Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  A silence fell between the two friends. Alder tried a handful of grapes. They were cool and delicious, each with a slightly different flavour bursting on his tongue. Presently, Berry came tottering out of the door in the side of the grassy dome, pinkly, hugely naked. Pleated folds of fat fell to his knees; his legs were so swollen that he could only take mincing little steps as he followed the machine that carried his bulb of margarita mix.

  ‘Man,’ Cash said. ‘You told me he was big, but I didn’t think he’d be that big.’

  ‘Nor did I,’ Alder said. ‘Most of him must have been underwater.’

  Berry managed half a dozen steps, then belly-flopped onto the grass and rolled onto his back, fat rippling under his skin in clashing tides.

  The drone drifted down and stuck its straw in Berry’s mouth; Xbo Xbaine knelt beside him and started to rub coconut-scented cream on his legs.

  ‘He can get about if he wants to,’ she told Alder. ‘But it hurts him, even in microgravity, so he stays mostly on his back. And because the chandeliers put out some UV for the plants, I have to rub this on him, to stop him burning. If you want to talk to him, you’d better do it now. He’ll want his drugs soon, and after that he won’t make much sense.’

  ‘Let me help,’ Alder said

  He knelt beside Xbo Xbaine, took a palmful of cream and rubbed it into the folds of Berry’s neck, over his shoulders. Berry grunted with deep animal contentment.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ Alder said.

  ‘Xbo’s friend. Want anything from room service? Just ask her. They let her sign it off for me.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Alder said, and asked Berry if he remembered the old times back on Earth.

  ‘Not really.’

  Alder talked about the research station and the fjord and the mountains, asked Berry if he remembered any of it.

  ‘The Beast’s chateau is in the mountains.’

  ‘You liked playing in the beech wood, too. And most of all you liked the games you played in the pool with your brother. You remember those?’

  ‘I always beat Alder.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you did. You’re a natural swimmer. Like a dolphin.’

  ‘Alder was smart and people liked him. But he couldn’t swim for shit,’ Berry said, and giggled.

  ‘Have you ever thought about going back to Earth?’ Alder said, ignoring the sharp look that Xbo Xbaine gave him.

  ‘I wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. But did you ever think about it?’

  ‘Xbo and me, we’re happy here.’ With some effort, Berry turned his head and squinted at Alder. ‘I know you.’

  ‘Do you? Who am I?’

  ‘You were here before. My mother sent you. You gave me this place . . .’

  ‘He gets confused,’ Xbo said.

  Alder said to Berry, ‘You like it here.’

  ‘Xbo and me. Yeah. Why are you here? Xbo? Xbo? Why is he here?’

  Berry was trying to get up, pushing to his elbows, breathing heavily, his face congested. Xbo Xbaine calmed him, stroked his forehead and cheeks, told him that it was all right, no one could take this away from them, they could stay here as long as they liked. After a while, Berry relaxed and lay down again. The drone fed him its straw, and he began to slurp down margarita mix.

  ‘You should leave,’ Xbo told Alder. ‘It isn’t good for him to get upset like this.’

  ‘I have to ask him a question.’

  ‘He won’t go.’

  ‘I know. But I have to ask it anyway,’ Alder said, and told Berry that he was going to visit Sri. ‘Do you want to come with me, Berry? It will take two days at most. If you want, Xbo can come with you. And I will bring you straight back here.’

  ‘You shouldn’t go near my mother. She’s dangerous.’

  ‘Do you know what she’s been doing, on Janus?’ Alder said. ‘Did she ever tell you about her plans?’

  He’d tried to find out about his mother’s work, of course, but his spies and agents had failed to get beyond the smokescreen of rumours and fairy tales, and Raphael had smoothly sidestepped his questions, telling him that he would see soon enough.

  ‘It’s bad place,’ Berry said. ‘Full of monsters.’

  ‘Really? What kind of monsters?’

  ‘I don’t want to think about it. I like margaritas. They go down smooth,’ Berry said. ‘I like dazzle too. It stops the bad thoughts.’

  Alder tried again, but he couldn’t get any sense out of his brother. Berry’s brain had been fried by alcohol and psychotropics. Most of the switches jammed open or closed, whole areas dead and blasted. Like a low-grade robot, he was able to follow the tracks of his routines but had trouble with anything outside them. When he grew agitated again, Xbo Xbaine slapped a patch on a fold of skin above his ear and told him it was time to take a little nap. ‘Sleep deep and don’t dream, sweetheart.’

  ‘No more questions . . .’

  ‘No more questions,’ Xbo said, staring at Alder.

  ‘That woman knows something,’ Cash said, as he and Alder rode across the grassland towards the hotel’s reception area.

  ‘I know,’ Alder said. ‘But she isn’t going to tell me.’

  ‘People like that, they have a price. Pay it, and she’ll talk. She’ll even tell something like the truth. If you want, I can go back tonight, talk to her alone.’

  ‘She won’t talk. Because the only power she has over me is withholding information. And because she wants to protect Berry.’

  ‘Her sweet set-up, you mean.’

  ‘They’re both locked together,’ Alder said. ‘Berry in his head with his bad thoughts; Xbo in that suite with him. Maybe she didn’t start out loving him, but I think she does now. She can’t let him go. She can’t walk away. Not because she wants the stuff, but because she loves him. I feel sorry for her. It’s luxurious enough, it has full room service, but it’s still a prison.’

  ‘So what do you want to do? There’s still Plan B.’

  ‘Plan B?’

  ‘Sure. There’s always a Plan B. Kidnap your brother’s ass, haul him back to the Moon, put him in a rehab programme and clean him up in every way. Say the word - I can put it in motion right now.’

  ‘If I thought it would make Berry happy, I’d do it. But I don’t think it would.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to talk to my mother.’

  The hired tug cut a deep chord across the rings as it headed inwards from Mimas to Janus, some sixty degrees around Saturn’s gravid curve. Cash Baker paid little attention to the stupendous view, chatting instead with the pilot about trade routes between the various moons. Alder was grateful that his friend had volunteered to come with him. Especially as he still did not know what he would find; before they’d left Camelot, he’d had another frustrating conversation with Raphael.

  ‘She wants you to see her home without any preconceptions,’ the neuter had told him. ‘Call it pride or vanity, call it whatever you like, but there it is.’

  The tug crossed the Cassini Division and swept on above the A Ring. Beyond the ring’s outer edge, Janus resolved from a spark to a bead to a pale lumpy sphere. The tug’s pilot talked to the traffic control AI and the tug matched the little moon’s orbital velocity with casual precision, swinging around it once every forty minutes at an altitude of less than a hundred kilometres: a mountain dimpled with impact craters that held commas of black shadow, the terrain between patched by silvery or black vacuum organisms. Two immensely tall, whip-like pylons with some kind of net stretched between them stood on the slumped rim of one of the largest craters, close to a dome that shone green with internal light: Avernus’s phenotype jungle. Somewhere down on the crater floor was the entrance to Sri’s underground lair.

  The tug’s pilot pointed to the great circle of shafts and boreholes that surrounded the outer ramparts of the crater, where construction robots were burrowing deep into the moon’s regolith, then spotted a de
fence proxy thirty kilometres off their starboard bow and presented Alder and Cash with a grainy image of the deadly little machine, a radar dish and microwave antenna at one end and the swollen bulb of an oversized motor at the other.

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take too long down there,’ he said. ‘Those things make me nervous.’

  ‘It will take as long as it takes,’ Cash told him. ‘And you’ll get paid for every second.’

  Alder and Cash sealed up their pressure suits, cycled through the tiny airlock one after the other, and clambered onto the impulse scooter that sat on one of the racks bolted to the hull. Cash was quiet as he guided them in, concentrating fiercely on a task he once could have done as easily as breathing, making a wide curve to avoid a plume of debris that feathered up from one of the shafts and painted a narrow, bright ellipse of fresh water ice across the moon’s surface.

  They touched down on a landing platform two kilometres around the crater rim from the green dome of the phenotype jungle. There was no one waiting for them - Sri’s crew lived and worked on Janus’s co-orbital partner Epimetheus now - but Raphael had given detailed instructions, and they set off along a broad road that slanted through a dense planting of tall black blades towards the crater’s floor.

  Alder hadn’t worn a pressure suit for many years, and in Janus’s vestigial gravity he felt both clumsy and insubstantial; although the road’s palely luminous surface was coated with some kind of nanotech adhesive that suckingly gripped the soles of his boots, he shuffled along as cautiously as an old and frail man negotiating a patch of ice. After a couple of minutes, Cash took his arm and steered him through the inky shadows cast by the blades that towered above on either side, out into the weak light of the sun and on across the floor of the crater, past small silvery domes and angled tents packed with jungly greenery, a white cube that Cash said was a fission pile, and something that looked like a chemical refinery, all tanks and pipes, parts of it glowing in infrared, to a circular shaft brimful of black shadow.

  Two child-sized figures in fluorescent orange pressure suits waited on a platform slung out beyond the edge of the shaft.

  ‘You have any idea what those might be?’ Cash said.

  ‘Not one.’

  ‘You don’t have to do this alone.’

  ‘If I thought this was in any way dangerous I wouldn’t have come here.’

  ‘Yes you would.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think it is. And I’m grateful beyond words that you came along.’

  ‘I’m just a tourist, is all. Taking in the sights.’

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.’

  ‘I hope you will. Remember me to her. Tell her that despite everything, I’ll always be grateful to her for fixing me up to fly singleships.’

  The two small figures in orange pressure suits did not respond when Alder greeted them on the common band. Their faces were masked by the golden mirrors of their faceplates and they did not move as he shuffled onto the platform, which immediately began to descend down a fixed rail, dropping for at least a kilometre and passing through dozens of stiffly yielding curtains, each breaking apart around it in a jigsaw of shards that afterwards snapped back into place. The curtains must have formed a pressure lock: soon after it had passed through the last of them, the platform emerged above a horseshoe of cliffs and terraces stepping down to the lumpy green canopy of a forest that stretched away beneath the sharp light of a hundred floating sunlamps.

  The platform slowed, gliding smoothly down a track set in the face of a cliff faced with black flowstone that fell to a meadow of tall red grasses on the topmost terrace. Alder’s guides jumped off and bounded away like a couple of grasshoppers and disappeared into a belt of lush green forest. His pressure suit informed him that the atmosphere was the standard oxygen-rich mix found in most habitats in the Outer System. When he cracked the seal of his helmet, his ears popped to accommodate a modest difference in pressure. The hot, muggy air smelt of soil and growing plants. He hooked his helmet to his utility belt and ankled through the shoulder-high grass.

  He wasn’t afraid. Hollow with anticipation, yes. Curious to see what his mother had created here. But he wasn’t afraid.

  There was no sign of his guides, but he soon discovered a ribbon of black gravel that ran off through ferns and pillowy mosses that sloped down between puffball pines and fan palms and tree ferns. He followed the path through the wood, saw white worms like severed fingers working through patches of rich humus, saw a snake with pale skin and blue, human eyes ripple away into a thicket of ferns, saw a huddle of naked little tarsiers peeking down at him from the crown of a palm tree. The path gave out at a mossy lawn set between palm trees at the edge of a steep drop to another belt of forest.

  Alder shaded his eyes with his forearm and stared down the length of the chamber. No sign of any roads or buildings on the ladder of terraces below, or in the thick forest that covered the chamber’s floor, stretching away for three or four kilometres under a haze of water vapour. Nothing moving out there except for a flock of birds turning in lazy circles between the bright daystars of the floating lamps, wheeling and swooping towards him, crying out in musical voices. They were more like bats than birds, with leathery wings as wide as his outstretched arms and human hands for feet and shrunken human faces, each turning to look at him as they poured past the edge of the lawn in a dry rustle of wings.

  Something twinkled in the air, drifting towards him through the bright air. A naked person - or no, it was an avatar, its white plastic glinting as it glided along, balanced on top of a platform curved like a turtle shell with a fan motor at each corner. As it drew nearer, Alder saw that the face floating in its visor was the face of his mother as she had been on the day he’d last seen her, more than twenty years ago. Before he’d been smuggled out of Brasília at the beginning of the long clandestine journey to the research facility in Antarctica, and she’d stolen a ship and taken Berry off to the Saturn System.

  The platform drifted to a stop at the edge of the lawn and the avatar stepped down lightly and easily in front of Alder, who stood bareheaded in the armour of his pressure suit, like an old-fashioned knight at the end of his quest. From thickets of ferns on either side naked children stepped forward, so pale and skinny that they seemed as translucent as cave fish. Their heads were small and wedge-shaped, sloping straight back from skin-covered dimples where their eyes should have been. Their ears flared out like bat wings; their hands had only three fingers, spaced like a crane’s grab.

  ‘Welcome to our home,’ the avatar said. Its voice was Sri’s voice, although the face floating in its visor did not move its lips. ‘What do you think of it? Isn’t it beautiful?’

  ‘I think you have acquired an unexpected taste for melodrama.’

  ‘You look well. Older, of course, but you are still my beautiful boy. You didn’t bring Berry.’

  ‘I asked him to come with me. He refused.’

  ‘You should have brought him. We could take care of him here.’

  ‘I’m sure you could,’ Alder said. ‘But he has his own life. His own way of surviving. His own way of escape. And he already has someone to look after him.’

  ‘The woman.’

  ‘His handfasted partner. The one person who truly cares for him, it seems.’

  ‘You think I have been a bad mother.’

  ‘I think we’ve both let him down.’

  ‘I did my best, but eventually I realised that nothing I could say or do would help him, so I left him to his own devices. It hurt me to do it. It hurts me still, to know how unhappy he is, how badly he is damaging himself.’

  ‘He came here, once upon a time. You turned him away.’

  ‘I was . . . changing. That is finished now. I am ready to look after him, but I would never force him to do anything he does not want to do. I would never bring him here against his will.’

  ‘I feel guilty about it too. He’s my brother. I should have reached out to him long ago,
and I didn’t. And now it’s too late.’

  ‘Is he happy, do you think?’

  ‘He is what he is.’

  ‘I have followed your career with much interest, Alder. And with no little pride. Perhaps you are angry and upset that I did not answer your messages. To begin with, it was a matter of security. And then . . .’

  ‘You were busy. I understand. I understand you better than you think I do.’

  ‘I was busy, yes. There is always much work to do, and too little time. And I was changing, too. We were changing. Changing and growing. We are the clade now. One flesh, one purpose.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘Do you? Do you really understand?’

  ‘I think I have a fair idea of what you’ve done. But I don’t understand why you’ve done it.’

  ‘Walk with me,’ Sri said.

  ‘I’ve seen the wood. And the things in it.’

  ‘Indulge me anyway,’ Sri said.

  Alder walked with lumbering and infinite care beside the graceful avatar through the green shade under the trees, the two of them followed by the pale blind children and a troop of lemurs that flowed from tree to tree. Things like severed hands shelled in bone lurked amongst tangled prop roots. At the bottom of a deep pool of clear water, nets of pale tubes pulsed and quivered like unstrung arteries across black sand. A flock of hand-sized butterflies whirled around a slanting shaft of chandelier light, their wings covered in pelts of fine black hair.

  Sri explained that an early experiment in immortality had gone a little astray. Her body had swollen with tumours teeming with independent life and her crew and a team of expert systems modelled on her own memories and skills had put her in hibernation while they searched for a cure. Although the tumours were under control now, she was confined to a series of vats. It did not matter. She had cloned a family of sister-daughters, and used her genome as a template to fashion dozens of species of animal by engineering and forced evolution: a clade of radically different phenotypes that shared the same genome and filled every niche of the biome’s self-regulating ecosystem. After her sister-daughters had taken charge of the biome, Sri had begun to reshape herself.