Gardens of the Sun (38 page)

‘I need to talk to her face to face about a highly confidential matter concerning her son,’ Loc said. ‘Tell her that, and then let’s see what happens.’

Raphael was very tall and very thin, with honey-coloured skin, a cloud of hair like spun gold wire, and a face like one of those optical illusions which switch between two perspectives. Not quite male, not quite female, a little of both but adding up to something completely different and impossible to read. It - yo - steepled yo’s long fingers before yo’s face and studied Loc with what might be sly amusement, or calculation, or artfully disguised dislike, take your pick. They were seated on fat cushion seats in a balcony office with a view across a green sea of puffy treetops draped with catenaries of flowering vines, chandelier lights burning at the apex of the tent’s dome like a shattered star and black sky beyond. The air was hot and packed with humidity. Loc was sweating in his suit-liner, but his head, washed clean by a fresh patch of pandorph, felt cool and clear. He was registering everything around him with dispassionate precision. Storing it away for later analysis. He hadn’t even flinched when, as he’d been led along a high path to this office, something that looked like the severed hand of a long-dead corpse had scuttled off into the lush undergrowth.

Raphael said, ‘Berry has achieved majority. He is responsible for his own actions. However, in unusual circumstances, I am authorised to act, as it were, in loco parentis. If you care to discuss his problem with me, perhaps I can be of some help in dealing with it.’

‘I’ve already dealt with it,’ Loc said. ‘And that is why I must insist on speaking with his mother. We both know that Professor Doctor Hong-Owen has many enemies. That she has survived one scandal, but may not survive another. So it is imperative that I speak with her as soon as possible, to discuss the best way forward.’

‘If this is a matter of reimbursing your expenses—’

‘This isn’t about money,’ Loc said. ‘I want to be very clear about that. This isn’t in any way about money. This is about helping a confused and lonely young man who has lost his way. I rescued him after he fell in with some dangerous people. He isn’t physically hurt, but mentally . . . He is very distressed. Anguished. I have done my best to help him, but he needs his mother now,’ Loc said, but he knew, with a falling feeling that had nothing to do with the lack of gravity, that he wasn’t going anywhere, the neuter shaking yo’s head, yo’s expression so cool, so carefully composed as yo told him that Sri Hong-Owen was not speaking with anyone at present.

‘She has much work to do, and does not want to be disturbed.’

Loc summoned up a show of outrage. ‘I’m sure that many people would be shocked to hear that she values her work more highly than her son’s well-being.’

‘Tell me something, Mr Ifrahim. Would you be as shocked as you pretend to be if we were talking about Berry’s father?’

‘The father in question died a long time ago, on Earth.’

‘Nevertheless, I believe that there is a kind of double standard here,’ Raphael said. ‘A symptom, no doubt, of a regrettable imbalance in your culture. As for Berry, I will say only this. Professor Doctor Hong-Owen has tried several times to find him gainful employment. He has always refused her help. I will repeat my offer of help in this matter, but I doubt if Berry will pay any more attention to me than to his mother.’

‘What’s it like, knowing you’ll never have sex again?’ Loc said.

The thought slipping out of his teeming head, hanging there in the hot, humid air. Fortunately, Raphael took it seriously.

‘It’s calming. It gives you a useful perspective on human foolishness. One you might appreciate, Mr Ifrahim. Thank you again for your concern. And good luck with Berry. I hope you can do the right thing by him.’

A majority of the Free Outers agreed that Idriss Barr and Macy Minnot should accept Sada Selene’s invitation - that taking part in the negotiations between the Ghosts and the Pacific Community diplomats was vital for their security and survival. But there was a long and contentious meeting about how Idriss and Macy should present themselves and what they should and shouldn’t say; no one was especially satisfied with the various compromises that Idriss had engineered; all kinds of rifts in the little community were exposed. Afterwards, Mary Jeanrenaud intercepted Macy and told her that she had to set aside her hatred of the Ghosts in general and Sada Selene in particular. ‘You must remember at all times that this is not about you. It is about the survival of our entire community.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Macy told the old woman. ‘I take everything that has anything to do with the Ghosts very seriously.’

Mary Jeanrenaud, clearly spoiling for an argument, adopted a tone of wintry condescension. ‘You may think that you understand us, Macy, but you never will. Not really. But if you can find it in yourself to do this service gladly, for the greater good, there may be some hope that you can come to an accommodation with our way of life.’

‘Oh, I’m learning all kinds of stuff all the time,’ Macy said. ‘For instance, I think I’ve finally figured out this democracy thing of yours. For a long time I thought it was about making the best choices that satisfy most of the people most of the time. But now I see that it’s a way of getting along with people you have to get along with in order to survive. Even if you don’t like them.’

Twenty-eight days later, the Pacific Community ship settled into the quarantine of an isolated orbit some two million kilometres from Neptune. A Ghost shuttle set out to collect the PacCom diplomats, and Macy and Idriss Barr boarded a tug that took them from Proteus to the Ghosts’ colony, grandly named the City of the New Horizon, on Triton.

The Ghosts had begun to settle Triton in secret more than a decade ago. According to their unseen guru, Levi, they were the chosen people. He claimed to have received messages from his future self: proof that his followers would throw off Earth’s chains and develop faster-than-light technology that would allow them to reach out to planets around other stars. They’d been preparing to fulfil this destiny for some time, recruiting young people from every city and settlement in the Jupiter and Saturn systems, stockpiling supplies and dispatching them to their beachhead on Triton in robot carriers. And they’d also jacked up the level of aggression and hostile posturing between Earth and the Outers before the Quiet War: attacking a pair of singleships from the BrazilianEuropean joint expedition when they’d penetrated deep inside Saturn’s atmosphere for a propaganda exercise; encouraging and supporting the promises of Paris’s renegade mayor, Marisa Bassi, to counter any attack on his city with swift and deadly force; firing a chunk of ice at the Pacific Community’s base on one of Saturn’s outer moons.

The confusion of the Quiet War had provided the Ghosts with the opportunity to steal ships, make their mass exodus from the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and begin the next stage of their long-term plan to fulfil Levi’s prophesies. The City of the New Horizon was spread across a wide area beneath cantaloupe terrain at Triton’s equator: a series of chambers excavated with dismounted fusion motors, linked by monorails that ran through tubes bored by powerful and indefatigable construction robots, and invulnerable to all but multiple strikes by high-yield hydrogen bombs. The Ghosts were using vacuum organisms to mine and transform deposits of complex organic material found everywhere beneath the nitrogen and methane frosts on the moon’s surface, and had also drilled boreholes forty kilometres down to the ocean wrapped around its rocky core. Robot refineries had begun to process minerals and metals from the ammonia-rich water, and the Ghosts had grandiose schemes to build electrolytic plants that would oxygenate the upper layer of the ocean, and to establish an entire ecosystem there. They planned to float cities in Neptune’s atmosphere, too. In a hundred years, they boasted, the Neptune System would be inhabited by clades of posthumans adapted to every possible habitat, a thriving, buzzing commonwealth that would drive and shape the future of the human race.

The team of negotiators from the City of the New Horizon and the diplomats of the Pacific Community met in a recently built chamber more than a hundred kilometres north of the city’s centre: a nest of large, spherical spaces surrounding a central axis, each divided into irregular terraces linked by the usual low-gravity drop shafts, ziplines and chutes, everything the stark white of freshly fallen snow, with no decoration or attempts at landscaping apart from clusters of tweaked bromeliads that grew here and there from the walls, removing potentially harmful trace gases from the air, and the halflife mosses in the toilet blocks that absorbed and purified urine and faeces.

The Ghosts slept in dormitories, ate in refectories, worked wherever they were needed. There were spaces dedicated to manufactories and workshops on the lower levels, but everywhere else could be configured to suit every requirement, from kindergartens to hospitals. These stark live/work spaces possessed the chilly elegance of unadorned functionality, and there was an admirable purity to the collective will of the city’s inhabitants, but Macy thought that it was about as homely as an anthill, utterly lacking in privacy, bustling with constant and purposeful activity twenty-four hours a day. And yet the Ghosts were not glassy-eyed and humourless fanatics. Most were under the age of fourteen, generally reckoned to be the age of majority in Outer communities, nurtured and born in ectogenetic tanks, and tweaked so that they matured quickly, reaching puberty at age ten and passing through adolescence in a couple of years but seemingly none the worse for it except that they knew nothing but the city, and the teachings of Levi and his mad, glorious dreams. They were cheerful and energetic, played all kinds of sport, took part in musical groups, theatrical pieces, and long philosophical debates, and commonly sang while they worked, lusty hymns to the grand future they were building and the great victories they would win. They called each other brother or sister, and often held hands while they talked or walked about together. They were not organised into families (they honoured their parents but did not live with them or defer to them) but into cadres, and members of each cadre worked and trained and spent their scant leisure hours together, and held group criticism sessions in which each in turn would confess what they called thought crimes, were gently rebuked by the others, and gratefully accepted small punishments.

Macy had expected to meet a parade of grotesques, but it turned out that most of the Ghosts were no different from other Outers - Phoenix Lyle, with his black-on-black eyes and his copper skin and serpentine tail, and a few others like him, had changed themselves before they’d joined the Ghosts. According to Levi, tweaks that altered physical appearance were useful only if they were adaptations to new environments, but otherwise they were affectations, wasteful, neither novel nor particularly radical. They were, in short, hands for feet - an old Outer joke about misguided ideas concerning adaptation for microgravity. First you exchange your feet for another pair of hands. And then you have to grow another head out of your ass, because you won’t know which way is up. No, Levi and his Ghosts believed that the real frontier of human evolution was not the body, but the mind. The human species was defined by its big brain, but like all evolutionary artefacts the human brain was scaffolded onto and extended from older structures, so the limits of the human mind and human imagination were constrained by random compromises. To really explore what it means to be human, Levi had said, human beings must re-engineer the organ that defined them as a species: improving memory, enhancing neuronal transmission and increasing the bit rate of thought, paring away or modifying redundant emotions, and making dozens of other tweaks and modifications.

Of Levi himself there was no sign. Macy Minnot, Idriss Barr, and the diplomatic representatives from the Pacific Community were told that he was watching them with great interest, but would take no direct part in the negotiations; like God, he was often referred to but never seen. No one who was not a Ghost had ever met him; no one knew anything of his history, not even his original name, before he had assumed leadership of his cult. One rumour had it that he had died years before, and lived on only as an expert system. Another claimed that he was a true AI, a self-aware, supernally intelligent digital consciousness out of the fantasies and nightmares of the long ago. Or that he suffered from an exotic cancer which had so bloated him that he was confined to a life-support vat. Or that he had entered cryosuspension, leaving behind a series of prophetic pronouncements, and would not be awakened until the end of the so-called years of crisis, when the faster-than-light drive was finally made ready and he could lead his children to their promised lands amongst the stars.

Macy was pretty sure that, like the Ghosts, the PacCom diplomats must have been cut for enhanced intelligence and fast-track maturity, for most of them were young, smart and irrepressibly cheerful. Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Malay . . . A rainbow coalition of teenage ambassadors led by an aged Australian, Tommy Tabagee. Apart from a war-gaming exercise staged inside the city’s chambers and monorail tubes to demonstrate the Ghosts’ willingness to defend their home to the death, and tours of the ocean mining facility and the great vacuum-organism farms on the surface, there were few formal meetings. The PacCom diplomats explained that they could best understand the aims and needs of the Ghosts by participating in every aspect of their ordinary lives, and the Ghosts surprised Macy by being completely candid about their philosophy and plans.

This openness was all very well, but she found it impossible to keep track of the unstructured and informal interactions between the Ghosts and their guests. The PacCom team roamed unchecked throughout the chamber, talking to anyone and everyone, working alongside their hosts in manufactories and workshops, taking part in discussion and self-criticism groups, and in musical and theatrical events. Drones recorded everything they said and did, but Sada Selene refused to give Macy access to the surveillance data.