Gardens of the Sun (31 page)

‘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.