Gardens of the Sun (13 page)

Sri assured him that the phenotype gardens had immense economic potential. ‘It’s a trivial skill to graft genes into an organism so that it expresses a new property. But once I understand how the apparently random expression of phenotype is regulated, I will be able to create varieties of totipotent plant that will be highly adaptable and produce all kinds of different foodstuffs according to need. Apples, maize, tomatoes, all growing on the same vine. Or plants that produce apples one season and tomatoes the next.’

She talked for a while, but Arvam didn’t seem convinced. ‘At least you passed the little monster’s test. What now?’

‘We will talk some more, and more openly, I hope.’

‘She gave you a little treat and you’re wagging your tail like a puppy. Who is in charge of whom?’

‘I’m happy to let her believe that she is testing me. It allows her to believe that she has some power over me. It brings us closer together.’

‘The psychologists think she’s trying to play you.’

‘Of course she is. She doesn’t want to be tortured. She wants better treatment. Simple quid pro quo.’

‘If she wants better treatment, she had better start giving up hard information,’ Arvam said.

‘She’s already given me this garden. In time she’ll give me much more.’

‘You have another seven days,’ Arvam said. ‘And I don’t need any more gardens.’

The psychologists cautioned Sri about getting too close to Yuli too quickly, and suggested that the little girl would be more willing to talk freely, more likely to divulge useful information, if Sri didn’t visit every day. Sri ignored them. For one thing, their plan was a crude variation of the reinforcement principle of behaviour, like giving a mouse food pellets at random intervals when it completed a series of tasks because that made it work harder than if it was rewarded every time. But people were not mice, and Yuli was not like most people; she would see through this transparent ploy straight away. For another, Sri knew that Arvam’s deadline was inflexible, so she needed to spend as much time with Yuli as possible, even if it meant neglecting Berry and the rest of her work.

She discussed the marvellous and intricate details of Avernus’s gardens with the girl, and told stories about her childhood: how she’d grown up shy and awkward and lonely in a provincial town where no one else was interested in science; how she had worked so very hard to escape, but because of her lowly birth had been able to win only a post in an agricultural research facility in São Luis; how her work had attracted the attention of the green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos, who’d given her one of his famous scholarships. She told Yuli about her first true insight, the epiphany that had cracked open a stubborn problem crucial to the development of a novel artificial photosynthesis system. She talked about her two sons, the research facility she had built on the Antarctic Peninsula, the biome she had created there and the biomes she had created elsewhere, including the ill-fated project at Rainbow Bridge, Callisto.

Sri poured out her life to Yuli. Opened her heart. Told her things that she hadn’t told anyone else. Trying to make contact. To find common ground. She didn’t tell her about the murder of her mentor, but she tried to explain the ambition and frustration that had driven her to risk everything by coming out to the Saturn System, leaving one son behind on Earth, bringing the other with her and giving him up as a hostage.

‘I’m lonely,’ Sri said. ‘Most really clever people are, at one time or another. And although I’m not as clever as your mother I’m cleverer than most people. But sometimes I wish that I wasn’t. It would have made my life much easier because I would be able to accept an ordinary life and small, ordinary ambitions.’

Yuli thought about this and said at last, ‘I see through the masks people wear in public, and I think faster than they do, and most of the time I can pretty much guess what they’re thinking. It makes it hard for me to like them, and that makes me lonely. It makes me feel that I’m the only real person in a toy universe too small to contain me. Is that how you feel?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I feel it all the time. With everybody.’

‘Including your mother?’

For a moment Sri thought that Yuli was going to open up, but then the little girl shrugged and said, ‘No one understands my mother. Not even my mother.’

So it went. Sri would spent hours attempting to establish common ground with Yuli, and just when she thought she had established a tenuous empathic bond the girl would retreat into her winter fortress. After three days of this, Sri went to the colonel in charge of security in the habitat and told him what she needed. The man was cautiously doubtful, but he couldn’t consult Arvam Peixoto because the general was visiting Baghdad, Enceladus, and Sri put her case with considerable force and assumed all responsibility.

The next day, she met with Yuli at the edge of the forest that ringed the perimeter of the hold. A pair of drones hovered overhead like hawks. The girl’s wrists were shackled in front of her and she stood in front of a phalanx of armed guards in black body armour, looking demure and composed and very small.

‘I thought you might enjoy a walk,’ Sri said.

‘Why not?’ Yuli said carelessly.

The guards and the drones followed them as they ambled through the green shade of the trees. Yuli told Sri that she had been here several times before; her mother had been friendly with Abbie Jones, the matriarch of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan.

‘I don’t suppose she lives here now,’ Yuli said.

‘I believe that she was moved to Paris.’

Abbie Jones was a political prisoner, one of several hundred interned without trial.

‘I’m glad she isn’t dead,’ Yuli said. ‘I liked her. She was almost as famous as my mother, but she wore her fame very lightly.’

They talked about the exploration of the fringes of the Solar System that had won Abbie Jones so much acclaim amongst the Outers. They talked about Avernus’s visits to the habitat and the little gifts she’d given the clan: the dwarf cattle that roamed the forest; several novel species of flowering plant that grew in the formal gardens beside the habitat’s mansion; a redesign of the waste-management system. They sat in the shade of a big cork oak and shared a jug of iced pomegranate juice and a plate of pão de queijos and other savouries prepared by Arvam Peixoto’s personal chef.

‘This is very nice,’ Yuli said at one point, ‘but it would be nicer if I wasn’t shackled like an animal and watched by armed men and machines. Isn’t this collar enough? It will knock me down if I try to do anything stupid. And anyway, I promise that I won’t.’

‘The military are scared of you,’ Sri said.

‘And what about you? Are you scared of me?’

‘Let’s say that I am cautious, because I don’t yet know all that you can do.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Yuli said, looking pleased.

Sri made arrangements to meet her in the same spot the next day, but when she arrived she found not only Yuli and the guards, but also Arvam Peixoto and Berry.

Arvam showed his teeth to Sri and said, ‘I thought we’d take a walk together. The children can get to know each other.’

‘You know that she isn’t a child,’ Sri said. She was angry and afraid. Angry that Arvam had presumed like this, exposing her son to danger without any precautions or preparation; afraid that he was doing this to punish her for forcing the security chief to allow Yuli out of her suite.

‘Whatever she is, we can control her,’ Arvam said, and showed Sri the remote he held. ‘A little demonstration would be appropriate, I think. Just in case.’

‘Don’t,’ Sri said.

Arvam turned and aimed the remote at Yuli, and the girl fell to the ground in a knot of agony.

‘I should make my staff wear those things,’ Arvam said. ‘It would keep them on their toes.’

‘You fit every definition of a fool,’ Sri told him and went over to Yuli and helped her up. It was the first time she’d touched the girl. Yuli’s skin was dry and fever hot, burning through her paper coveralls. Her wrists were fastened by plastic shackles and a short cord.

‘This wasn’t my idea,’ Sri said.

‘I don’t mind pain. It make me stronger. It shows me how much he fears me,’ Yuli said. She was almost exactly Sri’s height. There were flecks of gold in her calm green gaze. ‘Besides, it’s worth it to have a chance to talk to your son. Perhaps I can learn about you from him, just as you’ve learned about my mother from me.’

‘That seems fair,’ Sri said. She was striving to sound calm, but felt as if she had swallowed a cloud of butterflies.

Arvam told Berry, ‘You want to show our new friend the terrapins, don’t you?’

Berry studied Sri and Yuli solemnly, then shrugged.

‘Of course you do,’ Arvam said.

Berry picked up a stick and thrashed at the tall grasses either side of the trail as he ankled along. Yuli glided beside him, serene and calm, asking simple, seemingly harmless questions about the habitat while Arvam, Sri, and the guards followed close behind. Berry shrugged or gave monosyllabic answers, and when they entered the oval green eye of the glade that circled the pond he suddenly broke away, running in long floating leaps, splashing into the reedy shallows and commencing to throw clots of mud at the terrapins perched on the half-submerged log. When Yuli moved towards him, Arvam caught Sri’s arm and told her to let the children talk.

‘Perhaps your son will get her to say something useful, eh?’

‘If you want to punish me, punish me. Don’t ever again involve my son,’ Sri said.

‘What are you frightened of, Professor Doctor? I thought that you and the girl had become good friends.’

‘We have an understanding. But I never ever forget that she’s a monster,’ Sri said, and shook off Arvam’s grip and stepped away from him before she said something she would regret.

Berry and Yuli were squatting by the edge of the water, talking quietly with their heads close together. As Sri asked one of the guards to patch her into the drones so that she could listen to the children’s conversation, Berry suddenly reared up and shoved at Yuli. She grabbed at him and they both fell over, splashing and struggling. Someone bounded past Sri. It was Arvam, wading into the water, picking up Berry by an arm and a leg, pulling him off Yuli and tossing him ungently to one side. Then he stooped to help Yuli to her feet and reeled back, hands clapped over his face, blood running between his fingers, and Yuli shot up out of the water, a long balletic leap that carried her clear across the pond. Two guards ran towards Arvam; the rest chased after Yuli, going right and left around the pond. Berry picked himself up, wailing, and Sri went towards him, shouting to the guards.

‘Don’t shoot! Use the collar! Don’t shoot!’

Yuli ran on, fast and agile as a deer, jinking this way and that, disappearing under the trees. The pair of drones flashed past the guards, chasing after her. A whipcrack echoed out; another. A cloud of doves rose fluttering and tumbling into the bright air above the treetops.

Yuli had snapped off the end of Berry’s stick and jabbed it in Arvam’s right eye, skewering the ball and fracturing the bone at the back of the socket. If it had penetrated another centimetre it would have lobotomised him. He was rushed to surgery, but the eye couldn’t be saved.

Sri talked to Berry for a long time, but he clammed up, stubborn and petulant and scared, refusing to tell her what Yuli had said to make him so angry. Sri expected Arvam to blame her for the disaster, even though it had been his idea to introduce Berry to Yuli, but the general, wearing a black patch over his raw right eye socket, told her that she should put the incident behind her.

‘Work on Avernus’s gardens. Find something that will lead me to her. Find something that will persuade me that your work is worthwhile.’

‘What about Berry?’

‘He will stay here, of course.’ Sri started to say that what happened wasn’t in any way Berry’s fault, but Arvam interrupted her, saying, ‘You really don’t understand people, do you? I’m not going to hurt him. I love him as if he was one of my own sons. Now, go and say goodbye to him, and get back to work.’

So that was her punishment. She had lost Alder when she had fled Earth. Now she had lost Berry, too.

As Sri was leaving the mansion, Loc Ifrahim angled towards her through the busy throng of military personnel in the vaulted atrium. ‘I might have known you’d have something to do with this monstrous clusterfuck,’ he said.

Sri met his bright, bitter gaze and said, ‘My congratulations for having caught her, Mr Ifrahim. You’re a bona fide hero at last. At least they can’t take that away from you.’

‘If you think that, you clearly don’t know the general. I’m on my way to find out how he’s going to punish me for a mess I had nothing to do with. I have to eat shit over this, and you’re free to go back to Titan and your all-important quest. What’s it like, being able to float above ordinary human mess? I’m genuinely interested.’

‘You should go home, Mr Ifrahim. You’re clearly unhappy here, and in my opinion you’ve already done more than enough damage to the Outer System and its people. Go back to Earth, and get on with your life.’

For a moment, a glint of naked contempt showed behind the mask of Loc Ifrahim’s handsome face. Then he smiled and said, ‘Good luck with your work, madam. I hope that you find what you are looking for. Truly I do. But if you cross my path again, if you ever interfere with what’s properly mine, I will take you down.’

‘I promise you that I’ll do my very best to stay away from you.’ Sri was too tired and too upset to be angry at his presumption. Besides, he was a fool, so what was the point of trying to teach him any kind of lesson? She turned to the woman who stood at his elbow, a homely young thing with a bristling black crew cut and captain’s bars on the breast of her blue coveralls, and advised her to stay away from Mr Ifrahim. ‘His bad luck has a way of transferring itself to everyone around him,’ she said, and moved on.