Gardens of the Sun Read Free Page A

visual cortex before exiting his skull. The fragment had been just a couple of hundred microns across, but it had been travelling very fast: shock waves had destroyed or killed everything in a track averaging seven millimetres in diameter. Damage to the frontal cortex and visual cortex was trivial and could be easily repaired by insertion of glial and totipotent foetal cells. There would be some memory loss, but no serious side effects. But the damage to the corpus callosum was more problematical. Passage of the fragment had severed large numbers of reciprocal connections between the two halves of the brain. If this wasn’t repaired, the surgeon said, the right side of the pilot’s brain would be cut off from the dominant left side, a separate mind with its own perception, cognition, volition, learning and memory but lacking the ability to speak, able to express itself only through nonverbal reactions. He would not be able to integrate the right- and left-hand sides of his visual field, and might suffer ‘alien hand syndrome’ and other dissociative effects.
    After studying high-resolution tomographic renderings of the damage, Sri proposed a radical solution. She had helped to design the artificial autonomic nervous system that enabled singleship pilots to plug directly into the control system of their ships and to briefly boost their neural processing speeds during combat, and she believed that she could use this to reroute connections between the two sides of the pilot’s brain and reunite his mind.
    She had plenty of other work to do, of course. She wanted to visit the garden habitat that the general had taken over for his headquarters, and make sure that her son was safe and happy. She wanted to return to Janus and complete her survey of the phenotype jungle and the sunflowers and the other vacuum organisms, work up the data and thoroughly examine it and compare it with the data sets gathered from her inspections of other gardens. Then she would head out to the next garden, and the one after that . . .
    No, there was never enough time to do everything she wanted to do. But although she’d been bullied into doing it by Arvam Peixoto and it wasn’t anywhere near the top of her list of priorities, she enjoyed discussing the redesign of Cash Baker’s augmented nervous system with the ship’s surgeon. He had extensive experience of brain and nerve reconstruction, there was a definite intellectual bond between them, two minds into one, and she felt a spark of resentment when one of the general’s aides appeared and reminded her of the formal dinner.
    The aide escorted Sri to a senior officer’s cabin, waited outside while she showered and put on uniform coveralls and slippers, then led her to the wardroom, where senior officers and civil servants and the guests from the Pacific Community were already seated at the long table. As Sri settled into her seat between the ship’s captain and the PacCom liaison secretary, Arvam Peixoto gave her a stern look across a centre-piece arrangement of lilies and roses that must have been shuttled up from some garden on Dione - perhaps from the habitat where Berry was now living.
    Sri found most social occasions tedious. Trivial chatter and pointless and suffocating etiquette overlaying crude status displays. Alpha personalities like the general strutted and preened; everyone else flattered him, reinforcing their positions in their stupid little hierarchy, watching each other for possible faults and failings. Ape behaviour. Sri couldn’t play these games. She lacked in every measure the vivid, forceful and confrontational personality of the typical alpha male, and wasn’t the kind of wily social networker, able to build up cadres of loyal followers and keep them in line by Skinner-box reward-and-punishment games, typical of alpha females. Although her reputation gave her some social cachet, these occasions always reminded her that she was a wild card tolerated only as long as she