Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  So if you were going to make human beings more rational, Sri thought, you would have to suppress basic emotions, perhaps by making them harder to trigger, and enhance emotions associated with higher cognitive functions. Of these, amae was the most interesting. Even though there was no word for it in Portuguese, English or any of the other major Western languages, it was definitely universal. Sri knew it as the feeling she had after making a successful presentation to her peers. Approval, belonging, being valued.

  Evolutionary psychology provided a pat explanation: amae had been selected in hominids struggling to survive on the African plains because it was part of the social glue that bound together individuals in a tribe, and so made the tribe stronger, less prone to divisive squabbles, more prone to cooperation and swift agreement. But Sri wasn’t interested in Just-so stories, however plausible. She was interested in utility. And she was especially interested in evidence that amae appeared to alter the threshold for triggering basic emotions, suppressing those that, while useful in preserving the life of the individual, were potentially destructive to group cohesion. If she could find some way of triggering or inducing amae, she thought, she could make Berry feel that he was part of something, that he was wanted, cared for, appreciated, then perhaps he would become less prone to tantrums and sulks. He could find it in himself to love her again.

  Outers had done much useful work on amae, for it was a vital part of their various attempts to create scientific Utopias, and Sri had several interesting discussions about it with one of the leading researchers, Umm Said, in the prison camp of the New City.

  Built by the Brazilian occupying force twenty kilometres north of Paris, Dione, the New City was a living demonstration of the benefits of cooperation, mutualism, and communal action that amae promoted and rewarded. Although the narrow wedge of its tent was jammed edge to edge with hopelessly overcrowded and shoddily constructed apartment blocks, it was by no means a slum. Tiny gardens flourished everywhere. Platforms had been cantilevered from the sides of the apartment blocks and fibrous netting spread over the rest of the walls, transforming utilitarian structures with spills and terraces of crop plants and herbs. Playgrounds, little cafés, and other social spaces had been built on the roofs, and all the roofs were linked by slides and ziplines. As with public areas, so with private spaces. Although Umm Said lived with her partner and their four children in a single small room, it was clean and bright and exceedingly neat. Their scant possessions were stowed in a couple of chests or hung from pegs, bamboo-fibre mats covered the floors, and cushions were set around a low table, the only piece of furniture - the family slept on thin mattresses that they unrolled every night.

  A tall elegant black-skinned woman, Umm Said had a quick, sharp mind, and like all Outers was generous and unstinting when it came to sharing her ideas. She and Sri sipped green tea, nibbled sushi prepared from kelp and rice and fermented beans, or little dumplings or rolls fried on a tiny hotplate, and spent hours discussing higher emotional states.

  According to Umm Said, the Outers’ predisposition to behaviour that fostered feelings of amae was encouraged by exposure to all kinds of environmental cues, from city planning to the small change of social interaction, and was reinforced by positive feedback. Individuals whose behaviour enhanced the amae of others were also more receptive to cues that boosted their own amae. Outers also possessed a culturally specific emotion, wanderjahr, that was expressed most strongly in their teens and twenties, a yearning restlessness that drove them to leave home and travel from moon to moon. Supporting themselves with menial jobs, they discovered what excited and engaged them, experienced every variation of Outer culture, and learned how to get along with every kind of person. And because this taught them to be open-minded and tolerant, and made them feel that they belonged not to any single social subgroup or city but to the entire Outer System, they were predisposed to adopt amae as their primary or default emotional state.

  Sri, an habitual contrarian, pointed out that the flip side of an emotion that promoted cohesion of a tribe or cohort was a heightened sensitivity to signals and signs denoting difference and otherness. In stressful situations, this sensitivity could direct hostility and intolerance towards outsiders, and the positive feedback of peer approval would amplify individual attacks into mob behaviour.

  Umm Said said that this idea was very familiar to Outers. ‘That’s why we have a system of carefully calibrated checks and balances. A kind of hydraulic mechanism that diverts collective emotion into secondary channels before it can build up into an unstoppable flood.’

  ‘It didn’t work too well in Paris. It was under mob rule at the beginning of the war. Your “hydraulic mechanism” was overtopped.’

  ‘That’s because our mayor dismantled too many of the usual checks and balances. Of course, he was just one generation removed from Earth,’ Umm Said said. ‘His father was a diplomat from the European Union who made his home here.’

  ‘So Marisa Bassi was an outsider who lacked the ant pong of the mob. A bad seed who didn’t understand the importance of amae.’

  ‘Perhaps he understood it too well, and used it for his own ends,’ Umm Said said. ‘The point has been extensively discussed, as you might imagine. Unfortunately, he was killed during the battle for Paris, so we’ll never know the truth.’

  ‘His body was never found, and I’ve heard claims that he didn’t die after all. That he is leading the deadenders - what you call the resistance,’ Sri said.

  ‘Their methods are certainly as futile as Marisa Bassi’s. And far less effective than the collective practice of nonviolent protest.’

  ‘I don’t see any evidence that one is any better than the other,’ Sri said. ‘You’ve tried every kind of nonviolent tactic, from boycotts and sit-ins to hunger strikes. And yet here you all are, in this prison camp.’

  ‘Persuasion through enlightened discussion is also a form of nonviolent resistance,’ Umm Said said, and with a steady hand refilled Sri’s bowl with green tea.

  By now Sri was a long way from her original goal of finding a way to choke off Berry’s tantrums and anxieties. The work had become an obsession, an end in itself, as her work so often did. She believed that Umm Said was wrong. That being born and raised as an Outer wasn’t the only way to acquire a strong propensity towards amae; that it might be possible to re-engineer the brain to make it less prone to behaviour driven by the basic emotions of the limbic system. If an emotion could be culturally acquired or reinforced, then the reentrant paths that process engraved within the brain could be mapped. And if they could be mapped, they could be synthesised.

  She wrote a speculative paper, presented some of her work via avatar at various meetings of behavioural psychologists and neuroscientists in Greater Brazil, and received some encouraging feedback. The research had taken up much of her time since the attack on the Antarctic research facility, but she justified it to the oversight committees by talking up the insights gained into Outer behaviour and social control, and speculating about practical applications such as crowd control and media manipulation. She’d spent years pandering to factions within the Peixoto family, and knew exactly how to tickle the self-interest of civil servants and politicians.

  In the middle of this, one hundred and sixty-three days after Alder disappeared, one of Sri’s data miners flagged an anodyne comment on one of the science boards. I hope you will continue to enlighten us with your excellent and uplifting work. It was one of the blind messages that she and Alder had arranged to use in case of an emergency. It meant that he was alive and safe.

  Sri spent the rest of the day floating on air. Alder had not been killed when the research facility had been raided. She did not know where he was, who he was with, or what he planned to do, but she knew that he was alive, that he had at last escaped from Antarctica, and he felt safe enough to have sent the message. She knew better than to attempt to send a reply or post an acknowledgement that she had received and understood his message. When he was ready, he wo
uld contact her again. He was brave and intelligent and capable. He would find a way that would allow him to emerge from hiding without being arrested. He would find a way to begin to rebuild his power base.

  Meanwhile, Berry moved from Paris to Camelot, Mimas and started up another club, this time in partnership with a crew of young Outers. It seemed that Outers who had grown up after the war and could no longer go on wanderjahrs because of the travel restrictions imposed by the TPA were growing ever more restless, like caged birds unable to begin their migration at the appropriate season. Their frustration was expressed in escalating social turmoil, from minor acts of vandalism and refusal to perform civic duties to increased use of psychotropics and a spew of anti-establishment artworks and texts. Some attempted to justify their rebellious attitude by cobbling together a nihilist philosophy based on twentieth-century Situationism and several flavours of anarchy; Berry and his new friends ran a club in Camelot’s free zone, Club Blank, where the movers and shakers of this movement congregated and held court. They believed in the absolute extinction of hierarchy, in judging everything by its context rather than by categorical principles, and in metaphorical analysis of everything, from language to cultural identity, using an array of invented mathematical and pedagogical languages. There was a playful, pranksterish aspect to all this. If everything floated free, valued only for its utility within whichever context it happened to occupy, nothing much mattered: everything, including the movement itself, was a kind of elaborate in-joke. But Berry took it very seriously indeed, and he believed that the club’s rituals - the pounding tribal rhythms of its music and the wild freestyle dancing of its denizens, its elaborate lightshows, the psychotropics that boosted serotonin production and produced analogues of the so-called oceanic feeling in which the self dissolved into its environment - were far more than a way of escaping the mundane world for a little while. No, as far as he was concerned, they were a religious experience: a true transformative ecstasy that brought you closer to God.

  Sri had a bad falling-out with Berry after she suggested that she could help him to obtain the same emotional state by using forced MRI feedback, tailored viruses, and other carefully controlled protocols to manipulate the reentrant pathways of the brain. She told him that it would help him to control his mood swings; he said that she was trying to turn him into a docile zombie. They had a violent, lacerating argument, and Berry was also using a formidable battery of psychotropics by then. For a little while, he was utterly lost to her.

  Sri worked. It was what she did. It was what she was. And then, a little over a year after the raid on the Antarctic facility, still no word from Alder apart from that one message, a sympathetic officer in the Titan base told her that one of Avernus’s spiderholes had been found.

  Sri quit Dione for Titan the same day. She didn’t bother to ask permission of Euclides Peixoto or the military transport office. She appropriated a shuttle, powered straight out to Titan, and landed at the Brazilian base outside Tank Town, on the shore of the Lunine Sea. Four days later she was aboard a dirigible, approaching the northern edge of Xanadu, the continent-sized province that spanned Titan’s equator.

  The rough, rugged, landscape was similar to the foothills of the Himalayas - rumpled ranges of hills cut by tectonic faulting and braided river channels - and like the Himalayas it had been created by collision between two land masses, although on Titan these floated on an underground ocean of ammonia-rich water rather than on partially molten rock. Avernus’s hiding place was at the edge of a sinuous valley that wound between ranges of craggy hills. Before tectonic activity had uplifted the area, it had been part of a river system carved by flash floods of liquid methane and ethane during the infrequent but violent rainstorms at Titan’s equator. Now it was a dry playa floored with hydrocarbon sand and bounded by cliffs of ammonia-water ice frozen hard as rock and fretted with canyons and gullies that originated in alcoves in the clifftops and ran downslope, ending in triangular fans of debris.

  Sri insisted on walking around by herself. She wanted to get an idea of the place where Avernus had been hiding. She wanted to ground herself in its reality.

  Tall cliffs loomed above her, carved with steep gullies so numerous that the fans of debris at their feet had merged into a continuous smooth apron that sloped down to a broad valley floor cut by sinuous channels and silted with black hydrocarbon sand. Much of the sand had drifted into low longitudinal dunes at right angles to the cliffs; the dirigible squatted like a giant quilted manta ray above one of these dunes, quivering against its tethers in a stiff breeze. Beyond it, on the far side of the valley, ripsaw hills rose into the omnipresent orange haze.

  Black grit crunched like popcorn under the treads of Sri’s insulated boots as she trudged up a gentle slope of consolidated debris towards the cliffs. She had grown used to living as light as a bird on Dione: Titan’s pull of 0.2 g made her feel that her bones had turned to stone and a vengeful old woman had clamped herself onto her back. She was badly out of breath and sweating hard inside her pressure suit when she reached the edge of an area about the size of a soccer field that had been graded flat, stretching in front of the overhang where Avernus’s little plane was garaged.

  The original search party had stripped away the fullerene dropcloth that had camouflaged it. It was bright red, with a big propeller at its nose and stubby wings and a closed cockpit. It would not have seemed out of place on Earth.

  Sri had seen it once before, passing above her when she’d been lying on her back on a ridge inside a volcanic caldera, immobilised by a tangle of threads fired by one of Avernus’s creatures. She’d resolved then and there that she would never stop searching for Avernus, and although she was at the threshold of one of the gene wizard’s hiding places she did not feel any triumph or excitement. After more than four years, her prey was as elusive and enigmatic as ever.

  She climbed a steep path at the edge of a gully, hauling herself up roughly carved steps, muscles burning, pulse pounding, stopping every couple of minutes to get her breath. Near the top of the cliff, the path turned and dipped into a channel so narrow that the shoulders of her pressure suit brushed its smooth walls as she descended to a standard airlock. She cycled through and stepped out onto the top of a flight of steps fitted into a hollow, helical space like the inside of a nautilus shell. Light the warm colour of sunlight on Earth shone through a screen that, fretted with a random pattern of circles and ovals, stretched from top to bottom of the space. A little stream followed the sweep of the stairs, trickling between plantings of vegetables and herbs, down to a lawn of real grass and a little orchard of gnarled and dwarfed fruit trees.

  Sri took off her helmet and closed her eyes and breathed in the cool air, the mingled odours of damp earth and green, growing plants, then walked down the broad curve of the staircase. A hammock was slung between two apple trees. One niche under the staircase contained a shower and a toilet; another an industrial foodmaker. Apparently, Avernus had been living on CHON food supplemented by whatever she could grow in her little garden. Power came from wind turbines hidden in a channel out on the surface and thermogenerators that tapped into the residual heat deep under the ice. Sri tried to imagine living alone in this burrow, buried under Titan’s eternal ice, no one else within two thousand kilometres, nothing but her own thoughts for company. Growing vegetables. Maintaining the garden’s simple life-support systems. Occasionally hiking out along the valley, or amongst the hills beyond the gullied clifftops.

  It was like trying to think herself inside the daily habits of a ghost. She saw in her mind’s eye the old woman turning away from her, walking off across a bleak landscape, dwindling into obscurity.

  After examining everything in the habitat, Sri went back outside and clambered down the path and crossed the hillocky dunes to the dirigible. The lieutenant who’d led the search party steered the craft two kilometres down the valley, to the place where Avernus had parked her ship: an insulated landing pad set amongst a field of huge ice boulders
on a lenticulate island raised above the black dunes that combed the valley floor.

  The pad had been spotted by one of Sri’s autonomous drones, and a high-resolution deep-radar survey of the surrounding area had revealed Avernus’s little habitat. The shape and size of the camouflage shroud recovered nearby suggested that the ship had been one of the aeroshells used by Outers before the war to shuttle people and goods through Titan’s atmosphere. No one knew when the ship had departed, or on what course. There was no radar or traffic control on Titan, the ship had most likely been stealthed, and after it had quit the moon it had probably flown a minimal free-energy trajectory requiring only brief burns of its motor.

  Sri was convinced that Avernus was no longer in the Saturn System. Why would she risk discovery by moving from one moon to another? No, she must have rendezvoused with a ship that had taken her further out. Perhaps to Neptune. There were reports of increasing activity amongst Neptune’s moons. Euclides Peixoto was making noises about sending a punitive expedition; there were rumours that the Pacific Community were in clandestine contact with rebel Outers.