Blue Remembered Earth (17 page)

Chama led them deeper into the building, until they were passing along a corridor dug out of solid Moon rock, sprayed over with smoke-tinted plastic insulation. Pipes and power lines ran along the ceiling, stapled messily in place.

‘There are strict rules governing the transport and utilisation of genetic materials within the system,’ Chama said, looking back over his shoulder. ‘And I’m very proud to say that Gleb and I have broken most of them.’

‘Aren’t there good reasons for those rules?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘No one wants to see people dying because of some ancient virus escaping into the wild.’

‘We’re not interested in anything hazardous,’ Chama said. ‘Gleb and I have committed criminal acts only because we were obliged to break certain badly constructed laws. Legislation made by stupid, short-sighted governments.’

Geoffrey tensed. In his experience, governments were quite useful things: it was hard to see how the world could have come through the Resource and Relocation crises without them. But anti-centralist rhetoric came with the territory, here in the Descrutinised Zone.

‘Guess it depends on your intentions,’ he said.

‘Had a lot of time for your grandmother,’ Chama said. ‘You think dear old Eunice sat around analysing her every decision into the ground, looking at it from every possible ethical angle? Or did she just, you know, go for it?’

They’d arrived at a heavy door, the kind that might lead out onto the surface or into a non-pressurised tunnel system. Chama stood to one side and allowed the basketball hoop of an eidetic scanner to lower down over his skull. Chama closed his eyes while he visualised the sphinxware image sequence.

The door unlocked with the solid, reassuring clunk of a castle drawbridge and hinged slowly open.

‘Welcome to the menagerie,’ Chama said.

The room beyond the door was bigger than Geoffrey had been expecting – much larger than the vault in the Central African Bank – but still nowhere near capacious enough to contain a zoo. His eyes took a few moments to adjust to the very low ambient lighting, a soft red radiance bleeding from the edges of the floor. Rectangular panels, two high, divided the walls, but beyond that he couldn’t make out more than the sketchiest of details. There was another door at the far end, outlined in pale glowing pink.

‘Feel I’m missing something here,’ Geoffrey said.

Sunday smiled. ‘I think you’d better show him, Chama.’

‘Forgive the question, but you’re absolutely sure he can be trusted?’ Chama asked.

‘He’s my brother.’

Chama voked something. Polarising screens winked to transparency. The panelled rectangles in the walls were in fact glass screens. Behind the screens were enclosures rife with vegetation.

Geoffrey reeled. It was obvious, even from a moment’s glance, that the habitats differed in subtle and not so subtle ways. Some were flooded with bright equatorial sunlight – the blazing intensity of the noonday savannah. Others had the permanent gloom of the forest floor under a sun-sapping canopy of dense tree cover. Others were steamy or desert-arid.

He walked to the nearest pair of windows. They were stacked one above the other, with no sign that the habitats were in any way interdependent.

‘I don’t know as much botany as I should,’ Geoffrey said, peering at the amazing profusion of plants crammed into the upper window. Their olive leaves were diamonded with dewdrops or the remnants of a recent rain shower. Under Lunar gravity, surface tension shaped liquids into almost perfect hemispheres. ‘But if there’s as much biodiversity in this room as I think there is, this is a pretty amazing achievement.’

‘We’ve been growing plants in space since the first space stations,’ Chama said, ‘since the days of Salyut, Mir and the ISS. Some of the plant lines here go that far back: lines nurtured by the first thousand people to venture into space.
Their hands touched these lineages
.’ He said this as if he was talking about holy relics, fingered by saints. ‘But from the outset the work has always been scientifically and commercially driven – firstly, to explore the effects of weightlessness on growth mechanisms, then to push our understanding of hydroponics, aeroponics and so on. Once the ’ponics techniques had matured sufficiently, we stopped bringing new varieties into space. This is the first time that the majority of these plant species have been established beyond Earth. The difference here is that the driver isn’t science or commerce. It’s the Panspermian imperative.’

‘Ah,’ Geoffrey said, with a profound sinking feeling. ‘Right. Guess I should have seen that one coming.’

‘You don’t approve?’ Chama asked.

‘Colour me more than slightly sceptical.’

‘That’s my brother’s way of saying he thinks you’re all completely batshit insane,’ Sunday explained.

He shot her an exasperated glance. ‘Thanks.’

‘Best to get these things out in the open,’ Sunday said.

‘Quite,’ Chama agreed, cordially enough. ‘So yes – I’m a Panspermian. So’s Gleb. And yes, we believe in the movement. But that’s all it is – an idea, a driving imperative. It’s not some crackpot cult.’

The door at the far end of the room opened, allowing a figure to enter. It was another man, shorter and stockier than Chama, pushing a wheeled trolley laden with multicoloured plastic flasks and tubs.

‘This is my husband, Gleb,’ Chama said. ‘Gleb, we have visitors! Sunday’s brought along her brother.’

Gleb propelled the trolley to the wall and walked over to them, peeling gloves from his hands and stuffing them in the pockets of his long white labcoat. ‘The elephant man?’

‘The elephant man,’ Chama affirmed.

‘This is a great pleasure,’ Gleb said, offering his hand for Geoffrey to shake. ‘Gleb Ozerov. Have you seen the—’

‘Not yet,’ Chama said. ‘I was just breaking the bad news to him.’

‘What bad news?’

‘That we’re batshit insane.’

‘Oh. How’s he taking it?’

‘About as well as they usually do.’

Geoffrey shook Gleb’s hand. He could have crushed diamonds for a living.

‘He’ll get over it, eventually.’ Gleb studied him with particular attentiveness. ‘You look disappointed, Geoffrey. Is this not what you were expecting?’

‘It’s a room full of plants,’ Geoffrey said, ‘not the zoo I was promised.’

Gleb was a little older than Chama – a little older-looking, at least – with central-Asian features, Russian, maybe Mongolian. His hair was dark but cut very short, and he was clean-shaven. Under the white laboratory coat, Geoffrey had the impression of compact muscularity, a wrestler’s build.

‘Look,’ Gleb said, ‘you’re a citizen of the African Union, and the AU’s a transnational member entity of the United Surface Nations. That means you view things through a certain . . . ideological filter, shall we say.’

‘I think I can see my way past USN propaganda,’ Geoffrey said.

‘We’re Pans. Pans are bankrolled by the United Aqatic Nations, as you undoubtedly know, and the UAN’s at permanent loggerheads with the USN. That’s the way of the world. But we’re not at war, and it doesn’t mean that Pans are about to make a bid for global domination, on Earth or here on the Moon. It’s just that we believe in certain . . . unorthodox things.’ Gleb’s voice, coming in under the translation, was speaking a different language from Chama, something clipped and guttural, where Chama’s tongue was high and lyrical in intonation. He delivered this oratory with arms folded, muscles bulging under the white fabric of his sleeves. ‘Pans think that the human species has a duty, a moral obligation, to assist in the proliferation of living organisms into deep space. All living organisms, not just the handful that we happen to
want
to take with us, because they suit our immediate requirements.’

‘We’re doing our best,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s still early days.’

‘That’s one viewpoint,’ Gleb said cheerfully. ‘Especially if you’re trying to worm out of species-level responsibility.’

‘This is going really well,’ Sunday said.

‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I’ve only been here five minutes and already I feel like I’m about to be hanged, drawn and quartered for my crimes against the biosphere.’

‘Chama and Gleb don’t mean it personally. Do you?’ Sunday asked.

‘We do, but we’ll gladly make an exception for your brother,’ Gleb said with a smile.

‘Very magnanimous of you,’ Geoffrey replied.

‘We have a window here,’ Chama said. ‘The human species is poised on the brink of something genuinely transformative. It could be wonderful: an explosion of life and vitality, a
Green Efflorescence
, pushing beyond the solar system into interstellar space. We’re on the cusp of being able to do that. But at the same time we could also be on the cusp of entrenchment, consolidation, even a kind of retreat.’

Geoffrey shook his head. ‘Why on Earth would we retreat when we’ve come this far?’

‘Because soon we won’t need to be here at all,’ Gleb said.

‘Soon, very soon,’ Chama continued, ‘machines will be clever enough to supplant humans throughout the system. Once that happens, what reason will people have to live out in those cold, lonely spaces, if they can ching there instead?’

‘Thinking machines won’t rise up and crush us,’ Gleb said. ‘But they will make us over-reliant, unadventurous, unwilling to put our own bodies at risk when machines can stand in for us.’

Geoffrey was beginning to wish they’d stayed in the park, with the ice-cream stands and battling kites.

‘I’m not seeing what machines have to do with any of this,’ he said, gesturing at the glass-fronted enclosures.

‘Everything,’ Gleb answered. ‘Because this is where it all begins.’

Geoffrey peered into the lower window of the glassed enclosure. It was a kind of rock-pool tableau, with low plant cover and bubbling, gurgling water. ‘How many plant species have you brought here?’ he asked.

‘Living and replicating now, in the region of eight hundred,’ Chama said. ‘In cryosuspension, or as genetic templates, another sixteen thousand. Still some way to go.’

‘My god, there’s something alive in there.’ He couldn’t help jabbing his finger against the glass. ‘I mean something moving. In the water.’

‘A terrapin,’ Gleb said, on a bored note. ‘Terrapins are easy. If we couldn’t do terrapins, I’d give up now.’

‘Show him what else you do,’ Sunday said.

Gleb walked to another window, a few panels down from where Geoffrey was standing. ‘Come here,’ he said, tapping a thick finger against the glass.

The visible portion of the habitat – though it clearly extended far back from the room – was a circle of bare, dusty earth fringed by tall wheat-coloured grasses. Rising above the grasses, a seamless curtain of enamelblue, projected in such a way that it looked as convincing and distant as real sky. As Geoffrey walked over to join Gleb, he kept on tapping his fingernail against the glass. Gleb had very dark nails, tinted a green that was almost black. Geoffrey arrived in time to see the grasses swishing, parting to allow a hare-sized animal to bound into the clearing.

It was a battleship-grey rhinoceros, the size of a domestic cat. It was not a baby. Its proportions and gait, insofar as Geoffrey could tell – and allowing for the bouncing motion that was an inescapable consequence of Lunar gravity – were precisely those of a fully grown animal.

It just happened to be small enough to fit into a briefcase.

He was just satisfying himself as to the accuracy of his assessment when a pair of true babies sprang along behind what was now revealed to be their mother. The babies were the size of rats, but they walked on absurdly thick, muscular, wrinkle-hided legs. They were as tiny and precisely formed as bath toys moulded from grey plastic.

He laughed, amazed at what he was seeing.

‘Resource load is the crux,’ Chama said, joining them by the window. ‘We don’t have the means to keep fully grown adult specimens alive – at least not in a habitat that wouldn’t feel hopelessly claustrophobic to them.’ He pushed a strand of hair away from his cheekbone. ‘Fortunately – for now, at least – we don’t have to. Nature’s already given us a ready-made miniaturisation mechanism.’

‘Phyletic dwarfism,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Yes. Almost childishly easy to achieve in mammals and reptiles.’

Chama was right. Insular dwarfism often arose when an ancestor species divided into isolated sub-populations on islands. Allopatric speciation, and subsequent dwarfism, had occurred time and again in the evolutionary record, from dwarf allosaurs to the
Homo floresiensis
hominids in Indonesia. Even trees did it. It was a gene-encoded response to environmental stress; a way of allowing a population to survive hard times.

‘The same mechanisms will assist animal life transition through the difficult bottleneck of the early stages of the Green Efflorescence,’ Gleb declared. ‘All we’ve done is give the inbuilt mechanism a little coaxing to produce extreme dwarfism. It’s as if nature anticipated this future survival adaptation.’

‘A little coaxing’ sounded like magisterial understatement to Geoffrey, given the toy-like proportions of the rhinoceroses. But he could well believe that Chama and Gleb hadn’t needed to perform much deep-level genetic tinkering to achieve it. Certainly there was no evidence that the dwarf animals were in any way traumatised by their condition, judging by the way they were happily snuffling and shuffling around, the babies nudging each other boisterously.