Gardens of the Sun (62 page)

She asked Pete what the propeller moonlets were made of.

‘Dirty ice, mostly.’

‘Any carbonaceous material?’ Macy said.

‘Some, sure.’ Pete squinted at her. ‘You think it was spun into fullerene, used to weave the wrappings and make the mass drivers?’

‘Among other things,’ Macy said, thinking of the lovely little habitat circling Nephele.

Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. Someone patched into a feed from a drone more or less directly behind the little cluster of moonlets: chips of shadow in a vast haze of icy exhaust. And now Titan’s orange disc rose beyond Saturn, and within two minutes the fusion motors and mass drivers of the Ghosts started up. Clearly, they had spotted the moonlets and realised that they would pass through the volume of space their ships would occupy just before their encounter with Titan. They couldn’t change course but they could try to increase their velocity and cross ahead of the trajectories of the moonlets.

Everyone in the room was standing, watching the big memo space, as the arc of Ghost ships powered in towards Titan.

‘They aren’t going to make it,’ Abbie Jones said, with grim satisfaction.

Thirty seconds later, the leading Ghost ship was struck by a moonlet. Ice flashed into an expanding ring of white-hot gas brighter than the sun, devouring half the mass of the enshelled ship, flaring even more brightly as the pinch field of its fusion generator let go, this avid star dimming and beginning to collapse on itself as it plunged around Titan and headed on towards Saturn. And now the second ship flared, and the third. Macy and everyone else watched in sombre silence as the fourth and last ship ploughed on untouched. It skimmed a deep chord through Titan’s smoggy atmosphere, and its ice shield, heavily degraded by passage through the picket line, broke up. Some of the chunks of debris scored bright parabolas of plasma trails through Titan’s smog and impacted along the moon’s northern hemisphere, creating a string of raw new craters; others emerged more or less intact, a broken comet tumbling in a line towards Saturn, hurrying after the cooling shells of plasma that were all that was left of the other three ships.

Now at last the tension snapped and everyone in the room fell into each other’s arms. Macy hugged Pete Bakaleinikoff; strangers hugged her. And then she was standing in front of Raphael, who pulled her close and said in her ear, ‘I need your help. Will you help me?’

‘Sure.’

‘Good. I need to go home,’ Raphael said. ‘I would very much like you to take me.’

‘Now?’

‘Please. If we don’t leave soon, we’ll miss the rest of the fun.’

Macy took a moment to talk to Abbie Jones. Telling her that she had to leave, asking her if she wanted to come to Nephele to visit her son and grandchildren, to see what they had done and hear all about what they planned to do. Abbie told her that she would come as soon as she could, but there was still much to do right here around Saturn.

‘Set up a proper city government. Make links with the other cities,’ she said, ticking off each point on her fingers. She was perched on a beanbag with a slate in her lap, glazed with exhaustion but determined and coolly focused. ‘Get ships working again. Make peace with the people of Camelot, and with everyone else who tried to save their own skins by choosing neutrality . . .’

Macy, cross-legged on the floor in front of her, added a couple of her own. ‘Deal with the Ghosts. Make sure that the Europeans and the Pacific Community don’t renege on their agreement.’

‘Persuade them to go home,’ Abbie said. ‘And find a way of starting negotiations with the Brazilians in the Jupiter System. The people of Callisto and Ganymede and Europa deserve their freedom too. We have planned and talked and discussed what to do when this day came. And now it is here and everything needs to be done at once. Take care, Macy. Get home safely and make sure that my son doesn’t go charging off on some wild mission. Make sure he waits for me to come visit.’

It was past midnight, but no one in the city was asleep. People sat outside cafés and in parks, wandered the avenues in groups large and small. Laughing and singing as they ankled along arm in arm. In one park a drumming circle had started up and people pranced and leaped like a demented ballet corps.

Fireworks were bursting in the black air above the flat roofs of the old apartment blocks as, dressed in pressure suits, Macy and Raphael rode on a trike to the industrial zone. They hitched a ride to the spaceport on one of the rolligons that had been ferrying stockpiles of arms and ammunition into the city. Macy had flown from Iapetus to Dione in Elephant, and the tug had been powered up and refuelled and a dropshell had been loaded into the cargo bay. Macy strapped into the acceleration couch in the control blister, started to run a systems check, and asked Raphael where yo wanted to go.

‘Into orbit around Saturn, about a hundred and seventy thousand kilometres out.’

‘The edge of the F Ring?’

‘You might want to make it a little way beyond the edge. And you might also want to incline your orbit above the equatorial plane by ten degrees or so.’

‘You aren’t going to tell me why, are you?’

‘I can tell you that something is going to happen. Something wonderful. ’

Macy spent some time interrogating the navigation AI, then took Elephant up, her first real solo flight, powering straight out of Dione’s shallow gravity well and accelerating inwards towards Tethys; after Elephant curved around the icy moon, it would be at the correct velocity and angle to achieve orbit outside the rings at the inclination Raphael had suggested.

She was intensely nervous. The AI had calculated and implemented flight parameters tailored to her requirements, but she knew that she didn’t have the experience to figure out her best option if she encountered something unexpected. So when the comms lit up just after Elephant’s brief burn at orbital insertion, panic speared her heart. Jesus. It seemed that everyone in the system wanted to talk to her, all at once. Macy bounced the stack of messages to Raphael, asked the neuter if yo wanted to answer any of them.

‘They already have their answer,’ Raphael said. ‘Look out across the rings, Macy.’

The broad arc of the rings fell away beyond and below Elephant’s orbit, curving out around Saturn into the planet’s vast black shadow. Tiny stars were lighting up inside that shadow, a host or cloud of little lights strung out in an arc. Macy checked the bearings and aimed Elephant’s spectrometer at one of them. No doubt about it, they were moonlets lit up by mass drivers, beginning to move away from the plane of the rings. Heading out from Saturn, towards the sun.

‘Seeds,’ she said.

‘Precisely so.’

‘The packages on them, they’re components for bubble habitats, aren’t they? We built one ourselves. Found the design in the Library of the Commons.’

‘As did we, although we have considerably modified it,’ Raphael said. ‘When the moonlets reach their final orbits, construction robots will use the remaining mass to spin bubble habitats. And inside those habitats, other robots will create gardens from DNA libraries and carbonaceous material. A thousand gardens, all different, all orbiting just inside the snow line, at the outer edge of the asteroid belt.’

‘Who are they for?’

‘Anyone who wants to live there. Sri is a great person, Macy. Isolated by her genius, yes, but the finest gene wizard who ever lived. Finer even than Avernus. This is her last gift to humanity. Now it’s time to take me home. To Janus. We still have much work to do there.’

Macy consulted the navigation AI again, and at last Elephant’s motor lit up and the tug curved inward, towards Janus. She told Raphael that she could match the moon’s orbital speed but because of the inclination of Elephant’s orbit she’d have to swing around Saturn a couple of times to bring them into the ring plane.

Raphael, fastening up yo’s pressure suit, said that it didn’t matter. ‘The dropshell will take me where I need to go. Forgive me, Macy, but at present Sri does not welcome visitors. One day, perhaps. Not yet. But if I may ask a final favour?’

‘Ask away. I guess everyone owes you a moon-sized debt of karma. I’d like to reduce mine to a manageable level as soon as possible.’

‘If you ever meet Avernus, tell her that she is welcome to visit at any time. Sri believes that she and Avernus have a lot to talk about.’

‘If I ever see her, sure. I don’t know what good it will do.’

‘You saved her life, Macy. She will listen to you.’

‘And I thought you asked me to give you a ride because you liked me, not because of who I knew.’

‘You are a power, Macy. Perhaps not as powerful as Sri or Avernus, yet still a power in your own right. I respect you for that. And one day, who knows, perhaps we will know each other well enough to believe that we are friends.’

Raphael cycled through the airlock and swung easily around the hull to the hatch of the cargo bay. A couple of minutes later the dropshell drifted away on a whisper of gas, and when it was a few hundred metres from Elephant its chemical motor lit and it dwindled behind the tug, shedding velocity. Janus swelled from a fleck of light to a lumpy sphere half in shadow; then Elephant fell past it, heading beneath the ring plane at a shallow angle. Macy used the telescope to track the dropshell as it closed on the little moon, skimming towards a huge net slung between a pair of slender pylons hundreds of metres tall. The dropshell ploughed into the net, and the net folded around it as the pylons bowed towards the surface.

Macy consulted the navigation AI again. She was going to have to swing out past Titan, then come back in and slingshot around Saturn so that she could achieve escape velocity. She had a good twenty minutes before the burn that would put her on the trajectory for rendezvous with Titan. She used the time to send a message to Newt and the twins. Telling them that she was coming home.

It was the most important funeral to have been held in Paris, Dione, since the city’s foundation. In the sprawling park at the eastern end of the new biome, quickened just a year ago, more than half the population of Paris and many visitors from settlements on Dione and cities and settlements on other moons of Saturn crowded across the Great Lawn. They picnicked and talked, danced in small groups to music played on a common band, sat in meditation circles, got up impromptu games of futzball and tig with their children, and ascended in little one-and two-person dirigibles that floated like schools of tropical fish in the bright air beneath the tent’s skin. At the centre of this great gathering, representatives from cities and settlements on every inhabited moon in the Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus systems and the reefs of the new bubble habitats, met and mingled around the canopied platform of the funeral bier with the ambassadors of Greater Brazil, the European Union, the Pacific Community and several smaller nations on Earth, and scientists, green saints, gene wizards, and former colleagues and friends of the dead woman. Such was the respect for her that everyone had come in person or had sent a human representative instead of defaulting to an avatar. There was even a pair of etiolated Ghosts, talking to no one but each other in a private hand language.

Avernus, born Barbara Reiner in San Diego, California, a city lost to the global floods of the long ago and as storied now as Atlantis or Oz, was dead at the age of two hundred and twenty-two. Everyone said that her heart had been broken by the murder of her daughter. She had refused to renew any of her longevity treatments and had worked on in the research facility gifted to her by the people of Greater Brazil until she had died in her sleep after a brief illness. Although she had been born on Earth and had spent her last years there, she had lived most of her life in the Outer System, and after some discussion her body had been brought to Paris, Dione, where she had famously campaigned for peace before the Quiet War.

Dressed in an ancient white smock coat with hand-crafted pens and scalpels and a slide rule in its breast pocket, her lined face still and calm and empty, Avernus lay on a simple trestle banked with flowers left one by one by those who stepped up to pay their respects. Her funeral was an informal celebration of her life. Anyone could approach one of the attendants and ask for a turn to speak at the lectern in front of the bier to reminisce about the dead woman, to thank her for her work or for some small kindness, or to read out a few lines of poetry or prose. East of Eden’s best fado singer sang a long lament. A string quartet from Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, played Barber’s Adagio. A tin-man robot tottered up, leaking steam at its joints, and in an elaborate mime attempted to plant a flower and sprinkle it with a watering can packed with smoking carbon dioxide - a performance piece by one of Paris’s microtheatres. And although Avernus had believed that the Universe had been created by a chance confluence of physical laws and properties, priests and rabbis and imams and monks commemorated her passing in their fashion, chanting prayers or spinning prayer wheels, burning fake banknotes, lighting candles and cones of incense.