‘It won’t ever be the same, of course,’ he said. ‘For one thing, the climate is still completely buggered. There are places where it hasn’t rained for a hundred years. But we must let the land find its own direction. That’s the important thing. And we have had some small successes. Before I was assigned here, I had the honour of working with a crew in Darwin that was restoring a portion of the Great Barrier Reef. Using real corals to replace the artificial ones. Oh, it will never be as glorious as it once was, but if it works half as well as they claim, it has some small potential.’
Sri questioned Tommy Tabagee about the artificial corals, startled him with a few insights and ideas. Around them the other guests ate and drank and chattered, and marines in white jackets brought plates of food and took away empty plates and refilled glasses. Tommy Tabagee drank only water and ate quickly and neatly, like a machine refuelling, telling Sri that people like her were desperately needed back on Earth, it was a pity she had to waste her time out here.
‘I wouldn’t call investigating Outer technology a waste of time,’ Sri said. ‘I learn something new and useful every day.’
But Tommy Tabagee didn’t take the bait, telling her instead that he’d also learned a thing or two in his brief time in the Saturn System.
‘Best of all, as far as I’m concerned, was discovering that these moons have their own songlines,’ he said, and explained that songlines had been the key to the survival and civilisation of his ancestors. ‘In the long ago, my people lived in a country that was mostly scrub or desert, with scant and unpredictable rainfall. So they had to lead a nomadic existence, moving from waterhole to waterhole. These not only supplied food and water, you understand. They were also places where neighbouring tribes met to conduct ceremonies and exchange goods. Using a barter system very like the Bourse which regulated the economies of the Outer cities and settlements before the war, as a matter of fact. So they were important in all kinds of ways, and they were linked by paths called songlines, because the principal trade was in songs. Each tribe had its own song cycle, and traded verses with other tribes. Trade in goods was secondary to the trade in songs. And the songs, you see, they defined the land through which they passed.’
‘They were maps,’ Sri said.
She was thinking of the web of static lines that her crew had laid across the moonscape around the phenotype jungle’s pressure dome, the gardens she hadn’t had time to visit.
‘Exactly so,’ Tommy Tabagee said. ‘A man could cross hundreds of kilometres of desert he’d never before visited, using the information in songs he’d learned from other tribes. He wouldn’t have seen it that way, of course. He’d have said that he dreamed the land into existence as he sang. Which was why he had to get the song exactly right. Of course, the land here is even more unforgiving. No waterholes, and no food. Not even air! But the Outers have scattered oases and shelters across their moons, and in my opinion it is possible to think of the routes between them as songlines. I’m pleased to say that the Outers on Iapetus are very receptive to this notion. They are very intimate with their territory and they navigate by landmarks, just as my ancestors did.’
‘Is that why you’re here? To learn the songs of Iapetus and all the other moons?’
Tommy Tabagee’s playful smile revealed a notch between his front teeth. ‘I hope you’re not making fun of my cultural inheritance, Professor Doctor.’
‘I didn’t mean to,’ Sri said. The stuff about songlines and dreaming the world into existence was mumbo-jumbo that mythologised a basic survival strategy, but she believed that it revealed something useful about the Pacific Community’s plans for the territory it had seized.
‘I hear you’re interested in the gene wizard Avernus,’ Tommy Tabagee said, smartly changing the subject. ‘Do you know we have one of her gardens on Iapetus?’
It was a small tented oasis on the anti-saturnian hemisphere of Iapetus, he said, near the mountainous ridge that girdled the moon’s equator. The ground inside had been planted with stuff that looked like bamboo: tall black stalks that stiffly swayed and rattled in random gusts generated by the air conditioning. Every thirty days the stalks sprouted banners of every conceivable colour and pattern, died all at once, and released the banners, which swarmed and blew in a great cloud in the gusty air. Compatible banners exchanged genetic material by folding themselves together and forming a patchwork chimera that pulled apart into two halves that fell to the decaying mulch left by the stalks. And then new stalks arose, and the cycle began again. An endless round of growth and reproduction that generated fleeting patterns of random and unrepeatable beauty.
‘Maybe you can tell me what it means,’ Tommy Tabagee said. ‘Because I’m buggered if I can.’
‘I don’t think it means anything in particular. Apart from its own intrinsic meaning, that is.’
‘So it’s a work of art, is it?’
‘Avernus likes games,’ Sri said. ‘And her games are both playful and serious. They’re an expression of the whimsical side of her talent, and they also explore the possible expressions of the limited number of natural and artificial genes currently available. Evolution has been doing just that for more than four billion years on Earth, a little less in the ocean of Europa. It has produced many intricate and marvellous wonders, but they are a mere drop in the sea of the information space that defines every possible expression of life. Avernus’s gardens are expeditions beyond the edges of current maps of artificial genetics. She is creating new territory, just as your ancestors believed that their songs created the territory over which they walked.’
Tommy Tabagee thought about that for a moment, then said, ‘You like her, don’t you?’
‘I admire her.’
Sri felt a little flinch of caution, wondering if the spry little man knew just how badly she had been humiliated the only time she and Avernus had met.
Instead, he asked her about the gardens she’d discovered and explored, and they talked pleasantly until white-jacketed marines moved forward to serve coffee and Arvam Peixoto rose to make a short speech about the necessity for cooperation between Earth’s three great powers. When the general was finished, Tommy Tabagee told Sri that now he’d have to sing for his supper, and stood up and gave a graceful response. And then the dinner was over, but before Tommy Tabagee left he told Sri that he’d met her green saint once.
‘Oscar Finnegan Ramos, that is. He was a fine fellow. I was sorry to hear about his death.’
Sri’s flinch was stronger this time. Sharp as a needle stabbing her heart. According to the official story, Oscar had died of sudden-onset multiple organ failure, one of the signature syndromes suffered by those kept alive by longevity treatments. Until recently, Sri had believed that only she and Arvam knew the truth, but a few days before she’d left for Janus she’d found a handwritten note on the fold-down table in her cabin.
I admire your bold move. If you ever need help, contact me.
Sri had recognised the round, childish scrawl at once: it was Euclides Peixoto’s, a cousin and rival of Arvam’s who had been given oversight of one of her projects before the war. She’d swabbed the note for DNA, had failed to find any, and had destroyed it. She hadn’t told Arvam about it, even though it meant that one of Euclides’s agents must be on board the flagship; she’d been badly burnt by the internal politics of the Peixoto family once before and she didn’t ever again want to become involved in their intrigues. But now she was struck by the unpleasant thought that Euclides might have been spreading rumours about Oscar’s death to weaken Arvam’s position, and wondered if Tommy Tabagee knew or suspected that she had killed Oscar so that she could escape the tangle of intrigue that had threatened to trap her, and throw in her lot with Arvam Peixoto and the war effort.
She told the PacCom liaison secretary that Oscar’s death was an untimely loss, to herself and to the Peixoto family and the scientific world; if he noticed that her face had stiffened into a mask he gave no sign of it, saying that Oscar had been a fine man who had contributed so much to the great cause.
‘If you have half his scruples and a quarter of his talent, you’re all right by me, I reckon.’
After Tommy Tabagee and the rest of the Pacific Community delegation had returned to their ship, Arvam Peixoto intercepted Sri and asked her what she and the liaison secretary had been talking about.
‘The two of you were as thick as thieves.’
‘Isn’t that what you wanted? He told me that they found one of Avernus’s gardens on Iapetus. More or less invited me to visit.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Arvam said.
‘I might learn something useful about the PacCom’s plans.’
‘They’ll feed you a mess of grey info and naked propaganda while subtly pumping you for useful information. And besides, you’re a valuable asset,’ Arvam said. ‘I’d look like a damned fool if I let you go there and you decided to defect.’
Sri couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. ‘I’m sorry that you think I’m too naive to be trusted.’
‘You’re the most intelligent person I know. But you don’t know much about people. One of my aides is writing a summary report about your tête-a-tête with Mr Tommy Tabagee. Check it over, add any comments you feel necessary, sign it off, and have it on my desk tomorrow morning,’ Arvam said. ‘Oh, and you can tell me how you plan to fix up our hero pilot. It’s about time you started earning your keep.’
3
Some fifty days after he’d defected, the spy at last returned to Paris, Dione.
It had not been an easy journey. He’d fallen from orbit in a stolen dropshell, skimming through a hole in the Brazilian surveillance-satellite network, landing inside a small impact crater in the high northern latitudes of Dione’s sub-saturnian hemisphere, walking away across a frozen, gently undulating plain. He was short of air and power and had to reach a shelter or an oasis as quickly as possible, knew that his former masters would be searching for him and that he faced disgrace and execution if he was captured, yet in those first hours of freedom his heart floated on a flood of joy. All around, beyond the shell of his pressure suit, with its intimate chorus of clicks and whirrs, the tide of his breathing and the thud of his pulse, the moonscape stretched silent and still, lovely in its emptiness. The dusty ground glimmering golden-brown in the long light of the low sun. Saturn’s swollen globe looming half-full above the curved horizon, bisected by the black scratch of the ringplane, which printed crisp shadows across smoggy bands of butterscotch and peach and caught fire with diamond light as it shot beyond the gas giant’s limb towards the tiny half-disc of one of the inner moons. He felt as if he was the emperor of all he surveyed. The only witness to this pure, uncanny beauty. And for the first time in his brief and strange life, master of his fate.
He’d been shaped before birth, moulded and trained and indoctrinated during his strange childhood, dispatched to Dione before the beginning of the war on a mission to infiltrate Paris, sabotage its infrastructure, and soften it for invasion by Brazilian forces. He’d carried out his mission to the best of his considerable abilities, but his sojourn amongst the Outers had changed him. He had fallen in love, he’d begun to understand what it meant to be truly human, and then he’d betrayed the woman he loved for the sake of his mission. But now he was free of every obligation and duty towards God and Gaia and Greater Brazil. Free to be anything he wanted to be. Free to find Zi Lei, and save her from the aftermath of war.
And so he bounded along in exuberant kangaroo hops, chasing his long shadow across the plain. Several times he misjudged his landing and tumbled and fell amongst spurts of dust, wrenching his wounded shoulder. It didn’t matter. He bounced to his feet and bounded on, eager and happy, reaching a shelter some sixty kilometres from his landing spot late in the long afternoon.
Hundreds of these tiny unmanned stations were scattered across the surfaces of the inhabited moons, insulated fullerene shells buried in ice and surrounded by fields of tall silvery flowers that transformed sunlight into electrical power, providing basic accommodation where hikers and other travellers could stop for the night. The spy ate a hasty meal, fed a little sugar solution to the halflife bandage that covered the raw bullet wound in his shoulder, then swapped his Brazilian military-issue pressure suit for the shelter’s spare - it fit his lanky frame better, and its lifepack had a longer range - and filled a slingbag with supplies and hiked on towards a crater rim that stood at the horizon. He walked up the long apron of the slumped ridge and near the top found a good hiding place in a deep cleft between two house-sized blocks that had been shattered and overturned by the ancient impact, and unrolled an insulated cocoon and climbed inside it and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. He slept for sixty hours, through Dione’s long night and most of the next day, and woke and headed out to the next shelter, where he showered and ate, recharged his suit’s batteries and topped up its air supply, and walked on.
He travelled like this for more than forty days.
The land dropped in a series of broad, benched terraces into Latium Chasma, a long linear trough carved by a catastrophic flood of ammonia-rich meltwater early in Dione’s history, before the little moon had frozen to its core. He hiked along the broad plain of the chasma’s floor, moving from shelter to shelter, sleeping in shallow crevasses or in the deep shadows of embayments in the gouged and pleated cliffs of the trough’s eastern wall. He was certain that he was still being hunted, but although Dione was only a little over a thousand kilometres in diameter it had a surface area of four million square kilometres - half the size of Australia - and the Brazilian forces were small in number and would be mostly deployed around Paris. Even so, he would now and then spot in the black sky swiftly moving points of light crossing from west to east, and feel as exposed as a bug crawling across a microscope slide.