Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley Page A

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