Paul J. McAuley - Gardens of the Sun
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The Quiet War is over. The city states of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have fallen to the Three Powers Alliance of Greater Brazil, the European Union and the Pacific Community. A century of enlightenment, rational utopianism and exploration of new ways of being human has fallen dark. Outers are herded into prison camps and forced to collaborate in the systematic plundering of their great archives of scientific and technical knowledge, while Earths forces loot their cities, settlements and ships, and plan a final solution to the Outer problem. But Earths victory is fragile, and riven by vicious internal politics. While seeking out and trying to anatomise the strange gardens abandoned in place by Avernus, the Outers greatest genius, the gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen is embroiled in the plots and counterplots of the family that employs her. The diplomat Loc Ifrahim soon discovers that profiting from victory isnt as easy as he thought. And in Greater Brazil, the Outers democratic traditions have infected a population eager to escape the tyranny of the great families who rule them. After a conflict fought to contain the expansionist, posthuman ambitions of the Outers, the future is as uncertain as ever. Only one thing is clear. No one can escape the consequences of war - especially the victors.
Paul J. McAuley: author's other books
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Paul J. Mcauley
Paul J. McAuley
Jay Allan
Susan Burns Chong
Brian Coleman
Britannica Educational Publishing
Steven Erikson
Steven Erikson
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Table of Contents
Also by Paul McAuley from Gollancz:
400 Billion Stars
Cowboy Angels
Eternal Light
Fairyland
Pasquales Angel
Red Dust
Secret Harmonies
The Quiet War
Gardens of the Sun
Cowboy Angels
Eternal Light
Fairyland
Pasquales Angel
Red Dust
Secret Harmonies
The Quiet War
Gardens of the Sun
Gardens of the Sun
PAUL MCAULEY
Orion
www.orionbooks.co.uk
For Stephen Baxter, and for Georgina, encore, toujours.
PART ONE
WAR DAMAGE
A hundred murdered ships swung around Saturn in endless ellipses. Slender freighters and sturdy tugs. Shuttles that had once woven continuous and ever-changing paths between the inhabited moons. Spidery surface-to-orbit gigs. The golden crescent of a clipper, built by a cooperative just two years ago to ply between Saturn and Jupiter, falling like a forlorn fairy-tale moon past the glorious arch of the ring system. Casualties of a war recently ended.
Most were superficially intact but hopelessly compromised, AIs driven insane by demons disseminated by Brazilian spies, fusion motors and control and life-support systems toasted by microwave bursts or EMP mines. In the frantic hours after their ships had been killed, surviving crews and passengers had attempted to make repairs or signal for help with lasers pried from dead comms packages, or had composed with varying degrees of resignation, despair and anger last messages to their families and friends. In the freezing dark of her sleeping niche, aboard a freighter sliding past the butterscotch bands at Saturns equator, the poet Lexis Parrander had written in blood on the blank screen of her slate We are the dead.
They were the dead. No one responded to the distress signals they aimed at the inhabited moons or the ships of the enemy. Some zipped themselves into sleeping niches and took overdoses, or opened veins at their wrists, or fastened plastic bags over their heads. Others, hoping to survive until rescue came, pulled on pressure suits and willed themselves into the profoundly deep, slow sleep of hibernation. In one ship people fought and killed each other because there were not enough pressure suits to go around. In another, they huddled around an impedance heater lashed up from cable and fuel cells, a futile last stand against the advance of the implacable cold.
Many of the ships, fleeing towards Uranus when theyd been killed, had planned to pick up speed by gravity-assist manoeuvres around Saturn. Now they traced lonely paths that took them close around the gas giant and flung them out past the ring system and the orbits of the inner moons before reaching apogee and falling back. A few travelled even further outwards, past the orbits of Titan, Hyperion, or even Iapetus.
And here was the black arrowhead of a Brazilian singleship approaching the farthest point of an orbit that was steeply inclined above the equatorial plane and had taken it more than twenty million kilometres from Saturn, into the lonely realm where scattered swarms of tiny moons traced long and eccentric paths. Inside its sleek hull, a trickle charge from a lithium-ion battery kept its coffin-sized lifesystem at 4 Centigrade, and its mortally wounded pilot slept beyond the reach of any dream.
A spark of fusion flame flared in the starry black aft of the singleship. A ship was approaching: a robot tug that was mostly fuel tank and motor, drawing near and matching the eccentric axial spin of the crippled singleship with firecracker bursts from clusters of attitude jets until the two ships spun together like comically disproportionate but precisely synchronised ice-skaters. The tug sidled closer and made hard contact, docking with latches along the midline of the singleships flat belly. After running through a series of diagnostic checks, the tug killed its burdens spin and turned it through a hundred and eighty degrees and fired up its big fusion motor. The blue-white spear of the exhaust stretched kilometres beyond the coupled ships, altering their delta vee and their high, wide orbit, pushing them towards Dione and rendezvous with the flagship of the Greater Brazilian fleet.
Sri Hong-Owen was on Janus, climbing the outer slope of a big crater stamped into the moons anti-saturnian hemisphere, when General Arvam Peixoto reached out to her. Get back to the Glory of Gaia as soon as possible, he said. I have a little job that requires your peculiar expertise.
I have plenty of work here. Important work, Sri said, but she was speaking into dead air. The general had cut his end of the connection. She knew that if she tried to call back she wouldnt be able to get past his snarky aides, and she also knew that she couldnt risk the consequences of disobeying him: out here, in the aftermath of the Quiet War, Arvam Peixotos word was law. So she switched to the common channel and told the three members of her crew that shed been recalled.
Drop whatever youre doing and pack up. Were leaving in an hour.
Were already on it, boss, Vander Reece said. We got word too.
Of course you did, Sri said, and switched off her comms.
Despite the encumbrance of her pressure suit she was poised like a dancer in the vestigial gravity of the little moon, tethered to the static line shed been following up the bright slope. Below her, a stretch of flat terrain planted with vacuum organisms that somewhat resembled giant silvery sunflowers tilted towards the close horizon. Above, a scalloped ridge stood stark against the black sky where Januss co-orbital partner, Epimetheus, hung like a crooked fingernail paring. The two moons chased each other around the same track beyond the outer edge of the A Ring, one always slightly lower and faster than the other. Roughly every four years, the faster moon caught up with its slower partner. As it approached to within ten thousand kilometres, gravitational interaction kicked the faster moon into a higher, slower orbit and dropped the slower moon into a lower, faster orbit and the race started over, no end to it. A celestial version of a futile metabolic cycle. A crude metaphor for Sris life after the Quiet War.
This was her second solo outing on Januss surface, a long trek to patchwork gardens of several dozen variant species of vacuum organism that covered the inner slopes and floor of the crater. Theyd already been mapped by drones, but Sri had been looking forward to rambling through them, taking samples, searching for anything that might give her further insights into the mind of their creator, the great gene wizard Avernus. Well, too bad. Arvam Peixoto had twitched her leash, and like a good little pet she must come running to see what her master wanted. So Sri bit down on her resentment and regret, collapsed her long-handled pick and hooked it to the utility belt of her pressure suit, and swarmed back down the slope, following the line through the stands of sunflower vacuum organisms.
Their black stems towered all around her, topped by silvery dishes that focused the dim light of the sun - one-hundredth the brightness of sunlight incident on Earth - onto central nodes whose heat-exchange systems drew up liquid methane and warmed it and pumped it back down into a labyrinthine network of mycelial threads that ramified through the regolith, absorbing carbonaceous compounds and rare earths and metals that were deposited in scales elaborated around the bases of the stems, ready to be picked and refined. The sunflowers crowded close together, dishes set edge to edge in a tiled canopy that obscured most of the sky, stems rooted in a scurf of fallen scales and clumps of blocky ejecta. Despite the exiguous gravity, traversing the Stygian undercroft of this dwarf forest was hard work. Sri was sweating hard inside her pressure suit and feeling a quivering exhaustion in her shoulders and calves when at last she broke free and swarmed up the shallow slope of another crater rim, following a well-trodden path towards the tug that squatted on a landing platform a short distance from a pressure dome.
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