Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  The conference venue was a bubble habitat that had been especially constructed and set in orbit around Neso. A sphere five hundred metres across blown from insulating layers of aerogel interleaved with tough halflife polymers, given rigidity by the pressure of its atmosphere, an internal skeleton of fullerene struts, and bands set at ninety degrees to each other, running from pole to pole and around the equator. A toy globe. A bright little sphere of air and warmth and light afloat in an infinite cold black ocean. Two shuttles of Outer design stood a little way off, lines linking them to airlocks on the surface of the habitat. After the Brazilian freighter nosed close, a pair of Outers zipped across the gap in a scooter, dragging a line which the delegates used to cross over.

  Loc was stricken with delirious vertigo as he was carried in a sling across a black gulf as deep as the universe. An Outer in a pristine white pressure suit received him at the far end and brusquely shoved him into the airlock, a hemispherical bubble on the outer curve of the habitat that opened into another, bigger bubble stuck to the habitat’s inner wall. When Captain Neves cycled through, Loc was still in his pressure suit, helpless and trembling, loathing his weakness and longing for a cleansing jolt of pandorph. She helped him strip off his suit and calmed him down, and together they swam out into the habitat’s dimly lit, roomy interior.

  It was criss-crossed with the three-dimensional web of its internal skeleton and a kind of spherical tree or bush hung like the nucleus of a cell at its centre, a rigid tangle of forking branches scaled with stiff black leaves. Sleeping pods hung like giant fruit on the struts, glowing in shades of pink or orange, and motile lights swam everywhere, a small galaxy of wandering fireflies. Rayleigh scattering in the aerogel layers of the habitat’s wall diffused their light to a deep twilight blue like a ghost of Earth’s sky; it took an effort to remember that the skin of this bubble was less than a metre thick, with an infinity of freezing vacuum beyond.

  This spooky fairyland was inhabited by a gang of young men and women in their twenties and early thirties, tall and fiercely bright and quick, a group of heroes at the height of their physical powers. Barefoot, equipped with opposable big toes, they manoeuvred around the web of struts like a troop of monkeys, used hand-held reaction jets to zip through gulfs of thin air. Feral human beings, space and zero gravity their native domain.

  They were evenly split between the two factions that had colonised the Neptune System. Ten members of the Ghost cult, all dressed in white, severe and reserved, pale faces marked with tattoos of the constellation Hydrus; ten Free Outers. Sada Selene, a fierce young woman who had once helped to kidnap Loc but ignored him now, was amongst the former; Macy Minnot was amongst the latter, looking tired and careworn.

  During the round of introductions, Loc managed to avoid Sada Selene and brought himself close to Macy Minnot and exchanged a few words, expressing his pleasure at seeing her again, saying how strange it was that they should meet after all this time, at such a distance from their home.

  ‘Some might call it fate,’ he said.

  ‘Or bad luck,’ Macy Minnot said. ‘I hope you aren’t planning any of your usual mischief.’

  Her gaze was as pinched and suspicious as ever. Her skin grainy, dark smudges under her eyes, her auburn hair cropped unflatteringly short. Despite her years in exile she was nowhere near as adept at manoeuvring in free fall as her companions. Loc could almost feel sorry for her, exiled out here, living an unnatural life with unnatural creatures.

  ‘I’m here to observe the proceedings,’ he told her. ‘And to give advice, as required. And you? Despite being an outsider, you must have risen high in your little society.’

  ‘I guess you could call me an observer too. I know I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on you.’

  ‘We’re going to be stuck here with each other for a while, Miz Minnot. Given the circumstances,’ Loc said, ‘it wouldn’t hurt to be candid with each other.’

  ‘If we’re being candid, you can tell me who your woman friend is.’

  ‘Captain Neves is in charge of our security. Where is your good friend Newton Jones?’

  ‘At home. Looking after our kids.’

  ‘Home being Proteus. It can’t be easy, living on a barren chunk of ice so far from anything you could call civilisation.’

  ’We’ve made the best of it.’

  ‘And you have multiplied. Begun a dynasty.’

  ‘We don’t have children of our own yet. The twins, they were orphaned. Their father was killed by your people back at Uranus, when they attacked his unarmed ship,’ Macy Minnot said, with a fierce direct look that Loc remembered very well.

  ‘Not my people,’ he said. ‘That would have been Arvam Peixoto’s expeditionary force. And the good general, as you may have heard, received his just deserts for that and other careless actions.’

  ‘Yet you survived.’

  ‘We have both survived, Miz Minnot. Despite everything. Let’s hope that we can survive this.’

  ‘Let’s hope we can make something of it,’ Macy Minnot said.

  After the introductory session, everyone sat down for a meal in the largest of the habitat’s pods. A primal ritual: two tribes meeting and breaking bread together, sizing up each other’s differences and strengths and weaknesses.

  Both the Ghosts and the Free Outers were supposedly democratic collectives in which everyone had equal rank and authority, but it quickly became clear that Idriss Barr, charismatic and tirelessly enthusiastic, was the primary interlocutor for the Free Outers, while the Ghost delegation was led by Sada Selene, who immediately made a point of protesting about Loc’s presence. He’d been part of the diplomatic mission in the Saturn System before the war and was therefore, quite obviously, a spy. And he’d murdered one of her people at a scientific conference on Dione. It was not right that he should be here now. She wanted him to leave.

  Sara Póvoas was prepared for this. She said that Loc was an important member of her team, personally appointed by Euclides Peixoto, but since the Ghosts had genuine reservations about him she would make sure that he would have no active role in the negotiations. A clever ploy that used Loc’s presence to unsettle and provoke the Ghosts, and pretended to withdraw privileges he’d never possessed as a sop to their pride. The Ghosts fell for it at once, with Sada Selene taking obvious pleasure at having scored a point. Loc, amused by her naivety, told Captain Neves that the Ghosts’ leader would have done better to hold that card in reserve and use it to disrupt the proceedings if things had started to go against her.

  ‘She’s too aggressive. And she believes that aggression is a virtue, so she’s also arrogant. A fatal combination. Póvoas and her team will play her easily.’

  The next day, the negotiations began in earnest.

  To begin with, Sara Póvoas and the other diplomats cleaved to a conciliatory line, asking the Outers what they wanted to do out here, how they saw their future, what they needed or didn’t need from the TPA . . . Vaguely phrased questions that gently probed the Outers’ outlook and convictions and attitude. Non-specific replies to the Outers’ list of demands. Soothing generalities. Bland assurances.

  Sada Selene responded to this exactly as Loc had predicted, making it clear that she and her associates were not interested in any kind of treaty or trade mission, or anything else that would compromise their autonomy. The Ghosts had no need of anything the TPA had to offer, she said, and they had nothing to fear from the TPA either. She conjured up views of the Ghosts’ city on Triton - chambers and manufactories bustling with all kinds of activity, refineries that produced metals and minerals from water drawn from Triton’s deeply buried ocean, work crews swarming over the frames of ships in a vast hangar, racks of pods in which masked operators lay, flying swarms of attack drones by remote control. She said that the Ghosts commanded the volume of space around Neptune, claimed that they would have no trouble taking control of the Uranus System if they wanted to, and reminded the Brazilians and Europeans that the cities on the moons of Saturn and
Jupiter were as vulnerable to attack now as they had been before the Quiet War. As was Earth, if it came to it.

  ‘If you hit us, we’ll hit back ten times harder,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you haven’t forgotten the attack we mounted on the squatters on Phoebe, at the beginning of the last war.’

  Loc thought that was a nice touch: the last war. The Ghosts were ready to go at it again, and they wanted the TPA to know it.

  While Sada Selene was all razor-blade sarcasm and barbed aggression, the spokesperson for the Free Outers, Idriss Barr, was genial and relaxed, although no less serious. He spoke for several minutes at the end of that first session, telling the Brazilians and Europeans that although the Free Outers cared passionately about the Jupiter and Saturn systems and the fates of their friends and relations, they had made a fresh start out here. The war had given them the opportunity to light out for new territory, and they weren’t going back. This was their home, and although they would resist every attempt to bring it under the jurisdiction of the Three Powers Authority, they were willing to talk with the TPA as equals. To make sure that the terrible mistake of the Quiet War was not repeated. To begin to explore some way of moving forward.

  After that speech, Idriss Barr was content for the most part to sit back and let others talk things through, although he displayed a knack for intervening at crucial moments, usually when both sides were exhausted and uncertain about where to take the discussion next. Loc studied him with grudging respect; Captain Neves agreed that he was trouble. A true alpha male. Kingly. Someone who could cause serious problems if he could ever reach out to the Outers in the Jupiter and Saturn systems.

  ‘Killing him right now would save us a lot of trouble later on,’ Captain Neves said, and Loc believed that she was only half-kidding.

  That evening, he saw Idriss Barr drop out of a game that involved a lot of shouting and flying to and fro, Free Outers rebounding from the walls of the habitat in the big space above the equatorial web in every direction, and he made his way towards the young Outer, sat down beside him, and asked if he had lost or won.

  ‘I was tagged,’ Idriss Barr said. ‘So I get to sit out and catch my breath for ten minutes before I can rejoin the fun.’

  ‘It isn’t about winning or losing,’ Loc said. ‘It’s how you play the game.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Idriss Barr was barefoot in a cut-down suitliner. His skin glowed with ruddy health and he was blotting sweat from his face and arms with a bunched towel. A big happy human animal. Loc, swaddled in a sweater, a fleece jerkin, leggings, and a pair of thick sockshoes against the frosty cold, could feel the heat radiating off him.

  ‘I’ve lived amongst Outers for a long time now,’ Loc said. ‘More years than I care to count. But there are still many things I don’t understand. I try, of course. It’s my job. But it isn’t easy. I see that the Ghosts aren’t playing with you, for instance. And I have to wonder why that is.’

  ‘Perhaps you should ask the Ghosts.’

  ‘They take themselves very seriously, don’t they?’

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be an impartial observer, Mr Ifrahim.’

  ‘I believe I just made an observation.’

  Idriss Barr laughed. Those candid golden eyes. Lion’s eyes. An easy smile in a face that wasn’t especially handsome but had an appealing openness. It was easy to like him. To want him to like you, to be your friend. Pure alpha through and through. Like Arvam Peixoto, but without the streak of chilly cruelty.

  ‘And I’m sure that you’ve seen that the Ghosts have very different ambitions from us. But you are mistaken if you think that can be used against us.’

  ‘Because you are united against a common enemy?’

  ‘Because there’s room enough for a hundred different ways of life out here. A thousand. We have our differences with the Ghosts, but we’re both engaged in the same grand adventure. A broadening of possibilities and potential that, far from being a threat to the people of Earth, promises a glorious and harmonious future.’

  ‘Alas, there’s nothing inevitable about the future,’ Loc said. ‘Except for the hard fact that in the long run none of us will be there to see it. You should put the future behind you, Mr Barr, and think about how you are going to survive the realities of the present.’

  Idriss Barr slung his towel around his neck and studied Loc for a moment. ‘You’re thirty-five.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Loc said. He didn’t want to admit that the man was dead on the nose.

  ‘You’re the same generation as me and my friends. You aren’t part of the gerontocracy. The old people who run everything. Your new president - how old is he? A hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty? And he replaced a woman who died at the age of a hundred and ninety.’

  ‘A hundred and ninety-seven. But why should age matter? Longevity treatments—’

  Idriss Barr clapped his hands together. It was like a gun going off in Loc’s face: he couldn’t help flinching.

  ‘Of course it matters! On Earth, the old grabbed all the power long ago. And although the cities of Saturn and Jupiter liked to boast that they were the last redoubts of democracy, the old always outvoted the young. And they had more kudos too! They had longer to acquire it, and they traded it amongst themselves, so the young had great problems getting favours done or organising projects because they lacked the necessary kudos. You see, Mr Ifrahim, both sides in the Quiet War were dominated by old men and women who were refighting a war of a hundred years ago. The same rivalries over the same things. Throughout history, it’s been the same. Old people going to war against each other over long-held grievances.

  ‘Well, my friends and I have left all that behind. And so have the Ghosts. We have travelled out to the edge of human experience, where there are so many new worlds to explore and experience, where we are trying to create something different. Something new. And I think you have some sympathy with that. I think you’re like us. I think you also hunger for change.’

  ‘Let’s say for the sake of argument that’s true,’ Loc said. ‘What do you need from me? What do you think I need from you?’

  ‘Those are good questions, but they’re the wrong questions. Your friends talk about peace treaties and trade, but there’s really nothing we need from you. We can source from local materials everything we need to survive and work, and we have no need for superfluous stuff collected to signify status, as birds or fish make bowers to attract a mate. Oh, it’s true that Outer society was founded by people who fled from the Earth to a haven on the Moon because they were frightened of losing their wealth and power. But everything changed when the governments of Earth came to take their city from them, and they had to flee again. The worst of them went to Mars, but the majority, including all the people who had kept their lunar city running, the scientists and technicians and all the rest, they went to Jupiter and then spread further out still, to Saturn. And they founded a new kind of society, where people owned only what they needed and status was measured not by what people owned but by what they could do, their research and their arts, their work for the common good. We still cleave to those principles. Of course we do. It’s the only logical way to live. The best way to live. And that means that as long as we can live off the land and enjoy the freedom to pursue our artistic and scientific work, we don’t need anything else,’ Idriss Barr said, and pushed away from the spar and flew across the wide space, shouting and jostling with his friends in a game that Loc couldn’t begin to understand.

  ‘He’s wrong,’ he told Captain Neves later, as they lay fully clothed in each other’s arms, cloudy breath mingling, in their little pod. ‘The kind of society he describes, where everyone shares the same ideals and is driven by the same kind of dreams and hopes, only works in special circumstances like this. Somewhere cut off from the rest of human society. Somewhere where it takes a lot of work to survive, so that everyone must work together to provide basic needs. It’s like one of the old research stations in Antarctica, or on t
he Moon. A place where people have volunteered to live because they want to be there, not because they happened to be born there. Because they have a mission.

  ‘Once upon a time the Outer System really was like that. A marginal society of niche clingers. Every day, every hour, taken up with the struggle to survive. But as life became easier Outer society began to differentiate. Different people wanted different things. And so they began to trade with each other. For kudos rather than money, but the principle was exactly the same: gratification of desire. And then they began to need things that only we could supply, and they began to trade with us. Idriss Barr does not realise it, but it will happen here, if there is no war. It’s the human condition. He says that his people need nothing from us. But they will. They will. And the first person able to exploit that need will make a fortune.’

  Captain Neves was staring into Loc’s face, her eyes serious and intent under the unplucked hedge of her eyebrows, which met in a faint tangle above the bridge of her broad nose. Loc could see himself reflected in the inky wells of her pupils, the darkness where she lived. Could feel her breath on his cheek when she said, ‘I think you’ve let Idriss Barr get inside your head. He’s made you believe that his people can make a go of it out here.’

  ‘They’ve been out here for less than ten years, and they are already building cities. They spun this little habitat in only a few weeks. What else will they do, given enough time?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what they can do, or what they might want or need. Either they’ll fail because there aren’t enough of them and they don’t have enough resources, or they’ll be taken down because it looks like they might be making a go of it.’

  ‘As I told Idriss Barr, nothing about the future is inevitable.’

  ‘We already know what we want to do,’ Captain Neves said. ‘Go back to Earth as soon as we can. Use our experience and our contacts to make a real fortune, when the war comes. That’s the plan.’