Gardens of the Sun (30 page)

She’d been planning to pull crabs from burrows along several transects, measure their age and size and reproductive health, and work up an estimate of population growth and health. A simple little nature study. A bit of fun. Well, there was no time for that now. She opened the catch net and tipped out the crab, which hitched around in a crooked circle before scampering away across a stretch of ground softly carpeted with pine needles and vanishing into a shrubbery of elderberry that marked the course of a stream at the edge of the glade. Then she called her assistants and gave them the news, explaining that it was obvious that the attack had been instigated by the radical green faction in the government.

‘I want to find out why my contacts in the Senate failed to give any kind of warning, and why Euclides Peixoto had the news before me. I want to find out how many people were killed and injured and I want to know what has happened to the survivors. If they are being held prisoner, if charges are being brought against them, I want my lawyers in Brasília to provide legal representation as soon as possible. I want a collation of any news items about this atrocity, and reactions from the governments of the European Union, the Pacific Community, and the other signatories of the revised Antarctic treaty. But first of all, I need a gig. I have to go to Paris. I have to talk to Berry.’

 

Sri had brought Berry with her when she’d taken charge of the habitat. She’d employed tutors to fill in the gaps of her son’s patchwork education, indulged him by supplying animals and birds he could hunt in the rim forest, taken him on trips to the so-called free cities of Camelot, Mimas, and Athens and Spartica on Tethys, and done her best to give him some direction and shape to his life. Then, on his sixteenth birthday, Berry had tried to enlist in the Air Defence Force and had been turned down flat. He’d blamed Sri for that, and for everything else he believed had gone wrong in his life. After a series of epic rows and sulks he’d moved to Paris, and that was where Sri went now, still enveloped in her wintry calm, piloting a gig across the low-relief moonscape, landing at the outer edge of the spaceport on the floor of Romulus Crater, and hitching a ride to the city in a military rolligon.

The sergeant in charge of the garage next door to the freight yard’s cluster of airlocks told Sri that all the trikes had been signed out. She could wait or walk, her choice. She tried to call Berry for the tenth or twelfth time, but he was still offline. So she walked, loping along in an efficient low-gravity gait she’d long ago perfected, past silent manufactories and warehouses, past untenanted apartment blocks whose walls were covered with graffiti scrawled by soldiers of the occupation force: mad, multicoloured galleries of regimental badges and mottos, belligerent boasts, and cartoon atrocities.

The streets were deserted. Apart from a few hundred essential workers, no Outers were allowed to live inside the city limits, and the TPA’s civil servants, private contractors, and military personnel lived and worked in the Green Zone at the centre of the city, or in offices and apartments built around the railway station at the top of the long slope of its park. The air under the latticed roof of the tent was cool and still and stale, as in a house that had been shut up and abandoned. The halflife grass that covered the avenue was newly laid and vividly green, but the palm trees that lined it on either side, planted after the war to replace the city’s famous sweet chestnuts, were dying, the blades of their crowns yellowing or dry and brown. In the middle of a big intersection, a statue of an astronaut in an antique pressure suit lay where it had been toppled from its plinth; the park beyond was a basin of dry dust scored everywhere by tyre tracks. An arcade of artisans’ workshops, long ago smashed and looted, gaped like a row of caves. Off-duty soldiers lounged outside a corner café; several whistled at Sri when she went past. She circled the barricades of the Green Zone, passed a row of burned-out buildings, their roofs collapsed and walls slumped and blackened like blowtorched candle-wax, and tracked across another dead, dusty park towards the compound, a square, white structure at the foot of the park’s sloping tracts of replanted forest.

Before the war, when Paris had been at the forefront of the resistance to the incursion of the Brazilian and European joint expedition, Avernus and her crew had taken up residence in the compound. Afterwards, Arvam Peixoto had given it to Sri. One of his little jokes. Now Berry lived there.

Sri hadn’t visited her son for more than a hundred days: the reeking squalor inside the compound was as shocking as a slap to her face. The formal plantings of the central courtyard had been trashed and several people were sleeping or had passed out amongst litter that lay everywhere. A young woman wearing fatigues with the sleeves torn off, displaying muscular arms glossy with military tattoos, sat cross-legged on the slender wing of a bench, forking up beans and rice from a ration pack; when Sri asked her if Berry was at home, she jerked a thumb towards the string of rooms on the other side of the courtyard.

Berry was sleeping in a dark and hot little room amongst half a dozen young men and women. He was naked and half-drunk or drugged but docile enough, pulling on a pair of combat trousers and following Sri outside, yawning and scrubbing at his eyes with his fists. They sat down on the parched grass of the lawn and Sri told him straight away that the research station in Antarctica had been attacked and Alder was missing.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Alder and I knew it was likely to happen. We made extensive plans that covered every possibility. Right now he will be hunkered down in a shelter, waiting until his enemies stop searching for him. As soon as it’s safe he’ll send a message.’

Berry thought for a moment. His complexion was blotchy; his eyes sore and red-rimmed. He’d put on weight - a fold of his belly bulged above the waistband of his combat pants as he sat tailorwise - and he had a tattoo on his arm, an animated red devil with horns and barbed tail that over and again jabbed splashes of fire with its pitchfork. He’d grown out his hair and tied it back in a tightly pleated pigtail that hung past his shoulder blades. The style in which Arvam Peixoto had once worn his hair, Sri realised. At last he said, in his slow, sleepy drawl, ‘My brother’s smart. He can outwit the bad guys.’

‘Of course he can.’ Sri paused, then said, ‘These are dangerous times, Berry. I think you should come back to the habitat for a little while. You’ll be safe there, and you can be a great help to me.’

She knew that Berry liked the military, its discipline and order, its fetishism of violence, and planned to have him help out with the habitat’s security. The seasoned ex-marine sergeant presently in command would look after him, teach him, set him straight. But when she started to explain it to him, he shrugged and said that he wanted to stay in Paris.

‘I have friends here. I have work.’

‘I’ve just seen some of your friends. I won’t ask who they are or why you have allowed them to trash the compound, but it breaks my heart to see you waste your life, Berry. You’re so much better than this.’

‘I’m not wasting my life. I have work here. My own club. A place where soldiers can hang out and kick back. I like doing it, I’m good at it, it’s what I want to do,’ Berry said, with the anxious look he always got when he thought that he was about to be punished, or something he treasured was going to be confiscated.

Sri tried to explain that, because the new president lacked supporters in the Senate, he’d been forced to form a coalition with senators belonging to the radical green faction. And they had not only pushed through a great deal of hardline legislation, but were also using their power to remove or diminish everyone who disagreed with their policies. ‘That’s why they targeted Alder. And that’s why you should move back with me, Berry. Just for a little while. In case someone decides to make an example of you because of your brother’s so-called crimes.’

‘Your crimes,’ Berry said. ‘That’s what this is all about. The things you did. That you made Alder do.’

‘He was doing good and necessary work. As was everyone at the research station. People you knew, Berry. People who may well now be dead.’

‘It’s all about you. It always is. I can’t go back to Earth because of what you did there. I can’t enlist. And now you want to ruin everything I’ve done here, like always.’

‘I should have taken better care of you,’ Sri said. ‘Paid a little more attention to you. I know that, and I apologise. And this club of yours, I’m pleased to hear that you’ve been able to find something you like. It shows initiative. Why not use that initiative to help me, and help Alder, too?’

They talked back and forth for half an hour, but it did no good. Berry went through his usual stages of denial - clumsy attempts to change the subject, irrational anger, finally a smouldering sulk. Sri lost her temper and told him to stop being so selfish, to think about where his brother might be now, the hardships he must be suffering; Berry said that he’d learned all he knew about selfishness from her. Nothing she said got through to him after that, and then, because her assistants hadn’t been able to obtain any useful information about the raid on the research station, she had to endure a brief meeting with Euclides Peixoto, who presented her with a list of casualties and watched her study it with a sly and eager shine in his gaze, no doubt hoping to suck up any morsels of grief.

There were three people missing, including Alder, and fifteen confirmed dead - names she knew, men and women she had recruited and trained, who had accepted Alder’s leadership without question after she had been forced to leave Earth, who had continued to do excellent and important work. Euclides said that the survivors would be held at an army camp in Tierra del Fuego until his family had decided what to do with them.

‘Frankly, this is something of an embarrassment to us. A black eye, politically. So they’ll probably have to sit in that camp until things are calmer and we can see a way forward. It might take some time. You should be prepared for that,’ Euclides said. ‘Oh, and I have been asked to ask you to forget about any legal manoeuvres. It will only embarrass the family further. If you do, there will be blowback. And if that doesn’t hurt you, it will certainly damage your people.’

‘In the end, “my people” were working for the family. And if the family had protected them to begin with, it wouldn’t be in this embarrassing position now.’

‘They were breaking the law. And the family can hardly condone that, can it?’

Euclides Peixoto, dressed in a tailored version of the blue tunic and trousers of the Air Defence Force, was standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of his office, his back to the view of the tree-clad slopes of the park and the river that cut through it. He was a handsome man mantled with the languid arrogance of someone who had never needed to exert themselves to get what they wanted, vain and foolish but possessed of a weaselly cunning and proven to be a survivor blessed with no small amount of luck.

Before the war, Euclides had fallen in with the faction in his family that had opposed the attempts by the green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos, Sri’s mentor, Euclides’s great-uncle, to promote peace and reconciliation with the Outers. Euclides had tried to use Sri in a plot to depose Oscar, but she had realised that she would almost certainly be killed afterwards and had made her own move, killing the green saint, escaping from Earth, giving herself up to Arvam Peixoto. But now Arvam was dead, and Sri was once again at the mercy of Euclides. He couldn’t punish her for Oscar’s death because of his complicity in the wretched and sordid plot, but he never missed an opportunity to remind her of how much he enjoyed having power over her.

When she suggested that the scientists and technicians from the Antarctic facility could be brought out to Saturn, where they would be of immeasurable help in sorting through the treasure trove of the Library of the Commons, he said that she wasn’t the only person doing research in that area, and besides, as he was sure she knew, the security of her position had been undermined by the recent unfortunate events in Antarctica.

‘No point going to the trouble of shipping people all the way out here, only to send them straight back if you’re recalled,’ he said, and changed the subject, stepping daintily across the room to a display case containing a pressure-suit chestplate decorated with an intricate painting. ‘It’s one of Munk’s Seven Transformations of the Ring System. The last in the series. You know him? Munk? He was one of the big artists out here, before the war.’

‘I don’t know much about art,’ Sri said.

‘Me neither. But this fellow Munk, I’d say he did a pretty good job on this. You’ll never guess who presented this to me. An old friend of yours and mine from way back when.’

‘Loc Ifrahim.’

‘Either that’s a good guess, or you know something I didn’t know you knew.’

‘It was a reasoned deduction. We have few people in common, and Mr Ifrahim is the only one who has ready access to looted works of art. I assume he is trying to ingratiate himself.’

‘I have to admit that he’s been useful now and again. The fellow that owned this used to be the military commander over on Camelot, Mimas. Colonel Faustino Malarte. Remember him? He was mixed up in a scandal involving smuggling stuff like this and selling it back home.’

‘I’m not interested in politics.’

‘I know. You don’t care about things that are important to other people; you only care about your work. That isn’t a criticism, by the way. In fact, it’s the one thing I like about you. It means I can talk to you about politics because I know you won’t make any use of what I let slip. Anyhow, good old Malarte, he was the subject of an intensive investigation. Our friend Loc Ifrahim was part of it - he started it up in fact, although he did it in such a sly way that most people didn’t notice. So Malarte was duly investigated and found guilty of abuse of his office. And then, while he was waiting to be sent back to Earth in disgrace, he was murdered by a couple of Outers. You really don’t know any of this? I guess not. Well, it’s a good story,’ Euclides said. ‘One of the killers was an associate of the member of Camelot’s senate who’d been helping Malarte get hold of the stuff he was smuggling to Earth. The other was Malarte’s mistress. Who’d started sleeping with him to save a couple of members of her family from prison, but they went to prison anyway. Anyhow, Malarte was in so much trouble that when they killed him, they did him a favour - saved him the embarrassment of a court martial and the firing squad. Which I found kind of annoying, to be frank, since he was a scion of the Pessanha family, and we Peixotos don’t agree with them about all kinds of things. A juicy court martial would have been a nice black eye for them. Instead, they got a martyr. But that wasn’t why I had the killers executed. It was because we can’t have Outers killing our people, even if those happen to be liars and rapists and crooks.’