The Quiet War.

By Paul McAuley.

PART ONE.

1.

Every day the boys woke when the lights came on at 0600. They showered and dressed, made their beds and policed the dormitory, endured inspection by one of their lectors. Breakfast was a dollop of maize gruel and a thimble of green tea. They ate quickly, each boy facing one of his brothers across the long table, no sound but the scrape of plastic spoons on plastic bowls. There were fourteen of them, tall and pale and slender as skinned saplings. Blue-eyed. Their naked scalps shone in the cold light as they bent over their scant repast. At two thousand six hundred days old they were fully grown but with traces of adolescent awkwardness yet remaining. They wore grey paper shirts and trousers, plastic sandals. Red numbers were printed on their shirts, front and back. The numbers were not sequential because more than half their original complement had been culled during the early stages of the programme.

After breakfast, the boys stood to attention in front of the big screen, flanked by their lectors and the avatars of their instructors. A flag filled the screen edge to edge and top to bottom, a real flag videoed somewhere on Earth, gently rippling as if caught in a draught. Its green light washed over their faces and set sparks in their eyes as they stood straightbacked in two rows, right hands starfished on their chests as they recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

The same rituals every morning. The same video. The same flag rippling in exactly the same way. The same scrap of blue visible for half a second in the upper left-hand corner, the blue sky of Earth.

One of the boys, Dave #8, looked for that little flash of blue every day. Sometimes he wondered if his brothers looked for it as well, wondered if they too felt a yearning tug for the world they had been created to defend yet could never visit. He never talked about it, not even to his best friend. Dave #27 . Things like that, feelings that made you think you might be different from your brothers, you kept to yourself. Difference was a weakness, and every kind of weakness must be suppressed. Even so, at the beginning of every day Dave #8 anticipated the fugitive glimpse of that scrap of Earth's sky, and every time he saw it he felt a flutter of longing in his heart.

Their lectors and instructors recited the Pledge of Allegiance, too. Fathers Aldos, Clarke, Ramez and Solomon in their white, rope-girdled habits; the instructors' faces floating in the visors of the man-sized, man-shaped plastic shells of their avatars. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was instructors for ecosystem management, engineering, and sociology; the rest of the week it was theory of war, psychology, economics, and Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, and Russian - the boys were already fluent in English, the lingua franca of the enemy, but some enemy communities still used the languages of the homelands of their ancestors, and so the boys had to learn those, too.

The instructors taught theoretical classes in the morning and the lectors taught practical classes in the afternoon and evening. Maintenance and repair of pressure suits, construction and deployment of demons and data miners, vehicle and flight simulators, immersion scenarios that acquainted the boys with every aspect of everyday life in the cities of the enemy. They practised martial arts, bomb-making, and sabotage, and trained with staffs, swords, knives, and every other kind of blunt and bladed weapon. The practise versions were weighted so that they would find the real thing easier to handle. They learned to strip down, repair, and use firearms in all kinds of conditions. In the dark; in a centrifuge that buffeted them in every direction; in extremes of heat and cold and combinations of rain, snow, and high winds in the weather chamber. Sealed in their pressure suits. Underwater.

Every tenth day they were led in single file down a long umbilical passage to the cargo bay of a shuttle that took them into orbit. Floating weightless in the padded, windowless tube, where each move had to spring from the body's centre of mass and every blow caused an equal and opposite reaction, they had to learn hand-to-hand combat and use of weapons all over again.

The lectors punished every mistake. Father Solomon, who supervised the classes in martial arts, was quickest with the shock stick. Dave #8 and his brothers exhausted themselves in bruising bouts of boxing, capoeira and karate to win his approval, but most of them suffered at least one shock in each and every session.

Sometimes the practical classes were visited by an avatar that wore a woman's face. The lectors treated her with a deference they showed no one else and were quick to answer her questions. Usually she said nothing at all, watching the boys work for a few minutes or an hour before her face vanished from the avatar's visor and it marched out of the gymnasium and returned to its rack. The woman's name was Sri Hong-Owen. The boys had long ago concluded that she must be their mother.

It didn't matter that she looked nothing like them. After all, they'd been cut to resemble the enemy, treated with the same gene therapies, given the same metabolic tweaks, the same so-called enhancements. But the enemy had been human before they had perverted themselves, so the boys must have started out as human beings, too. And because they were clones, which was why they had numbers and why they were all called Dave (a casual joke by one of the instructors which the boys had incorporated into their private mythology), they must all have the same mother . . .

Although they had no proof that die woman was their mother, they had faith that she was. And faith was stronger than any mere proof because it came from God rather than the minds of men. She did not visit them often. Once every fifty days or so. The boys felt blessed by her presence, and worked harder and were more cheerful for days afterwards. Otherwise their routine was unvaried, dedicated to the serious business of learning how to kill and destroy. Learning how to make war.

In the evenings, after Mass, supper, and the struggle sessions in which the boys took turns to confess their sins and suffer the criticism of their brothers, it was politics. Videos crammed with motion and bright colours and swelling music told stories of courage and sacrifice from the history of Greater Brazil, showed how the enemy had betrayed humanity by sheltering on the Moon during the Overturn, how they had refused to return to Earth and help in its reconstruction but had instead run away to Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, how a group of Martians had later tried to attack Earth by nudging one of the Trojan asteroids, whose elliptical orbits around the sun crossed the orbit of Earth, into a collision course. The plot had failed, and a suicide mission of righteous heroes had exploded hydrogen bombs over the Martian settlements at Ares Valles and Hellas Planitia, and deflected the trajectory of a comet falling sunwards. The comet had been broken up by more hydrogen bombs and its fragments had stitched a string of huge craters around Mars's equator and wiped every trace of human life from the face of the red planet. But the enemy were plotting still in their nests and lairs on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn; were actively engaged in elaborating the greatest crime in the history of mankind by the anti-evolutionary engineering of their genomes.

The boys always knew which type of video would be shown because of the meal before it. Their favourite foods, sweet and swimming with fats, before history and heroes; gruel and plain boiled vegetables before crimes against humanity.

In snatched moments, they discussed the heroes they most admired and the battles they would have most liked to have fought in, and speculated about where they might go and what they might do after they had finished their training. Although war had not yet been declared, it was obvious that they were being trained to fight the enemy. Dave #27, who took extra instruction from Father Aldos on aspects of faith and the nature of Gaia, believed that if they were especially heroic they would be remade into ordinary human beings. Dave #8 wasn't so sure. Lately he'd been troubled by a simple paradox: if he and his brothers had been created by technology that was evil, how then could they ever do good? He brooded on this for a long time, and at last confided his thoughts to Dave #27, who told him that every kind of goodness can spring from evil, just as the most beautiful flowers may be rooted in filth. Wasn't that the story of the human race? Everyone was Fallen. Everyone who had ever lived was tainted by original sin. Yet anyone could achieve Heaven if they atoned for their sins by cultivating their faith, praising God, and tending His creation. Even the enemy had the potential to be redeemed, but they refused God because they wanted to be little gods themselves, ruling little heavens of their own making. Heavens that were heaven in name only, and were doomed to become hells to spite their creators' hubris because they lacked the grace that flowed only from God.

'We are sinful in origin and aspect, but not in deed,' Dave #27 said.

'We do not use our talents to rebel against God, but to serve Him. We might even be a little closer to angels than other men, because we are wholly dedicated to serving the Trinity. Because we are holy warriors who will gladly and eagerly lay down their lives for God, Gaia, and Greater Brazil.'

Dave #8, alarmed by the shine in Dave #27's eyes, warned his brother that he was committing the mortal sin of pride. 'Our lives may be dedicated to the defence of God and Gaia and Greater Brazil, but that doesn't mean we're in any way like the heroes of the great stories.'

'What are we, then?'

'Soldiers,' Dave #8 said. 'No more, no less.'

He did not want to be special. It helped that he did not excel or outshine his brothers in any aspect of training or instruction, that he lacked Dave #27's love of discourse and argument, Dave #11's limber athleticism, Dave #19's skill in electronic warfare. He wanted to believe that lack of any kind of singular talent was a virtue, for differing in any way from the ordinary might foster pride that would lead him astray and make him fail in his duty.

One day Father Solomon caught him trying to examine his reflection. This was in the gymnasium. There were cases of weapons down one long wall - short spears and javelins, stabbing swords and long swords, fencing foils and bouquets of knives, staffs, maces, bludgeons, truncheons, halberds, and pikes, longbows and crossbows and their arrows and quarrels, as well as the grinding stones and bottles of mineral oil and diamond-dust polish and files used to keep edges sharp and metal clean. There were projectile and energy weapons, too. Machine-pistols, target pistols, and sniper rifles; glasers whose beam could cook a man from the inside out; tasers that fired clouds of charged tags; pulse rifles that fired plasma needles hot as the surface of the sun. Ranged along the far wall of the cavernous room were racks of armour, pressure suits, and scuba suits with integral airpacks. That was where Dave #8 sat cross-legged with his brothers, the components of the pressure suits they had dismantled during a routine maintenance exercise laid out in front of them.

Dave #8 was holding the chest-plate of his pressure suit at arm's-length, turning it this way and that. Its polished black curve gave back only distorted fragments, but there were no mirrors anywhere in the warren of chambers the boys called home and this was the best he could do. He was trying to see if there was something different in his face. If there was, then he would know that his suspicion that he thought differently was true.

He did not notice Father Solomon creeping up behind him on rubber-soled sandals, thumbing back the snap that fastened his shock stick to his belt.

When Dave #8 came round, with an all-over cramp and blood in his mouth, Father Solomon was standing over him and lecturing the other boys about vanity. Dave #8 knew that he was in trouble so deep that the exercise Father Solomon gave them after his lecture, assembling their pressure suits in a howling snowstorm in the weather chamber, would not be enough to atone for it.

In the struggle session that evening, each of his brothers stood up in turn and denounced him ringingly, as he had denounced them in other sessions after they had committed sins of omission or commission. He could not explain that he had been trying to catch sight of hidden faults in the reflection of his face. It was forbidden to attempt to excuse or explain any sins, and he was conditioned to believe that every punishment was just. He was being punished because he deserved it.

The theme of Father Clarke's sermon at Mass took as its text Ecclesiastes, chapter one, verse two. Vanity of vanities, said the preacher; vanity of vanities and everything is vanity. It was a favourite of the lectors, but that evening Dave #8 knew that it was directed straight at him, a righteous X-ray laser shrivelling his soul.

Burning with misery and shame and self-loathing, he sat through a video that documented in gruesome detail the brute lawlessness and cannibalism that had swept over the great North American cities during the Overturn. He was certain that he had failed especially badly. That he was a candidate for disappearance. For although the last disappearance had occurred when the boys had been very much younger, over one and a half thousand days ago, it had been drilled into them that their survival was forever provisional and they must struggle to attain perfection every hour of every day.

The disappearances had always happened at night. The boys would wake to find one of their number gone, his bed stripped bare, his footlocker open and empty. No explanation had ever been given; none was needed. Their brother had disappeared because he had failed, and failure was not tolerated.

In bed after the lights had been switched off, Dave #8 struggled to stay awake, but his conditioning soon won out over his fear. He slept. And in the morning was surprised to discover himself still in his narrow bed, with the bustle of his brothers rising and dressing all around him. It was as if he had been reborn. Nothing had changed, yet everything was charged with significance.

Full of joy, he stood with his brothers in front of the rippling flag on the big screen and with his right hand over his heart recited the familiar words with renewed ardour.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of Greater Brazil and to the undertaking for which it stands, one Earth under Gaia, indivisible, restored, replenished, and purged of all human sin.

2.

Cash Baker was just twenty-six, with eight years' service in the Greater Brazilian Air Defence Force, when he was selected for the J-2 singleship test programme. From inauspiciously ordinary origins in a hard-scrabble city in the badlands of East Texas he'd risen through the ranks with astonishing speed. Luckily, he'd received as good an education as anyone in his neck of the woods could reasonably expect, and one of his teachers had spotted his preternatural mathematical ability and given him extra tutoring and steered him towards the Air Defence Force. He scraped into the top percentile in the induction tests, was streamed straight into basic pilot-training at the academy in Monterrey, and a year later, on a hot, thundery day in August, marched at the head of the graduation parade for the class of 2210. He started out flying fat-bellied Tapir-L4s on supply missions to remote camps of the Wreckers Corps east of the Great Lakes, was quickly promoted to the combat wing of the 114th Squadron, flying fast, deadly little Raptors, and distinguished himself in a string of air-support missions during the campaign fought by General Arvam Peixoto's Third Division, clearing bandit settlements in and around the ruins of Chicago. The bandits were organised and highly disciplined, but for the most part poorly armed, although one time someone fired a reconditioned smart missile at Cash's bird and he had a hairy couple of minutes flying all over the sky before his battle AI broke the encryption of the missile's fierce little mind and it incontinently exploded.

Then he was transferred to the big base outside Santiago and flew long-range intercept patrols out across the Pacific during the Cold War between Greater Brazil and the Pacific Community, when for a little while it looked as if war might break out over possession of Hawaii. After the Cold War cooled down, he was selected for test-pilot school, and worked on a new generation ground-to-orbit fighter, the Jaguar Ghost. A dream to handle in orbit, but a pig during re-entry. After three of the eight prototypes crashed and burned when their engines flamed on erratically or not at all while planing back into the atmosphere, and two more burnt up because of flaws in their lightweight diamond-paint heat shields, the programme was cancelled. But Cash had a lot of fun in the six months he spent testing the craft, loved the way the horizon flexed beneath him and the sky darkened until the stars came out as he arrowed out of the atmosphere, loved the serene oceanic feeling of seeming to float above the Earth while travelling at several thousand klicks a second. Up there, the terrible wounds left by the industrial age and anthropogenic climate change and the Overturn were mostly invisible. The dead zones in the oceans, the flooding along the shorelines of every continent, the deforested deserts of the Amazonian basin and Africa, the vast and tumbled deserts of North America, the ruined cities . . . All was lost in the shining vastness of the beautiful blue planet. Cash wasn't especially religious, but in orbit he understood for the first time what the green saints meant when they said that the Earth was a living organism whole and entire.

After the Jaguar fiasco Cash was returned to combat status, but by now he had a bad jones for test flying, and for space. He was chasing down rumours of a new kind of space plane when General Arvam Peixoto's office reached out to him. The general remembered Cash from the Chicago campaign, and Cash volunteered for the test programme as soon as he was asked if he wanted to come aboard.

So he went to the Moon, and the Earth seemed lovelier than ever, a lonely blue-white pearl floating in the black sky above the lunar wastelands. A hundred and fifty years ago some of Earth's richest, brightest, and most powerful people had underwritten the construction costs of a tented city, Athena, east of Archimedes Crater on the edge of the Imbrium Basin, moving there to escape the devastation and disorder caused by climate change and dozens of brush-fire wars fought over dwindling resources. Strip mines had processed lunar regolith for helium-3, and there was a sprawling site where sunshade mirrors had been manufactured and slung into orbit at the L1 point between the Earth and Moon. The helium-3 had been used in fusion reactors; the swarm of mirrors had cut down insolation and helped to stabilise the Earth's climate during the wild years of the Overturn, when runaway global warming driven by vast surges of methane released from Antarctic clathrates had threatened to cause mass extinction on a global scale. The mirrors were in orbit still, maintained by international crews. It would be at least another century before the effects of the Overturn and global warming were entirely ameliorated.

When it had become clear that the new supranational states that had emerged after the Overturn were determined to take control of the strip mines and shut down everything else on the Moon, the construction workers and the science crews, along with their families and many of the private citizens and their families and employees, had lit out for Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Greater Brazil had claimed the city they had abandoned in place, and it had been refurbished by members of the Peixoto family, its most enthusiastic proselytisers for an expansion of the space programme. They had built a small fleet of long-range ships, had recently established links and trade routes with cities and settlements in the Jupiter and Saturn systems, and their skunk works had developed all kind of technological miracles, including a new kind of combat space plane.

Directly after disembarking from the shuttle from Earth, Cash and the other volunteers for the test programme were taken to a briefing room where General Arvam Peixoto walked them through the specs of the prototype of the new plane, the J-2 singleship. It was a hot bird, all right. A self-guided missile equipped with a new kind of fusion motor that used antiprotons to drive a fission/fusion chain reaction in micro-droplets of deuterium and tritium, and was far more powerful than any currently in operation. There was a pressure-suit-sized life system at the J-2's sharp end, it had cut-back wings for atmospheric sorties, and it was armed with a pumped-pulse X-ray laser, a drum of single-shot gamma-ray lasers, a rail mini-gun that fired depleted-uranium flechettes, a variety of conventional missiles, and manoeuvrable proxies that after being fired from a fat cannon could do all kinds of imaginative damage when they caught up with their targets. Its flight guidance system, using long-range and sideways radars, and GPS and contour maps accurate to within ten centimetres, could fly it completely around the Moon at an average altitude of a hundred metres, and then do it all over again, with exactly the same flight profile. And it was so agile and so fast, General Peixoto explained, that in combat situations it demanded superhuman qualities from its pilots.

The general was a powerfully built man with shoulder-length white hair brushed back from his craggy face. He talked with an easy informal style, as if to members of his own family, making eye contact with everyone in the room. When his glance fell on Cash for a moment, the young pilot felt his heart swell with pride and passion.

'You are already the most able pilots in Air Defence,' General Peixoto said. 'There are none better than you anywhere on Earth or the Moon. But it is possible to make you even better. I'm not familiar with all the techniques involved, and I think it only fair that you should understand completely what we are asking of you. So I'm going to hand you over for a few minutes to Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen, who will walk you through what the procedure entails.'

Later, one of the pilots, Luiz Schwarez, whose family had a background in medical science, told the others that Sri Hong-Owen was a stone-cold genius who had risen to the top of her field under the sponsorship of the Peixoto family's green saint, that she'd designed a radical new photosynthetic system, created all kinds of vacuum organisms, developed many of the techniques that family members used to extend their lives, and much else. But at the time, during the briefing, Cash Baker didn't think much of her. Severe and awkward, dressed in the same blue coveralls everyone wore around the base, she was a plain woman of indeterminate age with a shaved, gleaming scalp and the palest skin he'd ever seen. She talked too fast, addressed the checklists, diagrams, and videos she conjured in the memo space rather than her audience, and answered questions with a brisk, take-no-prisoners manner, as if she thought the pilots were goddamned fools who'd failed to grasp the simplest of facts about the procedure.

Which was, when all the jargon and doubletalk was boiled away, some kind of rewiring or augmentation of their nervous systems that would allow them not only to plug directly into the plane's control systems, but also to briefly boost their neural-processing speeds. When Sri Hong-Owen was done, General Peixoto addressed the pilots again, telling them that it was an extremely radical procedure, that there was no guarantee that it would work in every case, or that everyone would survive it. If any of them wished to walk away and return to normal duties, there would be no dishonour in doing so, no shame, and no mention of it on their service record, he said, and asked those who wished to volunteer to raise their hands.

Cash stuck his arm straight up. So did everyone else. Someone down at the front was waving both his hands above his head. Because, hell, who didn't want to be a better pilot?

The first operation was performed under general anaesthetic and laid an artificial neural network around Cash's spine. The process of bedding in, as the network interfaced with his peripheral nervous system, was tedious and sometimes agonising, and during the seemingly endless rounds of tests that followed he found it weirdly unsettling to watch his right or left arm move by itself and his hands dance through a memo space with robotic swiftness and precision, solving spatial and kinetic problems without any conscious intervention on his part.

There was worse to come. He had to stay awake throughout the second operation, when the interfaces of the network were laced into his motor and sensory cortices, because the surgical team had to check that not only were his new talents in place and functioning, but also that nothing else, from his spinal reflexes to his memory, was damaged during the procedure that inserted them. So although he was given a nerve block and felt no pain, Cash had to endure the vibration and smell of burnt blood and bone as the bone saw cut open his skull, felt the sucking lift as the cap of his skull was lifted away, heard the mosquito whine of the bush robot that worked on his brain with manipulators that divided and divided a thousand times into clouds of cutting and recording tips nanometres in length, not much bigger than the neurons on which they operated. And although the brain has no pain receptors, he felt waves of phantom pain burn through his limbs as the bush robot tested each and every connection, was overwhelmed by discordant symphonies of emotion and taste and sound and hallucinatory shapes of every colour. Afterwards, he was knocked out for two days while final tests were made, and then he and the rest of the pilots on the wing began their long convalescence.

They had to learn to use their bodies all over again, but they were young and fit and determined. They made rapid progress and turned everything into a contest. Laying bets on who would be the first to walk from bed to jakes unaided, who threw up the most (at first they all suffered from balance and inner-ear problems), who could deliver the greatest volume of piss when the doctors asked for a sample. Later on, when they were allowed to use the gym, they competed to see who could do the most press-ups or sit-ups, who could cycle or run the furthest on the machines, who could bench-press the heaviest weights.

Aldo Ruiz started to get into arguments with an invisible presence, hectoring the air in front of his face with passionate anger. He was taken away after he started to punch and slap himself, and the rest of the wing never saw him again.

The next week the tests started in earnest.

Complete physicals to begin with, more intensive than any they'd endured during induction. Then psychological testing, answering all kinds of questions about hypothetical situations and having to complete puzzles while wearing caps that monitored their brain activity. They also wore the caps while carrying out basic exercises on simulations of the J-2. Two of them were weeded out at this stage, for reasons never explained. The rest went forward into the testing and training programme.

No one bothered to tell Cash what would happen the first time his new abilities were activated. He was lying on a couch, surrounded by the usual gaggle of doctors and medical technicians, and then everything around him slowed. His hearing faded, leaving only a faint rumble; it felt as if he was sinking deep in tar; his field of vision dopplered down to red and narrowed to a patch about the size of his thumbnail held at arm's length. He couldn't turn or raise his head but could slowly track his eyes, moving that tiny patch of acuity like a spotlight to study a tech's ponderous blink (one eye squashing shut just before the other), watch another make a laborious mark on a slate. And then, just as suddenly, the world came back to normal. He was hot and horribly breathless, as if he'd just run twenty kilometres in full gear. His chest heaved as he tried to suck down air and his heart was slamming against his ribs and then the taste of metal flooded his mouth and he briefly fainted.

The doctors and techs wouldn't tell Cash if he'd passed or failed, wouldn't explain exactly what had happened to him, wouldn't tell him that it had been okay to faint. So he didn't know if he'd scratched out until he was returned to the ward, and found that everyone else had fainted when they'd been accelerated into what the techs called hyper-reflexive mode for the first time. In the night, Eudoxia Vitoria and Bris Lispector both threw full-blown epileptic fits and the doctors took them away and the rest of the wing never saw them again. After the second day of testing Chiquinho Brown didn't come back, and Luiz Schwarez claimed that he'd overheard one tech telling another that Chiquinho had died of a heart attack.

Those were the last casualties. Five weeks later, the survivors were passed as fit and fully integrated. They had each logged over a hundred hours on simulations, both with normal HUD controls and with their neural systems wired directly into control and guidance systems. Because they might be zipped into their birds for weeks at a time in a war situation, they'd all had their teeth extracted and replaced by contoured plastic ridges. Their appendices had been removed, too. Now they were let loose on the J-2 prototypes, flying with only HUD controls at first, basic point-to-point flights and simple combat simulations. After two weeks of these bedding-in trials, Cash Baker was selected to be the first pilot to fly in fully-wired mode.

It was a live-round discriminatory target exercise. He flew west - the bird was basically flying itself, but Cash was extended into every corner of its airframe - out across the dark plain where more than three and a half billion years ago lava had flooded the raw impact crater of the Imbrium Basin. When the target area in the slumped rim mountains at the far edge of the basin came around the horizon, the transition from being merely wired in to flying by wire was fantastically smooth: the J-2's trim altered by less than point zero one arc of a minute. It wasn't like flying the plane. It was like being the plane. Like having sex with it, Luiz said later, although as far as Cash was concerned, that first time, he couldn't remember when he'd ever had sex that good.

He'd been taught to visualise the trigger for his hyper-reflexes as a big red button in the centre of his head. He pressed that button now, and everything went dream-slow. He felt each individual jolt as the rail mini-gun loosed a hail of depleted-uranium flechettes that shredded a simulated pressure dome, located the two rolligons with friendly markings moving across the plain amongst six others tagged as enemy, and targeted those six and crisped their control systems with precise gamma-ray laser shots within a second, and used missiles to take out a series of pop-up targets. Then the target area was behind him, and he gave up command and control to the J-2's battle AI and pushed the imaginary red button again. He'd learned how to stay conscious during the switch-over by now, and was able to acknowledge the range officer's confirmation of his kills.

That evening there was an official celebration of the programme's success. The pilots hung in a tight group and sipped water and fruit juice while senior officers and scientists and techs tossed down shots of pulque and rum and tequila and grew loud and animated. General Peixoto made a short speech, was videoed shaking the hands of the pilots, and disappeared. Officers and the science crew toasted the pilots and each other with grand and florid eloquence, shattered empty glasses on the floor. The pilots left when one of the suit techs was persuaded to take off her shirt and the party started to get serious - they had medical tests the next morning just like every other morning, 0530-0630, and then an hour in the gym before the daily briefing over breakfast before they started work.

Everyone in the Air Defence Force believed that there was going to be another war with the Outers. The so-called peace and reconciliation initiatives would never amount to anything other than a colossal waste of time; the Outers had to be brought under control before they threw another comet at Earth, or developed some weird posthuman tweak that made them invincible. There was going to be war, and Cash Baker, raised on stories of the heroic deeds of his forefathers, couldn't wait. Meanwhile, he and the other pilots continued to work on the J-2. They flew solo missions and flew in formation. They flew over every type of lunar landscape, practised intercept missions in orbit around the Moon and Earth, tested their birds at every level of Earth's atmosphere. When they weren't flying in real time, they honed specific skills in simulations, attended seminars on redesign and improvements of their craft, and updates in combat theory, endured endless suit fittings, medical tests, psychological evaluations . . .

One day, about six months after Cash's maiden flight, the intelligence officer delivering the usual briefing session after breakfast gave way to the colonel in charge of the J-2 programme, who said without preamble that Maximilian Peixoto, the husband of the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Greater Brazilian Air Defence Force, had died late last night. He told the pilots that there would be no test or training flights until after the funeral, which would take place in ten days' time, and said that he had been instructed to choose four pilots who would fly their J-2s over the cathedral in Brasilia at the end of the funeral service to honour the man who had been their commander. He named Cash Baker and Luiz Schwarez and two others, and announced that there would be a special Mass in one hour.

Afterwards, Luiz told Cash that this changed everything.

'Maximilian Peixoto wasn't just our Commander-in-Chief. He was also chair of the Committee for Reconciliation, one of the champions of making peace with the Outers. He set up the first embassies out there thirty years ago. He'd been working steadily ever since to establish trade links. And he naturally had the ear of the President. Now he's dead, his friends will have much less influence.'

'This means what?'

'You really are an ignorant son of a bitch,' Luiz said.

'Maybe I am,' Cash said. 'Or maybe I don't much care for politics.'

'Well, you should. There are many people in the government who think it is pointless and dangerous to try to make friendly overtures to the Outers. They are not yet in the majority, but now they will be able to argue openly against peace and reconciliation. And General Arvam Peixoto is one who has always opposed reconciliation very strongly. You watch out. Pretty soon I believe that he will get the green light to put the J-2 into production.'

'So we're finally going head to head against the Outers.'

'Not quite yet, but we're a step closer.'

'Well it's about time,' Cash said.

3.

It was the most important funeral to have been held in Brasilia for more than twenty years. The avenues around the Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida were clogged with limousines and flitters. Drivers and security details eyed each other with professional interest. Drones wove amongst treetops. Helicopters beat wide circles under the hot blue sky. Wolves prowled the long park, Eixo Monumental, and half the city was paralysed by interlocking rings of security.

Inside the cathedral the harmonies of the Agnus Dei laced the air, soaring above solemn strings and the Earth-shaking reverberation of the organ whose ranked pipes rose like a pleated steel curtain behind choir and orchestra. In front of the pure white block of the limestone altar, a tulipwood coffin rested on a bank of sweetly odorous lilies and orchids. Here lay Maximilian Pietro Solomon Cristagau Flores Peixoto, husband of the President of Greater Brazil, Commander-in-Chief of the Greater Brazilian Air Defence Force, Grand Wizard of the Order of the Knights of Viridis, Steward of the Northern Territories, Chair of the Committee for Reconciliation, Rector of the Universities of Montevideo, Caracas, Mexico City and Denver, and so on and so forth, a great power in the world who had died from systemic organ failure at the age of one hundred and seventy-two. The dead man's dark face peeped still and solemn above the linen sheet that wrapped his body. His famous moustache waxed to sharp points. His eyes closed by gold coins salvaged from the wreck of a Spanish galleon.

His coffin was elevated above the sleeve of water that cut across the equator of the cathedral's circular nave. The water was as black as oil, disturbed here and there by spreading ringlets as fish tasted the underside of its skin. On the far side, the congregation in funeral finery packed three broad tiers of seats like a parliament of rooks. Almost every member of the Peixoto family was present, occupying forty rows of the middle tier, ranked by consanguinity. The widowed President sat on a canopied chair at the centre of the first row, resplendent in fuliginous robes, now and then reaching under the veil that covered her face to capture a tear in a tiny vase of cultured diamond. Behind the family rose solemn phalanxes of senators, senior officers of the armed forces glittering in ceremonial uniform, ambassadors and politicians from every country on Earth, and the representative from Rainbow Bridge, Callisto. On the flanking tiers were members of the other great families, ministers, governors, senior civil servants, and the servants of the Great House: an audience of two thousand people, with millions more watching pictures relayed from static cameras.

Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen didn't have a single drop of Peixoto family blood in her veins, yet she and her fifteen-year-old son, Alder Topaz, were sitting with the family nonetheless, on the far left-hand side of the fortieth row of the central tier. They were attending the funeral in place of one of the senior members of the family, Sri's sponsor and mentor, the green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos, who these days never stirred from his hermitage in Baja California, even for an occasion as grand and important as this.

The long service was crammed with intricate ritual. Mass, a sermon celebrating the dead man's life, the service for the commitment of the dead, and now the requiem. No doubt the music was glorious, but Sri was tone-deaf and quite unable to appreciate it. As was her habit when forced to endure some tedious ceremony or committee meeting to which she had nothing to contribute but her presence, she retreated into her head, meditating on the latest tests of a promising new refinement of the standard gerontological treatment. Alder, thoroughly engaged with the occasion, nudged her when choir and orchestra and organ achieved an ecstatic climax. The archbishop, dressed in green and gold mitre and robes, glided towards the bier and asperged the corpse with holy water and with his thumb printed its brow with oil. Then he stepped backward and made the sign of the cross and loop, and the coffin soundlessly tilted above its bed of flowers and the body shot out feet first, shedding its linen shroud and knifing into black water that boiled up in a fierce flurry as hungry fish began to feed, returning Maximilian Peixoto's store of carbon and other elements to Gaia.

A moment later, the whistling roar of a wing of J-2 singleships flying low above the city in 'missing man' formation shook the entire cathedral, and the choir and organ launched into the In Paradisum.

Sri's honorary position meant that she was among the first to leave the cathedral at the end of the service, but her lowly rank meant that she had to wait a long time for her ride. People streamed past and climbed into limousines that pulled away as others nosed forward. Flitters descended and ascended like bees at a hive.

Rothco Yang, the representative from Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, stepped out of the crowd and greeted Sri and Alder and told them that he had been most impressed by the solemn and splendid occasion. 'One thing puzzled me,' he said. 'The fish.'

'The fish?'

'The fish in the pool or moat or whatever it is called.' Rothco Yang, dressed in black silk pyjamas and a black broad-brimmed hat, was fastened inside the cage of the exoskeleton that supported him against the pull of Earth's gravity. 'I was wondering what happens to them afterward. After they are . . . finished.'

'I really don't know,' Sri said, 'but I could look it up.'

Alder said, 'Nothing happens to the fish. They are holy, I think.'

'Holy?'

'Blessed by die archbishop,' Alder said.

Rothco Yang's smile gleamed under the brim of his hat. His head was propped by a padded neck-brace. 'And is this how all people are, what is the phrase, returned to Gaia?'

'Only the most important,' Alder said.

'And the rest?'