Gardens of the Sun

by Paul McAuley

  Xander was a pilot, and he and Newt disappeared off for hours at a time, inspecting ships garaged in the hangars, lost in discussions about microscopic improvements to routes between the inner and outer planets and the latest tweaks to fusion-motor technology. Unlike her brothers - Darwin with his comets; Han with his current enthusiasm for extending and improving the gardens that Avernus had created in the atmosphere of Saturn, which would almost certainly be replaced by an enthusiasm for something else in a year or two - Hannah was sensible and thoroughly grounded. She had made her home here with her partner and children, was part of the crew that maintained the ecosystems, variations on the phytoplankton-krill-fish food chains of Antarctic seas, of the watery bubbles that jacketed Pan-Ku. She loved her life and saw no reason to make any radical changes to it.

  One day, while Xander and Newt were mooching around in Pan-Ku’s hangars, Macy and Hannah took the twins down to one of the island forests. An expedition that took all morning to organise. It was well past noon when they finally set out, travelling on a cog tram that ran down the centre of one of the hollow spars to the island’s tiny station.

  The island was a plate of fullerene composite a kilometre across, sculpted in low relief and landscaped with lawns and paths of halflife grass that, overlaid with a web of tethers, wound through heather scrub and thickets of puffball pines and live oaks. Abbie and Kit swarmed ahead of Hannah and Macy, swinging from tether to tether with swift balletic grace, vanishing around a clump of trees and returning a few minutes later, calling to their mother and grandmother, eager to show them the perfect spot they’d chosen. And it was lovely, a sheltered saddle of soft turf sprinkled with wild flowers, embraced on three sides by a thick belt of trees, with views across the ocean of air and the linear archipelagos of green islands that arrowed inward all around, like a student’s exercise in perspective, towards the glare of the sunlamps.

  Hannah settled down with a contented sigh; she was as huge and awkward as a walrus, as she put it, had to spend half of each day in the habitat’s centrifuge for the sake of her babies, and suffered from nagging backaches. She and Macy set out the picnic they’d brought and coerced the twins into spending at least some time tethered while they ate, and then there was an argument about how soon they could go flying. Not for an hour, Hannah said firmly, or you’ll be sick to your stomachs.

  Two of Hannah’s ecosystem crew, Jack and Christof, and their son Cho, a solemn two-year-old, joined them. Abbie fussed over Cho, feeding him titbits and giving him sips of chocolate milk, while Kit roved to and fro, collecting beetles for his vivarium, and Macy and Hannah talked with Jack and Christof about the ongoing planoforming projects on Titan and Mars, and the conference on the Moon. Jack and Christof had a sideline in cultivating grapes and making wine; Macy shared a pouch of their latest, a pink Zinfandel.

  Kit came back, wanting to show Macy a colony of funnel spiders he’d found, and she got up and hauled herself hand over hand along a tether, into the bank of trees. He watched her critically, said that it would be easier if she didn’t try to walk.

  ‘Cheeky pup. I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive.’

  The funnels were gauzy trumpets laid everywhere in the fibrous tangle of tree roots. Kit showed her that the threads from which they were woven were sticky if you rubbed them in one direction and smooth if you rubbed them the other way. So that beetles and other insects could walk in, but they couldn’t get out.

  ‘Very clever,’ Macy said. ‘Did someone invent these or are they from someplace on Earth?’

  Kit shrugged, feigning indifference because he was embarrassed that he didn’t know.

  ‘We can look it up when we get home,’ Macy said.

  ‘I want to get rigged for full net access,’ Kit said, ‘but Hannah says I’m too young.’

  ‘That’s because it’s good to learn how to remember things. Stretches the brain.’

  Macy clung to the tether with both hands, turning to look up at the raking spread of branches and leaves. She was a little dizzy from the wine. If she let go she would fall past the trees into the sky.

  She said, ‘What happens to dead leaves? On Earth, they would drop to the ground. Here they must simply float away. Why isn’t the sky full of them?’

  ‘Little drones collect all kinds of junk,’ Kit said. ‘They move in flocks, like birds. If you catch one it starts to make this beeping noise, louder and louder. Because it’s lonely.’

  They talked about the different kinds of drones that policed the habitat, and the soil that wasn’t really soil but intricate domains of halflife hyperfibre. Macy told Kit that he should come and visit Coleridge, and see how things grew in real soil, and then they hauled themselves back to the others and Hannah helped Kit and Abbie fit on their flying gear: crash helmets, spurs for landing, the ribbed wings of monomolecular plastic that extended out beyond their hands and clipped to their ankles. And then the twins went bouncing away, clambering like grounded bats to the edge of the catchnets that stretched around the edge of the island and kicking off and beating their wings to get up speed, chasing each other towards the next island, Abbie in red, Kit in yellow and in the lead as they dropped beneath the edge of the island and vanished from sight.

  Macy’s heart gave a little bump when they disappeared. She asked Hannah if she ever worried that the twins might get into trouble.

  ‘Not really,’ Hannah said. ‘The wings aren’t very efficient, so they can’t go much faster than twenty k.p.h. Kit broke his wrist soon after he took it up, because he was trying to show off, but he’s better at flying than Xander now. He wants to get the full set of traits, practise in different kinds of gravity, different environments. It will mean a fair bit of travelling if he’s serious.’

  ‘Just like his grandfather and his uncles,’ Macy said.

  ‘Just like his grandmother,’ Hannah said.

  Macy laughed, and conceded that she had a point.

  They talked about the woman Han was living with, down in the waterzone inside Saturn, about Darwin’s plans to expand the comet business. Presently the twins reappeared, small red and yellow shapes far off in the immense sky, Kit chasing Abbie, wings beating steadily as they stooped down and vanished from sight again as they went below the keel of the island. It was more like swimming than flying, Macy thought. Without gravity you had to beat your wings to get up speed, and if you stopped you wouldn’t fall - air resistance would slow you down until you came to rest, like a fish hanging over a reef.

  Newt called, said that a party was getting up to go visit an asteroid that was due to make a transit just ninety thousand kilometres away.

  ‘It’s entirely covered with a garden of vacuum organisms. One of Avernus’s. Very weird and beautiful, I’m told. They’re heading out in two days and need to know numbers. I said you’d be interested. How about it?’

  ‘You go. I’ll see it another time.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. Come out here and join us. There’s wine, and plenty of food, and the twins are playing tag in the sky.’

  Macy was content to rest. Tethered on the warm slanting lawn with her daughter on one side, flushed with the hormonal health of late pregnancy, and the two men and their son on the other, the solid two-year-old jiggling happily in his webbing, a glaze of yogurt on his chin.

  ‘You didn’t want to go down to Earth,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Oh, you heard about that?’

  ‘I knew Newt had planned it as a surprise for you.’

  ‘One day we’ll all go.’

  ‘Not me. We have too much to do here. And I’d have to exercise like crazy, and I’ve already had enough of the centrifuge. As far as I’m concerned, gravity is for losers,’ Hannah said, shading her eyes as she looked straight up.

  Macy shaded her eyes too, saw Kit and Abbie floating high above them, red and yellow wings moving in wide and lazy sweeps as they checked their momentum. And now they both turned and began to pick up speed, wings beating swift
ly and steadily, laughing and calling out as they swept low above their mother and grandmother, climbing beyond the treetops so that they could do it all over again.

  How they flew!

  3

  Every day the girls of Crew #1 wake at 0600 and swim from their sleep pods, a school of lithe pale mermaids undulating through the oxygenated liquid fluorocarbon that fills the tubeways and commons and work stations of their ship, a medium far better suited to permanent microgravity than air. At a little less than five hundred days old they are already fully grown. Tool belts are cinched around their waists but they are otherwise naked. The muscular barrels of their chests pump fluorocarbon through book-lungs packed with blood-rich fibrils; their arms are long and double-jointed; their fused legs flare into ribbed, fan-like fins. Their faces are round, with small pouting mouths, flattened noses, and large black eyes. Each wears on her right cheek a tattoo of spiky dots and lines that sketch the constellation of Hydrus.

  There are twenty-one of them. Two of their original complement of twenty-four died in an accident while working on the surface and a third, injured beyond repair, had to be euthanised.

  They collect pouches from the treacher and eat quickly, sucking up a salty gruel rich in vitamins and amino acids and casually discarding the empty pouches, halflife things that, tracking a simple chemical cue, flutter back to the treacher like flattened jellyfish as the girls swim one after the other through a short tube to the equipment bay. Two screens are already lit, showing the faces of the tutelary spirits of the ship: AI constructs animated with personalities derived from the hero-warriors Sada Selene and Phoenix Lyle. They update the girls on the progress of the other crews and give them their tasks for the day, and then the big screen on the other side of the spherical space lights up and with synchronised flicks of their fins the girls turn to face their beloved and benevolent leader, Levi.

  Sometimes, while working, the girls fall into intense discussions about whether Levi is an AI construct like the mentors, or whether he is something more. A true AI, or even the image of a real person alive somewhere else in the ship. Not the real Levi, of course, but perhaps a clone. They want to believe that he is with them in body as well as in mind. They dream that when their work is done they will be allowed to meet him as a last reward.

  This day as on every other day Levi talks of the great project in which they are engaged. Moving day by day in small but definite steps towards fulfilment of the auguries of the past-directed messages from his future self. The great circle of time ticking inexorably towards closure, and the glories of rapture.

  And so on, and so forth.

  The girls have heard variations on this theme many times before. Yet on this day as on every other day they give themselves up to it heart and mind. Levi’s words vibrate through the fluorocarbon, beat on their skins and the taut drums of their ears, thrill in their blood, the marrow of their bones.

  At last Levi’s face fades from the great screen. The girls unclip their tool belts and help each other into their pressure suits and clip on their belts again, and three by three cycle through the airlock and flow away from the ship, out across the surface of the tiny worldlet.

  It is a battered planetesimal: a core of water ice and silicates frozen harder than granite and caulked with thick layers of primeval hydrocarbons and pitted with craters. A lonely remnant of the swarming shoals of protoworlds of the early planetary disc; a fossil deep-frozen in the comet-haunted outer dark far beyond the orbit of Neptune. It has been greatly modified since the Ghost ship reached it two hundred and forty-six days ago. Construction robots have excavated pits along its spin axis, and the crews are assembling three huge mass drivers, each with its own fusion generator. Other robots are mining water ice and shaping it into pellets that will fuel the mass drivers, spinning fullerenes and construction diamond wire and other exotic materials from the tarry regolith, digging down into the planetesimal’s frozen core.

  There is still much to do. The girls of Crew #1 relieve their sisters of Crew #3, and begin their twelve-hour shift with joyful hearts. When the work is finished, the lumpy planetesimal will have been transformed into a tapered teardrop wrapped in a diamond-mesh skin and hung behind a parasol shield of fullerene and aerogel, with fabricators and libraries of genetic information and a community of AIs held snugly in the chambers of its heart.

  The girls of the construction crews will live just long enough to complete their work and supervise the start-up of the starship’s mass drivers at the beginning of its long, long voyage.

  They won’t reach the stars. But their brothers and sisters will.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Parts of this novel are based on heavily modified characters and situations that first appeared in the following stories: ‘The Gardens of Saturn’ (Interzone, 1998); ‘The Passenger’ (Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2002); ’The Assassination of Faustino Malarte’ (Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2002); ‘Dead Men Walking’ (Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2006).

  My profound gratitude to the astronauts, scientists, engineers, and flight crews of the Apollo programme, Pioneer 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, Galileo, and Cassini-Huygens for the photographs, maps, research, and first-hand accounts that have inspired and informed every part of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun.