“Other people had it worse.” She shrugs. “We had a garden; we had plenty of canned goods in the house. My mother had the bath filled with water, all the pans and the dishes. We managed okay until your army moved in to restore order.”
She seems remarkably unperturbed by the affair.
“So you joined us out of gratitude?” I suggest.
She laughs.
“No, I joined you for security. This way I get to eat and I’m pretty sure that my salary won’t be wiped out at the touch of a button. If your army’s servers aren’t secure, then whose are?”
“Fair enough.”
“No, it’s not fair. It’s just life. Your army wiped out Jutland’s data. Just like it did this country’s.”
I try to look shocked.
“You think that we are responsible for the trouble here?”
“It’s an old trick. Create civil unrest and then send in your troops to sort out the problem. You’ve swallowed up half of Europe that way.”
“I don’t think it’s that well planned,” I said, honestly. “I just think that everyone takes whatever opportunity they can when a DoS hits.”
As if to underline the point, the staccato rattle of gunfire sounds in the distance.
“Aren’t you worried that I will report you?” I ask. “Have you charged with sedition?”
She rises easily to her feet and walks towards me.
“No. I trust you. You have nice eyes.”
She’s laughing at me.
“Come here,” she says. I lean down and she kisses me on the lips. Gently, she pushes my face away. “You’re a very handsome man. Maybe later on we can talk properly.”
“I’d like that.”
She looks back out of the window, checking the area. Little white puffs of cloud drift across the blue sky.
“So, what are you going to paint?” she asks. “The heroic rescuers, making the country safe once more?”
“You’re being sarcastic.”
“No,” she says, and she pushes a strand of blonde hair back up into her helmet. “No. We all do what we must to get by. Tell me, what will you paint?”
“I honestly don’t know yet. I’ll know it when I see it.” I look down into the square, searching for inspiration. “Look at your flier.”
She comes to my side. We look at the concrete-grey craft, a brutalist piece of architecture set amongst the elegant buildings of this city.
“Suppose I were to paint that?” I say. “I have plenty of photos, but I need a context, a setting. I could have it swooping down on the enemy! The smoke, the explosions, the bullets whizzing past.”
“That’s what the army would like …”
“Maybe. How about I paint it with you all seated around the back? That could send a message to the people back home: that even soldiers are human, they sit and chat and relax. Or should I evoke sympathy? Draw the flier all shot up. The mechanics around it, trying to fix it up. One of you being led from the scene, blood seeping from the bandages.”
She nods. She understands. Then her radio crackles, and I hear the Sergeant’s voice.
“Friis! Get down to the Flier! We need help bringing equipment inside.”
“Coming!”
“I’ll tag along,” I say.
The whine of the Flier is a constant theme; the engines are never turned off. We join the bustle of soldiers around the rear ramp, all busy unloading the pink-bound boxes and carrying them into the surrounding buildings.
“What is all that?” I wonder aloud.
“Servers, terminals, NAS boxes,” says Agnetha. “I saw this in Jutland. We’re establishing a new government in this place.”
“Keep it down, Friis,” says the sergeant, but without heat. I notice that no one seems to be denying the charge. The head of the soldier behind him suddenly spouts red blood. I’m photographing the scene before I realise what’s happening.
“Sniper!”
Everyone is dropping, looking this way and that.
“Up there,” shouts someone.
The Sergeant is looking at his console, the green light of the screen illuminating his face.
“That’s the Palazzo Egizio. The Via Fossano runs behind it …”
He’s thinking.
“Friis, Delgado, Kenton. Head to the far end of the street. See if you can get into that white building there …”
I raise my head to get a better look, and I feel someone push me back down. At the same time there are more shots and I hear a scream. I feel a thud of fear inside me.
Agnetha has been shot.
Shot protecting me.
She’s coughing up blood.
“Agnetha,” I begin …
“Get back,” yells the Sergeant. “You’ve caused enough trouble as it is …”
Agnetha’s trying to speak, but there is too much blood. She holds out her hand and I reach for it, but the sergeant knocks it away.
“Let the medic deal with it,” he says. “Let someone who should be here deal with it,” he adds, nastily.
The other soldiers have located the sniper now, and I’m left to watch as a man kneels next to Agnetha and takes hold of her arm. She looks at me with those brilliant blue eyes, and I don’t see her. For a brief moment I see another picture. Blues and greens. Two soldiers: a man and a woman, standing in front of a flier just like the one behind us. They’re surrounded by cheering, smiling civilians. A young child comes forward, carrying a bunch of flowers. A thank you from the grateful liberated.
The picture I painted of Jutland.
I push it from my mind, and I see those brilliant blue eyes are already clouding over.
“We all do what we have to do,” I whisper. But is that so true? She joined the army so her family could eat. I’m here simply to build a reputation as an artist.
The medic injects her with something. She closes her eyes. The medic shakes his head. I know what that means. The sergeant looks at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“So?” he says. “How’s that going to help?” He turns away. The others are already doing the same. Dismissing me.
I take hold of Agnetha’s hand, feel the pulse fading.
The picture.
I wonder if Agnetha would approve of what I had done? I suspect not. She was too much of a realist.
I included the flier after all. But not taking off, not swooping down from the skies.
No, this was a different picture.
The point of view is from just outside the cockpit, looking in at the pilot of the craft. And here is where we move beyond the subject matter to the artistic vision, because the person flying the craft is not the pilot, but the sergeant.
His face is there, centred on the picture. He’s looking out at the viewer, looking beyond the cockpit.
What can he see? The dead children in the square, sheltered by the bodies of their dead parents? We don’t know. But that doesn’t matter, because there is a clue in the picture. A clue to the truth. One that I saw all the time, but never noticed. It’s written across the sergeant’s face. Literally.
A reflection in green from the light of the monitor screen, a tracery of roads and buildings, all picked out in pale green letters. Look closely at his cheek and you can just make out the words St Mark’s Church. All those names that were supposedly wiped for good by the DoS attack, and yet there they were, still resident in the Sergeant’s computer. And none of us found that odd at the time. We could have fed that country’s data back to it all along, but we chose not to.
They say a picture paints a thousand words.
For once, those words will be mostly speaking the truth.
The Master of the Aviary
BRUCE STERLING
Bruce Sterling (www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/) lives usually in some exotic place in Europe, from which he continues his lifelong habit of cultural observation and commentary, now mostly online. In 2003 he became Professor of Internet studies and science fiction at the European Graduate School, where he teaches intensive Summer seminars. His most recent novel, his eleventh, is SF, The Caryatids (2009). His short fiction is collected in Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007). Throughout Sterling’s career, part of his project has been to put us in touch with the larger world in which we live, giving us glimpses of not only speculative and fantastic realities, but also the bedrock of politics in human behavior. He says, “Once I got my head around this idea that ’the future’ was bogus, I was able to mess around with a lot of invisible assumptions.” He is drawn to events and especially people tipping the present over into the future. His short fiction, now as likely to be fantasy as SF, is one of the finest bodies of work in the genre over the last three decades.