Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Ken died in the war. I’m Felice Gottschalk now. And when I walk out of this room I will be someone else, and you and your friends will never find me.’

  ‘If you help us, then in time it might be possible to find Zi Lei. You help us; we help you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you. I killed a man once, and I never want to do it again,’ the spy said, and quick as thought slapped a second patch on Keiko Sasaki’s forehead and caught her as she slumped sideways.

  He walked out of the storeroom as a Brazilian marine, Ari Hunter. Trooper Hunter was a skin, a few entries in the files of the Brazilian military, but he wore the spy’s face and fingerprints and retinal and metabolic patterns, and he possessed the spy’s DNA. He also looked like an Outer, but that didn’t matter. He only had to deal with the AIs and robots that controlled the security gates and the garages. They believed that Ari Hunter required a rolligon because he was on a mission to investigate an anomalous signal near the northern end of Latium Chasma.

  This time the spy could drive across the surface of the little moon without worrying about being targeted by the Brazilians. His mission was logged and approved - although he would not be making the return part of the journey, of course. He planned to retrieve and refuel the dropshell and quit Dione. It wasn’t an ideal craft, but he couldn’t risk stealing anything else. It had just enough thrust to reach escape velocity, and then he could spiral out to Iapetus in a long, lazy orbit that would take more than a hundred days. That was all right. He had plenty of air and water and food, and would spend most of the time drowsing in hibernation. And when he woke, he would set out again to find the woman he loved. It was a holy mission. Nothing could stop him.

  6

  Loc Ifrahim deserved a world of his own. Instead, they gave him a junkyard full of dead ships.

  When the war had kicked off, most of the Outer ships in the Saturn System had been killed by encounters with singleships or drones or mines. Now, robot tugs were locating and intercepting these hulks, modifying the long and erratic paths they traced around Saturn, and nudging them towards Dione, where they were parked in equatorial orbit to await the attentions of the salvage gangs.

  A dozen agencies commissioned and loosely controlled by the Three Powers Authority were attempting to reconstruct damaged infrastructure in the Saturn System, find gainful employment for tens of thousands of displaced Outers, set up Quisling administrations and police forces, harness the skills of Outer gene wizards, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, and reboot the economy using a centralised command-and-control model. All this required a robust transport network, and because it was too expensive to build ships from scratch, repair and refurbishment of those damaged in the war was an essential part of post-war reconstruction planning. Loc Ifrahim was responsible for civilian oversight of the salvage operation, reporting directly to the TPA Economic Commission. A key role in work that was crucial to the success of the occupation. Nevertheless, he felt short-changed and slighted.

  Before the war, as a member of the Brazilian diplomatic service, Loc had worked in most of the cities on the major moons of both Jupiter and Saturn. He’d been part of the commission that had drawn up tactics used in the war; he’d helped to lay the groundwork for the deal that had kept Camelot, Mimas, neutral. And in addition to his official duties, he had been carrying out clandestine work for General Arvam Peixoto. He’d not only fed the general useful information, but had also gotten his hands dirty on several occasions. And he was a genuine war hero, too. He’d been kidnapped by Outers and held hostage in a prison outside Paris, Dione, but had managed to escape at the outbreak of war, reach the Brazilian flagship, and disclose important information about the whereabouts of the gene wizard Avernus. It was not his fault that Avernus and her daughter and members of her crew had managed to escape, and yet he was certain that he was being punished for it.

  When the war ended, Loc could have chosen to return to Earth, either accepting a modest promotion within the diplomatic service or resigning and becoming a consultant for one of the companies bidding for construction or security work in the Outer System. Instead, he’d made a riskier but potentially highly lucrative move: taking up Arvam Peixoto’s offer of a job as special adviser. It paid well enough, but Loc soon realised that the general had no real plans for him and simply wanted to keep him close. Because he knew too much. Because he was an asset that might be useful at some point in the future. Loc spent some time on advisory and intelligence-assessment committees, but his main duty - oversight of the salvage operation - amounted to no more than pushing files to and fro, participating in exhaustive debates about insignificant matters, and spending far too much time in orbit around Dione in a cramped little facility staffed by Outers and controlled by the Brazilian Air Defence Force. He should have been governing a major city, or running one of the relief or reconstruction agencies. Instead, he spent most of his time harassing Outers and Air Defence officers about repair and refurbishment schedules, and taking the flak for slippage in schedules, slow delivery times, and slipshod workmanship.

  In short, his work was tedious and onerous but gave him little power or influence, effectively excluded him from the main action, and didn’t offer any opportunities to make any real money. The ships had been packed with people fleeing the war, but their personal possessions had little value. The original Outer economy had been based on utility rather than scarcity, and the Outers prized above everything else non-transferable knowledge and experience, and what they called kudos - personal ratings in a bartering system based on favours, good works, and small kindnesses. The only things of value on board the dead ships were works of art, but these were mostly sold off cheaply, as souvenirs. Loc, who knew enough about Outer art to know that he knew very little, had snagged a few nice pieces but couldn’t sell them for what they were worth: people from Earth were largely ignorant of Outer traditions and aesthetics, so there was as yet no established market for their art.

  Meanwhile, young blades from the great families, with little or no experience or knowledge of the Jupiter and Saturn systems, were being parachuted into positions that were rightfully Loc’s. The only way for ordinary people to get ahead of the game was by marriage or adoption, but Loc, who had been born in the slums of Caracas and had worked his way up the ladder of the diplomatic service by skill and cunning and ruthless ambition, had spent far too much time in the Outer System instead of on the cocktail circuit in Brasília. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to woo and win a woman with even a minor degree of consanguinity unless he gave up his ambition to make his fortune from the spoils of war and returned to Earth. And he wasn’t prepared to do that, not after enduring years of hard work, hazards and humiliation. So he had to suck up the insult of his present position, and hope that in time he would be properly rewarded for the favours he’d done for Arvam Peixoto, or that he’d discover some rich opportunity and mine it for all that it was worth.

  ‘We’ll all come good in the end,’ his friend and colleague Yota McDonald said, after Loc had vented at great length and with fine passion about his latest humiliation at the hands of the Economic Commission.

  ‘I don’t want early retirement on a government pension. I want the preferment and promotion I’ve earned,’ Loc said.

  The two men were sitting on a café terrace that overlooked the silken slide of the semicircular waterfall that plunged into a seething basin of wet rocks and ferns and the jewelled cushions of giant mosses. The basin fed a river that ran away downhill between stands of newly planted saplings towards the Green Zone at Paris’s midpoint. The terrace, with its quaint wooden tables and white umbrellas, stands of tree ferns and black bamboo, and strings of fairy lanterns, was the preserve of senior civil servants, diplomats and military officers. Its food - shrimp and fish grown in the city, lobster tails and steak shipped at tremendous expense from Earth - was excellent. In one corner of its terrace a guitarist and flautist played delicate choro numbers that floated on a cool breeze invigo
rated by the iron tang of falling water. It was one of the most pleasant places in the city, redolent of the privilege Loc craved, but he slouched sulkily in his sling chair, a slender, dark-skinned man dressed in a tailored canary-yellow suit and a pink shirt open to his navel, oiled black hair done up in a cap of short braids tipped with ceramic beads. A dandy whose handsome face was spoiled by an air of jaded cynicism that he no longer bothered to hide.

  His companion, Yota McDonald, was a sleek, plump young man who before the war, in Brasília, had worked alongside Loc in the commission that had analysed information about the cities and the main political players in the Jupiter and Saturn systems and had developed the asymmetric ‘quiet war’ strategies that had proven so effective in taking down the Outers. Like Loc, Yota had a taste for gossip about the failings of his superiors, but he lacked Loc’s ambition. He was content with his position in the middle grade of the diplomatic service and looked forward to returning to Greater Brazil in a couple of years’ time, when he would use the bonuses he was assiduously banking to get married, and the contacts he had made to win a well-paid job as an adviser in the private sector.

  ‘You are smart and shrewd, but you feel that you must have everything at once,’ he told Loc. ‘Try patience, for a change.’

  ‘I want to get what I deserve before I die,’ Loc said.

  ‘Of course. But destroying yourself in the attempt to win it makes no sense.’

  ‘Perhaps I have already destroyed myself. I have given up my health and my marriage prospects in service to God and Gaia and Greater Brazil. So winning fame and fortune is all I have left. My only reason for living. Yet I am frustrated at every turn by men who have grown rich at my expense. Fools who know nothing, who can do nothing, who have suffered nothing. Fools whose only virtue is to have been born into the right family. Lucky sperm. All they have to do is reach out and pluck the golden apples that dangle in front of their faces. And most of the time they get someone else to do it for them.’

  ‘We are lucky enough, considering who we are. Look how far we’ve come!’

  ‘Yes. But not yet far enough.’

  Yota skilfully changed the subject, telling Loc about the latest row between General Arvam Peixoto and Ambassador Fontaine over treatment of Outer prisoners.

  ‘Our ambassador is still struggling to impose any kind of “normalisation” on the general and his merry men,’ Yota said. ‘Did you hear that he wants to mount a punitive expedition to Uranus?’

  ‘Military command and the Senate have vetoed it; he is threatening to do it anyway,’ Loc said. ‘And you know what? He’s right. We know that every kind of Outer malcontent is skulking out there. And every day we leave them alone they grow stronger and bolder. We have to deal with them now, before they decide to deal with us.’

  ‘Don’t let anyone in the security service hear that kind of talk,’ Yota said. ‘It’s defeatist.’

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  Yota shrugged. ‘Even so, it could get you sent back to Earth.’

  ‘Nothing could get me sent back to Earth. It’s punishment enough that I remain here,’ Loc said.

  ‘Now your grievances are showing again,’ Yota said amiably.

  ‘There has to be more to it than this, Yota. You deserve more. I deserve more. And most of the people who are making good, they don’t deserve it at all.’

  Loc was thinking of Colonel James Lo Barrett, the officer in command of the salvage yard. A lazy, self-satisfied bully of a man with no regard for schedules or the minor details that kept the project running right, bombproof because he was one thirty-second consanguineous with the Nabuco family. The latest slippage in the salvage work had been entirely due to Colonel Barrett’s laissez-faire attitude, but it was Loc who’d had to explain it to the subcommittee of the Economic Commission.

  Yota took a sip of brandy from his oversized glass and said, ‘Here’s something that might please you. It seems that Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen is increasingly out of favour with General Arvam Peixoto. She’s spending too much time out in the field, working on those exotic gardens, when she should be providing the general with technological miracles he can profit from.’

  Loc had already heard about this, but it was good to have it confirmed from another source. As far as he was concerned, it was not only important to succeed - it was also important that your enemies should fail. And he believed Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen shared a large part of the responsibility for his present plight, for she’d whispered poison about him in the general’s ear after the gene wizard had escaped, when in truth it had been entirely her fault. She was obsessed with the hunt for Avernus, and it was a delicious irony that this obsession, coupled with her self-regarding arrogance, might yet be her downfall.

  He said as much to Yota, hinting about the small part he’d played in cutting her down to size, smiling and shaking his head when Yota asked him to elaborate. He liked secrets; liked to make people think that he had an inside angle on everything.

  ‘I have allies in unexpected places,’ he said. ‘One day soon, perhaps, I’ll be able to tell you more. But not yet. It isn’t that I don’t trust you, Yota. But I don’t want to put you in danger.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Yota said, clearly believing that this was another of Loc’s revenge fantasies.

  It was and it wasn’t. After the humiliation of his appointment, Loc had reached out to a cousin and rival of Arvam Peixoto. He’d met the man before the war, when they’d both been involved in one of the projects of the failed and little-mourned peace and reconciliation initiative meant to enhance trade, cultural exchange and mutual understanding between Greater Brazil and the Outers. The project had failed; Loc, working clandestinely for Arvam Peixoto, had played a small part in its failure. But when it became clear that he would never be properly rewarded despite all he’d done, he had begun to make tentative approaches to Arvam’s rival, feeding him little bits of information, such as the truth about the hero-pilot who was promoting the war back in Greater Brazil, and doing a few minor favours. Nothing much so far, although one errand had been amusing - slipping a handwritten note to Sri Hong-Owen that suggested it would be in her best interests for her to look for a new sponsor. Luckily, the bitch hadn’t taken the hint. Loc hoped that she’d stick with Arvam Peixoto until the day of reckoning came; he very much wanted to have a hand in her downfall, even though he couldn’t see any way of profiting from it.

  Meanwhile, he was stuck on the dreary round of his dead-end job, rotating between Paris and the orbital salvage yard. Dione’s elegant shipyard, a gossamer web dotted with workshops and cradles, had been destroyed during the war. Its replacement was a grim utilitarian lash-up of modified cargo cylinders, with noisy air conditioning, an ineradicable odour of stale cooking and chemical toilets, and little privacy. Loc had to bunk in his tiny office, with his aide snoring on the other side of a betacloth curtain; the rations were military MREs; the recycled water reeked of chlorine and showers were rationed to two minutes once every three days. Colonel James Lo Barrett, the soldiers of the security detail, and the Outer salvage crews didn’t seem to mind the appalling living conditions, but Loc loathed the place, and would have spent as little time as possible up there if he hadn’t had to cover for Colonel Barrett’s deficiencies.

  The salvage yard hung in the middle of a Sargasso Sea of derelict ships. More than sixty of them now, and one or two still arriving every week, even though it was a year and counting since the war had ended. Their shapes sharply silhouetted against Saturn’s foggy bulk, flashing like fugitive stars as they tumbled slowly through black vacuum. Those damaged beyond repair were stripped of reusable components, their fusion and attitude motors were dismounted, and their lifesystems, hulls and frames were rendered into chunks of scrap metal, fullerene composite and construction diamond. Most were powerless and frozen but otherwise intact, killed when their cybernetic nervous systems had been zapped by microwave bursts or EMP mines during the investment of the Saturn System. Salvage and refu
rbishment of these brain-dead ships was fairly straightforward, apart from having to deal with the remains of the dead.

  General Arvam Peixoto had refused to mount any kind of expedition to rescue the crews and passengers of the crippled ships. There were too many ships in too many orbits, and the risk that rescue crews might be attacked by survivors was too great. So every ship was a tomb, because those trapped on board without power and life support had either committed suicide, suffocated, or succumbed to the relentless cold. Before salvage could begin, the dead were located and documented and removed, along with all their possessions, the black boxes containing the ship’s logs and flight data were handed over to an intelligence officer for analysis, and any cargo was inventoried and offloaded. Then the hulk was guided into a cradle where crews of men and robots replaced AIs and control systems, overhauled and quickened the lifesystem, checked attitude motors, and gave the fusion motor a static test before the ship was inspected by flight technicians, certified, and handed over to the transport wing of the Three Powers Authority.

  The salvage work went slowly because there was a shortage of skilled Outer volunteers, and the Air Defence Force claimed that the only flight technicians it could spare were the surly pair who certified the salvage work. The job Loc detested would last for at least two years. Maybe more. But then a chance to redeem himself came out of the empty black sky.

  Loc was in Paris, recuperating from another bruising session with the Economic Commission’s subcommittee, when his aide called and told him that one of the salvage crews had found a live body.

  It was late in the evening. Loc was dining with Yota McDonald. They’d finished a bottle of expensive imported wine and were working on their second brandies, so Loc was a little thick-headed, saying stupidly, ‘A live what?’