by Paul McAuley
‘Ask away. I guess everyone owes you a moon-sized debt of karma. I’d like to reduce mine to a manageable level as soon as possible.’
‘If you ever meet Avernus, tell her that she is welcome to visit at any time. Sri believes that she and Avernus have a lot to talk about.’
‘If I ever see her, sure. I don’t know what good it will do.’
‘You saved her life, Macy. She will listen to you.’
‘And I thought you asked me to give you a ride because you liked me, not because of who I knew.’
‘You are a power, Macy. Perhaps not as powerful as Sri or Avernus, yet still a power in your own right. I respect you for that. And one day, who knows, perhaps we will know each other well enough to believe that we are friends.’
Raphael cycled through the airlock and swung easily around the hull to the hatch of the cargo bay. A couple of minutes later the dropshell drifted away on a whisper of gas, and when it was a few hundred metres from Elephant its chemical motor lit and it dwindled behind the tug, shedding velocity. Janus swelled from a fleck of light to a lumpy sphere half in shadow; then Elephant fell past it, heading beneath the ring plane at a shallow angle. Macy used the telescope to track the dropshell as it closed on the little moon, skimming towards a huge net slung between a pair of slender pylons hundreds of metres tall. The dropshell ploughed into the net, and the net folded around it as the pylons bowed towards the surface.
Macy consulted the navigation AI again. She was going to have to swing out past Titan, then come back in and slingshot around Saturn so that she could achieve escape velocity. She had a good twenty minutes before the burn that would put her on the trajectory for rendezvous with Titan. She used the time to send a message to Newt and the twins. Telling them that she was coming home.
PART SIX
EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE
1
It was the most important funeral to have been held in Paris, Dione, since the city’s foundation. In the sprawling park at the eastern end of the new biome, quickened just a year ago, more than half the population of Paris and many visitors from settlements on Dione and cities and settlements on other moons of Saturn crowded across the Great Lawn. They picnicked and talked, danced in small groups to music played on a common band, sat in meditation circles, got up impromptu games of futzball and tig with their children, and ascended in little one-and two-person dirigibles that floated like schools of tropical fish in the bright air beneath the tent’s skin. At the centre of this great gathering, representatives from cities and settlements on every inhabited moon in the Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus systems and the reefs of the new bubble habitats, met and mingled around the canopied platform of the funeral bier with the ambassadors of Greater Brazil, the European Union, the Pacific Community and several smaller nations on Earth, and scientists, green saints, gene wizards, and former colleagues and friends of the dead woman. Such was the respect for her that everyone had come in person or had sent a human representative instead of defaulting to an avatar. There was even a pair of etiolated Ghosts, talking to no one but each other in a private hand language.
Avernus, born Barbara Reiner in San Diego, California, a city lost to the global floods of the long ago and as storied now as Atlantis or Oz, was dead at the age of two hundred and twenty-two. Everyone said that her heart had been broken by the murder of her daughter. She had refused to renew any of her longevity treatments and had worked on in the research facility gifted to her by the people of Greater Brazil until she had died in her sleep after a brief illness. Although she had been born on Earth and had spent her last years there, she had lived most of her life in the Outer System, and after some discussion her body had been brought to Paris, Dione, where she had famously campaigned for peace before the Quiet War.
Dressed in an ancient white smock coat with hand-crafted pens and scalpels and a slide rule in its breast pocket, her lined face still and calm and empty, Avernus lay on a simple trestle banked with flowers left one by one by those who stepped up to pay their respects. Her funeral was an informal celebration of her life. Anyone could approach one of the attendants and ask for a turn to speak at the lectern in front of the bier to reminisce about the dead woman, to thank her for her work or for some small kindness, or to read out a few lines of poetry or prose. East of Eden’s best fado singer sang a long lament. A string quartet from Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, played Barber’s Adagio. A tin-man robot tottered up, leaking steam at its joints, and in an elaborate mime attempted to plant a flower and sprinkle it with a watering can packed with smoking carbon dioxide - a performance piece by one of Paris’s microtheatres. And although Avernus had believed that the Universe had been created by a chance confluence of physical laws and properties, priests and rabbis and imams and monks commemorated her passing in their fashion, chanting prayers or spinning prayer wheels, burning fake banknotes, lighting candles and cones of incense.
Towards the end of the day, Alder Topaz Hong-Owen walked up to the lectern. Drones swooped down to video him and a hush spread across the crowd around and about. He spoke in his usual plain and direct manner, telling the great assembly in the park and everyone watching in the city and the worlds beyond that Avernus had risked her life for peace not once but twice: first in Paris, before the Quiet War, and then after she had returned to Earth and joined the underground movement that had at last overthrown the rule of the great families. She had not only helped the people of Greater Brazil to win their freedom; she had also gifted them with something that allowed them to explore the wildernesses so long forbidden to them. They must still tread lightly on the land, and live for the most part in self-sufficient cities, but their cities were no longer prisons. They were free to embark on wanderjahrs across both rewilded territories and those as yet unreconstructed, travelling from oasis to oasis in a network that stretched across Greater Brazil from the Thirtieth Parallel in the north to Tierra de Fuego in the south. Every oasis was centred on groves of a new variety of people tree that Avernus had created. The trees grew in tundra and grassland, in desert basins and in high mountains, flourishing in places where very little life had been able to survive before, providing food, water, shelter and clothing. Avernus lives on not only in our memories, Alder said, but in her work. In every plant and animal that she touched and changed, in every biome and garden she created, she still lives.
After his speech, Alder had a private meeting with Raphael, the representative sent by his mother, and talked with half a hundred other people. Some he remembered from the time when he had visited the Jupiter System with his mother, twenty-three years ago. Burton Delancey, who, after he’d seduced her, had taken him on a trek across Callisto’s tumbled and shattered moonscapes to one of Avernus’s secret gardens, and was now a senior member of the Callistan Senate. The ancient gene wizard Tymon Simonov from Minos, Europa. Macy Minnot, whom Alder had never before met but knew so much about, and her husband Newton Jones and her youngest son. They had recently moved to Titan, where she was designing garden habitats and helping with the planoforming project.
The biome’s great chandeliers dimmed towards twilight. Fireworks bloomed under the high angles of the tent. Fliers with chromatophore tweaks, their skin rippling in luminous patterns like amorous squid, danced in the middle air. And at last the dead woman was taken up by pall-bearers and half a hundred men and women in white breechclouts beat out a slow, deep rhythm on drums hung at their waists as a great procession gathered and wound out of the biome and through the railway tunnel and into the darkened city, along avenues lined with people holding lighted candles, ten thousand points of flickering flame that illuminated every kind of human face. Until at last Avernus’s body was carried into the resomation facility, and the crowds dispersed and night and silence settled over the city.
Alder had been given the task of returning a portion of Avernus’s ashes to Greater Brazil, where it would be scattered around a people-tree sapling in the Eixo Monumental in Brasília. But he had some family business to atten
d to first.
For the past ten years, his younger brother, Berry Malachite, had been holed up in a suite in the hotel in Camelot, Mimas, built to accommodate VIP visitors during the TPA era. His bills were underwritten by his mother’s credit and karma; he had no work, and had long ago lost contact with his friends and former business partners; he had never replied to any of the messages that Alder had dutifully sent him every birthday, Gaia Day, and Christmas. Alder wanted to help Berry in any way he could, but according to Cash Baker, who’d travelled to Camelot ahead of him, he would first have to deal with the woman who claimed to be Berry’s handfasted partner.
The hotel, located in a cut-and-cover chamber trenched into the cratered plain outside the tents of the city proper, was a biome of rolling grassland that, punctuated by scattered clumps of trees and grazed by small herds of mammoths and zebras and aurochs, appeared to extend to infinity under a virtual sky, the blue sky of Earth. As they rode a cart along a red-dirt track towards Berry’s suite, Cash told Alder that during the occupation guests had been allowed to hunt the animals.
‘Anything they shot was butchered on the spot and broiled in a barbecue pit. There are fishing holes, too. Pools in the little river that wanders through this place. Of course, the Outers who run this place control the animal populations with contraceptive implants now. When I think back on how it was after the war, the things we did . . . We must have seemed like barbarians.’
The cart, rolling along the track at a leisurely walking pace, made a wide circle around a big stand of bamboos and yellow-flowered mimosa, and there was Berry’s suite, a dome turfed over with lush grass, punctuated with little round windows like rabbit holes. Waiting outside the round door at its base, her dark face pinched in a grim expression and her arms folded over the plastic vest laced across her small breasts, was Berry’s partner, Xbo Xbaine.
She seemed courteous enough, showing Alder and Cash to sling seats under the shade of an umbrella tree, offering them tea and sushi, telling them that Berry wasn’t at his best today.
‘Does he know I’m here?’ Alder said.
‘If I may be candid? I didn’t think that it was a good idea to tell him,’ Xbo Xbaine said. ‘He’s having one of his bad times, and his bad times are very bad now. The shock of seeing you could easily tip him over into one of his fugues. Or worse. If you come back tomorrow, or the day after, he might be a little better. I can’t promise anything, of course, but I’ll do my best to talk him around. And meanwhile, if there’s anything you want to know, anything at all . . . Perhaps this is presumptuous of me, but I like to think that I’m part of the family now. And people in families shouldn’t have any secrets from each other, should they?’
Alder saw straight through this clumsy attempt to stall for time, but even if the woman had been looking after Berry only for what she could get out of it, he felt that he owed her something. And he felt a little grudging respect, too, for her attempt to stand up to him. So instead of using Cash’s extensive research into her past and present crimes to bludgeon her into submission, instead of telling her that the handfasting she and Berry had entered into was a sham, witnessed by people she had bribed, instead of telling her that he knew about her little scam, selling high-end room-service goods for credit, he talked to her about Berry’s good days and bad days, listened sympathetically to her litany of complaints, and asked her if there was anything that she and Berry needed.
‘Credit,’ Xbo Xbaine said, with a bold and direct look that surprised Alder. ‘There’s only so much that you can get on room service. With a little credit and kudos I could look after your brother much better.’
Alder promised that he’d see what he could do, and said that while Berry might not be at his best he still had to see him.
‘Your mother sent you, didn’t she?’ Xbo said. ‘You think I don’t know what this is all about? Of course I know.’
‘I want to talk to him because he’s my brother,’ Alder said.
‘One of her creatures came here,’ Xbo told Alder, and smiled when she saw that she’d surprised him. ‘She didn’t tell you about that? How like her. It was a couple of days after they announced that Avernus’s funeral would be held in Paris. After, I bet, she found out you were coming out here because of it. Her creature told me that you were visiting her, said that she wanted Berry to go with you. A family reunion. Well, I’ll tell you now what I told the creature then. Berry tried to see her once. It was before I met him. Twelve, thirteen years ago. He hired a tug to take him to Janus, and when he got there she refused to see him. That’s when he really started drinking and drugging. You know? To numb himself. He was in a bad way when I met him first. Much worse than he is now. But you have to love him because underneath it all he’s so sweet and helpless . . .’
‘I know,’ Alder said.
‘She hurt him bad. She doesn’t have the right to hurt him again. That’s what I told her creature before I sent it away. And now here you are, bothering me all over again.’
‘It’s true that my mother wants to see both of us. But I would have come here anyway,’ Alder said.
After a moment, Xbo Xbaine sighed and shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose I can stop you. But if you try to talk to him about his mother and he gets upset, don’t say I didn’t warn you. And your friend better stay here.’
She led Alder through the round door in the side of the turf-covered dome, into a big space with halflife grass over the floor and walls and furniture handcrafted from wood and steel scattered about. ‘I thought this was so choice at first,’ she said. ‘The luxury. Everything anyone could need. This way. He’s in the pool.’
A ramp spiralled down to a basement that was all white tiles and bright light, with a circular pool of water covered in a skin of blue plastic balls that rippled back and forth in slow waves, something big and pink rising and falling in the dead centre. An enormously fat man floating on his back, naked apart from spex and tipset gloves, his fingers twiddling and tapping on the bulging folds of his belly.
‘Time to wake up,’ Xbo said loudly. ‘Come back to reality, Berry. I’ve brought a friend to see you.’
‘I’m in the Ten Thousand Flower Rift,’ Berry said.
A little drone hovered in the air close by his head, clutching a bulb of thick white liquid. When he lifted his face the drone dipped down and stuck a straw between his swollen lips. He sucked at it noisily, then said, ‘I’m going to get through to the Beast’s chateau this time.’
‘It’s an old friend,’ Xbo Xbaine said. ‘A family friend.’
‘Tell him in a minute,’ Berry said.
Alder recognised his brother then: that familiar squeal of petulant frustration.
‘He does love his sagas,’ Xbo Xbaine said. ‘Mostly he just lies there, immersed in one or another of them. And he loves his drink, too. Banana margaritas, mostly. He gets through a couple of litres a day. He uses other stuff, too. Tailored psychotropics. I get them by selling off stuff I order on room service.’
‘I know.’
‘I have to do it because your brother needs the drugs and the hotel doesn’t feature them on its room-service menu. I have to buy medichines, too. To flush out Berry’s blood once a month, and clean up his liver. He likes ice cream, and peanut-butter sandwiches. That’s about all he’ll eat, but I slip him supplements in his margaritas. The only other thing he likes, apart from running sagas and maintaining a steady load, is fucking. He can manage it, just about, although it takes some care. That’s our life. You think I wouldn’t put up with it if I didn’t love him?’
Xbo Xbaine fixed Alder with her dark and truculent gaze, daring him to challenge her. Saying, ‘Can I be candid? Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen is very smart. She saved the Saturn System and she gave away those bubble habitats. And rumours are she’s turned herself into something radically posthuman out there on Janus. But I don’t think she was much of a mother. Not to Berry, at least.’
Alder felt that he had to defend Sri, saying, ‘She loves him in her own wa
y.’
‘Now you’ve seen how he is, do you really think he should go see her?’
‘You feel that you have to protect him, Xbo. I appreciate that. And I appreciate all you’ve done for him. I really do. But this is something he has to decide for himself.’
‘I know I can’t stop you taking him away. But please, don’t do it unless he really wants it.’
‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
‘All right, then,’ Xbo Xbaine said. ‘You go wait outside now, while I coax Berry out of the pool.’
Cash Baker was waiting under the umbrella tree, absent-mindedly picking grapes from a vine twisted around its slender trunk. Alder told him what he’d seen, said, ‘I think we can forget about taking him to see my mother. Or anywhere else.’
‘What about the woman?’
‘She cares for him, in her way.’
‘She’s a vampire.’ Cash nipped a grape between the contoured plastic ridges that had replaced his teeth when he’d been cut and adapted to fly singleships. ‘Back in the day, I was taught that Outers had turned themselves and their children into monsters because they believed they were better than ordinary humans. Turns out they aren’t so different from us. Maybe they’re smarter, and kinder, but that doesn’t stop them fucking up their lives and the lives of other people in the same old ways, does it?’
‘Living with Xbo didn’t make Berry what he is. If anyone is to blame, it’s my mother.’
‘You turned out all right.’
‘I have advantages that he lacks. I don’t mean the tweaks she gave me. When she came out here with Berry, I was left behind on Earth, in charge of the Antarctic research facility. So I was able to escape her shadow. I was able to learn what I could do, who I really was . . . Berry didn’t have a chance to do any of that. The drinking and the drugs, I think it started as a rebellion against her control. And it worked, in a way. But it’s ruined him, Cash. He had to destroy himself to get free of her.’
