Gardens of the Sun (22 page)

Frankie Fuente, his current partner, was a cheerful cynic who said that he took the world at face value so that he wouldn’t ever be disappointed or surprised by anything. A big man with dusty black skin and a genial manner, he’d been promoted from first sergeant to lieutenant after the accident that had put him on the PR circuit. He and Cash had been getting along just fine for the past three months. They’d both joined the Air Defence Force to escape the dirt-poor towns in which they’d been born, Cash in East Texas, Frankie in the arid badlands of Paiuí where plantations of Lackner trees soaked up excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and vultures flew with just one wing so that they could fan themselves with the other because it was so damn hot.

Frankie’s PR story was that he’d lost both his arms when he’d been trying to defuse a booby trap that an Outer saboteur had attached to a gig. Truth was, he’d confided to Cash one drunken night early in their partnership, he’d been high on three patches of rize while working in the maintenance bay of the Glory of Gaia, and his arms had been severed above the elbows when he’d accidentally triggered a hydraulic ram. He had artificial arms now. The fake artificial arm that covered the new arm growing from the high-cut stump of his left arm, and the real artificial arm that permanently replaced his right arm. The latter, woven from fullerene fibres and covered in halflife skin, could bend like a snake and had a mind of its own whenever he detached it, pulling itself about with its hand, hiding in dark places, and, according to Frankie, driving his lady friends wild in bed.

His real and fake artificial arms crossed on the wet concrete of the edge of the infinity pool, his chin resting on them as he floated in the water, Frankie told Cash, ‘Here we are with a view that would make a green saint come, in the house of a man so rich and powerful he has, count ’em, not one, not two, not three, but four children. And I bet you aren’t enjoying any part of it because you’re thinking about your speech. Which you’ve given fifty times already, to my certain knowledge.’

‘Matter of fact, I was watching that bird soaring over yonder,’ Cash said.

It was a big bird, some kind of eagle maybe, silhouetted against the blue sky as it turned and turned in a thermal. Cash had been wondering what it would be like to hang out in the airy gulf so lightly and easily, heart pumping quick and hot in a cradle of hollow bones, broad wings outspread, fingering the air with big primary feathers, eyes sharp enough to pick out a mouse twitch a kilometre away. He was allowed to putter around in the little one-lunged two-seater prop planes used in basic training, and that was it as far as flying went these days, but he’d once soared like that eagle . . .

Frankie turned his head to look at Cash and said in a kindly tone, ‘You’ve been in a mood all day. And now that mood is turning into the mood you get before you have to speak. I wouldn’t mind that you can’t ever relax, Captain, except it makes it hard for me to relax around you.’

‘You have my permission to go relax somewhere else, Lieutenant.’

‘You flyboys are all the same,’ Frankie said. ‘You all concentrate on the thing you have to do next. That, and maybe the next thing, but no more than that.’

‘That’s what you have to do, if you want to survive in combat.’

‘Yeah, but that’s how you are all the time. You’re obsessing about your speech right now, even though it’s no big thing. Because, as far as you’re concerned, it’s not enough to go out and just do it. No, you got to go out and be the best you could ever be, time and time again.’

‘Better that than screw the pooch.’

Frankie grinned sideways at Cash. Sweat beaded the black skin of his broad forehead and shaven scalp. ‘That right there is what I believe they call the crux of the problem. Because what you don’t ever see, what you don’t ever believe, no matter how many times I tell you, we can’t ever screw this particular pooch. You give the best speech you can, Captain, and the punters will bathe in your righteous aura of manly courage and applaud your fine display of grace under pressure. Or you give the worst performance of your career, and the punters will still applaud, and feel sorry for you too, because you are so clearly fucked up by what happened to you in the war. You understand? The pooch, it is absolutely and positively no-two-ways-about-it unscrewable.’

Cash knew that Frankie Fuente was right, but it wasn’t in him to not try to give his best. So that night, dressed in his pressed blues and polished black knee boots, a rack of unearned medal ribbons on his chest and his peaked cap folded under his right arm, he made small talk with members of the Bernal family, industrialists and their uncannily beautiful wives, and a smattering of high-ranking civil servants, and then he gave his speech, hitting the keynotes with pinpoint precision. He told the story of how he had been wounded while attempting to deflect a chunk of ice aimed at a base on one of Saturn’s moons, described how the Quiet War had been so quickly and comprehensively won, explained that the cost of waging war around Jupiter and Saturn would be rewarded by exploitation of the Outers’ skills, technology, and knowledge base, and reminded his audience that the space industry was important both for the security of Greater Brazil and the health of the planet. Orbital sunshade mirrors had done much to ameliorate the effects of the massive amount of thermal energy pumped into Earth’s weather systems during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And moving industry off-planet, mining raw materials from asteroids and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and fully exploiting the Outers’ treasure trove of novel technologies, would make it possible to return Earth’s land and oceans and atmosphere to their primal pristine state and remake the planet into a pre-industrial paradise, Cash said, his voice soaring at the end like that eagle, just the way he’d been taught.

‘Man, I don’t know why you get so tense beforehand,’ Frankie Fuente told him afterwards. ‘You’re a natural.’

‘I reckon I scored 7.5 out of a possible ten. A definite could-do-better. ’

The next day, the two heroes flew in a tiltrotor to Caracas, where they did their thing at a big reception: a thousand high-ranking citizens partying in a gilt and marble hall with a ceiling so high it seemed to generate its own climate. There was a weird undercurrent to the glittering gathering. Soldiers and aides coming and going, knots of men talking in low voices, and then, halfway through the proceedings, an announcement by the host, Euclides Peixoto: he had been summoned to Brasília, but he hoped that everyone would be able to enjoy themselves in his absence. Cash and Frankie gave their speeches, but the applause was thin and half-hearted, and the reception broke up immediately afterwards.

Frankie had organised a couple of women anxious to sample the manly courage and righteous auras of genuine war heroes. Cash woke at dawn with a mouth full of cotton wool and panic tolling like a bell in his head. He sat up, heart racing, sweat starting across his flanks. The lithe young woman half-asleep beside him sighed and burrowed deeper into the silk pillows and sheets. A moment later, Frankie Fuente came into the room through the French windows that opened onto the balcony of their suite and told him to get his ass out of bed.

‘What’s up?’

Frankie was bare-chested and one-armed, his white shorts luminous against his black skin. ‘History is up, Captain. You best come see.’

On the balcony, Cash looked out across the grid of streets, giant apartment blocks, and tower farms. Grey in the chill pre-dawn. Spires of smoke rising here and there. The thin wail of sirens. Police drones shuttling through the deep shadows between the blocks and towers; police helicopters beating above the rooftops.

‘What is it, some kind of food riot?’ he said, but Frankie had already pushed through the billowing white curtains at the other end of the balcony, into his room. Cash followed. Frankie was kneeling low at the edge of his bed, hunting beneath it for his real artificial arm. The room’s memo space glowed in one corner, tiled with news feeds. Cash watched for a moment, then said, ‘She’s dead?’

Frankie stood up, holding his writhing right arm in the hand of his short and skinny left arm. ‘That’s what they’re saying.’

Cash said stupidly, ‘I met her last year.’

Frankie plugged the writhing snake into his stump and it grew rigid and he flexed it at elbow and wrist and there it was, his right arm. An everyday magic trick courtesy of Outer technology. He said, ‘I met her too. All us war heroes met her one time or another. But I guess that exposure to our manly auras wasn’t enough to save her.’

Every news feed was saying the same thing. Elspeth Peixoto, the president of Greater Brazil, was dead. She had died in her sleep yesterday evening; the news had been suppressed until all the members of her family had been informed. She had been president for more than sixty years. She had been one hundred and ninety-eight years old.

Cash thought of Euclides Peixoto last night, his hasty speech and his quick departure. He said, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of our little tour.’

The two men watched the mosaic of talking heads and archive clips that showed Elspeth Peixoto at every age.

Frankie said, ‘Remember when her husband died?’

Cash said, ‘I flew over his funeral service.’

‘Get out of here.’

‘Swear to God and Gaia. He was Commander-in-Chief of the Air Defence Force. We did a fly-by over the cathedral in Brasília. A wing of J-2 singleships in “missing man” formation.’

‘Remember how everything stopped for two weeks either side of the funeral?’

‘Not really. I was on the Moon.’

‘This is going to be ten times worse,’ Frankie said, and went into the bathroom and came out with towels and little bottles of unguents and lotions clutched to his chest. He stuffed everything into his ditty bag and started hunting through the drawers of the chiffonier, tossing things onto the bed. When Cash asked him what he was doing, Frankie said that he might not get another shot at being a war hero, so he was taking what he could right now.

‘They’ll cancel the rest of our tour, no doubt. But there’ll be another one after things shake down,’ Cash said.

‘You got to see the big picture, Captain. Lose your flyer’s tunnel vision. Take a long hard look at what this means. The Peixotos are the chief supporters of the return to space, colonising the Moon, pushing back out into the rest of the Solar System. They tried to make nice with the Outers, and when that didn’t work they went to war with them. Sure, there were other families involved, they pulled the Europeans in with them, and the Pacific Community tagged along too because it didn’t want to miss out. But none of it would have happened without the Peixotos,’ Frankie said. He was folding up the top sheet of his bed into a tight square. ‘And the president, God and Gaia speed her soul to heavenly rest, she was a Peixoto. She was in power for sixty years, and now all the other families will be jostling for the top spot. It’s going to be messy, it’s going to change everything, and while it’s going on there will most definitely be no need for war heroes. We’re out of business, Captain. When I told you the pooch was unscrewable? I was wrong. We couldn’t screw it up, but this surely has. What do you think of that picture?’

‘I don’t think things will be as black as you’ve painted them.’

‘I mean the picture over the bed. I reckon it would look nice on the wall of my momma’s house. Come over here and hold it steady,’ Frankie said, pulling a folding knife from a pocket of his ditty bag, ‘while I cut it out of the frame.’

Loc Ifrahim was up in the junkyard station, in orbit around Dione, when news of the death of the president of Greater Brazil splashed across the TPA net. It was a shock, but not unexpected. The woman had been almost two centuries old, and in her dotage. And she’d never recovered from the death of her husband. Still, she’d been a power, and now there was a vacuum, and various alliances in the great families would be manoeuvring to fill it as soon as possible after the state funeral. Loc began to calculate what it might mean for the TPA. What it might mean for him.

In the days that followed there were reports of riots in several major cities, renewed fighting with wildsiders along the edges of unreclaimed land, and flare-ups of nationalist activity, especially in the territories that covered the former United States of America, where an independence movement calling itself the Freedom Riders had issued demands for immediate secession from Greater Brazil. But these were minor problems, and the government showed no sign of falling over. There was no revolution, no coup. Armand Nabuco, the vice-president who’d long been the power behind the throne, a dark prince who had built up his own branch of security, the Office for Strategic Services, and controlled several government offices that weren’t answerable to any of the Senate oversight committees, was installed as president pro tem, pending an election.

Armand Nabuco made it clear that he supported the continuing occupation of the Outer System, but six days after the state funeral of the president, while Greater Brazil and the moons it controlled in the Jupiter and Saturn systems were still locked in a period of official mourning, two ships quit Earth orbit for Saturn, and it was announced that General Arvam Peixoto had been promoted and would return to Greater Brazil, and the military authority that dominated the Brazilian presence in the Saturn System would be replaced by a civilian administration led by Euclides Peixoto.

Immediately after the announcement, the general and his senior officers withdrew from all engagements and executive committees. According to the official line, they were preparing for the handover, but there were strong rumours that they had been surprised by cadres of the Office of Strategic Services, were being kept under house arrest pending their removal, and did not dare to step out of line because their families were being held hostage back on Earth.

The groundwork for the swift and ruthlessly efficient decapitation of Arvam Peixoto’s administration must have been put in place long before the death of the president. Many people believed that her death had not been due to natural causes but was the culmination of an ingenious plan to seize control of the government. Loc Ifrahim did not. Armand Nabuco had already possessed all the power he required, and he’d been free to act unseen in the shadows behind the figurehead of a beloved president over whom he had complete control. No, he hadn’t been responsible for her death, but he would have made extensive plans and preparations to silence or emasculate potential troublemakers and rivals after she died, and to ensure that he would keep control of the power he’d accrued. And Arvam Peixoto would have been high on his list. The general had gained considerable political advantage after winning the Quiet War, and had more or less declared himself a free agent when, despite explicit instructions to the contrary from the Brazilian senate and military command, he’d dispatched a ship to Uranus to search out and neutralise rebel elements, destroying four of their ships and several habitats, and driving a few no-account survivors deeper into the outer dark.