Life After Wartime by Paul McAuley

Author:Paul McAuley [McAuley, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-07-05T23:00:00+00:00

Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, The Potter’s Garden

One day, midway in the course of her life, Mai Kumal learned that her father had died. The solicitous eidolon which delivered the message explained that Thierry had suffered an irreversible cardiac event, and extended an invitation to travel to Dione, one of Saturn’s moons, so that Mai could help to scatter her father’s ashes according to his last wishes.

Mai’s daughter didn’t think it was a good idea. ‘When did you last speak with him? Ten years ago?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘Well then.’

Mai said, ‘It was as much my fault as his that we lost contact with each other.’

‘But he left you in the first place. Left us.’

Shahirah had a deeply moral sense of right and wrong. She hadn’t spoken to or forgiven her own father after he and Mai had divorced.

Mai said, ‘Thierry left Earth; he didn’t leave me. But that isn’t the point, Shah. He wants – he wanted me to be there. He made arrangements. There is an open roundtrip ticket.’

‘He wanted you to feel an obligation,’ Shahirah said.

‘Of course I feel an obligation. It is the last thing I can do for him. And it will be a great adventure. It’s about time I had one.’

Mai was sixtytwo, about the age her father had been when he’d left Earth after his wife, Mai’s mother, had died. She was a midlevel civil servant, Assistant Chief Surveyor in the Department of Antiquities. She owned a small efficiency apartment in the same building where she worked, the government ziggurat in the Wassat district of alIskandariyya. No serious relationship since her divorce; her daughter grownup and married, living with her husband and two children in an arcology commune in the Atlas Mountains. Shahirah tried to talk her out of it, but Mai wanted to find out what her father had been doing, in the outer dark. To find out whether he had been happy. By unriddling the mystery of his life she might discover something about herself. When your parents die, you finally take full possession of your life, and wonder how much of it has been shaped by conscious decision, and how much by inheritance in all its forms.

‘There isn’t anything out there for people like us,’ Shahirah said.

She meant ordinary people. People who had not been tweaked so that they could survive the effects of microgravity and harsh radiation, and endure life in claustrophobic habitats scattered across frozen, airless moons.

‘Thierry thought there might be,’ Mai said. ‘I want to find out what it was.’

She took compassionate leave, flew from alIskandariyya to Port Africa, Entebbe, and was placed in deep, artificial sleep at the passenger processing facility. Cradled inside a hibernaculum, she rode up the elevator to the transfer station and was loaded onto a drop ship, and fortythree days later woke in the port of Paris, Dione. After two days spent recovering from her long sleep and learning how to use a pressure suit and move around in Dione’s vestigial

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