Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  He felt the tether slacken, and a moment later Captain Neves slammed into him and he grabbed hold of her and a series of short, sharp jolts buffeted him in different directions. Captain Neves was using her reaction pistol to counter their spin.

  ‘All right,’ she said, and wrapped one arm around his waist. ‘That’s the best I can do . . .’

  Loc risked opening his eyes. The stars were still revolving, but at a slow and regular pace now. A stately waltz. Captain Neves was talking, asking for help over and over. Trying different channels, Loc realised. He pulled up his suit’s comms package, began to ask for help too. No reply. Maybe the freighter had moved out of range . . . He looked all around, searching for its star of fusion light, and Captain Neves pulled him close and told him to quit moving about or he’d start them tumbling again.

  ‘They killed the ship,’ Loc said. He felt that he was at the centre of a great ringing calm.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe it shut down its comms when it was attacked,’ Captain Neves said.

  There was a sobbing catch in her voice, and Loc saw then that her left arm was hanging limp at her side. It was twisted oddly at the elbow and there was stuff bulging out, black against the yellow of the suit’s fabric.

  ‘You’re hurt,’ he said.

  ‘The line pinched my arm against the sling. Cracked the suit’s elbow joint. But it’s okay. The suit sealed itself, at the shoulder.’

  ‘Oh Christ.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to die. Not today.’

  ‘Are you bleeding?’

  ‘Some. Not much now. The arm’s mostly frozen, I think. I’ll be all right. They’ll patch me up on the ship.’

  ‘Tell me we’re going to survive this.’

  ‘It looks a lot worse than it really is.’

  ‘How can it get any worse!’

  ‘Loc! Loc! Look at me. All right. You have to stay calm,’ Captain Neves said. Her face was centimetres away from his, separated by the faceplates of their helmets. She told him to take a deep breath and hold it and let it out slowly. ‘And again. Like this.’

  For a couple of minutes they didn’t do anything but breathe together.

  ‘You’re going to be fine,’ Captain Neves said.

  ‘I know we’re in trouble because you never called me by my first name before,’ Loc said. It was supposed to be a joke but it came out wrong.

  ‘The Ghosts attacked the habitat and our ship. Sent in a swarm of drones. That’s why the ship took off. It jettisoned the line, and the line whiplashed. I saw it coming. Tried to get us free . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Loc said.

  ‘We have to stay calm and alert. The ship will come back. For us. For the marines.’

  ‘We could try to reach the habitat. What’s left of it. The marines can help us.’

  The idea of being inside something, even it had no air, was unbelievably attractive. Anything was better than endlessly falling through nothing at all.

  ‘The habitat took a bad hit,’ Captain Neves said. ‘A drone detonated right inside it. Maybe the marines survived it, maybe not. I don’t know. I do know they’re not talking on any of the channels . . . Anyway, we’re too far away. And moving too fast. Stay still. Stay calm. Take slow deep breaths. We’ll get through this together. I promise.’

  ‘Don’t die,’ Loc said. ‘Please don’t die.’

  ‘I’m doing my best.’

  The stars revolved around them. The sun’s brilliant star crossed the black sky from left to right every few minutes. Captain Neves said that she couldn’t find the freighter, told Loc it didn’t mean anything. It was stealthed and her suit’s radar only worked over short distances. The Free Outers’ ship was nowhere to be seen either, but Captain Neves got a fix on the tiny moon, Neso, and said that the Outers might be squatting down there.

  ‘If the Ghosts didn’t attack it too,’ Loc said.

  ‘If I was them, I’d sit tight until I could be sure it was safe to head for home,’ Captain Neves said. ‘But before I did that, I’d sweep the area, look for survivors. So as soon as we’re pinged by radar, we light up our emergency beacons and we start calling, on every channel. Okay?’

  ‘It might be the Ghosts’ radar.’

  ‘That’s a risk we’ll have to take.’

  There was a growing tightness in her voice but she was quite calm. As if this was a training exercise. Loc looked into her face, her dark brown eyes. Locked behind the faceplate of her helmet. Unreachable. He talked about what they would do when they got back to Earth until she told him to be quiet, he should save his air. They clung to each other, and he watched her eyes lose focus and told her to stay awake. Then told himself that she was only sleeping.

  He kept talking to her. His mouth was dry and although he kept sucking water from the helmet’s nipple it did not slake his thirst and at last he stopped, worried that he would run out of water before he ran out of air. He tried using the radio but no one answered. He held Captain Neves as the rigid patterns of the stars wheeled slowly around. He knew that he was going to die and he did not much care. At any time he could switch off the rebreather in his lifepack and he would pass out when the partial pressure of carbon dioxide passed a critical level and he would not wake up. It wouldn’t be so bad.

  Loc could no longer see the habitat. The sun was the brightest star of all the stars sliding past, chased by Neptune’s tiny blue crescent. Swinging up on his left side past his knees, his hips, his shoulders, vanishing overhead, swinging down on his right side . . . He must have fallen asleep, because without a beat of time a voice was in his ears. His first thought, rising on a surge of relief, was that it was Captain Neves, that she’d only passed out . . . No, it was someone else, calling his name. Calling Captain Neves’s name.

  Something flared to one side, a pale jet blinking on and off, and Loc suddenly realised that a shadow hung between him and Neso, growing larger and acquiring three dimensions. A ship. The freighter had come back . . .

  But then he saw that it was not the freighter’s razorshell but a squat boxy thing, an Outer tug sidling up, suddenly very close. He switched on his suit’s emergency strobe and switched on his helmet light too, aimed it straight at the tug. He saw the rack of its cargo frame and the blister of its lifesystem. It was very close now, close enough to see that its black paint had flaked away in places to show pink underneath.

  A light blinked under his chin. Someone was trying to talk to him on the common channel. Loc switched over to it, said that he was alive but his friend was hurt, she needed help. ‘Hurry. Please hurry.’

  ‘We’ll be right there,’ the voice said.

  It was Macy Minnot.

  PART FIVE

  CHIMES OF FREEDOM

  1

  The Free Outers fled inward, towards the sun. Eight ships carrying a little over three hundred souls. The survivors of the delegation, and those who had escaped from Endeavour in the scant hour allowed by the Ghosts, whose ships had landed outside the Free Outers’ habitat just before the attack on the Brazilian freighter. Drones armed with thermal lances had immediately begun to trash the vacuum-organism fields on the cratered plain around Endeavour, and banner messages projected through the diamond panes of its roof had announced in black lettering ten metres tall that a holy war of liberation had been declared against the occupiers of the Outer System, the Free Outers could either join it or leave the Neptune System at once. When the Free Outers tried to contact the Ghosts, they discovered that this same message looped on every channel. Then, directly beneath the apex of the spiderweb roof, a block of giant numbers appeared: minutes counting backwards from sixty to zero. Newt told Macy that he’d snatched up the go bag they’d packed for emergencies and grabbed the twins and bolted through one of the escape tunnels, priming Elephant and taking off just before the deadline expired.

  ‘It wasn’t anything like the drills. Han and Hannah knew it was for real, but they did good. They didn’t argue. They came right along. When we go
t to Elephant, Hannah asked me if we were going to die. She looked so frightened. Han was scared and excited, but Hannah knew. She knew what it was all about. That was the hardest thing. Dealing with that. They didn’t have to do it that way,’ Newt said, rigid with anger. ‘They could have asked us politely.’

  ‘It’s not in their nature,’ Macy said. ‘I guess, in some odd way, giving us the chance to join them was a sign of respect. But they didn’t want to discuss it with us because, as far as they’re concerned, whether or not any of us chose to join them was a matter of faith. And you don’t question faith.’

  ‘A lot of people stayed behind,’ Newt said. ‘Too many.’

  ‘Maybe they thought the Ghosts were doing the right thing,’ Macy said. ‘Or maybe they just couldn’t face lighting out and starting over someplace else.’

  ‘You’re taking this very calmly, considering they tried to kill you.’

  ‘I can’t see any other way of dealing with it. After we agreed to meet with the diplomats from Greater Brazil and the European Union, Sada told me that we’d made the right choice. She didn’t mean it was the best thing to do as far as our interests were concerned, or that it was morally right. She meant that it fitted into the great plan they’re working towards. The Ghosts do what they do because they believe it’s necessary - to make sure history is steered in the right direction. So there’s no point arguing with them; there’s not even any point getting mad at them. Besides, they could have killed us if they wanted to, but they didn’t. They’re crazy, but they’re not bad to the bone.’

  ‘They’re bad enough.’

  ‘What did you say to Hannah?’

  ‘When she asked if we were going to die?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I told her we were going to find you.’

  ‘And you did.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘We survived.’

  ‘We survived.’

  ‘And we’ll go on.’

  ‘We’d better.’

  Everyone aboard the refugee ships was numb and exhausted. When Newt and Idriss Barr proposed a possible destination it was accepted almost at once, with very little debate. They could not return to the Uranus System because they feared that it would be guarded and watched by Brazilian drones, and because it had already proven to be of no worth as a hiding place. But although their morale was at its lowest ebb, they were not yet ready to return to Saturn or Jupiter and surrender to the TPA. And so their small mismatched fleet angled up out of the plane of the ecliptic towards a rendezvous with Nephele, one of the class of objects known as centaurs that follow wandering orbits between Jupiter and Uranus.

  Some centaurs are planetoids; others are the nuclei of spent or semiactive comets; all have been ejected from the Kuiper Belt after encounters with one of its dwarf planets. Nephele was one of the largest, a rough ovoid of water ice with a semi-major axis of a little over two hundred kilometres and a dark red surface rich in thiolins, olivine grains, methanol ice, and sooty carbon. It orbited the sun with a period of some ninety-one years, with an aphelion that swung inside the orbit of Saturn and a perihelion that grazed the edge of the orbit of Uranus. Currently, it had just passed perihelion. Heading sunwards, it was roughly 1.4 billion kilometres from Saturn, a little over nine times the distance between Earth and the sun.

  The Free Outers matched orbit with Nephele fifty-eight days after quitting the Neptune System, and started work at once. Pleased to be engaged in practical matters. Salving their sorely wounded pride by engaging with straightforward problems of material science and engineering. Spinning useful materials from ancient ices and tars. Living off the land.

  They’d had to leave behind their crew of construction robots, but had brought with them the modified units which had spun the temporary bubble habitat where the ill-fated negotiations had taken place. They set up a mining and refinery system that processed the organics that coated Nephele’s surface, melted and purified water ice, and used these materials to create a new habitat just two hundred metres across, with a water-filled bubble forming an anchoring point at its centre and platforms strung above and below the main internal struts, some for hydroponic farms, others for general living space.

  Their dreams of exploring human limits, building cities on the moons of Uranus and Neptune and expanding into the Kuiper Belt had been abandoned. Left behind with almost everything else when the Ghosts had evicted them from their home on Proteus. Nevertheless, when it was finished, Nephele’s tiny new moon, with its racks of lights, greening gardens, and watery nucleus, had a fragile, precious beauty. A teardrop jewel hung amongst the little fleet of ships as they swung around the dark and misshapen centaur.

  The Free Outers agreed that they had done the best they could in the circumstances, and began to plan improvements as soon as they had moved into their new home. Water ice could be used to weave a shell around the bubble habitat; strengthened by a pseudofungal vacuum organism from Avernus’s great catalogue that would grow through the ice and extrude a fine but incredibly strong web of fullerene threads, it would provide protection from the perpetual sleet of cosmic radiation and occasional micrometeorites. Aerogel insulation on the inside of the water-ice shell would reduce the habitat’s infrared signature, and a radar-reflective coat and a layer of bound soot on the outside would make it even harder to spot. The tarry surface of Nephele could be planted out with vacuum-organism farms. Borrowing a trick from the Ghosts, a dismounted fusion motor could be used to melt deep pits into its surface, and these could be insulated and capped to create microgravity biomes. Every tonne of meltwater would yield several grams of tritium and deuterium fuel. In time, the Free Outers might even be able to construct a linear particle accelerator and use it to synthesise antiprotons.

  But these and other plans could not be realised until they had first survived the unclear and hazardous reefs of the immediate future. Meanwhile, they were short of just about every kind of consumable, and had to strictly enforce food rationing until the refinery ramped up production of CHON food and the catch crops planted by the farm crew matured. And they were low on fuel, too, with only enough for less than half their little fleet to be able to reach either Saturn or Uranus. All they could do was hunker down, and hope that they would be overlooked when the war between the Ghosts and the TPA began.

  That there would be a war was, at present, their only certainty.

  2

  The prison was set inside the great basin of Korolev Crater, on the Moon’s far side, just south of the equator. Its domed tent, built by construction robots confiscated from the Outers, spanned the rim of a crater some four kilometres across. Inside, a thin atmosphere, two hundred millibars of carbon dioxide leavened with a little sulphur dioxide and water vapour, was maintained at a balmy 18° Centigrade. Most of the floor was patched with fields of photosynthetic vacuum organisms that fixed carbon dioxide and drew up minerals from the lunar soil and synthesised plastics and exotic biochemicals. A quilt of autumn colours that stretched in every direction. During the long lunar night the fields were lit by rows of suspensor lamps, but during the day the sun produced light enough. Felice Gottschalk had forgotten how bright the sun was, on the Moon. Bright enough to blind you, if you looked at it long enough. He’d forgotten how big and hot it was, too. He could feel its heat through the thin material of the close-fitting body suit that he wore when out in the fields, supervising the stoop labour of his stick of prisoners under a high roof that glowed gold with diffused sunlight.

  The prisoners, former politicians and leaders of the peace and reconciliation movement, and the trusties who supervised them, were mostly left to their own devices. The prison was an experimental facility, set up to find out if Outers could be safely quarantined in self-sufficient, self-policing communities. The Brazilian and European guards used a panoptic surveillance system to monitor the prisoners, and rarely entered the tent or directly intervened in ordinary prison life; Felice Gottschalk and the other trusties were responsible for keeping order
, allocating work, and enforcing rules and instructions issued by the prison administration; the prisoners grew CHON foods and dole yeast, harvested and processed plastics and biochemicals produced by the vacuum organisms, which could be traded for fresh food and other luxuries, and spent their free time as they pleased.

  Felice lived with the other trusties from Rhea in a two-storey flat-roofed apartment building in Trusty Town, one of ten identical white cubes scattered amongst lawns and spindly young trees under a secondary dome at the edge of the prison tent. The acknowledged king of Trusty Town was a vigorous young psychopath named Edz Jealott. He’d had himself tweaked to develop a cartoonishly exaggerated musculature, and spent a great deal of his free time exercising to maintain the tone and definition of his massive arms and legs, his broad shoulders and the gleaming shield of his chest. He liked to parade around naked or mostly naked, accompanied by a posse of lieutenants and girlfriends. He had been in remedial treatment ever since, at age fourteen, he’d fatally stabbed his younger sister. Now, with the tacit approval of the prison administration, he ruled the trusties with arbitrary and brutal authority.

  Soon after Felice was discharged from the prison clinic, two of Edz Jealott’s lieutenants tried to ambush him, a ritual hazing all trusties had to endure. Felice broke the arm of one man and knocked out the other. After that he was mostly left alone, and did his best to ignore Edz Jealott’s regime.