Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  The Free Outers held another interminable debate and decided once again that they couldn’t risk sending anyone to Iapetus. Afterwards, Macy went for a swim in the tank at the heart of the habitat and hung at its pellucid centre for a long, long time. Only the sound of her breathing in her face mask, and the slosh of currents. Red and black fronds stirring to and fro like drowned fright wigs.

  Loc Ifrahim had spoken of a hinge point in history. She could feel it turning inside her, a slow but irresistible tide.

  That night she told Newt what she planned to do. He heard her out quietly and soberly, then asked why she felt she had to do it. They were lying side by side on conjoined crash couches in Elephant’s command blister. Talking quietly, faces just a few centimetres apart, the twins asleep in the main part of the cabin.

  ‘Because it’s the right thing to do,’ Macy said. ‘Because Loc Ifrahim is right, and everybody else is wrong. I know I’m an outsider. I know that I still don’t understand everything about Outer society, but there isn’t any kind of Outer society right now. It’s been shattered. And this is our best chance to start to put it back together. I know a lot of people hope that the Ghosts are going to war against the TPA on behalf of all of the Outers, but it’s pretty obvious that this war fleet is part of that manifest-destiny thing of theirs. Trying to make the future come out the way it’s supposed to, according to the so-called prophesies of their leader.’

  ‘You know that. I know that,’ Newt said. ‘But most people won’t be happy if you go against a decision arrived at democratically. It could give you a short ride to a world of trouble. It got me in trouble more than once, back in the day.’

  ‘I don’t want this to get you into trouble now. I’ll make it clear that it’s on me. But I have to do it.’

  Newt smiled. ‘There’s no way of talking you out of this, is there?’

  ‘None that I can think of.’

  ‘You better let me work up a flight profile.’

  ‘I got one from the navigation AI. It says it’s doable.’

  ‘It’ll say anything you want it to say, if you ask it the wrong questions.’

  They talked about what they needed to do, what to tell the twins, what might happen if Macy was declared an outcast. They didn’t talk about whether or not Macy had made the right decision. They didn’t need to.

  Like all the ships, Elephant had been kept topped up with fuel and consumables, ready to take off at a moment’s notice. And kidnapping Loc Ifrahim turned out to be amazingly easy. Macy told him that she had some more news about the rebellion in Greater Brazil - he needed to see it before she showed everyone else. When he came aboard Elephant and began to strip off his pressure suit, Macy slapped an air mask over her face and flushed a dose of sevofluorane into the lifesystem’s atmosphere, putting Loc under before he could begin to ask what she was doing. She kept him under with an anaesthetic patch, prepped him for hibernation, and packed him into a coffin. The difficult part was saying goodbye to the twins, who got it into their heads that she would be back in a day or so. Untangling that notion would be another hard task for Newt, after he’d explained to the rest of the Free Outers what Macy had done, and why.

  She’d flown Elephant many times by now, but never before solo. Newt stayed in constant contact for the first hour and just finished helping her finesse the parameters of the burn that would put her on course for Saturn when Idriss Barr cut in, asking with anger and incredulity what she thought she was doing.

  ‘Making history,’ Macy said, and said goodbye to Newt and shut down the comms.

  Elephant took sixty-three days to fall from Nephele to Saturn. Macy kept busy with housekeeping tasks, building up her muscle tone by exercising assiduously with intertial weights and on the stationary bicycle, and teaching herself basic navigation and practising landings and every other kind of manoeuvre in the tug’s virtual reality system. She routinely checked Loc Ifrahim’s hibernation coffin, and talked to Newt and the twins at least twice a day, morning and evening, sometimes more. As Elephant left Nephele behind, the lag in communications grew so great that they were forced to default to text messages and video blips.

  Newt forwarded news transmitted by the PacCom base on Iapetus. The People’s Revolutionary Committee had established itself in Brasília and had announced a date for elections, but did not yet have authority over the entire country. Armand Nabuco and the remains of his government were holed up in Georgetown and controlled a swathe of territory between the Cuara River in the north and the Amazon in the south; six territories loyal to the former president had not yet surrendered; there was considerable insurgent activity everywhere else, led by former members of the OSS. More than a million people were living in refugee camps, there were food shortages and thousands were dying of disease every day, and it was the beginning of the hurricane season in those territories adjacent to the Caribbean. The only good news was that the European Union had refused to come to the aid of the deposed government, and the Pacific Community had declared that it was ready to supply aid if it was asked to do so, but would otherwise respect Greater Brazil’s sovereignty.

  The People’s Revolutionary Committee and a group of Outer politicians who’d been imprisoned on the Moon had asked the TPA to engage in immediate talks aimed at finding a peaceful end to the occupation of the Outer System. The Brazilian authorities in the Jupiter System had not yet responded. In the Saturn System, the Europeans and the Pacific Community had indicated that they were willing to participate, but Euclides Peixoto had declared that he wouldn’t enter into any kind of talks until the Ghost ships currently heading towards Saturn turned back. If the Saturn System came under attack from any quarter, he said, he would retaliate with swift and deadly force.

  As for the Free Outers, the majority wanted to wait and see what happened when the Ghosts reached the Saturn System.

  ‘There’s a vague and unfocused hope that it will solve itself somehow, ’ Newt told Macy, reporting on the latest debate about the crisis.

  The twins were creating a garden on one of the hydroponic shelves. Macy did her best to encourage them, gazed wistfully at videos of their enthusiastic work and energetic play. They sent her scans of paintings and drawings and she printed them out and stuck them around the lifesystem. She recorded stories that Newt could play back to them, but it wasn’t the same as telling them stories in person. She missed them dreadfully and thought about them and Newt all the time, and kept herself busy so that she would not have time to regret leaving them.

  It was the first time in many years that she had been so alone (Loc Ifrahim, sealed in his hibernation coffin, hardly counted as company). And she had never before been aboard Elephant without Newt. She remembered the long, languorous voyage after they’d fled from the Saturn System to Uranus at the end of the Quiet War. How they had made love everywhere, in every conceivable position. Newt teaching her the delights of free-fall sex after the motor had been switched off. Naked to each other for the first time. Learning each other’s bodies, alive with all five senses. Newt’s presence was imprinted everywhere inside the little ship but he was growing ever more distant as it fell through vast volumes of black vacuum.

  Back when she’d been working in the R&R Corps at the northern edge of the Fontaine Territory, Macy, caught in a full-on winter storm, had spent nine days in a line hut out of radio contact with base, hunched in all her clothes over a convector heater or lying in the bunk under a mountain of blankets, living on MRE packs and instant coffee while everything beyond the hut’s frosted window was erased by a blur of falling whiteness. She felt the same lonely anxiety now - although back then she hadn’t had to worry about running out of air or water, and although she’d been entirely cut off from the civilised world, the base had been just thirty klicks away, half a day’s ride in the snow-cat once the blizzard had blown itself out, snow-covered pine trees standing under a flawless blue sky, sunlight sparkling on the crests of crystalline white drifts.

  But she was such a very long way f
rom everywhere else now, and despite her housekeeping routines and the daily contact with Newt and Han and Hannah, she never forgot that she was caught inside a fragile bubble of heat and light and air. A spark rising in an infinite flue. A mote of dust floating in a cathedral. The old airplane fear would seize her at odd moments and she had trouble sleeping, would wake with a sudden jolt, convinced there was something badly wrong, her pulse hammering in her ears for long moments before she felt the steady subsonic rumble of the motor through the pad of the sleeping niche, the whirr and sigh of the fans and pumps that circulated and refreshed the air.

  At last she reached turnover. Although she’d practised assiduously for the moment, and Newt was in constant contact throughout, the business of shutting down Elephant’s motor and swinging the little tug end for end and reigniting the motor to begin deceleration was a blur of nightmare anxiety. When it was over Macy stripped off her suit-liner, sponged stale cold sweat from her skin, and crawled into the sleeping niche and slept for twelve hours straight.

  One day Newt sent her shots of the Ghosts’ little fleet, taken at the closest approach to Nephele, which wasn’t very close at all, a gulf of several billion kilometres. The four ships were strung out in a line like broken fragments of a comet, each no more than a handful of pixels across. Tiny clusters of bright squares. Macy knew that it was impossible to resolve any meaningful detail, but all the same she stared long and hard at them. They had a high albedo, perhaps because they were painted white, the Ghosts’ totemic colour, and they were far bigger than any ships that the Ghosts were known to possess.

  - The spectra of their exhausts is weird too, Newt sent. The standard signature of the fast-fusion drive plus absorption lines corresponding to hydrogen and oxygen. It looks like they’re augmenting thrust with mass drivers that are shoving out water so fast it splits into its atomic constituents. It’s hard to get a red shift with the equipment I have, but my best guess is that they’re throwing off a plume at around nine thousand klicks per second. About three per cent the speed of light.

  - If they have this extra boost why aren’t they accelerating faster than Elephant? Macy sent back.

  - Their ships are bigger. Greater mass needs greater thrust. I checked the archives. There are plans for half a dozen kinds of mass driver. I guess they made one of them work.

  - We didn’t know much about what they were doing, when it comes down to it.

  - Like what else they’ve been building.

  - I guess I’ll see soon enough.

  - Promise me again you won’t get too close.

  - I promise I won’t do anything stupid on purpose.

  A few days later, Newt called and told Macy that the Ghost ships hadn’t gone into turnover. They were still accelerating.

  - It looks like they’re going to be flying straight through the Saturn System, he sent. Probably using a gravity-assist manoeuvre to bend their course so they head somewhere else. Jupiter or Earth. I think Jupiter. That’s where many of them came from.

  - They could hit targets in the Saturn System on their way through, couldn’t they? Macy sent back. And then go on to cause trouble at Jupiter, or maybe even Earth. But I can’t turn back. We need more than ever to figure out a way of working out a deal with the TPA.

  She ate her lunch while waiting for Newt’s reply. Curd cheese smeared on a gritty biscuit, a handful of small sour tomatoes from the cold store. She was eating sparingly, knew it was because she had the irrational fear of running out of food, couldn’t help it.

  A telescopic image of Saturn hung in the memo space. Just three hundred and forty million kilometres away now. A minuscule half-disc that looked slightly deformed because of the rings. Like the fuzzy image of a broken teacup. In nine days she’d be there, and her problems would really begin. The prospect filled her with a grinding dread. She might not be able to convince the right people to do the right thing. She might be thrown in prison, or worse. She might never see the twins or Newt again: an unbearable thought.

  The comms pinged. Newt’s reply had arrived.

  - When it comes to making a deal, you’re going to have to do some fast talking. You’re slowing down so you can make orbit around Saturn, but the Ghosts are coming on faster and faster . . . It means you don’t have three weeks’ grace after all. It means that the Ghosts will arrive at Saturn a little over five days after you do.

  Macy and Newt spent the rest of the day discussing her options. There weren’t many, and none of them were good. She could begin to accelerate again, but she would have to get rid of the excess velocity when she reached Saturn. Elephant was a true space vehicle and lacked a heat shield, so she couldn’t brake by ploughing though the upper atmosphere of either Saturn or Titan. At best, she could fire up the motor for a day or so and add a couple of hours to the gap between Elephant’s arrival and that of the Ghosts, but then she’d have to slow down by performing a complex series of fly-bys past Saturn and Titan, which would waste more time than she saved. Or she could start accelerating again and keep going, swing straight past Saturn as the Ghosts were evidently planning to do, but she didn’t yet know whether they were heading on to Jupiter or Earth or someplace else, and she couldn’t be sure of their final destination until after Elephant had encountered Saturn. For all she knew, they could be heading for Mars, planning to reclaim the planet lost to the Outers more than a century ago.

  And in any case, her options were limited by the amount of fuel she was carrying.

  In the end, Macy and Newt decided that they’d stick with the plan. Continue to slow down, then swing around Saturn in a reverse gravity-assist, enter orbit and get to Paris, Dione, as quickly as possible. They also agreed that it was time to wake up Loc Ifrahim.

  The coffin did most of the work. Macy fed Loc sips of fruit juice, swabbed his face and torso with wet wipes, helped him to the head. She’d twice been through revival after long periods of hibernation and knew how bad it was. He picked at a small helping of boiled rice, chewing every grain, saying in his post-hibernation croak, ‘I’ve been ready to return to Saturn ever since you picked me up, Macy. There was no need for this drama. All you had to do was ask.’

  ‘We needed to save on consumables.’

  ‘And spending nine weeks in this little ship with me was not a pleasing prospect. I quite understand - the feeling is mutual,’ Loc said, with a ghost of his old crooked smile.

  ‘We make quite a team, don’t we?’ Macy said. ‘They wouldn’t believe me alone, or you. But both of us together . . .’

  ‘May I ask, did you also bring aboard the body of Captain Neves?’

  ‘There wasn’t time.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘If this all works out,’ Macy said, with a deep pang of guilt, ‘you can take her back to Earth.’

  ‘Of course. Well, what has been happening while I have been asleep?’

  Macy told him about the refusal by the Brazilian forces at Jupiter and Saturn to surrender control, told him that the Ghost ships were still accelerating towards the Saturn System, and explained what it might mean.

  He thought for a while, then said, ‘You have not yet talked to the TPA. Or to the PacCom authority on Iapetus.’

  ‘We thought it best to keep radio silence.’

  ‘But now you think otherwise. Which is why you woke me. And not before time,’ Loc said. ‘Let’s see what I can do, shall we?’

  After some to-and-fro with Newt, Macy managed to aim Elephant’s main antenna at Dione. She turned the comms over to Loc Ifrahim and watched as he engaged in a text conversation with someone called Yota McDonald. An old friend in the diplomatic service, he said.

  Yota McDonald explained that the revolution in Greater Brazil had caused a seismic shift in the balance of power at Saturn. A sizeable faction in the Brazilian contingent of the TPA, including the diplomatic, police and civil services, and four of the five governors and their staff of the Brazilian-controlled cities, wanted to come to an accommodation with the Outers, but Euclides Peixoto and sen
ior officers in the Army and the Air Defence Force refused to countenance any such move. It seemed that Euclides Peixoto was determined to stick it out at Saturn; not so much out of loyalty to the old regime, but because he did not want to relinquish power over his little empire. But he lacked the backing of the Europeans and the Pacific Community, and without their support the only way he could keep power was by main force. There had already been a long series of strikes and nonviolent protests in Camelot, Mimas, and Baghdad, Enceladus, and Athens and Sparta, Tethys. The governors of those cities had refused to challenge the protesters, and Euclides Peixoto had threatened to send in troops if nothing was done, a stand-off that had not yet been resolved, mainly because the approach of the Ghost fleet was a menace overshadowing every kind of domestic problem. There could be no doubt about its hostile intent now. Euclides Peixoto claimed to be planning a spectacular counterstrike, and he wanted to attack their city on Triton, too. If Loc Ifrahim and Macy really did have useful intelligence about the Ghosts, Yota McDonald sent, Euclides Peixoto would certainly want to talk with them.

  - We don’t plan to sell anything to anyone, Loc sent back. This is too important. We will talk to the TPA security council.

  - Euclides won’t like that.