The Quiet War
4(i).
Much later, Macy Minnot would come to believe that Emmanuel Vargo had been the first casualty of the war. But when she first heard about the ecosystem engineer's death she thought that it was nothing more sinister than bad luck. A freak medical mishap. An accident.
Like Macy and the rest of the construction crew, Emmanuel Vargo spent the twelve-week voyage from Earth to Jupiter in the deep sleep of artificial hibernation, drugged and chilled and consuming a minimal amount of oxygen and water while the Brazilian cargo ship fell through eight hundred million kilometres of sunlit black vacuum. He was still asleep when the ship went into orbit around Callisto, the outermost of Jupiter's four large Galilean moons, and first-class passengers and hibernation coffins and cargo pods were offloaded onto a tug that descended to the port, a cluttered slab cantilevered above a dusty plain west of the city of Rainbow Bridge. The tug touched down on a scorched landing apron with the lumbering delicacy of a hippopotamus attempting ballet. A mobile crane unlatched from the tug's cargo frame the truck-sized pod that contained the hibernation coffins and transported it to a pressurised hangar where the coffins were extracted one by one and loaded onto flatbed carts that trundled through subsurface tunnels to the medical facility at the edge of the port. That was where Emmanuel Vargo began to wake, and that was where he died.
Usually, revival from hibernation was routine. Most people woke with nothing worse than a shrivelled stomach, concrete bowels, and an existential hangover. But like every medical procedure, revival had its risks -- signature syndromes, systemic organ failures, metabolic storms. After his core temperature had been gently raised to 37.5° Centigrade, his blood chemistry had been adjusted, and he'd been injected with a cocktail of GABA receptor stimulants, Emmanuel Vargo suffered an episode of chaotic neurological decoupling. Instead of quickly and spontaneously developing the usual pattern of dynamic multi-locus activity, as in waking from ordinary sleep, his neurons began to fire at high rates without any kind of synchrony, disrupting consciousness and coordination of respiration, heartbeat, and blood pressure.
Most victims of CND survived with varying degrees of memory loss and aphasia, but Emmanuel Vargo's episode was exceptionally severe. The electrochemical activity of his brain writhed like a bag of worms. A crash team tried and failed to induce synchrony with microtonic pulsed magnetic fields. His blood pressure collapsed and his heart stopped and did not respond to defibrillation, injection of norepinephrine, or direct massage. While he was being hooked up to a heart-lung bypass, he suffered a major clonic seizure. Two more seizures followed in quick succession. After the third, brain stem activity ceased. Thirty minutes later he was declared brain-dead, and life-support was disconnected.
Emmanuel Vargo had been one of the prime movers of the project to construct a biome at the city of Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, a symbol of cooperation and reconciliation between Earth and the Outer System, and a major step in the long campaign to defuse tension between Earth's radical green conservatism and the smorgasbord of radical doctrines and utopian philosophies of the Outer System's city-states and settlements. Avernus, the Outer System's most notorious gene wizard, had drawn on her prodigious stores of karma to sponsor the biome's construction, and Maximilian Peixoto and the green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos had persuaded the Brazilian government to underwrite the cost of designing and quickening of its ecosystem. Although the green saint's great-great-grandson, Euclides Peixoto, had been appointed titular head of the construction crew, Emmanuel Vargo had been responsible for every aspect of the planning and organisation of Greater Brazil's contribution. He'd collaborated with Oscar Finnegan Ramos's protégée, Sri Hong-Owen, in the design of the ecosystem, liaised with the Callistan crew during the construction of the biome's tent, and would have been responsible for supervising the elaboration and quickening of the ecosystem from start to finish.
Euclides Peixoto said all this and more two days after Emmanuel Vargo's death, in a short speech at the ceremony that marked the official beginning of the construction crew's work. This was on the broad lawn at the northern tip of the biome's main island. Euclides Peixoto stood at a podium with the empty lake bed stretching behind him under the gigantic tent of diamond and polymer panes and fullerene struts, and his audience seated in front of him on a crescent of folding chairs: the Brazilian ambassador and his retinue of aides, members of the Peixoto family's trade mission, a colourful medley of representatives from the Callistan congress and the city council of Rainbow Bridge, the men and women of the construction crew. A little shoal of drones hung at different levels in the air, transmitting the ceremony to citizens of Rainbow Bridge and other cities and settlements on Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa, and to the mining camps on tiny, distant Himalia and Elara.
Sitting amongst the rest of the construction crew, Macy Minnot had to admit that Euclides Peixoto definitely looked the part. Handsome in a two-piece suit whose chlorophyll hue matched the coveralls of the construction crew, a black armband fastened around his left sleeve, he spoke in a sonorous but engaging tone. Eulogising Emmanuel Vargo's contribution to the project, recounting a couple of well-judged anecdotes, winding up by saying that despite their grievous loss everyone in the crew was determined to work as well as they could to bring to life a beautiful and robust biome, and honour the memory of an extraordinarily talented ecosystem engineer, someone he was proud to have considered a friend.
Hard to believe this was the same man who just two days ago had badly botched the announcement of Emmanuel Vargo's death. The crew had assembled for what they'd believed would be an ordinary briefing, and without any preamble Euclides Peixoto had told them that Maximilian Peixoto, the husband of the President of Greater Brazil, had died while they'd been in hibernation during the voyage from Earth to Callisto. And before they'd had a chance to absorb that bombshell, he'd blurted out that Emmanuel Vargo had died too, during the revival process. Before he could say anything else, Ursula Freye had spoken up from the back of the room. Ursula and Emmanuel Vargo had become lovers soon after she'd been recruited to the construction crew. Trembling and grimly pale, she'd said that it was obvious that Manny had been murdered by enemies of the project, and demanded an immediate investigation. Speller Twain, the crew's security chief, had tried to hustle her away and there'd been an undignified struggle. Shouts, jeers, shrieks. The meeting had erupted into chaos, and Euclides Peixoto had fled without explaining how the project would proceed after the death of its engineer.
Now, as the applause at the end of his speech pattered into silence, Euclides Peixoto invited the young girl who had won the lottery to step forward. Eight years old, tall and slender in a simple white dress, the child took the remote control from him and without ceremony pressed its red button. At dozens of points along the eastern and western shores of the lake, gouts of water burst roaring from fat pipes and crashed down to the lake floor. Vast clouds of spray billowed up, softening the glare of the chandelier lights strung along the high ridge of the tent and filling the cool air with a fresh, steely odour. Above another wave of applause, Euclides Peixoto declared in ringing tones that the quickening of the biome had begun.
#
Macy Minnot had never had much time for Euclides Peixoto. The man was not only a political appointee who'd been given his job because of an accident of birth, he was also a strutting fool who couldn't draw a trophic web, resurrect dead mud or even plant out a flowerpot, much less a forest or marsh, to save his life. But she'd liked and respected Emmanuel Vargo, who'd risen from humble beginnings to become one of the best ecological engineers on Earth, and had shown her many small kindnesses and courtesies after he'd selected her to be part of his crew.
That had been a little over a year ago, when Macy, recently promoted to gang leader, had been working with Reclamation and Reconstruction Crew #553 at Lake Champlain, on the northern border of newly conquered territory gifted to the Fontaine family. Guerrillas, wildsiders and tribes of squatters had been pushed out of the region after a decade of fierce fighting, and R&R #553 had moved in to undo a couple of centuries of ecological damage. Before the crew began its work, nothing much had lived in the lake but blooms of blue-green algae, mitten crabs, snake-fish, and a pernicious variety of tweaked water hyacinth, fast-growing and hardy, that had been introduced to many freshwater bodies in the middle of the twenty-first century during early but misguided attempts at remediation. And thanks to the oil-burning culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a characteristic layer of sediment, polluted with fossil-fuel residues and heavy metals, covered the bottom of the lake: anaerobic, stinking, tarry-black, and completely lifeless. Macy Minnot was in charge of the gang that had the job of transforming this oleanthropocene sludge into honest-to-goodness mud. They used big pumps to suck up sediment and pump it, through baffles impregnated with polymers and plastizymes that removed heavy metals and other highly toxic substances, into a series of fermentation tanks where cocktails of tweaked microbes digested organic material; at the end of the process, the pristine mud was mixed with a balanced microbial population and pumped back onto the lake bed. It had taken three months to work down from the northern end of the lake to Malletts Bay. The crew had been hit by a couple of big storms and harassed by wildsiders and bandits -- in the middle of one raid Macy had seen a smart RPG miss a pumping platform by no more than a metre, the thing making a long, lazy turn in midair and beginning to shark back in when its motor ran out of gas and it plunged into the lake and blew about a gazillion litres of water all over the crew barge. Mostly, though, the work was gravy. Hard and dirty, for sure, but tremendously worthwhile.
After its sediment and water had been processed and cleansed, the lake would be stocked with phytoplankton and waterweed, invertebrates and fish: an entire trophic web built from scratch and set running. Macy gave only lip service to worship of Gaia, but as far as she was concerned the restoration of a ruined, near-dead lake to something close to its pristine state was pretty much a religious experience. She loved her work and woke up every morning happy and grateful, eager to get going.
R&R #553 was commanded by Roxy Parrish, an experienced, sharp-minded woman in her fifties who took no bullshit from anyone, asked from her people only competence, hard work and loyalty, and in return provided them with unstinting support and protection from the worst whims and fancies of family bureaucrats. Every week or so she stopped by Macy's floating complex of barges, pumping platforms and coffer dams to check progress, discuss snags, and exchange gossip about the other R&R crews working the region. One summer evening, Roxy and Macy were up on the flying bridge of the crew barge, drinking beer and watching the sunset burnish the wide sweep of calm water that stretched out to low hills clad in ragged patches of newly planted forest at the eastern shore. A skein of geese laboured northwards across the dark blue sky, calling each to each. Macy, as happy as she had ever been, took a sip of beer and thought that next year those geese would find a good home here, if they wanted to stop awhile. She said something to that effect to her boss, and Roxy asked her what she thought she would be doing this time next year.
'When this project is finished? I guess it depends where we're sent,' Macy said. She was tilted back in her canvas chair, auburn hair loose about the shoulders of her denim shirt, roughened hands cradling her beer bottle against the waist snap of her jeans, work boots cocked on the rail of the flying bridge.
'This is a pretty good crew, so I can understand why you'd want to stick with us. But you're young, you have some talent, and you need all the experience you can get. I think you ought to take a look at this,' Roxy said, pulling her slate from her sling bag.
That was when Macy first learned that the green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos and the infamous gene wizard Avernus were sponsoring construction of a biome in the city of Rainbow Bridge on Callisto, Jupiter's second-largest moon, and the Peixoto family were assembling a crew that would engineer its ecosystem from scratch.
'Why me?' Macy said. 'This is landscaping. It's a big job and it's in a weird place, but that's all there is to it.'
'Read the specs,' Roxy said. 'Most of the park will be a freshwater lake. They need people who'll be able to quicken it, and one of those people will be responsible for the microbial ecology. It's interesting work and it will stretch you in all kinds of interesting ways. The engineer slated to lead the crew, Emmanuel Vargo, is at the top of his game, and I bet you could learn all kinds of new wrinkles from the Outers. They'd been developing and maintaining closed-cycle ecosystems for more than a hundred years. And then there's the chance to meet and maybe work with Avernus, who's about as famous as Darwin or Einstein or any other scientist you care to mention.'
'I appreciate the hard sell,' Macy said. 'But it's an awful long way to go, and there must be a hundred people more qualified to work on this thing than me. A thousand.'
'I wouldn't be too sure. You're one of the best microbial jockeys I know. You have a frank manner that sometimes causes friction with other gang leaders, but you're a hard worker, and you're young and smart and ambitious. And this kind of opportunity comes but once in a lifetime, Macy. You might not see that now, but you will.'
'I'm beginning to get the feeling that I don't have much choice about volunteering.'
'There's that frank manner I mentioned,' Roxy said. 'I'll be just as frank. I was hoping you'd go for this straight away. Not just because it would make my job easier, but also because I really do believe that this is a great opportunity for you, and of all my people you're the best candidate. So if you don't volunteer, then yes, I'll have to put your name forward, and you won't get to have any say in the matter. We aren't the Army or the Air Defence Force, but we do have a chain of command. And you're somewhere near the bottom of it.'
Macy thought about that for a little while. Staring off at the V of geese dwindling away towards the darkening rim of the world, saying at last, 'Can I at least ask you who asked you to ask me?'
'As a matter of fact it was the governor of this region.'
'Louis Fontaine?'
'The same. Apparently he's still paying attention to your career.'
'The governor doesn't owe me anything any more,' Macy said. 'And even if he did, I'm not sure if I'd kindly thank him for this.'
Four years ago Macy had been working as an R&R labourer in Chicago, helping to remove the last traces of buildings and roads from the lake shore. It was one of the biggest reclamation projects in the Fontaine family territory. The downtown skyscrapers had been cleared years ago, but work on the suburbs and exurbs seemed never-ending. A runaway without any qualifications or patronage, Macy would have been working as a labourer still if Fela Fontaine, high on three different tailored pyschotropic drugs, hadn't crashed her stolen flitter.
The little aircraft had skimmed low and flat above hectares of tree stumps and rubble, sending people running in every direction, and had made a wide turn and had come back for a second pass, which was when it had clipped the rusted skeleton of an electricity pylon and lost its tail rotor. Spinning like a sycamore seed, it had augered into the lake a couple of hundred metres offshore, and Macy had jumped into a boat and raced to where it was sinking amidst a spreading pool of burning fuel, suffering third-degree burns to her hands and arms when she'd pulled the unconscious girl from the wreckage.
Fela Fontaine's father was the governor of the Northeast Region. He'd visited Macy in hospital, paid for her medical treatment, and arranged a scholarship that put her through college, but she'd had no further contact with him or the rest of the family. Six months later, she learned that Fela Fontaine had committed suicide. As far as she was concerned that was the end of the matter. Sure, she'd been given an opportunity to better herself, but four years down the line she felt that she had proven her own worth. She'd graduated at the top of her class and worked hard at her first posting, the city-sized treatment plant out on Lake Michigan, where she'd solved a knotty washout problem in the remediation reactors and had earned promotion to gang leader. She'd always be grateful for the push she'd been given, but she wanted to put that behind her, wanted to be defined by what she could do, wanted to make her own way in the world without any help or patronage.
So she felt a spark of anger and resentment at the way the governor had casually reached out and interfered with her life; when Roxy Parrish tried to convince her that it really was a good opportunity, she said, 'What does this have to do with him anyway? The biome is the Peixoto family's thing, not the Fontaine's.'
'You really should start paying attention to politics. Otherwise your pristine ignorance will get you into serious trouble one of these days.'
'I know about the Outers. We had a war with them a hundred years ago. Some people want to make up to them. Some other people want to go to war with them again, because they're barely human any more. Some might call that politics,' Macy said. 'I call it foolishness. We got enough to do right here without trying to stamp on a bunch of people who don't happen to live the way we want them to.'
'That's exactly the position of the Fontaines,' Roxy said. 'That's why we've been supporting the Peixoto family's attempts to reach some kind of reconciliation with the Outers, and that's why we support this biome project. Most of the other families opposed it, but the Fontaines and a few others stood shoulder to shoulder with the Peixotos when the bill went through the Senate. And because the Peixotos needed our votes, there'll be a couple of places for our people when they get to picking the crew. As for that, you're not the only microbial jockey being put forward. There are people from every region, but I think you have a good shot at this. I think you might just make it. You're young, but you're good. There's that work you did at Lake Michigan, and the way you make dead mud come back to life is a sweet thing to behold. Your reversion rate is so low it barely registers.'
'Like you always say, it's easier to get it right the first time than do it over.'
'It's easier, but it also takes a lot of skill.'
'If I do get picked, it better be because of what I can do,' Macy said.
'I don't think that Emmanuel Vargo is going to pay any attention to anything else.'
'Well all right then. I guess you can tell them I volunteered.'
Roxy took a sip from her bottle of beer. 'Just this morning, a couple of my labourers stumbled on the remains of a wildsider shrine in the basement of some big old ruin -- automobile parts, bones, a pyramid of more than a hundred human skulls. Some of them are small, children's skulls . . . The world is badly fouled up, kid. It's going to take a long time and a lot of work to fix it. If you do go up and out, I can promise you that there'll be plenty to do when you get back.'
Macy tried not to think much more about it. She told herself that she had little chance of getting a place on the crew, that if it did happen she'd deal with it then, and meanwhile she had plenty of work to do. So she was surprised that she felt a keen pang of disappointment when, two weeks later, she heard that she hadn't made the first cut. She threw herself back into her work. The Lake Champlain project was winding down when Roxy called and told her that Emmanuel Vargo wanted to talk to her.
The engineer arrived in a tilt-rotor plane that stooped low over the treetops and touched down neatly in a meadow at the edge of the lake. He was a tall, square-shouldered man, dark-skinned and bald as a bullet, dressed in blue jeans and an expensive but rumpled yellow silk jacket with a coffee stain on one lapel. He shook Macy's hand with a hardbarked grip, studied her with a keen, searching gaze.
'Let's go for a walk in the woods,' he said.
It was a beautiful crisp day in the middle of October. They rambled under trees laden with glorious reds and golds. Soldiers armed with pulse rifles moved ahead of them and behind them. Emmanuel Vargo asked perceptive questions about Macy's work before coming to the point and telling her that the person originally appointed to construct the microbial ecology of the Rainbow Bridge biome had resigned from the project.
'He's from the European Union, the Couperin family. Ten days ago the head of the Couperins died, and his successor cleaves to the hard line against the Outers. One of the first things he did was withdraw the three people his family had put up for the crew. Bad luck for them, good luck for us, because now we can appoint three Brazilians as replacements. That is why I am here, Miz Minnot. To ask you to consider joining the crew.'
They were standing in a little clearing. The leaves of a clump of maple saplings glowed red as fresh blood in the low afternoon sunlight. There was a chill edge to the clean air.
Macy said, 'Can I ask you a question, Mr Vargo?'
Emmanuel Vargo's smile showed crooked brown teeth and his eyes shone with fine good humour. 'Anything you like.'
'Are you here because someone high up in the Fontaine family recommended me?'
'I'm here because you're the best of all the microbial ecologists who were put forward. Unfortunately, political nonsense meant that I had to select someone else in the first instance. Fortunately, that same political nonsense gives me a chance to remedy the situation. You don't have much experience, but neither do most of the other candidates -- the other families have been reluctant to volunteer senior personnel. It doesn't matter. In this case, where we are working in a new and unknown arena, ability counts for more than experience. And I believe that you are more than capable of doing the work. That's why I came out here to personally ask you to do me the honour of joining my crew.'
Macy wasn't the kind of woman most men would look at twice, but when she smiled, her face lost its habitually guarded expression and was as utterly transformed as a shuttered room suddenly flooded with sunlight. She smiled now, saying, 'Haven't I already volunteered? When do you need me?'
'How quickly can you pack?'
Macy flew out with Manny Vargo an hour later. The next day she started training with the rest of his crew. And now she was on Callisto. Now she had to prove her worth all over again.
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