Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  There were other losses too. Galileo Alomar was killed when a temporary cabin at the mining facility on Sao lost pressure. Heideki Suso was crushed between two slabs of construction diamond while supervising the final phase of the fabrication of the canopy. And during the installation of the chandelier lights Anya Azimova slipped and fell, the clip of her safety harness snapped, and she plummeted more than five hundred metres, a fall that even in Proteus’s vestigial gravity was instantly fatal.

  The loss of Anya Azimova was especially hard. Her partner, Tor Hertz, had been piloting one of the unmodified ships attacked and destroyed by Brazilian drones during the flight from Uranus, and her death orphaned their twins, Hannah and Han, then two years old. After a great deal of communal discussion, Newt and Macy had volunteered to adopt them. A solemn and serious undertaking that precipitated their decision to formalise their relationship. Some Outers married according to the tenets of their various faiths or philosophies, but Macy had long ago lost the belief in which she’d been inculcated during her childhood in the Church of the Divine Regression, and Newt was wholly innocent of any kind of religion, so like the majority of Outers they pledged their love and allegiance to each other at a civil handfasting - a brief, simple ceremony attended by all the Free Outers, and afterwards celebrated by a huge party.

  Having children of their own had turned out to be problematical. Macy’s genome was base stock, unmodified, while Newt, like all the other Outers, carried a number of artificial genes in his chromosomes. Some of these tweaks were adaptations to microgravity - the single-chambered hearts in the major veins of his arms and legs that stopped blood pooling at his extremities, altered rates of calcium reabsorption so his bones didn’t become brittle, an enhanced spatial awareness. Others coded for cellular mechanisms that repaired radiation damage to chromosomes, an increase in the number of cones in his retinas, so that he could distinguish colours by the equivalent of moonlight on Earth, and the ability to enter into a form of hibernation. Also, he lacked an appendix and wisdom teeth, and possessed an additional set of tooth buds beneath his adult teeth. In short, he and Macy were genetically incompatible. And although it was possible to weave new genes into the chromosomes of Macy’s eggs, the Free Outers’ only gene wizard had defected to the Ghosts, and no one else possessed the necessary skill set. Macy and Newt had tried in vitro fertilisation, but several rounds had failed to yield any viable embryos. And so, unless they also defected to the Ghosts, they were stuck.

  Macy wondered if she was a bad person for sometimes feeling relieved that the choice about whether or not to have children had, for the moment, been taken out of her hands. For she was still not yet reconciled to exile in the outer dark. Although the Free Outers had established a home on Proteus, they still faced every kind of uncertainty, threatened not only by their near neighbours but also by the possibility that the TPA might come after them again.

  And now, some four years after arriving at the Neptune System, their vulnerability had been starkly underscored by news that a crew of Pacific Community diplomats was on its way from the Saturn System. The Ghosts made no secret of the fact that they had been in contact with the Pacific Community, just as they made no secret about having acquired the technical specifications of the fast-fusion motor from Free Outers who had defected to them. As far as they were concerned, they were the undisputed masters of the Neptune System; the squatters on Proteus had no voice or vote, and if they dared to protest or disagree they should be prepared to suffer the consequences.

  In fact, many of the Free Outers welcomed the news. Whenever this was discussed at communal meetings Macy made it plain that she thought it more likely that the PacCom diplomats were coming here to probe the Ghosts’ strengths and weaknesses or to deliver some kind of ultimatum than to make nice, but a majority believed that this might be the first step towards negotiating some kind of alliance with the Pacific Community and making peace with the Three Powers Alliance. They’d been so short of hope for the past seven years that they grasped at every scrap, no matter how exiguous.

  And so everything was at hazard once again. More than ever it seemed to Macy that any children she and Newt might have together would be hostages to a bleak and uncertain future. Yet when it had come to taking responsibility for looking after the orphaned twins, she had stepped right up to the plate, and didn’t regret it for a moment.

  Han and Hannah had reached the point in their young lives where they had begun to develop in sudden leaps and bounds, gaining ten IQ points overnight, constantly surprising and challenging Macy and Newt with new insights and interests. Like all the children of the Free Outer community, the twins had been forced to grow up fast, and their education was haphazard and heavily emphasised practical skills. There was always work to be done, and now they were old enough they pitched in along with everyone else.

  By now, the Free Outers’ habitat had been capped and sealed, warmed to a habitable temperature, and pressurised. The bottom of the pit had been flooded and the circular lake filmed with a monomolecular halflife skin to tamp down fat waves that sloshed from side to side in Proteus’s featherweight gravity, and stocked with tweaked kelps that quickly formed underwater forests that trailed slicks of fronds across its restless surface. The crew of construction robots had graded the sides with broad terraces in a variety of organic shapes and had erected clusters of small pressure tents - homes that could be pressure-sealed in the event of a catastrophic failure of the canopy roof. Emergency refuges had been constructed beneath the surface, too, and exit tunnels ran out to landing platforms east and west of the habitat. Vacuum-organism farms had been established on the surface, in shallow troughs scraped into the surface and illuminated and warmed by mirrors that focused the weak sunlight. And now the habitat’s upper terraces were being planted out with rolling meadows and stands of white spruce, larch, Douglas fir, piñon pine and white pine, all dwarfed and tweaked to grow in low gravity, creating a landscape like the mountain forests and alpine tundra found in high elevations of the great mountain ranges of the west coast of North America.

  The Free Outers had named their habitat Endeavour. It would be beautiful when it was finished, but some believed that it was only a temporary home. Newt and other members of the motor crew were part of a group that was making plans to explore the inner fringes of the Kuiper Belt, and they were working up detailed strategies for constructing viable habitats; Macy had joined a small crew who had uncovered in the archives of the Library of the Commons plans for bubble habitats with skins of halflife polymers and aerogel insulation held rigid by internal pressure and a web of fullerene spars anchored in a central node. By making use of materials that had been developed since the plans had been drawn up, it might be possible to build habitats the size of Proteus. Islands and archipelagos that could be set in orbit anywhere around the sun. While other members of the crew elaborated schematics for every kind of zero-gravity architecture, Macy devised a variety of simple and robust ecosystems. She told herself that it was just for fun, a pleasing theoretical exercise, but she couldn’t help thinking that this might be a way of moving inwards one day. Of creating a thousand floating gardens close to the hearthwarmth of the sun.

  Meanwhile, the Free Outers still had plenty of work to do in their home on Proteus. One day, Macy was working with a gang of children on a terrace cantilevered out from the western side of the habitat, showing them how to plant out tree seedlings. The children bounced to and fro, dressed in padded coats and trousers, excited chatter and laughter chiming in the chill air as they lugged trowels and seedlings and watering cans from place to place, dug holes and dusted them with fertiliser granules, tamped soil around the seedlings and puddled them with liberal amounts of water. As always, Macy was infected by the children’s unforced enthusiasm, and amused and comforted by their innocent, unquestioning acceptance of the bizarre circumstances of their lives, the strangeness of the place they called home. They made the extraordinary ordinary, and the ordinary extraordinary; gave you
a fresh perspective on the relative importance of your own problems.

  The soil factory Macy had designed and built was running very effectively now. The big kidney-shaped terrace had been covered with topsoil to a depth of about half a metre over a bed of crushed siderite and fullerene gravel, and conditioned with a catch crop of fast-growing grasses and clovers, a green carpet rich and lustrous in the diamond light of the chandelier lamps strung from the apex of the roof. When Idriss Barr called, Macy was showing Han and Hannah a soil sample she’d stuck under a magnifying screen. Han was rapt with solemn concentration as he studied wriggling nematodes, springtails like curious mechanical horses, delicate webs of fungal hyphae, and jewel-like strands of cyanobacteria; Hannah chattered away, naming the various minibeasts and getting about half of them right.

  Macy’s spex vibrated in her pocket. When she put them on, Idriss Barr said, ‘I think you call this sort of thing a heads-up. Sada Selene wants to have a word with you.’

  ‘I’m sure you can find a polite way of telling her I’m too busy.’

  ‘It’s too late for that, I’m afraid. She’s already on her way.’

  Macy turned, saw two figures gliding along one of the ziplines strung across the gulf of air beyond the tall transparent barrier at the edge of the terrace.

  ‘She wants to put a proposal to you,’ Idriss said.

  ‘What kind of proposal?’

  ‘She wants you to meet with the Pacific Community representatives when they arrive.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  The two people riding the zipline slanted in above the lip of the barrier and dropped neatly to the terminus set beyond a stand of young spruce.

  Idriss said, ‘I told her about your objections, Macy. She said that you must set aside your prejudices because your experience could be crucial to the success of the negotiations.’

  ‘My experience? I’ve never met anyone from the Pacific Community.’

  ‘The fact that you’re from Earth.’

  ‘Me and ten billion other people.’

  ‘Listen to what she has to say, Macy. We can all help you to decide what to do about it afterwards.’

  Now the two people came around the edge of the trees and loped across the meadow. Sada Selene and her partner, Phoenix Lyle. They visited Endeavour three or four times a year, attending trade and policy meetings, but until now Macy had managed to keep out of their way. She didn’t trust Ghosts in general, and trusted Sada Selene even less. Sada and her, they had a history. Immediately after Macy had defected to the Outers she’d been incarcerated in the city of East of Eden, Ganymede. Sada and Newt had helped her escape. Macy had ended up on Dione, in the habitat owned by Newt’s family; Sada had joined the Ghosts and a couple of years later had been part of the little gang responsible for kidnapping Macy.

  Sada didn’t look much different from any other Outer. A tall, skinny young woman dressed in a figure-hugging suitliner, her pale hair roughly cropped, a tattoo of the constellation Hydrus sprawled across her right cheek. But her partner was an extraordinary creature who might have stepped from the virtual landscapes of some fantasy saga or one of Newt’s silly stories about pirates and monsters: a tall, powerfully-built man with black mirrors for eyes and skin the colour of new copper and smooth as plastic and completely hairless (he didn’t even have eyelashes), dressed in a white suitliner moulded to his torso and cut low at the back to accommodate his tail. Rooted at the base of his spine, it was long and muscular, and divided at its end into clasping fronds like a fleshy orchid. Despite his imposing presence, he was no more than an escort, hanging back as Sada Selene stepped close to Macy with cool confidence.

  ‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘Making mud pies as usual.’

  ‘Making a home,’ Macy said.

  She was dressed in paper coveralls with a rip along one shoulder seam that had been mended with tape, auburn hair scraped back and held with a twist of plastic wire, dirt crested under her fingernails, a smear of mud on one cheek. Sada overtopped her by almost a metre, clean as new porcelain in her immaculate white suitliner.

  ‘I suppose you could call it nice enough, in an unevolved kind of way,’ Sada said. ‘But do you know what this reminds me of? This sunken chamber and its poor imitation of Earth? East of Eden. A place designed by people who liked to pretend that they were artists and scientists, that they lived the life of the mind, but who were really no more than farmers suffering a collective failure of imagination. Perhaps it’s good enough for you, Macy. But it isn’t in any way acceptable for those of us who want to explore new ways of being human. These low-gravity architectures are no more than imitations of the African forests that our ancestors of the long ago quit for the savannahs and seashores. They force us to use our monkey muscles to get about in them, force us to think monkey thoughts. No, if we are going to explore entirely new ways of living, then our settlements and cities have to be entirely new. Unfettered by memories of Earth.’

  ‘This from someone whose boyfriend has a tail,’ Macy said.

  ‘It looks good on him, doesn’t it?’

  Phoenix Lyle was swishing the fleshy tip of his tail back and forth to the general delight of the children gathered around him.

  ‘Those are your wards,’ Sada said. ‘The blond boy and girl holding hands. Hannah and Ham.’

  ‘Han.’

  ‘They’re cute, in an old-fashioned way,’ Sada said. ‘I expect Idriss told you why I’m here. I hope we can set aside our differences and discuss it sensibly.’

  ‘Everyone thinks I’m an expert on everything to do with Earth because I was born there,’ Macy said. ‘I’m not even an expert on Greater Brazil, let alone the Pacific Community.’

  ‘I never imagined that you were. But you might be able to contribute some useful insights.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve already discussed this with Idriss.’

  ‘At great length. Eventually, he agreed to agree with me.’

  ‘He should have told you that I hardly know anything about the Pacific Community, and most of what I do know is propaganda and black information put out by the Greater Brazilian government when they and the Pacific Community almost went to war, ten years back. I’ve never been there. I haven’t even met anyone from there.’

  ‘Not yet. But you will.’

  ‘Are they coming here? To Endeavour?’

  ‘Why would they want to do that? They want to talk to us,’ Sada said, with acid patience, ‘because we are the principal power in the Neptune System. But I have agreed that Idriss can attend the preliminary meetings. As long as he is accompanied by you.’

  ‘Because you think I might have some useful insights. I can give you one right now,’ Macy said. ‘You’re trying to play the Pacific Community against its partners in the TPA. Have you given any thought to the possibility that the Pacific Community might be using you?’

  She would have said more, told Sada that she and the rest of the Ghosts, and most of the Free Outers, were relying on good intentions that the Pacific Community almost certainly didn’t possess, that a small band of refugees trying to make a favourable deal with the political giant - China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, and parts of Africa: five billion people - was like hoping to lever the Moon out of orbit, if only they had a long-enough lever and a place to put a fulcrum, but she was distracted by children’s squeals and cries. They’d been chasing the tip of Phoenix Lyle’s tail as he lashed it from side to side, and he’d thrown a muscular coil around the waist of a small boy who’d gotten too close and lifted him wriggling and kicking into the air.

  Macy stepped up, told Phoenix Lyle to pick on someone his own size, and took hold of the boy and pulled him free. He immediately began to cry, huge shuddering sobs, his face hot and wet against her shoulder. Phoenix Lyle smiled blandly and said that he was only having a bit of fun, and so were the kids.

  ‘You took things too far,’ Macy said. She was angry, because of Phoenix Lyle’s crassness, because of Sada’s presumption. ‘You people
always take things too far.’

  Sada told her that Phoenix hadn’t mean any harm by it. She said, ‘The offer is genuine. You can help all of us, Macy. And in a funny way I look forward to working with you. After all, we had some fine fun in East of Eden, didn’t we? Fooling the old fossils who thought the place was some kind of Shangri-la.’

  ‘As I recall, you didn’t tell me what you were going to do until after you did it,’ Macy said. ‘That won’t happen again.’

  ‘Talk it over with your partner, the heroic pilot. Talk with whoever you want. You have plenty of time. The PacCom ship isn’t due to enter orbit around Neptune for thirty days. But for the sake of everyone in your funny little habitat,’ Sada Selene said, ‘I hope you make the right choice sooner rather than later.’

  3

  The two men sat on weather-bleached canvas chairs in the shade of a big boxy hangar, off to one side of a runway aimed at a technicolor Texas sunset. Cash Baker working on his third Antarctica beer; Colonel Luiz Schwarcz drinking iced tea. They’d been playing catch-up, but after Cash had brought Luiz up to date, telling his old friend how he’d turned his life around by joining the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps, there’d been a stretch of silence. At last, Luiz said, ‘Man, one of the things I miss most, up on the Moon, are sunsets.’

  ‘We have good ones here,’ Cash said. ‘Especially like now, when the wind blows from the northwest and hangs some desert dust in the air. And there’s an awful lot of dust up there right now because we’re in the middle of a drought. A real bad one. But I guess you don’t hear about things like that, up on the Moon.’