Gardens of the Sun (55 page)

‘Well, maybe I’ve grown up a little,’ Newt said. ‘Maybe I’m being realistic.’

‘And I’m being - what? Crazy?’

‘I agree that we’re in a chancy place right now. But we’re dealing with it, and things will change, in time.’

‘In time? Suppose we don’t have any more time?’

The twins picked up on this of course, and were too often solemn and quiet. Whispering to each other as they played. Clinging to Newt and asking him if he still liked Macy. Or clinging to Macy and asking her if she and Newt were going to split up. Macy told them that she and Newt loved each other very much and that was why they were arguing. And then she and Newt would argue about the effect their arguments were having on their children.

Macy spent much of her time organising the hydroponic gardens; Newt disappeared for hours with his friends from the motor crew. They were attempting to analyse radio traffic picked up from the Saturn System, filtering key words and phrases from the jumble of faint transmissions, using stochastic models to try to work up meaningful intelligence. So far they had failed to find anything except scraps of routine chatter between civilian ships and traffic control: military comms used tight-beam transmissions that were not only impossible to intercept at any distance but were also deeply encrypted. Macy had long ago lost faith in the monitoring programme, but then Newt came to find her one day, breathless, lit up with excitement, full of impossibly wonderful news.

Macy and the twins were harvesting the first coffee buds from strands of tweaked moss that floated and tangled across one of the hydroponic shelves. Hannah and Han were as adept in zero gravity as fish in water, sculling effortlessly on their fingertips, quickly filling their pouches even though they spent most of their time playing a complicated game of tag whose rules Macy couldn’t understand no matter how many times they tried to explain. They shot out to intercept Newt when they saw him coming, colliding with him and knocking him off course, so that he had to let himself fall sideways to a neighbouring spar, with the twins clinging around his neck, before he could shove off again and arrow towards Macy. Shouting to her that he’d picked up a transmission from the Pacific Community settlement on Iapetus.

‘It’s about Greater Brazil. There’s been a revolution.’

‘A revolution? Like a shooting war?’

‘Not yet. The family that ran the territory where you used to live, the Fontaines, are part of it. So is most of your old outfit, the R&R Corps. And it gets even better. Avernus is on Earth. And she’s right in the middle of everything.’

Afterwards, it was generally agreed that the revolution began when the archbishop of Brasília gave a sermon at the Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida that called for an end to preparations for war against the Pacific Community, and then led more than two thousand citizens down the Eixo Monumental to the Esplanada dos Ministérios, where they held a silent vigil. Officers of the OSS, backed by army units, ordered the crowd to disperse. When the people stood firm, soldiers moved against them with shock batons, kinetic weapons, grasers and knockdown gas, killing more than thirty and injuring many more. The next night, ten thousand people gathered for a second vigil, led by a phalanx of the walking wounded from the night before and dissident senators and members of the Peixoto, Fonesca and Fontaine families. They held up candles and pictures of the dead, and women stepped forward and placed wreaths on stones still stained with the blood of innocent protesters and taped flowers to the riot shields of the soldiers ranked along the east side of the Esplanada dos Ministérios. The vigil passed off peacefully, and on the third night peace protesters gathered outside major public buildings in cities across Greater Brazil. They carried candles and flowers, and laser pens projected luminous images of Gaia in all Her aspects in the night-blue air above their packed heads as they sang the century-old hymn to Her, set to the tune of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy:

Two days later, crews of the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps in every territory of Greater Brazil left their barracks and took control of public buildings and communication and transport centres and began distributing food from warehouse stocks. Armed only with rifles and spades and stout hearts, as a historian later put it, outnumbering the military and police three to one, within twenty-four hours they had seized control of more than half the cities of Greater Brazil.

After that, there was no turning back. Sittings of the Senate were suspended. Martial law was declared in Brasília and fourteen major cities. The president fled to his family’s territory and established a so-called emergency government in Georgetown. All over the country, mobs swirled through cities in a delirium of looting. They stormed jails and OSS prison camps, freed every inmate and set fire to the buildings or systematically demolished them. The branches of people trees along avenues or in squares or plazas were hung with strange and grisly fruit: OSS officers and government officials; men and women accused of being government informers. A thousand committees, councils, and panels tried to talk to each other all at once. Senior members of the Peixoto family were arrested at Brasília’s spaceport when they tried to board a shuttle. Others made alliances with the Fontaine and Fonesca families and issued a joint statement declaring that they would establish Citizens’ Parliaments and hold free and fair elections in their territories, based on the democratic principles developed by Rainbow Bridge, Callisto.

Revolution had come to Greater Brazil.

 

When everything kicked off, Cash Baker was recovering from the nanotech and viral treatments that Avernus had used to repair and modify his artificial neural network. Interfaces between the network and his motor neurons had accumulated the equivalent of tissue scarring while compensating for the brain damage he’d suffered during the Quiet War. Cash was put in a deep coma while bush robots cleaned and re-engineered the interfaces, and tailored viruses inserted artificial genes that tweaked action and resting potentials. He spent a week more or less immobilised while the changes bedded in, had just been allowed up and was undergoing every kind of neurological test when soldiers in Brasília opened fire on people who had marched from the cathedral to the Esplanada dos Ministérios.

Eight days later Cash reported for duty at the R&R Corps base on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Colonel Stamford advised him to wait, saying that he would be needed as soon as the spaceport at Brasília had been liberated, but Cash said that he wasn’t about to take charge of any kind of spaceship until he had been tested out with regular flying, and since there was a shortage of pilots of every description he might as well help the cause while he was doing it. He’d passed every neurological test; his tremors were gone; it was the first time in years that he’d been completely dry and sober; he wanted to get back in the saddle.

The territory controlled by the Fontaine family had been largely untroubled by the revolution because Louis Fontaine had persuaded senior military officers to confine troops to their bases and had invited representatives from every city to help him oversee an orderly handover of power. But in the neighbouring territory, a square chunk that stretched south from North Virginia down to Florida and west to the Mississippi River, every member of the Pessanha family and most of the senior politicians and officials had fled, leaving the armed forces to battle with citizens. There was serious unrest in Atlanta, Birmingham, Huntsville, Jackson, Nashville, Memphis, Montgomery, Raleigh, and a score of minor cities. Soldiers loyal to the Pessanhas had set fire to warehouses before they’d fled, stores had been stripped, and workers armed with agricultural implements and a few rifles were having a hard time keeping people from ransacking the farm towers.

The day after he reported for duty, Cash Baker flew an R&R skycrane loaded with medical supplies into Atlanta, the capital of the Pessanha family’s territory. A mob had stormed the headquarters of the state police, overwhelming the troopers left to guard it and beating them to death before hanging their bodies from windows, liberating prisoners, trashing the stacks that had held cross-referenced data on every man, woman and child in the territory, and setting the compound on fire. Buildings in the downtown area and many mansions and houses in Cascade Heights, formerly the preserve of the rich and the political elite, were also burning. Smoke formed a general haze over the city, like one of the smogs of the long ago.

Cash landed his cumbersome bird on an apron in the military section of Dekalb-Peachtree airport, which had been secured by R&R Crew #45 and elements of the Ninety-Second Armoured Brigade. On the other side of the main runway, civilians were climbing out of army trucks and hauling their suitcases towards hangars where government officials and their families were being kept for their own safety. Cash barely had time to drink a cup of coffee before his bird was unloaded, and then he was in the air again, this time heading for Chattanooga, where a distribution depot had been set up. As he cleared the city limits something big blew up to the south, sending a massive column of black smoke into the blue summer sky, with secondary explosions flaring at its base - the munitions dump at the Hartsfield army barracks, according to Dekalb-Peachtree air traffic control.

‘Looks like you might have another civil war on your hands,’ Cash said.

‘I do hope not,’ the air traffic controller said. ‘The last two we had, Atlanta was burned to the ground.’

Out over the replanted forest north of the city everything looked peaceful, apart from the columns of army vehicles heading south down the main highway. Helicopters were rising from or falling towards the military base at Fort Oglethorpe like bees at a hive; Cash had to circle twice in a holding pattern before he could come in. He ate a quick meal while the skycrane was refuelled and reloaded, and then he was off again. So it went. He slept the first night in Atlanta; the second in Memphis, where R&R #12 was building a pontoon crossing because every bridge across the Mississippi had been cut by retreating army units. The ruins of major government buildings were still smouldering, but the riots had died out. Anger and reckless exuberance had given way to anxieties about the future, and to more immediate concerns about finding food, and restoring power and water and communications.

Louis Fontaine made a broadcast that went out across every functioning city net. He announced that the government had lost control of fourteen territories of Greater Brazil, urged soldiers and security police in regions secured by the people for the people to remain in their barracks and depots, and asked citizens to practise restraint and curb their impulse to attack symbols of authority or officials employed by the government. The Fontaine family and other families controlling the liberated areas would hold to their promise to organise elections as soon as possible. Meanwhile, everyone should work together to restore order and to ensure an equitable distribution of food. Every block of apartments in the cities should elect or appoint a representative and each representative would coordinate the efforts of volunteers to maintain order, and would also liaise with ad hoc authorities set up to run essential services in the cities and take stock of food and medical supplies.

‘The revolution is over and the country is in the hands of the people,’ Louis Fontaine said. ‘They must not let it slip from their grasp.’

The next day Cash was back in Atlanta, ferrying in a crew of negotiators. The munitions dump to the south of the city was still smouldering, but most of the fires across the city had been put out. At the airport the negotiators were whisked away in APTs, heading for the Capitol Building, where the city comptroller and other civil servants of the former administration were holed up, and Cash was told to head on up to Indianapolis.

After he’d brought the skycrane down in the centre of its appointed apron in the loading area, Cash found Colonel Bear Stamford and the old gene wizard, Avernus, waiting for him, accompanied by a handsome young man dressed in denim jeans and a rabbit-skin gilet. It was Alder Hong-Owen, his long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his left arm still strapped in a sling. He and Cash fell into each other’s embrace, pounding each other’s backs amidst the bustle of trucks moving in supplies and the roar and hot winds of helicopters and tiltrotors and flitters taking off and landing.

‘I hear you’ve been fixed up,’ Alder said.

‘Avernus did some good work on me, but I believe I have to thank you for the push,’ Cash said.

‘Are you ready to give me a ride?’

‘Anywhere you want to go, I’m your man. You know that.’

‘How about the Moon?’

‘There is a prison on the far side of the Moon,’ Avernus said. As usual, she was dressed in a plain grey shift tunic and trousers. An old, old woman with a brown face as wrinkled and crazed as sun-baked earth, a woolly cap of white hair, and a calm and modest manner, nothing but her shrewd dark gaze to mark her as anything out of the ordinary. ‘Many citizens from the cities of Saturn and Jupiter are being kept there. Scientists and artists, and leaders of the peace and reconciliation movement.’

‘Also many of my people,’ Alder said. ‘They moved them up there from Tierra del Fuego. Either because they are an important resource, or as hostages.’

‘I’m told that I may still have influence over them,’ Avernus said. ‘I myself doubt it, but I will do what I can.’

‘They have extensive experience of democracy in action, and we need their help and advice,’ Alder said. ‘At the moment, the prisoners are in control of the prison itself but the guards and administrators are still on site. The situation is very fluid, with a strong risk that the Europeans may use the present confusion to attempt to take control. So we need to secure the place as soon as possible.’