Gardens of the Sun (6 page)

In the first weeks, the spy and his fellow prisoners, all single, childless men, worked twelve hours a day every day in the ruins of the city. Supervision was minimal. They were left to their own devices when they weren’t working, and organised themselves into crews assigned a variety of housekeeping tasks: taking turns at cooking, laundry, and general maintenance, nursing those who’d been wounded in the battle for Paris and its aftermath, collecting and recycling urine and faeces, tending the fruit bushes packed into the farm tube that served as their quarters, and sharing out harvested fruit to supplement their CHON food rations.

The spy was immediately welcomed into this little community. The Outers weren’t naive or credulous, but they were naturally hospitable and hadn’t yet learned to suspect and distrust strangers. And besides, it was obvious that, with his etiolated build, opposable big toes, and simple secondary hearts pulsing in his femoral and subclavian arteries, he was one of them, and his story about his search for his friend Zi Lei chimed with their strong sense of romance. He told them that she had been arrested and incarcerated before the war, that he had tried and failed to find her during the confusion of the attack on the city when battle drones and troops had fallen from the sky and quickly overwhelmed the defences that ringed the city’s perimeter, and that he had been searching for her ever since.

No one in the farm tube had known Zi Lei before the war, or knew if she had survived it. And the Brazilians kept men and women apart, so there was no easy way of discovering if she was a prisoner, in one of the work crews or, more likely, amongst the refuseniks. The spy bided his time. He had been taught how to be patient. But he couldn’t stop wondering where she was and if she was all right. He supposed that his tender helpless yearning meant that he was in love.

The spy’s work crew had been tasked with collecting the bodies of citizens killed when the Brazilians had taken Paris. The Brazilians had broken in at either end of the city’s tent and advanced towards the centre amidst fierce hand-to-hand street fighting. The city’s defenders had blown up and set fire to the public buildings in a last desperate stand, and then the tent had been ruptured and the city had lost its air. Half the population had died. Some ten thousand people.

The crew worked in the lower part of the city, amongst manufactories, workshops and blocks of old-fashioned apartment buildings. It was where the spy had lived as Ken Shintaro before the war, and he found it strange to return to it now. Power had been restored, but the city was still in vacuum and everything was frozen at -200° Centigrade. Trees stripped of foliage and branches by the hurricane of explosive decompression when the city’s tent had been ruptured stood naked and frozen hard as iron along the wide avenues. The halflife grass that turfed the avenues and the plants in the parks and courtyard gardens was frozen too, slowly bleaching in the stark light of the chandeliers.

Most buildings had been damaged during the battle; few had retained integrity. There were bodies in apartments, in central court-yards, in basements. Fallen where they had been caught in the open, huddled around doors, in bed niches, inside airlocks. Those who had been wearing pressure suits when they had died were the easiest to deal with. The rest were statues frozen to the floor or to furniture or to each other, heads and hands swollen and blackened by pressure bruising, faces masked by blood expressed from ears and eyes and mouths and nostrils, eyes starting, swollen tongues protruding. Men and women and children. Babies.

The crew secured samples of frozen flesh for DNA analysis and logged and bagged any possessions, then pried the bodies free by using crowbars and wedges and loaded them onto sleds that were driven out of the city through airlocks whose triple sets of doors stood permanently open. Construction robots dug long trenches in the icy regolith beyond the eastern edge of the vacuum-organism fields, and the bodies were dumped into them without ceremony and covered with ice gravel. As if the Brazilians wanted the evidence of their atrocities to be erased as quickly as possible.

After all the bodies in public areas had been removed, the clearance work became a macabre treasure hunt. Searching through apartment blocks room by room. Looking in basements and service tunnels. In storage lockers and cupboards where people had sought refuge or had tried to hoard a last few sips of air. Everyone worked in a haze of exhaustion. They averted their gazes from the faces of the dead as they levered and pried and cut. They cursed the stiff and awkward corpses, sat down and wept, were chivvied back to work by the Brazilian guards.

There were dreadful stories of people finding loved ones, partners, parents, children, and in any case the work was an unceasing horror. Many people in the salvage crews committed suicide. A few dramatically, by unlatching their helmets or throwing themselves under the treads of one of the construction robots that were demolishing badly damaged buildings; most by finding some hidden spot and disabling their air scrubbers. It wasn’t so bad, people said. You became woozy as the carbon dioxide built up, and passed into merciful sleep.

The suicides went into the trenches, too.

One day, the spy was lined up with the rest of the crew near one of the big airlocks, everyone shivering with fatigue inside the shells of their pressure suits, waiting for their armed escort to march them back to the farm tube, when a sled glided by and something caught his eye. A woman lying on top of a pile of bodies, her unmarked face pale and hard as the face of a marble statue, a stiff banner of black hair, little tucks in the outer corners of her eyes, a small uptilted nose. It was her. It was Zi Lei. He broke ranks and chased after the sled and caught up with it, and with a shock of relief saw that the dead woman wasn’t Zi Lei after all. Then two guards crashed into him and knocked him to the ground. They hauled him away to the punishment block and stripped him and beat him half-heartedly and threw him in a cell and left him there all night without food or water. And in the morning gave him his pressure suit and put him back to work.

No one on the crew said anything to him about his moment of craziness.

The spy had been in the city for more than sixty days and still had no news of Zi Lei. By now a kind of telegraphic system had been established amongst the prisoners. Crews sometimes mingled while working on large projects and could exchange news by using a form of sign language to talk to each other right under the noses of their guards. Everyone asked after everyone else. Establishing a roll-call of the living and the dead and the missing. Zi Lei was one of the missing. No one knew anything about her. It was as if she had dropped off the face of the world.

Perhaps she had.

One day, the spy’s crew spent an entire shift searching for bodies and turned up only one. The following three shifts they found no bodies at all. And then, without warning, they were redeployed to work in the vacuum-organism fields.

Many of the city’s farm tubes and its microalgal and dole-yeast cultures had been destroyed during the war, and most of the crops that had been planted out in new or refurbished farm tubes were not yet ready for harvest, so tracts of vacuum organisms south and east of the city were being ripped up to provide CHON for the foodmakers that supplied the prisoners with basic rations. One day this work took the spy’s crew close to the little dome of the research station where Zi Lei and others in the peace movement had been held prisoner. He’d hiked there to save her, and that had been the last time he’d seen her. And here he was again, helping to scrape up stiff lichenous growths from dusty ice, with the dome sitting on a low ridge in the middle distance, gleaming against the black sky. Remembering what had happened there when he’d been someone else.

By now, the damage to the city’s tent had been repaired, and it was being repressurised by atmosphere plants that split water into hydrogen and oxygen, stored the hydrogen for fuel, and mixed the oxygen with reserves of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. At first, the carbon dioxide fell as snow, but it sublimed as the city slowly warmed, and then the temperature crept past the melting point of water-ice. The whole city began to thaw. What had once been a frozen morgue was now a ripening charnel house. Trees shed bark and branches as their icy cores melted. Every plant wilted and deliquesced into slime. Bacteria and fungi whose spores had survived the freezing vacuum multiplied tremendously and a great stink of rot and mould filled the tent. Drones equipped with methane probes located bodies that had so far escaped detection. The spy’s crew returned to their grim task for a few weeks, and afterwards were put to work repairing the surfaces of streets shattered by explosions during the bitter fighting, and clearing away the rubble of collapsed buildings.

It was a hundred and fifty days since Paris had fallen. Air pressure inside the city’s tent was now at four hundred millibars, thin but breathable. Power had been restored to most areas. The river was running again, fed by a waterfall at the top of the city and tumbling over the rocky watercourse that ran between slopes of dead trees and dead parkland in the slanted half of the city, flowing through the centre of the flat built-up area of the lower half and disappearing underground into pipes that recirculated it back to the top. The pace of reconstruction work picked up as more and more prisoners were brought in from outlying areas across Dione. Work crews cleared rubble and chopped down dead trees. Repaired the railway terminus at the top of the city, and the big airlock complex at the bottom. Patched up apartment buildings.

The spy’s crew was rehoused in one of the old square-built apartment blocks at the edge of the industrial zone, very similar to the block in which he had lived when he had first come to the city. Where he had first met Zi Lei. Other crews moved into neighbouring blocks. Only men at first, but then women and children. Families and friends fell into each others’ arms. Slowly, that quarter of the city came back to life. Entrepreneurs set up makeshift cafés on corners, serving tea and snacks, or cultivated small patches of herbs and vegetables. There were stalls where goods could be exchanged. An informal index of kudos was established. Along the banks of the river, people erected memorials to their dead, making little sculpture gardens from rubble and glass, setting plaques in the embankment wall, raising painted flags and pennants on wire-whip staffs that blew and doffed on cross-currents of air-conditioning. They painted murals across bullet-riddled walls. There was a fashion for embroidering tiny but elaborate abstract patterns on the sleeve-cuffs of standard-issue coveralls. There were poetry recitals, song-fests, discussion groups on science and philosophy.

But the bulk of the city was still shabby and battle-scarred. The halflife turf that paved streets and avenues was dead and crumbling to dust; parks and gardens had not been replanted; many buildings were still badly damaged and uninhabitable. Curfews and other restrictions were strictly enforced, power was cut in apartment blocks from ten at night until six in the morning, and Brazilian drones constantly patrolled the middle air between the high vault of the tent and the flat rooftops of the old part of the city. Deadly glittering things that moved with a lazy hum, strobe lights blinking. At night, the red threads of their tracking lasers stitched empty streets and avenues. Sometimes Brazilian patrols would stage night raids on apartment blocks, waking everyone and searching rooms, confiscating possessions and tossing them down to the courtyard, trampling precious garden plots, making random arrests. Most people would return two or three days later, dazed with lack of sleep and the after-effects of veridical drugs. Some never returned at all.

The Brazilians had moved into the city too, zoning off everything west of the burnt-out ruins of the Bourse and the City Senate, turning the central part of the city and the sloping park beyond into a kind of fortress or forbidden zone inside a perimeter of heavy blast walls and tangles of smart wire. A tented and relatively undamaged apartment building that had retained its integrity when the main tent had been breached was converted into suites of offices and became the seat of the new government of the Saturn System. A regular traffic of tugs and gigs ferried Brazilian and European officers and civil servants to and from orbit, and they were conveyed at speed through the city to what was now called the Green Zone.

When Outers began to be recruited for menial tasks in the Green Zone, the spy began to ingratiate himself with his guards. Unlike most of the Outers he spoke fluent Portuguese, and in addition to his usual work he ran errands for the guards and pretended not to mind whenever he became the butt of their stupid practical jokes. At last, he was granted a brief interview with a security officer, and was put to work in the Office of Collateral Damage Assessment, checking translations of files recovered from the spex and slates of dead Outers.

As soon as he could, he inserted one of his little zoo of demons into the Brazilians’ net, a data miner that quickly returned with the results of its searches amongst the great registers of the living and the dead. Zi Lei’s name was not listed with the dead; nor was it on the lists of refuseniks and members of the general labour pool. And although the spy’s demon presented him with pictures of some twenty-three young women culled from files and security footage, none had more than a passing resemblance to Zi Lei, so it was unlikely that she was living under an assumed identity. It took a little longer, and deployment of two more demons, to break into the hardened and deeply encrypted communications system and send copies of his data miner to the administrations of the other moons under Brazilian control. Zi Lei was not registered on Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys or Titan.

The spy refused to consider the possibility that she was aboard one of the dead ships still in orbit around Saturn. No, she was alive. She must be. Perhaps she had escaped on one of the ships that had managed to head out to Uranus. Or perhaps she had fled to Rhea, or to Iapetus. Rhea was controlled by the European Union, and Iapetus by the Pacific Community: there was no direct connection with their nets. Or perhaps she was still on Dione, part of the active resistance movement whose members had infiltrated the city or lived in refuges not yet discovered by the occupying force. The spy inserted a demon in the Brazilian net and tasked it with scanning every frame of the city’s security camera footage for Zi Lei, and began to reach out to sympathisers of the resistance.