Gardens of the Sun Read Online Free PDF

dead straight line towards the equator, the usual graded construction of ice gravel laced with fullerene mesh, thirty metres wide, absolutely level, and with transponder guides set along one edge so that he could surrender control to the rolligon’s AI. He performed a set of stretches and isometric exercises to loosen the rigid bar across his shoulders, went into the galley and steeped a sachet of lemon tea in a beaker, and returned to the driving chair and saw a line gleaming at the horizon.
    It was the railway that girdled Dione’s equator, a single track elevated above the plain on pylons like a tightrope bridging the western and eastern horizons. Built, like the road, by the patient and unceasing labour of gangs of construction robots. The spy took back control of the rolligon and stopped a little distance from the elevated track, looking all around, wary again. The railway was important. It could be a target. Something could be watching it . . .
    To the east, far off, a faint light gleamed. A star perched at the vanishing point of the railway’s ruled line. The spy used the zoom function of the rolligon’s monitor. The star dimmed as it expanded; details emerged. It was a bullet-shaped railcar, its rear capped with a cargo space, its nose a diamond canopy over a pressurised cabin. It had been heading west, away from Paris. Now it sat flat on the superconducting magnetic track and the door of its cabin gaped open.
    The spy sipped lemon tea as he thought things through. The power had cut off and the railcar had grounded and its passengers had climbed out. That much was clear. But where were they now? And who were they? Brazilian or Outer? At last, with less than an hour before dawn, the spy took the wheel of the rolligon and bumped off the road and drove across the dusty ground parallel to the elevated railway, towards the stationary railcar. The nape of his neck and his palms were prickling, but he couldn’t not look. He was hoping that someone else’s bad luck would give him what he needed.
    He spotted a muddle of bootprints around the base of the support pylon closest to the grounded railcar and stopped the rolligon and pulled on his pressure suit and climbed out and cast around. The bootprints resolved into a path that followed the railway east, in the direction from which the railcar had come. Five sets of tracks either side of something that had left a broad trail in the icy dust.
    The spy called up a map, realised that the railcar’s passengers must be heading for the nearest station, some fifty kilometres away at the rim of Mnestheus Crater. He looked towards the horizon but nothing moved there. Everywhere was as silent and still as it had ever been.
    He climbed the rungs stapled to one side of the pylon and walked down the track to the railcar and stood at the open door for a little while. One of the floor panels was missing and there was blood on another part of the floor and on two of the big cushions that had served as seats. The blood frozen and black in the cold vacuum.
    Someone had been wounded, then. And his companions had taken the floor panel and used it to drag him along with them. The spy wondered how much air they’d had, wondered if their wounded comrade had survived the trip.
    There was only one way to find out.
    A few minutes after he’d started up the rolligon and set off parallel to the railway, the sun sprang above the horizon directly ahead, as bright and sharp now as it would be at noon because there was no atmosphere to attenuate or diffuse its harsh white light. The railway strode straight on, its pylons stepping amongst a string of small impact craters and growing taller as it crossed a broad and shallow depression. The spy lost sight of the track left by the railcar passengers when it bent to the north, around the outer edge of the craters. He backtracked, spotted a bright yellow cannister someone had discarded, picked up the trail and went on.
    After a few kilometres, the trail of