Gardens of the Sun (33 page)

Enough, she thought. She would put Gunter Lasky to the question - she was certain that the old pirate had known about this hiding place all along - and she would recommend that Tank Town should be shut down as soon as possible. And then she would abandon the chase. She had details of Avernus’s gardens, interviews with her associates, a vast integrated database of her work. Enough. It was time to move on.

She had been thinking about the phenotype jungle on Janus recently. There was a political problem with the little co-orbital moon right now. The Pacific Union had earmarked it as one of the places it wanted to secure by settling it with hardy pioneers, had made it clear that it would proceed without the approval of Greater Brazil and the European Community. Euclides Peixoto was furious about it; when Sri had last met with him, he’d spent half the time ranting about PacCom’s recklessness. All right. She could suggest that he could pre-empt PacCom’s plans by allowing her to move her laboratory there. She would live in the phenotype jungle to begin with, and build a garden of her own. It was time she made use of everything she had learned, and she could promise to make Euclides rich by giving him a majority share in her discoveries . . .

On the adamantine ice, under Titan’s orange sky, Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen once again began to map out her future.

Five years into his sentence for first-degree murder, Felice Gottschalk was working as a trusty - a prisoner who guarded other prisoners. Before the war, ordinary criminals who had committed crimes of varying degrees of violence because of flaws or glitches in their brain chemistry would have been subjected to a battery of remedial therapies and interventions; now, they supervised and controlled hundreds of nonviolent protesters, refuseniks, former politicians and leaders of the peace and reconciliation movement, all of them crammed into the reeking tunnels of the maximum-security prison built by the Europeans outside Xamba, Rhea. Apart from dealing with suicides and the occasional sit-down protest, the work wasn’t difficult. Escape was impossible: every prisoner had a tiny capsule injected into their third cervical vertebra that not only continuously transmitted their location but also grew pseudo-axonal fibres that knitted into their dorsal root ganglion and induced paralysing migraines and muscular spasms if they took so much as one step outside the prison boundary. As for the daily routines of prison life, the prisoners had established a thoroughly democratic cooperative that reflected in miniature the life of the city before the war. Most refused out of principle to collaborate with their captors by working in the manufactories, farms or vacuum-organism fields, but they were by no means idle. Crews of volunteers cleaned the dormitories and common spaces, and maintained the life-support systems. Groups wrote and staged operas, choral works, and theatrical events; there were madrasas and discussion groups about every kind of scientific and artistic discipline, endless debates about the inexhaustible topics of ethics and morality.

Felice Gottschalk made no friends, and because he had committed the rare and repugnant crime of murder he was mostly left alone. He didn’t participate in the petty cruelties that his fellow trusties inflicted on the prisoners, but he did nothing to prevent them, either. And while many wasted hours in speculating about what they would do when they were released from prison - complex plans of revenge, fantasies about the fortunes that could be earned by working as civil police for the Three Powers Authority, or the paradises that might be constructed in one of the many abandoned oases and habitats that the TPA would surely give them to reward their cooperation - as far as Felice Gottschalk was concerned, daydreams about the future had ended when his mission to find Zi Lei had gone so badly wrong. It had been a very comprehensive failure, and now he must atone for it. For the death of his brother, yes, and for his presumption, and his folly, and the grievous sins of selfishness and pride.

He worked day shifts one week; night shifts the next. This was the pattern of his life, turn and turn about, for five years. And then one day he was summoned to the administration block and told that he could either stay in Xamba and continue to work as a trusty for the rest of his life, or volunteer to go to the Moon, Earth’s moon, and work in a new, experimental prison facility built by the European government and its allies in Brazil, the Peixoto and Nabuco families. And after ten years, he would be granted his freedom, and he could become a citizen of the European Union.

He asked the army captain where he could go after he’d been freed; the woman shrugged and said anywhere he chose.

‘Could I go to Earth?’

‘If you think you could survive it, why not?’

For the first time since he had been arrested, Felice Gottschalk felt a faint spark of hope. He had always dreamed of breathing the air of Earth, of walking under her blue skies, seeing with his own eyes her forests and oceans. Surely he would not have been offered this chance unless he deserved it. His murdered brother, Dave #27, had once told him that goodness could spring from evil, just as beautiful flowers could grow from filth. He had already spent five years attempting to atone for his wickedness. Perhaps in ten years more he might complete his penance and be absolved, and set out on a new life. Perhaps he could find some way of rededicating himself to the service of God and Gaia.

So he chose, and went to the Moon.

He travelled with three other trusties and several dozen prisoners selected by the Europeans: deposed representatives of Xamba’s Senate, members of the former government of Baghdad, Enceladus, who had fled to Xamba at the outbreak of the war, and selected leaders of the nonviolent protests. Trusties and prisoners slept out the voyage in hibernation coffins stacked in the hold of a freighter, and after the freighter achieved orbit around Earth they were transferred to a shuttle and flown onward to the Moon, and the prison, where they were revived.

Felice Gottschalk woke in the prison clinic. He was weak and confused and his entire skin was on fire. It took him a little while to understand that he had suffered a violent and atypical adverse reaction during revival. That he had almost died. The next day, when he was more lucid, the medical technician, a small, bird-like old woman with glossy red hair cut in a kind of helmet that framed her pale face, and a brisk but kindly manner, told him the rest of the bad news: he was suffering from the early stages of an autoimmune disease that somewhat resembled systemic lupus.

‘Your immune system is attacking the connective tissue in your joints and lungs, and also in your skin,’ she said. ‘Before you shipped out, did you ever suffer from skin rashes?’

‘Everyone in the prison had some kind of skin problem. The air wasn’t very clean, and we mostly ate CHON food.’

‘You are suffering from a very bad reaction right now, covering about eighty per cent of your body. I’ve dosed you with steroids to reduce the inflammation. You also have a small reduction in your lung capacity due to scarring caused by minor bouts of inflammation. That will grow worse, over time. You will find it harder to breathe, and that will affect your heart because your blood will not be properly oxygenated and so your heart will have to pump harder to keep you alive. And you have incipient leukemia, because your immune system is beginning to attack the cells in your bone marrow that create new blood corpuscles - the cells that carry oxygen. I can treat that with whole-blood transfusions. I may even be able to cure it with injections of donated blood marrow, if I can find a volunteer whose tissue type matches yours. But that won’t be easy,’ the medical technician said, looking straight at Felice Gottschalk. ‘You see, I ran your DNA through a sequencer and I discovered some novel tweaks.’

The spy tried to sit up but he was very weak - the gravity was much stronger than Rhea’s - and the impulse to kill the old woman quickly passed. He lay back, blood thumping in his skull, and asked her what she was going to do.

‘If you think I’m going to betray you to the people who run this place, think again. As far as I am concerned we’re all in this together. Even trusties. Even trusties who have been tweaked in a number of unusual ways. Muscle strands with very fast contraction times, for instance, and with unusually strong fibrils. Motor nerves that fire more quickly than the norm. Rod cells in the retina that detect infrared and near-ultraviolet light. And so on and so forth. I wonder, did the person who fixed you up want you to be a soldier?’

He looked away from her shrewd gaze.

‘There are stories that the Ghosts were stretching the limits of human gene engineering, before the war,’ she said.

‘I had an unusual childhood, but I am not a Ghost.’

‘You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. I won’t pry. But anything you do tell me may help your treatment,’ the old woman said, and explained that she couldn’t cure him because she didn’t have access to the necessary retroviral treatments. He could throw himself on the mercy of the Europeans and Brazilians who ran the prison, but if they agreed to treat him, routine genome scans would flag his tweaks and he would be exposed.

‘I can relieve the symptoms with blood transfusions and high doses of steroids and other treatments. Light therapy may sometimes be helpful, for instance. But I cannot do anything about the underlying cause of the symptoms, and they will grow worse, and more complicated, in time.’

The spy said, ‘If there’s no chance of a cure . . .’

‘You want to know if it will kill you. Yes, I’m afraid it will. But not immediately.’

‘How much time do I have?’

‘The truth is, I don’t know,’ the old woman said. ‘The genes responsible for your condition are multilocus and multivariant, and they are triggered by a wide variety of environmental cues. Put simply, your condition is the result of a complicated and unpredictable interaction between your genetic make-up and your environment. Perhaps the people who tweaked you didn’t know about it. Or perhaps they did, but thought it an unlikely side effect of the changes they needed to make. In any case, although it has some similarities to lupus, it has a different etiology, and its progress will be different, too. All I can say for certain is that you’ve been suffering from it for some time, and hibernation, or revival from hibernation, has definitely made it worse.’

‘Will I have ten years?’

‘You want to know if you will live long enough to work out your sentence.’

‘I want to know the truth.’

‘It isn’t likely, no. I’m sorry.’

It hurt to laugh. Something sharp and heavy shifting in his lungs. The inflamed skin of his face cracking in a hundred paper cuts. Tears swelling in his eyes, stinging as they rolled down his cheeks - even tears hurt. But the laughter let out something that had been squatting inside him for a long time. He could feel it go.

‘I thought I was being punished for daring to think that I was something I was not,’ he told the old woman. ‘But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t God, or fate. It was something far simpler. It was the people who made me - they didn’t do their job properly.’

Whenever it was her turn to put the twins to bed, Macy Minnot turned down the light in their sleeping niche to a starlight glow and told them a story about Earth. She had discovered that she was pretty good at storytelling; it came naturally to her, as easy as falling off a log. In fact, that was how she’d started off one of the bedtime stories - one of the stories about her fictional version of her own self.

‘I was sitting on a log in a clearing in the woods, eating my lunch, and I fell off,’ she told the twins. Han and Hannah, six years old, blond head by blond head, sharing the same solemn, sleepy gaze. ‘Why? Because I’d seen a flash in the air and I toppled over backwards as an arrow cut the air over my head and buried itself in a pine tree. The arrow was fletched with black feathers, and resin was running out of the bark around its shaft. It looked like the tree was bleeding . . .’

Of course, it took longer than that to tell, because Macy had to explain just about everything. Han and Hannah knew what pine trees were, they’d helped Macy plant force-grown saplings in the habitat’s parkland, but they’d never seen a fully grown one. And although they knew about woods in principle, they had a lot of trouble picturing a tree-filled park so big that you could walk through it for a day and not reach the end. And as for bows and arrows . . . But that was part of the fun, using the stories to teach them about life on the world that Macy had come from; where everyone had come from, once upon a time in the long ago.

Newt had his own ideas about what made for a good story, mostly involving pirates and breathless adventures in caverns under the surfaces of moons, or giant balloon cities sailing the azure ocean of Neptune’s atmosphere. Strings of colourful scenes with no shape and no real ending. One damn thing after another.

‘What you need to do,’ Macy said, ‘is find a few good characters and see where they take you. The story comes out of who they are and what they want, and the problems they have to overcome to get it. It isn’t just a bunch of stuff that happens to them.’

‘The kids like my stories a lot, thanks very much,’ Newt said.

How she loved the way his smile crimped one corner of his mouth and his eyes narrowed in insouciant challenge. Loved it even when it exasperated her. Newt could take any amount of criticism because he didn’t take any of it seriously.

Macy said, ‘My mother used to tell me stories from the Bible - the original Christian version. There are some good ones in the Old Testament. You should check it out.’

‘I already did,’ Newt said. ‘After you told me about it the first time. There are some good ones, all right, but most are pretty violent.’

‘Your pirate stories always end in a fight.’

‘They aren’t real fights, and the pirates aren’t real pirates. No one gets killed, like the giant soldier this kid knocks down with a pebble. Or the fellow who has his head cut off by two women out for revenge. I read that, and I thought, Macy’s mother told her about stuff like this when she was little? Everyone trying to conquer everyone else, slaughtering their enemies or turning them into slaves? No wonder she turned out so tough.’