Blue Remembered Earth (36 page)

‘You knew. You looked for something to ching, and you found . . . this. You found a way in. You couldn’t have done that without realising that the ching coordinates pointed to a suit, not a robot.’

‘I . . . improvised, dear. It’s a suit with servo-assist and a camera built into the helmet. It moves, it sees. How, in practical terms, does that differ from a robot?’

‘Because it’s got a corpse in it.’ She was too angry to swear, too angry even to sound angry.

‘Fate presented us with this opening; I took it.’

‘How can you be so callous? This is . . . was a person, and you’re using

them like . . .’ Sunday flustered, ‘like some cheap tool, like some piece of disposable equipment. And I’m locked in with them, in a . . . a
coffin
.’

‘Get over it. Do you think this person gives a shit, Sunday? Whoever they are, whoever they were, no one cared enough to come and look for them. They sealed this place up, not even realising there was a dead body inside. That’s how missed this person was.’

‘You’re not making this any easier.’

‘We’ve found them now, haven’t we? When we get back to Stickney we’ll alert the authorities, and they can come and open up the camp. They’ll probably be able run a trace on the suit and find its owner. But in the meantime? Am I going to refuse to make use of this suit just because someone died in it once upon a time? This is serious, Sunday.’

She swallowed her revulsion. ‘Let’s get this over with. And if you ever do something like this to me again—’

‘You’ll do what? Erase me, because I had the temerity to make a decision? I thought you were smarter than that, granddaughter. By the way – while we’ve been talking, I happened to notice that that locker isn’t where it ought to be.’

‘What?’ Sunday asked, wary of a diversion.

‘Check the dust tracks on the floor. It’s been moved. Those may even be my own footprints.’

Sunday could no more grip the locker than she could the mug or the glove, but in Phobos’s gravity it wasn’t hard to shove it sideways until it toppled in slow motion. Sunday directed the helmet torch at the portion of the wall that had been hidden by the locker until then.

Eunice’s intuition had been correct. It was a painting, more properly a mural: brushed directly onto the dome’s curving wall.

Sunday stared at it in wonderment. For a moment, she forgot all about the corpse suit.

‘I know this.’

‘Of course you know it. It’s a copy of the one in my room, back in the household. I take no responsibility for the original, but I’m certain I made this copy.’

‘You painted this?’

‘Projected the original onto the wall, copied it. It doesn’t make me an artist.’

She wished that the construct had permitted the tingle of recognition to endure for at least a few moments before shattering the spell. Eunice was quite right, of course. Sunday had visited her grandmother’s abandoned bedroom on a handful of solemn occasions – it had always felt like the room of someone dead, not merely absent – and she recognised the mural from those visits.

‘Who’d have thought it?’

The construct looked at her sharply. ‘Who’d have thought what, child?’

‘That you, the great and fierce Eunice Akinya, could ever have been homesick. Why else would you have brought this piece of your past with you?’

Executed with childlike boldness, the mural was a vivid, colour-drenched painting of Kilimanjaro. The mountain’s steepness was exaggerated, its snow-cap diamond-faceted against deep-blue sky. Cutting across the middle of the painting was a horizontal swathe of trees, depicted with naive exactness and symmetry. Ornamenting the trees, perched on the branches like jewels and lanterns, were many colourful birds with long tails and horned beaks. In the foreground were ochre grasses and emerald shrubs. Woven into the grasses, striped and counter-striped like partial ciphers, were many different kinds of animal, from lions to zebra to giraffe and rhino, snakes and scorpions. There were even Maasai, their tall black and red spear-clutching forms the only recurrent vertical elements in the composition.

‘I wasn’t homesick,’ Eunice said, after a great while. ‘Home-proud. That’s not the same thing.’

Sunday blinked the mural. ‘I’ve captured an image. But I’m not sure this is the thing we were meant to find.’

‘And I’m sure it is. When I came back here, I must have changed the picture. It was well done, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps I redid the whole thing, to make sure the joins wouldn’t show.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘It doesn’t match. I have a memory of the original, and . . . something’s different.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Let’s be sure of ourselves, shall we? I can’t be certain that my memory of the mural is accurate. But your brother’s still in Africa. Have him visit my room and blink the image up to us. Then we can talk.’

Jitendra was on the drowsy cusp of consciousness, in the same kind of room where she had been revived earlier in the day. Sunday sat down in the chair next to the bed and was smiling when he surfaced, squinting against the light and licking sleep-parched lips. ‘Welcome back, lover. We’re on Mars. Almost.’

Jitendra had already been reassigned voluntary muscle function, so he was able to tilt his head and smile back. His face was slack, but the tone would return soon enough.

‘We made it,’ he said, slurring and pausing. ‘Not that I ever had doubts . . . but still.’

‘It’s still a miracle.’ The technician had given her a box holding six little cuboid sponges, stuck on the end of sticks like lollipops. They were soaked with something sweet, chemically tailored to Jitendra’s palate. She leaned over and dabbed his lips with one.

‘Thank you,’ Jitendra said.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Like I’ve been dead for a month.’

‘You have, Mister Gupta. It’s called space travel.’

He struggled into a sitting-up position, propping himself with an elbow. He was wearing silver pyjamas. They had even shaved him, so that when Sunday kissed his cheek his skin was peach soft and perfumed, smelling of violets. Jitendra took in his surroundings, studying the white room and the false window with its ever-breaking waves. ‘Everything went OK, didn’t it?’

Sunday dabbed at his lips again. ‘Not a hitch. They brought me out sooner, but apparently that’s what happens sometimes. Just time to take a little stroll outside, see the scenery.’

‘Please don’t tell me you’ve seen Mars ahead of me.’

‘No,’ she said, just a bit too quickly. ‘Not yet. It was on the other side. We’ll see it together.’

‘I’d like that.’ Jitendra rubbed his slightly stubbled scalp. ‘I need a haircut.’

‘We found something,’ she blurted.

‘We?’

‘Eunice and I. I need to talk to my brother, but . . . I think I already know where we’re going next.’

Jitendra sat in silence, waiting for her to elaborate. ‘Are you going to let me in on the big secret?’ he asked eventually.

‘It’s Mars,’ Sunday said. ‘Which is where we were going anyway, of course. But there’s a complication.’

Jitendra managed a smile. ‘Why am I not surprised?’

When Mars lifted into view its aspect was different, but she made no mention of that. In a way it helped, because this was a different face of the world, not the one she had already seen, and she could study it afresh without having to pretend. Sunday regretted her lie, but it had been a small one.

They were standing next to each other, far enough away from the other tourists that they could imagine themselves alone on this airless ridge, the only living people on Phobos. Soon this would be the memory she chose to hold on to, letting the earlier one wither. And in time she might even come to believe that this was, indeed, the first time she had seen Mars rising, in all its ancient, time-scarred immensity.

‘It’s wonderful,’ Jitendra said.

‘It’s a world. Worlds are wonderful.’

They stood in silence, transfixed, until a soft chime from the console told them it would soon be time to return their rented suits, and make ready for the rest of their journey.

‘Before we go inside,’ Sunday said, ‘you should see Chakra’s Folly. Reckon we’ve still got time. On the way, you can tell me all about the Evolvarium.’

‘Why are you interested in that all of a sudden? I thought that was more my area.’

‘Because that’s where we’re going.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The ching was passive, but the resolution more than adequate for his purposes. He exited his standing body, rose into the air and drifted over the treetops, gaining speed and altitude. Sometimes it was good not to take the Cessna, or one of the other machines; just to become a disembodied witness, with a viewpoint assembled from distributed public eyes. The scene was rendered with exacting thoroughness down to the last leaf, the last hoofprint or elephant footprint in the dust. Any uncertainty in the image flow was seamlessly interpolated long before his brain had to fill in any gaps.

He found the herd soon enough. Whatever status Matilda might have lost among the other females when she was startled by Eunice’s figment had been regained over the ensuing weeks. Her position and body posture were as authoritative as ever. She was leading her family along a narrow trail bordered by acacia and cabbage trees.

Revelling in the freedom – as much as he loved flying the Cessna, there was something delicious about lacking body and inertia, the ability to traverse the sky like a demon, at the merest whim – Geoffrey scouted the other herds, taking the opportunity to refresh his memories of their structures and hierarchies. He also pinpointed the roving bulls, solitary or in small, quarrelsome gangs. The minds of bull elephants, soaked with testosterone, preoccupied with status and mating, felt infinitely more alien to him than those of the matriarchs and their herds. And yet he’d known many of these bulls when they were juvenile males, as boisterous and carefree as the rest.

Minds were deeply strange things. When these elephants were young, it had required no great effort to see the sparks of human awareness in their curiosity and playfulness. It was even possible to think that their minds were in fact more human before adulthood clamped down and locked those attributes away, secure behind iron walls of dominance and aggression.

Elephant society was a product of necessity, shaped by environmental factors over countless millions of years. But what did that mean, here and now? Things were changing for the elephants; had been changing for centuries. Humans had come, and the humans had done things to the climate that had made the world convulse. Steamships to space elevators: all that in a Darwinian eye-blink, a strobe-flash of massively compressed change. Elephants were still dealing with the fact that monkeys had fire and spears; they hadn’t even
begun
to process the industrial revolution, let alone the space age or the Anthropocene.

Bolder changes still were coming down the line, changes that even humans would struggle to accommodate. Panspermian Initiatives, the Green Efflorescence.

Observing elephants, monitoring them – even creeping into their skulls – that was acceptable to Geoffrey. But making them into something else, rewiring their society as if it was no more than a defective mechanism, transforming it into something better equipped to survive . . . ? He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. People had done enough harm, even with the best of intentions.

When he chinged back into his body, someone was waiting for permission to manifest. The tag was unfamiliar, so for a moment he presumed it was Sunday, coming in via an unorthodox, highly quangled routing.

He took the call in the research shack. He had made coffee before chinging and now, as the figment assumed reality, he drained the bitter dregs into his cup.

‘I hope I haven’t caught you at an inopportune moment, Mister Akinya. I did say I’d be back in touch, didn’t I?’

Geoffrey studied the blank-eyed man, with his sea-green suit and toothless gash of a mouth, his skin so pale that it might have been grafted from a reptile’s belly.

‘Kind of hoping you might have forgotten, Truro.’

‘Well, I can’t fault your honesty. But no, we don’t forget our debts. Especially when they’ve been extended. Remortgaged.’

‘If Sunday cut a deal with you, that’s between you and her.’

‘Ah, but it doesn’t work like that. If it ever did. We’ve done you two favours now, Mister Akinya. I’d very much like us at least to begin to discuss something by way of reciprocity.’

‘You can start by telling me where you’re chinging from.’

‘Oh, not so very far from you. Your sister correctly deduced that I was based on or near Earth. As it happens, I’m practically within spitting distance. I’m calling from Tiamaat, not too far from your Somalian coast. You’ll have heard of it, of course.’

‘I’m not an idiot. Why have you waited until now to contact me?’

‘You needed time to reflect, to assess your obligations to family. Sunday has arrived at her destination: we facilitated her visit, and the quangled bind from Phobos. She is awake. History has begun again. It felt like an appropriate time to resume negotiations.’

Geoffrey knew that Sunday was safe. He had received her message and made a point of blinking her a view of Kilimanjaro by way of reply.