Mountainous ridges nested in concentric circles rose above the horizon’s sharp curve: the rim of Herschel Crater, a multiringed basin a hundred and thirty kilometres across, a third of Mimas’s diameter, created by an impact that had very nearly shattered the little moon. The gig dropped past broken terraces that stepped down to the vast scab-lands of the crater floor, and flew on for thirty kilometres before the top of the crater’s central peak appeared. With a brisk rattle of attitude jets, the gig rolled over and turned end for end. The empty desolation of the crater floor swung away into black sky, the gig’s motor flamed on with a solid thump, a brief burn that killed the last of its momentum, and the moonscape crept back into view as the gig drifted sideways above the outer slopes of the central peak’s western flank, past boulderfields and the inky lightning bolts of canyons and rifts towards a broad bench where a beacon blinked red in the monochrome landscape. Attitude jets rattled again as the gig adjusted its final approach, and then its shadow raced up to meet it and with a jarring smack it was down, perched on the edge of a landing platform the size of a football field, close to a turtle-shaped shuttle with the green flag of Greater Brazil splashed over its flank.
Captain Neves had given Berry a shot of tranquilliser before the flight, but she’d miscalculated the dose and he was still more or less comatose: it took the combined efforts of Loc and the pilot to manoeuvre him out of the gig’s little hatch. A member of Sri Hong-Owen’s crew was waiting for them. A brisk young man named Antônio Maria Rodrigues, dressed in a pristine white pressure suit, he helped to carry Berry to the sled parked on the mesh roadway below the lip of the landing platform, and drove Loc and Berry towards a long slope cut by crevasses that radiated from the foot of a vertical arc of cliffs more than a kilometre high. The road slanted down into one of the crevasses, ending in a tracked and trampled apron in front of a large opaque dome pitched at the foot of a sheer wall of granitic water ice.
Loc and Antônio Maria Rodrigues hauled Berry off the sled and marched him to the oval hatch of an airlock set in the base of the dome, cycling through into a cramped antechamber with lockers, racks of pressure suits, and a dressing frame crowded along the walls, lit by glowsticks stuck at random in its spray-foam ceiling. In the greenish underwater light, Loc and Antônio Maria Rodrigues stripped off their pressure suits and, wearing only suit-liners that did little to protect them against the meat-locker chill, helped Berry out of his. The boy smiled dopily at them, asked if they could go on the ride again.
‘First we must talk with your mother,’ Loc said.
‘I don’t want to. I want to go back.’
‘You know that you can’t. Come with me, and don’t make a fuss.’
Loc and Berry followed Antônio Maria Rodrigues through a double set of pressure doors and climbed a short steep ramp to a big, roughly circular space under a vaulted roof that shed a pale glow. Paths wandered amongst layered shelves of black rocks cleverly faked up from shells of spun fullerenes, giant cushions of moss of every hue of red and yellow, clumps of tree ferns, and peaty pools of black water ringed with sedges. The air was clean and cold and damp. Winter. Yes, it smelt like winter . . . Loc felt a sudden aching swell of homesickness, sharply magnified by the pandorph. But this wasn’t home. It wasn’t Earth, or anything like it. Just another garden in a dome, a tiny bubble of life set in a vast and lifeless desolation. He looked around and declared that although it was pretty enough, he’d been expecting something rare and marvellous.
‘This isn’t the garden, sir. The garden is in there,’ Antônio Maria Rodrigues said, and pointed to the far side of the dome, where a black cliff loomed over an inky lake and a slender white bridge arched across the water to a narrow cave cut into the base of the cliff.
Sri Hong-Owen was waiting in one of the hemispherical tents clustered at the edge of the lake. As always, she seemed ageless: severe and rail-thin, her head shaven, her manner cool and self-contained. She was dressed in a silvery, knee-length insulated coat and wore spex with rectangular lenses in thick black frames.
‘You look well,’ she told her son. ‘And you’ve grown, too.’
Berry shrugged. The clean air of the moss garden had flushed away the residue of Captain Neve’s tranquilliser. He was his usual suspicious, truculent self, a flabby boy like a bear cub not yet licked into shape, scowling at his mother through the curtain of long hair that half-hid his face, saying, ‘The general told me I had to come here. It wasn’t my idea.’
‘The general was thinking of your welfare,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘How is he?’
They talked for a few minutes, an anodyne exchange with no warmth in it; then Sri Hong-Owen sent Berry off with Antônio Maria Rodrigues to get something to eat and drink, and asked Loc if he needed anything.
He declined her offer. ‘I was in Camelot just two hours ago, ma’am. Hard to believe, but there it is.’
‘And now you’re here. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes, it has,’ Loc said, coolly meeting her gaze. ‘But it isn’t too late, I hope, to apologise for my unseemly behaviour when we last crossed paths.’
‘Are you still working in that orbital junkyard?’
‘Not for much longer, I hope.’
‘You expect a new position when Euclides Peixoto replaces the general? Or are you going back to Earth with him?’
‘I hope to continue to serve as special adviser to the TPA.’
‘But right now you’re working for Arvam.’
‘On the eve of his departure from the Saturn System, General Peixoto asked me to return your son to your care. I was honoured and flattered to be given the responsibility, and hope that I have discharged it to the best of my ability.’
‘And what about Colonel Malarte?’
‘I’m certainly not employed by him.’
‘But you needed his permission to come here, and he doesn’t grant such permissions lightly. Arvam no longer has authority over the man, and you can’t afford to bribe him, so I suppose that he asked you to report on what I’m doing here. A favour for a favour.’
Loc didn’t flinch. His thoughts were as bright and quick as fish darting through sunlit water; he knew at once that it was in his best interest to tell the truth.
‘You see things as clearly as I do, ma’am. Colonel Malarte has expressed, shall we say indirectly, a proprietorial interest your work. Whether or not it is legitimate is not for me to say. But I can assure you that he does not have any authority over me.’
‘Well, for once I’m happy to do you a favour, Mr Ifrahim. I will show you what we have found here, and you can tell Colonel Malarte all about it. And then, perhaps, he will understand that there is nothing here that he can exploit, and he will stop pestering me.’
‘It won’t be easy, ma’am. From what I’ve seen of him, the colonel will have trouble understanding anything more complicated than a petting zoo.’
‘I’ll explain it in very simple terms,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘And if you happen to be working on some little scheme to humiliate the colonel because you resent being bullied by him, do bear in mind that I have considerable experience in dealing with his regime.’
‘It would be very dangerous to plot the downfall of an officer like Colonel Malarte. Not only because it would be treason, but because he is very well connected. Anyone working against him should keep their plans secret - even from potential allies.’
‘Of course. For once, we understand each other perfectly.’
‘For once, ma’am, we want the same thing.’
‘I wouldn’t say that the general has been kind towards me,’ Sri Hong-Owen said as she led Loc through the cluster of tents towards the bridge that spanned the lake. ‘And I can’t forgive him for using Berry. For holding him hostage to make sure that I did as I was told. Oh, he gave him a home, and a kind of education, but he also filled his head with distasteful and barbaric notions about honour and courage and war. As if the worst expressions of male behaviour are in any way virtuous or good. He suggested several times that a spell of military service would be good for Berry, when he was old enough. Fortunately, he has no say in the matter now.’
‘Yet he returned your son to you.’
‘He did it only to spite Euclides Peixoto. Still, as far as my work is concerned he has always been tolerant and understanding. I suppose I must be grateful for that. What do you think will happen to him, when he gets back to Earth?’
‘I can’t say, ma’am.’
‘I understand that Armand Nabuco is looking for someone to carry the blame for the failure of the Quiet War.’
‘Has it failed? I hadn’t heard,’ Loc said, following her up the narrow span of the bridge, holding on to the rails on either side. One misstep in this vestigial gravity and he would fly away and smack down into the lake.
‘I see you still have your sense of humour, Mr Ifrahim.’
‘Yes ma’am. It survived the war.’
‘I wonder if it will survive Euclides Peixoto.’
‘I’m sure I’m beneath his attention, ma’am. Unlike you.’
‘Oh, he won’t present a problem. He needs me. They all need me.’
They ducked through the narrow cave entrance and went down a slanting passage lined with spray-foam insulation, the air growing colder as it descended, until at last it opened onto a kind of gallery or viewing chamber with a long window set in the thick insulation. Triple-glazed with diamond panes, it shone with dim red light. A cluster of cameras and monitoring equipment stood in front of it.
‘This is what Avernus made here,’ Sri Hong-Owen said.
The window looked out across a huge spherical chamber carved out of the native ice and lit by a point source hung at the apex of its ceiling like a drop of incandescent blood. Its walls curved down to a floor creased with smooth ridges, and the top of each ridge was streaked with dark eddies and swirls and littered with dense copses of half-melted candles, phalanxes of tooth-like spikes, heaps of tangled wires or curled scrolls like spun sugar, meadows of brittle hairs, pods of paper-thin fins breaking out of the ice. All these growths stark black in the ruby light, apart from a large candle-copse close to the observation window that was clearly dying from the inside out, its lumpy spires crumbling into pale ash.
‘Vacuum organisms,’ Loc said. ‘A garden of vacuum organisms.’ He’d been expecting something truly exotic. A clone farm of superhuman babies. A wonderland full of weird plants and animals. A city of intelligent rats or racoons. But these growths weren’t that much different from the vacuum organisms cultivated on the naked surface around every city and settlement on the moons of Saturn.
‘They look like vacuum organisms,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘But they are not. They are not constructed from bound nanotech, but are spun from intricate pseudo-proteinaceous polymers. I call them polychines. If commercial vacuum organisms are synthetic analogues of prokaryotes - bacteria, Mr Ifrahim - these are analogues of the ancestors of prokaryotes.’
‘You want to give me a lecture,’ Loc said. ‘It would be easier if you cut to the chase, and told me exactly why these things are worthless. They certainly look worthless.’
Sri Hong-Owen ignored his sally, and told him that the chamber contained a methane-hydrogen atmosphere at minus twenty degrees Centigrade, far warmer than Mimas’s ambient temperature. ‘As for the polychines, they do not possess a pseudocellular structure; nor are they generated by the systematic execution of a centralised set of encoded instructions. Instead, they are networks of self-catalysing metabolic cycles created by interactions between specific structures in their polymers.’
‘Like carpets, or suit-liners.’
‘Very good, Mr Ifrahim. But although halflife materials are self-repairing and can even grow when fed the correct substrate, they encode only a very simple set of on/off instructions and can express only one morphology. The polychines are far more versatile. They are non-binary logic engines that use a form of photosynthesis to transform simple chemicals to complex polymers. They can reproduce, and they can even exchange information, although that information is entirely analogue in form. And they possess a limited set of components which obey a limited set of self-organising rules capable of generating new instructions, and, therefore, new properties and even new forms. Once I completely understand how those rules operate in every possible combination, it will be possible to manipulate the polychines to produce predictable states.’
‘Does that mean you can order them to manufacture useful stuff?’
‘This isn’t a factory floor, Mr Ifrahim. It is a puzzle. A challenge. Unlike ordinary living cells or vacuum organisms, polychines lack any form of internal description. We are accustomed to thinking of information as being encoded in the written word, or in the binary code at the base of all computer languages, or in the four-letter alphabet of DNA. In there—’ Sri Hong-Owen made a limpid gesture at the cavern beyond the window ‘—is a world in which information and form are inextricably entangled. A set of analogue computers that generate unique and unpredictable solutions to a single problem: how to survive and grow. Avernus set them up and left them to their own devices, but I will play her at her own game and prove myself her superior. By providing them with the right information to process, it will be possible to force them to produce predictable solutions, as I shall now demonstrate.’
The gene wizard stepped up to the cluster of monitoring equipment, conjured a view in a small memo space, and panned across a bare slope to focus on a silvery box slung between four long thin articulated legs. ‘Run the sequence,’ she told the air.
The robot jerked forward, stalking stiffly to a cluster of lumpy black spikes that jutted from a frozen puddle of soot. It extruded a nozzle that jetted a brief mist, and the spikes immediately developed a rash of luminous orange blotches.
‘That was a spray of N-acetylglucosamine,’ Sri Hong-Owen told Loc.