Gardens of the Sun (44 page)

That evening, he saw Idriss Barr drop out of a game that involved a lot of shouting and flying to and fro, Free Outers rebounding from the walls of the habitat in the big space above the equatorial web in every direction, and he made his way towards the young Outer, sat down beside him, and asked if he had lost or won.

‘I was tagged,’ Idriss Barr said. ‘So I get to sit out and catch my breath for ten minutes before I can rejoin the fun.’

‘It isn’t about winning or losing,’ Loc said. ‘It’s how you play the game.’

‘Exactly.’

Idriss Barr was barefoot in a cut-down suitliner. His skin glowed with ruddy health and he was blotting sweat from his face and arms with a bunched towel. A big happy human animal. Loc, swaddled in a sweater, a fleece jerkin, leggings, and a pair of thick sockshoes against the frosty cold, could feel the heat radiating off him.

‘I’ve lived amongst Outers for a long time now,’ Loc said. ‘More years than I care to count. But there are still many things I don’t understand. I try, of course. It’s my job. But it isn’t easy. I see that the Ghosts aren’t playing with you, for instance. And I have to wonder why that is.’

‘Perhaps you should ask the Ghosts.’

‘They take themselves very seriously, don’t they?’

‘I thought you were supposed to be an impartial observer, Mr Ifrahim.’

‘I believe I just made an observation.’

Idriss Barr laughed. Those candid golden eyes. Lion’s eyes. An easy smile in a face that wasn’t especially handsome but had an appealing openness. It was easy to like him. To want him to like you, to be your friend. Pure alpha through and through. Like Arvam Peixoto, but without the streak of chilly cruelty.

‘And I’m sure that you’ve seen that the Ghosts have very different ambitions from us. But you are mistaken if you think that can be used against us.’

‘Because you are united against a common enemy?’

‘Because there’s room enough for a hundred different ways of life out here. A thousand. We have our differences with the Ghosts, but we’re both engaged in the same grand adventure. A broadening of possibilities and potential that, far from being a threat to the people of Earth, promises a glorious and harmonious future.’

‘Alas, there’s nothing inevitable about the future,’ Loc said. ‘Except for the hard fact that in the long run none of us will be there to see it. You should put the future behind you, Mr Barr, and think about how you are going to survive the realities of the present.’

Idriss Barr slung his towel around his neck and studied Loc for a moment. ‘You’re thirty-five.’

‘Something like that,’ Loc said. He didn’t want to admit that the man was dead on the nose.

‘You’re the same generation as me and my friends. You aren’t part of the gerontocracy. The old people who run everything. Your new president - how old is he? A hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty? And he replaced a woman who died at the age of a hundred and ninety.’

‘A hundred and ninety-seven. But why should age matter? Longevity treatments—’

Idriss Barr clapped his hands together. It was like a gun going off in Loc’s face: he couldn’t help flinching.

‘Of course it matters! On Earth, the old grabbed all the power long ago. And although the cities of Saturn and Jupiter liked to boast that they were the last redoubts of democracy, the old always outvoted the young. And they had more kudos too! They had longer to acquire it, and they traded it amongst themselves, so the young had great problems getting favours done or organising projects because they lacked the necessary kudos. You see, Mr Ifrahim, both sides in the Quiet War were dominated by old men and women who were refighting a war of a hundred years ago. The same rivalries over the same things. Throughout history, it’s been the same. Old people going to war against each other over long-held grievances.

‘Well, my friends and I have left all that behind. And so have the Ghosts. We have travelled out to the edge of human experience, where there are so many new worlds to explore and experience, where we are trying to create something different. Something new. And I think you have some sympathy with that. I think you’re like us. I think you also hunger for change.’

‘Let’s say for the sake of argument that’s true,’ Loc said. ‘What do you need from me? What do you think I need from you?’

‘Those are good questions, but they’re the wrong questions. Your friends talk about peace treaties and trade, but there’s really nothing we need from you. We can source from local materials everything we need to survive and work, and we have no need for superfluous stuff collected to signify status, as birds or fish make bowers to attract a mate. Oh, it’s true that Outer society was founded by people who fled from the Earth to a haven on the Moon because they were frightened of losing their wealth and power. But everything changed when the governments of Earth came to take their city from them, and they had to flee again. The worst of them went to Mars, but the majority, including all the people who had kept their lunar city running, the scientists and technicians and all the rest, they went to Jupiter and then spread further out still, to Saturn. And they founded a new kind of society, where people owned only what they needed and status was measured not by what people owned but by what they could do, their research and their arts, their work for the common good. We still cleave to those principles. Of course we do. It’s the only logical way to live. The best way to live. And that means that as long as we can live off the land and enjoy the freedom to pursue our artistic and scientific work, we don’t need anything else,’ Idriss Barr said, and pushed away from the spar and flew across the wide space, shouting and jostling with his friends in a game that Loc couldn’t begin to understand.

‘He’s wrong,’ he told Captain Neves later, as they lay fully clothed in each other’s arms, cloudy breath mingling, in their little pod. ‘The kind of society he describes, where everyone shares the same ideals and is driven by the same kind of dreams and hopes, only works in special circumstances like this. Somewhere cut off from the rest of human society. Somewhere where it takes a lot of work to survive, so that everyone must work together to provide basic needs. It’s like one of the old research stations in Antarctica, or on the Moon. A place where people have volunteered to live because they want to be there, not because they happened to be born there. Because they have a mission.

‘Once upon a time the Outer System really was like that. A marginal society of niche clingers. Every day, every hour, taken up with the struggle to survive. But as life became easier Outer society began to differentiate. Different people wanted different things. And so they began to trade with each other. For kudos rather than money, but the principle was exactly the same: gratification of desire. And then they began to need things that only we could supply, and they began to trade with us. Idriss Barr does not realise it, but it will happen here, if there is no war. It’s the human condition. He says that his people need nothing from us. But they will. They will. And the first person able to exploit that need will make a fortune.’

Captain Neves was staring into Loc’s face, her eyes serious and intent under the unplucked hedge of her eyebrows, which met in a faint tangle above the bridge of her broad nose. Loc could see himself reflected in the inky wells of her pupils, the darkness where she lived. Could feel her breath on his cheek when she said, ‘I think you’ve let Idriss Barr get inside your head. He’s made you believe that his people can make a go of it out here.’

‘They’ve been out here for less than ten years, and they are already building cities. They spun this little habitat in only a few weeks. What else will they do, given enough time?’

‘It doesn’t matter what they can do, or what they might want or need. Either they’ll fail because there aren’t enough of them and they don’t have enough resources, or they’ll be taken down because it looks like they might be making a go of it.’

‘As I told Idriss Barr, nothing about the future is inevitable.’

‘We already know what we want to do,’ Captain Neves said. ‘Go back to Earth as soon as we can. Use our experience and our contacts to make a real fortune, when the war comes. That’s the plan.’

‘And it’s a good plan,’ Loc said. ‘It’ll set us up for life. But you’re not the kind of person who will be able to settle into retirement. Neither am I. We’ll want to do something else. This might be it.’

‘Is this something serious, or are you causing trouble because you’re bored?’

‘Machiavelli taught us long ago that if you want to control a territory, you support the weaker powers in it without increasing their strength, and crush the strongest.’

‘We studied Machiavelli in officer school,’ Captain Neves said. ‘He also said that you can’t avoid war; you can only postpone it.’

Loc shrugged inside her loose embrace. ‘It’s just an idea at the moment. A possibility. The Ghosts, there’s no point in talking to them. They’re fanatics with no interest in making a deal, as they’ve made plain from the outset. They only agreed to this meeting because they want to find out about us, and make vain threats and boasts. The talks will fail in a day or two, you wait and see. But Idriss Barr and his people aren’t Ghosts. They are something else.’

‘You’ve fallen in love,’ Captain Neves said, smiling.

Loc smiled too. ‘All I’m going to do is talk. What harm can it do?’

Over the next two days, as Loc had predicted, the negotiations began to stall. The Ghosts sat in frosty silence as the Brazilian and European diplomats set out their proposals, and then spent hours picking apart every detail and making outrageous demands until nothing was left. And while they continued to ignore Loc, they engaged the other diplomats in intense conversations about their lives and work, no doubt hoping to add the information to socio-economic and political models of Greater Brazil and the various cities on the various moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Of course, the Brazilians and Europeans were attempting to do exactly the same thing, but although the Ghosts boasted freely about the defensive and offensive capabilities of their cadres and ships, and their willingness to sacrifice everything to protect the future that their leader and guru had entrusted to them, they yielded only scant details about their city and the lives of their people.

Somehow, Sara Póvoas’s expertise and the energetic optimism of Idriss Barr and the Free Outers kept things together. Loc watched everything, analysing every player’s strengths and weaknesses and habits of thought, noting how everyone interacted with everyone else, feeling out the cross-currents of power and influence. He tried his best to explain some of it to Captain Neves, who was growing increasingly bored and impatient with talks that went around and around without any movement forward or back. She saw a hopeless knot; Loc saw a web taut with intrigue and alive with possibility.

The Free Outers were growing increasing frustrated with the Ghosts’ tactics, yet dared not challenge them openly. Partly out of solidarity, no doubt, Outers standing shoulder to shoulder with Outers. Partly because they were clearly intimidated by the Ghosts: because they were a small band of refugees living in the shadow of a kind of death cult. Yet it was clear that they hoped to persuade the Brazilians and Europeans of their legitimacy, and wanted to define some measure of common ground in which they could, at some later date, sink the foundations for a peace treaty. Loc was increasingly confident that he would be able to work on their hopes and fears, persuade them to open a clandestine back channel so that they could continue talks with the TPA without the knowledge or interference of the Ghosts. That he might gain some personal prestige from this farrago, and later, maybe, just maybe, be able to profit from it.

And anyway, it wasn’t as if he had anything better to do.

He couldn’t approach Idriss Barr, of course: both Sara Póvoas and the Ghosts would suspect he was up to something. But everyone knew that Macy Minnot disliked and distrusted him because he’d once tried to have her killed, so he believed that he could talk to her without arousing any suspicion or accusation of double-dealing. After the communal dinner on the third night, he found her sitting on a platform near one of the poles of the habitat, looking down at the gulf where the Free Outers flew about in the perpetual blue twilight. Shouting and laughing as they chased after a small ball and each other, rebounding from walls and swinging around spars and rocketing off in different directions.

‘I still don’t understand the rules of that game,’ he said.

‘The person with the ball has to pass it to someone else as quickly as possible,’ Macy Minnot said, without looking at him.

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘I notice that you don’t play.’

‘I’ve played. But I’m not quick enough. I slow the game down.’

‘As the Ghosts slow down the negotiations.’

‘That isn’t very subtle, Mr Ifrahim. You’re losing your touch.’

‘I think we’ve reached a stage where we can safely abandon subtlety and nuance.’

Macy Minnot looked at him, her face as usual clenched as a fist. ‘If you want to find out why the Ghosts are doing what they are doing you should ask them.’

‘It’s clear that they want only to advertise their strength and determination, and to make sure that your friends gain no advantage from these talks. It hurts, doesn’t it?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘To think that this will come to nothing. I understand. After all, you have more to lose than anyone else.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘Your friends are here because they want to be here. Because they believe that they are the cutting edge of human evolution. The seed from which a thousand Utopias will flower. But you are here by accident. You managed to make a kind of life for yourself. And I’m impressed, I really am. You are tougher and more resourceful than I thought. But is it really what you want?’