‘You think I know anyone who’d help you with a crazy-ass scheme like this?’
‘I just want to talk to someone about it, is all. If they don’t like it, fine. I’ll give it up there and then.’
‘They’ll most probably think you’re some kind of double agent and kill you.’
‘That’s why I came to you first. You know the right people, and they know you and they trust you. All I want is an introduction. Nothing else.’
Billy shook his head again, but he was smiling now. ‘You really think you can sell it to them?’
Cash smiled back. ‘I sold it to you, didn’t I?
It took a while to set things up: it was close to the end of June when Cash and half a dozen Freedom Riders rode out into the desert on tough little horses, travelling east and then south, crossing a playa into low hills where early in the evening they camped under a stand of young trees with smooth pale trunks and umbrella canopies of hand-shaped leaves. They ate army rations from self-heating pouches, passed around a pipe of marijuana and a flask of pulque, and finalised their plan of action.
The leader of the little group, Arnie Echols, told Cash that the trees under which they’d camped were a variation on the people trees found in just about every city in Greater Brazil, from Detroit to Punta Arenas. Designed by the famous old gene wizard Avernus before she and the rest of the Outers had quit the Moon for Mars and points south, people trees had sugary sap, produced protein-rich nodules and pods that yielded cooking fuel, bark that could be stripped off in layers that could be used to make paper or clothes, and leaves that could be eaten raw or boiled up into a tasty porridge. These tough variants were just as useful, and had been tweaked so that they could grow in every kind of habitat - the salt marshes of what was left of the coastal plain, the dry pine hills, the desert. Everywhere they went, Freedom Riders planted packages containing people-tree seeds, starter cultures of the symbiotic fungus that would help them find water, and fertiliser to kick-start their growth. The trees grew very quickly; stands of them were scattered all over the Southwest.
‘We make little gardens where nothing else will grow,’ Arnie Echols said. ‘And I can tell you that they make living out here much easier.’
One of the men said that they were God’s gift. Another said no, they were from the mind and hand of a gene wizard who had modified Avernus’s design. But where did the inspiration come from, if not from God, the first man said, and they talked seriously about this for some time. Cash learned that the Freedom Riders had no compunction about using every kind of technology to survive in the wilderness. They had stills that pulled moisture from air, featherweight sleeping bags, slates and comms equipment that ran on artificial photosynthesis and plugged into what they called a dark net. A clandestine tribe living in places where men where forbidden to live by law, but not, as one of the Freedom Riders said, by nature.
Cash lay awake most of the night, sore and tired from the long day’s ride. The horses staked out nearby made a tearing sound as they cropped dry grass. The desert spread dark and quiet beyond the hills, under a moonless night sky full of stars. He watched several bright stars moving steadily east to west: satellites and ships in orbit. He felt that he hung suspended between worlds.
Late in the afternoon of the next day, Cash and the Freedom Riders were laid up amongst rocks on a hilltop, in sight of the white house that stood at the head of the ravine, some five klicks away. Two of them went out on foot, carrying explosive charges and an aluminium case containing six dragonfly drones that Cash had liberated from the big R&R base at Loma del Arena with a fake requisition order. The drones would locate cameras and sensors, hack into their radio chips, and insert demons that would take down the house’s security net. The two men returned a couple of hours later, told Cash and Arnie Echols that there were just four guards at the house, but there were wolves, too.
‘That’s a bad complication,’ Arnie Echols said. ‘Those things will be better armed than we are, and they can outrun a car, let alone a horse.’
‘They patrolled every airbase I flew from, back in the day,’ Cash said. ‘They’re smart and fierce, sure, but they’re only machines. They’ll be linked to the AI that controls the security net. Once the drones have done their work, they’ll go down like the cameras and everything else. You’ll see.’
Weeks later, Cash told Billy Dupree that the raid had been like a scene from one of those old cowboy movies of the long ago, with Indians raiding a homestead. After the drones had taken down the security and communications systems, and knocked out the wolves, explosive charges planted to the west of the house went up in a showy and distracting column of red fire, and the Freedom Riders rode up the dry creek to the east and fired canisters of riot gas through the windows. The guards had come stumbling out, coughing and choking, and had immediately surrendered.
‘The news had it that you tortured and killed the guards,’ Billy said.
‘We winged one, is all. The youngest. He came out with his pistol drawn and started firing at random. Nearly hit me,’ Cash said, remembering how the guard had staggered across the dark terrace, weeping and snorting and firing his gun at shadows. ‘A couple of rounds went whooping past my head, I fell flat on my ass, and one of my friends shot the guy. It busted his arm and knocked him down, and that was that.’
‘And then you blew up the house.’
‘Then I took pictures of the house, which I know you’ve seen.’
It had been a hunting lodge owned by a senior member of the Montoya family, a simple but beautiful place with fieldstone fireplaces and old wooden furniture, rugs and the skins of wolves and a bear on the flagstone floors, and heads of deer, pronghorn antelope, and mountain lions on the walls. Cash had taken plenty of pictures of the heads and the skins, documenting how Carlos Montoya and his sons spent their time out in the desert, hunting animals reintroduced by the R&R Corps, treating the rewilded land as if it was their own private kingdom.
‘When I was done, we walked the guards down the creek a ways, and then blew it all to hell,’ Cash said. ‘And rode straight out as fast as we could.’
‘You just went right ahead and did it, didn’t you? Walked away from us and everything we did for you without so much as a goodbye. And now you’re back, and I have to wonder what it is you want,’ Billy said.
‘I know you and Uncle Howard and everyone else must be pretty mad at me. I don’t blame you. As to why I’m here, I want you to know what’s been going on. What I learned.’
‘I’ve half a mind to rat you out,’ Billy said. ‘The reward would come in handy, and it would get the police and the OSS off our backs.’
‘I didn’t think they’d go after anyone but me. I apologise for that.’
‘They turned everything in the base upside down, looking for you.’
‘Then it’s a good thing I didn’t tell you what I was planning to do.’
‘You have balls of steel even coming here,’ Billy said.
They were sitting knee to knee in the storeroom of a café at the edge of Bastrop, with two friends of Billy’s keeping watch outside. Cash was travelling under a fake ID.
‘If you came here because you need more plastic explosive,’ Billy said, ‘then count me out. How many places have you done now? Seven?’
‘Just two. The rest were down to parties unknown who I guess just flat-out liked my idea. We have enough munitions to knock down every hunting lodge and holiday home in the entire region if we wanted to,’ Cash said. ‘But there’s too much security around them now, and too many army patrols in the desert. Why I’m here, one reason anyhow, is I want you to know I’m moving on.’
‘You still haven’t told me why you’re doing this,’ Billy said. ‘Wasn’t smuggling illegal shit exciting enough?’
‘What I was doing, it couldn’t ever satisfy me, after the kind of flying I used to do.’
‘That friend of yours got you stirred up, didn’t he? I saw it at the time, and I should have done something about it.’
‘You know those people trees that grow out in the desert, and in the marshes along the coast?’
‘Yeah. There’s a couple of crews dedicated to ripping them out.’
‘Good luck to them. The Freedom Riders have been planting them for about four years now. They grow real fast and they’re all over the place. Here’s a funny thing. Anywhere you dig around one of the trees, you find these black threads. They grow through soil or sand or even through rock, all the way down to the water table, no matter how deep it is. And if the water is salty, the black stuff filters out the salt, brings up pure clean fresh stuff for the tree. The Freedom Riders claim those black threads are some kind of fungus, but I’ve seen stuff on the Moon looks just like it. Vacuum organisms. They grow out on the surface, or under tents with funny atmospheric mixes that people can’t breathe. And they aren’t really organisms - they aren’t really alive. Organisms are made up of cells. Vacuum organisms are made up of tiny machines that behave like cells, what’s called bound nanotech.’
‘So they’re regular miracles of modern science,’ Billy said. ‘What does this have to do with you and me and this whole mess?’
‘I met with one of the people who are involved with this whole tree thing, and also with passing on information about leaving the cities, and how to live lightly on the land. I got his attention, and he wants me to go work with him.’
‘So I guess this is goodbye.’
‘I know if I asked you to join me you’d laugh in my face—’
‘Or maybe punch you upside the head, if I thought it would knock any sense into you.’
‘Just take a look at this,’ Cash said, and held out a data needle. ‘There’s information about all the places we dealt with. It shows you what our so-called masters get up to out in the wild, where ordinary folk aren’t allowed to go. And there’s stuff about how to live out in the wild, too. Take a look, make copies, pass them around.’
Billy Dupree studied Cash and said, ‘You’ve changed.’
‘I found something to be serious about. I haven’t been drinking, either,’ Cash said. ‘That’s why my hands are shaking, in case you thought it was because I had the fear.’
Billy reached out and took the data needle. ‘I’ll look at this, but don’t think it’ll change anything.’
‘Things are going to change whether you like it or not,’ Cash said. ‘This might help you see which side is the right side, when it does.’
Two weeks later, Cash Baker was sitting with Arnie Echols in a ruined one-and-a-half storey house on the outskirts of Albuquerque, at the western edge of an old exurb. Streets and streets of houses half-drowned by sand, standing forlorn and roofless amongst thorny scrub. It was close to midnight. No light but the stars and a sickle moon, the vast desert quiet stretched all around.
‘Here he comes,’ Arnie Echols said, and a moment later Cash heard the faint drone of tyres on sand. He put on his night-vision goggles and followed Arnie out into the middle of the street.
Three trikes cut around a stand of mesquite and drew up a few metres away. A tall, lithe man swung off the lead trike and came towards them. Even in the false greens of the night-vision goggles, Cash could see that he was young and handsome, long pale hair framing a face with high cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes. Holding out a hand and telling Cash, ‘It’s good to meet you at last, Captain Baker. I’m Alder Hong-Owen.’
7
After his overture to Sri Hong-Owen was so rudely rebuffed, Loc moved her son to Paris, Dione. Partly because the family of the young man who had been framed for the girl’s murder by Captain Neves refused to accept the official story and were spreading rumours and causing Berry all kinds of trouble; partly because Loc would be able keep a close personal watch on him in Paris, and would know at once if his mother ever reached out to him. But she never did. Berry took up with his old friends, drinking hard and doing every kind of psychotropic; Loc sent a few choice clips of Berry’s more embarrassing moments to Sri’s lieutenant, Raphael, but received no reply. The gene wizard had cut herself off from her son as completely as she had cut herself off from the rest of the Saturn System.
Loc kept an eye on Berry, just in case, and turned to his other special projects. He was finally beginning to make some money from the Quiet War: a steady income from the art-smuggling business that he and Captain Neves had taken over after Colonel Faustino Malarte had been removed from the scene; shares in licensing various scraps of Outer technology he’d passed on to a minor member of the Gamaliel family; fees paid by businesses that needed advice on and access to the Saturn System. But he did not yet have enough to set himself up in the style he deserved when he at last returned to Earth, and besides, money was only a means to an end. The ambition that had driven him to study relentlessly for the civil service exams when he’d been a ragged kid in the slums of Caraccas drove him still. He was not yet forty. He had another century ahead of him; perhaps more. He did not want to spend it running some minor consultancy business or growing roses in a gated arcology. He wanted to leave his mark on the world. He wanted to change history. He wanted to found a dynasty that would rival the greatest of the great families.
Loc had considerable autonomy as head of the Office of Special Affairs, but his plans were conditional on the whims of his superiors and the vagaries of the political climate, and the latter had begun to exhibit some alarming shifts of late. President Nabuco had used emergency powers granted by one of his puppet committees to suspend elections and extend the reach of the Office for Strategic Services, which had recently arrested on conspiracy charges several senior members of the Fonseca and Fontaine families who had been his most vocal critics. There was growing unrest in almost every territory in Greater Brazil, especially the north, which had suffered a year of droughts and food shortages. And the Pacific Community was slowly but surely strengthening its presence in the Saturn System: constructing a small city on Iapetus and expanding its base on Phoebe; taking control of previously unoccupied oases built by Outers before the war on two moons of the inner system, Atlas and Pandora; claiming several of the small irregular moons that orbited at the outer edge of the Saturn System by emplacing a few settlers in crude cut-and-cover habitats. The PacCom government was also campaigning for some form of reconciliation with the Outers, arguing that the Brazilian policy of control and segregation was proving too difficult and costly to sustain, suggesting that a managed retreat and a client-state relationship with the Outers was the best way forward. That the future was not in empire and dominion, but in commonwealth and partnership.