Blue Remembered Earth (42 page)

‘This may not be Africa,’ the golem said, ‘but nor is it the Descrutinised Zone. You’re in the Surveilled World now, Sunday.’ He moved to stand, rising from the stool with the oiled precision of a periscope. ‘And it runs on our rules, not yours.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

She worked quickly, but not because she considered the commission beneath her. It was simply the way she always approached her art. Preparation, forethought, hours of meditation, then an explosion of swift and decisive action, like the quick and merciful descent of a sword. Execution, in every sense of the word.

The morning after her arrival in Crommelin, she had chinged back to the Pan lodge on the edge of Valles Marineris, into a proxy this time rather than the warmblood body of Holroyd’s nurse. She had made her preferences known, and the Pans had abided by them. Now Magdalena was free to do her chores, and Sunday was wearing a wasp-waisted black mechanical mannequin. It was a recent model, ornamented with pastel-glowing vines and limb-entwining daisy chains.

‘I meant to say that I’ve arranged a guide for you,’ Holroyd announced. ‘He has experience in the Evolvarium, which you’ll definitely need. Not many people go anywhere near that place without good reason, usually involving a commercial interest. You’re still certain you don’t want to subcontract this operation to . . . specialists?’

‘I came to Mars for a reason, Mister Holroyd.’

‘That was before you found out where your grandmother had buried the next item.’ Holroyd waited for Magdalena to snip away a thumbsized growth from one of his chest-spines, leaving a weeping milky wound. If there was pain, he was careful not to show it. ‘That development is . . . unfortunate,’ he went on, ‘but I suppose we can’t blame her for not seeing this far ahead.’

‘She could have saved us all a lot of bother and just put the first and last clue in the same place,’ Sunday said.

‘That obviously wasn’t her intention.’

The sculpture was nearing, if not completion, than at least the point where the probability of success or failure could rightly be judged. Sunday had begun with an upright cylinder of lustrous silver-grey material, mounted on a plinth. The material, which stood nearly as tall as Sunday herself, was active clay: an inert medium saturated with nanomachines at a density of five per cent by both weight and volume. The machines were programmed to respond to gestural and proximal cues from Sunday’s proxy-driven hands, moving not just their own bodies but the inert matrix in which they were embedded.

Sunday couldn’t see the machines themselves, but their effect on the material was obvious enough. She only had to skim her fingers near the working surface and the clay would repel, flinching back in channels or grooves or wide, scalloped curves depending on the precise orientation of her hand and fingers. As it deformed, the clay turned reflective. It obeyed pseudo fluid dynamics, knotted with eddies and turbulence, forming rippling, surflike sheets or bubbling globular mirrored extrusions, like mercury slowed down a thousand times. Once her hand was withdrawn, the active clay froze into its last configuration. By bringing in the other hand, creating opposing vectors of repulsion, Sunday could coax the matter into solid geometries of surprising complexity.

‘I don’t know what she had in mind for us. All I know is it can’t be personal. She didn’t know it was going to be my brother who looked into that bank vault.’

‘She knew it would be one of you, though. Definitely an Akinya. Whatever she’s doing, she seems very determined to keep it in the family, doesn’t she?’

Sunday flicked her wrist through part of the sculpture, cleaving matter the way prophets parted waters. The sculpture didn’t really look like a man, she had to admit. More like a lung, or a tree dipped in molten lead. But the prickliness of it, the densely packed spines and thorns, was suggestive of her host.

‘If she’s testing us, I suppose there has to be a reason.’

‘Gold at the end of the rainbow? Or just a dead woman playing malicious games with her descendants?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever Eunice planned, though, it was put in place before her last mission. She may have gone a little mad up in the Winter Palace – who wouldn’t? – but she was sane when she took
Winter Queen
out for its last expedition.’

‘Plenty of imagery and footage from then, in that case.’

Sunday nodded, cajoling an arc of clay out on its own lazy Martian parabola, freezing into the crooked curve of a gull’s wing. She didn’t get to work with active clay very often; it was too expensive for her usual commissions and there were strict conditions on the importing of nanotechnology into the Zone. ‘That’s what unsettles me. Ever since she came back, the whole time she’s been up there, orbiting the Moon . . . she’s known about this . . . plot of hers.’

‘You speak as if she’s still alive.’

‘I don’t mean to, but when you dig into a person’s past, and you have—’

‘I know about the construct, Sunday. A data entity like that, distributed cloudware – we could hardly fail to detect its presence in the Martian aug.’

She hid her shock. If the Pans were going to rip into her secrets, she was damned if she’d give them the pleasure of looking surprised about it.

‘Of course. It’s just that sometimes, if only for a moment, I forget that it isn’t my grandmother.’

‘An understandable error. But not, I’d imagine, one that you make all that often.’

‘I try not to.’

After a moment, Holroyd said, ‘Your grandmother was born in a different world, Sunday. A different century. She lived through difficult times; saw the best and the worst of what we are capable of. So did billions of others . . . But she was in a privileged, possibly even unique position. She may not have experienced wars first hand, but she would have met many people who were touched by them, and touched badly. There were no Mandatory Enhancements in Eunice’s day, either. She would have understood that there are times, many times, when we can’t always be trusted to do the right and proper thing. Even with the Mechanism guiding our actions, even when the neuropractors have knifed villainy out our heads.’

‘I’m not sure where this is leading, sir.’

‘All I mean to say is . . . no one would have been better placed than your grandmother to see the truth about humanity. And given everything that happened to her, no one would have been better placed to stumble on dangerous knowledge.’

Sunday paused in her sculpting. ‘Dangerous knowledge?’

‘I speculate, that’s all. But if your grandmother did learn something, by whatever means . . . something that she didn’t think the rest of us were ready for . . . do you
really
think she’d be so selfish as to take that knowledge to her grave, for all of time?’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Geoffrey went deep. At length the transit flume opened out into a submarine chamber the size of which he could only guess at. It was large, definitely: probably big enough to have swallowed both wings of the household and a fair part of the grounds as well. It was spherical and the walls were black, but the equator of this sphere was dotted with entry and exit flumes at regular intervals, and these luminous red and green circles offered some sense of scale and perspective.

Opposite him – the water was as clear as optical glass – hovered a glowing image, projected onto the curvature of the sphere’s far side. For a moment he took it to be Earth, seen from space: it didn’t look all that different from the view he’d had coming down the Libreville elevator. A moment’s further scrutiny told him that this was not Earth, nor any world in the solar system. It had surface oceans and continents and weather systems, but they were fundamentally unrecognisable.

Like an eclipsing moon, a partner world to this alien planet, a dark form interposed itself between Geoffrey and the image.

Through the harness’s headset he heard, ‘You can leave him with me, thank you. I’ll show him out when we’re done.’

And at the same time as he heard those words, spoken in almost accentless Swahili by a woman’s voice, he felt a subsonic component, deep as an elephant’s musth rumble, conveyed through the water, into his belly, into his nervous system.

As if the Earth itself had made an utterance, shaping words through the tectonic grind of crustal plates.

He glanced around. His guides had departed.

‘Welcome, Geoffrey Akinya,’ the female voice said, with the same accompanying rumble. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me. Your meeting with Truro – it was suitably productive?’

Geoffrey was staring into the water, still trying to map the shape and extent of the dark form and hoping it was not as far away – and therefore as
large –
as his eyes were insisting.

‘Arethusa?’ he asked.

‘My apologies. One tends to assume that my visitors need no introduction, but that’s an inexcusable rudeness on my part. Yes, I am Arethusa.’

Geoffrey decided that it might be prudent to answer her question. ‘Truro had some . . . interesting proposals.’

‘And your response?’

‘I suspect I’m not really in a position to say no, after what happened on the Moon.’

‘You feel indebted.’

‘
Made
to feel indebted. Amounts to the same thing, I guess.’

‘I was informed about Chama and Gleb’s endeavours with the phyletic dwarves. It’s a small aspect of our work, but an important one nonetheless. They deserve success. I’m sure you could play a vital role in making that happen.’

‘And risk ruining my entire career.’

‘Or creating a shiny new one. Why be a prisoner of your past?’

He took that as an invitation to steer the conversation in the vague direction of Eunice. ‘I was told you knew Lin Wei.’

‘We were close. She spoke often of your grandmother.’

‘You never met Eunice yourself, though?’

‘Lin painted a vivid picture. Warts and all, as the expression goes. Did you know your grandmother well?’

‘Not particularly. She was already in the Winter Palace by the time I was born, and she didn’t ching down to Africa very often. To be honest, I don’t think she was interested in us any more.’

‘But she’s of interest to you, now.’

Obviously Arethusa knew about the glove, the burial in Pythagoras, the Martian angle. ‘I’ve become tangled up in something I’d rather not have had anything to do with. But my sister’s been digging into Eunice’s past a lot longer than I have. There’s this project of hers—’

‘The construct, yes. I know of it. A valiant effort.’

‘I’m surprised you approve. It’s a thinking machine, for a start. And Sunday told me that my grandmother broke her side of the bargain with Lin Wei.’

‘Water under the bridge. Lin Wei bore her no ill will, in later years. I see no reason why Sunday’s project shouldn’t be celebrated.’

‘There are gaps in the construct’s knowledge. It doesn’t even remember Lin Wei.’

‘No?’

His eyes had acclimatised to the darkness by small degrees. Arethusa was an elongated form, hovering in the water at an angle, her head closest to him, her tail further away and lower. He was fairly sure that she was a whale. The size and shape, the flippers on either side of her streamlined body, the subsonic communication. The only remaining question was whether she’d been born a whale, or had attained this form by post-natal genetic and surgical intervention.

He knew of nothing like her, anywhere in creation. A whale with a human-level intellect, or a person turned cetacean. He wasn’t sure which would be the more miraculous.

‘You know what really happened on Mercury?’

‘I know that there was deceit,’ Arethusa replied, with evident caution. ‘More recently I’ve found myself wondering how far down that deceit extended.’ She paused, and with a languid wave of her flippers began to gyre her massive form.

Across metres of water Geoffrey felt the awesome backwash. ‘When was the last time you two spoke?’

‘Just before she died. I chinged up to the Winter Palace, spoke to her in that mad jungle of hers. I may have been one of the last people to speak to her.’

‘I’m surprised you had much to talk about.’

‘I felt obliged. Your grandmother played a pivotal role in Ocular.’

He recalled what Sunday had told him. ‘That was some kind of telescope, right?’

‘A machine for mapping exoplanets,’ Arethusa corrected in scholarly tones. ‘The Oort Cloud Ultra-Large Array: a swarm of eyes, cast into the outer darkness, linked together laser-interferometrically so they could function as a single vast lens wider than the solar system. Even half-finished, it was an astounding technical feat. But it broke Lin Wei’s heart, to see what became of her beautiful child.’

‘I know a little about Eunice’s connection.’

‘Your family was brought in to help with the heavy lifting. In return, we gave them the Mercury leasehold. Akinya Space built their polar facility, saying it was for physics research.’

‘Which was a lie.’ Geoffrey presumed there was now no harm in recounting what he had been told. ‘They were doing illegal work on artilects.’

‘That was what we thought at the time. But Eunice was much too clever to allow herself to be nearly caught out that way. If she really, badly wanted to conduct illicit artilect studies, she’d have found somewhere else to do it, somewhere just as far away from the Cognition Police as Mercury. There’s a whole system out there, after all. No shortage of dark corners.’