The peace effort had been sabotaged. There had been a short, swift war. The Outers had been comprehensively defeated. Expeditionary forces from Earth’s three major power blocs had taken control of every city and settlement on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. A few Outers had managed to escape into the outer dark; Avernus had disappeared into the vastness of Titan’s icescapes.
Sri had been unable to persuade Arvam Peixoto to mount a full-scale search for the gene wizard. The men and women under his command had more important things to do - securing the cities and major settlements on Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys and Dione, policing and caring for their populations, repairing damaged infrastructure, installing new administrations. Sri had been given only the vague promise of some kind of help in the indefinite future, and use of a pod of autonomous drones. They were ferociously smart hunters that could synthesise fuel from the hydrocarbons in Titan’s atmosphere but were pitifully inadequate for the task of locating a single person squatting in some spiderhole on a smog-shrouded moon with a surface area of more than eighty-three million square kilometres. Sri had set them loose with little hope or expectation, and turned to searching out and exploring the gardens that Avernus had scattered across inhabited and uninhabited moons, elegant fusions of whimsy and theory that would take years of hard work to catalogue, analyse and understand.
But the secrets of the gardens of Janus would have to wait. Sri helped her crew pack equipment and samples and load them into the lockers of the little tug, and one by one they cycled through the airlock into the cramped cabin where they’d been living for the past week. Sri strapped herself into the crash couch next to Vander Reece and he lit the motor and Janus fell away behind them, quickly lost in the glory of the rings. Six hours later, the tug entered orbit around Dione and rendezvoused with General Arvam Peixoto’s flagship, the Glory of Gaia. The tug matched delta vee with the big ship and crept close and fired a harpoon tether and reeled itself onto a docking spar, and the spar contracted like a chameleon’s tongue and delivered it to a cargo bay.
Sri gave her crew precise instructions about handling and storage of their collection of specimens and went off to find her son. After ten days in the vestigial gravity of Janus, the 0.05 g imparted by the ship’s spin felt like lead in her bones. The hot stale air stank of ozone and old sweat, like the locker room of a municipal swimming pool; the corridors and companionways were crowded with soldiers and civilians. A ship-load of advisers and civil servants had arrived from Earth while Sri had been working on Janus; in Berry’s cubicle two men she didn’t recognise were sleeping in cocoons hung on the walls. She backed out, called the quartermaster, and learned that Berry was no longer on board: he’d been reassigned to a habitat formerly owned by the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan, down on the surface of Dione.
Sri didn’t need to ask who’d arranged this, or why she hadn’t been informed. Arvam Peixoto had refused to allow Berry to leave the Glory of Gaia, keeping him hostage to ensure Sri’s absolute and unconditional loyalty; now, without bothering to consult her, the general had dispatched Berry to some tented habitat on a moon not yet fully pacified. With a cold star of indignation and anxiety burning in her chest, Sri swarmed down the ship’s spine and badged her way past a marine guarding the hatch to what had been the officers’ wardroom before Arvam Peixoto’s staff had appropriated it.
Walls and ceiling padded with red leather; couches and side tables bolted to the floor; the general and half a dozen officers and civil servants over in one corner, studying spreadsheets scrolling through a big memo space. No one acknowledged Sri’s entrance, and she knew better than to interrupt. Arvam Peixoto was a bully who loved to pick and pry at other people’s weaknesses; if she confronted him head on he’d use her anger against her. And besides, there was no point in picking a fight she couldn’t win. No, she had to be calm and cool and strong. For the sake of Berry. For the sake of her work. So she snagged a bulb of coffee and sank into a sling chair and diverted herself by reviewing and collating the last of the data that her crew had gathered on Janus. The close attention required to parse the information soothed her; she had more or less regained her equilibrium when at last one of the aides floated across the room and told her the general had a few minutes to spare.
‘Here you are at last. I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me,’ Arvam Peixoto said.
He was a handsome, vigorous man in his sixties, dressed in his usual many-pocketed flight suit. He’d shorn his hair since they’d last met, cut off his ponytail and clipped what was left to a crisp snow-white flat-top. A pistol was holstered at his hip: the one he had used to murder a man right in front of Sri, once upon a time.
‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten that I was working on Janus,’ Sri said.
‘I don’t believe I’ve been there yet. Have I been there yet?’ Arvam said.
‘No, sir,’ one of the aides said.
‘Is it worth a visit?’ Arvam said to Sri.
‘I have plenty of work to do there. May I ask,’ Sri said, trying to keep her tone light and friendly, ‘why you sent Berry to Dione?’
‘Oh, the ship’s no place for the boy,’ Arvam said. ‘It’s too crowded, and there’s nothing for him to do except get into trouble. Where I sent him, it’s being made over into my headquarters. It’s been thoroughly checked out, and it’s quite safe. A big garden with lawns and fields, trees and lakes. Just the kind of place for a healthy, active boy, yes?’
‘I’d like to see it. Your people might have missed something.’
‘I’ll tell you all about it after dinner tonight. The Pacific Community liaison secretary is paying a visit and for some reason he is eager to meet you. You can tell him about your gardens, and perhaps he’ll let slip some useful information about the situation on Iapetus.’
‘This is why you interrupted my research? To make small talk with a PacCom official?’
‘That’s one reason. I also have a new project for you,’ Arvam said. ‘A very important project. Come with me.’
Sri and a comet-tail of aides followed the general to the medical bay and a curtained alcove at the far end where a young man lay in a slanted bed. A white sheet was tucked tight as a drumhead across his legs and waist; the black band of a heart-lung machine was clamped across his chest. His head was shaven and bandaged and his eyelids were taped shut, there were tubes in his nose, and a dripline attached to his arm looped up to a sac of liquid hung from the bulkhead beside him. The sac quiveringly pulsed at intervals, like a sluggish and fretful jellyfish.
Arvam told Sri that the young man was Lieutenant Cash Baker, singleship pilot and war hero. ‘He was wounded in combat. Brain damage. I want you to fix it.’
‘I’m flattered, of course. But what can I do that your excellent and highly experienced medical staff can’t?’
‘You rewired his nervous system during the J-2 test programme. Also, it’s your fault he died.’
After a heartbeat’s hesitation, Sri understood what the general meant. ‘He was flying the singleship that attacked Avernus’s tug.’
‘Yes, he was. But he may be useful to me, so you will have to find it in yourself to forgive him.’
Lieutenant Cash Baker had piloted one of the singleships sent to intercept and destroy a chunk of ice flung at the Pacific Community’s temporary base on Phoebe, at the beginning of the war. His ship had been damaged by the ice’s automatic defence system, but it had managed to partially repair itself and as he’d fallen back towards Saturn he’d targeted an Outer tug that had escaped from Dione. The tug had been carrying Avernus, and Sri Hong-Owen had been in hot pursuit. When Cash Baker had ignored a direct order to call off his attack, it had been necessary to activate a suicide program buried in his singleship’s control system. In the aftermath, the singleship had plummeted through the plane of the ring system, a speck of basalt travelling faster than any bullet had pierced its hull and shattered into dozens of fragments, and one of those fragments had shot through the lifesystem and drilled Cash Baker’s visor and skull and brain. The lifesystem had put him in hibernation and saved his life, his singleship had been located and retrieved, and now General Arvam Peixoto wanted Sri to help the medical team tasked with repairing his brain damage.
‘We need heroes who can drum up support back home by telling stirring stories of extraordinary acts of bravery. This man is an excellent candidate.’
‘He is a fool who very nearly murdered Avernus.’
‘I’ll deal with his story, Professor Doctor. Your job is to fix him up. I don’t care if he can’t move from the neck down, but he has to be able to speak in full sentences without drooling. Think you can do that?’
The chief surgeon told Sri that the fragment of basalt had struck the pilot just above his left eye, burning a path through his frontal cortex and corpus callosum and clipping the lower edge of the visual cortex before exiting his skull. The fragment had been just a couple of hundred microns across, but it had been travelling very fast: shock waves had destroyed or killed everything in a track averaging seven millimetres in diameter. Damage to the frontal cortex and visual cortex was trivial and could be easily repaired by insertion of glial and totipotent foetal cells. There would be some memory loss, but no serious side effects. But the damage to the corpus callosum was more problematical. Passage of the fragment had severed large numbers of reciprocal connections between the two halves of the brain. If this wasn’t repaired, the surgeon said, the right side of the pilot’s brain would be cut off from the dominant left side, a separate mind with its own perception, cognition, volition, learning and memory but lacking the ability to speak, able to express itself only through nonverbal reactions. He would not be able to integrate the right- and left-hand sides of his visual field, and might suffer ‘alien hand syndrome’ and other dissociative effects.
After studying high-resolution tomographic renderings of the damage, Sri proposed a radical solution. She had helped to design the artificial autonomic nervous system that enabled singleship pilots to plug directly into the control system of their ships and to briefly boost their neural processing speeds during combat, and she believed that she could use this to reroute connections between the two sides of the pilot’s brain and reunite his mind.
She had plenty of other work to do, of course. She wanted to visit the garden habitat that the general had taken over for his headquarters, and make sure that her son was safe and happy. She wanted to return to Janus and complete her survey of the phenotype jungle and the sunflowers and the other vacuum organisms, work up the data and thoroughly examine it and compare it with the data sets gathered from her inspections of other gardens. Then she would head out to the next garden, and the one after that . . .
No, there was never enough time to do everything she wanted to do. But although she’d been bullied into doing it by Arvam Peixoto and it wasn’t anywhere near the top of her list of priorities, she enjoyed discussing the redesign of Cash Baker’s augmented nervous system with the ship’s surgeon. He had extensive experience of brain and nerve reconstruction, there was a definite intellectual bond between them, two minds into one, and she felt a spark of resentment when one of the general’s aides appeared and reminded her of the formal dinner.
The aide escorted Sri to a senior officer’s cabin, waited outside while she showered and put on uniform coveralls and slippers, then led her to the wardroom, where senior officers and civil servants and the guests from the Pacific Community were already seated at the long table. As Sri settled into her seat between the ship’s captain and the PacCom liaison secretary, Arvam Peixoto gave her a stern look across a centre-piece arrangement of lilies and roses that must have been shuttled up from some garden on Dione - perhaps from the habitat where Berry was now living.
Sri found most social occasions tedious. Trivial chatter and pointless and suffocating etiquette overlaying crude status displays. Alpha personalities like the general strutted and preened; everyone else flattered him, reinforcing their positions in their stupid little hierarchy, watching each other for possible faults and failings. Ape behaviour. Sri couldn’t play these games. She lacked in every measure the vivid, forceful and confrontational personality of the typical alpha male, and wasn’t the kind of wily social networker, able to build up cadres of loyal followers and keep them in line by Skinner-box reward-and-punishment games, typical of alpha females. Although her reputation gave her some social cachet, these occasions always reminded her that she was a wild card tolerated only as long as she continued to be useful. And to be useful she needed to work, not waste her time on chit-chat and posing.
Then there was the political dimension. Less than a decade ago, the Pacific Community and Greater Brazil had almost gone to war over control of the Hawaiian islands. Both power blocs had stepped back from armed confrontation and had slowly restored diplomatic links, but a great deal of mutual antipathy and suspicion still remained. And although it had cooperated with Greater Brazil and the European Union during the brief war against the Outers, the Pacific Community had come late to the campaign and had made only a minimal contribution, and its intentions were still obscure. Arvam Peixoto wanted Sri to wheedle some morsels of useful intel from the PacCom liaison secretary, and although she liked that kind of game even less than ordinary social discourse, she had to play along for the sake of her son, and for herself.
Fortunately, the liaison secretary, Tommy Tabagee, turned out to be sufficiently intelligent and witty to keep her mildly amused throughout the long and formal dinner. A slight, limber man with coal-black skin and a Medusa’s crown of dreadlocks, he was very proud of his Aboriginal ancestry and fanatically dedicated to reconstruction and remediation of his native continent, telling Sri about what he called his modest contributions to the levelling of cities and erasure of every sign of the sins of the age of industry, a great work that would take centuries to complete.