Gardens of the Sun (26 page)

‘It is a common lectin, a protein that specifically binds to a sequence of sugar residues. When it binds to certain sites on the surface of the polychine, it initiates a short metabolic cascade that results in the luminescent display. So although the polychines do not encode any information, they are capable of processing information. Each consists of a specific set of polymers, and each polymer exists in one of two states, either on or off, determined by a number of limited rules. For instance, a particular polymer might switch on in the presence of either of two chemical substrates. Or it might require the presences of both substrates.’

‘Boolean logic,’ Loc said, a distant memory swimming out of the transparency inside his head.

‘Exactly so,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘Perhaps there is hope for you yet, Mr Ifrahim. The reaction you saw was a simple AND sequence: lectin plus binding polymer equals activation of another polymer which produces the luminescence. The polychines are Boolean networks, capable of generating orderly dynamics - fixed-state cycles. One polychine constructed from just a hundred polymer components, each possessing just two possible states, either on or off, would generate ten to the power of thirty possible arrays. If every component receives an input from every other component, the system will become chaotic, cycling through a vast number of states at random; it would take a very long time before it returned to its original state. But if each component receives just two inputs, the system will spontaneously generate order - it will cycle between just four of its ten to the power of thirty possible states. Thus, constrained by spontaneous self-organising dynamical order, the polychines generate fixed-state cycles that are very similar to our own metabolic processes. And because these cycles are capable of processing information, it is possible to generate predictable results by supplying them with the right information. As a first step, my crew and I tested their reaction to a wide range of chemical messengers, just as you have seen. But they are much more than chemical detectors. When two different polychines grow together, interaction between their pseudo-metabolic hypercycles produces new forms of polychine. And interactions between second-generation polychines can produce a third generation, and so on. The diversity of the system is constrained only by size and by time. We have been attempting to derive theoretical solutions that will define the entire information space, but infinity keeps creeping in.’

‘A marvellous toy for someone with your interests. But I doubt that it will please the colonel,’ Loc said.

He was beginning to understand, with a slick of acid pleasure in his heart, that this strange garden was a puzzle and a trap. Something that would take up huge amounts of Sri Hong-Owen’s time and attention to no good purpose. She was undeniably possessed by genius, but she was vain and self-indulgent too, obsessed with playing games for the sake of nothing more than play itself.

And yet there was a strange beauty, a pleasing asymmetrical order, to the copses and meadows of spikes and spires, scrolls and sheets, patched across the vast bowl beyond the window. It reminded him of the neatly nested mechanism of the ancient watch his father had worn on his wrist. An heirloom centuries old. Cogs and springs and tiny balances working away at different cycles that somehow meshed to drive the hands around the face at exactly one second per second. Loc had loved that watch, but although his father had often promised that he would inherit it, it had been hocked to pay a debt one day, and that had been that. A harsh but useful lesson. Make no attachments to anyone or anything. Expect nothing except that which you make or win for yourself.

‘Do you believe in fate, Mr Ifrahim?’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘Do you believe that our destinies are shaped by patterns and forces we cannot see? Or do you think that everything we do is shaped by nothing more than chance and contingency?’

‘I was raised as a Catholic, madam.’

‘Mmm. That’s a nicely slippery answer. I suppose I should expect nothing less. I learned long ago that biology teaches us that chance and destiny go hand in hand. Our bodies bear the imprints of a myriad contingencies that randomly favoured survival and reproduction of certain genes over others. If you were able to run the great pageant of life in reverse to some point in the distant past and set it going again, it would not play out in the same way. It would tell a different story. Reverse and replay it again, and yet another story would emerge.

‘This garden of Avernus’s is a lesson in the marriage of contingency and destiny. An experiment that is as unrepeatable as life on Earth. As I have said, the polychines lack the equivalent of DNA - an internal cache containing a minimal set of instructions than can be used to reproduce their initial state. If they are destroyed, their past and future will also be destroyed: irretrievably so. They are creatures of an eternal yet ever-changing now. But I will uncover the rules that shape them. I will free them from contingency, and give them a history and a destiny.

‘There’s an interesting parallel one could draw between this garden and Outer society. The Outers hoped that, by rewriting their genomes, they could escape the limited range of destinies shaped by past contingencies in human history. The war put an end to that grand experiment because we feared that they would develop into something more than human, something that we could not control or contain, something that would affect our destiny whether we liked it or not. By examining this garden and others like it, we can understand the breadth of their capabilities. And by understanding them, we can control them. There’s your utility, if you like, although I doubt the colonel will be able to appreciate it.’ Sri Hong-Owen looked at something behind Loc and added, ‘Come and join us, Berry. Don’t skulk around like that.’

The boy mooched out of the shadows by the entrance. When Sri asked him what he thought of the garden he said that he liked the robot.

‘I like it too,’ Sri said. ‘My assistants are setting up a system that will allow me to control it remotely, so that we can continue to study the polychines wherever we are. You’ll stay overnight, Mr Ifrahim. We have to discuss Berry’s future.’

As if that was any of his concern, Loc thought. But he didn’t have much choice about it. Sri Hong-Owen controlled everything here. He’d needed Colonel Malarte’s permission to come here, but he needed her permission to leave.

Everyone ate in a tent floored with halflife fur that hummocked into seats and low tables. Sri Hong-Owen’s assistants were friendly, extremely intelligent and highly motivated young people who clearly were in awe of her. Apart from Antônio Maria Rodrigues, they were all Outers; one, Raphael, was an androgyne neuter, tall and disturbingly handsome, yo’s flawless skin as pale and translucent as the wall of the tent.

After the meal, Loc asked Sri Hong-Owen why the Outers were working for her. She said that they had been minor gene wizards who’d worked on the biomes of habitats and oases and so on before the war, and were keen to hone and develop their skills by studying Avernus’s gardens.

‘Do they have security clearance?’

‘They respect and admire Avernus’s work, and they’ve been extremely useful in every way,’ Sri said. ‘To give just one example, they helped me to find this place. If you want to find something big in Greater Brazil, Mr Ifrahim, you follow the money trail. Here, you must examine the records of the bourses of the various cities for large exchanges of kudos. Two of my assistants discovered that Avernus borrowed a crew of mining machines some twenty years ago, and further investigation led me here.’

‘Some say that you’re hiding. That you are scared that Euclides Peixoto will send you back to Earth.’

‘They couldn’t have won the war without me,’ Sri said, with a flash of brittle defiance. ‘And they seem unable to understand what they have won until I explain it to them, and show them how they can use it and make money from it. I’ve been “down here” for the past hundred days because I have been working. But I will admit that I’ve been out of touch lately. Perhaps you can tell me something of the great changes that have been happening out there in the wider world. Tell me about Arvam. Tell me how he looked when you last saw him.’

It was very nearly a pleasant conversation. Loc realised that they were no longer enemies because they had nothing in common any more. Sri Hong-Owen had her gardens and her obsession with Avernus; Loc had temporal needs that couldn’t be satisfied by knowledge for knowledge’s sake: neither had anything that the other wanted or needed

As they talked it grew darker outside, and rain began to fall. As it did for an hour at the beginning of every night, Sri said. But the rain quickly grew harder, a heavy drumming on the taut material of the tent, and at last Sri used her spex to talk to one of her assistants, a brief and irritable argument about the garden’s climate control.

‘I must deal with something,’ she told Loc, and rose and left without another word.

Loc stepped to the entrance of the tent, saw her talking briefly with two of her assistants. When the three of them walked off into the rainy dark he followed, certain that something was up. The big cushions of moss gave off a steely luminescence, glowing like the ghosts of small clouds, enabling him to pick his way along a path that had turned into a small stream. Cold water flowed as sluggishly as mercury over his feet, and enormous drops of low-gravity rain drifted down all around; when one smacked down on Loc’s head, it was as if he’d been drenched with a pailful of water, doing Gaia knew what damage to his carefully braided hair, soaking his face, slicking straight off his suit-liner. He knuckled water from his eyes, spat and snorted, saw the shadows of Sri Hong-Owen and the two assistants float past a shoulder of luminous moss towards the lake.

Loc groped his way to the bridge and pulled himself along it. Fat, slow raindrops smacked against the water below. Braids dripping, cold air stinging his wet face, he crept through the green light of the sloping passageway towards the red glow of the gallery and the echo of loud voices. Sri Hong-Owen was talking to her son, who hung his head and shrugged and snuffled. One of the assistants, the neuter, was nursing yo’s eye; the other was bent over the memo space, where virtual screens tiled in the air showed paths smashed through cloudy thickets of wires and a fleet of paper-thin fins, showed from several angles the spindly robot pacing in mindless circles amongst the wreckage of a candle-copse. It seemed that Berry had not only managed to get into the climate controls of the moss garden; he’d also sent the robot on a rampage through the polychine garden.

Sri Hong-Owen suddenly turned around, called Loc before he could shrink away, told him that she had changed her mind. He was no longer needed here, she said. He could leave immediately. ‘Berry is my responsibility. I will deal with him.’

Loc couldn’t resist a parting shot. ‘I hope he has not done too much damage, ma’am.’

‘It isn’t serious. And it might even yield interesting results. Go now,’ the gene wizard said. Her icy disdain had returned in full measure. ‘Go. There’s nothing for you here.’

‘It’s a classic case of acting out,’ Loc told Captain Neves later that day, back in Camelot. ‘The only way the boy is able to express his frustration is to smash something.’

‘You ask me, sometimes people do bad things because they’re bad,’ Captain Neves said. ‘And Berry is a bad seed, no doubt about it.’

‘He certainly drew the short straw in the genetic lottery,’ Loc said. ‘I understand that the other son, the one left behind on Earth, takes after his mother.’

‘Not that that’s any kind of advantage. I mean, it hasn’t done her much good, has it?’

‘I almost feel sorry for her. She believes in the supremacy of logic and order. She believes that science is our only salvation. That only science can make sense of the world, and ourselves. Most of all, she believes in control and determinacy. Those weird things in that garden, their unique, unrepeatable configurations, run counter to all of that. They are a game with no purpose or utility, yet she believes that she can prove herself better than her enemy by attempting to control something that, by its very nature, cannot be controlled. It’s funny,’ Loc said. ‘She can waste as much time as she likes there, but in the end she’ll be no nearer to understanding Avernus.’

‘So you didn’t find anything useful out there. Perhaps you should ask me what I found out about Marlene,’ Captain Neves said.

‘I’d almost forgotten about the good colonel. I’m going to have to find a way of explaining that garden to him. It will be like trying to teach calculus to a donkey. Well, what have you been up to?’

Captain Neves explained that she had plugged into the military police rumour mill and learnt that Colonel Malarte was employing one of the city’s senators, a mountebank named Todd Krough, to help him acquire the works of art he was shipping back to Earth. As for the chestplate decorated with the last in the series of Munk’s Seven Transformations of the Ring System, the colonel had taken it in exchange for guaranteeing the release from prison of the woman who was presently his mistress.