Gardens of the Sun
Part Three. The Changing of the Guard.
5.
Sri Hong-Owen was walking a transect of the rim forest early one morning, collecting hand crabs for a population survey, when Euclides Peixoto called her out of the blue. He told her that there'd been a little trouble she should know about, back on Earth, and read out a brief official announcement about a successful action against a nest of criminals in Antarctica who had been in flagrant breach of the new regulations controlling scientific research. Survivors had been arrested and transported to Tierra del Fuego; their laboratories had been destroyed.
‘I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but there it is,' Euclides said, not sounding sorry at all.
‘Alder. Is he one of the survivors?'
Sri was standing knee-deep in a ferny glade amongst tall sugar pines, a long pole fitted with a loop of smart wire in one hand, a catch net containing a big hand crab in the other, her spex showing Euclides Peixoto's face in a window of virtual light. Shock had scooped her hollow. She felt as cold and weightless as a ghost. She felt as if she was about to fall off the face of the world.
Euclides said, ‘I understand your son ran away before the fireworks began.'
‘Then he's alive.'
‘The soldiers looking for him think so.'
‘How many people were killed? Do you have a list of casualties?'
‘I can't tell you offhand, but it looks like the place was very thoroughly trashed,' Euclides said, and put up an inset showing an aerial view of the station, buildings burned-out in splashes of black along the snowy shoreline of the fjord.
It was bad, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Sri's shock was fading, displaced by cool calm anger. She could have told Euclides Peixoto that innovations produced by the scientists in her Antarctic fastness had, over the years, earned his family more than ten billion reals, that their work had not been illegal in Greater Brazil until the new regulatory bill had been passed two months ago, and because it was not now nor had it ever been illegal in Antarctica the attack was a violation of at least three different international treaties. But nothing she could say would unmake the raid or help Alder, and if Euclides was hoping that she would break down or lose her temper, she wasn't about to give him any kind of satisfaction.
‘OSS will probably want to talk to you,' Euclides said. ‘It would save everyone a lot of trouble if you could give them some advice about where your son might be hiding.'
‘You can tell them I don't have the first idea where to find him,' Sri said. She pulled off her spex and sat down amongst the ferns, absent-mindedly watching the hand crab pick at the knotted mesh of the catch net with its strong black nails as she thought things through.
After Arvam Peixoto had been recalled to Earth, the garden habitat where he'd made his headquarters had fallen vacant -- Euclides Peixoto had chosen to live in Paris, and the Air Defence Force had reassigned Arvam's people elsewhere. So Sri had moved in, setting up laboratories in a wing of the mansion, building a string of small tents containing experimental biomes on the icy plain south of the habitat's dome, planting fields of novel vacuum organisms. The hand crabs were the first of her experiments in bodymorph design, scuttling creatures with a bony carapace, four multi-jointed ‘fingers' and a peglike ‘thumb', and a cluster of simple compound eyes over a mouth equipped with flaps and feelers. A hundred days ago, she had released a batch into the forest that circled the rim of the habitat's tent and they had multiplied and spread with gratifying speed -- the crab in the catch net was a fat and healthy specimen with a beard of translucent nymphs budding beneath its busy mouthparts.
She'd been planning to pull crabs from burrows along several transects, measure their age and size and reproductive health, and work up an estimate of population growth and health. A simple little nature study. A bit of fun. Well, there was no time for that now. She opened the catch net and tipped out the crab, which hitched around in a crooked circle before scampering away across a stretch of ground softly carpeted with pine needles and vanishing into a shrubbery of elderberry that marked the course of a stream at the edge of the glade. Then she called her assistants and gave them the news, explaining that it was obvious that the attack had been instigated by the radical green faction in the government.
‘I want to find out why my contacts in the Senate failed to give any kind of warning, and why Euclides Peixoto had the news before me. I want to find out how many people were killed and injured and I want to know what has happened to the survivors. If they are being held prisoner, if charges are being brought against them, I want my lawyers in Brasília to provide legal representation as soon as possible. I want a collation of any news items about this atrocity, and reactions from the governments of the European Union, the Pacific Community, and the other signatories of the revised Antarctic treaty. But first of all, I need a gig. I have to go to Paris. I have to talk to Berry.'
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had brought Berry with her when she'd taken charge of the habitat. She'd employed tutors to fill in the gaps of her son's patchwork education, indulged him by supplying animals and birds he could hunt in the rim forest, taken him on trips to the so-called free cities of Camelot, Mimas, and Athens and Spartica on Tethys, and done her best to give him some direction and shape to his life. Then, on his sixteenth birthday, Berry had tried to enlist in the Air Defence Force and had been turned down flat. He'd blamed Sri for that, and for everything else he believed had gone wrong in his life. After a series of epic rows and sulks he'd moved to Paris, and that was where Sri went now, still enveloped in her wintry calm, piloting a gig across the low-relief moonscape, landing at the outer edge of the spaceport on the floor of Romulus Crater, and hitching a ride to the city in a military rolligon.
sergeant in charge of the garage next door to the freight yard's cluster of airlocks told Sri that all the trikes had been signed out. She could wait or walk, her choice. She tried to call Berry for the tenth or twelfth time, but he was still offline. So she walked, loping along in an efficient low-gravity gait she'd long ago perfected, past silent manufactories and warehouses, past untenanted apartment blocks whose walls were covered with graffiti scrawled by soldiers of the occupation force: mad, multicoloured galleries of regimental badges and mottos, belligerent boasts, and cartoon atrocities.
streets were deserted. Apart from a few hundred essential workers, no Outers were allowed to live inside the city limits, and the TPA's civil servants, private contractors, and military personnel lived and worked in the Green Zone at the centre of the city, or in offices and apartments built around the railway station at the top of the long slope of its park. The air under the latticed roof of the tent was cool and still and stale, as in a house that had been shut up and abandoned. The halflife grass that covered the avenue was newly laid and vividly green, but the palm trees that lined it on either side, planted after the war to replace the city's famous sweet chestnuts, were dying, the blades of their crowns yellowing or dry and brown. In the middle of a big intersection, a statue of an astronaut in an antique pressure suit lay where it had been toppled from its plinth; the park beyond was a basin of dry dust scored everywhere by tyre tracks. An arcade of artisans' workshops, long ago smashed and looted, gaped like a row of caves. Off-duty soldiers lounged outside a corner café; several whistled at Sri when she went past. She circled the barricades of the Green Zone, passed a row of burned-out buildings, their roofs collapsed and walls slumped and blackened like blowtorched candle-wax, and tracked across another dead, dusty park towards the compound, a square, white structure at the foot of the park's sloping tracts of replanted forest.
Before the war, when Paris had been at the forefront of the resistance to the incursion of the Brazilian and European joint expedition, Avernus and her crew had taken up residence in the compound. Afterwards, Arvam Peixoto had given it to Sri. One of his little jokes. Now Berry lived there.
Sri hadn't visited her son for more than a hundred days: the reeking squalor inside the compound was as shocking as a slap to her face. The formal plantings of the central courtyard had been trashed and several people were sleeping or had passed out amongst litter that lay everywhere. A young woman wearing fatigues with the sleeves torn off, displaying muscular arms glossy with military tattoos, sat cross-legged on the slender wing of a bench, forking up beans and rice from a ration pack; when Sri asked her if Berry was at home, she jerked a thumb towards the string of rooms on the other side of the courtyard.
Berry was sleeping in a dark and hot little room amongst half a dozen young men and women. He was naked and half-drunk or drugged but docile enough, pulling on a pair of combat trousers and following Sri outside, yawning and scrubbing at his eyes with his fists. They sat down on the parched grass of the lawn and Sri told him straight away that the research station in Antarctica had been attacked and Alder was missing.
‘Don't worry,' she said. ‘Alder and I knew it was likely to happen. We made extensive plans that covered every possibility. Right now he will be hunkered down in a shelter, waiting until his enemies stop searching for him. As soon as it's safe he'll send a message.'
Berry thought for a moment. His complexion was blotchy; his eyes sore and red-rimmed. He'd put on weight -- a fold of his belly bulged above the waistband of his combat pants as he sat tailorwise – and he had a tattoo on his arm, an animated red devil with horns and barbed tail that over and again jabbed splashes of fire with its pitchfork. He'd grown out his hair and tied it back in a tightly pleated pigtail that hung past his shoulder blades. The style in which Arvam Peixoto had once worn his hair, Sri realised. At last he said, in his slow, sleepy drawl, ‘My brother's smart. He can outwit the bad guys.'
‘Of course he can.' Sri paused, then said, ‘These are dangerous times, Berry. I think you should come back to the habitat for a little while. You'll be safe there, and you can be a great help to me.'
She knew that Berry liked the military, its discipline and order, its fetishism of violence, and planned to have him help out with the habitat's security. The seasoned ex-marine sergeant presently in command would look after him, teach him, set him straight. But when she started to explain it to him, he shrugged and said that he wanted to stay in Paris.
‘I have friends here. I have work.'
‘I've just seen some of your friends. I won't ask who they are or why you have allowed them to trash the compound, but it breaks my heart to see you waste your life, Berry. You're so much better than this.'
‘I'm not wasting my life. I have work here. My own club. A place where soldiers can hang out and kick back. I like doing it, I'm good at it, it's what I want to do,' Berry said, with the anxious look he always got when he thought that he was about to be punished, or something he treasured was going to be confiscated.
Sri tried to explain that, because the new president lacked supporters in the Senate, he'd been forced to form a coalition with senators belonging to the radical green faction. And they had not only pushed through a great deal of hardline legislation, but were also using their power to remove or diminish everyone who disagreed with their policies. ‘That's why they targeted Alder. And that's why you should move back with me, Berry. Just for a little while. In case someone decides to make an example of you because of your brother's so-called crimes.'
‘Your crimes,' Berry said. ‘That's what this is all about. The things you did. That you made Alder do.'
‘He was doing good and necessary work. As was everyone at the research station. People you knew, Berry. People who may well now be dead.'
‘It's all about you. It always is. I can't go back to Earth because of what you did there. I can't enlist. And now you want to ruin everything I've done here, like always.'
‘I should have taken better care of you,' Sri said. ‘Paid a little more attention to you. I know that, and I apologise. And this club of yours, I'm pleased to hear that you've been able to find something you like. It shows initiative. Why not use that initiative to help me, and help Alder, too?'
They talked back and forth for half an hour, but it did no good. Berry went through his usual stages of denial -- clumsy attempts to change the subject, irrational anger, finally a smouldering sulk. Sri lost her temper and told him to stop being so selfish, to think about where his brother might be now, the hardships he must be suffering; Berry said that he'd learned all he knew about selfishness from her. Nothing she said got through to him after that, and then, because her assistants hadn't been able to obtain any useful information about the raid on the research station, she had to endure a brief meeting with Euclides Peixoto, who presented her with a list of casualties and watched her study it with a sly and eager shine in his gaze, no doubt hoping to suck up any morsels of grief.
There were three people missing, including Alder, and fifteen confirmed dead -- names she knew, men and women she had recruited and trained, who had accepted Alder's leadership without question after she had been forced to leave Earth, who had continued to do excellent and important work. Euclides said that the survivors would be held at an army camp in Tierra del Fuego until his family had decided what to do with them.
‘Frankly, this is something of an embarrassment to us. A black eye, politically. So they'll probably have to sit in that camp until things are calmer and we can see a way forward. It might take some time. You should be prepared for that,' Euclides said. ‘Oh, and I have been asked to ask you to forget about any legal manoeuvres. It will only embarrass the family further. If you do, there will be blowback. And if that doesn't hurt you, it will certainly damage your people.'
‘In the end, "my people" were working for the family. And if the family had protected them to begin with, it wouldn't be in this embarrassing position now.'
‘They were breaking the law. And the family can hardly condone that, can it?' Euclides Peixoto, dressed in a tailored version of the blue tunic and trousers of the Air Defence Force, was standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of his office, his back to the view of the tree-clad slopes of the park and the river that cut through it. He was a handsome man mantled with the languid arrogance of someone who had never needed to exert themselves to get what they wanted, vain and foolish but possessed of a weaselly cunning and proven to be a survivor blessed with no small amount of luck.
Before the war, Euclides had fallen in with the faction in his family that had opposed the attempts by the green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos, Sri's mentor, Euclides's great-uncle, to promote peace and reconciliation with the Outers. Euclides had tried to use Sri in a plot to depose Oscar, but she had realised that she would almost certainly be killed afterwards and had made her own move, killing the green saint, escaping from Earth, giving herself up to Arvam Peixoto. But now Arvam was dead, and Sri was once again at the mercy of Euclides. He couldn't punish her for Oscar's death because of his complicity in the wretched and sordid plot, but he never missed an opportunity to remind her of how much he enjoyed having power over her.
When she suggested that the scientists and technicians from the Antarctic facility could be brought out to Saturn, where they would be of immeasurable help in sorting through the treasure trove of the Library of the Commons, he said that she wasn't the only person doing research in that area, and besides, as he was sure she knew, the security of her position had been undermined by the recent unfortunate events in Antarctica.
‘No point going to the trouble of shipping people all the way out here, only to send them straight back if you're recalled,' he said, and changed the subject, stepping daintily across the room to a display case containing a pressure-suit chestplate decorated with an intricate painting. ‘It's one of Munk's Seven Transformations of the Ring System. The last in the series. You know him? Munk? He was one of the big artists out here, before the war.'
‘I don't know much about art,' Sri said.
‘Me neither. But this fellow Munk, I'd say he did a pretty good job on this. You'll never guess who presented this to me. An old friend of yours and mine from way back when.'
‘Loc Ifrahim.'
‘Either that's a good guess, or you know something I didn't know you knew.'
‘It was a reasoned deduction. We have few people in common, and Mr Ifrahim is the only one who has ready access to looted works of art. I assume he is trying to ingratiate himself.'
‘I have to admit that he's been useful now and again. The fellow that owned this used to be the military commander over on Camelot, Mimas. Colonel Faustino Malarte. Remember him? He was tangled up in a scandal involving smuggling stuff like this and selling it back home.'
‘I'm not interested in politics.'
‘I know. You don't care about things that are important to other people; you only care about your work. That isn't a criticism, by the way. In fact, it's the one thing I like about you. It means I can talk to you about politics because I know you won't make any use of what I let slip. Anyhow, good old Malarte, he was the subject of an intensive investigation. Our friend Loc Ifrahim was part of it -- he started it up in fact, although he did it in such a sly way that most people didn't notice. So Malarte was duly investigated and found guilty of abuse of his office. And then, while he was waiting to be sent back to Earth in disgrace, he was murdered by a couple of Outers. You really don't know any of this? I guess not. Well, it's a good story,' Euclides said. ‘One of the killers was an associate of the member of Camelot's senate who'd been helping Malarte get hold of the stuff he was smuggling to Earth. The other was Malarte's mistress. Who'd started sleeping with him to save a couple of members of her family from prison, but they went to prison anyway. Anyhow, Malarte was in so much trouble that when they killed him, they did him a favour -- saved him the embarrassment of a court martial and the firing squad. Which I found kind of annoying, to be frank, since he was a scion of the Pessanha family, and we Peixotos don't agree with them about all kinds of things. A juicy court martial would have been a nice black eye for them. Instead, they got a martyr. But that wasn't why I had the killers executed. It was because we can't have Outers killing our people, even if those happen to be liars and rapists and crooks.'
‘I suppose you are trying to make some point with this sordid little tale,' Sri said.
‘I'm coming to it,' Euclides said. ‘This chestplate was one of the choicest items looted by Malarte. Loc Ifrahim liberated it, and he presented it to me. Naturally, I had it checked out. And you know what? Turns out it's a fake. See, Malarte's mistress, she was a pupil of Munk's. So either the Outers were swindling Malarte, selling him fakes, or Loc Ifrahim had the mistress cook up a fake in exchange for giving her the opportunity to get her revenge. Malarte was killed in the storage vault where he was keeping his loot before it was shipped out. The woman got hold of the code for its lock, and she and her accomplice ambushed him there. The investigation concluded that she had stolen the code, but I wouldn't put it past Loc Ifrahim to have slipped it to her. The sly son of a bitch gets rid of Malarte, he gets hold of a very valuable work of art, and he makes it look like he did me a personal favour. And aside from all that, he swung it so his very close friend Captain Neves was made chief of security over in Camelot. That Ifrahim, he's a player. But don't worry, I'm keeping a very close eye on him. One of these days he'll slip, and I'll be there. Ready to present him with his own head.'
Sri was only mildly appalled by Euclides's story. She'd long ago become habituated to the intrigue, rivalry, and criminal behaviour amongst the senior members of the TPA. And while diplomats, civil servants, contractors and senior officers of the armed forces systematically looted the cities and settlements of the Saturn System, Euclides Peixoto strutted and bullied like the worst kind of prison commandant.
Greater Brazil had played a major role in winning the Quiet War, but it had not been magnanimous in victory or charitable to those it had defeated. Cities whose governments had rolled over before the war and remained neutral still retained a degree of independence, but their citizens could not travel anywhere without first applying for permission that was hardly ever granted, they were constantly monitored and checked, access to the nets was limited, meetings of more than five people were banned, and so on and so forth. The situation was even worse on Dione, where almost all the Outers were by now penned in the prison camp of the so-called New City. Most of their possessions had been confiscated, they endured countless random inspections and interviews, and food and water and other essential supplies were strictly rationed. According to Euclides Peixoto, it was the most effective way of keeping them under control, but it was a constant source of friction between his administration and the governments of the free cities, and a pointless waste of the Outers' expertise and skills.
And the political climate was growing ever more hostile to the Outers. Plans were being drawn up to ship so-called high-risk prisoners, including surviving members of Paris's government, to a special camp on the Moon, and a full-scale test of a so-called ‘zero-growth initiative' had just been implemented in the New City, where everyone above the age of twelve had been injected with contraceptive implants. The radical green faction in Greater Brazil's government believed it was not enough to police and control the Outers: they should also be prevented from having children. There would be no death camps or mass executions, merely a slow, humanely controlled dwindling until the last genetically modified human being died and the anti-evolutionary threat posed by the Outers was ended for ever. It would take at least a century, but it was vitally important for the survival of the human race.
If Greater Brazil had defeated the Outers by itself, then the zero-growth initiative might already have been rolled out on all the other inhabited moons of the Saturn and Jupiter systems. But the European Union had moral objections to an enforced mass-sterilisation programme, and the Pacific Community had not only entered into a working partnership with the population of Iapetus but was also shipping in colonists from Earth, expanding its base on Phoebe and threatening to annex and settle several of the smaller moons whose few inhabitants had been forcibly removed after the war.
Disagreement between the three members of the TPA over the direction and aims of the occupation had developed into a kind of Cold War stand-off, prickling with mistrust and paranoia. And so, despite the increasing power of the radical greens, Greater Brazil wasn't yet willing to give up exploitation of the Outers' scientific and technological knowledge; at least, not while the European Union and the Pacific Community were still plundering it and there was the chance that they might stumble on a fragment of exotic physics, mathematics or genetic engineering that would become the cornerstone of a new technology as world-changing as aeroplanes or antibiotics. Radical green legislation meant that scientific research in Greater Brazil was now licensed and controlled by a new and fanatically fierce regulatory body, but work on the Moon and in the Outer System remained unfettered because it was deemed necessary for state security. Nevertheless, even though Sri and her assistants were able to explore Avernus's gardens, reverse-engineer Outer biotechnology and mine the great archives of the Library of the Commons with only minimal interference from review boards and oversight committees, she was driven by an increasing sense of urgency, of time running out.
By now, Sri believed that she had a firm grasp of the principles that underpinned the design of the exotic gardens created by Avernus. She had interviewed many people who had known the gene wizard or had worked with her, and although attempts to construct an expert AI simulation had so far proved disappointing she had not yet given up on the idea. More data was needed, and further integration of existing data. Sri was developing algorithms that mapped the possibilities of what she called ‘biological information space' and had learned a great deal about the way in which Avernus's many and varied gardens maintained homeostasis -- some had been cycling through a variety of states without ever exhibiting population crashes or extinctions for fifty years or more. She had also devised many new wrinkles in the design, function, and propagation of vacuum organisms, and used them to create strains that exhibited pseudosexual recombination of their basic instructions and stochastic inheritance of varieties of the pseudoribosomes that transcribed instructions and the pseudomitochondria that underpinned their metabolic functions: features that allowed variation between individuals, and therefore the potential for evolution by Darwinian selection.
And in addition to all of this, her most recent row with Berry had stimulated a new interest in the development of the human brain and the fundamental neurological mechanisms that generated and regulated emotion. It proved to be a useful distraction from her anxiety about Alder, and in her usual fashion when dealing with a field in which she had only a little basic knowledge, Sri read widely and digested and summarised what was known and made lists of important questions that had not yet been answered. Discounting Freudian fairy tales and dubious socio-anthropological comparisons with young, subdominant male chimpanzees, there seemed to be a consensus that adolescent misbehaviour -- tantrums and sulks, inchoate rages, all the rest -- was caused by changes in the brain during its final maturation at puberty. The effects of this rewiring were more pronounced in boys than girls because the changes were not only driven by huge doses of testosterone surging through the bloodstream, but were also compressed into a shorter time-frame, causing a radical disconnection between emotional states and higher consciousness.
At bottom, Sri thought, it was one of the side effects of the extremely conservative nature of brain evolution. Despite drastic modifications of body form, all vertebrates possessed the same basic structures -- forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain -- that carried out the same basic functions. Thus, although the neocortex had massively ballooned in mammals (and most especially in human beings), it was underpinned by a limbic system similar to those possessed by reptiles, amphibians, and fish. And it was in the limbic system that mechanisms regulating basic emotions such as joy, distress, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust were located.
These emotions, and the typical facial expressions associated with them, were universally recognised by every human culture. They were hardwired into the brain, they were often expressed within a few milliseconds of being triggered, and they were triggered via stimulation of the sensory thalamus without intervention of higher functions in the neocortex, so that people could be catapulted into states of fear or anger without first making a conscious, reasoned analysis of the trigger. In evolutionary terms this short-circuit was a survival technique that made perfect sense. If a lion jumped out at you, you had to start running at once; if you paused to think about whether or not you needed to run, you'd be killed and eaten. But because people no longer lived in the African savannah, many of the situations that triggered basic emotions had nothing to do with immediate survival, which meant that many human cultures and individuals exhibited heightened responses to situations that did not require heightened responses. And this was most pronounced in adolescent males -- they went from zero to a hundred with no stages in between, and there was no point trying to reason with them because their reactions did not proceed from reason: conscious thought only became involved afterwards, producing post hoc justifications for irrational behaviour.
A second set of universal emotions -- the blushings of love, guilt, shame, and embarrassment; the pricking thorns of pride, envy, and jealousy; the pleasurable feeling of acceptance by others that the Japanese called amae -- were associated with higher cortical functions and took longer to build up and longer to die away than basic emotions. Some, like jealousy or shame, were shared by other primates, or even by other mammals. Others, like envy or guilt, appeared to be unique to human beings. There was much speculation about instances where primates or other mammals seemed to exhibit the latter emotions, but as far as Sri was concerned no one had ever produced any unimpeachable evidence. And all were fundamentally social, associated with interaction with peers rather than environmental stimuli, and because they took more time to develop than basic emotions, they were more amenable to the general background state or coloration of the brain -- to mood -- and could be altered by learned experience. Basic emotions like the fright/flight reflex differed from culture to culture by only a small degree, but higher cognitive emotions showed a great deal of variation.
So if you were going to make human beings more rational, Sri thought, you would have to suppress basic emotions, perhaps by making them harder to trigger, and enhance emotions associated with higher cognitive functions. Of these, amae was the most interesting. Even though there was no word for it in Portuguese, English or any of the other major Western languages, it was definitely universal. Sri knew it as the feeling she had after making a successful presentation to her peers. Approval, belonging, being valued.
Evolutionary psychology provided a pat explanation: amae had been selected in hominids struggling to survive on the African plains because it was part of the social glue that bound together individuals in a tribe, and so made the tribe stronger, less prone to divisive squabbles, more prone to cooperation and swift agreement. But Sri wasn't interested in Just-so stories, however plausible. She was interested in utility. And she was especially interested in evidence that amae appeared to alter the threshold for triggering basic emotions, suppressing those that, while useful in preserving the life of the individual, were potentially destructive to group cohesion. If she could find some way of triggering or inducing amae, she thought, she could make Berry feel that he was part of something, that he was wanted, cared for, appreciated, then perhaps he would become less prone to tantrums and sulks. He could find it in himself to love her again.
Outers had done much useful work on amae, for it was a vital part of their various attempts to create scientific Utopias, and Sri had several interesting discussions about it with one of the leading researchers, Umm Said, in the prison camp of the New City.
Built by the Brazilian occupying force twenty kilometres north of Paris, Dione, the New City was a living demonstration of the benefits of cooperation, mutualism, and communal action that amae promoted and rewarded. Although the narrow wedge of its tent was jammed edge to edge with hopelessly overcrowded and shoddily constructed apartment blocks, it was by no means a slum. Tiny gardens flourished everywhere. Platforms had been cantilevered from the sides of the apartment blocks and fibrous netting spread over the rest of the walls, transforming utilitarian structures with spills and terraces of crop plants and herbs. Playgrounds, little cafés, and other social spaces had been built on the roofs, and all the roofs were linked by slides and ziplines. As with public areas, so with private spaces. Although Umm Said lived with her partner and their four children in a single small room, it was clean and bright and exceedingly neat. Their scant possessions were stowed in a couple of chests or hung from pegs, bamboo-fibre mats covered the floors, and cushions were set around a low table, the only piece of furniture -- the family slept on thin mattresses that they unrolled every night.
A tall elegant black-skinned woman, Umm Said had a quick, sharp mind, and like all Outers was generous and unstinting when it came to sharing her ideas. She and Sri sipped green tea, nibbled sushi prepared from kelp and rice and fermented beans, or little dumplings or rolls fried on a tiny hotplate, and spent hours discussing higher emotional states.
According to Umm Said, the Outers' predisposition to behaviour that fostered feelings of amae was encouraged by exposure to all kinds of environmental cues, from city planning to the small change of social interaction, and was reinforced by positive feedback. Individuals whose behaviour enhanced the amae of others were also more receptive to cues that boosted their own amae. Outers also possessed a culturally specific emotion, wanderjahr, that was expressed most strongly in their teens and twenties, a yearning restlessness that drove them to leave home and travel from moon to moon. Supporting themselves with menial jobs, they discovered what excited and engaged them, experienced every variation of Outer culture, and learned how to get along with every kind of person. And because this taught them to be open-minded and tolerant, and made them feel that they belonged not to any single social subgroup or city but to the entire Outer System, they were predisposed to adopt amae as their primary or default emotional state.
Sri, an habitual contrarian, pointed out that the flip side of an emotion that promoted cohesion of a tribe or cohort was a heightened sensitivity to signals and signs denoting difference and otherness. In stressful situations, this sensitivity could direct hostility and intolerance towards outsiders, and the positive feedback of peer approval would amplify individual attacks into mob behaviour.
Umm Said said that this idea was very familiar to Outers. ‘That's why we have a system of carefully calibrated checks and balances. A kind of hydraulic mechanism that diverts collective emotion into secondary channels before it can build up into an unstoppable flood.'
‘It didn't work too well in Paris. It was under mob rule at the beginning of the war. Your "hydraulic mechanism" was overtopped.'
‘That's because our mayor dismantled too many of the usual checks and balances. Of course, he was just one generation removed from Earth,' Umm Said said. ‘His father was a diplomat from the European Union who made his home here.'
‘So Marisa Bassi was an outsider who lacked the ant pong of the mob. A bad seed who didn't understand the importance of amae.'
‘Perhaps he understood it too well, and used it for his own ends,' Umm Said said. ‘The point has been extensively discussed, as you might imagine. Unfortunately, he was killed during the battle for Paris, so we'll never know the truth.'
‘His body was never found, and I've heard claims that he didn't die after all. That he is leading the deadenders -- what you call the resistance,' Sri said.
‘Their methods are certainly as futile as Marisa Bassi's. And far less effective than the collective practice of nonviolent protest.'
‘I don't see any evidence that one is any better than the other,' Sri said. ‘You've tried every kind of nonviolent tactic, from boycotts and sit-ins to hunger strikes. And yet here you all are, in this prison camp.'
‘Persuasion through enlightened discussion is also a form of nonviolent resistance,' Umm Said said, and with a steady hand refilled Sri's bowl with green tea.
By now Sri was a long way from her original goal of finding a way to choke off Berry's tantrums and anxieties. The work had become an obsession, an end in itself, as her work so often did. She believed that Umm Said was wrong. That being born and raised as an Outer wasn't the only way to acquire a strong propensity towards amae; that it might be possible to re-engineer the brain to make it less prone to behaviour driven by the basic emotions of the limbic system. If an emotion could be culturally acquired or reinforced, then the reentrant paths that process engraved within the brain could be mapped. And if they could be mapped, they could be synthesised.
She wrote a speculative paper, presented some of her work via avatar at various meetings of behavioural psychologists and neuroscientists in Greater Brazil, and received some encouraging feedback. The research had taken up much of her time since the attack on the Antarctic research facility, but she justified it to the oversight committees by talking up the insights gained into Outer behaviour and social control, and speculating about practical applications such as crowd control and media manipulation. She'd spent years pandering to factions within the Peixoto family, and knew exactly how to tickle the self-interest of civil servants and politicians.
p>In the middle of this, one hundred and sixty-three days after Alder disappeared, one of Sri's data miners flagged an anodyne comment on one of the science boards. I hope you will continue to enlighten us with your excellent and uplifting work. It was one of the blind messages that she and Alder had arranged to use in case of an emergency. It meant that he was alive and safe.
Sri spent the rest of the day floating on air. Alder had not been killed when the research facility had been raided. She did not know where he was, who he was with, or what he planned to do, but she knew that he was alive, that he had at last escaped from Antarctica, and he felt safe enough to have sent the message. She knew better than to attempt to send a reply or post an acknowledgement that she had received and understood his message. When he was ready, he would contact her again. He was brave and intelligent and capable. He would find a way that would allow him to emerge from hiding without being arrested. He would find a way to begin to rebuild his power base.
Meanwhile, Berry moved from Paris to Camelot, Mimas and started up another club, this time in partnership with a crew of young Outers. It seemed that Outers who had grown up after the war and could no longer go on wanderjahrs because of the travel restrictions imposed by the TPA were growing ever more restless, like caged birds unable to begin their migration at the appropriate season. Their frustration was expressed in escalating social turmoil, from minor acts of vandalism and refusal to perform civic duties to increased use of psychotropics and a spew of anti-establishment artworks and texts. Some attempted to justify their rebellious attitude by cobbling together a nihilist philosophy based on twentieth-century Situationism and several flavours of anarchy; Berry and his new friends ran a club in Camelot's free zone, Club Blank, where the movers and shakers of this movement congregated and held court. They believed in the absolute extinction of hierarchy, in judging everything by its context rather than by categorical principles, and in metaphorical analysis of everything, from language to cultural identity, using an array of invented mathematical and pedagogical languages. There was a playful, pranksterish aspect to all this. If everything floated free, valued only for its utility within whichever context it happened to occupy, nothing much mattered: everything, including the movement itself, was a kind of elaborate in-joke. But Berry took it very seriously indeed, and he believed that the club's rituals -- the pounding tribal rhythms of its music and the wild freestyle dancing of its denizens, its elaborate lightshows, the psychotropics that boosted serotonin production and produced analogues of the so-called oceanic feeling in which the self dissolved into its environment -- were far more than a way of escaping the mundane world for a little while. No, as far as he was concerned, they were a religious experience: a true transformative ecstasy that brought you closer to God.
Sri had a violent falling-out with Berry after she suggested that she could help him to obtain the same emotional state by using forced MRI feedback, tailored viruses, and other carefully controlled protocols to manipulate the reentrant pathways of the brain. She told him that it would help him to control his mood swings; he said that she was trying to turn him into a docile zombie. They had a violent, lacerating argument, and Berry was also using a formidable battery of psychotropics by then. For a little while, he was utterly lost to her.
Sri worked. It was what she did. It was what she was. And then, a little over a year after the raid on the Antarctic facility, still no word from Alder apart from that one message, a sympathetic officer in the Titan base told her that one of Avernus's spiderholes had been found.
#####
Sri quit Dione for Titan the same day. She didn't bother to ask permission of Euclides Peixoto or the military transport office. She appropriated a shuttle, powered straight out to Titan, and landed at the Brazilian base outside Tank Town, on the shore of the Lunine Sea. Four days later she was aboard a dirigible, approaching the northern edge of Xanadu, the continent-sized province that spanned Titan's equator.
The rough, rugged, landscape was similar to the foothills of the Himalayas -- rumpled ranges of hills cut by tectonic faulting and braided river channels -- and like the Himalayas it had been created by collision between two land masses, although on Titan these floated on an underground ocean of ammonia-rich water rather than on partially molten rock. Avernus's hiding place was at the edge of a sinuous valley that wound between ranges of craggy hills. Before tectonic activity had uplifted the area, it had been part of a river system carved by flash floods of liquid methane and ethane during the infrequent but violent rainstorms at Titan's equator. Now it was a dry playa floored with hydrocarbon sand and bounded by cliffs of ammonia-water ice frozen hard as rock and fretted with canyons and gullies that originated in alcoves in the clifftops and ran downslope, ending in triangular fans of debris.
Sri insisted on walking around by herself. She wanted to get an idea of the place where Avernus had been hiding. She wanted to ground herself in its reality.
Tall cliffs loomed above her, carved with steep gullies so numerous that the fans of debris at their feet had merged into a continuous smooth apron that sloped down to a broad valley floor cut by sinuous channels and silted with black hydrocarbon sand. Much of the sand had drifted into low longitudinal dunes at right angles to the cliffs; the dirigible squatted like a giant quilted manta ray above one of these dunes, quivering against its tethers in a stiff breeze. Beyond it, on the far side of the valley, ripsaw hills rose into the omnipresent orange haze.
Black grit crunched like popcorn under the treads of Sri's insulated boots as she trudged up a gentle slope of consolidated debris towards the cliffs. She had grown used to living as light as a bird on Dione: Titan's pull of 0.2 g made her feel that her bones had turned to stone and a vengeful old woman had clamped herself onto her back. She was badly out of breath and sweating hard inside her pressure suit when she reached the edge of an area about the size of a soccer field that had been graded flat, stretching in front of the overhang where Avernus's little plane was garaged.
The original search party had stripped away the fullerene dropcloth that had camouflaged it. It was bright red, with a big propeller at its nose and stubby wings and a closed cockpit. It would not have seemed out of place on Earth.
Sri had seen it once before, passing above her when she'd been lying on her back on a ridge inside a volcanic caldera, immobilised by a tangle of threads fired by one of Avernus's creatures. She'd resolved then and there that she would never stop searching for Avernus, and although she was at the threshold of one of the gene wizard's hiding places she did not feel any triumph or excitement. After more than four years, her prey was as elusive and enigmatic as ever.
She climbed a steep path at the edge of a gully, hauling herself up roughly carved steps, muscles burning, pulse pounding, stopping every couple of minutes to get her breath. Near the top of the cliff, the path turned and dipped into a channel so narrow that the shoulders of her pressure suit brushed its smooth walls as she descended to a standard airlock. She cycled through and stepped out onto the top of a flight of steps fitted into a hollow, helical space like the inside of a nautilus shell. Light the warm colour of sunlight on Earth shone through a screen that, fretted with a random pattern of circles and ovals, stretched from top to bottom of the space. A little stream followed the sweep of the stairs, trickling between plantings of vegetables and herbs, down to a lawn of real grass and a little orchard of gnarled and dwarfed fruit trees.
Sri took off her helmet and closed her eyes and breathed in the cool air, the mingled odours of damp earth and green, growing plants, then walked down the broad curve of the staircase. A hammock was slung between two apple trees. One niche under the staircase contained a shower and a toilet; another an industrial foodmaker. Apparently, Avernus had been living on CHON food supplemented by whatever she could grow in her little garden. Power came from wind turbines hidden in a channel out on the surface and thermogenerators that tapped into the residual heat deep under the ice. Sri tried to imagine living alone in this burrow, buried under Titan's eternal ice, no one else within two thousand kilometres, nothing but her own thoughts for company. Growing vegetables. Maintaining the garden's simple life-support systems. Occasionally hiking out along the valley, or amongst the hills beyond the gullied clifftops.
It was like trying to think herself inside the daily habits of a ghost. She saw in her mind's eye the old woman turning away from her, walking off across a bleak landscape, dwindling into obscurity.
After examining everything in the habitat, Sri went back outside and clambered down the path and crossed the hillocky dunes to the dirigible. The lieutenant who'd led the search party steered the craft two kilometres down the valley, to the place where Avernus had parked her ship: an insulated landing pad set amongst a field of huge ice boulders on a lenticulate island raised above the black dunes that combed the valley floor.
The pad had been spotted by one of Sri's autonomous drones, and a high-resolution deep-radar survey of the surrounding area had revealed Avernus's little habitat. The shape and size of the camouflage shroud recovered nearby suggested that the ship had been one of the aeroshells used by Outers before the war to shuttle people and goods through Titan's atmosphere. No one knew when the ship had departed, or on what course. There was no radar or traffic control on Titan, the ship had most likely been stealthed, and after it had quit the moon it had probably flown a minimal free-energy trajectory requiring only brief burns of its motor.
Sri was convinced that Avernus was no longer in the Saturn System. Why would she risk discovery by moving from one moon to another? No, she must have rendezvoused with a ship that had taken her further out. Perhaps to Neptune. There were reports of increasing activity amongst Neptune's moons. Euclides Peixoto was making noises about sending a punitive expedition; there were rumours that the Pacific Community were in clandestine contact with rebel Outers.
The dirigible drifted low and fired off its anchors. Sri climbed down and walked around the landing platform. The house-sized boulders had been worn smooth as eggs by wind-blown hydrocarbon sand. Some stood on eroded pedestals. A garden of gigantic sculptures set on rippled black sand.
She looked for but failed to find any bootprints -- no doubt the constant wind had smoothed them away -- and walked out from beneath the dirigible's shadow and climbed to the prow of the island. A ladder of black dunes caught between gullied cliffs stretched away into orange haze. Wind seethed like static as it blew past the bowl of her pressure suit's helmet. Sri had resolved to never stop searching for Avernus, had dreamed of persuading her to work with her in a long and fruitful collaboration, but the thought of trying to follow the gene wizard into the outer dark at the edge of the Solar System filled her with a weary dismay.
Enough, she thought. She would put Gunter Lasky to the question -- she was certain that the old pirate had known about this hiding place all along -- and she would recommend that Tank Town should be shut down as soon as possible. And then she would abandon the chase. She had details of Avernus's gardens, interviews with her associates, a vast integrated database of her work. Enough. It was time to move on. Time to make use of what she knew.
She had been thinking about the phenotype jungle on Janus recently. There was a political problem with the little co-orbital moon right now. The Pacific Union had earmarked it as one of the places it wanted to secure by settling it with hardy pioneers, had made it clear that it would proceed without the approval of Greater Brazil and the European Community. Euclides Peixoto was furious about it; when Sri had last met with him, he'd spent half the time ranting about PacCom's recklessness. All right. She could suggest that he could pre-empt PacCom's plans by allowing her to move her laboratory there. She would live in the phenotype jungle to begin with, and build a garden of her own. It was time she made something of everything she had learned, and she could promise to make Euclides rich by giving him a majority share in her discoveries . . .
On the adamantine ice, under Titan's orange sky, Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen once again began to map out her future.
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