Blue Remembered Earth (25 page)

‘So you’re just leaving this with me?’

Geoffrey looked surprised at her question. ‘Do what you want with it. I’ll back you all the way.’

‘In mind, if not in body.’

‘I can’t be in two places at once. If I start chinging up here at every opportunity, the cousins will really start wondering what’s going on. And we don’t want that, do we?’

‘No,’ Sunday said, with reluctance. ‘That we don’t.’

‘But you should be ready for whatever Eunice throws at you,’ Chama said. ‘She’s taken you from Earth to the Moon. Do you honestly think she meant you to stop there?’

‘My sister has to pay the rent as well,’ Geoffrey said. ‘She can play Eunice’s little game up to a point but at some point reality has to kick in. We both have day jobs. And in case you got the wrong impression, neither of us has buckets of money to throw around.’

‘Then dinner’s on me,’ Chama said grandly. ‘That’s only fair, isn’t it? I feel like celebrating. It’s not every day you become a pawn in international relations.’

So they went out that night, the five friends, to a good place that did East African and Indian, and when they had finished two courses and finally fended off the last of the inquisitive well-wishers, eager to congratulate Chama on his safe return, Sunday took out the cylinder of rolled paper, snapped it free of its rubber band and spread it carefully on a part of the table as yet unblemished by food and wine spillages. Two full wine bottles served as weights, to stop the pages curling back into a tube.

‘I think I have it,’ she said, hardly daring to voice her suspicion aloud, for fear that it would strike the others as foolish. ‘The fact that this is
Gulliver’s Travels
isn’t the only thing tying the book to Eunice.’

Geoffrey sounded wary but curious. ‘Go on.’

‘When you get back home I want you to confirm that these pages really were ripped from the copy of the book in the household archive. I’m betting they were, though. I’m also betting that Eunice picked this part of the book very deliberately. It’s a signpost. It’s telling us where to look next.’

‘Which would be?’ Jitendra asked.

Sunday sucked in a breath. ‘I have to go to Mars. Or rather, the moons of Mars. That’s the point, you see.’

Chama looked up from the third course he had ordered while the others were on their seconds. ‘Gulliver went to Mars? I don’t remember that part.’

‘That was Robinson Crusoe,’ Gleb said firmly. ‘At least, I think he was on Mars. Otherwise why would there be a city there named after him?’

‘The point,’ Sunday said, before the conversation drifted irrevocably off course, ‘is that Gulliver met the Laputan astronomers. On their flying island. And the astronomers showed Gulliver their instruments and told him that there were two moons going around Mars.’

‘Which is sort of . . . unremarkable, given that there
are
two moons going around Mars,’ Jitendra said, with the slow, befuddled air of a man in deep surrender to intoxication. He picked up one of the wine bottles, causing the pages to revert to a tight off-white tube.

Sunday gritted her teeth and pushed on. ‘This was before anyone knew of the real moons. Swift took a guess. Even put in their orbits and periods. Didn’t get them right, of course, but, you know, give the man credit for trying.’

‘And you think this is the clue?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘I ran it by the construct. She agrees with me.’

‘You made her,’ Geoffrey said. ‘That’s maybe not too surprising.’

Sunday deployed a fierce frown. ‘She’s perfectly capable of shooting my theories down in flames, brother. This time she thinks I’m on the right lines.’

‘Mars is a big planet,’ Gleb mused. ‘Where are you going to start?’

‘The clue indicates the moons, so that’s where I’ll look. And we can rule out Deimos immediately – Eunice was never there. Which leaves—’

‘Phobos,’ Chama said. ‘Fear, to Deimos’s Panic. Hmm. Are you really sure you want to go to a chunk of rock named Fear?’

Jitendra was recharging their glasses. ‘It could be called Happy Smiley Fun Moon and it wouldn’t make it any easier to get to. Look, it’s a nice idea, all this adventuring, but we need to be realistic. We can’t afford Mars.’

‘I could go on my own,’ Sunday said.

‘And that suddenly makes it achievable?’ Jitendra shook his head, smiling with the supercilious air of the only grown-up in the room. ‘This is out of our league, I’m afraid. You have commissions to finish, I have research to complete for June Wing. We can’t afford to let people down, not when we’ve bills to pay.’

Sunday was not proud of herself, but she pouted anyway. ‘Bills can fuck off.’

‘And so can Eunice,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘Even if she planted clues all over the system, she obviously did it decades ago. What difference does it make if we follow this up now, or wait a few years?’

‘Oh, brother. You really don’t get it, do you?’ She was shaking her head, stabbing her finger on the table. ‘This is life. It’s not a dress rehearsal. If we don’t do this now, we may as well start planning our own funerals. I don’t want to be sensible and prudent. Being sensible and prudent is for arseholes like Hector and Lucas. We turned away from all that, don’t you realise? We wanted life, surprises, risk . . . not stocks and shares and tedious fucking boardroom meetings about the cost of importing ice from fucking . . . Neptune.’ Realising that she was getting loud, drawing glances from across the restaurant, she dialled down her voice. ‘That’s not the life for me, all right? Maybe you’ve changed your mind. I haven’t. And if I have to find a way to get to Mars, I will.’

Geoffrey gave her his most infuriating calm-down nod. ‘All right. I get it. Really, I do. And although you may not believe me, I agree. But if we do this, we have to do it together. A shared risk. And we mustn’t rush into it.’

‘You’ve spent your whole life not rushing into things.’

He shrugged off the barb. ‘Maybe I have, Sunday, but I’m serious. If you insist on going to Mars, then I want to be part of that. She’s my grandmother, too. But we do it on our own terms, without begging favours from anyone. The cousins promised to pay me pretty well for coming to the Moon, and there’s more funding to follow. If I can find a way to channel some of that into a ticket to Mars . . . even two tickets . . . I will. But I’ll need time to make it happen, and the last thing I want to do is give them even more reason to get suspicious.’ He paused, absently picking at the edge of a wine bottle label. ‘If that means waiting months, even a year, so be it.’

‘There’s a favourable conjunction right now,’ Sunday said. ‘Mars is never closer, the crossing never easier.’

‘What goes around, comes around,’ Geoffrey answered.

‘Thank you. I think I have at least a basic grasp of orbital mechanics.’

Jitendra took her hand. ‘Maybe Geoffrey’s right, you know? No one’s saying we should forget all about this. But a year, two years . . . what difference will that make, given how long these clues must have been sitting around?’

Geoffrey nodded keenly. ‘Whatever we do, we shouldn’t act right now. That’ll be the worst possible thing, if we want to keep Hector and Lucas off our backs. Once I’m home I’ll give them the glove, and in a few weeks they’ll have forgotten all about it. Trust me on this – they don’t have the imaginations to think further ahead than that. Not unless money’s involved.’

‘Let the trail go cold . . . then strike?’ she asked.

‘Exactly.’ She sensed his pleasure and relief that she had come round to his way of thinking. ‘In the meantime, it’ll give us all the opportunity to . . . think things over. We really don’t know what we’re getting into here. Today we escaped, but we were lucky, and we won’t necessarily be lucky next time. We may think we know Eunice, but this could just as easily be her way of having a good laugh at our idiocy from beyond the grave. Or burial site.’

‘She went to a lot of trouble to put that box under Pythagoras,’ Sunday said. ‘Whatever was motivating her then, it wasn’t just spite. And she won’t be sending us to Mars out of spite either. She knows only family could get into that vault. She might want to test us, but she won’t want to hurt us.’

‘You hope,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I know this woman, brother. As well as anyone alive.’

And in that moment she felt more certain of that than anything else in the universe.

She woke in the middle of the night, Jitendra’s form cool and blue-dappled next to hers. They had made love, when her brother was asleep in the next room, and then she had fallen into deep, dreamless oblivion until something caused her to stir. For once the world beyond her apartment was almost silent. Through the wall she heard Geoffrey snoring softly. From somewhere below, two or three stacks under her module, a shred of conversation reached her ears. Something clicked in the air circulator; there was a muted gurgle from the plumbing. From a block away came the shriek of a cat. A distant urban hum underpinning everything, like the engines in the basement of reality.

Sunday slid out of bed, mindful not to disturb Jitendra. Conscious that her brother might wake at any moment, she wrapped a patterned sheet around herself. She passed through the living room, through the clutter left over after their return from the restaurant. More wine, scarlet-stained glasses, bottles of beer. Chama and Gleb had come back to the apartment before returning to their own quarters. Though the conversation had hit some rapids, it had all ended cordially enough. They were friends, after all. In fact they had spent the rest of the evening trading musical instruments, Geoffrey turning out to be surprisingly nimble-fingered on her battered old kora, Chama astonishing them all by being able to bash out some desert blues on a dusty old acoustic guitar left in one corner of her studio by a former tenant. Then they had watched some cricket and drunk more wine, and the zookeepers had bidden them farewell, and not long after that Geoffrey had turned in, weary and anxious about his trip back to Earth.

From the clutter to her studio. She closed the door behind her and moved to the commissioned pieces, the slender white figures, the ones they now wanted redone in black. She stroked their hard-won contours, feeling the electric tingle of hours of accumulated work. The boundary between art and kitsch was negotiable, even porous. In the right setting, the right context, these pieces might have some questionable integrity. But she knew very well where they would end up, black or white: flanking the doorway to an ethnic restaurant that couldn’t even be bothered to decide which part of Africa it was supposed to be parodying.

Indifference sharpened to hate. She hated the hours of her life this commission had robbed from her. She loathed it for the true art it had prevented her from creating. She despised it for the path it put her on for the future. She still liked to think she had ambition. Churning out emblematic crap for brainless clients was no part of that. It was easy to take one commission here, another there, just to pay the rent. Too much of that, though, and she might as well stop calling herself an artist.

In a moment of self-directed spite she raised her hand to smash the sculptures. But she stilled herself, not caring to wake Jitendra or Geoffrey.

That’s you in a nutshell
, she thought.
You can’t stand what you have to do to stay afloat, but you don’t have the nerve to actually do anything about it. You do shit jobs to pay the rent, and you only get to eat in nice restaurants when Chama and Gleb are footing the bill. You’re as much a prisoner of money as if you’d chosen to work for the family business after all. You just kid yourself that you’ve escaped. You might laugh at your brother, scold him for his unadventurousness. But at least he has his elephants.

In the morning they were up early to see him off, groggy-eyed and fog-headed from the night before. Geoffrey was tense about going back to Copetown, back to the Central African Bank. He had to do so, though. According to the current narrative, the glove was still in the vault. If he wasn’t seen to return to the branch, his story would unravel at the first awkward question from the cousins.

‘You’ll do fine,’ she told him.

He nodded, less convinced of this than she was. ‘I have to go into the vault, come out again. That’s all. And the bank won’t think this is funny behaviour?’

‘It’s none of their business, brother. Why should they care?’

They accompanied Geoffrey to the terminal, kissed him goodbye. She watched her brother speed back to the Surveilled World, and reflected on the lie she had just told him.

Because the last thing he had asked her was to promise that she wouldn’t do anything rash.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The thread-rider gobbled distance at an easy thousand kilometres per hour. They had put him under at the Copetown terminus but Geoffrey had exercised his right – and the cousins’ expense account – to be revived when he was still three hours up from Libreville. Being revived prior to landing cost more than sleeping all the way – it required onboard medical support, as well as a recuperation lounge and space to stretch his legs – but he doubted that Hector and Lucas would begrudge him this one chance to see the scenery. After all, he had no idea if he would ever leave Earth again.

It was the afternoon of the twelfth of February. He’d only been on the Moon for six full days, but that was more than enough to make the transition to normal gravity thoroughly unpleasant. Some of his fellow passengers were striding around in full-body exos, worn either under their clothes – though they invariably showed through – or as external models, colour-coordinated with their underlying fashions. Geoffrey made do with slow-release drug patches, pasted onto his limbs. They sent chemical signals to his bones and muscles to accelerate the reconditioning, while simultaneously blocking the worst of the discomfort. He felt stiff, as if he had been exercising hard a day or two before, and he had to constantly watch his footing in case he stumbled. On the face of it, he was forced to admit, these were minor readaptive symptoms. Above all else, he was relieved it was over. There’d been no trouble at the Central African Bank. He’d returned to the vault, opened the drawer, closed it again. The glove remained in his holdall. Sunday had the jewels, and the pages torn from Eunice’s book.