Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  Macy and Newt closed up their pressure suits, wriggled through the airlock one after the other, unpacked the sled, and rode it across slopes of dusty ice under a black sky where Uranus’s bland blue crescent lay on its side. The cliffs curved around them, rippled like frozen curtains, scalloped footings rising out of cones of mass-wasted material. Macy and Newt switchbacked up the face of one of these cones to a bench butted against the cliff face, where an automobile-sized mining robot was patiently gnawing into an intrusive seam of silicates, cutting out block after block and piling them in neat pyramidal stacks. Sunlight on Miranda was just one four-hundredth as strong as sunlight falling on Earth - brighter than moonlight, but not bright enough for Macy to easily make out colours. The dusty hummocks of the bench and the cliffs rearing above were mostly shades of grey enlivened by stark black shadows and salt-sharp glints reflected from freshly-exposed facets of water ice, and the brick-sized chunks of silicate material looked like iron slag. But when Macy turned on her helmet lamp, the silicate bricks were transformed into glistening blocks of coarsely textured jade, shot through with folds of delicate yellow and carbon black. Perfect material for pavements and low sinuous walls in the little parks planned for the habitat.

  She and Newt loaded a sled and hauled it back to Elephant and stacked the bricks in the tug’s external cargo lockers. After four trips the lockers were full and their work was done. They hiked out across the floor of the cirque, chasing each other in long floating leaps under the black sky. The sun’s bright chip was close to the horizon; their shadows stretched and shrank, stretched and shrank as they bounded along, dancing in the ethereal microgravity, delighted in each other’s delight. They warmed meals in the foodmaker and ate them and drank a little home-made wine, and made love and lay in each other’s arms in the hammock they’d stretched across the living space. Macy snuggled up against Newt, resting her head on his cool bony chest. She could hear his heart beating, and feel the pulse of the microheart in the wrist which lay against her neck as he stroked her hair, the short bristles making a crisp sound under his fingers.

  ‘We don’t have to go back,’ he said.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘We could build our own garden right here. Throw up a tent, fill it full of jungle.’

  ‘And chickens.’

  ‘Why not? I’d even let you kill and eat one now and then.’

  ‘I don’t know how you can bear to live with an unevolved barbarian like me.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve eaten meat before,’ Newt said. ‘There’s a cult in the free zone of Sparta, Tethys. They grow cloned cow meat, mince it up, eat it raw. A sex thing. They drink blood, too. Little sips of human blood.’

  ‘Is this one of your stories?’

  Newt had all kinds of tall tales from back when he’d been a freebooting trader. Macy reckoned that about half of them contained a pinch of truth, and one or two might even be more or less genuine.

  ‘Maybe one day I’ll be able to take you there,’ Newt said. ‘Although I have to say that even though I only took the smallest mouthful, I nearly threw up.’

  ‘Raw meat, now that’s barbaric. We can clone up our own cow meat, and I’ll show you how to cook a hamburger. Or broil a steak.’

  ‘Corrupt me with your Earthly ways. We’ll build a garden here and grow chickens. And have kids. I mean, forget about the chickens, but don’t you think it’s time we did something about having kids?’

  They’d talked about starting a family before, but this had arrived sideways. Macy raised her head and looked at Newt. His face, with its prominent cheekbones and narrow nose, was all highlights and shadow in the soft faint glow of the dialled-down lights. It was impossible to make out his expression.

  ‘Don’t joke about it,’ Macy said.

  ‘I’m not joking. People are having babies all around us. Four since we arrived, six more on the way. Not to mention all the kids who came out here in the first place. Oh, I know what you’re going to say, it’s too early, we’re going to have to move on when the TPA comes calling. But if we stick to that line of thought it will always be too early, until it’s too late.’

  Newt was serious, for once. A rare mood for him, which meant that Macy had to take his proposal seriously. She told him that it was something that she wanted, all right, but she wasn’t sure she was ready for it, and they talked it over, rehearsing all the arguments for and against, and fell asleep twined around each other in the deep hammock.

  Macy woke when Newt reared up and reached past her and pulled something towards him: his spex. They were making a soft beeping that stopped when he hooked them over his ears.

  ‘What is it?’ Macy said, chills chasing over her bare skin. Like everyone in the field they maintained strict radio silence. If someone had sent them a message, it meant trouble of some kind.

  After a moment Newt took off his spex and handed them to her.

  She put them on. Black letters marched across a flat grey background in front of her eyes:

  Possible contact. Return at once. Possible contact. Return at once. Possible contact. Return at once.

  ‘They must have bounced it off the observatory on Titania,’ Newt said. ‘It’s the only one above the horizon right now.’

  Macy clutched at the side of the hammock as he swung off. ‘Possible contact. It means they aren’t sure,’ she said.

  ‘I guess we’ll have to go back and find out. Any way you cut it, it’s bad news.’

  ‘But not the worst. Not yet.’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  The observatories on Oberon, Titania and Ariel kept high-resolution telescopes trained on the patches of sky through which ships from Saturn, Jupiter or Earth had to pass if they were heading for orbit around Uranus. After two years, with no sign of any ships or sneaky little drones infiltrating the Uranus System, the Free Outers had begun to think that they were safe. That the TPA had decided that it was not worth chasing after them. Jupiter was presently on the far side of the sun and Saturn was drawing away from Uranus - was now further away than Earth, in fact. These vast distances were a moat separating them from the rest of humanity. A quarantine. But blink comparison of frames captured by the telescope of the Oberon observatory showed a fleck of light moving across the rigid patterns of the star field, and spectrographic analysis showed that it was fusion light: the exhaust of a ship that had been dispatched from Saturn and was now decelerating towards Uranus on a trajectory that put it at just thirty days out from orbital rendezvous.

  As soon as everyone had returned to the habitat an extraordinary meeting was convened in the bowl of the commons where the Free Outers cooked communal meals and played and talked. They talked for most of the day, and long into the night. Although the general tone of the discussion was serious and sober, it was sharpened by an edge of strained anxiety that sometimes broke out in uncharacteristic catcalls and squabbles. They had made detailed plans and preparations for this day, and now that it was here they had been brought face to face with the possibility that they might not survive.

  Sitting beside Newt in their usual place near the lip of the bowl, Macy watched the proceedings with growing impatience burning low in her belly. Frustration and claustrophobia. She had never doubted that one day the TPA would move against the Free Outers, but she’d been lulled into a false sense of security as she and everyone else had busied themselves with turning their temporary refuge into a home. They’d sat here making gardens and babies, growing comfortable and complacent, and now that the crisis had arrived they were wasting time with pointless arguments.

  Macy had never had much time for the interminable debates that the Outers so loved, especially when it was obvious from the get-go what needed to be done. No point talking about it: they needed a strong leader who’d stand up and take charge. But Idriss Barr was more concerned with moderating the discussion than taking charge, anxious to defer to every point of view. So they wasted more than three hours debating whether they should stay or leave, and when they’d voted by a slim majority
to leave they immediately settled into another discussion about whether they should head for Pluto or Neptune.

  Newt, Macy, and the rest of the motor crew opted for Neptune. Ziff Larzer set out their plans calmly and methodically. Neptune was further away than Pluto, but other refugees might be hiding out there, and its big moon, Triton, was larger and more hospitable than Pluto or Charon. The motor crew had manufactured sufficient antiprotons to fuel all the ships fitted with new fusion motors, and these would be more than enough to transport everyone. They might have to leave behind the unconverted ships and a considerable amount of equipment, but they would be able to take enough to make a new home, and there was the possibility that they could return to Uranus one day and retrieve the rest. As far as Macy was concerned, it was done and dusted, but there was another interminable delay while people quibbled over this or that detail before they all voted again. This time the majority was clear. The motor crew had won the day. The Free Outers would pack up and move on to Neptune.

  Before they could leave they had to strip out everything useful in the habitat, collect the final set of fuel tanks dispatched from the robots in Uranus’s atmosphere, and prep and load their ships. Macy and the rest of the biome crew spent most of the time harvesting the hydroponic farms, pruning back the gardens and simplifying the habitat’s ecosystem so that it would be easier for the maintenance bots to look after. They packed coffee and tea mosses and dried herbs and collected as much seed as they could - it would be faster and easier to grow new crops from seed than from callus cultures derived from the libraries of gene maps - but the rest of the edible biomass went into the bioreactors because they couldn’t afford to waste fuel carrying it.

  Macy worked with growing regret. She’d put a lot of work and love into the gardens that curved up on either side of the habitat’s narrow floor - clumps of dwarf conifers and bamboos, squares of maize and corn and rice, peanut vines scrambling through stands of banana plants, great heaps of express vine, based on kudzu and cut so that different strains bore tomatoes or cucumbers, dozens of varieties of peas and beans, citrus bushes and grape vines, egg plants and onions, containers overflowing with thyme and mint and parsley. A dense green maze, crammed with lush and vivid life. Now all this was cut back to the bone, everything was stark and bare, domes and tepees were stranded on the floor like barnacles when the tide went out, and she could see that the habitat was no more than a tunnel jointed up from half a dozen cylinders little bigger than the airframes of transport planes, no longer any kind of home.

  The Outers worked hard, eighteen hours a day, planning to quit Miranda ten days before the TPA ship arrived. They were still working when a nuclear warhead took out the old commune habitat on Titania.

  The missile had been shot off by the TPA ship while it was still decelerating towards Uranus. It flared in on a trajectory that gained delta vee as it hooked around the ice giant, and headed straight out towards Titania and detonated five hundred metres above the tented habitat, vaporising it and melting a perfectly circular shallow bowl a kilometre across in the icy regolith. A clear message that the TPA wasn’t prepared to negotiate or take prisoners. That they had come here to clean out a nest of vermin.

  And so, before the oncoming ship could launch more missiles, the Free Outers abandoned the habitat and boarded their ships in jittery haste. The last of Miranda that Macy saw before cycling through Elephant’s airlock was the scatter of decorative bricks she and Newt had dumped from the tug’s external lockers. Lumps of slag derelict on trampled dust.

  They left without any formality beyond coordination of launch of their ships. Eighteen equipped with the fast-fusion motor, followed by four slower unconverted shuttles packed with as much equipment and construction material as they could carry and crewed by volunteers. Burning up from the floor of the deep groove where the habitat was hidden and from pits hidden in parallel grooves or close to the rims of craters on the rolling plain beyond, flying straight out from the dark northern hemisphere of the little moon into the diluted glare of the sun.

  Idriss Barr sent a brief message from ship to ship, saying that they had become pioneers during their sojourn on Miranda and they would always be pioneers, never refugees. But as Uranus’s crescent dwindled behind them into the starry black Macy couldn’t help thinking that, rather than setting out on a grand adventure, they were simply running away, like rabbits scattering from the shadow of a hawk. One way or another she seemed to have been running away all her life. From the bleak compound of the Church of the Divine Regression, huddled on the dust deserts of Kansas, to the slums of Pittsburgh, where she’d briefly fallen in love before running away again, and joining the R&R Corps. And that had taken her all the way to Jupiter: to Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, where she’d become embroiled in a sleazy little tangle of intrigue and sabotage and murder. She’d blown the whistle on that and had defected, and had been rewarded with incarceration in an uptight little city from which she escaped with the help of Newt, running with him further out to Saturn, and his family home on Dione. Then war had come, and they’d gone on the run for the second time. And here she was, running away yet again.

  The observatories on Oberon, Titania and Ariel, and a satellite left in orbit around Miranda, transmitted views of the TPA ship as it closed on Uranus, describing an aerobraking manoeuvre through the tenuous outer reaches of the atmosphere that drew a violet contrail halfway around the ice giant, then jettisoning its scorched heat shield and hooking out past Oberon on a periapsis raise manoeuvre that, inside six hours, brought it into an equatorial parking orbit beyond the broken arcs at the outer edge of the ring system. A spray of drones shot out towards the five larger moons, swung into orbit around them, and quickly located and took down the observatories. The satellite orbiting Miranda transmitted glimpses of nuclear strikes on decoy tents that had been set up on Oberon and Ariel, and then its signal cut out. The fleeing Free Outers would never know if the TPA ship located the habitat, or the ships hidden around and about, or the little refuges they’d scattered across Miranda’s surface. All they could do was plough on towards Neptune.

  Think of the Solar System as a clock, with the sun at its centre and the planets sweeping out rings of increasing diameter around it, moving counterclockwise. Set Uranus at twelve o’clock, with Saturn off to the left at roughly nine o’clock, and Neptune all the way across the dial at half past five, on the far side of the sun. More than seven billion kilometres away, a vast gulf that even the ships equipped with the fast-fusion motor would take twenty-seven weeks to cross, while the unconverted shuttles would take much longer, more than two years.

  The little fleet forged steadily onwards, dropping empty fuel tanks behind them as they rose out of Uranus’s gravity well. At last their motors cut out and they were falling free, vanishingly small and faint motes drifting in the great ocean of night.

  Most people slept most of the time. Outers had the knack of being able to drop into a deep sleep similar to hibernation, slowing heartbeat and breathing and metabolism, a spark of consciousness remaining so that they could wake up in just a few minutes. But although Macy had been given retroviral treatments to help her adapt to the stresses of microgravity, the hibernation tweak was more radical than adding a few regulatory genes and so she slept in a coffin like the one she’d slept in when she’d first voyaged out from Earth to Jupiter, cooled down to -4° Centigrade, at the borderland between life and death.

  Waking was slow, and painful. She was briefly aware of choking up pink fluorosilicones that had infused her lungs, and then she passed out. When she woke again, sick, blinded and nearly paralysed by the universe’s worst hangover, she gradually realised that she was in a cocoon hung in a corner of Elephant’s living space. Someone swam towards her. It was Newt, saying something she couldn’t grasp. Words that were just noise, lost in the distracting thump of her headache. She slept and woke again, racked by bone-deep aches, her stomach clenched and empty, her bowels distended around fifty kilogrammes of concrete.


  She was still strapped in the cocoon. A peristaltic line was feeding clear nutrient fluid into a vein in her left wrist. The living space was empty, lit by dim red light. Elephant’s motor was making a comforting rumble and pulling about 0.1 g sternwards. After unplugging the line in her wrist and unzipping the cocoon, Macy tumbled to the padded floor; it took all her strength to haul her aching carcass up the rungs to where Newt and Ziff Larzer and Herschel Wu lay side by side on the crash couches that took up most of the little control blister.

  Newt started to get up, and Macy stumbled forward and dropped to her knees and embraced him, breathed in the familiar warmth and smell of him.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I think I’m alive. More or less.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be up.’

  ‘What do you want me to do - go back to sleep? I’ve been asleep too long.’ Macy bumped fists with Ziff Larzer and Herschel Wu and said, ‘We’re all still here, so I guess the TPA didn’t try to cut us off.’

  The three men exchanged glances.

  Cold electricity zipped down Macy’s spine. ‘Something happened,’ she said.

  Ziff Larzer said, ‘We have good news and bad news, and news we’re not sure about.’

  Herschel Wu twiddled his fingers in the air: the memo space in front of the couches opened up and displayed a navigation plot curving through the orbits of moons scribed around a fat planet, tagged with way points, a bead blinking halfway along it. He said, ‘We’re about a hundred thousand kilometres out from Neptune, coming towards the end of a burn that will insert us into orbit.’

  ‘Around Triton or around Neptune? I thought we were heading directly for Triton,’ Macy said.

  A telescope view of Neptune’s half-globe hung in a corner of the memo space, darker blue than Uranus, differentiated into distinct bands. Pale elongated wisps of cloud. A small black spot capped with a feathering of white cloud rode above the equator, close to the fuzzy terminator line between day and night. The ice giant was girdled by the bright circles of its two prominent rings, and hanging beyond the rings was a tiny disc: Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, their new home.