Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley Read Free Book Online Page A

news boards, public forums and private discussion groups, personal mailboxes, and registers in the nets of cities that had survived the war unscathed. Anyone who had ever been a member of any civic agency, had served on Paris’s council or any of its committees, or had spoken out against reconciliation with Earth, whether in private or in public, was dispatched to the maximum-security jail, formerly the city’s correctional facility and now much expanded. Of the rest, pregnant women and women or men nursing babies were sent to a maternity camp; everyone else was told that they could either work for the Three Powers Authority or spend the rest of their lives in a prison camp.
    Almost half the prisoners supported the doctrine of nonviolent resistance and refused to work. At first, the Brazilians attempted to break their spirit. Refuseniks were subjected to public strip-searches, random beatings, solitary confinement, or even, in the early days, execution. The guard would order the prisoners to line up and then seize two or three of them and drag them to an airlock and cycle them through into vacuum, but this practice was abandoned when prisoners began to follow the guards and their victims, demanding to be cycled through too. If anyone in one of the barracks was refused rations, the rest went on hunger strike in sympathy. If the guards selected someone for a random beating, other prisoners would volunteer to take their place. And so on. At last, the Brazilians gave up on attempting to convert the refuseniks and left them to their own devices, supplying their barracks with minimal rations and life support, locking them down in quarantine.
    The spy chose to work. People who practised nonviolent resistance might be honourable, principled, and brave, but they were also crazy. They would weaken and die in their isolated barracks, and their principles would die with them. In any case, it was nothing to do with him. He was neither an Outer nor a Brazilian. Neither prisoner nor occupier. He was a free man. He had given himself up to the Brazilians freely because it gave him the best chance of finding Zi Lei. He knew that it was a stupidly dangerous quest, but it gave his new life a shape and a destination. He had been trained all his life to be someone else: to wear the skin of an assumed identity and infiltrate the enemy population and carry out a secret mission. That was what he had done before the war, when, working in the skin of Ken Shintaro, he had sabotaged Paris’s infrastructure. And that was what he was doing now. Despite the deprivation and fear and hard work, he was quietly content.
    In the first weeks, the spy and his fellow prisoners, all single, childless men, worked twelve hours a day every day in the ruins of the city. Supervision was minimal. They were left to their own devices when they weren’t working, and organised themselves into crews assigned a variety of housekeeping tasks: taking turns at cooking, laundry, and general maintenance, nursing those who’d been wounded in the battle for Paris and its aftermath, collecting and recycling urine and faeces, tending the fruit bushes packed into the farm tube that served as their quarters, and sharing out harvested fruit to supplement their CHON food rations.
    The spy was immediately welcomed into this little community. The Outers weren’t naive or credulous, but they were naturally hospitable and hadn’t yet learned to suspect and distrust strangers. And besides, it was obvious that, with his etiolated build, opposable big toes, and simple secondary hearts pulsing in his femoral and subclavian arteries, he was one of them, and his story about his search for his friend Zi Lei chimed with their strong sense of romance. He told them that she had been arrested and incarcerated before the war, that he had tried and failed to find her during the confusion of the attack on the city when battle drones and troops had fallen from the sky and quickly overwhelmed the