Blue Remembered Earth (35 page)

‘What the hell are those things?’

‘Prayer wheels. What the Tibetans used to call ’
khor
. Ceramic gyroscopes and reaction-control discs from spacecraft stabilisation systems. The things painted on the rim are Buddhist incantations, mainly – the eight auspicious symbols of the
Ashtamangala
. Supposed to notch up good karma by turning the wheels whenever you were coming and going from the camp.’

Eunice’s ghost-hand brushed through the prayer wheels without turning them.

‘Don’t tell me you believed that stuff.’

‘You don’t have to believe something to keep on good terms with your neighbours. Their cooking was great, and it cost me nothing to turn their silly old wheels. I even suggested we should rig them up to dynamos, make some extra energy.’ She made a tooth-sucking noise. ‘Didn’t go down well.’

‘So why touch the wheels now?’

‘Old habits.’ Eunice hesitated. ‘Respect for the people who once lived here. There was one . . . there was this young Tibetan. I think space had already got to him by the time he reached Phobos. Cooped up here, the poor kid went completely off the rails. Just sat there rocking and chanting, mostly. Then he latched on to me. My fault, really. Had this helmet . . . I’d painted a lion’s face around the visor. We’d all customised our suits, so it was no big deal to me.’

‘And?’

‘This poor young man . . . there’s this figure, they call her the Dakini.
Khandroma
in Tibetan – “she who traverses the sky”. One of her manifestations is Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one. She’s on some of those wheels. When I showed up with my helmet . . . let’s just say he had a few adjustment issues.’

Sunday had no recollection of ever having heard this story before. Yet it was out there, somewhere in Eunice’s documented life – either in the public record, or captured in some private recording snared by the family’s posterity engines. The construct could not have known it otherwise.

How marvellous a life was, how effortlessly complex, how full of astonishments.

‘You pushed him over the edge,’ Sunday said. ‘Into madness.’

‘Wasn’t my fault that he was already primed to believe that claptrap,’ Eunice said. ‘This was before the Mandatory Enhancements, remember. But he was a sweet little boy. I tried to downplay my karmic stature as best as I could, but I didn’t want to undermine his entire belief system.’

‘How considerate of you.’

‘I thought so.’

At the base of the comms tower was a low rock-clad dome – inflated and pressurised and then layered over with a scree of insulating rubble, fused to a lustrous ebony. Radiating out from this central dome were three semicircular-profiled tunnels connected to three hummocks, each of which had an igloo-like airlock and a thick-paned cartwheel-shaped window set into its apex.

The entire Indian complex was smaller than one wing of the household, but this was where Eunice had spent months of her existence, holed up with a dozen or so fellow travellers while they waited for the storm to blow over.

‘How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’

‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.’

‘I know about books,’ Sunday said. ‘It’s one of your stupid books that’s brought me here.’’

‘Well, we read a lot. And watched movies and listened to music and indulged in this strange behaviour called “making our own entertainment”.’ She paused. ‘We weren’t just sitting around watching the days go by. We had work to do, keeping the base operational, drilling into Phobos, even, very occasionally meeting the Chinese and other settlers in Stickney. Just because the governments made us build separate bases didn’t mean we couldn’t hang out.’

Sunday had walked the suit all the way around the main dome and its three satellites.

‘I can’t see a way in. There are airlocks on each of the smaller domes, but they’re all sealed over. Even if they weren’t sealed, I’m not sure this suit would fit through the doorway.’

‘The camp was abandoned by the end of the century, which is when I’d have had to come back here. But that sprayed-on sealant must be newer than that.’

‘Did it occur to you sixty years ago, while you were busy thinking of ingenious ways to waste my time, that I might not even be able to get in there now?’

Eunice bent to peer through the viewport in the nearest airlock, wiping the glass with her ghost-hands. ‘You’re making an unwarranted assumption. There may be no need for physical entry into the domes. There’s aug here, self-evidently. If it reaches into the domes, then we can ching inside.’

‘I already tried that. There’s no way into the domes, active or passive.’

Eunice stalked around to the next airlock. ‘Let me make absolutely sure of that.’

Sunday had equipped the construct with a suite of routines to maximise the effectiveness of the simulation, even when the aug was thin or local data traffic highly congested. Those same routines made Eunice’s conversations all but secure, even with only modest levels of quanglement. Perhaps Eunice would be able to sniff a way into the dome using the same box of tricks.

Sunday wasn’t optimistic about that. Unless there was something inside capable of surveilling – a security camera, a robot, a distributed sensor web – they were back to square one. And why would there be anything like that in an abandoned encampment?

‘OK, I’ve found a way in. Impressed, granddaughter? Damn well should be. I’ve lost none of my edge.’

‘Yes, I’m . . .’ But Sunday trailed off. Was it right to be impressed that software had done the job it was designed to do? Wasn’t that exactly the point of it? ‘Just tell me what we’ve got.’

‘Active ching, my dear. There’s a . . . robot. Someone left it in there, and it’s still motile.’

‘Someone just
left
a robot in there?’

‘Do you want the ching or not? You don’t need to know the coords – I can put you through from my side.’

‘Where will I end up?’

Eunice gestured vaguely. ‘The dome to the left of us, I believe. It doesn’t really matter, because I’ll be right with you and I know the layout of the place. Once inside, we can make our way to my quarters.’

‘Give me the bind,’ Sunday said.

It was, by some distance, the crudest ching she had ever experienced – cruder even than the proxy she’d used on the Moon, during Chama’s expedition through the Ghost Wall. She had a point of view, but no sense of being elsewhere – her body, as far as her mind was concerned, was still in the rover-suit. When she tried to look around, her viewpoint juddered like a camera with a sticky bearing.

‘Are you here?’ Eunice asked. She was standing next to Sunday, cradling her helmet under one arm. The helmet, Sunday was astonished to see, had gained a custom paint job in the seconds since she had last seen Eunice.

A lion’s roaring face, coloured gold and ochre, with startling blue eyes and a toothsome, red-lined jaw gaping around the visor.

‘Very nice,’ Sunday said.

‘There’s no air, according to your sensors, but it feels odd to wear a suit in here.’

A circular window crowned the apex of the dome, but it didn’t admit much light. Sunday’s robot had a torch built into its head, which must have activated as soon as the ching bind went through. She steered its dim yellow beam around the airless room, picking out a miserable assortment of junk and detritus. The room looked as if it had suffered an earthquake, or been looted. There were bunks, equipment lockers, ancient and broken computer systems. Printouts, photographs of loved ones, children’s drawings were still fixed to the in-curving walls.

Her robot was slumped, knees drawn up to its chest, back to the wall. She tried standing up. The robot hesitated, then jerked into shambling motion. It had a limp and its fine motor control was shot. It was obviously very damaged, which might have been the reason it had been left to moulder in the camp. There was something attached to its chest, a kind of mechanical spider with jointed white limbs and a flattened crablike body. Sunday presumed it was a repair bot that had broken down in the process of trying to fix the larger unit.

She dislodged it with a stiff flick from her forearm and gauntlet. The fingers were seized into uselessness, like a frostbitten hand.

‘This way,’ Eunice said, picking a path between piles of junk.

They navigated the connecting corridor between the domes, Eunice looking back impatiently as Sunday struggled to keep apace. Decompression, when it happened, must have been sudden. There were flashfrozen plants, their vines still curling around the corridor walls. When Sunday touched them, they snapped into green shards like brittle sugary confections.

‘I don’t like this place. Hope no one was here when the pressure went.’

‘Do you see bodies?’

‘No.’

‘It was abandoned long before it fell into decay, I’m sure of that. No one’s been inside these walls for a very long time.’

‘Why would they? It’s the dead past. Anyone sensible has got better things to do with their time.’

Eunice flashed her a cocky smile. ‘Then what does that make you?’

‘Find your room, then let’s get out of here.’

The main dome had interior partitions with pressure-tight doors between them. The doors were all open now, the air long since fled. There was a lounge/commons area with a round table, its black top engraved with a zodiacal design, and brightly coloured chairs that were normal enough save for the fact that they had seat belts and foot stirrups. There was a mug still on the table, with a snap-on plastic lid and a drinking nipple. Sunday moved to examine it, but the robot’s seized-up grip wasn’t wide enough to grasp it and she knocked it off the table. The mug drifted to the floor without breaking. On its side were the words
Reykjavik 2088
, above the five rings of the Olympics symbol.

‘This way,’ Eunice said. She stepped through one of the partition doors, Sunday following into the room beyond.

Sunday waggled the torch beam around. ‘Sure this is it?’

‘Yes, quite definitely.’ Eunice didn’t need to explain herself. If she was certain, it meant that the records placed her in this part of the Indian base. There would be images, movies that had been gorged by the construct’s ravenous curiosity. ‘But I may not have been the last occupant, and there’s no reason they’d have kept this place as a shrine to my greatness.’

‘Then we’re wasting our time, aren’t we?’

‘My older self obviously thought otherwise, or she wouldn’t have buried those papers in Pythagoras.’

‘Well, that worked well, didn’t it? If your older self didn’t anticipate that part of the Moon being swallowed by China, maybe she got her plans wrong here as well.’

‘Do have a little faith, child.’

In one angle of the segment-shaped room was a combination bunk/hammock, optimised for sleep in microgravity conditions. Next to that was a fold-out desk, with a screen and mirror above it. Elsewhere there were equipment lockers and shelves, furnished with boxes, cartons, medical supplies and general spacefaring kipple.

Sunday scuffed her hand along one of the shelves, bulldozing dust. After depressurisation the dust had had decades to resettle, forming a cloying grey sediment on every surface.

Sunday saw something on the bunk. She limped over and tried to pick it up, but her hands were useless.

‘It’s your glove,’ she said. ‘The other half of the pair. It’s just like the one Geoffrey found in Copetown. But I can’t grab hold of it.’ Then a thought occurred to her. ‘Even if I
could
grab onto it, how the hell am I going to get it out of here?’

‘Break the window in the ceiling and throw the glove out – just make sure you don’t put it into orbit.’

‘Then what? By the time it makes it back down to the surface, it could be anywhere on Phobos!’

Eunice had her helmet under her arm and was scratching the back of her head with her other hand. ‘It’s not the glove,’ she said quietly. ‘The glove’s a gift, reassurance that you’re close. But it’s not the glove. That’s not how I think.’

Sunday moved to another part of the room. She had noticed the mirror before, but it was only now that she happened to stand in front of it and glimpse herself. For an instant, the realisation of what she was looking at, what was being reflected back at her, did not quite click. She was chinging an androform robot, as she had expected: hard-armoured and articulated like a human being. The light in the crown of the robot’s head dazzled her as it bounced back from the mirror.

But it wasn’t an androform robot. It was a spacesuit, with a helmet on.

And there was something behind the visor.

Sunday looked at the face of death, looking back at her. There was a skull inside the helmet. A skull with skin pasted on, skin like rice paper.

‘Eunice . . . this isn’t a robot.’ Horror made her own voice sound unfamiliar.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It’s a spacesuit with a dead body and I’m walking around in it. Please tell me you didn’t know this.’

Eunice looked at her. There was no change of expression on her face, no dawning comprehension. ‘How could I possibly have known, Sunday?’