Gardens of the Sun

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

400 Billion Stars
Cowboy Angels
Eternal Light
Fairyland
Pasquale’s Angel
Red Dust
Secret Harmonies
The Quiet War
Gardens of the Sun

 
 
 

 
Gardens of the Sun

 

 
PAUL MCAULEY

 
 
Orion

 
Copyright © Paul McAuley 2009

 
All rights reserved

 
The right of Paul McAuley to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Gollancz
An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

eISBN : 978 0 5750 8848 1

 
ISBN 978 0 575 07937 3 (Trade Paperback)
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,
Lymington, Hants
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Mackays,
Chatham, Kent

 
The Orion Publishing Group’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
www.unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com
www.orionbooks.co.uk

For Stephen Baxter, and for Georgina, encore, toujours.

A hundred murdered ships swung around Saturn in endless ellipses. Slender freighters and sturdy tugs. Shuttles that had once woven continuous and ever-changing paths between the inhabited moons. Spidery surface-to-orbit gigs. The golden crescent of a clipper, built by a cooperative just two years ago to ply between Saturn and Jupiter, falling like a forlorn fairy-tale moon past the glorious arch of the ring system. Casualties of a war recently ended.

Most were superficially intact but hopelessly compromised, AIs driven insane by demons disseminated by Brazilian spies, fusion motors and control and life-support systems toasted by microwave bursts or EMP mines. In the frantic hours after their ships had been killed, surviving crews and passengers had attempted to make repairs or signal for help with lasers pried from dead comms packages, or had composed with varying degrees of resignation, despair and anger last messages to their families and friends. In the freezing dark of her sleeping niche, aboard a freighter sliding past the butterscotch bands at Saturn’s equator, the poet Lexis Parrander had written in blood on the blank screen of her slate We are the dead.

They were the dead. No one responded to the distress signals they aimed at the inhabited moons or the ships of the enemy. Some zipped themselves into sleeping niches and took overdoses, or opened veins at their wrists, or fastened plastic bags over their heads. Others, hoping to survive until rescue came, pulled on pressure suits and willed themselves into the profoundly deep, slow sleep of hibernation. In one ship people fought and killed each other because there were not enough pressure suits to go around. In another, they huddled around an impedance heater lashed up from cable and fuel cells, a futile last stand against the advance of the implacable cold.

Many of the ships, fleeing towards Uranus when they’d been killed, had planned to pick up speed by gravity-assist manoeuvres around Saturn. Now they traced lonely paths that took them close around the gas giant and flung them out past the ring system and the orbits of the inner moons before reaching apogee and falling back. A few travelled even further outwards, past the orbits of Titan, Hyperion, or even Iapetus.

And here was the black arrowhead of a Brazilian singleship approaching the farthest point of an orbit that was steeply inclined above the equatorial plane and had taken it more than twenty million kilometres from Saturn, into the lonely realm where scattered swarms of tiny moons traced long and eccentric paths. Inside its sleek hull, a trickle charge from a lithium-ion battery kept its coffin-sized lifesystem at 4° Centigrade, and its mortally wounded pilot slept beyond the reach of any dream.

A spark of fusion flame flared in the starry black aft of the singleship. A ship was approaching: a robot tug that was mostly fuel tank and motor, drawing near and matching the eccentric axial spin of the crippled singleship with firecracker bursts from clusters of attitude jets until the two ships spun together like comically disproportionate but precisely synchronised ice-skaters. The tug sidled closer and made hard contact, docking with latches along the midline of the singleship’s flat belly. After running through a series of diagnostic checks, the tug killed its burden’s spin and turned it through a hundred and eighty degrees and fired up its big fusion motor. The blue-white spear of the exhaust stretched kilometres beyond the coupled ships, altering their delta vee and their high, wide orbit, pushing them towards Dione and rendezvous with the flagship of the Greater Brazilian fleet.

Sri Hong-Owen was on Janus, climbing the outer slope of a big crater stamped into the moon’s anti-saturnian hemisphere, when General Arvam Peixoto reached out to her. ‘Get back to the Glory of Gaia as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘I have a little job that requires your peculiar expertise.’

‘I have plenty of work here. Important work,’ Sri said, but she was speaking into dead air. The general had cut his end of the connection. She knew that if she tried to call back she wouldn’t be able to get past his snarky aides, and she also knew that she couldn’t risk the consequences of disobeying him: out here, in the aftermath of the Quiet War, Arvam Peixoto’s word was law. So she switched to the common channel and told the three members of her crew that she’d been recalled.

‘Drop whatever you’re doing and pack up. We’re leaving in an hour.’

‘We’re already on it, boss,’ Vander Reece said. ‘We got word too.’

‘Of course you did,’ Sri said, and switched off her comms.

Despite the encumbrance of her pressure suit she was poised like a dancer in the vestigial gravity of the little moon, tethered to the static line she’d been following up the bright slope. Below her, a stretch of flat terrain planted with vacuum organisms that somewhat resembled giant silvery sunflowers tilted towards the close horizon. Above, a scalloped ridge stood stark against the black sky where Janus’s co-orbital partner, Epimetheus, hung like a crooked fingernail paring. The two moons chased each other around the same track beyond the outer edge of the A Ring, one always slightly lower and faster than the other. Roughly every four years, the faster moon caught up with its slower partner. As it approached to within ten thousand kilometres, gravitational interaction kicked the faster moon into a higher, slower orbit and dropped the slower moon into a lower, faster orbit and the race started over, no end to it. A celestial version of a futile metabolic cycle. A crude metaphor for Sri’s life after the Quiet War.

This was her second solo outing on Janus’s surface, a long trek to patchwork gardens of several dozen variant species of vacuum organism that covered the inner slopes and floor of the crater. They’d already been mapped by drones, but Sri had been looking forward to rambling through them, taking samples, searching for anything that might give her further insights into the mind of their creator, the great gene wizard Avernus. Well, too bad. Arvam Peixoto had twitched her leash, and like a good little pet she must come running to see what her master wanted. So Sri bit down on her resentment and regret, collapsed her long-handled pick and hooked it to the utility belt of her pressure suit, and swarmed back down the slope, following the line through the stands of sunflower vacuum organisms.

Their black stems towered all around her, topped by silvery dishes that focused the dim light of the sun - one-hundredth the brightness of sunlight incident on Earth - onto central nodes whose heat-exchange systems drew up liquid methane and warmed it and pumped it back down into a labyrinthine network of mycelial threads that ramified through the regolith, absorbing carbonaceous compounds and rare earths and metals that were deposited in scales elaborated around the bases of the stems, ready to be picked and refined. The sunflowers crowded close together, dishes set edge to edge in a tiled canopy that obscured most of the sky, stems rooted in a scurf of fallen scales and clumps of blocky ejecta. Despite the exiguous gravity, traversing the Stygian undercroft of this dwarf forest was hard work. Sri was sweating hard inside her pressure suit and feeling a quivering exhaustion in her shoulders and calves when at last she broke free and swarmed up the shallow slope of another crater rim, following a well-trodden path towards the tug that squatted on a landing platform a short distance from a pressure dome.

Inside the dome’s transparent blister, lights brighter than the shrunken sun illuminated a green, jungly garden - another of Avernus’s sly little miracles. A preliminary survey had shown that the bushes, creepers, grasses and sprawling trees of the jungle shared the same genome: all were different phenotypic expressions of a single artificial species, creating an intimately interlinked self-regulating biome. Sri’s old mentor, Oscar Finnegan Ramos, would have thought this phenotype jungle a vain and silly exercise, a waste of a great talent. And he would have been wrong, as he’d been wrong about so much else. Sri was learning all kinds of novel techniques and tricks from her investigations of Avernus’s gardens, finding inspiration for her own work, beginning to get the measure of the contours and amazing range of the gene wizard’s mind.

Principles and elements of ecosystem construction developed and elaborated by Avernus had enabled Outer colonists of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn to establish robust and stable biomes in their cities and garden habitats and oases on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn; the vacuum organisms she’d designed, congeries of cellular nanomachines able to grow and reproduce on the moons’ cold and airless surfaces, provided dependable supplies of CHON food, metals, fullerene composites, and every kind of complex organic compound. Avernus had expected little or no reward for her work and had withdrawn from ordinary life, an aloof genius protected by a small circle of acolytes, absent-mindedly conjuring miracle after miracle. But despite her long self-imposed exile, she had realised that humanity was approaching a crucial crossroads. A hundred years ago, when Earth had attempted to extend its hegemony over them, the pioneering generation of Outers had fled from the Moon to Mars and Jupiter’s second-largest moon, Callisto. Shortly afterwards, the nascent colonies on Mars had been H-bombed by the Chinese Democratic Republic, but the Outers on Callisto had survived and prospered, spreading to other moons of Jupiter and to the Saturn System, building cities and settlements, experimenting with novel forms of scientific utopianism. Previous attempts to heal the rift between Earth and the Outers had failed, but these failures had not mattered much. Earth had been preoccupied with repairing the damage caused by catastrophic climate change; the Outers had become inward-looking, absorbed in the creation of works of art or in scientific research with little or no practical value. But this equilibrium had been threatened by the expansionist ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, and Avernus had allowed herself to become one of the figureheads of the movement for peace and reconciliation, ploughing vast amounts of personal kudos into collaborative projects meant to strengthen bonds between the two branches of humanity.