Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  ‘I guess I walked into something bigger than I thought it was.’

  ‘It’s bigger than any one person can imagine, Captain Baker.’

  Cash was caged in the house and its grounds for three days. It didn’t let up raining and the low skies and gloomy light didn’t help his growing mood of edgy paranoia. He played with the whole Earth view in the memo space, zooming in on places he knew and places he didn’t, careful to keep well away from anywhere he’d visited during the past year. He talked with Colonel Stamford about the history of the colonel’s family, and learned a lot about the history of the United States. He tried to talk to the house robots but most of them weren’t very bright, and the two or three able to hold a conversation were clever enough to dissemble. He took long walks around the grounds in the rain. It was the kind of place he would have firebombed, once upon a time. Long lawns soft with moss. Magnolias lifting their candles in the rain. Tracts of rhododendrons with packed buds about to burst into flower. Trees coming into leaf. Its footprint was bigger than the block in Bastrop where Cash had been born and raised and upward of five thousand people lived, but only the colonel and an old woman who worked as his gardener lived there.

  Cash came across the gardener on the second day, in a far corner of the grounds. An old woman bundled up in a dark green hooded slicker and waterproof overtrousers spattered with mud, watching a pair of construction robots that were building an earth mound over a stone chamber inside a circle of newly planted birch trees. The place where the colonel would be buried when he died, the gardener said.

  ‘So all this will become a graveyard for just the one guy?’ Cash said.

  ‘He is leaving his house and garden to the people of Indianapolis. A gift from the past to the future. And I am giving him this,’ the gardener said.

  She was short and broad-hipped and slightly stooped. The hood of her slicker was cinched around her brown and deeply lined face, a few stray strands of white woolly hair caught around the margins. She was so very old that it was hard to tell how old she was. She reminded Cash of a schoolteacher he’d once had. Her gaze level and wise and patient. Her voice low and smoky. She explained that the mound was modelled on an ancient burial site in England, where several of the colonel’s ancestors had come from in the long ago.

  ‘When it’s finished, I’m going to turf it with prairie grasses and wild flowers. June grass and bottlebrush grass and fox sage. Butterfly milk-weed and black-eyed Susans and yellow coneflowers, and so on and so forth.’

  ‘You might want to try bluebonnets, too.’

  ‘You’re from Texas, I believe.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. East Texas. The city of Bastrop.’

  ‘They’re having a hard time of it there.’

  ‘I believe they could do with some of this rain we’re enjoying.’ They were standing under a tree, on a wet mulch of last year’s leaves. Rain dripped through the fresh green canopy and fell on the grass and the bare white tines of the young birch trees and danced on the yellow shells of the robots as they backed to and fro in the mud. Water beaded and dripped from the rim of Cash’s hat. His fists were stuffed deep in the pockets of his duster to hide their palsy. It was pretty bad that morning.

  The gardener asked him if they had gardens in Bastrop.

  ‘Rich folk do. Most of the rest live in apartment blocks. My uncle, he grows stuff up on the roof. Tomatoes and chillies, mostly.’

  ‘A sensible man.’

  ‘I’d say he knows what he wants and what he doesn’t.’

  ‘Do you have any other family in Bastrop? A wife, perhaps?’

  ‘I was married one time, but it didn’t take. And it was a long way from Bastrop. Most of my family live there. Hell, all of them, I guess. We settled there long ago and were just too plain dumb or stubborn to move on. Are you from around here, ma’am?’

  ‘I was born in San Diego.’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘It’s on the west coast, what used to be called California. Or it was. It isn’t there any more. The rise in the oceans took some of it, and a couple of big quakes levelled the rest.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. It happened long before you were born.’

  ‘I’ve heard of California.’

  ‘It’s called North Tijuana now. The southern part, anyway, where San Diego used to be. The territory of the Guzman family. You still call Texas Texas.’

  ‘Well I guess we don’t know what else to call it.’

  The gardener asked him about Texas, and the places he’d travelled through, and his part in the Quiet War; he asked her how long she had been working as a gardener. She considered the question seriously and said that she supposed she had been a gardener all her life.

  ‘You must like it a lot.’

  ‘What would be the point of doing work you did not like?’

  ‘I guess some people don’t have a choice.’

  ‘Then there is something wrong with them. Or with the society in which they live.’

  ‘A little of both, I reckon.’

  ‘My work is my life; my life is my work. I have made many gardens in many places, but there’s nowhere I can call home. Not any more.’ The old woman paused, then said, ‘I had a daughter. We separated in difficult and dangerous circumstances, and later on she died. She was killed.’

  Cash said that he was sorry to hear it.

  ‘You were in the Air Defence Force. So no doubt you have heard of General Arvam Peixoto.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. I even met him a couple of times.’

  ‘He captured my daughter. He was interrogating her. She put out his eye, and in the confusion attempted to escape. She was . . . unsuccessful. I didn’t hear about it for some time. Not until General Peixoto was disgraced. It was leaked out then, by his enemies. Put on the net - the official news channel. That’s where I saw it. On the news. I made her what she was, you know. As I made so many other things. She resented that. She said that I’d made her a monster. As perhaps I had. She was my companion and my assistant, but she was never really my daughter, as I was never really her mother. And yet we loved each other, in our fashion. Can you tell me - what kind of man was Arvam Peixoto?’

  ‘I can’t really say, ma’am. I served under him, but I didn’t know him.’

  ‘Was he a kind man? A wise man? Or was he as cruel and capricious as his enemies claim?’

  ‘I’d say he knew his own mind. He knew what he wanted, and knew how to get it. I heard he had a temper, but I never saw it myself.’

  ‘Was he capable of murder?’

  ‘He was a good officer, ma’am. I know that.’

  ‘A good officer. Yes. He won the war, after all.’

  The gardener said this without bitterness. A simple statement of fact. They stood in silence while the rain fell down everywhere beyond the shelter of the tree. The robots working unceasingly, one backing to and fro with loads of earth and gravel that the other spread and tamped down.

  At last the gardener said, ‘After I heard about my daughter’s death, I decided to come back to Earth. I am glad that I did. I spent a long time making gardens in bottles. Hermetic ecosystems perfectly circumscribed by their boundaries, unable to become anything other than what they already were. Fixed patterns. Complex, yes, sometimes. But fixed. I had forgotten how dynamic Earth’s gardens are. Subject to weather and to invasion from the land all around. To every kind of random influence. I could make a fairly accurate guess at what this garden might look like in five years, if it was left untended. But in a hundred? It might be a wild wood, or a briar patch, or a swamp.’

  Cash, relieved to be talking about something else, said, ‘I guess you have to keep fighting back nature to make sure something like this stays the way it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘That suggests that a garden is separate from nature. It is not. No more than we are. No, a garden is simply a small part of the natural world on which we have imposed our own ideal of beauty. And where does that ideal proceed from if not
from nature in the first place? All we do, then, is seek to improve on nature. The tree that’s sheltering us. Do you know what it is?’

  ‘I’m sorry to say I don’t know much about trees and the like. I’ve seen a lot of the wild in the past six months, and liked an awful lot of what I saw. But I haven’t yet gotten around to understanding it.’

  ‘It’s a Chinese tallow-tree. First introduced to this country - to what was once the United States of America, and still is, according to our friend the colonel - by Benjamin Franklin. One of our first scientists. He brought the tallow-tree to the United States at the end of the eighteenth century because it provided oil for candles and lamps. Gardeners planted it because its foliage makes a fine display in autumn. But although it is useful and beautiful, it is also invasive. It grows quickly, and when its leaves fall they release chemicals that alter the soil and make it inhospitable to other plants. That’s why nothing grows under it. Should we condemn it for that? Or should we improve it, make it a little less invasive, a little more beautiful?

  ‘Some think that we are like the tallow-tree. That after we moved out of Africa, we became as invasive and destructive as any animal or plant on the planet. That we changed the world as irrevocably as the Chicxulub impact or the Deccan Traps. As I once thought. But now I think we are far more than mere agents of destruction. That we have more of goodness than evil in ourselves. That we are not enemies of nature, nor are we separate from it. We are at our best agents who drive evolution in ways that are both useful and beautiful. Gardeners who could make a garden of the Earth, and of many worlds besides,’ the old woman said, and excused herself and went off to shout at one of the robots, which had managed to get itself bogged down in the mire on the far side of the mound.

  On the evening of the third day, while Cash was in the study playing with the memo space, there was a commotion outside the house. Vehicles pulling up, the voices of men and women. Cash snuck into the reception room at the front, with its stacks of obsolete electronic equipment and furniture covered in white sheets, and twitched back the dusty curtains. Saw cops in slickers and with plastic bags over their visored caps milling around cruisers and a limo, the scene starkly lit by spotlights that had come on along the eaves of the house, rain falling though the blades of white light and falling around the cops and the vehicles.

  Cash had a bad panicky feeling and headed towards the kitchen, planning to bug out through the back door, but one of the robots intercepted him and told him the colonel requested his presence in the hall.

  ‘What’s this about? Why the cops?’

  ‘No one tells me anything, sir,’ the robot said, and led him to the big entrance hallway where Colonel Stamford was talking to a burly man in a black suit while half a dozen men and women hung back. The gardener was there too, her green slicker dripping water on the marble floor. The man turned as Cash came up and flashed a smile, very white in his neatly trimmed black beard, and held out a hand and said, ‘I’m Louis Fontaine. Good to meet you, Captain Baker. I’ve heard a lot of good things about you.’

  Cash shook his hand and said that he hoped a few of them might be true, looking sidelong at the gardener.

  Colonel Stamford saying to Cash, ‘I believe you have already met Avernus.’

  The gardener shook Cash’s hand and held on to it, studying his face, saying, ‘I think it’s time we talked about how I can help you.’

  6

  Six days after the death of Goether Lyle, Felice Gottschalk was roused from his bed by a squad of prison guards. There had been another murder; the victim was a member of his stick, Jael Li Lee. The former leader of the Senate of Athens, Tethys, deposed on trumped-up charges by the Brazilian occupying force and replaced with someone more tractable. His body had been found in the washroom of his barracks some time after the night’s lockdown. He had been strangled, and Edz Jealott’s name had been written on the wall of the washroom in his blood. Every prisoner in the barracks was put to the question, along with Edz Jealott and Felice Gottschalk. They shot Felice full of a hypnotic, fitted him with an MRI cap, and interrogated him for two hours. He told them truthfully that he knew nothing about the latest murder, and at last he was returned to Trusty Town.

  Several members of Edz Jealott’s gang were waiting outside the main airlock. As Felice walked past they called out, asked him who he was going to kill next.

  He went straight to the clinic, and found Amy Ma Coulibaly and Bel Glise waiting for him.

  ‘I need to talk to you alone,’ he said to Amy. ‘Some place where we won’t be overheard.’

  ‘And Bel and I need to talk to you,’ Amy said, ‘and this is as safe a place as any to do it. Bel dealt with the spyware.’

  ‘We want you to help us find the person who killed our friends,’ Bel Glise said.

  ‘You told me that Goether Lyle killed himself,’ Felice said to Amy.

  ‘All of us are under tremendous pressure, and Goether felt it more than most,’ Amy said. ‘He was convinced that the prison administration knew what he was doing. So when his body was found out in the fields, I thought - no, I hoped - that it was suicide. Jael’s death proved me wrong.’

  The two women explained that before the war Goether Lyle had done much scholarly research into the so-called libertarian warez used by activists to subvert the surveillance and monitoring systems of late-stage capitalist regimes of the long ago. He and several of his friends, allowed access to memo spaces because of their work, had used the principles developed by those long-dead activists to create a simple AI that had infiltrated the prison’s net. The AI could switch prisoners’ implants on and off and create blind spots in the surveillance system, and had also opened a back door into the stock system that supplied prisoners with goods in exchange for the biochemicals and plastics harvested from the vacuum-organism fields, enabling Goether Lyle and his friends to order pressure suits and other items, and falsify the inventory and tracking data to hide the true nature of the contraband.

  ‘In short,’ Amy said, ‘we were planning to escape.’

  ‘To Earth,’ Bel Glise said.

  ‘To Greater Brazil,’ Amy said. ‘They need us.’

  ‘The agitators,’ Felice said.

  ‘The Freedom Riders,’ Amy said. ‘We have been in contact with them for several weeks now. They need our help. They know about democracy in theory, but in practice . . . We have been advising them as best we can, but the bit rate of our transmissions is very low and we can’t do it very often because of the danger of being discovered.’

  ‘You’re planning to walk out of here,’ Felice said. ‘And then what? Steal a ship?’

  ‘We plan to take control of the tent, and wait here until a ship comes to pick us up,’ Amy said.

  ‘The prison administration will cut off the tent’s power,’ Felice said. ‘And its air and water.’

  ‘We have taken care of that,’ Bel Glise said.

  ‘It isn’t just the four of you,’ Felice said. ‘You two, and Goether Lyle and Jael Li Lee. The four Athenians. It’s bigger than that, isn’t it?’

  ‘I hope you understand why we can’t tell you,’ Amy said.

  ‘After Goether died, Jael checked his account,’ Bel Glise said. ‘As a precaution. It took a little while, but at last he discovered a discrepancy in the look-up tables. It seems that a second party has been hacking into the surveillance system.’

  ‘Whoever it was, they traced Jael and killed him,’ Amy said. ‘Just as they killed Goether.’

  ‘Someone in the prison,’ Felice said. ‘One of us.’

  ‘We think so,’ Amy said.

  ‘Edz Jealott isn’t clever enough to work up something like this,’ Bel Glise said. ‘But he may have forced someone to do it for him.’

  ‘It could be anyone,’ Amy said. ‘It might even be one of the new prisoners.’

  ‘How do you know it isn’t me?’ Felice said.

  Amy took the question seriously. ‘If you were the murderer, and if you knew about us, you would hav
e killed me first.’

  ‘Amy says that you have certain skills that may be useful,’ Bel Glise said. ‘I saw something of them, I think, when you helped me.’

  ‘That didn’t work out too well, did it?’ Felice said.

  ‘You were outnumbered,’ Bel Glise said. ‘This time, you will have to deal with only one person.’

  The two ill-matched women, Amy slight and fiercely vivid, Bel Glise pale and willowy, were anxious but determined. United in common purpose. Felice wondered how deep their conspiracy went, briefly wondered whether Amy had cultivated her friendship with him because she’d thought that one day he might be useful, and realised that he didn’t care. He was on the inside now. Eager to do whatever he could. Eager to serve.

  ‘You want me to be bait for a trap,’ he said. ‘I check Goether Lyle’s account, and follow the trail that Jael Li Lee uncovered. And then I wait for whoever is watching it to come after me. Someone who has already killed two men.’

  The women looked at each other. Amy said, ‘You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Of course I want to do it,’ Felice said. ‘It’s what I was made to do.’

  Felice knew that Amy Ma Coulibaly and Bel Glise wanted his help because of what he was, not who he was. He knew that he was being used, but after six years of taking each day as it came, each day no different from any other that preceded it, he had a mission again. He would have done it even if Amy hadn’t offered to take him to Earth afterwards, to try to find a cure for his condition.

  Bel Glise had modified the clinic’s blood sniffer so that he could use its link to the prison’s net - which enabled it to upload diagnostic data directly to prisoners’ files - to access Goether Lyle’s account. Felice worked all night, resurrecting a simple demon and tailoring it to the virtual environment of the prison net. Then, with the feeling that he was stepping off a cliff, he opened Goether Lyle’s account and spent a little time flipping through the objects stored there. A notepad space filled with tracts of scribblings about some kind of metatopology, written in notation as compact and baffling as Egyptian hieroglyphics. Several small and simple virtualities that modelled various n-dimensional universes. Long Q&A sessions with Brazilian mathematicians. The draft of a research presentation. The back door to the surveillance system was hidden somewhere amongst this commonplace clutter, but Felice didn’t bother to look for it. He uploaded his demon, a simple, dumb, very reliable gatekeeper that would flash a question to anyone who opened Goether Lyle’s account or checked the user log, and would run a tag-and-trace routine. Then he turned himself off and slept the last two hours of the night. He had made himself into a target. All he had to do now was wait.