The Quiet War by Paul McAuley

Author:Paul McAuley [Mcauley, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781591027812
Google: tnCRrYxIEbMC
Amazon: 1591027810
Publisher: Pyr
Published: 2008-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

3

Highland cattle no bigger than Saint Bernard dogs, perfect miniatures with shaggy auburn coats and flexed horns, looked up from their grazing as Newton Jones came into the broad meadow. A few ambled out of his way; the rest stood and watched, jaws milling sideways, as Newt bounded towards the four people sitting around the hearth-glow of a memo space under a big sweet-chestnut tree, an outlier of the narrow belt of forest that girdled the outer zone of the garden habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan. He dropped down beside Macy Minnot and said, ‘The warship picked up the singleships. It’s heading back to Mimas.’

‘Let’s hope this is the end of the stupid affair,’ Pete Bakaleinikoff said.

‘Everything went perfectly,’ Newt said. ‘The Ghosts showed the Brazilians that they can’t go wherever they want without being challenged. They scared them off, and they cleaned up the so-called science packages they dumped, too.’

‘Pure unevolved primate behaviour is nothing to be proud of,’ Pete Bakaleinikoff said.

‘It was a silly stunt,’ Junko Asai said.

‘Now it’s over we should do our best to forget about it,’ Junpei Asai said.

Husband and wife leaned against each other with fond familiarity, dressed alike in collarless white tunics and white trousers. Junpei wore plum-coloured lipstick and layers of bead necklaces; Junko had a carefully trimmed strip of white beard under his lower lip and many rings on his fingers. They had been married for almost fifty years, had six children, fifteen grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren, a casual fecundity that Macy, from a country where only the rich, lottery winners, and criminals had more than one child, thought amazing. They were also two of the smartest people she had ever met. In partnership with Pete Bakaleinikoff, they operated a cloud of optical telescopes more than twenty thousand kilometres across that sat in a stable orbit at Saturn’s trailing Trojan point. Junko and Junpei had designed the elements of the telescope cloud and the AI that coordinated its operation; Pete Bakaleinikoff had underwritten its cost and supervised analysis of the data that it collected. For the past five years they had been studying Tierra, a rocky terrestrial planet about one and a half times the diameter of Earth that orbited inside the life zone of the star Delta Pavonis, mapping its single supercontinent and sprawling ice caps, its Mars-sized moon. There was life on Tierra: oxygen, water vapour and methane in its atmosphere; seasonal colour changes along the shoreline of the supercontinent. Currently, the telescope cloud’s best resolution yielded about a hundred kilometres to a single pixel, but its owners were continually refining and tweaking their instruments and analytical programmes.

Newt flew missions that maintained and updated the cloud; Macy had become involved through Pete Bakaleinikoff, Newt’s uncle. Pete was also interested in long-term closed ecosystems of the type that would be required by a multi-generation starship that might take two or three hundred years to complete its journey, in which everything would have to be continually recycled with as close to one hundred per cent efficiency as possible.

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