Gardens of the Sun (49 page)

They celebrated Christmas with a community of wildsiders in a village of shipping containers buried in the raddled plains just south of the Missouri River, in what had once been North Dakota, left on New Year’s Day and rode on south along the edge of the Great Desert in a meandering path that sometimes doubled back on itself or looped out to the east or west. By now, they were beginning to talk to members of the R&R Corps. To individuals or small groups that came out to meet them at first, and then to entire camps.

There had been food shortages and riots in the cities that winter. Martial law in most of the territories of the former United States. In Panama City, soldiers opened fire on starving people who marched on the mansion of one of the scions of the Escobar family. More than seven hundred people were killed that day, and thousands more died in riots that laid waste to half the city. The bishop of Manaus led a prayer vigil for peace; on the third day, in the middle of the service, an assassin walked through the congregation that packed the cathedral and shot the bishop dead as he raised the host for Mass, and in the square outside soldiers shot into the crowds as they fled. The government declared that the martyred bishop had been an agent of the Pacific Community, there were mass arrests of priests and other dissidents across Greater Brazil, and trials and executions of the most prominent so-called traitors were broadcast across the nets.

A number of brigades of the R&R Corps refused to leave their barracks when they were ordered to help the army put down riots. Army units fought their way into camps, rounded up everyone, selected men and women at random, and executed them. When the Commander-in-Chief of the R&R Corps protested, she and many of her senior officers were placed under arrest and transported to the notorious military prison outside São Paulo. The rank and file of the R&R Corps were in a mutinous mood, but had lacked direction and leadership until Alder Hong-Owen, son of the famous gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen, rode through the camps along the front line at the western edge of the Great Desert to speak amongst them.

The stopover in the camp of R&R Corps #897 was little different to all the others. Cash spoke first, drawing on the tricks and techniques he’d been taught when shilling for the Air Defence Force. Standing on a table at one end of the crowded mess hut, he told the story of how he’d been made into a hero by General Arvam Peixoto and then disgraced as part of a plot to bring the general down, explained that his elevation and fall from grace was just one example of how the great families used and discarded ordinary people, and then asked Alder Hong-Owen to step up and talk, raising his voice to be heard over the crowd’s whoops and applause.

Alder spoke with an easy and engaging confidence. His pale hands shaping the air, his mellifluous voice floating above the packed heads of his audience. He spoke of how gangsters, arms dealers, pirates and plutocrats had seized power during the confusion after the Overturn and had founded new dynasties. How these so-called great families had co-opted certain ideas of the green movement - restitution and rewilding, ecological stewardship, living lightly on the land and all the rest - and used them to gain and hold on to power. How the great and good work to reclaim and restore Earth’s damaged ecosystems had been turned into a tyrannical creed. How people had been herded into cities that were prison camps in all but name, or forced to toil on pharaonic projects. How enemies had been invented to keep the population under control, for as long as the population feared those enemies they would not question those in power. The Pacific Community, and then the Outers, and now the Pacific Community again. And always the wildsiders and bandits on the borders. How the sacrifices endured by the many were not shared by the few who ruled them.

‘Ordinary men and women have suffered every kind of deprivation and hardship in the name of Gaia, yet this is how the so-called great families of Greater Brazil live,’ Alder said, and conjured images of the houses of the rich in a memo space. Some from his own files, some taken by Cash Baker, some from surveillance satellites. Mansions and hunting lodges. Great estates walled off from the world. Islands made over into private paradises.

He answered every question put to him, and it was long past midnight when he and his crew distributed people-tree seeds amongst the R&R crew and explained where to plant them and how they would grow.

Early the next morning, the small party rode out in a mist of thin rain blown by the cold March wind in drifts and billows across fields of cottonwood and willow saplings. They rode across the pontoon bridge that floated on the broad, shallow flood of the river, rode on down a dirt road that cut straight through rewilded grassland, and just two kilometres south of the river they were ambushed.

The three men riding point ahead of the rest of the party disappeared in an eruption of red flame and black smoke and a harsh thunderclap that rolled out across the grassland as dirt and pieces of horses and men rained down. The other riders checked their startled mounts and circled round, shouting to each other as men rose up from the waist-high grass either side of the road, two on the left, three on the right. They were armed with automatic rifles and began firing at once from distances of less than twenty metres. Rounds snapped through the air and knocked spouts of mud and water from the road as Cash crawled behind his foundered horse. He’d lost his hat and his ears were ringing. His horse had been shot through the neck and kept trying to lift its head. Its eyes were rolling and it was blowing bloody foam through its nostrils. Cash drew his pistol, but his hands were shaking badly and the gunsight wove and jittered as he tried to take aim at the nearest of the bushwhackers and his shots went wide. A burst of gunfire struck the road close by and spattered him with wet dirt. He thumbed mud from his eyes and braced his pistol against the worn leather of the saddle’s seat, but the harder he tried to keep it steady the more it shook. One of the bushwhackers collapsed as if someone had cut him off at the knees and the other ducked away, bent low as he ran off into the windblown sea of grass. Cash rolled over, pointed his wavering pistol at the other side of the road, and saw that the three other bushwhackers were down. One was crawling like a broken-backed snake along the ditch, and Cash got up and limped after Arnie Echols and caught hold of Arnie’s arm as he raised his pistol.

‘He can tell us who set us up,’ Cash said.

But the man had been shot through both lungs and when Cash turned him over he coughed a spray of blood and died. His halflife camo gear pulsed with dark irregular patches as it tried to match the blood seeping through the ditch’s mud.

‘Who are they?’ Arnie said. ‘Army?’

‘The Army would have surrounded the camp with tanks. These are bounty hunters I reckon,’ Cash said. ‘And amateurs at that, luckily for us. Anyone who knew what they were about would have hit us as we were crossing the bridge.’

He searched the dead man but failed to find any ID, just three clips of steel-jacketed rounds, a pair of handcuffs and a packet of chewing resin in his pockets, a hunting knife sheathed at his belt, the spike of a short-range phone in his ear. Cash washed blood from his hands in cold ditchwater, then stood up and followed Arnie back along the road. Two bodies covered with dusters, horses lying dead or gravely wounded, horses standing in the rain with their reins trailing. People were kneeling around wounded men and women, cutting off clothes, breaking open medical kits. One of the wounded sat against the belly of a dead horse, the shoulder of his green nylon serape wet with blood, blond hair plastered in rat-tails, face pale as chalk: Alder Hong-Owen.

 

They agreed that they couldn’t ride back to the R&R camp because it was very likely that someone there had betrayed them. Arnie Echols used the phone that connected to the clandestine communications network to arrange a rendezvous, and they buried the dead by the road, fixed up hammocks between pairs of horses, and walked their wounded through the grassland and out into the desert beyond. Late that night they met up with a group of wildsiders camped in a deep ravine, and the wildsiders led them east. They crossed the river at a series of fords strung between low islands and as the stars began to fade from the sky they reached a camp in the hills beyond.

Alder Hong-Owen’s left shoulder had been shattered by a high-velocity round and he’d developed pneumonia during the journey to the camp. A medical technician brought in from the big R&R depot outside Omaha did what he could, but said that Alder needed the kind of surgical intervention and post-operative treatment that only a hospital could supply. Alder refused to leave the camp, and Cash and the others backed him up when the technician appealed to them.

‘He’ll lose the use of his arm,’ the technician said.

‘Better that than lose his life,’ Cash said.

The medical technician was affronted by this slight on his honour, and said so. Cash told him that he shouldn’t take it personally. ‘One of those bushwhackers got away, and we have to assume he has friends, or maybe told the Army about us, hoping to get a share of the reward. And that means we can’t show our faces anywhere people might be looking for us.’

Alder was young and strong. Within a few days he was using the wildsiders’ communications network to keep track of the growing political and civil disturbances and to talk with leaders of Freedom Rider cells in cities scattered the length and breadth of Greater Brazil. A week later he was out of bed and hobbling around the camp, wincing and sweating, sitting down to rest at frequent intervals; two weeks after that he quit using painkillers and declared that he was fit enough to travel.

The next day, he and Cash rode through the sandy hills beyond the camp with two wildsiders trailing them. Alder’s arm was strapped to his chest in a sling of black cloth, but he handled his horse well enough and if he was in any pain he didn’t show it. They stopped at a grove of people trees growing green and vigorous in a shallow basin below a ridge top, sat in the shade amongst knobby roots and black ropes of symbiotic nanomachinery clutching at rocks, and shared a lunch of cheese and bread and pickled tomatoes while Alder explained that he wanted Cash to travel east and meet one of his contacts in Indianapolis.

‘They need a pilot,’ he said.

Cash held up his hands to show the tremor in his fingers. ‘I’d have to get a load on to be able to fly. I don’t see what good that would do anyone.’

‘Maybe my friend can help you with that. And we’re short on people who can fly shuttles, and you’re about the only one I trust.’

‘You mean space shuttles?’

‘To the Moon, when the time comes,’ Alder said.

News about growing unrest in Greater Brazil seeped into Trusty Town via a sympathetic European scientist who was collaborating with one of the gene wizards. Most of the trusties said that it would never amount to anything. The great families were too powerful. Every form of dissent would be ruthlessly suppressed and in the end nothing would be changed.

‘The trusties have to believe that the revolution will fail because they have a personal stake in the survival of the status quo,’ Amy Ma Coulibaly told Felice Gottschalk. ‘They may not realise it, but they’ve become as politicised as any of the prisoners.’

‘It isn’t a revolution,’ Felice said. ‘That’s the point. Some of those agitators might want to start a revolution, but they haven’t managed it yet. And they probably never will.’

They were playing chess, and as usual Felice’s endgame was a hopeless position. Yet he persevered, hoping that Amy would make a mistake, even though experience had long ago taught him that she would not.

While she waited for Felice to make his next move, Amy said, ‘As I understand it, ordinary people in Greater Brazil have had to pay for the Quiet War and the occupation of the Jupiter and Saturn systems, while the great families have grown fat on profits from looted technology. And now their government wants to go to war against the Pacific Community, over who should govern some distant balls of ice. Their sons and daughters will be drafted into the military; they’ll lose what little freedom they have left; their cities will become targets for enemy missiles. They’ve had enough. They want things to change.’

Felice moved a pawn to the sixth rank, threatening Amy’s remaining knight. ‘But you can’t change things simply by wanting them to change, can you?’

‘Are you speaking from personal experience?’ Amy said, with a dry look. She’d cut her hair short and dyed it jet black a couple of weeks ago, was wearing dark purple lipstick and black eyeliner that heightened the papery paleness of her skin.

‘You have to know how you want to change.’

Amy moved her rook one step sideways. ‘Perhaps they want what we used to have, before the war. All they lack is a leader to point them in the right direction.’

Felice saw that if he took the knight he’d be checkmated when the rook took the pawn, so he moved his other surviving pawn a step past his king. Amy moved the threatened knight, checking his king and forcing him to move it back, then moved her other rook into the same row and declared checkmate.

‘I lost some time ago,’ Felice said, rubbing the numb and stiff fingers of his left hand. He was taking doses of steroids by intramuscular injection now, but they weren’t making much difference.

‘You always fight to the very end,’ Amy said.

‘As I was taught.’

‘Your nose doesn’t look so bad now. In this light, at least.’

‘I believe I began to change long before Edz Jealott broke my nose. I hope I’m still changing.’

‘Except for your endgame.’

‘If I don’t play every game to the end, how can I ever hope to win?’

‘What would you do if the government fell?’

‘If there was a revolution?’

‘If it succeeded.’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t mean that we would be freed, does it?’