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

defences that ringed the city’s perimeter, and that he had been searching for her ever since.
    No one in the farm tube had known Zi Lei before the war, or knew if she had survived it. And the Brazilians kept men and women apart, so there was no easy way of discovering if she was a prisoner, in one of the work crews or, more likely, amongst the refuseniks. The spy bided his time. He had been taught how to be patient. But he couldn’t stop wondering where she was and if she was all right. He supposed that his tender helpless yearning meant that he was in love.
    The spy’s work crew had been tasked with collecting the bodies of citizens killed when the Brazilians had taken Paris. The Brazilians had broken in at either end of the city’s tent and advanced towards the centre amidst fierce hand-to-hand street fighting. The city’s defenders had blown up and set fire to the public buildings in a last desperate stand, and then the tent had been ruptured and the city had lost its air. Half the population had died. Some ten thousand people.
    The crew worked in the lower part of the city, amongst manufactories, workshops and blocks of old-fashioned apartment buildings. It was where the spy had lived as Ken Shintaro before the war, and he found it strange to return to it now. Power had been restored, but the city was still in vacuum and everything was frozen at -200° Centigrade. Trees stripped of foliage and branches by the hurricane of explosive decompression when the city’s tent had been ruptured stood naked and frozen hard as iron along the wide avenues. The halflife grass that turfed the avenues and the plants in the parks and courtyard gardens was frozen too, slowly bleaching in the stark light of the chandeliers.
    Most buildings had been damaged during the battle; few had retained integrity. There were bodies in apartments, in central court-yards, in basements. Fallen where they had been caught in the open, huddled around doors, in bed niches, inside airlocks. Those who had been wearing pressure suits when they had died were the easiest to deal with. The rest were statues frozen to the floor or to furniture or to each other, heads and hands swollen and blackened by pressure bruising, faces masked by blood expressed from ears and eyes and mouths and nostrils, eyes starting, swollen tongues protruding. Men and women and children. Babies.
    The crew secured samples of frozen flesh for DNA analysis and logged and bagged any possessions, then pried the bodies free by using crowbars and wedges and loaded them onto sleds that were driven out of the city through airlocks whose triple sets of doors stood permanently open. Construction robots dug long trenches in the icy regolith beyond the eastern edge of the vacuum-organism fields, and the bodies were dumped into them without ceremony and covered with ice gravel. As if the Brazilians wanted the evidence of their atrocities to be erased as quickly as possible.
    After all the bodies in public areas had been removed, the clearance work became a macabre treasure hunt. Searching through apartment blocks room by room. Looking in basements and service tunnels. In storage lockers and cupboards where people had sought refuge or had tried to hoard a last few sips of air. Everyone worked in a haze of exhaustion. They averted their gazes from the faces of the dead as they levered and pried and cut. They cursed the stiff and awkward corpses, sat down and wept, were chivvied back to work by the Brazilian guards.
    There were dreadful stories of people finding loved ones, partners, parents, children, and in any case the work was an unceasing horror. Many people in the salvage crews committed suicide. A few dramatically, by unlatching their helmets or throwing themselves under the treads of one of the construction robots that were demolishing badly damaged buildings; most by finding some hidden spot and disabling their air scrubbers. It wasn’t so bad, people said. You became woozy as the carbon