Gardens of the Sun (66 page)

‘We have enough karma to organise an initial study,’ Newt said to Macy later that evening, back on board Elephant. ‘We could give it a push, see where he takes it.’

‘And how would he feel about that, do you think?’

‘He should feel grateful, I reckon. It would be his thing - there’s no way I want to get involved with the kind of bureaucratic jungle that’s bound to grow around a project like that. But we could help him plant the seed.’

Sometimes Newt couldn’t see anything but the problem at hand. Macy said patiently, ‘What I mean is, think back to when you were Darwin’s age. How would you feel about your parents muscling in on your plans?’

‘Hell, I didn’t have any plans back then.’

‘Were you grateful every time Abbie bailed you out of trouble?’

Newt laughed. ‘Good point. But I want to find some way of helping him. Don’t you? And it could be a fantastic opportunity for the company. The start-up costs are big, but the potential is way bigger.’

‘Of course I want to help. But I don’t want to run Darwin’s life for him.’

Newt thought for a little while and said at last, ‘The kid needs to start up his own company. Then we act as subcontractors. We bring in the karma, but he’ll control everything. It’ll be up to him to make it happen. Maybe it’ll come to something, maybe not. But the kid’s smart. He’ll pull it off, I reckon, if he doesn’t get bored and go off and get into something else instead.’

They spent two days with Darwin and his crew. Macy discussed the latest panspermia theories with the exobiologist who had hitched a lift so that he could take cores from the heart of the comet. So far, he’d failed to find any traces of biological activity, but his inventory of organic molecules, deep-frozen since the formation of the Solar System, would add to the vast store of data about conditions in the primordial planetary disc. And Macy and Newt talked with Darwin about his plans for the construction of the ocean habitat, and did their best to support him without appearing to criticise or interfere. Telling themselves that if he failed, it would not be an important failure. He was young, and the Solar System was buzzing with boundless possibility. At last they said their farewells to Darwin and his crew, and Elephant powered on, hooking past Mars in a slingshot that sent her back into the plane of the ecliptic, towards the sister worlds of the Earth and the Moon.

Macy hadn’t been to one of the conferences on the Great Leap Up And Out for eighteen years - she’d dropped out of research into extrasolar planets because her work on Titan had taken over most of her time. Superficially, little seemed to have changed. The same round of intense discussions about everything from mapping extrasolar planets to the Holy Grail of faster-than-light travel; the same social dynamic, with young delegates looking to make their mark and older delegates defending their reputations. There were even a few Ghosts, keeping themselves to themselves as usual. They were generally regarded as a spent force, pariahs who had at last made peace with the great society of the Solar System but were still struggling with the long and painful process of integration.

Macy knew more than half the delegates, old friends who were a little greyer and slower than she’d last seen them, but were otherwise much the same. A few faces were missing, chief amongst them Pete Bakaleinikoff, who had hitched a ride on Pholus, a centaur planetoid that had been outfitted with mass drivers and was now heading out towards Delta Pavonis, a voyage that would take more than a thousand years. Junko and Junpei Asai were still researching Delta Pavonis’s Earth-like planet, Tierra. Using an ultra-long base telescope cloud stretched between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, they’d refined resolution down to less than a kilometre, and were discussing their findings with Pete and the rest of Pholus’s crew - possible landing sites, places where cities could be built, climate models and vegetation maps, and much more.

So that was one very large difference. When Macy had attended her first conference, everything had been theoretical. In addition to Pholus, several other planetoids were being converted into generation starships, and Sri Hong-Owen and her clade were heading out to Fomalhaut inside a chunk cut from the regolith of Janus, still steadily accelerating eight years after departing from orbit around Saturn, travelling deep inside the cometary belt now, some seventy-five trillion kilometres from the sun.

At the end of the conference, loaded with invitations to visit every kind of research project, Macy and Newt rode out from the Moon and fell towards Earth in the ancient free-return trajectory, a slow, lazy trip of three days, the mother planet swelling ahead until at last they were in orbit a mere five hundred kilometres above the equator. Macy pointed out landmarks and mountains and rivers and cities; Newt told her that he knew they’d talked about this before they’d left, but just in case she had changed her mind he’d brought along a couple of exoskeletons: they could hitch a ride down on a shuttle if she wanted. Watching her carefully as she thought about it.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We have places to go, people to see. And we have to get to Hannah before her time is due. Maybe another time.’

‘It’s so close we could walk it. And I’m curious to see where you came from.’

‘Where we all came from.’

‘Not me. I was born on Titania.’

‘You won’t find anything down there you can’t find anywhere else. And there’s the crushing gravity, impossibly crowded cities, biting insects, diseases . . .’

‘And wind, and rain, and all the rest of the stuff you miss.’

‘I grew out of missing it. Let’s get on.’

They docked briefly with one of the stations hung in synchronous orbit around Earth’s equator and unloaded their cargo, and then they headed outward to one of the reefs of bubble habitats that, grown from the fugitive moonlets modified and launched by Sri Hong-Owen and her crew, orbited inside the inner edge of the main Asteroid Belt. Thin and interrupted arcs of gardens ringing the sun.

Macy and Newt’s adopted daughter, Hannah, lived in one of the largest, Pan-Ku, named for the world-sculpting Chinese demiurge, with her partner Xander Elliott and their twins, Abbie and Kit, Macy and Newt’s first grandchildren. Abbie and Kit were seven years old now, and Hannah was pregnant again, again with twins. She was carrying them the natural way, as Macy had carried Darwin, and was due to give birth in three weeks’ time, which was why Macy and Newt had come to visit.

Pan-Ku was twenty kilometres in diameter and jacketed in a lumpy skin of water-filled bubbles that helped to protect it from solar and cosmic radiation, but otherwise it was little different to the habitat that Macy and Newt and the other Free Outers had built at Nephele. Hannah and Xander’s home was a tented garden on the inner surface, with views out across the vast airy gulf where rafts bearing farms and forests, strung along the habitat’s radial spars, receded towards the loose shell of sunlamps and the infrastructure that underpinned the habitat’s lifesystem.

Xander was a pilot, and he and Newt disappeared off for hours at a time, inspecting ships garaged in the hangars, lost in discussions about microscopic improvements to routes between the inner and outer planets and the latest tweaks to fusion-motor technology. Unlike her brothers - Darwin with his comets; Han with his current enthusiasm for extending and improving the gardens that Avernus had created in the atmosphere of Saturn, which would almost certainly be replaced by an enthusiasm for something else in a year or two - Hannah was sensible and thoroughly grounded. She had made her home here with her partner and children, was part of the crew that maintained the ecosystems, variations on the phytoplankton-krill-fish food chains of Antarctic seas, of the watery bubbles that jacketed Pan-Ku. She loved her life and saw no reason to make any radical changes to it.

One day, while Xander and Newt were mooching around in Pan-Ku’s hangars, Macy and Hannah took the twins down to one of the island forests. An expedition that took all morning to organise. It was well past noon when they finally set out, travelling on a cog tram that ran down the centre of one of the hollow spars to the island’s tiny station.

The island was a plate of fullerene composite a kilometre across, sculpted in low relief and landscaped with lawns and paths of halflife grass that, overlaid with a web of tethers, wound through heather scrub and thickets of puffball pines and live oaks. Abbie and Kit swarmed ahead of Hannah and Macy, swinging from tether to tether with swift balletic grace, vanishing around a clump of trees and returning a few minutes later, calling to their mother and grandmother, eager to show them the perfect spot they’d chosen. And it was lovely, a sheltered saddle of soft turf sprinkled with wild flowers, embraced on three sides by a thick belt of trees, with views across the ocean of air and the linear archipelagos of green islands that arrowed inward all around, like a student’s exercise in perspective, towards the glare of the sunlamps.

Hannah settled down with a contented sigh; she was as huge and awkward as a walrus, as she put it, had to spend half of each day in the habitat’s centrifuge for the sake of her babies, and suffered from nagging backaches. She and Macy set out the picnic they’d brought and coerced the twins into spending at least some time tethered while they ate, and then there was an argument about how soon they could go flying. Not for an hour, Hannah said firmly, or you’ll be sick to your stomachs.

Two of Hannah’s ecosystem crew, Jack and Christof, and their son Cho, a solemn two-year-old, joined them. Abbie fussed over Cho, feeding him titbits and giving him sips of chocolate milk, while Kit roved to and fro, collecting beetles for his vivarium, and Macy and Hannah talked with Jack and Christof about the ongoing planoforming projects on Titan and Mars, and the conference on the Moon. Jack and Christof had a sideline in cultivating grapes and making wine; Macy shared a pouch of their latest, a pink Zinfandel.

Kit came back, wanting to show Macy a colony of funnel spiders he’d found, and she got up and hauled herself hand over hand along a tether, into the bank of trees. He watched her critically, said that it would be easier if she didn’t try to walk.

‘Cheeky pup. I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive.’

The funnels were gauzy trumpets laid everywhere in the fibrous tangle of tree roots. Kit showed her that the threads from which they were woven were sticky if you rubbed them in one direction and smooth if you rubbed them the other way. So that beetles and other insects could walk in, but they couldn’t get out.

‘Very clever,’ Macy said. ‘Did someone invent these or are they from someplace on Earth?’

Kit shrugged, feigning indifference because he was embarrassed that he didn’t know.

‘We can look it up when we get home,’ Macy said.

‘I want to get rigged for full net access,’ Kit said, ‘but Hannah says I’m too young.’

‘That’s because it’s good to learn how to remember things. Stretches the brain.’

Macy clung to the tether with both hands, turning to look up at the raking spread of branches and leaves. She was a little dizzy from the wine. If she let go she would fall past the trees into the sky.

She said, ‘What happens to dead leaves? On Earth, they would drop to the ground. Here they must simply float away. Why isn’t the sky full of them?’

‘Little drones collect all kinds of junk,’ Kit said. ‘They move in flocks, like birds. If you catch one it starts to make this beeping noise, louder and louder. Because it’s lonely.’

They talked about the different kinds of drones that policed the habitat, and the soil that wasn’t really soil but intricate domains of halflife hyperfibre. Macy told Kit that he should come and visit Coleridge, and see how things grew in real soil, and then they hauled themselves back to the others and Hannah helped Kit and Abbie fit on their flying gear: crash helmets, spurs for landing, the ribbed wings of monomolecular plastic that extended out beyond their hands and clipped to their ankles. And then the twins went bouncing away, clambering like grounded bats to the edge of the catchnets that stretched around the edge of the island and kicking off and beating their wings to get up speed, chasing each other towards the next island, Abbie in red, Kit in yellow and in the lead as they dropped beneath the edge of the island and vanished from sight.

Macy’s heart gave a little bump when they disappeared. She asked Hannah if she ever worried that the twins might get into trouble.

‘Not really,’ Hannah said. ‘The wings aren’t very efficient, so they can’t go much faster than twenty k.p.h. Kit broke his wrist soon after he took it up, because he was trying to show off, but he’s better at flying than Xander now. He wants to get the full set of traits, practise in different kinds of gravity, different environments. It will mean a fair bit of travelling if he’s serious.’

‘Just like his grandfather and his uncles,’ Macy said.

‘Just like his grandmother,’ Hannah said.

Macy laughed, and conceded that she had a point.

They talked about the woman Han was living with, down in the waterzone inside Saturn, about Darwin’s plans to expand the comet business. Presently the twins reappeared, small red and yellow shapes far off in the immense sky, Kit chasing Abbie, wings beating steadily as they stooped down and vanished from sight again as they went below the keel of the island. It was more like swimming than flying, Macy thought. Without gravity you had to beat your wings to get up speed, and if you stopped you wouldn’t fall - air resistance would slow you down until you came to rest, like a fish hanging over a reef.

Newt called, said that a party was getting up to go visit an asteroid that was due to make a transit just ninety thousand kilometres away.

‘It’s entirely covered with a garden of vacuum organisms. One of Avernus’s. Very weird and beautiful, I’m told. They’re heading out in two days and need to know numbers. I said you’d be interested. How about it?’

‘You go. I’ll see it another time.’