It"s a purely one-sided affair," DeHon told me, when it caught me watching her at a party held by one or another of the corporados, I forget which, on the huge lawn at the center of the diplomatic quarter, part of the parkland that both penetrated and surrounded the built-up area inside the quarter"s pyramidal tent. As always, most of us were there, scattered across an oval of brilliant green gra.s.s webbed with tethers, the dozens of faint shadows overlapping at our feet cast by brilliant lamps hung from the high ridge of the quarter"s roof, Saturn"s foggy crescent tilted beyond like a fantastic brooch pinned to a sky as black as jeweler"s velvet. In the shade of the efflorescent greenery of a sweet chestnut tree, that sprawled like a banyan in the low gravity, Demi Lacombe was talking earnestly with a couple of techheads; Dev Veeder stood close by in his dress uniform, watching her over the rim of the wine bulb from which, every now and then, he pretended to sip. Cris DeHon said, "She"s such an innocent: she really doesn"t see how badly she is humiliating Dev. You"ve heard how he"s increased the number of security sweeps in the general population? I do believe that it is a reliable index of his growing frustration. I think that soon there will be more public executions, unknowing sacrifices on the altar of our gallant police chief"s unrequited love." I said, perhaps a trifle sharply, "What do you know of love?" "Love or l.u.s.t," the neuter said, "it"s all the same. Love is merely the way by which men fool themselves that they have n.o.bler motives than merely spending their urges, a game sprung from the constant tension between the male"s blind need to copulate and the female"s desire to win a father who will help provide for her children. Our security chief is parading like a peac.o.c.k because he knows he is competing against every potential suitor of the delicious Mademoiselle Lacombe. And how many suitors there are!" DeHon bent closer and whispered, "I hear she takes long night walks in the parkland." Its breath smelt of milk and cinnamon: a baby"s breath. "That"s hardly surprising," I said. "She is an environmental engineer. The gardens must fascinate her." "I"ve heard she has a particular interest in the gardeners." I laughed. "That would be obscene if it were not so ridiculous." Cris DeHon"s smile showed small pearl-white teeth. "Perhaps. But perhaps poor beautiful Demi seeks simple relief from the strain of being the focus of a killer"s desire." I suppose the epithet was not an exaggeration, although it shocked me then, as no doubt DeHon hoped it would. Dev Veeder had had a good war, and had risen quickly through the ranks of the Greater Brazilian Army. He was a war hero, although like many heroes of the uiet War-at least, on the winning side-he had never engaged in combat. His specialty was debriefing; I suppose a more liberal age might say that he was a torturer, although his methods were as much psychological as physical. He once confided to me that showing a prisoner the instruments he proposed to use often had as much effect as application of the instruments themselves -especially if the prisoner had been forced to listen to the screams of others suffering hot questioning. Early in the war, Dev Veeder had interrogated an entire mining community on Europa, some fifty men, women and children; the intelligence he had wrung from them had helped bring a swift and relatively bloodless end to the siege of Minos. This and other exploits had won him his present position of head of security of Paris, which he prosecuted with diligence and vigor. Dev Veeder was young, the youngest son of a good family with connections in both industry and government. He was fiercely ambitious and highly intelligent. He had a sharp black impatient gaze. His hair was combed back in waves from his high forehead and aquiline nose; his make-up was discretely but skillfully applied. A dandy from the pages of a seventeenth century novel, but no fool. I knew him well from the conversations we had had about history. He was very interested in my theories, and believed, like many middle-ranking military men, that he himself had something of the attributes of a great man. This vanity was his single serious weakness, although it was true that, like all tyrants, he believed himself both benevolent and pragmatic. "If only I had had the chance to really prove myself," he said to me more than once, showing that he really misunderstood my theory. For great men of history do prove themselves; the will to succeed, not luck or circ.u.mstance, is what makes them great. They rise to the occasion; they seize the day; they mold themselves to be all things to all men. Dev Veeder was too proud to realize this, and perhaps too cruel. He could only be what he was, and perhaps that is why I feared for Demi, and why I crossed him. Each day, I left the safety of the diplomatic quarter for the ruins of the city to interview the survivors of the siege, to try and learn what they knew or claimed to know about Marisa Ba.s.si. In spite of my reputation and the letters of commission I carried, Dev Veeder did not think that I was important enough to warrant a proper escort-an impertinence for which I was grateful, for one cannot properly conduct interviews amongst a defeated population in the presence of troopers of the force which now occupies their territory. And so, each day, armed only with the blazer which I kept bolstered at my ankle, I set out to pursue my research in the refugee warrens. It was my custom to wait for my guide in a small cafe at the edge of the small plaza just outside the diplomatic quarter. The place had once been the checkpoint for the quarter, with cylinder gates to control access and human guards on duty in case there was a problem the computer was not authorized to handle. On the night of the revolution, a mob had stormed the guardhouse and killed the guards, fried the comPuter and a.s.sociated security hardware with an industrial microwave beam, and blown the gates. The diplomatic quarter had already been evacuated, but a small detachment of soldiers and minor executives had been left behind as caretakers; no one had expected the revolutionary committee to violate the diplomatic quarter"s sovereign status. The soldiers killed half a hundred of the mob before they were themselves killed, the surviving executives were taken hostage, and the buildings looted. After the war, the quarter was the first place to be restored, of course, and a memorial had been erected to the murdered soldiers and martyred hostages, virtually the only casualties on our side. But the ruins of the gates still stood to one side of the plaza on which half a dozen pedways and escalators converged, tall hollow columns gutted of their armatures, their bronze facings scorched and ghosted with half-erased slogans. The guardhouse"s airy teepee was slashed and half- collapsed, but an old married couple had set up a tiny kitchen inside it and put a scattering of mismatched chairs and tables outside. Perhaps they hoped to get the custom of those collaborators who had clearance to get past the security things, half dog, half bear, knitted together with cybernetic enhancements and armor, which now guarded the diplomatic quarter. However, I seemed to be their only customer, and I suspected that they were relatives of my a.s.siduous guide; for that reason I never left a tip. That day, two days after the party, I was sitting as usual in a wire frame chair, sipping from a bulb of dark strong coffee and nibbling a meltingly sweet pain au chocolat, looking out across the vista of Paris"s main dome while I waited for my guide. Before the uiet War, Paris, Dione, was one of the loveliest cities in the solar system, and the largest of all the cities on Saturn"s moons. Its gla.s.sy froth of domes and tunnels and tents straddled a ridge of upthrust brecciated basalt between Romulus and Remus craters. Since the twin craters are close to the equator of the icy moon"s sub-Saturnian hemisphere, Saturn stood almost directly overhead, cycling through his phases roughly every three days. The city had been renowned for its microgravity architecture, its wide, tree- lined boulevards and parks-much of its population was involved in the biotech industries-its cafe culture and opera and theaters, and the interlinked parkland blisters which stepped down the terraces of Remus crater along the waterfall- filled course of what had been renamed the Proudhon River during the revolution and now, after the end of uiet War and the fall of the barricades, was the Little Amazon-or would be, once the pumps were fixed and the watercourse had been cleared of debris.
The main dome, like many others, had been blown during the b.l.o.o.d.y end of the siege. It was two kilometers across, bisected by a dry riverbed from east to west and by the Avenue des fitoiles, so-called because of the thousands of lanterns which had hung from the branches of its trees, from north to south, and further divided into segments by boulevards and tramways. Cl.u.s.ters of white buildings stood amongst the sere ruins of parks, while warehouses and offices were packed around its circ.u.mference. Although the civic buildings at its center were superficially intact, their windows were shattered and their white walls were pockmarked to the third story by the bullet-holes of the bitter hand-to-hand fighting of the b.l.o.o.d.y day in which eighty thousand citizens died defending their city from invading troops of the Three Powers Alliance. Every sc.r.a.p of vegetation in the parks had been killed by exposure to vacuum after the blowout, of course, and now, with the restoration of atmospheric pressure, it was all rotting down to mulch. The air of the plaza where I sat, high above it all, held a touch of that cabbagey stink. I was woken from my reverie by a light touch on my shoulder, the musk of roses. Demi Lacombe fell, light as a bird, into the wire chair on the other side of the little cafe table and favored me with her devastating smile. She wore loose white coveralls; I could not help but notice that her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were unbound. I scarcely saw Dev Veeder scowling a dozen meters away, or his squad of burly armored troopers. Demi Lacombe"s left wrist was bound by a pressure bandage; when I expressed my concern, she explained that she had fractured it in a silly accident. "I overestimated my ability to jump in this lovely light gravity, and took a bit of a tumble. The clinic injected smart bacteria which will fix up the bone in a couple of days. I"ve seen this place so many times," she added, "but I didn"t know that you were its patron, Professor-Doctor." "Please, my name is Fredo. Won"t you join me in a coffee? And you too, perhaps, Colonel Veeder?" "There"s no time for that," Veeder said brusquely. "You"re a fool to patronize these people, Graves." Inside the guardhouse"s half-collapsed shroud, the old couple who ran the makeshift cafe shrank from his black glare. I said boldly, "The psychologists tell me that enterprises like this are a healthy sign, Colonel. Even though it is, admittedly, on a microeconomic scale." "You"re being scammed," Veeder said. "I think I ought to re-examine the credentials of your so-called guide." "History shows us, Colonel, that those defeated benefit from subsequent cultural and economic fertilization. Besides, my sponsors would be unhappy if you disturbed my work." Demi Lacombe said, "I think it"s a nice thing, Dev. A little sign of reconciliation." "Whatever. Come on. It"s a long way to the tramhead." "The trams are working again?" "One or two," Dev Veeder said. "Dev restored the tram lines which pa.s.s through some of the parklands," Demi said. "It really does help my surveys." For a moment, she took my hand in both of hers. "You"re a kinder man than you seem, Fredo," she said, and floated up out of her chair and took Dev Veeder"s arm. I watched them cross the plaza to the escalators. Demi had only been in Paris a couple of weeks, but she had already mastered the long loping stride which worked best in Dione"s low gravity. Only when they had descended out of sight did I look at the sc.r.a.p of paper she had thrust into my palm. I must talk with you.
My guide arrived hardly a miaute later; I suspected that he had been watching the whole thing from a safe vantage. I suppose I should tell you something about Lavet Corso. The most important thing was that I never entirely trusted him, an instinctive reaction to which I should have paid more attention. But who does like collaborationists? They are despised by their own people for being traitors, and for the same reason are distrusted by those they are so eager to please. Lavet Corso had once been something in the lower echelons in the city"s government, and was studiedly neutral about Marisa Ba.s.si. Although he had arranged many interviews, I had never tried to interview him. He had been widowed in the war and had to support a young daughter in difficult circ.u.mstances. While interviewing survivors of the siege, I had to endure the squalor of the warrens in which they lived. On my first visit, Corso had had the temerity to complain about the noise, lack of privacy, dirt and foul air, and I had told him sharply, "You and your daughter are lucky. Fate saved you from a horrible death. If not for a chance which separated you from your wife, you could have been aboard that scow too. You could have fallen inside a tin can into Saturn"s poisonous atmosphere, choking and boiling and flattened in the calorific depths. But you, Mr. Corso, were spared, as was your daughter. Life goes on." I don"t think he took my little homily to heart, but he didn"t dare complain again. Corso was a tremendously tall man, with a pockmarked face, dark eyes and black hair slicked back from his pale face with heavy grease. He was efficient and smarter than he mostly allowed himself to appear; perhaps too smart, for his flattery never seemed sincere, and he was too ready to suggest alternatives to my plans. That day, for instance, after I had told him where I wanted to go, he immediately proposed visiting another sector that was both easier to reach and in a far safer condition. "It is my life if you are hurt, boss." "I hardly think so, given the waivers I had to sign in order to do my fieldwork." "And you have been there already, boss. Several times. Very badly damaged it is, not safe at all. And there are still many b.o.o.by traps." "I do remember, Mr. Corso, and I also remember that on each occasion you tried to dissuade me. But I will go again, because it is important to me. If we do get into trouble, the machines of the security force claim to be only five minutes away from any spot in the city." "It"s certainly what we"re told," Corso said. "Perhaps it"s even true." "Then lead on, Mr. Corso. I want to see this place today." A few minutes later, the whole of the main dome was spread beneath us. I sat behind Corso as he labored at the pedals of the airframe, beneath the central joint of its wide, vivid yellow bat wings. I found this mode of travel quite exhilarating, for Corso was an expert pilot, and in Dione"s meager gravity we could fall a hundred meters and escape with only bruises and perhaps a broken bone or two. We swooped out above the cankerous, rotting tangles of parks, above streets dotted with half-cleared barricades, above white buildings and the blackened sh.e.l.ls of buildings set afire in the last hours of the siege. One reason for the blowout had been to save Paris from its crazed citizens (riding behind Corso, with cold cabbagey air blowing around me, I could imagine the dome"s blister filling with swirling fumes, a smoky pearl that suddenly cleared when its integrity was breached; its huge diamond panes were still smudged with the residue of the suddenly snuffed fires). And then the little flying machine stooped and we bounced nce, twice, and were down, taxiing across a wide flat roof above an avenue lined with dead chestnut trees. I had come here on my second day in Paris. I had in- Slsted, and Dev Veeder had, with ill-grace, provided an escort. I had returned several times since, for here were the roins of the office building, like a broken tooth in the terraced arcades of this commercial sector, from which Marisa Ba.s.si had run his revolutionary committee. Since I had first visited the place, I had learned much more about those desperate, last days. From one of these terraces, bareheaded and in shirt-sleeves, Ba.s.si had made his crucial speech to the crowds who had packed the stilled pedways and empty tram tracks. It was at an intersection nearby that he had organized the first of the barricades, and inaugurated the block captain system by which the building and defense of each barricade was a.s.signed to platoons of a dozen or so citizens. How proud the survivors still were of their token efforts, singing out the names of the barricades on which they had served like captains recalling the names of their ships. Place de la Concorde. The Killing Field. The Liberty Line. For a long time, I stood at the remains of that first barricade and tried to imagine how it had been, that day when Ba.s.si had made his speech. To insert myself, by imaginative reconstruction built on plain fact, into the life of another, is the most delicate part of my work. As I stood there, I imagined the plane trees in leaf, the heat and brilliant light of hundreds of suspensor lamps beneath the roof of the dome, like floating stars against the blackness of Dione"s night, the restless crowd hi the wide avenue, faces turned like flowers towards Marisa Ba.s.si. An immigrant, he was half the height of most of the population of Paris, but was broad-shouldered and muscular, with a mane of gray hair and a bushy beard woven through with luminescent beads. What had he felt? He was tired, for he had certainly not slept that night. I was certain that he had had a direct hand in the deaths of his former government colleagues, and perhaps he was haunted by the b.l.o.o.d.y scenes. Murder is a primal event. Did the screams of his murdered colleagues fill him with foreboding, did his hands tremble as he grasped the rail and squared his shoulders and prepared to address the restless crowd? He had showered, and his hair was still wet as he let go of the rail and raised his hands (I had a photograph of his hands which I looked at often: they were square-palmed, the fingers short and stout, with broken nails-a laborer"s rather than a murderer"s hands) to still the crowd"s noise, and began to speak. And in that moment changed history, and condemned most of his audience to a vainglorious death. Had he planned his speech, or did it come unprompted? Several of those I had interviewed had said that he had seemed nervous; several others that he had spoken with flawless confidence; all said that he had spoken without notes, and that he had been cheered to the echo. I walked about for an hour, every now and then dictating a few words to my notebook, impressions, half-realized ideas. Ba.s.si did not yet stand before me fully-fleshed, but I felt that he was growing closer. One of the killing machines which patrolled the repressurized parts of the city stalked swiftly across a distant intersection, glittering and angular, like a praying mantis made of steel, there one moment, gone the next. I wondered if it or one of its fellows had caught the man who had painted the silly slogan, He Lives!, across the sooty stone of the building"s first setback; I would have to ask Dev Veeder. I told Corso, "I"m pleased to see that our angels of mercy are afoot." "They might rea.s.sure you, boss, but they scare the s.h.i.t out me. I"ve seen what those things can do to a man." "But not to you, my dear Corso. Not while you are under my protection." "Not while I have the stink of occupation upon me." "That"s putting it crudely," I said.
All of the occupation force and certain of its favored collaborators had been tweaked so that their sweat emitted specific long-chain lipids which placated the primitive brains of the security things and killing machines. "I"m sorry, boss. This place weirds me out." "Bad memories, perhaps?" I was wondering if Corso had been there, that day, but as usual, he did not rise to the bait. He said, "I was on corpse detail, right after they repressurized this part of the city. The bodies had lain in vacuum at minus two hundred degrees Centigrade for more than two months. They were shriveled and very dry. Skin and flesh crisp, like pie crust. It was hard to pick them up without a finger or a hand or a foot breaking off. We all wore masks and gloves, but flakes of dead people got in your skin, and pretty soon all you could smell was death." "Don"t be so gloomy, Corso. When the reconstruction is finished, your city will have regained its former glory." "Yeah, but it won"t be my city any more. So, where do you want to go next?" "To the sector where he lived, of course." "Revisiting all your old favorites today, boss?" "I feel that I"m getting closer to him, Mr. Corso." We climbed back up to the roof, took off with a sudden stoop, and then, with Corso pedaling furiously, rose high above roofs and avenues and dead parkland. "I don"t understand why you aren"t grateful for the reconstruction, Mr. Corso. We could quite easily have demolished your city and started over. Or pulled out entirely, and brought you all back to Earth." "I was born here. This is where I was designed to live. Earth would kill me." "And you will live here, thanks to the generosity of the Three Powers Occupation Force, but you will live here as part of human mainstream. The high flown nonsense about colonizing the outer limits of the solar system, the comets and the Kuiper Belt, all of that was sheer madness. I have a colleague who has demonstrated that it is economically impossible. There will be a few scientific outposts, perhaps, but the outer system is too cold and dark and energy poor. It"s no place to live. Here though, will be the jewel of Earth"s reconciliation with her children, Mr. Corso. I believe that the uiet War will mark the beginning of the first mature epoch of human history, a war to end wars, and an end to childish expansionism. In its place will be as fine a flowering in the sciences and the arts as humanity has ever known. We are lucky to be alive at this time." "The Chinese might disagree. About an end to war." "Such disagreements as there are between the Democratic Union of China and the Three Powers Alliance will be settled by diplomacy and the intermingling of trade and culture. Men live for so long now that their lives are too valuable to be wasted in war." Pedaling hard, Corso said over his shoulder, "Old men have always used that as an excuse to send young men to war." "You are a cynic, Mr. Corso." "Maybe. Still, it"s funny how the war started because we wouldn"t repay our debts, and now you"re pouring money into reconstruction." How do wars start? I suppose you could graph the rise in Sovernment debt against public resentment at the colonies funded by Earth"s taxes until a trigger point was reached, a crisis which had finally forced the governments of the Three Powers Alliance to act. That crisis was generally agreed to be the refusal by certain colonies to pay increased rates of interest on the corporate and government loans which had funded their expansion, an act of defiance which coincided with the death of the president of Greater Brazil close to an election, and the need by his inexperienced and unpopular vice president to be seen to act decisively. By that view, the uiet War was no more than an act of debt recovery. Or perhaps one might suggest that the uiet War was an historical inevitability, the usual reaction of colonies which had chafed under the yoke of an over-stretched and underfunded empire until they could not help but demand independence: there were dozens of precedents for this in Earth"s history. And yet the colonists had lost. The Three Powers Alliance had the technological and economic advantage, and superior access to information; the colonies, fragile bubbles of air and light and heat scattered in the vastness of the outer solar system, were horribly vulnerable. Apart from a few a.s.sa.s.sinations and acts of sabotage, almost no one had died on Earth during the uiet War, but hundreds of thousands had died in the colonies on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, in orbital habitats and in s.p.a.cecraft. Sartre wrote that because of technology we can no longer make history; instead, history is something that happens to us. It is an irony, I suppose, that Marisa Ba.s.si"s spark of defiance was extinguished because the very technology which sustained his city made it so very vulnerable. And yet certain important corporados were sufficiently worried about the futile resistance led by that one man, in one city on one of Saturn"s small icy moons, to have sent me to profile him, as a police psychologist might profile a ma.s.s murderer. Was Marisa Ba.s.si a great man who had risen from obscurity to fame but had failed? Or was he a fool, or worse than a fool-a psychopath who had hypnotized an emotionally vulnerable population and made them martyrs not for the cause of liberty, but for gratification of his inadequate ego? I still had too little material to make that judgment, and I confess that on that day, as I returned to places I had already trawled over, my mind was as much on the implications of Demi Lacombe"s note as my work, and to Lavet Corso"s undisguised relief I brought an early end to my labors. Four It was not easy to arrange a private meeting with Demi La- combe, for the diplomatic quarter was small, and Dev Veeder"s already keen eye was sharpened further by jealousy. I took to walking in the parkland after dark, even though I gave little credence to Cris DeHon"s gossip, but I met only tame animals and, once, one of the gardeners, who for a moment gazed at me with gentle, mild curiosity before shambling away into the shadows beneath the huge, s.h.a.ggy puffb.a.l.l.s of a stand of cypress trees. I spent the next few days within the diplomatic quarter, interviewing wretches caught up in Dev Veeder"s latest security sweep. They were either sullen and mostly silent, or effusively defiant, and in the latter case their answers to my questions were so full of lies or boasts or bl.u.s.ters that it was almost impossible to find any grain of truth. One wild-eyed man, his face badly bruised, claimed to have seen Ba.s.si shot in the head in the last moments of the resistance, after the invading troops had blown the main dome and stormed the barricades. Several said that he was sleeping deep beneath one of the moon"s icefields, and would waken again in Paris"s hour of need-something I had heard many times already, unconsciously echoing the Arthurian legend just as the Ba.s.si"s revolution had so very consciously echoed the Parisian communes of the 19th century (in our age, all revolutionaries worth their salt must pay fastidious attention to precedent). All worthless, yet I felt that I was growing near to understanding him. Sometimes he was in my dreams. But suddenly my work no longer mattered, for I contrived my rendezvous with Demi Lacombe. It was at another of the receptions with which the small community within the diplomatic quarter bolstered its sense of its own worth. It was easily done. By an arrangement I was later to regret, Cris DeHon diverted Dev Veeder into a long and earnest conversation with a visiting journalist about the anti-reconstruction propaganda that was circulating in the general population (in truth no more than a few scruffy leaflets and some motile slogans planted more to irritate the occupying troops than rally the vestigial resistance, but how Dev preened before the journalist"s floating camera). I exchanged a glance with Demi Lacombe, and she set her bulb of wheat frappe" on a floating tray and set off past the striped tents erected in the airy glade into the woods beyond. I followed a minute later, my heart beating as quickly and lightly as it had when I had set off on romantic a.s.signations half a century ago. Ferns grew head-high beneath the frothy confections of the trees, but I glimpsed Demi"s pale figure flitting through the green shadows and hurried on into the depths of the ravine which split the quarter"s parkland. We soon left the safety of the trees behind but still she went on and I had to follow, although my eagerness was becoming tempered with a concern that we would be spotted by one of the security things. Yet how wonderful it was, to be chasing that gorgeous creature! We flew down a craggy rock face like creatures in a dream, over vertical fields of brilliantly colored tweaked orchids, along great falls of ferns and vines and air-kelp. Birds lazily swam in the air; beyond the brilliant stars of suspensor lamps, beyond the diamond panes of the quarter"s tent, Saturn blessed us with his pale, benign gaze. The chase ended in a triangular meadow of emerald- green moss, starred with the spikes of tiny red flowers and backed by the tall, ferny cliff of black, heat-shocked basalt down which we had swum. There was a steep drop to the dark lake at the bottom of the ravine at one edge, and a dense little wood of roses grown as tall as trees at the other. The wild heady scent of the roses did nothing to quieten my heart; nor did the way Demi pressed her hands over mine. The bandage on her left wrist was gone; those smart bacteria had worked their magic. "Thank you, Fredo," she said. "Thank you for this. If I couldn"t get away from him now and then I swear I would go crazy." How can I describe what she looked like in that moment? Her silvery hair unbound about her heart-shaped face, which was mere centimeters from my own. Her pale, gauzy trousers and blouson floating about her body. Her scent so much like the scent of the wild roses. The virides- cent light of that little meadow, filtered through ferns and roses, gave her pale skin an underwater cast; she might have been a Nereid indeed, clasping a swooning sailor to her bosom, "Dev Veeder," I said stupidly. "He"s declared his love for me." "You must be careful how you respond. You may think him foolish, but it will be dangerous to insult his honor." "It"s so f.u.c.ked up," the gorgeous creature declared. She let go of my hands and strode the width of the meadow in four graceful strides, came back to me in four more. "I can"t work, the way he follows me around everywhere." "His devotion is exceptional. I take it that you do not reciprocate his infatuation." "If you mean do I love him, do I want to marry him, no. No. I thought I liked him, but I knew better than to sleep with him because I know what a big thing it is with you Greater Brazilians." I thought then that it might have been better if she had slept with him as soon as possible, since it would have instantly devalued her in Dev Veeder"s eyes. She would have become his mistress, but never his wife.
Demi said, "I think he"s been out here too long. I"ve heard dreadful stories about him."
"Well, we have been at war."
"That he tortures his prisoners," she said. "That he enjoys it."
"He is a soldier. Sometimes it is necessary to do things in war which would be unforgivable in peacetime."
I did not particularly want to defend Dev Veeder, but I did not yet know what she wanted of me, and I was feeling an old man"s caution.
"He enjoys it," she said again.
"Perhaps he enjoys carrying out his duty."
"A Jesuitical distinction if ever I heard one."
"I was educated by them, as a matter of fact."
"So was I! Just outside Dublin. A horrible gray pile of a Place that smelled of damp and floor polish and cheap disinfectant. Brr," she said, and shuddered and smiled. "I bet you had to endure that lecture on d.a.m.nation and eternity. The sparrow flying from one end of the Universe to the other..."
"On each circuit carrying away in its beak a grain of rice from a mountain as tall as the Moon"s...o...b..t."
"In our lecture the mountain was made of sand. And I guess your priests were men, not women. I still remember the punchline. Even when the sparrow had finished its task not one moment of eternity had pa.s.sed. They knew how to leave a mark on your soul, the Jesuits. I learned to hate them because they scared me into being good."
"I am sure that you needed little tuition in that direction, Dr. Lacombe."
"Demi, Fredo. Call me Demi. uit being so formal."
"Demi, then."
"They gave me a strong sense of duty too, the Jesuits. I came here to do a job. An important job."
I began to understand what she wanted. I said, "Dev Veeder"s attentions are interfering with your work."
"He"s an impossible man. He says that he wants to help me, but he won"t listen when I try to tell him that he could best help by letting me get on with my work on my own."
"He is from a good family. Very old-fashioned."
"Right. He insists on going everywhere with me, and insists that I stay locked up in the quarter when he can"t spare the time to escort me. So I"m way behind in my survey. I mean, I knew it would be a big job, but Dev is making it impossible. And it"s so important that it gets done. This was such a wonderful place, before the war." She made a sweeping gesture that took in the roses, the falls of ferns, the viridescent moss. "It was all like this, then."
"The restoration is an important symbol of political faith."
"Well, there"s that. But this city was a biotech showpiece before the war. It had more gene wizards than any other colony, and they exported their expertise to almost everywhere else in the outer system.
There"s so much we can learn from what"s left, and so much more we can learn during the reconstruction."
"And of course you want to play a part in that. It would set the cap on your career."
"It was like a work of art," Demi Lacombe said. "It would be a terrible sin not to try and restore it.
There"s a man I need to see. Away from Dev."
"One of the survivors."
"Yani Hakaiopulos. He was a gene wizard, once upon a time. As great a talent as Sri Hong-Owen or
Avernus. He retired a long time ago, but he helped entrain the basic ecological cycles which underpinned everything else. I can learn so much from him, if I"m given the chance." "But he won"t talk if Dev Veeder is with you." "The Parisians think that Dev is a war criminal." "If they had won the war, perhaps that"s what he would have become. But they did not." "Will you help me, Fredo? You go out into the city alone. You interview the people there." "And you want me to interview this man about the city"s ecosystems? I would not know where to begin." "No," Demi Lacombe said, her gaze bright and bold. "I want you to take me with you." "Without Dev Veeder"s knowledge." "Under his nose." "He is the chief of police, Demi. No one can come and go without his knowledge." "I think I"ve found a way," Demi Lacombe said. She stepped back and put two fingers between her blood-red lips and whistled, a single shrill note so loud it startled me, and disturbed a flock of small brown birds which had been perching in the ferns overhead. As they tumbled through the air, a man stepped out of the roses on the other side of the little meadow. My heart gave a little leap, tugged by guilt, and I was suddenly aware of how much like illicit lovers Demi La- combe and I must have looked. But the man was no man at all, merely one of the gardeners, the tutelary spirits of the parkland. Before the revolution, before the uiet War, the government of Paris, Dione was an attempt to revive the quaint notion of technodemocracy, an experiment in citizen partic.i.p.ation that on Earth had been dismissed long ago as just another Utopian idea that was simply too unwieldy in practice. But it had briefly flourished in the little goldfish bowl of the colony city; every citizen could put a motion to change any aspect of governance providing he could enlist a quorum of supporters, and the motion would be enforced by the appropriate moderating committee if a sufficient majority voted it through. It was a horrible example of how lazy and misguided rulers, who should have been elevated above the mob by virtue of breeding or ability, devolve their natural obligations to ignorance, prejudice and the leveling force of pop- f ular taste. Imagine the time wasted in uniformed debate j: over trivial issues, the constant babble of prejudices masquerading as opinion or even fact! It had been a society shaped not by taste or intelligence but by a kind of directionless, mindless flailing reminiscent of Darwinian evolution. We have mastered evolution, and we must be masters of the evolution of our civilization, too. Yet Paris"s nascent technodemocracy had thrown up one or two interesting ideas, and one of these was its method of capital punishment. Like all democracies, it mistakenly believed in the essential perfectibility of all men, and so practiced rehabilitation of its criminals rather than punishment. But even it had to admit that there were some criminals who, by genetic inheritance, parental conditioning or choice, were irredeemable. As thrifty as the rest of the energy- and resource-poor colonies of the outer solar system, Paris did not waste material and labor in constructing prisons for these wretches; nor did it waste their potential for labor by executing them. Instead, they were lobotomized and fitted with transducer and control chips, transforming psychopaths into useful servants, meat extensions of the control system which maintained the parklands and wilderness and farms of the city. The gardener Demi had summoned from his hiding place had obviously been an untweaked immigrant, for he was no taller than me. Like the gardener I had encountered when wandering the parkland like a lorn, lovesick fool, hoping to encounter Demi Lacombe, he was st.u.r.dy, barechested and barefoot, his white trousers ragged, his shaven head scarred by the operation which had transformed him, encircled by a coppery headband into which was woven a high-gain broad band antenna. Through this he was linked to both his fellows and the computers which controlled the climate of the parkland, its streams, its hidden machines, and even its animals, which all were fitted with control chips too. Several of the small brown birds which had fallen from the ferns fluttered about his head, calling in high excited voices, unnervingly like those of small children, before flying away over the edge of the meadow. With a rustling and snapping of canes, a pygmy mammoth emerged from the roses, its long russet hair combed straight and gleaming with oils, its trunk flexed at its broad forehead as the sensitive pink tip snuffled the air. Tools and boxes hung on its flanks, attached to a rope harness. The gardener scarcely glanced at me; his attention was on Demi Lacombe. I thought I saw a look pa.s.s between them, crackling with a shared emotion. Desire, I thought, and in that moment unknowingly sealed her fate, for I was suddenly, violently, unreasonably jealous of the poor child of nature she had summoned, believing that Cris DeHon"s malicious insinuations may have been right all along. "He knows me," Demi Lacombe said softly. "I can speak with him." "Anyone can speak to them," I said. "I understand they are programmed to understand a few simple commands. But mostly they keep away from the people they serve. It"s better that way." Demi Lacombe smiled and touched her left temple with her forefinger. "I mean that I can truly talk with him. I have an implant similar to his, so that I can access the higher functions of the machines which control the habitat. Through them, I can talk with him. Watch, Fredo! I can send him away as easily as I summoned him." She made no signal, but the gardener turned and parted the canes of the roses and vanished into them. The mammoth turned too and trotted after him. It was unnervingly like magic, and I briefly wondered how else she might have commanded the brute, before crushing the vile image as a man might crush a loathsome worm beneath the heel of his boot. Demi said, "He showed me a way out of here that Dev and his troopers don"t know about." I laughed, a trifle excessively I fear. I was not quite myself. Roses in a wild garden, a woman trapped by her own beauty, a compliant monster. I said, "Really, Demi. A secret pa.s.sage?" "A stream was diverted when the layout of the parkland was redesigned twenty years ago. Its sink pipe wasn"t sealed up because it lies at the bottom of the lake, down there." She stepped gracefully to the edge of the meadow. A light wind blew up the face of the cliff, stirring her long, silvery hah- as she pointed downward; she looked like a warrior from some pre-technological myth. I shuffled carefully to her side, and looked down at the long, narrow sleeve of black water that was wedged at the bottom of the ravine, between the base of the cliff on which we stood and the wall of bare sheetrock which rose in huge bolted slabs toward the foot of one of the tent"s diamond panes, high above us. Demi said, "The pipe is flooded, but the gardeners can give me one of the air masks they wear when they clean out the bulk storage tanks. There"s a pressure gate which must be opened-it fell closed when the main dome was blown. Then I"ll be outside." "It sounds dangerous. More dangerous than Dev Veeder." "I"ve tested the pressure gate. I know it works. But I need help getting across the main part of the city." She had turned to me, her face shining with excitement. How young she was, how lovely! Her scent was very strong at that moment; I could have drowned in it quite happily. She said, "I need your help, Fredo. Will you help me?" For a moment, I quite forget my loathsome spasm of jealousy. "Of course," I said. "Of course I will, my dear Demi. How could I refuse the plea of a maiden in distress?" w Five We made our plans as we walked back through the s.h.a.ggy, exuberances of the cypresses toward the lights and noise of the party. We took care to return to it separately, from different directions, but still my heart gave a little leap when I saw Dev Veeder moving purposefully through knots of chattering people, hauling himself hand over hand along one of the waist-high tethers which webbed the lawn. He was making straight for Demi, and when he reached her she put her hand on his shoulder and her lovely, delicate face close to his and talked quietly into his ear. He nodded and smiled, and she smiled too, my cunning minx. "Now you can tell me all about it." I swung around so quickly that I would have floated above the heads of the chattering party-goers if Cris DeHon had not caught my wrist. The neuter"s fingers were long and delicate, and fever-hot. It wore a white blouson slashed here and there to show flashes of scarlet lining, as if it were imitating the victim of some primitive and b.l.o.o.d.y rite. Its hair was dyed a crisp white, and stiffened in little spikes. "Tell me all about it," DeHon said. "What plot"s afoot? Is it love?" I smiled into the neuter"s sharp pale face. "Don"t be ridiculous." "A marriage of summer and winter is not unknown. And if you"re half the distinguished scholar you claim to be, you"d be quite a catch for a struggling academic from the most backward and impoverished country of the Alliance." "She was showing me some of the wonders of our gardens," I said, shaking free of DeHon"s hot grasp. "This city is famous for its gene wizards." DeHon smiled craftily, looking sidelong through the crowd at Demi Lacombe and Dev Veeder. "I don"t believe it for a minute, but I won"t spoil the fun. The curtain has risen; the play has commenced. For your sake, I hope Dev Veeder will be in a good temper when he discovers your little plot." The night pa.s.sed in a daze of half-sleeping, half-waking. I had never slept well in Dione"s light gravity, and what sleep I had that night was full of murky dreams colored by fear and desire. The next morning, I drank an unaccustomed second cup of coffee at the makeshift cafe" and, when Lavet Corso finally arrived, I instructed him to fly us to the coordinates which Demi Lacombe had given me. He stared at me insolently, the seams in his face tightening around his mouth. "That"s nothing but a park, boss." "Nevertheless, that is where we will go." And so we did, after a brief argument which I quite enjoyed, and which did more to wake me than the coffee did. I was beginning to suspect that Corso"s protests were ritual, like the bargaining one must do in a souk when making a purchase. Now that the game was afoot, I was in a careless mood of antic.i.p.ation, and did not complain at the pitch and yaw of the airframe as Corso slipped it through updraughts, spiraling down to the brown and black wreckage of the park. We swooped in low over the tops of skeletal trees which raised their white arms high above a wasteland of deliquescing vegetation. The stink was horrible. An eye of water gleamed in the shadow of a low cliff of raw basalt, and a small figure stepped from a cleft at the foot of the cliff and semaph.o.r.ed its arms. A flood of relief and renewed desire turned my poor foolish heart quite over. I tapped Corso"s shoulder, but he had already seen her. The wings of the airframe boomed as they shed air, and we skidded across a black carpet of mulch. Demi Lacombe floated down from the cleft, from which a little water still trickled into what had once been a lake, and ran to us with huge loping strides, sleek in silvery skinthins which hugged every contour of her slim body. An airmask and a small tank dangled from one hand. Her wet hair was snarled around her beautiful face, made yet more beautiful by the brilliant smile she turned on me.
Corso gave a low whistle, and I said sharply, "Enough of that. Remember your poor dead wife." "You"re late," Demi said breathlessly. "My guide has a bad sense of time." "It doesn"t matter. Well, I"m ready.
Let"s go!" "You have not brought... more suitable attire?" Demi laughed, and c.o.c.ked her hip. The silvery material was molded tightly to every centimeter of her body. "What"s wrong? You don"t like this?"
I liked it very much indeed, of course, and it was obvious at Corso did too. He was cranking up the prop, to give enough kinetic energy to a.s.sist takeoff. When I told him aaM futures sharply to hurry up, he mumbled something about overloading.
"Nonsense. You hardly expect my pa.s.senger to walk. Look lively! Every moment we stay here risks discovery."
"I didn"t sign up for adventure," Corso said. He straightened, with one hand to the small of his back.
"Maybe you better tell me what this is all about, boss."
"You just get us to the warrens," I said.
"No," Demi said, "he"s right." She stepped up to Corso and touched his arm and said, "You"re Lavet Corso, aren"t you? Professor-Doctor Graves has told me so much about the help you"ve given him."
"And who are you?"
"Dr. Demi Lacombe. I"m here to help reconstruct your wonderful ecosystem, and I want to talk to Yard Hakaiopulos."
"Really," Corso said, but I could see that he was weakening. "Why not have your boyfriend haul him in?"
"My boyfriend?"
"Colonel Veeder. You are the woman he"s been escorting everywhere."
"Well, that"s true, but he isn"t my boyfriend, and that"s why I need your help."
Corso locked the prop"s winding mechanism and said, "You can try and talk to Yani if you like, but you"ll find he"s immune to your charms. Climb on board now, both of you. Let"s see if I can get this higher than the trees."
Demi looked at the flimsy airframe and said, "I thought it would be safer to walk."
"Not at all," I said. "It would take several hours, and we would be bound to encounter more than one of the killing machines, and they would report straight back to the security forces. But no one bothers to watch where we go."
"You had better be right, boss."
The airframe jinked across the rotten black carpet and bounded into the air. Demi, seated behind me, screamed loudly and happily. She had put her arms around my waist; the pressure of her body against my back, and her musky scent, almost as strong as the cabbage-stink of the rotten vegetation, awakened a part of me that had been sleeping for quite some time.
Although Corso was pedaling hard, the airframe clambered through the middle air of the dome with the grace of a pregnant dragonfly. I leaned back and pointed out to Demi the remains of barricades across the avenues, the ruined hulk of the Bourse, like a shattered wedding cake, where the last of those citizens who had been in or near to pressure suits when the dome had been blown open had made their final stand. Once, I saw the silver twinkle of a killing machine stalking down the middle of the Avenue des fitoiles; Corso must have seen it too, for he veered the airframe away, scudding in toward one of the flat rooftops cl.u.s.tered around the edge of the dome.
The place was an automated distribution warehouse of some kind, and although it would have been cleared of any bodies, the red-lit echoing emptiness of its storage areas and ramps was eerie. Demi kept close to me as Corso led us down a narrow street. I told her about Marisa Ba.s.si"s early days in Paris, Dione, when as an immigrant he had worked in one of these warehouses, rising quickly to become its supervisor, then moving on to become a partner in an import- export business of dubious legality, where he had made enough money to buy his citizenship. "And two years after that he became a councillor, and then the war came. The rest will be history, once I have written it." "Your history, maybe," Corso said. "All history belongs to the winners," I said, "so it will be your history too. If you know anything about Ba.s.si, now"s the time to tell me." "Nothing you need to know, boss," Corso said, with his maddening disingenuousness. Marisa Ba.s.si had been living in this semi-industrial sector when the war began. Imagine his small, spa.r.s.ely furnished room that evening, the sounds of the street drifting up through a window open to catch any stray breeze: a tram rattling through a nearby intersection; the conversation of people strolling about as the suspensor lights dimmed overhead; the smell of food from the cafes and restaurants. Ba.s.si was sitting in a chair, flicking through page after page on his slate-he hated the paperwork which went with his job, and was especially impatient with it now that the first move toward independence had been made-when he heard a distant thump, like a huge door closing. At the same moment the suspensor lights flickered, came back on. Ba.s.si looked out of the window and saw people running, all in one direction, running with huge loping strides like gazelles fleeing a lion"s rush. His heart felt hollow for a moment, then filled with a rush of adrenaline. He called out to someone he recognized, and the man stopped and shouted up that it was the parliament building, someone had blown it up. "It"s war!" the man added, holding up a little sc.r.a.p of TV film. Let"s say that he was a Sicilian too, Bep Martino or some such rough hewn name, a construction worker. He and Ba.s.si played chess and drank rough red wine under the chestnut trees in the little park at the end of the street. "Wait there!" Ba.s.si said. "I"m coming with you!" It seemed that most of the population of Paris had converged on the ruins of the parliament building. It had neatly collapsed on itself, its flat roof draped broken-backed across the pancaked remains of its three stories. People had organized themselves into teams and were carefully picking through the wreckage, chains of men and women pa.s.sing chunks of fractured concrete from top to bottom, stopping every now and again while someone listened for the calls of those who had been buried. Living casualties were carried off to hospital; the dead lay in a neat row under orange blankets on the trampled lawns. Followed by his friend, Marisa Ba.s.si restlessly stalked all the way around the perimeter of the building. Five killed, eighteen injured, a doctor told him, and probably more still to be found in the rubble. Bep Martino appraised the ruins with a critical eye and said that it was a professional job. "Charges placed just so, the walls went out and the floors fell straight down. Boom!" Every so often, he flattened out the TV on his palm and gave a report on what it was saying. Earth"s three major powers had made good their threat, and were sending out what they called an expeditionary force to quell revolutionary elements in their outer colonies. "Note the possessive," Ba.s.si said. "Well, we voted to suspend payments," Martino said, "so I guess we"re all revolutionaries now." "This is our moment," Ba.s.si said.
He stopped to talk with another councillor, a third generation tweak, very tall, and thin as a rail. Stooping, he told Ba.s.si that the air conditioning had failed because of a virus, and software faults had shut down the fusion reactors; the city was running on battery power. "We expected all this," Ba.s.si said impatiently. "It is only a warning. We will get the systems back on line, we will clear this up. We will bury our dead and swear on their graves that they will not have died in vain." He said this last loudly, for the benefit of the people who were gathering around the two councillors, felt a gleeful kick of adrenaline, and added, because he liked the phrase, "This is our moment." "We did not expect them to send soldiers," the tall councillor said gloomily. "We"ll fight if we have to," Ba.s.si said, his face burning with a sudden self-righteous anger. "We built this city; no soldiers can take it from us." People were clapping and shouting all around him now. The councillor took his elbow and said quietly, "Be careful of the mob, Ba.s.si. It"ll eat you up, if you let it." Surely someone would have told him something like that, but with the taste of concrete dust in his throat and his blood up, Marisa Ba.s.si would have shrugged off any advice. It was not a time for moderation or conciliation. That was what he told the city"s prime committee a day later, as they debated their response to the threats made by the Three Powers Alliance, and on that day at least, the council was with him, for it agreed to declare a state of war. The stage was set. Soon, Marisa Ba.s.si would dominate it. The sector where he had lived was dead now; his entire city was dead. Corso, Demi Lacombe and I crept like mice in a deserted house along a walkway which plunged through the dome"s rocky skirt (its diamo