‘So I imagine that Yuli must have had a strange childhood. Growing up with only her mother. And it’s hard for me to think of Avernus as a mother . . . You know, of course, the irony of her chosen name. Avernus was a volcano in Italy, a place where poisonous fumes meant that birds crossing over it fell dead from the air. Avernus: without birds. Without life. And she who fashions life for places with poisonous air or no air at all took the name of that place, you see? Because she transforms killing airs to life. A clever woman, a genius. Yes! No denying that. But odd. Living at a slant to the rest of us. In her own world, with her own codes and principles.’
Sri suspected that Gunter knew more about Yuli than he claimed, but she wasn’t able to get past his little act. He told Sri several stories about Yuli that she’d heard from other sources, asked questions of his own. How had Yuli been caught? Where was she being held, and in what conditions?
‘I’m certain that she is being treated humanely. Whatever Outers might think, Brazilians are not barbarians.’
‘Don’t hold out any hope that she will tell you where her mother is hiding,’ Gunter said. ‘She probably does not know. And even if she does know, she will not tell you. No matter what is done to her.’
‘I will find Avernus sooner or later,’ Sri said. ‘With or without her daughter’s help.’
Gunter laughed. ‘You are so serious, and so certain of yourself! Just like Avernus!’
‘I certainly know that things may go badly for your people and the rest of the Outers if my search is prolonged. For all the reasons we have discussed several times before.’
Sri knew that the old man was withholding all kinds of vital information. He and Avernus had once been lovers, they’d explored Titan together, and Avernus had continued to visit the moon, on and off, for almost a century. She’d borrowed blimps and construction robots from the Tank Towners, and Gunter would have kept track of her comings and goings - he’d probably ridden along with her many times, too. Yes, he knew much more about Avernus and her daughter than he’d ever admit, but he was also stubborn and wily, and threatening him wouldn’t achieve anything. As far as he was concerned, the Brazilians were not conquerors but guests. Visitors who should be forgiven their presumptive arrogance and treated politely and hospitably. He would tell Sri only what he wanted to tell her: no more, no less.
Saying now, ‘Like Avernus, you don’t really understand people. So please allow me to give you a little advice. You are anxious and eager to learn what Yuli knows, not only because it will teach you much about Avernus, but also because your general is growing impatient with you. Because you spend too much time studying Avernus’s gardens instead of doing what he wants. You think that you can help him by talking with Yuli. But she will not talk. Not to his people, not to you. I have never met her but this I know. Because she is her mother’s daughter. So be patient. Let the general fail without you. Do not let your eagerness and anxiety and ambition drive you to become part of his failure.’
‘I won’t fail,’ Sri said.
‘Well then, I can’t wish you luck,’ Gunter Lasky said. ‘But I can say that I hope to see you again.’
His smile, fond and gentle and sad, touched for a moment the part of Sri that had loved - that still loved - her murdered mentor. But she had no time for sentiment. She had work to do.
At last the shuttle arrived. Sri rode it up through the sky’s orange haze and fell towards Saturn. Dione’s icy crescent hung small and sharp beyond the outer curve of the rings. After a single orbit around the little moon the shuttle stooped down to the spaceport outside Paris, and Sri rode the railway east around the equator and transferred to a rolligon and drove along a new four-lane highway to the tented crater formerly owned by the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan, which General Arvam Peixoto had confiscated and made over into his headquarters.
Sri thought it was typical of Arvam’s theatrical arrogance to set up his official residence on the moon whose chief city had been at the centre of the resistance to Earth’s incursion into the Saturn System, and in a place inconvenient to reach and vulnerable to attack. It was an unambiguous signal of his determination to stay, demonstrating to the Outers that the TPA could commandeer anything it chose; and it was also a deft piece of symbolism. The matriarch of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff, Abbie Jones, had enjoyed a stellar level of kudos because of her exploits in the far reaches of the Solar System, and it was here that the infamous traitor Macy Minnot had made her home after defecting.
The area around the habitat was in the throes of a massive transition. A military spaceport was being constructed ten kilometres to the northeast; the four-lane highway that linked it with the habitat cut past the fortified bunkers and fields of satellite dishes and tower aerials of the command centre that controlled and monitored all traffic in the Saturn System, past icy ridges that Outers had sculpted into a fantasy of animals and heroes and castles, now much knocked about by target practice and military training exercises. And then the dome of the habitat’s tent reared into view, neatly fitted into the slumped rim of a circular impact crater. Chandelier lights strung high inside its web of giant diamond panes and fullerene composite supports burned brightly against the naked black sky, brighter than the sun; the green thread of the rim forest was hallucinogenically vivid in the moonscape’s ashy desert. It was beautiful, but appallingly vulnerable: a single missile or smart rock could rupture the dome’s integrity and every living thing inside it not destroyed by the blast would be killed by exposure to freezing vacuum.
Arvam and his staff occupied the mansion at the centre of the habitat’s gardens, groves of trees, and ponds and meadows. A rambling structure that looked as if it had grown piecemeal, towers and wings and domes in a dozen clashing styles carelessly tacked together and linked by haphazard walkways and ziplines and dogtrots. The general’s office was a big, round, white room cluttered with gymnasium equipment, including a rack of fixed weights and a treadmill wheel, several memo spaces, a scarred table cluttered with all kinds of handguns and rifles, and a long low cage in which a dwarfed tiger paced back and forth on tiptoe, tail lashing, yellow eyes bright as lanterns, baring its teeth at any secretaries and aides who came too near. In the middle of this organised chaos, Arvam Peixoto lay prone on a bench, stripped to the waist, a masseur working oil into his shoulders. Because of Dione’s vestigial gravity, Arvam was strapped to the bench, and the masseur’s feet were stuffed into loops tacked to the floor.
The general was in a good mood, calling loudly to Sri when she entered, asking her if she needed any kind of refreshment after her journey. ‘We just turned up a cache of excellent white wine in an oasis a couple of hundred kilometres south of here. Try a glass.’
‘Where is she? Can I see her?’
Arvam smiled at up Sri, his chin resting on his folded forearms, his gaze cold and sharp. ‘Always business, always straight to the point. I don’t hear from you for months and months. It is impossible to make contact with you. And now here you are all of a sudden, making demands.’
‘I’ve come to help you.’
‘If you know something we don’t, you should write up a memo. I can assure you that it will receive serious attention from the people I’ve put in charge of the case.’
‘I know more about her mother than anyone else. I know that she may be much older than she seems. I know that she isn’t human. And I know your people will fail.’
The general closed his eyes as the masseur worked on the knots in his shoulders. At last he said, ‘This isn’t about your quixotic quest to find Avernus, Professor Doctor. This is an important matter of security.’
‘Which you made public knowledge.’
‘To prove to the tweaks that no one can hide from us.’
‘It won’t do you any good unless she talks. And she isn’t talking, is she?’
‘My people know exactly what they are doing. They can make the very stones sing.’ Arvam grunted as the masseur twisted an elbow into the flesh between his shoulder blades. ‘But there is something you can do for me, now you’re here. Talk to the crew analysing her hiding place, and also the crew working on her genome. Translate what they’ve found into plain speech and report back to me.’
‘And then?’
‘And then we’ll see if we need your help. But there’s something else you need to do before you get to work,’ Arvam said, raising his head and aiming his steady, slightly cross-eyed gaze at Sri. ‘Go visit your son.’
It was an awkward encounter. Sri hadn’t seen Berry for six months. She’d been too busy, unriddling the secrets of the phenotype jungle on Janus and the various gardens discovered on Titan. He had to be encouraged by his governess, a slim young soldier, to go to his mother, and he was stiff with shyness and resentment when Sri gathered him into her arms, answering her questions in monosyllables and shrugs. He’d put on three centimetres and was broader in the shoulders and chest. A boy-man with a shock of black hair and a pale face. Looking at Sri and glancing away. Sly and shy.
Sri dismissed the governess and took Berry for a walk in the belt of forest that girdled the rim of the garden habitat. Tether lines were strung everywhere, but Berry was fully accustomed to Dione’s low gravity - one sixth of Titan’s, one thirtieth of Earth’s - and bounded ahead of Sri like a gazelle. He showed her a herd of shaggy-coated miniature cattle grazing amongst long grass in a grove of sweet chestnut trees, pointed out an albino pheasant, a string of quail chicks jittering along after their mother, a rushy pond where terrapins sprawled on a half-submerged log and giant dragonflies skated over the water’s unquiet skin.
Sri thought that the carefully planned and planted forest reeked of nostalgia for Earth and a consequent poverty of imagination, but for her son’s sake she affected an enthusiasm for this petty little paradise, the dwarfed animals cut for cuteness and domesticity, the formal gardens and fake wildernesses. Berry was as capricious and exhausting as ever. He chased after the dog-sized cattle and scattered them far and wide, threw stones at the pheasant, would have stamped on the quail chicks if Sri hadn’t restrained him, and she had to wade in after him when he splashed into the pond and tried to snatch up one of the terrapins.
Sri stepped on her impulse to correct her son then and there. She’d have a severe talk to the governess later. Berry needed discipline and a strong framework of routine, and it was clear that the young woman had been slack and indulgent. Meanwhile, Sri allowed Berry to lead her up a long path through stands of turkey oak and white pine to a grassy saddleback ridge that had a fine view across the entire garden habitat. He showed her a wooden ramp that jutted above a steep plunge to the treetops of the rim forest, and said that he had flown from there. It was easy, he said. You were strapped under a kind of kite, and you ran out, and the air took you up and out.
‘You did that? You really flew?’
Berry nodded solemnly and told Sri that other people wore suits with wings from their wrists to their ankles and flew like birds. He said that he wanted to try that ever so much, but the general had said he would have to wait.
‘But I don’t want to wait! I want to be a bird!’ he shouted, and bounded away across the top of the ridge, arms out, wheeling this way and that and making noises like a combat plane on a strafing run.
Sri calmed him down and they walked back and ate supper and splashed in a warm pool together before Sri allowed the governess to put him to bed. Afterwards, she gave the young woman a severe lecture about allowing her son to risk his life, told her that from now on any kind of flying was forbidden.
The young soldier lifted her chin in defiance. ‘You’ll have to take it up with the general, ma’am. He supervises Berry’s education.’
But the general had left Dione for Xamba, Rhea, where he was meeting with the city’s mayor and the commander of the European forces to discuss problems caused by passive and nonviolent resistance to the occupying forces. So Sri set aside her anger and got to work on the tasks she’d been assigned.
She read a summary about the discovery of Yuli’s hiding place in one of the dead Outer ships, the rig that had allowed her to survive more than a year of deep hibernation inside an empty fuel tank, how Loc Ifrahim, of all people, had thwarted her attempt to escape from hospital after she’d been revived. The tank in which the girl had hidden herself had been detached from the shuttle and brought down to Dione’s surface. Now it lay under a canopy in a secure area in the military spaceport west of the habitat, a sphere six metres in diameter, half-covered with the black scurf of a lichenous vacuum organism and propped on scaffolding like a gigantic Christmas ornament. Sri was shown the hatch cut into the tank’s skin and the nest that Yuli had made inside, neatly stashed between two of the anti-slosh vanes that honeycombed the interior. The vacuum organism that coated part of the tank’s exterior was a deep, glossy black, smooth as spilled paint in some places, raised in thin, stiff sheets and vase shapes like mutant funeral-flowers in others. The technician who had sequenced its pseudoDNA told Sri that it was a fast-growing variant of a common strain that absorbed sunlight and generated an electrical charge.
‘Something like point six watts over its entire surface. Not very much, but enough to supplement the battery the girl was using to run her equipment. And of course it was still growing. In another year it would have covered most of the shuttle,’ the technician said.
‘Using carbon and other material from the shuttle’s hull.’
‘Yes, ma’am. But its feeding hyphae don’t penetrate very far, so it would not have damaged the integrity of the ship.’
‘She planned to stay asleep for a long time,’ Sri said.
‘We believe that she could have survived for at least ten years,’ the technician said.