Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten that I was working on Janus,’ Sri said.

  ‘I don’t believe I’ve been there yet. Have I been there yet?’ Arvam said.

  ‘No, sir,’ one of the aides said.

  ‘Is it worth a visit?’ Arvam said to Sri.

  ‘I have plenty of work to do there. May I ask,’ Sri said, trying to keep her tone light and friendly, ‘why you sent Berry to Dione?’

  ‘Oh, the ship’s no place for the boy,’ Arvam said. ‘It’s too crowded, and there’s nothing for him to do except get into trouble. Where I sent him, it’s being made over into my headquarters. It’s been thoroughly checked out, and it’s quite safe. A big garden with lawns and fields, trees and lakes. Just the kind of place for a healthy, active boy, yes?’

  ‘I’d like to see it. Your people might have missed something.’

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it after dinner tonight. The Pacific Community liaison secretary is paying a visit and for some reason he is eager to meet you. You can tell him about your gardens, and perhaps he’ll let slip some useful information about the situation on Iapetus.’

  ‘This is why you interrupted my research? To make small talk with a PacCom official?’

  ‘That’s one reason. I also have a new project for you,’ Arvam said. ‘A very important project. Come with me.’

  Sri and a comet-tail of aides followed the general to the medical bay and a curtained alcove at the far end where a young man lay in a slanted bed. A white sheet was tucked tight as a drumhead across his legs and waist; the black band of a heart-lung machine was clamped across his chest. His head was shaven and bandaged and his eyelids were taped shut, there were tubes in his nose, and a dripline attached to his arm looped up to a sac of liquid hung from the bulkhead beside him. The sac quiveringly pulsed at intervals, like a sluggish and fretful jellyfish.

  Arvam told Sri that the young man was Lieutenant Cash Baker, singleship pilot and war hero. ‘He was wounded in combat. Brain damage. I want you to fix it.’

  ‘I’m flattered, of course. But what can I do that your excellent and highly experienced medical staff can’t?’

  ‘You rewired his nervous system during the J-2 test programme. Also, it’s your fault he died.’

  After a heartbeat’s hesitation, Sri understood what the general meant. ‘He was flying the singleship that attacked Avernus’s tug.’

  ‘Yes, he was. But he may be useful to me, so you will have to find it in yourself to forgive him.’

  Lieutenant Cash Baker had piloted one of the singleships sent to intercept and destroy a chunk of ice flung at the Pacific Community’s temporary base on Phoebe, at the beginning of the war. His ship had been damaged by the ice’s automatic defence system, but it had managed to partially repair itself and as he’d fallen back towards Saturn he’d targeted an Outer tug that had escaped from Dione. The tug had been carrying Avernus, and Sri Hong-Owen had been in hot pursuit. When Cash Baker had ignored a direct order to call off his attack, it had been necessary to activate a suicide program buried in his singleship’s control system. In the aftermath, the singleship had plummeted through the plane of the ring system, a speck of basalt travelling faster than any bullet had pierced its hull and shattered into dozens of fragments, and one of those fragments had shot through the lifesystem and drilled Cash Baker’s visor and skull and brain. The lifesystem had put him in hibernation and saved his life, his singleship had been located and retrieved, and now General Arvam Peixoto wanted Sri to help the medical team tasked with repairing his brain damage.

  ‘We need heroes who can drum up support back home by telling stirring stories of extraordinary acts of bravery. This man is an excellent candidate.’

  ‘He is a fool who very nearly murdered Avernus.’

  ‘I’ll deal with his story, Professor Doctor. Your job is to fix him up. I don’t care if he can’t move from the neck down, but he has to be able to speak in full sentences without drooling. Think you can do that?’

  The chief surgeon told Sri that the fragment of basalt had struck the pilot just above his left eye, burning a path through his frontal cortex and corpus callosum and clipping the lower edge of the visual cortex before exiting his skull. The fragment had been just a couple of hundred microns across, but it had been travelling very fast: shock waves had destroyed or killed everything in a track averaging seven millimetres in diameter. Damage to the frontal cortex and visual cortex was trivial and could be easily repaired by insertion of glial and totipotent foetal cells. There would be some memory loss, but no serious side effects. But the damage to the corpus callosum was more problematical. Passage of the fragment had severed large numbers of reciprocal connections between the two halves of the brain. If this wasn’t repaired, the surgeon said, the right side of the pilot’s brain would be cut off from the dominant left side, a separate mind with its own perception, cognition, volition, learning and memory but lacking the ability to speak, able to express itself only through nonverbal reactions. He would not be able to integrate the right- and left-hand sides of his visual field, and might suffer ‘alien hand syndrome’ and other dissociative effects.

  After studying high-resolution tomographic renderings of the damage, Sri proposed a radical solution. She had helped to design the artificial autonomic nervous system that enabled singleship pilots to plug directly into the control system of their ships and to briefly boost their neural processing speeds during combat, and she believed that she could use this to reroute connections between the two sides of the pilot’s brain and reunite his mind.

  She had plenty of other work to do, of course. She wanted to visit the garden habitat that the general had taken over for his headquarters, and make sure that her son was safe and happy. She wanted to return to Janus and complete her survey of the phenotype jungle and the sunflowers and the other vacuum organisms, work up the data and thoroughly examine it and compare it with the data sets gathered from her inspections of other gardens. Then she would head out to the next garden, and the one after that . . .

  No, there was never enough time to do everything she wanted to do. But although she’d been bullied into doing it by Arvam Peixoto and it wasn’t anywhere near the top of her list of priorities, she enjoyed discussing the redesign of Cash Baker’s augmented nervous system with the ship’s surgeon. He had extensive experience of brain and nerve reconstruction, there was a definite intellectual bond between them, two minds into one, and she felt a spark of resentment when one of the general’s aides appeared and reminded her of the formal dinner.

  The aide escorted Sri to a senior officer’s cabin, waited outside while she showered and put on uniform coveralls and slippers, then led her to the wardroom, where senior officers and civil servants and the guests from the Pacific Community were already seated at the long table. As Sri settled into her seat between the ship’s captain and the PacCom liaison secretary, Arvam Peixoto gave her a stern look across a centre-piece arrangement of lilies and roses that must have been shuttled up from some garden on Dione - perhaps from the habitat where Berry was now living.

  Sri found most social occasions tedious. Trivial chatter and pointless and suffocating etiquette overlaying crude status displays. Alpha personalities like the general strutted and preened; everyone else flattered him, reinforcing their positions in their stupid little hierarchy, watching each other for possible faults and failings. Ape behaviour. Sri couldn’t play these games. She lacked in every measure the vivid, forceful and confrontational personality of the typical alpha male, and wasn’t the kind of wily social networker, able to build up cadres of loyal followers and keep them in line by Skinner-box reward-and-punishment games, typical of alpha females. Although her reputation gave her some social cachet, these occasions always reminded her that she was a wild card tolerated only as long as she continued to be useful. And to be useful she needed to work, not waste her time on chit-chat and posing.

  Then there was the political dimension. Less than a decade ago, the Pacific Community an
d Greater Brazil had almost gone to war over control of the Hawaiian islands. Both power blocs had stepped back from armed confrontation and had slowly restored diplomatic links, but a great deal of mutual antipathy and suspicion still remained. And although it had cooperated with Greater Brazil and the European Union during the brief war against the Outers, the Pacific Community had come late to the campaign and had made only a minimal contribution, and its intentions were still obscure. Arvam Peixoto wanted Sri to wheedle some morsels of useful intel from the PacCom liaison secretary, and although she liked that kind of game even less than ordinary social discourse, she had to play along for the sake of her son, and for herself.

  Fortunately, the liaison secretary, Tommy Tabagee, turned out to be sufficiently intelligent and witty to keep her mildly amused throughout the long and formal dinner. A slight, limber man with coal-black skin and a Medusa’s crown of dreadlocks, he was very proud of his Aboriginal ancestry and fanatically dedicated to reconstruction and remediation of his native continent, telling Sri about what he called his modest contributions to the levelling of cities and erasure of every sign of the sins of the age of industry, a great work that would take centuries to complete.

  ‘It won’t ever be the same, of course,’ he said. ‘For one thing, the climate is still completely buggered. There are places where it hasn’t rained for a hundred years. But we must let the land find its own direction. That’s the important thing. And we have had some small successes. Before I was assigned here, I had the honour of working with a crew in Darwin that was restoring a portion of the Great Barrier Reef. Using real corals to replace the artificial ones. Oh, it will never be as glorious as it once was, but if it works half as well as they claim, it has some small potential.’

  Sri questioned Tommy Tabagee about the artificial corals, startled him with a few insights and ideas. Around them the other guests ate and drank and chattered, and marines in white jackets brought plates of food and took away empty plates and refilled glasses. Tommy Tabagee drank only water and ate quickly and neatly, like a machine refuelling, telling Sri that people like her were desperately needed back on Earth, it was a pity she had to waste her time out here.

  ‘I wouldn’t call investigating Outer technology a waste of time,’ Sri said. ‘I learn something new and useful every day.’

  But Tommy Tabagee didn’t take the bait, telling her instead that he’d also learned a thing or two in his brief time in the Saturn System.

  ‘Best of all, as far as I’m concerned, was discovering that these moons have their own songlines,’ he said, and explained that songlines had been the key to the survival and civilisation of his ancestors. ‘In the long ago, my people lived in a country that was mostly scrub or desert, with scant and unpredictable rainfall. So they had to lead a nomadic existence, moving from waterhole to waterhole. These not only supplied food and water, you understand. They were also places where neighbouring tribes met to conduct ceremonies and exchange goods. Using a barter system very like the Bourse which regulated the economies of the Outer cities and settlements before the war, as a matter of fact. So they were important in all kinds of ways, and they were linked by paths called songlines, because the principal trade was in songs. Each tribe had its own song cycle, and traded verses with other tribes. Trade in goods was secondary to the trade in songs. And the songs, you see, they defined the land through which they passed.’

  ‘They were maps,’ Sri said.

  She was thinking of the web of static lines that her crew had laid across the moonscape around the phenotype jungle’s pressure dome, the gardens she hadn’t had time to visit.

  ‘Exactly so,’ Tommy Tabagee said. ‘A man could cross hundreds of kilometres of desert he’d never before visited, using the information in songs he’d learned from other tribes. He wouldn’t have seen it that way, of course. He’d have said that he dreamed the land into existence as he sang. Which was why he had to get the song exactly right. Of course, the land here is even more unforgiving. No waterholes, and no food. Not even air! But the Outers have scattered oases and shelters across their moons, and in my opinion it is possible to think of the routes between them as songlines. I’m pleased to say that the Outers on Iapetus are very receptive to this notion. They are very intimate with their territory and they navigate by landmarks, just as my ancestors did.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here? To learn the songs of Iapetus and all the other moons?’

  Tommy Tabagee’s playful smile revealed a notch between his front teeth. ‘I hope you’re not making fun of my cultural inheritance, Professor Doctor.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ Sri said. The stuff about songlines and dreaming the world into existence was mumbo-jumbo that mythologised a basic survival strategy, but she believed that it revealed something useful about the Pacific Community’s plans for the territory it had seized.

  ‘I hear you’re interested in the gene wizard Avernus,’ Tommy Tabagee said, smartly changing the subject. ‘Do you know we have one of her gardens on Iapetus?’

  It was a small tented oasis on the anti-saturnian hemisphere of Iapetus, he said, near the mountainous ridge that girdled the moon’s equator. The ground inside had been planted with stuff that looked like bamboo: tall black stalks that stiffly swayed and rattled in random gusts generated by the air conditioning. Every thirty days the stalks sprouted banners of every conceivable colour and pattern, died all at once, and released the banners, which swarmed and blew in a great cloud in the gusty air. Compatible banners exchanged genetic material by folding themselves together and forming a patchwork chimera that pulled apart into two halves that fell to the decaying mulch left by the stalks. And then new stalks arose, and the cycle began again. An endless round of growth and reproduction that generated fleeting patterns of random and unrepeatable beauty.

  ‘Maybe you can tell me what it means,’ Tommy Tabagee said. ‘Because I’m buggered if I can.’

  ‘I don’t think it means anything in particular. Apart from its own intrinsic meaning, that is.’

  ‘So it’s a work of art, is it?’

  ‘Avernus likes games,’ Sri said. ‘And her games are both playful and serious. They’re an expression of the whimsical side of her talent, and they also explore the possible expressions of the limited number of natural and artificial genes currently available. Evolution has been doing just that for more than four billion years on Earth, a little less in the ocean of Europa. It has produced many intricate and marvellous wonders, but they are a mere drop in the sea of the information space that defines every possible expression of life. Avernus’s gardens are expeditions beyond the edges of current maps of artificial genetics. She is creating new territory, just as your ancestors believed that their songs created the territory over which they walked.’

  Tommy Tabagee thought about that for a moment, then said, ‘You like her, don’t you?’

  ‘I admire her.’

  Sri felt a little flinch of caution, wondering if the spry little man knew just how badly she had been humiliated the only time she and Avernus had met.

  Instead, he asked her about the gardens she’d discovered and explored, and they talked pleasantly until white-jacketed marines moved forward to serve coffee and Arvam Peixoto rose to make a short speech about the necessity for cooperation between Earth’s three great powers. When the general was finished, Tommy Tabagee told Sri that now he’d have to sing for his supper, and stood up and gave a graceful response. And then the dinner was over, but before Tommy Tabagee left he told Sri that he’d met her green saint once.

  ‘Oscar Finnegan Ramos, that is. He was a fine fellow. I was sorry to hear about his death.’

  Sri’s flinch was stronger this time. Sharp as a needle stabbing her heart. According to the official story, Oscar had died of sudden-onset multiple organ failure, one of the signature syndromes suffered by those kept alive by longevity treatments. Until recently, Sri had believed that only she and Arvam knew the truth, but a few days before she’d left for Janus she’d
found a handwritten note on the fold-down table in her cabin.

  I admire your bold move. If you ever need help, contact me.

  Sri had recognised the round, childish scrawl at once: it was Euclides Peixoto’s, a cousin and rival of Arvam’s who had been given oversight of one of her projects before the war. She’d swabbed the note for DNA, had failed to find any, and had destroyed it. She hadn’t told Arvam about it, even though it meant that one of Euclides’s agents must be on board the flagship; she’d been badly burnt by the internal politics of the Peixoto family once before and she didn’t ever again want to become involved in their intrigues. But now she was struck by the unpleasant thought that Euclides might have been spreading rumours about Oscar’s death to weaken Arvam’s position, and wondered if Tommy Tabagee knew or suspected that she had killed Oscar so that she could escape the tangle of intrigue that had threatened to trap her, and throw in her lot with Arvam Peixoto and the war effort.

  She told the PacCom liaison secretary that Oscar’s death was an untimely loss, to herself and to the Peixoto family and the scientific world; if he noticed that her face had stiffened into a mask he gave no sign of it, saying that Oscar had been a fine man who had contributed so much to the great cause.

  ‘If you have half his scruples and a quarter of his talent, you’re all right by me, I reckon.’

  After Tommy Tabagee and the rest of the Pacific Community delegation had returned to their ship, Arvam Peixoto intercepted Sri and asked her what she and the liaison secretary had been talking about.

  ‘The two of you were as thick as thieves.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you wanted? He told me that they found one of Avernus’s gardens on Iapetus. More or less invited me to visit.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Arvam said.

  ‘I might learn something useful about the PacCom’s plans.’