‘You and your mother have at least one thing in common,’ Sri said. ‘I think you see the world at a slant too.’
With shocking abruptness, Yuli rolled onto her back and kicked her legs in the air and knotted her long prehensile toes together. After a moment, she looked over at Sri and said, ‘She’s hiding, isn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘I caught up with her on Titan. But she escaped.’
‘This was during the war.’
‘Yes.’
‘After we escaped from that dreary prison and those silly people.’
‘After she left Dione, yes.’
‘Who was she with?’
‘She was alone when I met her, but I believe that two people helped her reach Titan. Macy Minnot and Newton Jones.’
Yuli’s toes knotted and unknotted. ‘And where were these two heroes when you confronted my mother?’
‘When I arrived, they appeared to be heading away from Titan.’
Sri hesitated. She’d never told anyone, not even Arvam Peixoto, the whole truth. But she felt that she had to be candid now; she was certain that Yuli would know if she attempted to dissemble, and in any case candour was the cornerstone of trust. So she gave a brief account of how her attempt to confront and capture Avernus in one of her gardens had ended in utter humiliation. How her secretary had disobeyed her, and she’d had to kill him. How she had been snared by one of Avernus’s creations.
She said, ‘After your mother got the better of me, I saw an aeroshell land nearby. I think it was carrying Macy Minnot and Newton Jones - they came back to rescue your mother. But she didn’t need rescuing. A small aeroplane took off, and soon afterward the aeroshell left.’
‘My mother was flying the plane.’
‘I think so. I want to find her because I want to help her. Because I think we could create wonderful things together.’
‘Do you have any children?’ Yuli said.
‘Yes. Two sons.’
‘Did you tweak them?’
‘I gave my eldest son a few . . . advantages,’ Sri said.
‘Is he here?’
‘He’s in charge of a research facility in Antarctica.’
‘Pity. Him and me, we have something in common.’
‘My other son, Berry, lives here. It might be possible for you to meet him.’
‘My mother created me,’ Yuli said. ‘She isn’t what you could call a people person. Really, she doesn’t understand people at all. She doesn’t even understand herself most of the time. But when Greater Brazil began to make overtures to the Outer System a decade ago, she believed that for the first time in a hundred years there was a possibility of a real and lasting reconciliation with Earth. And she decided that she wanted to become involved. That she could do some good - like the biome at Rainbow Bridge. And because she didn’t want to be distracted by all the political manoeuvring, she got up a crew of advisers and she made me - made me what I am - to help her explain what people wanted of her and how she could deal with them. But here’s the funny thing. She didn’t listen to me. I would give her advice and she would listen carefully and then completely ignore it. She carried on exactly as she had always carried on. When the so-called joint expedition arrived in the Saturn System and began to behave in a grossly provocative manner, I told her to give up any idea of making peace with Earth. And I told her to keep away from the people who, contrary to all the evidence, believed that war could be averted. But she didn’t listen. No, she made herself into their figurehead and sacrificed her freedom on the altar of their principles. Sacrificed my freedom, too. And when war broke out and we managed to get free, I told her to stay with Macy Minnot, who may not be the brightest of people but is a proven survivor. But again: no. She decided that she knew better, and went off on her own. To sulk, I bet. To lick her wounds and try to figure out where she went wrong.’
‘Very often my advice goes unheeded,’ Sri said. ‘I know how frustrating it can be.’
She was trying to make a connection with the girl by sympathising with her and seeking to underscore similarities, as the two psychologists had advised. But Yuli laughed and said scornfully, ‘Do you really, truly think we’re in any way alike? Oh, maybe you’re like my mother, just a little bit. But you and I have nothing in common. I’ll tell you why, if you like.’
‘Please,’ Sri said, as calmly as she could.
‘I hope for your sake that you didn’t change your son too much, Professor Doctor. I hope you didn’t make him into a true more-than-human monster. The kind of creature that people like your general quite rightly fear. Because if you did make him into a monster, he will destroy you. That’s what monsters do. They aren’t grateful for the so-called gifts they’ve been given. They may love them because they elevate them above the common herd, or they may loathe them for exactly the same reason, but they’ll never, ever be grateful. Why? Because those gifts set them apart from everyone else, including their creators. Yes, the old story, Frankenstein and his monster, the stuff of a billion tawdry serials and sagas. But the reason it has persisted for so long is because it contains a fundamental truth: monsters are always lonely, because they can’t connect with ordinary people in any ordinary way. People fear and persecute monsters because they are different, and monsters despise and torment people because, despite their weakness and inferiority, they possess the one thing that monsters can never possess: the fellowship of the herd. And so monsters grow contemptuous, and contempt turns to hate, and hate to rage, and then the running and the screaming and the killing and the destruction begins. And I should know,’ Yuli said, flexing her back and bouncing to her feet, ‘because I’m very definitely a monster!’
Sri flinched, she couldn’t help it, and then Yuli was on her back, arched and straining, making raw animal noises. After a moment, Sri realised that one of the monitors had activated the collar.
Despite the abrupt end to the session, the psychologists believed that it had gone well. ‘The pheromone had only a small effect, but I think it was significant,’ one said. ‘Yuli was open and friendly towards you. She engaged in conversation, showed curiosity, and was candid about herself. It’s an excellent start.’
‘She was attempting to assert her own identity,’ the other said. ‘She harbours considerable resentment towards her mother, that’s been clear from the outset. And she appears to blame her mother for her present situation. We must find a way of sympathising with that, and using it to build a bridge or two.’
‘I’m not interested in making friends with her,’ Sri said. ‘And she isn’t interested in making friends with me. I thought that was clear enough.’
‘But she was friendly,’ the first psychologist said.
‘Discover what she wants,’ the second psychologist said. ‘Then she may open up and give you what you want.’
‘She wants her freedom,’ Sri said. ‘I can’t give her that. And besides, she’s already refused it when it was offered to her in exchange for information about her mother. Tell me: does she really hate Avernus? If she does, wouldn’t she have betrayed her mother by now?’
‘She’s conflicted,’ the first psychologist said. ‘She blames her mother for her situation, but she’s also loyal to her.’
‘And she knows that by blaming her mother she isn’t taking responsibility for herself,’ the second psychologist said. ‘Help her to do that, and you will begin to win her trust.’
It sounded too pat to Sri. Like one of the Just-so stories made up by evolutionary biologists, simplistic attempts to rationalise quirks of human behaviour by suggesting they were hardwired relics of ancient survival strategies. Nevertheless, she allowed the psychologists to coach her through a couple of scenarios and went back to the suite early the next day. She’d been coolly confident before; now she felt a sharp edge of caution.
Yuli was waiting for her, sitting cross-legged on the big cushion, calm and indifferent. Sri had brought a slate with her and showed the girl videos of the garden on Titan where she’d been working: ragged sheets fluttering in currents in a lead of ammonia-rich water under the volcanic dome, the zoo of different microscopic forms expressed by a single suite of genes.
Yuli yawned, said that she didn’t know anything about her mother’s gardens. ‘She made them before I was born. And afterwards, she was too busy to make any more.’
‘I’m sure you visited some of them.’
‘If you want to know why my mother made them, ask a plant why it makes flowers. Ask a bee why it makes honey. She made them because that’s what she does.’ Yuli paused, then added, ‘You’re collecting them, aren’t you?’
‘I’m trying to understand them because I believe it will help me understand how your mother works. How she thinks. And I believe that it will make me better at what I do. Let me show you something else,’ Sri said, and pulled up the list of changes made to Yuli’s genome and highlighted those which had altered her brain structure.
The girl shrugged. ‘You can’t understand someone by cataloguing their genes.’
‘I’m not trying to understand you, Yuli. I wouldn’t presume. But I am trying to understand your mother’s work. She changed you because that’s what she does. She remade you out of the same impulse that lay behind the creation of her gardens,’ Sri said. ‘It’s all one piece.’
‘I don’t know where she is,’ Yuli said.
‘I believe you.’
‘If she’s hiding, it will be in one of the gardens she didn’t tell anyone about. Even me.’
Sri showed Yuli more videos, and gave quick and precise summaries of what she had discovered in the gardens that she had so far explored. Yuli watched and listened quietly, and said, ‘Those are the only ones you know about?’
‘Apart from one on Iapetus I have yet to visit.’
‘There are many more gardens than that,’ Yuli said, with a perfect imitation of carelessness. ‘One of them is right here on Dione. I’ll take you to it, if you like.’
Arvam Peixoto refused to allow Yuli to leave her suite, let alone travel to some remote spot on the surface of Dione. Besides, he said, her offer to lead Sri to one of her mother’s hidden gardens was no more than an attempt to create an opportunity to escape: Sri would find nothing but dust and ice out there, or some kind of trap. Sri said that Yuli was more subtle than that, pointed out that she wore a collar that could paralyse her at any time, and suggested several other ways of making sure that she could be controlled. But Arvam’s mind was made up.
When Sri told Yuli about the general’s decision, the little girl shrugged and said that she would think exactly the same thing if their positions were reversed. ‘As of course I wish they were.’
In their previous meetings it had been as if Yuli had drawn a circle around herself, a wintry fortress she’d defended with barbs of sarcasm and shafts of bitter wit. Now it was as if she had opened the gates of the fortress and stepped outside. As if, overnight, winter had turned into spring. She seemed to be genuinely relaxed, making and maintaining eye contact with Sri, smiling at her small joke.
‘I’m sorry I can’t do more,’ Sri said, and meant it.
‘Don’t be. I’ll tell you where it is anyway. As a gift.’ Yuli recited a set of map coordinates, and added, ‘Of course, it’s a test.’
‘What are you testing?’
‘You, Professor Doctor. I want to see how quickly you can understand my mother’s little jeu d’esprit.’
‘And if I succeed? As I will, of course.’
‘Then we can talk some more,’ Yuli said.
The coordinates led Sri to one of the bright cliffs created by tectonic fracturing east of Palatine Chasmata. A passage cut between two folds of ice descended to a sealed and insulated bottle chamber some five hundred metres long. Sri burned with frustration while a squad of marines wasted half a day mapping the chamber and the area around it with drones and deep radar, treating it like an unexploded bomb or plague pit until it was at last declared safe and she was allowed to enter and get to work.
She quickly realised that it was another phenotype garden like the jungle on Janus or the microbial biome in the volcanic vents on Titan. It seemed to be a favourite theme of Avernus’s. Here, the basic form was a kind of moss that expressed gross and subtle variations of thallus structure, from thick cushions to tangles of filaments or erect shoots like scaled clubs a metre tall in every shade of green or orange, all connected to each other by hyphal threads, like a drawing made by a single unbroken pencil line. This moss garden filled the floor of the chamber from edge to edge, interrupted by chunks of black silicates mined, according to spectrographic and isotopic analysis, from the dark and broken ring that circled Rhea. The light was dim and red, the air cool and damp. Water burbled up from springs near the entrance and fed slow, fat, low-gravity streams that cut wandering lines through the moss and fed deep pools at the far end. In places ferns or grasses or bamboos sprang directly from the moss substrate. Everything shared the same genotype, including the butterflies that hatched from capsules at the tips of the club mosses and fluttered about and died and sprouted new moss filaments, like the grass-scarf-grass cycle that the PacCom liaison secretary, Tommy Tabagee, had once described to Sri.
Within a day Sri had worked up a bare-bones description of the garden. Analysis of every potential form coded in its genome, and the homeobox sequences and transcription cascades that controlled their expression - whether a filament would become moss cushion or fern or grass - would have to wait, but she expected that they would turn out to be variations on the basic pattern. When she returned to the habitat she gave a precis of her findings to Arvam Peixoto, told him that it was as spare and elegant as the ancient moss gardens of Japan. He said that it was an elaborate joke, and worthless. He was in a bad mood. Several of his soldiers had been killed or injured when a sabotaged building had collapsed in Paris; its skeleton had been weakened by some kind of halflife catalyst that had degraded the fullerene components to sooty powder.