Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  ‘This isn’t the garden, sir. The garden is in there,’ Antônio Maria Rodrigues said, and pointed to the far side of the dome, where a black cliff loomed over an inky lake and a slender white bridge arched across the water to a narrow cave cut into the base of the cliff.

  Sri Hong-Owen was waiting in one of the hemispherical tents clustered at the edge of the lake. As always, she seemed ageless: severe and rail-thin, her head shaven, her manner cool and self-contained. She was dressed in a silvery, knee-length insulated coat and wore spex with rectangular lenses in thick black frames.

  ‘You look well,’ she told her son. ‘And you’ve grown, too.’

  Berry shrugged. The clean air of the moss garden had flushed away the residue of Captain Neve’s tranquilliser. He was his usual suspicious, truculent self, a flabby boy like a bear cub not yet licked into shape, scowling at his mother through the curtain of long hair that half-hid his face, saying, ‘The general told me I had to come here. It wasn’t my idea.’

  ‘The general was thinking of your welfare,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘How is he?’

  They talked for a few minutes, an anodyne exchange with no warmth in it; then Sri Hong-Owen sent Berry off with Antônio Maria Rodrigues to get something to eat and drink, and asked Loc if he needed anything.

  He declined her offer. ‘I was in Camelot just two hours ago, ma’am. Hard to believe, but there it is.’

  ‘And now you’re here. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it has,’ Loc said, coolly meeting her gaze. ‘But it isn’t too late, I hope, to apologise for my unseemly behaviour when we last crossed paths.’

  ‘Are you still working in that orbital junkyard?’

  ‘Not for much longer, I hope.’

  ‘You expect a new position when Euclides Peixoto replaces the general? Or are you going back to Earth with him?’

  ‘I hope to continue to serve as special adviser to the TPA.’

  ‘But right now you’re working for Arvam.’

  ‘On the eve of his departure from the Saturn System, General Peixoto asked me to return your son to your care. I was honoured and flattered to be given the responsibility, and hope that I have discharged it to the best of my ability.’

  ‘And what about Colonel Malarte?’

  ‘I’m certainly not employed by him.’

  ‘But you needed his permission to come here, and he doesn’t grant such permissions lightly. Arvam no longer has authority over the man, and you can’t afford to bribe him, so I suppose that he asked you to report on what I’m doing here. A favour for a favour.’

  Loc didn’t flinch. His thoughts were as bright and quick as fish darting through sunlit water; he knew at once that it was in his best interest to tell the truth.

  ‘You see things as clearly as I do, ma’am. Colonel Malarte has expressed, shall we say indirectly, a proprietorial interest your work. Whether or not it is legitimate is not for me to say. But I can assure you that he does not have any authority over me.’

  ‘Well, for once I’m happy to do you a favour, Mr Ifrahim. I will show you what we have found here, and you can tell Colonel Malarte all about it. And then, perhaps, he will understand that there is nothing here that he can exploit, and he will stop pestering me.’

  ‘It won’t be easy, ma’am. From what I’ve seen of him, the colonel will have trouble understanding anything more complicated than a petting zoo.’

  ‘I’ll explain it in very simple terms,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘And if you happen to be working on some little scheme to humiliate the colonel because you resent being bullied by him, do bear in mind that I have considerable experience in dealing with his regime.’

  ‘It would be very dangerous to plot the downfall of an officer like Colonel Malarte. Not only because it would be treason, but because he is very well connected. Anyone working against him should keep their plans secret - even from potential allies.’

  ‘Of course. For once, we understand each other perfectly.’

  ‘For once, ma’am, we want the same thing.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that the general has been kind towards me,’ Sri Hong-Owen said as she led Loc through the cluster of tents towards the bridge that spanned the lake. ‘And I can’t forgive him for using Berry. For holding him hostage to make sure that I did as I was told. Oh, he gave him a home, and a kind of education, but he also filled his head with distasteful and barbaric notions about honour and courage and war. As if the worst expressions of male behaviour are in any way virtuous or good. He suggested several times that a spell of military service would be good for Berry, when he was old enough. Fortunately, he has no say in the matter now.’

  ‘Yet he returned your son to you.’

  ‘He did it only to spite Euclides Peixoto. Still, as far as my work is concerned he has always been tolerant and understanding. I suppose I must be grateful for that. What do you think will happen to him, when he gets back to Earth?’

  ‘I can’t say, ma’am.’

  ‘I understand that Armand Nabuco is looking for someone to carry the blame for the failure of the Quiet War.’

  ‘Has it failed? I hadn’t heard,’ Loc said, following her up the narrow span of the bridge, holding on to the rails on either side. One misstep in this vestigial gravity and he would fly away and smack down into the lake.

  ‘I see you still have your sense of humour, Mr Ifrahim.’

  ‘Yes ma’am. It survived the war.’

  ‘I wonder if it will survive Euclides Peixoto.’

  ‘I’m sure I’m beneath his attention, ma’am. Unlike you.’

  ‘Oh, he won’t present a problem. He needs me. They all need me.’

  They ducked through the narrow cave entrance and went down a slanting passage lined with spray-foam insulation, the air growing colder as it descended, until at last it opened onto a kind of gallery or viewing chamber with a long window set in the thick insulation. Triple-glazed with diamond panes, it shone with dim red light. A cluster of cameras and monitoring equipment stood in front of it.

  ‘This is what Avernus made here,’ Sri Hong-Owen said.

  The window looked out across a huge spherical chamber carved out of the native ice and lit by a point source hung at the apex of its ceiling like a drop of incandescent blood. Its walls curved down to a floor creased with smooth ridges, and the top of each ridge was streaked with dark eddies and swirls and littered with dense copses of half-melted candles, phalanxes of tooth-like spikes, heaps of tangled wires or curled scrolls like spun sugar, meadows of brittle hairs, pods of paper-thin fins breaking out of the ice. All these growths stark black in the ruby light, apart from a large candle-copse close to the observation window that was clearly dying from the inside out, its lumpy spires crumbling into pale ash.

  ‘Vacuum organisms,’ Loc said. ‘A garden of vacuum organisms.’ He’d been expecting something truly exotic. A clone farm of superhuman babies. A wonderland full of weird plants and animals. A city of intelligent rats or racoons. But these growths weren’t that much different from the vacuum organisms cultivated on the naked surface around every city and settlement on the moons of Saturn.

  ‘They look like vacuum organisms,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘But they are not. They are not constructed from bound nanotech, but are spun from intricate pseudo-proteinaceous polymers. I call them polychines. If commercial vacuum organisms are synthetic analogues of prokaryotes - bacteria, Mr Ifrahim - these are analogues of the ancestors of prokaryotes.’

  ‘You want to give me a lecture,’ Loc said. ‘It would be easier if you cut to the chase, and told me exactly why these things are worthless. They certainly look worthless.’

  Sri Hong-Owen ignored his sally, and told him that the chamber contained a methane-hydrogen atmosphere at minus twenty degrees Centigrade, far warmer than Mimas’s ambient temperature. ‘As for the polychines, they do not possess a pseudocellular structure; nor are they generated by the systematic execution of a centralised set of encoded instructions. Instead, they are netw
orks of self-catalysing metabolic cycles created by interactions between specific structures in their polymers.’

  ‘Like carpets, or suit-liners.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Ifrahim. But although halflife materials are self-repairing and can even grow when fed the correct substrate, they encode only a very simple set of on/off instructions and can express only one morphology. The polychines are far more versatile. They are non-binary logic engines that use a form of photosynthesis to transform simple chemicals to complex polymers. They can reproduce, and they can even exchange information, although that information is entirely analogue in form. And they possess a limited set of components which obey a limited set of self-organising rules capable of generating new instructions, and, therefore, new properties and even new forms. Once I completely understand how those rules operate in every possible combination, it will be possible to manipulate the polychines to produce predictable states.’

  ‘Does that mean you can order them to manufacture useful stuff?’

  ‘This isn’t a factory floor, Mr Ifrahim. It is a puzzle. A challenge. Unlike ordinary living cells or vacuum organisms, polychines lack any form of internal description. We are accustomed to thinking of information as being encoded in the written word, or in the binary code at the base of all computer languages, or in the four-letter alphabet of DNA. In there—’ Sri Hong-Owen made a limpid gesture at the cavern beyond the window ‘—is a world in which information and form are inextricably entangled. A set of analogue computers that generate unique and unpredictable solutions to a single problem: how to survive and grow. Avernus set them up and left them to their own devices, but I will play her at her own game and prove myself her superior. By providing them with the right information to process, it will be possible to force them to produce predictable solutions, as I shall now demonstrate.’

  The gene wizard stepped up to the cluster of monitoring equipment, conjured a view in a small memo space, and panned across a bare slope to focus on a silvery box slung between four long thin articulated legs. ‘Run the sequence,’ she told the air.

  The robot jerked forward, stalking stiffly to a cluster of lumpy black spikes that jutted from a frozen puddle of soot. It extruded a nozzle that jetted a brief mist, and the spikes immediately developed a rash of luminous orange blotches.

  ‘That was a spray of N-acetylglucosamine,’ Sri Hong-Owen told Loc.

  ‘It is a common lectin, a protein that specifically binds to a sequence of sugar residues. When it binds to certain sites on the surface of the polychine, it initiates a short metabolic cascade that results in the luminescent display. So although the polychines do not encode any information, they are capable of processing information. Each consists of a specific set of polymers, and each polymer exists in one of two states, either on or off, determined by a number of limited rules. For instance, a particular polymer might switch on in the presence of either of two chemical substrates. Or it might require the presences of both substrates.’

  ‘Boolean logic,’ Loc said, a distant memory swimming out of the transparency inside his head.

  ‘Exactly so,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘Perhaps there is hope for you yet, Mr Ifrahim. The reaction you saw was a simple AND sequence: lectin plus binding polymer equals activation of another polymer which produces the luminescence. The polychines are Boolean networks, capable of generating orderly dynamics - fixed-state cycles. One polychine constructed from just a hundred polymer components, each possessing just two possible states, either on or off, would generate ten to the power of thirty possible arrays. If every component receives an input from every other component, the system will become chaotic, cycling through a vast number of states at random; it would take a very long time before it returned to its original state. But if each component receives just two inputs, the system will spontaneously generate order - it will cycle between just four of its ten to the power of thirty possible states. Thus, constrained by spontaneous self-organising dynamical order, the polychines generate fixed-state cycles that are very similar to our own metabolic processes. And because these cycles are capable of processing information, it is possible to generate predictable results by supplying them with the right information. As a first step, my crew and I tested their reaction to a wide range of chemical messengers, just as you have seen. But they are much more than chemical detectors. When two different polychines grow together, interaction between their pseudo-metabolic hypercycles produces new forms of polychine. And interactions between second-generation polychines can produce a third generation, and so on. The diversity of the system is constrained only by size and by time. We have been attempting to derive theoretical solutions that will define the entire information space, but infinity keeps creeping in.’

  ‘A marvellous toy for someone with your interests. But I doubt that it will please the colonel,’ Loc said.

  He was beginning to understand, with a slick of acid pleasure in his heart, that this strange garden was a puzzle and a trap. Something that would take up huge amounts of Sri Hong-Owen’s time and attention to no good purpose. She was undeniably possessed by genius, but she was vain and self-indulgent too, obsessed with playing games for the sake of nothing more than play itself.

  And yet there was a strange beauty, a pleasing asymmetrical order, to the copses and meadows of spikes and spires, scrolls and sheets, patched across the vast bowl beyond the window. It reminded him of the neatly nested mechanism of the ancient watch his father had worn on his wrist. An heirloom centuries old. Cogs and springs and tiny balances working away at different cycles that somehow meshed to drive the hands around the face at exactly one second per second. Loc had loved that watch, but although his father had often promised that he would inherit it, it had been hocked to pay a debt one day, and that had been that. A harsh but useful lesson. Make no attachments to anyone or anything. Expect nothing except that which you make or win for yourself.

  ‘Do you believe in fate, Mr Ifrahim?’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘Do you believe that our destinies are shaped by patterns and forces we cannot see? Or do you think that everything we do is shaped by nothing more than chance and contingency?’

  ‘I was raised as a Catholic, madam.’

  ‘Mmm. That’s a nicely slippery answer. I suppose I should expect nothing less. I learned long ago that biology teaches us that chance and destiny go hand in hand. Our bodies bear the imprints of a myriad contingencies that randomly favoured survival and reproduction of certain genes over others. If you were able to run the great pageant of life in reverse to some point in the distant past and set it going again, it would not play out in the same way. It would tell a different story. Reverse and replay it again, and yet another story would emerge.

  ‘This garden of Avernus’s is a lesson in the marriage of contingency and destiny. An experiment that is as unrepeatable as life on Earth. As I have said, the polychines lack the equivalent of DNA - an internal cache containing a minimal set of instructions than can be used to reproduce their initial state. If they are destroyed, their past and future will also be destroyed: irretrievably so. They are creatures of an eternal yet ever-changing now. But I will uncover the rules that shape them. I will free them from contingency, and give them a history and a destiny.

  ‘There’s an interesting parallel one could draw between this garden and Outer society. The Outers hoped that, by rewriting their genomes, they could escape the limited range of destinies shaped by past contingencies in human history. The war put an end to that grand experiment because we feared that they would develop into something more than human, something that we could not control or contain, something that would affect our destiny whether we liked it or not. By examining this garden and others like it, we can understand the breadth of their capabilities. And by understanding them, we can control them. There’s your utility, if you like, although I doubt the colonel will be able to appreciate it.’ Sri Hong-Owen looked at something behind Loc and added, ‘Come and join us, Berry. Don’t skulk around like that.’


  The boy mooched out of the shadows by the entrance. When Sri asked him what he thought of the garden he said that he liked the robot.

  ‘I like it too,’ Sri said. ‘My assistants are setting up a system that will allow me to control it remotely, so that we can continue to study the polychines wherever we are. You’ll stay overnight, Mr Ifrahim. We have to discuss Berry’s future.’

  As if that was any of his concern, Loc thought. But he didn’t have much choice about it. Sri Hong-Owen controlled everything here. He’d needed Colonel Malarte’s permission to come here, but he needed her permission to leave.

  Everyone ate in a tent floored with halflife fur that hummocked into seats and low tables. Sri Hong-Owen’s assistants were friendly, extremely intelligent and highly motivated young people who clearly were in awe of her. Apart from Antônio Maria Rodrigues, they were all Outers; one, Raphael, was an androgyne neuter, tall and disturbingly handsome, yo’s flawless skin as pale and translucent as the wall of the tent.

  After the meal, Loc asked Sri Hong-Owen why the Outers were working for her. She said that they had been minor gene wizards who’d worked on the biomes of habitats and oases and so on before the war, and were keen to hone and develop their skills by studying Avernus’s gardens.