Gardens of the Sun (67 page)

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure. Come out here and join us. There’s wine, and plenty of food, and the twins are playing tag in the sky.’

Macy was content to rest. Tethered on the warm slanting lawn with her daughter on one side, flushed with the hormonal health of late pregnancy, and the two men and their son on the other, the solid two-year-old jiggling happily in his webbing, a glaze of yogurt on his chin.

‘You didn’t want to go down to Earth,’ Hannah said.

‘Oh, you heard about that?’

‘I knew Newt had planned it as a surprise for you.’

‘One day we’ll all go.’

‘Not me. We have too much to do here. And I’d have to exercise like crazy, and I’ve already had enough of the centrifuge. As far as I’m concerned, gravity is for losers,’ Hannah said, shading her eyes as she looked straight up.

Macy shaded her eyes too, saw Kit and Abbie floating high above them, red and yellow wings moving in wide and lazy sweeps as they checked their momentum. And now they both turned and began to pick up speed, wings beating swiftly and steadily, laughing and calling out as they swept low above their mother and grandmother, climbing beyond the treetops so that they could do it all over again.

How they flew!

Every day the girls of Crew #1 wake at 0600 and swim from their sleep pods, a school of lithe pale mermaids undulating through the oxygenated liquid fluorocarbon that fills the tubeways and commons and work stations of their ship, a medium far better suited to permanent microgravity than air. At a little less than five hundred days old they are already fully grown. Tool belts are cinched around their waists but they are otherwise naked. The muscular barrels of their chests pump fluorocarbon through book-lungs packed with blood-rich fibrils; their arms are long and double-jointed; their fused legs flare into ribbed, fan-like fins. Their faces are round, with small pouting mouths, flattened noses, and large black eyes. Each wears on her right cheek a tattoo of spiky dots and lines that sketch the constellation of Hydrus.

There are twenty-one of them. Two of their original complement of twenty-four died in an accident while working on the surface and a third, injured beyond repair, had to be euthanised.

They collect pouches from the treacher and eat quickly, sucking up a salty gruel rich in vitamins and amino acids and casually discarding the empty pouches, halflife things that, tracking a simple chemical cue, flutter back to the treacher like flattened jellyfish as the girls swim one after the other through a short tube to the equipment bay. Two screens are already lit, showing the faces of the tutelary spirits of the ship: AI constructs animated with personalities derived from the hero-warriors Sada Selene and Phoenix Lyle. They update the girls on the progress of the other crews and give them their tasks for the day, and then the big screen on the other side of the spherical space lights up and with synchronised flicks of their fins the girls turn to face their beloved and benevolent leader, Levi.

Sometimes, while working, the girls fall into intense discussions about whether Levi is an AI construct like the mentors, or whether he is something more. A true AI, or even the image of a real person alive somewhere else in the ship. Not the real Levi, of course, but perhaps a clone. They want to believe that he is with them in body as well as in mind. They dream that when their work is done they will be allowed to meet him as a last reward.

This day as on every other day Levi talks of the great project in which they are engaged. Moving day by day in small but definite steps towards fulfilment of the auguries of the past-directed messages from his future self. The great circle of time ticking inexorably towards closure, and the glories of rapture.

And so on, and so forth.

The girls have heard variations on this theme many times before. Yet on this day as on every other day they give themselves up to it heart and mind. Levi’s words vibrate through the fluorocarbon, beat on their skins and the taut drums of their ears, thrill in their blood, the marrow of their bones.

At last Levi’s face fades from the great screen. The girls unclip their tool belts and help each other into their pressure suits and clip on their belts again, and three by three cycle through the airlock and flow away from the ship, out across the surface of the tiny worldlet.

It is a battered planetesimal: a core of water ice and silicates frozen harder than granite and caulked with thick layers of primeval hydrocarbons and pitted with craters. A lonely remnant of the swarming shoals of protoworlds of the early planetary disc; a fossil deep-frozen in the comet-haunted outer dark far beyond the orbit of Neptune. It has been greatly modified since the Ghost ship reached it two hundred and forty-six days ago. Construction robots have excavated pits along its spin axis, and the crews are assembling three huge mass drivers, each with its own fusion generator. Other robots are mining water ice and shaping it into pellets that will fuel the mass drivers, spinning fullerenes and construction diamond wire and other exotic materials from the tarry regolith, digging down into the planetesimal’s frozen core.

There is still much to do. The girls of Crew #1 relieve their sisters of Crew #3, and begin their twelve-hour shift with joyful hearts. When the work is finished, the lumpy planetesimal will have been transformed into a tapered teardrop wrapped in a diamond-mesh skin and hung behind a parasol shield of fullerene and aerogel, with fabricators and libraries of genetic information and a community of AIs held snugly in the chambers of its heart.

The girls of the construction crews will live just long enough to complete their work and supervise the start-up of the starship’s mass drivers at the beginning of its long, long voyage.

They won’t reach the stars. But their brothers and sisters will.

Parts of this novel are based on heavily modified characters and situations that first appeared in the following stories: ‘The Gardens of Saturn’ (Interzone, 1998); ‘The Passenger’ (Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2002); ’The Assassination of Faustino Malarte’ (Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2002); ‘Dead Men Walking’ (Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2006).

 

My profound gratitude to the astronauts, scientists, engineers, and flight crews of the Apollo programme, Pioneer 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, Galileo, and Cassini-Huygens for the photographs, maps, research, and first-hand accounts that have inspired and informed every part of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun.