Blue Remembered Earth (37 page)

‘I’m not sure anything needs negotiating.’

‘Chama Akbulut . . . found something, didn’t he? On the Moon, in the Chinese sector?’

Geoffrey picked a fly out of the coffee’s cold meniscus. ‘If you say so.’

‘I’ll confess, there are two reasons why we ought to meet in person, and with some urgency. One is the business with Chama, Gleb and the phyletic dwarves. It’s a marvellous little project and it has my absolute support. There’s something else, though. You’ve come to the attention of . . . well, I shan’t say for the moment. But a colleague of mine has requested an audience.’

‘Thing is, my calendar’s a little full.’

‘And this is science, Mister Akinya. Whatever your plans, I doubt there’s anything so pressing that it can’t wait a few days.’

Geoffrey opened his mouth to argue, but beyond the usual vague notions of getting ahead on paperwork, he had no detailed intentions. ‘You’re not going away, are you?’

‘As you’ll find, I’m a remarkably persistent soul.’

‘You’re going to keep bothering me, I suppose I might as well get it over with.’

‘Splendid,’ Truro said, as if he had been expecting no other response. ‘You shall come to Tiamaat, and the pleasure will be all mine! I have your ching coordinates. Shall we say . . . this location, tomorrow morning? Ten a.m.? Very good.’

The knob clicked, the door emitting a mouselike squeak of protestation as it opened. Eunice’s room was cool, the windows permanently shuttered. A ceiling fan stirred the air to no detectable benefit. Geoffrey had peered into this room at various points during his childhood and adolescence, but not often since his late teens. Eunice’s figment had sometimes manifested here, but as often as not it had appeared somewhere else in the household or its grounds. Whatever the case, Geoffrey had usually done his best to be elsewhere.

The room was a time capsule, a piece of the twenty-first century lodged in the present. The rose-printed wallpaper was paper, not active material: it was pasted onto the walls and couldn’t be altered at a moment’s whim. Rectangular fade marks hinted at the locations of old pictures, join lines where the sheets didn’t quite match, and little white lesions where the paper had been scuffed. The rug on the floor was a kind of textile rather than a self-cleansing frond-carpet. When he stood on it, it didn’t ooze over his shoes and try to pick them clean of nourishment. The furniture was wooden: not the kind of wood that grew purposefully into furniture shapes, but the kind that started off as trees, before being hacked and rolled and sawed and steamed into shape. There were things in this room older than the Cessna.

One wall wasn’t papered, or had been papered and then painted over. The mural didn’t fill the entire area; it was bordered in white and smaller than Geoffrey remembered. The wall faced east, towards the real Kilimanjaro.

‘I was right,’ Eunice said. ‘You can blink it for Sunday’s sake, but I’ve seen it through your eyes now and that’s much the same thing.’

‘I haven’t seen the other one. What’s different?’

‘Directly below the mountain, here.’ She was pointing at a long-legged bird, maybe a crane or ibis. ‘The etymology of Kilimanjaro isn’t very clear, but it may mean “white mountain” or “white hill”. This bird is white, do you see?’

‘I do.’

‘In the version on Phobos, it’s a different bird. I saw it immediately, but I had to be sure. Sunday would never have realised, but—’

‘Get to it, Eunice.’ His nerves were addled after the visitation from Truro. ‘Some of us have lives to be getting on with.’

‘It’s a peacock,’ she said, ‘painted in exactly the same position. That’s the only point of difference between the two murals. We have stills of the Indian camp taken around 2062, and some of them show the mural. There was no difference between this one and that one at that point, so I must have made the change when I returned to Phobos in 2099.’

‘Fine. And this is supposed to mean something to me?’

‘From white mountain to peacock mountain, Geoffrey. Must I labour the point? The original mural refers to Kilimanjaro; the one on Phobos can only refer to Pavonis Mons.’

‘Pavonis Mons,’ he repeated.

‘On Mars. It’s the—’

‘Highest mountain. Or volcano. Or something.’

‘That’s Olympus Mons, but you’re on the right lines. Pavonis Mons is still pretty impressive. Main thing is, I was there. If there was no documented link to my past, then you’d be forgiven for dismissing the mural. But
I was there.
I walked on that mountain. It was 2081; I was fifty-one years old, pregnant with Miriam. We know the exact coordinates.’

‘Then all Sunday has to do is . . .’ Geoffrey trailed off. ‘She mentioned complications, Eunice.’

The figment swallowed audibly. ‘There are . . . difficulties.’

‘Such as?’

‘That part of Mars . . . the Tharsis Bulge . . . it’s changed a little since my time.’

Memphis motioned Geoffrey to take a seat until his call was done. Geoffrey poured himself some water from the jug set on a low table near Memphis’s desk.

‘What can I do for you, Geoffrey?’ Memphis asked pleasantly, when he had come out of ching.

‘I have to go away, just for a couple of days, leaving tomorrow morning. Could you check on things while I’m gone?’

‘It is rather short notice.’

‘I know, but I’d feel a lot happier if you could do that for me.’

Memphis shook his head, a gesture of good-natured exasperation that Geoffrey remembered well from his earliest days.
What are we going to do with you, young man?

‘Couple of days, you said?’

‘That’s all. And you don’t need to spend hours out there.’

‘Could you not ching, from wherever you’ll be?’

‘That may not be possible. Anyway, I’d rather someone went there in person. You know how it is.’

‘Yes,’ Memphis said, in long-suffering tones. ‘One does. Well, you would not ask this lightly, I think. I will inspect Matilda’s herd from an airpod. Will that suffice?’

‘If you could also land and inspect the perimeter monitors, and then check on the camp, that would be even better.’

‘Will one inspection per day suffice?’

Geoffrey shifted on his seat. ‘If that’s all you can give me—’

‘Which is your way of saying you would rather I made at least two.’

Geoffrey smiled softly. ‘Thank you, Memphis.’

‘This mysterious trip of yours . . . you’ll be sure to tell me what it’s all about, when you get back?’

‘I will, I promise. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us.’

‘Nor I.’

There was a lull. Memphis looked ready to return to his work, so Geoffrey made to stand up. But his old mentor was not quite done.

‘Now that Eunice is never coming back, we should give some thought to what happens to her room. She would not have wanted it kept as some miserable, dusty shrine.’

‘There are plenty of rooms in the household going spare.’

‘When we have many guests – as we did during the scattering – we are considerably stretched. If the subject upsets you, I won’t raise it again. But I know your cousins will be anxious to move on.’

‘Bury the past, you mean.’

‘We must all do that, if we are to keep living,’ Memphis said.

In the morning, Geoffrey saw a glint of moving silver, an aircraft with an upright tail fin, sharking low over the trees. Gradually he heard the drone of . . . He shook his head, ready to laugh at the patent absurdity of it. The only thing in his experience that made a sound anything like that was the Cessna, and the Cessna was sitting in plain view.

‘Eunice,’ he said quietly, ‘I could use some help here.’

She was with him in an instant, as if she had never been more than a few paces away. ‘What is it, Geoffrey?’

‘Need a reality check. Tell me I’m not looking at an aeroplane even older than my own.’

Geoffrey was shielding his eyes from the sun. Eunice echoed his gesture, but at the same time – from where, he hadn’t noticed – produced a pair of slim grasshopper-green binoculars, which she held to her eyes single-handed, as daintily as if they were opera glasses. She tracked the moving form of the aircraft, now almost nose-on.

‘If I’m not very much mistaken, that is a DC-3. Is there any particular reason why a DC-3 would be coming down to land, miles from anywhere, in the middle of equatorial East Africa?’

‘It’s my ride,’ Geoffrey said.

Eunice lowered the binoculars. ‘To where?’

‘Somewhere interesting, I hope.’

The DC-3 dropped under the treeline, its engines throttling back. They walked over to meet it.

‘They were extraordinarily numerous and long-lived,’ Eunice said as they picked their way through dry brush. ‘Sixteen thousand, and that’s not including all the copies and knock-offs. Even when they were old, you could strip out the avionics, put in new engines and begin again with a zero fatigue rating. Dakotas were still flying when I was a child.’

‘Did you like planes?’

‘Adored them.’ Eunice was stomping her merry way through thigh-high grass as if it wasn’t there at all. ‘Look at it this way. You’ve been born in a time when it’s possible to
fly through the air in machines.
Who wouldn’t fall in love with the idea of that?’

The DC-3 sat tail-down at the end of the airstrip. It was quite astonishingly beautiful: a gorgeous sleek thing, as curvaceous and purposeful as a dolphin.

But, incongruously, there was no sign of a welcoming committee. A door had been opened and a set of steps lowered, but no one was standing at the top of those steps, beckoning him aboard.

‘Are you sure this is for you?’

‘I thought so,’ he said, but with ebbing confidence.

Yet what else could it be but the transport Truro had promised? Then he saw a neat little logo on the tail fin, a spiral galaxy painted green, the only marking anywhere on the highly reflective silver fuselage.

If that didn’t clinch it, nothing would.

They climbed aboard. It was cool inside, with seats and settees laid out lounge-fashion and a bar situated at the rear of the fuselage. The compartment ran all the way to the nose: there was no cockpit, no flight controls or instrument panel, merely a couple of additional lounge seats for those who wanted to take advantage of the forward view.

Behind them, the steps folded back into the plane and the door sealed itself. The engines revved up again and Geoffrey felt the aircraft turning on the airstrip.

‘And you’ve no idea what this is about?’

‘You, ultimately,’ Geoffrey said.

Soon they were bouncing along the airstrip, and then aloft, climbing shallowly, skimming the treetops by no more than hand-widths.

‘Well, this is grand fun,’ Eunice said, striding imperiously from window to window. ‘I’m still here, too. Whoever’s sent this thing is allowing you full access to the aug. That’s reassuring, isn’t it? You’re not being kidnapped.’

‘I never thought I was.’

Eunice soon tired of the view and sat herself down in one of the seats. ‘So who sent this aircraft?’

‘The Panspermian Initiative. You know about them – you used to hang out with Lin Wei.’

‘I don’t know anyone called Lin Wei.’

‘You should do, but there’s a part of your life missing. Sunday established the connection with Lin, but she doesn’t have enough information to fill in the rest of the void.’

‘Have to take your word for it, then. So we’re going to see this Lin Wei?’

‘I doubt it, seeing as she’s dead. My point of contact is someone called Truro.’

‘Whom you trust enough to get aboard this plane?’

‘I’m in his debt. Actually, we’re all in his debt, but I’m the one who seems to be expected to do the paying back.’

‘The Panspermian Initiative,’ Eunice said languidly, drawing out the words as if she was reading them, signwritten across the sky. She was tapping the aug, glugging gallons of data. ‘You need to watch people like that. All that species-imperative stuff? Self-aggrandising horse-piss.’

‘They think we might be in a critical period, a window of opportunity. If we don’t seize the moment now, we might never get beyond the system, into the wider galaxy.’

‘Which would automatically be a good thing, would it?’

‘You weren’t exactly short of grand visions in your day.’

She scoffed. ‘I didn’t have any noble intentions for the rest of humanity. I was in it for myself, and anyone else smart enough to go along with me.’

‘No,’ Geoffrey said, shaking his head. ‘You were a pioneer and a risk-taker, sure, but you also had ambitions. You didn’t go to Mars just to stamp your footprint into that soil and come home again. You wanted to live there, to prove it was something we could do.’

‘Me and a thousand others.’

‘Doesn’t matter – you got there as soon as you could. But your problem was that you couldn’t stand still. You had to keep moving, pushing outwards. You liked the idea of living on one planet more than the actuality. That’s why you left your husband behind.’

‘Jonathan and I grew apart. What has that got to do with anything?’