Free Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley

work, hazards and humiliation. So he had to suck up the insult of his present position, and hope that in time he would be properly rewarded for the favours he’d done for Arvam Peixoto, or that he’d discover some rich opportunity and mine it for all that it was worth.
    ‘We’ll all come good in the end,’ his friend and colleague Yota McDonald said, after Loc had vented at great length and with fine passion about his latest humiliation at the hands of the Economic Commission.
    ‘I don’t want early retirement on a government pension. I want the preferment and promotion I’ve earned,’ Loc said.
    The two men were sitting on a café terrace that overlooked the silken slide of the semicircular waterfall that plunged into a seething basin of wet rocks and ferns and the jewelled cushions of giant mosses. The basin fed a river that ran away downhill between stands of newly planted saplings towards the Green Zone at Paris’s midpoint. The terrace, with its quaint wooden tables and white umbrellas, stands of tree ferns and black bamboo, and strings of fairy lanterns, was the preserve of senior civil servants, diplomats and military officers. Its food - shrimp and fish grown in the city, lobster tails and steak shipped at tremendous expense from Earth - was excellent. In one corner of its terrace a guitarist and flautist played delicate choro numbers that floated on a cool breeze invigorated by the iron tang of falling water. It was one of the most pleasant places in the city, redolent of the privilege Loc craved, but he slouched sulkily in his sling chair, a slender, dark-skinned man dressed in a tailored canary-yellow suit and a pink shirt open to his navel, oiled black hair done up in a cap of short braids tipped with ceramic beads. A dandy whose handsome face was spoiled by an air of jaded cynicism that he no longer bothered to hide.
    His companion, Yota McDonald, was a sleek, plump young man who before the war, in Brasília, had worked alongside Loc in the commission that had analysed information about the cities and the main political players in the Jupiter and Saturn systems and had developed the asymmetric ‘quiet war’ strategies that had proven so effective in taking down the Outers. Like Loc, Yota had a taste for gossip about the failings of his superiors, but he lacked Loc’s ambition. He was content with his position in the middle grade of the diplomatic service and looked forward to returning to Greater Brazil in a couple of years’ time, when he would use the bonuses he was assiduously banking to get married, and the contacts he had made to win a well-paid job as an adviser in the private sector.
    ‘You are smart and shrewd, but you feel that you must have everything at once,’ he told Loc. ‘Try patience, for a change.’
    ‘I want to get what I deserve before I die,’ Loc said.
    ‘Of course. But destroying yourself in the attempt to win it makes no sense.’
    ‘Perhaps I have already destroyed myself. I have given up my health and my marriage prospects in service to God and Gaia and Greater Brazil. So winning fame and fortune is all I have left. My only reason for living. Yet I am frustrated at every turn by men who have grown rich at my expense. Fools who know nothing, who can do nothing, who have suffered nothing. Fools whose only virtue is to have been born into the right family. Lucky sperm. All they have to do is reach out and pluck the golden apples that dangle in front of their faces. And most of the time they get someone else to do it for them.’
    ‘We are lucky enough, considering who we are. Look how far we’ve come!’
    ‘Yes. But not yet far enough.’
    Yota skilfully changed the subject, telling Loc about the latest row between General Arvam Peixoto and Ambassador Fontaine over treatment of Outer prisoners.
    ‘Our ambassador is still struggling to impose any kind of “normalisation” on the general and his merry men,’ Yota said. ‘Did you hear that he wants to mount a