Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  Trusties had access to every part of the prison tent. They jogged or cycled around its circumference, rambled amongst the cliffs and boulderfields of the rim. Felice discovered a talent for freestyle climbing. He soloed several new routes, and had a favourite spot near the top of the western rim, close to the skirt of the tent, where he could sit and look out across pieced fields of vacuum organisms to the comb of salt-white barracks that housed the prisoners and the blue-tinted dome of Trusty Town perched above it, in a low saddle in the rim wall. Groups of prisoners small as insects worked here and there in the fields and the black flecks of surveillance drones hung above them in the bright air. His world entire. The only world he had now. Perhaps the last world he would ever have.

  Despite regular exercise and strong doses of steroids, he was troubled by a persistent stiffness in his limbs and a numbness that came and went in his fingers and toes, and he was sometimes a little clumsy, dropping things or knocking them over. The medical technician, Amy Ma Coulibaly, assured him that his condition was developing more slowly than she had expected, and he tried not to think of it as a death sentence, but it was always there, even at moments when he was happiest. Like the shadow of a rock under the surface of a sunlit lake.

  During his long convalescence after the trauma of revival from hibernation, Amy Ma Coulibaly had taught Felice the rudiments of chess; he visited her at the clinic three or four times a week to play a game or two. He lost most of the time: the old woman was a fierce and agile tactician. She made her moves swiftly and decisively, altering the position of a piece on the slate’s virtual board with a flick of her forefinger, leaning back while Felice agonised over his response. He was fascinated by the way in which a few simple opening moves so quickly developed into a complex web of possibilities, how lines of power and influence switched in strange and unexpected configurations as the game developed. It was so very like battle calculus that he had to wonder why he and his brothers hadn’t been taught to play chess during their training. Perhaps it was because of the fierce intellectual pleasure that immersion in the game generated. His childhood and his training had been strictly utilitarian, and the lectors had roundly denounced every kind of pleasure.

  Felice and Amy Ma Coulibaly talked about the small change of prison life while they played - the rivalries, intrigues and romances amongst the prisoners and the trusties, Edz Jealott’s excesses, the significance of the latest tweaks made by the prison administration to the rules and regulations. Amy did most of the talking. She loved to gossip, and had sharp and vividly expressed opinions about everyone and everything in the prison. She was one of the pioneering generation of Outers, a century and a half old, born into a wealthy family in New Zealand, where many of the richest and powerful people on Earth had moved to escape the worst effects of climate change, food riots, energy shortages, terrorism, and the general breakdown of civilisation at the back end of the twenty-first century. But even refuges like New Zealand had become unstable, and when she had been just five years old Amy’s family had decided to buy shares in a settlement, Athena, that was being built near Archimedes Crater in the northwest quadrant of the Moon. A year after they had quit Earth, the violent release of millions of tonnes of methane gas from clathrate fields in the Antarctic had triggered a chaotic and comprehensive climatic disaster - the Overturn

  - that had caused the deaths of several billion people and had radically and permanently altered global politics. Twenty years later, the powerful military and criminal families who’d taken control of most of the countries of Earth had turned their attention to the refugees on the Moon, who had fled outward before the threats of annexing Athena could be realised. They had possessed considerable experience in building habitats by then, settling on Mars and on Jupiter’s second-largest moon, Callisto, colonising other moons of Jupiter and Saturn. And then Earth had moved against Mars.

  Felice Gottschalk believed that he knew some of this story - how a treacherous plan by the colonists on Mars to nudge an asteroid into a collision course with Earth had been foiled, how heroes from the Chinese Democratic Republic had sacrificed their lives by H-bombing the settlements on Mars and diverting a comet and breaking it up so that it had stitched a string of impacts around Mars’s equator and killed every last Martian. This was the version of history drilled into him during his strange childhood, but according to Amy Ma Coulibaly the Chinese had struck the first blow after the Martians had refused to cede their independence, a sneak attack that had destroyed the settlements at Ares Valles and Hellas Planitia. A few of the surviving Martians had attempted to avenge this atrocity by altering the orbit of a Trojan asteroid so that it would intersect the orbit of Earth, but their plan had failed, and the Chinese had wiped out the survivors of the sneak attack with the cometary impact. Amy said that if the Chinese hadn’t lost more than half of their small fleet of ships in this effort they might have gone on to destroy the nascent colonies of the Jupiter and Saturn systems, too. Instead, both sides had recoiled from the enormity of the Martian holocaust and a peace treaty had been hastily drawn up and ratified. Amy had been present at the signing ceremony that had taken place in the ruined city of her childhood, Athena. A solemn and important moment in human history from which no one seemed to have learned anything lasting. It was true that the fragile peace between Earth and the Outers had lasted a century, but only because the chief political powers on Earth had been preoccupied with making good the damage caused by the Overturn and centuries of industrialisation and global warming.

  Amy had raised a family with her partner and had helped to build the city of Rainbow Bridge, Callisto. After her partner died, she had moved to Athens, Tethys, and had taken up a new career as a medical technician. She’d been a friend and occasional collaborator with the gene wizard Avernus, and had also been involved with the peace and reconciliation movement, and that was why she had been put in jail by the TPA after the war.

  ‘But I was never a refusenik,’ she said. ‘I’m too old and cowardly to take part in the nonviolent protests. So I was sent here, with all the other old crocks.’

  Felice Gottschalk gave her a bowdlerised account of his search for Zi Lei, the year he’d spent helping to repair and rebuild Paris, Dione, and his adventures on Iapetus with the gypsy prospector Karyl Mezhidov. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Amy that they had something in common, that they’d both lived on the Moon in former lives, that he’d been born here, tweaked to resemble an Outer and grown to maturity in only two and a half thousand days, trained as a spy and saboteur. And if Amy suspected his true nature, she never mentioned it, and never asked who had designed his tweaks, or where he had come from, or what he’d been doing before the war. She seemed to like him for what he had become, and as far as he was concerned the past was past. The daily routines of the prison were his life now, a chain of beads told one by one, each a minuscule measure of atonement for his sins.

  A little over two hundred and fifty days after Felice had woken in Amy’s prison clinic, a new batch of prisoners arrived. Gene wizards, engineers, experts in every area of science and technology. They were housed in Trusty Town rather than in the barracks of the ordinary prisoners, and were put to work collaborating with scientists in the European Union and the territories of the Peixoto and Nabuco families. One of them, Bel Glise, was an old friend of Amy Ma Coulibaly, and she often sat with Amy and Felice while they played chess and gossiped. A rake-thin, edgy woman of some sixty years, she was a mathematician and a poet - famous for her poetry on every inhabited moon of the Outer System, according to Amy - but she never talked about her work, or much else, either.

  ‘Now is not the time,’ she said, with a thin smile, on the only occasion when Felice’s curiosity got the better of him and he asked her if she had written anything in the prison.

  He didn’t much like the woman. Most Outers kept themselves scrupulously clean, but Bel Glise had a faint persistent sour odour, her long pale hair hung lank and dull around her thin face, and she bit her nails to the q
uick. Sitting hunched and forlorn like some admonitory revenant while she watched the games of chess with unnerving concentration, saying hardly a word.

  Amy told Felice that he should try to understand Bel Glise a little more and criticise her a little less. She had lost several members of her immediate family in the war; she’d been arrested on a trumped-up charge so that the Europeans and Brazilians could exploit her expertise in a branch of mathematics useful in data mining; and she was finding it hard to adjust to life in prison.

  ‘She’s the most intelligent person I know,’ Amy said. ‘Her mind operates on very abstract levels, and her interrogators have difficulty understanding her even when she is doing her best to explain her ideas. So they hurt and threaten her. They treat her with massive doses of veridical drugs, and use her implant to give her brief jolts of intense pain to punish her when they feel that she’s being especially uncooperative. And that makes it even harder for her to give them what they want, and so they hurt her more. A nasty little positive feedback loop. I’m trying to help her with cognitive therapy, and sitting with us is part of that.’

  Amy was a good friend - the only friend Felice had - and he needed her medical expertise and the drugs she gave him to ameliorate the symptoms of his condition. And that meant that he had to try to be a friend to Bel Glise. The mathematician cut a lonely figure in Trusty Town. She sat by herself in the commissary or wandered alone between the accommodation blocks, twisting her hands over one another as if trying to wash off some indelible stain, her lips moving and her eyes focused elsewhere. She could often be found on the promenade where Trusty Town’s dome abutted the flank of the main tent and a long, flat panel of construction diamond gave an unobstructed view out across the lunar surface. There was nothing much to see - an undulating plain littered with small craters and fans of ejecta and a few larger rocks, stretching away towards a low hill at the horizon, the rim of another crater - but the panorama seemed to fascinate and calm her.

  Felice Gottschalk liked it, too. Liked to watch the way shadows changed shape and the colours of the landscape slowly transmuted from every shade of grey to bronze and golden tans as the sun tracked across the black sky. It reminded him of the last days of his training, when he and his brothers had been allowed out onto the surface, when he had been full of happy anticipation, dreaming of the missions he might be given, the victories he would help win. And yes, sometimes of escape. Even then, he’d dreamed of escaping what he was, of finding his own true self. Sometimes, as he stood staring out at the lunar panorama, his mind ticked through a simple calculation. The Moon was about eleven thousand kilometres in circumference and Korolev Crater was off to one side of the meridian. If he walked about two thousand kilometres eastward, he would be able to see Earth rise above the horizon. It would take him about two hundred hours, a little over eight days . . .

  He was standing there one day, lost in contemplation, when he became aware of a disturbance behind him. On the far side of a broad stretch of parched and threadbare grass, two of Edz Jealott’s lieutenants were circling Bel Glise, taunting her, blocking her attempts to walk away. As Felice Gottschalk approached, he saw that the taller of the two men was Zhang Hilton, the man whose arm he’d broken in the brief fight six months ago, after he’d been discharged from the clinic. Zhang Hilton was trying, half-seriously, to pull down the zipper of Bel Glise’s coveralls, and she was trying with furious and silent concentration to preserve her modesty, shielding the zipper with one hand and with the other batting at Zhang Hilton as he pried and prodded, and his companion made coarse suggestions.

  A drone floated high above, sharply silhouetted against the blue of the dome. Felice could hear the faint whisper of its fans as he loped across the grass, Zhang Hilton turning to him, smiling, asking him if he wanted a piece of the action.

  Felice ignored the man and asked Bel Glise if she was all right. She nodded once, straight up and down, her bloodless lips clamped tight.

  ‘I’ll walk you back to your room,’ Felice said.

  ‘We just got her warmed up and you step in?’ Zhang Hilton said. He was still smiling, but his gaze was deadly serious. ‘Man, I don’t think so.’

  ‘How is your arm?’ Felice said.

  ‘I heal quick,’ Zhang Hilton said. ‘How about you?’

  ‘If you want to fight me, don’t involve anyone else. Just walk up and ask,’ Felice said.

  He was staring into Zhang Hilton’s face, watching for the cues that would give away the man’s intentions, but he was also aware of Zhang Hilton’s friend in his peripheral vision, turning now to look at something. He glanced around, a half-second jerk of his head. Two men were coming across the plaza from the west and a man and a woman were advancing from the east, all moving with the jaunty bouncing stroll that marked out Edz Jealott’s lieutenants. Felice saw Zhang Hilton’s expression change slightly, caught the man’s wrist when he began to reach inside his jerkin and bodychecked him and threw him to the ground and kicked him hard below the angle of his jaw, at the spot where nerves clustered, then pulled his shock stick from his belt and flicked it on and turned to face the other man, who’d conjured a three-ball flail from somewhere. The man held it low and swished it to and fro as he sidled to the left. Felice turned to follow him, aware of the other lieutenants closing on either side, armed with various of the non-lethal weapons permitted by the prison administration.

  The drone hung unmoving high above. No help there. In the early days, the guards had put a stop to every kind of trouble by zapping everyone involved, but now they intervened only if it looked like someone was going to be killed.

  Felice stepped towards the man with the flail, drawing circles in the air with his shock stick. The man swung at him and he drew himself in, the three iron balls at the ends of their taut chains whirring past his belly, and jammed the shock stick against the man’s ear. The man howled and fell to his knees and dropped the flail; before Felice could snatch it up, the other lieutenants charged in on either side. A man jabbed a shock stick at Felice’s face and Felice kicked him in the kneecap and put him straight down, spun in a half-circle and broke the woman’s nose with his elbow. Another man moved in from the left, swinging a cosh fabricated from a flexible sleeve of plastic stuffed with gravel and sand. Felice fended off the first blow with his left arm, the shock numbing it from elbow to shoulder; the second caught him on the side of the head and drove him to his knees. He saw the bloody-nosed woman wrestling with Bel Glise, saw Zhang Hilton staggering towards him with a cudgel gripped loosely in one hand, saw the cosh come down again and ducked away and felt air part above his head. Then the fourth lieutenant stepped in and kicked Felice hard in the small of his back and laid him out flat and breathless.

  That wasn’t what knocked him out. The drone did that, zapping everyone in the vicinity with bolts of white-hot pain before Zhang Hilton could smash Felice’s skull.

  When Felice Gottschalk regained consciousness, he was lying on his back, looking up at Edz Jealott and the blue curve of the dome. The light hurt his eyes. His head felt as if it had been split open and his left arm was hot and swollen. When he pushed to his knees, his sight pulsed black and red and the world revolved around him at a tilt and he almost fell down again.

  ‘You started a fight,’ Edz Jealott said. ‘I won’t have that in my town.’

  Men and women stood in a wide and loose circle around the two of them. Edz Jealott’s girlfriends and lieutenants, other trusties, scientists. The young giant wore only a body suit rolled down to his waist, white elastomer moulded to his muscular legs and bulging over the bullybag of his genitals. On the broad shield of his chest a nest of tattooed snakes composed entirely of flame writhed around each other in slow motion. His skin was milkily translucent and his mane of black hair hung in oily ringlets to his shoulders.

  ‘If you want to fight anyone, fight me,’ he said, and struck the knot of flame-snakes with a hand big enough to wrap around Felice’s head. ‘I’ll even let you take the first shot.’ />
  Felice didn’t reply. There was no point. Besides, it was taking most of his concentration to stay on his feet. The ground was pitching to and fro and Edz Jealott’s face kept doubling and sliding back together, the man making a speech now about the need to stick together, why it was dangerous for anyone to think that they could do what they wanted and ignore the common good. There was a commotion amongst the people loosely gathered around them - it was Amy Ma Coulibaly, intercepted by one of Edz Jealott’s lieutenants as she pushed through the watchers, the man twisting her arm up behind her back. Felice stepped towards her, and Edz Jealott caught his arm, swung him around, and swept him up in an implacable embrace. For a moment, they stared at each other; then Edz Jealott reared back and slammed his head forward and with the stony prow of his forehead broke Felice’s nose. Felice fell flat on his back, dazed and half-blinded by the hot knot of pain. He rolled over and pushed to his knees, and Edz Jealott’s kick caught him square in his chest and sent him flying backwards. The Moon slammed into him with all its unforgiving mass, and he didn’t feel anything else.

  Waking once more in Amy Ma Coulibaly’s clinic, staring up at the pale glow of its ceiling, Felice felt as if he had reached without passing through any intermediate stages the terminal point of his illness. His torso and his left arm were badly bruised, he could feel his ribs creak every time he took a breath, and his nose was swollen and splinted. Amy told him that he had a concussion, and insisted on subjecting him to a battery of neurological tests. Rather more, he suspected, than was strictly necessary, but he was too confused and too weak to put up any resistance. He asked about Bel Glise. Amy told him that she had suffered nothing more than a few bruises and a mild case of shock.