Gardens of the Sun (9 page)

Yota asked if there was anything he could do.

‘You can order transport. I need to get to the other end of the city right away,’ Loc said, and called the hospital.

 

The city’s main hospital, badly damaged by fire during the war, had not yet been repaired, so its medical services had been relocated to a converted warehouse at the eastern end of the city’s tent, close to the freight yards. The place was in uproar when Loc and Yota arrived. After Loc’s call, the hospital’s supervisor had checked the pod where the little girl was being treated: she had disappeared, a nurse lay unconscious in the pod, and something had shut down the hospital’s surveillance system. Soldiers and drones had set up a perimeter and were going from pod to pod, room to room. Loc found the captain in charge and told her that the little girl was very dangerous but under no circumstances should lethal force be used.

By now, Loc’s aide had transmitted a video clip from the shoulder camera of a member of the salvage crew. There’d been a clear shot of the girl’s face through the faceplate of the helmet of her pressure suit, and Loc had recognised her at once. Avernus’s daughter, Yuli.

The captain was a sturdy, competent young woman who listened calmly to Loc’s brief explanation about who the girl was and where she had come from. ‘She could be anywhere in the city now,’ he said. ‘Patch me in to your superior. I want to call an immediate curfew, lock down every possible exit, and flood the place with drones.’

‘She knocked out the hospital’s system, but the cameras on the streets were still working,’ the captain said. ‘I had an AI process their footage. It found no trace of her.’

‘Then she used the service tunnels. There’s a maze of them under the city.’

The captain shook her head. ‘We have good surveillance down there, too. Ever since we found a posse of rebels hiding in one of the pump rooms. Fixed cameras, bots and autonomous drones. So far, none of them have picked her up. She’s still in the hospital, sir. Be patient.’

‘Evacuate the patients and staff. Seal it up, flush knock-out gas through the air-conditioning, then send drones in to look for her.’

‘We’ll find her, sir.’

‘She’s no ordinary little girl, Captain. She’s a monster.’

They stared at each other. Then the captain said, ‘I’ll need to get authority from my CO.’

‘I’m in charge,’ Loc said. ‘If anything goes wrong, I’ll carry it.’

He would be in a bottomless amount of trouble if he fucked up, but he didn’t care. He needed this prize so very badly.

The captain, Bethany Neves, was young but wouldn’t be intimidated, and insisted on contacting her commanding officer before she began the evacuation. Her soldiers sealed off the building and escorted staff and patients out through the main entrance one by one, past a gauntlet of drones and armed marines. It took more than an hour. The lieutenant colonel who had command of city security arrived and tried to take charge, but by then Loc had managed to talk briefly with Arvam Peixoto and the general had given him control of the operation, telling him, ‘Find her and bring her to me. Alive or not at all.’

At last, the evacuation was complete. The doors were sealed and a narcotic gas was introduced into the air-conditioning system. Loc had a bad moment, picturing the girl calmly putting on a breathing mask and attaching it to an oxygen cylinder. He told Captain Neves, and she said that the gas worked very quickly.

‘One whiff and you’re out cold. She won’t have time to realise what’s happening, let alone do anything about it.’

‘She could have guessed what we planned to do.’

‘We’ll find her and bring her out alive,’ Captain Neves said.

It took thirty minutes for the gas to infiltrate every part of the converted warehouse. Drones moved through rooms and corridors, and located a heat spot in a service duct close to the entrance.

Loc insisted on going inside with Captain Neves, a squad of marines, and a medical technician. He didn’t want to do it but knew he must or else lose his authority. Parched by booze, caffeine, and adrenaline, he had a bad case of the shakes as he crept after the others. They were all wearing full-face masks and white nylon oversuits. Three marines aimed pulse rifles at the duct while a fourth cut into it with a power saw. Peeling back a big flap of plastic, exposing the girl huddled unconscious amongst water bottles and ration packs. No doubt she’d planned to wait out the search and then slip away. The technician slapped a tranquilliser patch on her forehead and fastened a mask over her face, and one of the marines lifted her out.

A slender figure dangling limp and helpless in the man’s arms. Loc’s prize. His ticket to a better place. His way back in.

Sri Hong-Owen didn’t hear about it until a news bite hit the nets: a brief announcement that Avernus’s daughter Yuli had been taken into custody following a collaborative action between the civilian administration of Dione and the military, soundtracked over video of a tall young girl dressed in an orange jumpsuit and sitting at a table in a bare room with two burly marines behind her. Propaganda no doubt meant to dishearten the resistance. No details about how or where she had been captured, or whether she had given up anything useful about her mother. Sri tried to reach out to Arvam Peixoto, but couldn’t get past an aide who, even though the line was strongly encrypted, refused to give her any information ‘for obvious security reasons’.

Sri was on Titan, exploring one of Avernus’s gardens. It had been located just six weeks previously by one of the autonomous drones: a small tent capping a shaft drilled into a volcanic dome west of Hotei Arcus, giving access to domains of ammonia-rich water seething with a complex ecosystem of halflife prokaryotes. She ignored Vander Reece’s advice, told him he was in charge of the crew until she returned, and flew north in one of the dirigibles to Tank Town.

The journey covered some seven thousand kilometres and took a little over two days. Flying under the hazy orange sky across a vast desert of transverse dunes neatly combed in parallel rows hundreds of kilometres long, built from crunchy grains of frozen gasoline and shaped by prevailing winds that blew steadily from west to east, with long shallow slopes scalloped and sculpted on the upwind sides and steep slip faces on the downwind sides. The sun, a pale spotlight blurrily magnified by the dense atmosphere and ringed by shells of diffused light, tracked across the dense orange smog that sheeted the sky, slowly descending towards the western horizon through Titan’s long, long afternoon. At last, a low range of hills appeared out of the haze: outliers of the northern uplands, a rumpled province of ammonia-water ice carved by the lightning forks of dry river channels and dappled with thousands of lakes, some little more than shallow ponds, others small seas the size of North America’s Great Lakes. It was midwinter. Methane accumulated during the summer rains was evaporating from the lakes, leaving behind ethane doped with benzene and complex hydrocarbons. The larger lakes had shrunk inside their contoured beds and some of the smaller ones had dried up completely. The braided river channels were dry too. This dark, rugged landscape spreading away under the omnipresent orange haze, the tops of ridges and low domed hills palely gleaming where ammonia-water ice had been stripped of overlying organic material by aeolian erosion and run-off from the methane and ethane rains.

Tank Town squatted on the shore of one of the largest of the lakes, the Lunine Sea. The Brazilian base was a few kilometres to the north, a segmented structure built from discarded cargo shells and raised on fat struts and wrapped in silvery quilted insulation, its fission pile lofting a pale plume of steam bent by the constant wind. The traffic master refused to lay on a special shuttle, so Sri was stuck there, buzzing with frustration like a bee in a bottle, until the scheduled supply run arrived. She tried and failed to get information on the capture of Avernus’s daughter, collated her field notes, and paid a visit to Tank Town’s mayor, Gunter Lasky.

The old man was of the pioneering generation which had fled from the Moon to the Outer System, and the first person to have established a permanent home on Titan. One hundred and thirty-eight years old, he’d outlived three wives, and his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren comprised a significant proportion of Tank Town’s population. He was boastful and vain, an old pirate king acting out the myths of his cunning, idealism and intestinal fortitude, but he was still a potent force in Titan’s micropolitics. He and two of his sons had brokered a neutrality deal with the TPA and claimed to know as much as anyone in the Jupiter and Saturn systems about Avernus. But he told Sri now that he knew little of any importance about Yuli, saying that the girl had never visited Titan.

‘She isn’t as young as she seems, I can tell you that. Did you ever meet her?’

‘Once,’ Sri said. ‘From a distance.’

It had been two years before the war, at the opening ceremony of the biome at Rainbow Bridge, Callisto. Sri had designed the biome’s ecosystems and had been looking forward to showing them to Avernus, who’d helped to underwrite the cost of its construction. But the ceremony had been disrupted by the appearance of the corpse of a murdered man, carried by drones across the surface of the biome’s central lake, and in the subsequent confusion Avernus and her daughter had vanished. Sri had chased them to Europa, but had been recalled before she could make contact. The memory still rankled, a significant portion of her vast store of frustration. Sometimes it seemed that she had been chasing Avernus half her life.

Gunter Lasky said, ‘How old did Yuli seem then? Eight? Nine? She will seem no older now, I bet, even though Avernus popped her out of an ectogenetic tank more than twenty years ago. Raised her in one of her gardens, as if they were castaways on some desert island. Avernus was given to long disappearances then. Before she became involved in the peace movement, before she returned to the public eye and installed herself in Paris, she was a recluse. A hermit. Hardly ever seen. Mostly communicating through her so-called entourage, although they didn’t see much more of her than anyone else. It isn’t that she can’t bear to be around people, or that she doesn’t like them. What it is, she doesn’t need them. But I suppose she must have been lonely, so she made herself a daughter . . .’

The old man fell silent. Lost in some distant memory, staring out at the chthonic landscape beyond the big diamond window, where habitat drums three or four storeys high and capped with steep conical roofs were raised on stilts amongst vivid green farm tubes. Beyond the little settlement, fields of black crusts, spikes, and giant fins stretched away under orange haze towards the dry shore of the Lunine Sea. Gunter Lasky and Sri were sprawled side by side on a mound of low cushions amongst big-leaved tropical plants and vines growing in gravel beds set in the floor, Sri nursing a glass of mint tea, Gunter sipping wine made from grapes he’d grown himself, the only grape vines on Titan. He was a skinny, pale-skinned old satyr with an abundance of white hair and a white beard plaited with coloured strings, wearing only shorts cut down from a suitliner, a swirling mandala tattooed in black ink on his chest, earrings looped around the rims of his ears, and a chain strung between rings in his upper lip and his eyebrow.

‘By making a daughter, I suppose you mean that Yuli is a clone,’ Sri said, prompting him.

‘Hmmm. Most say so, but I don’t believe it. The young people who worship Avernus can’t believe that anyone as old as she is could ever have had sex, but we were lovers, once upon a time. Did I ever tell you about that?’

‘You told me that you’ve known her a long time,’ Sri said. She was excited and intrigued by this unexpected revelation, but wary too. This could be another of the old man’s tall tales, a skilful blend of fact and misinformation got up to divert her from an important truth.

‘Our little fling was more than eighty years ago,’ Gunter Lasky said. ‘Long before I settled down and married my first wife. But it is clearer to me than yesterday. Yes, for a season or two, when this world was as yet mostly unexplored and Tank Town was no more than a landing platform and a single dome, we were lovers as well as collaborators. I taught her about lovemaking and she taught me about designing vacuum organisms. So it’s not impossible that Avernus got herself pregnant by the usual means, although I imagine that she would have used the poor man as a sperm donor, nothing more. She’s chilly that way.

‘Oh, she was passionate in the act,’ the old man said, with an exaggerated and astonishing lewd wink. ‘But afterwards she’d go away inside her head, no use asking what she was thinking. She was brilliant, of course. And vivid and a lot of fun, when she wanted to be. But more often she was moody and remote, impossible to live with. Although we did live together for a little, and worked together, too, building a new home on a new world. A world we explored hand in hand, so to speak, and made our own. But she had interests elsewhere. No one world can hold her for long, let alone one man. Not even me. You understand, I know. You and her, you’re somewhat alike.’

‘Did she ever talk with you about her daughter?’

‘I only saw Avernus a handful of times after Yuli was born. And - you may be astonished to hear this - I always respected her privacy. I didn’t pry. I heard stories, of course. That Yuli was a clone, yes, many times. That she’d been cut to be some kind of immortal superhuman. All kinds of nonsense, none of it remotely true. What I can tell you is that Avernus has grown strange in her old age. She had a mystery about her, of course. Tossing off hints and half-formed ideas that would take us ordinary mortals years to understand fully. Making us think hard about everything she said. I didn’t always appreciate it at the time, but I realise now that it was good discipline. After all, thinking is what makes us human, eh? So by making us think hard she was making us more human. While she became, well, not less than human, but different. Which is why the young, with their strange ideas about driving human evolution in every possible direction, worship her.