Blue Remembered Earth (28 page)

‘I’m happy to be of assistance. Whatever business you were on, I trust it’s done and you can return to normality?’

‘I hope so.’

Memphis nodded once. ‘As do I.’

Geoffrey said goodbye and set off wandering the house again, until his perambulations took him into the cool of the museum wing. No one else was abroad, no other family members, hangers-on or normal household staff, so he did something uncharacteristic of him and loitered, examining the glassed-over cases that had hitherto merited no more than a glance.

Eventually he found the book, the copy of
Gulliver’s Travels
Memphis had mentioned during the scattering. It was sitting in one of the cases, mounted on a black stand so that it stood nearly upright.

Geoffrey opened the case’s lid. It squeaked on old metal hinges. Holding it open with one hand, he reached down with the other and lifted out the book. The cover was a faded blue-grey, dog-eared at the edges. It looked dustier than it was. He gently eased the book open.

Marbled paper lined the cover’s interior. He made out scratchy grey marks, an unfamiliar but not inelegant script. It was in English, but too faint and cursive for the aug to detect and translate without coaxing. ‘To Eunice, on her twentieth birthday, January twentieth, 2050,’ he read, speaking the words aloud. ‘With all our love, Mother and Father.’

The book was obviously much older than that; it must have been an antique even at the time Eunice received her gift. He kept turning the pages, into the main story itself.

Presently he found the gap where sheets were missing, a little over halfway through the book. It was hard to spot unless one was looking for it: just a slight irregularity in the way the bound sets of pages were fixed into the spine. Perhaps the omission had been spotted when the book was placed in the library, noticed and then thought no more of – treasured books were at particular risk of suffering damage, after all, by virtue of being read and carried. On the other hand, it was equally likely that no one had ever realised.

He made a mental note of the missing page numbers, then returned the book to its rightful position. He was about to close the lid and walk away when he noticed the fine white text engraved into the base of the book’s stand.

Donated to the private collection by Eunice Akinya in 2100, immediately prior to her last deep-space mission.

She had come back a year and several months later, from the edge of the solar system. Even now, almost no one had gone that far out. But upon her return to Lunar orbit, Eunice had been in no position to go burying things on the Moon. Had she left the Winter Palace, her movements would have been tracked and recorded for posterity. She had spent the entire subsequent sixty years in the station.

Whatever she had done, from the glove in the safe-deposit box to the papers under the soil of Pythagoras, and assuming no one else had been involved, must have been done before she left for deep space.

So it was premeditated.

CHAPTER NINE

Kilimanjaro was a cut diamond dropped from the heavens, sliced at its base by a sliver-thin line of haze. It appeared to float just off the ground, by some mountainous marvel of levitation.

He found the clan without difficulty, after less than thirty minutes in the air. He came in low, executing a sharp turn with his starboard wingtip almost scything the marula and cabbage trees bordering one of the waterholes. The elephants turned to watch him, elevating trunks and flapping ears. Matilda was easy to pick out among them: she was the one carrying on unimpressed, scuffing and probing with her trunk, trying valiantly to give the impression that his return was really not all that big a deal.

He picked a stretch of ground, the grass worn away in arid furrows where he had landed on many previous occasions, and brought the Cessna in at a whisker over stall speed. He cut the engine just after the tyres bounced and let her roll in near-silence, the wings and undercarriage swishing and crackling through dry undergrowth, until the aircraft came to a stop. Still wearing the same clothes he’d put on before leaving Sunday’s apartment, he grabbed his kitbag and climbed out of the cockpit.

Geoffrey left the aircraft and walked slowly through the grass towards the elephants. The breeze, such as it was, was at his back, ushering his scent ahead of him. He had not changed his clothes, nor showered, for precisely that reason. After such an absence he wished to take no chances. Periodically he clapped his hands and bellowed a wordless call, to further reinforce his identity.

It was late in the day. Shadows spread, black and grey and purple, moving and coalescing as the breeze stirred nets and fans of vegetation. His brain began to fill in the gaps, suggesting muscular crouched forms, pairs of tracking eyes agleam with single-minded vigilance. The dusky sighing of grass on grass became the slow inhalation of patient, hungry things, drawing a final breath before the neck-breaking pounce. Random shapes in the soil assumed a crawling, serpentine aspect, making him hesitate with every third or fourth stride. That part of his brain, ancient and stupid as it was, couldn’t be switched off completely. But he had learned to disregard that nervous monkey babble as well as he could.

There, ahead, was Matilda, her darkening profile broken behind two candelabra trees. He whooped and clapped again, his armpits damp with sweat, then called out, ‘Hello, Matilda. It’s me, Geoffrey. I’ve come home.’

As if she didn’t know it was him, dropping in from the skies. The Cessna was as weird and singular as a unicorn.

She allowed him to approach, but there was a wariness in her posture, a sense of caution that the other elephants picked up on. Geoffrey halted as he heard and felt a threat rumble from one of the other high-ranking females. Matilda answered with a vocalisation of her own, perhaps a signal for reassurance or merely the elephant equivalent of,
Shut up and let me handle this.

Geoffrey waited a while and then resumed his approach.

‘I told you I had to go away,’ he said. ‘Be glad I wasn’t gone longer.’

He took in her family. Hovering in the air, an aug layer had verified that all were present and correct, but it was only on the ground that he could look for signs of injury and illness. He paid particular attention to the youngsters, and saw nothing amiss.

‘So it’s all been business as usual,’ he said softly, as much for his own benefit as Matilda’s.

He found a tree-stump, squatted on it and drew out his sketchbook and 2B pencil. He worked with furious energy as the light ebbed, striving to capture the essence of the moment with as few pencil strokes as possible, like some mathematician searching for the quickest route to a theorem. No time for nuance or detail or shading; it was all about brutal economy and a devout, martial approach to the act of marking the paper. He drew until the gloom was absolute, the elephants no more than round-backed hillocks, grey shading into purple. His eyes had amped up, and the aug offered to drop an enhancement layer over his visual field, but Geoffrey declined.

When he had filled three pages he packed the sketchbook away, shouldered the bag and rose from the stump with aching bones. The elephants were calmer now, accepting his presence with benign indifference. He approached the matriarch, stood his ground and allowed her to examine him with her trunk.

‘You won’t believe where I’ve been,’ he told her. ‘Or maybe you would, if you were capable of understanding it. Maybe it wouldn’t seem much further away to you than Namibia. I was on the Moon, Matilda. How amazing is that? I was up there.’

He couldn’t see the Moon tonight, but he would have pointed it out to her if he’d been able.

Geoffrey voked the link, Matilda’s real-time brain scan appearing in the upper-left corner of his visual field. There was activity in all the usual functional areas, but nothing untoward. Her state of mind was as unexceptional as he had ever seen it, allowing for the normal patterns associated with nocturnal watchfulness.

He shouldn’t do it, he told himself. It was too soon after his return to proceed to the next step of initiating the full mind-to-mind link. But why not? He was supremely calm now, his mind settled by the flight and the placidity of the herd. Tomorrow might be different.

He voked his own brain image and began the transition. He pushed quickly through the low percentages, ten, twenty and beyond. At twenty-five per cent he felt his self-image losing definition, his mind decoupling from his body, his sense of scale undergoing a ballooning, dreamlike shift, Matilda losing size until she appeared no larger to him than one of the phyletic dwarves.

He passed through thirty-five per cent, then forty. The neural schematics showed areas of congruency, territories of brain lighting up in unison. The anatomical details were different, of course, but the functional relationships were precisely conserved. Matilda’s thought processes were guiding his own, moving fire around in his skull. He still felt calm and in control, aware that his mind was being influenced by an external agency yet retaining sufficient detachment not to be unnerved by the process. There was no fear – yet – even as he pushed through forty-five per cent and then hit the psychological barrier of fifty per cent, more than he had ever dared risk before. He didn’t just feel disconnected from his own body now; he felt multitudinous, part of a larger whole. Matilda’s identity as matriarch was so closely bound to her family that her identity encompassed other elephants. Geoffrey reeled, dizzy with the perceptual shifts, but he steeled himself and continued pushing through to fifty-five per cent, then sixty. He was a long way out now, swimming in deep neural waters. The world was coming through with the preternatural sharpness of a hallucination, dambursting his senses, flooding his brain with more stimulation than it could readily assimilate. The background noise of the waterhole and its surroundings was teased apart, deconstructed like the mathematical separation of a signal into its Fourier components, unwoven into threads of distinct and specific sound – each tree, each bush whispering its own contribution, each breath, each footfall a thing unto itself. Rumbles from elephants near and far, felt in his belly more than his head.

Yet that endless complex proclamation was only one part of the sensory tapestry. Matilda’s sense of smell was acute and untiring, and the link was lighting up Geoffrey’s olfactory centre accordingly. The translation was too crude to replicate the specific impressions, but Geoffrey nonetheless felt overwhelmed with smells drawn from his own experience, each of which arrived with an accompanying gift-wrapping of memories and emotions. The odour of freshly laid frond-carpet, in a newly furnished room at the household, when he was eight. The smell of transmission oil leaking from one of the jeeps. A box of paper-wrapped wax crayons, spectrum-ordered, like a perfumed rainbow waiting to spill its hues onto paper. Pushing his hand into a mound of fresh hyena dung when he’d tripped on the ground – and running crying into the household, holding his soiled hand as if he’d cut himself. The memories were usually of things that had happened to him when he was small, coming from old-growth brain structure, laid down when the architecture of his mind was still vigorously open to change.

Sixty-five per cent, seventy. That was enough for now, he told himself. It might even be enough for ever. Further refinements could follow – fine-tuning the interface so that the sense impressions were rendered more precisely, so that when Matilda smelled lion, he would smell lion too, and know it for what it was. It would only be a matter of building up data, cross-correlating neural states with external factors. There was no theoretical or philosophical reason why he couldn’t experience her world the way she did, with all its specificities. And then, only then, might he begin to glimpse something of her thought processes, if only in the play of shadows on the cave wall of her mind.

In all this, she had remained supremely calm and attentive, oblivious to the machines reading her mind; oblivious to the fact that her mind was being echoed and mirrored in another creature’s head. Geoffrey knew that this was the point where he should break off contact, having already achieved more than during any of his previous sessions. But another part of him wanted to forge ahead, now that he had overcome his initial fears. Not by pushing the percentage level higher, but by allowing traffic in the other direction. That had, after all, always been his ultimate goal: not just to peer into her mind, but to establish a communication channel. What was the phrase June Wing had used – a cognitive gate? The neuromachinery protocols were already in place; it would take no more than a sequence of voked commands to begin pushing his state of mind into Matilda’s head.

Was she ready for it, though? How would an animal cope, in the absence of any rational framework to temper its instinctive reactions? Nothing in her evolutionary past had equipped Matilda with the apparatus to grasp what he was contemplating doing to her.

Still, he hadn’t come this far with the project to allow such qualms to stop him now. The point was to conduct the experiment and
then
learn something – even if the only conclusion was that the work was a dead end, of no further value.

As a precautionary measure, he dialled the existing neural interface threshold back down to thirty per cent. It was low enough that his sense of self returned more or less to normal, but not so low that he couldn’t still feel Matilda’s sense-world bleeding into his own, with all its gaudy welter of multichannel impressions.

Five per cent in the other direction, he thought. That was more than enough to be starting with.