Blue Remembered Earth (53 page)

At four in the afternoon, a quill of orange-red dust feathered up from the horizon. It scribed its way across the landscape, propelled by an invisible hand. Sunday’s first thought was that they were watching a dust-devil, but Gribelin’s map showed a pawn symbol close to their present location.

‘Sifter,’ he said. ‘Your basic low-down grazing caste. Chew through the dust and the top layer of rock, looking for anything recyclable. What they can use to repair or fuel themselves, they use. What’s left over, they barter between themselves or trade on up the food chain.’

‘What’s that?’ Sunday asked, pointing dead ahead, up the gently rising lie of the land. A grey-black smudge floated in the sky, like a dead fly on the windshield, just above the horizon. It dangled entrails, as if it had been swatted. She had tried zooming, but the aug was all but absent.

Gribelin tugged down a pair of binoculars fixed to the ceiling on a scissoring mount and settled his goggled eyes into the rubber-shielded cups. ‘
Lady Disdain
,’ he said quietly. ‘Not usually this far east. Might be following the sifter, looking for anything thrown up behind it.’

‘Can we avoid her?’ Jitendra said.

‘Only if Dorcas is feeling nice.’ Gribelin steered left, the Overfloater craft veering slowly to the right in the window. He slid the binoculars towards Sunday. ‘Be my guest.’

The rubber eye-cups were greasy with sweat and tiny skin flakes. It took a moment for the binoculars to sense her intended point of interest. The view leapt, stabilised, snapped to sharpness, overlaid with cross hairs and distance/alt-azimuth numerics.

The Overfloater machine was a fat-bellied airship, approximately arrowhead-shaped. Slung under it, blended into the deltoid profile of its gas envelope, was an angular gondola. The ‘entrails’ were sinuous, whiplike mechanical tentacles, a dozen of them, emerging from the base of the gondola. The airship skimmed the surface at a sufficiently low altitude that the arms were able to pluck things from the ground. That was what
Lady Disdain
was doing right now: loitering, examining.

It brought to Sunday’s mind one of Geoffrey’s elephants, nosing the dirt with its trunk. Or a family of them, bunched into a single foraging organism.

‘Is Dorcas a friend of yours?’ Sunday asked.

‘Friend,’ Gribelin said, chewing over the word as if it was a new one on him. ‘That’s a tricky concept out here. Pretty much dog eat dog all the way down. Machines fuck each other over, Overfloaters fuck the machines over, Overfloaters fuck each other for a profit margin. I fight for the scraps. Me and Dorcas? We go back some. Don’t exactly hate each other. Doesn’t mean we’re kissing cousins either.’

‘Wouldn’t you rather be at the top of the rat heap?’ Sunday asked. She had some idea of how it worked: how the machines, in their endless evolutionary struggle, occasionally splintered off some novelty or gadget or industrial process that the rest of the system could use. Like the technology behind the prototype claybot, the one she’d chinged to the scattering. That rapidly morphing material had been a spin-off from the Evolvarium, and now it stood to make trillions for Plexus. ‘Floating up there like a god, being worshipped. Because that’s what’s going on here, isn’t it? Gods hovering over mortals, taking amusement in their endless warfare and misery.’

‘Wouldn’t go that far,’ Jitendra said. ‘These machines might be super-adaptive, but there’s no actual cognition going on down here. The machines don’t understand that they’re machines. All they know how to do is survive, and try not to fall behind in the arms race. They’re no more capable of religion than lobsters.’

‘Nice if it was that clear-cut,’ Gribelin said. ‘Me, I ain’t so sure. Spend as much time out here as I have, you’ll see some things that make you question your certainties.’

‘Really?’ Jitendra asked sceptically.

‘You think these machines don’t grasp what they are, that they don’t get the difference between existence and non-existence?’ He paused to take a sip from his liquor bottle, flicking the cap off with his thumb while steering one-handed. ‘Once, out by the western flanks, I saw a sifter begging for its life, begging not to be destroyed by a rogue collector.’

‘An evolved response, like a whimpering dog,’ Jitendra said dismissively. ‘Doesn’t prove there’s anything going on inside its head.’

‘You’d seen what I saw, you’d feel differently.’

‘Show me the imagery, I’ll make up my own mind.’

‘Not enough public eyes to catch it,’ Gribelin answered. ‘My own eyes were surrendered to the Overfloaters. They wiped the evidence.’

‘I can see why they might want to,’ Sunday said.

Lady Disdain
was powering downslope, three or four tentacles dragging the ground. Sunday had a better impression of the manta-like vehicle now. It was enormous – as it had to be, given the tenuousness of the Martian atmosphere. Ducted engines as large as ocean turbines were bracketed to the drab green gondola.

She felt that it ought to make a sound, a terrible droning approach, but there was nothing.

‘Can you outrun it?’ Jitendra asked.

Gribelin gave a brief shake of his head. ‘Not a hope in hell, and even if we did, we’d only run into more Overfloaters further into the Evolvarium. But don’t worry – I’m sure I’ll find a way to sweet talk Dorcas.’

‘Using your natural charm and diplomacy,’ Sunday said.

‘You’d be surprised how far it gets me.’

The airship circled the moving truck then headed slightly south, dropping its triangular shadow over them like a cloak. Gribelin was still driving, but he was making no effort to push the truck to its limits. Sunday looked up, watching as the underside of the airship, hundreds of metres across and speckled with patch repairs, began to eclipse the sky. The gondola was as large as the Crommelin cable car, aglow with tiny yellow windows.

Figures stole around up there, backlit and mysterious.

Something clanged against them. Sunday jumped. Jitendra grabbed for the nearest handhold. Gribelin swore, but appeared otherwise resigned. The truck pitched as if it had just run into a sand-trap. The ground pulled away, dust cataracting from the wheels.
Lady Disdain
was lifting them into the sky, hauling them up with one or more of her tentacles.

Fifty metres, then maybe a hundred. The horizon began to rotate, the deltoid canopy gyring slowly overhead. The tentacles held them level with the front of the gondola so that they were looking back at the deep, slanted windows of what was evidently the airship’s bridge. The bridge was wide, and there were at least six visible crew, none of whom were obviously proxies.

One figure drew Sunday’s attention. A woman garbed in a long black coat that went all the way to her boots strode from one side of the bridge to the other, pointing and jabbing at her underlings. She came to rest at a console or podium, then angled some cumbersome speaking device to her lips.

A head and shoulders appeared in the truck, hovering above the dashboard and rendered with slight translucence.

‘Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something here, Gribelin?’ She was ghost-pale, slender-faced, with a sharp chin and long ash-grey hair brushed in a side-parting so that a curtain of it covered half her features. Her nose was pierced and many rings hung from the lobe of her one visible ear.

‘We’re kind of in the middle of something, too, Dorcas,’ Gribelin said. ‘As you’ve probably worked out. You mind letting us go, while there’s still some daylight?’

‘You cross the ’varium on our terms, when we feel like letting you. Why do I have to keep reminding you of that?’

‘Look, it would be nice to chat, but . . .’

The woman combed fingers through her hair, allowing it to fall back into place. ‘You’re not usually in this much of a hurry. Anything to do with the vehicle following you from Vishniac?’

Sunday glanced at her driver. ‘Ask her how far behind it is.’

‘No need, I heard you anyway,’ Dorcas said. ‘You weren’t aware of it until now?’

‘You know how tenuous things get out here,’ Gribelin said.

‘Especially after someone went to a lot of trouble to tie up all the proxies and swamp the public eyes with dumb queries. You usually operate alone, Grib. Why do I have the feeling someone’s pulling strings behind your back this time?’

‘Tell me about the vehicle,’ Sunday said. ‘Please.’

Something in Dorcas appeared to relent, albeit only for the moment. ‘A rented surface rover, a little smaller than your truck. About two and a half hours behind you, maybe a little less.’

‘Lucas,’ Sunday said, as if there could be any doubt. ‘Quick off the mark, too. He must have arranged the vehicle rental before the train got in.’

‘Not a friend of yours?’ Dorcas asked.

‘I’m on an errand for a couple of clients,’ Gribelin explained. ‘A golem’s been following them since they left Crommelin.’

‘This errand . . . it wouldn’t be anything that will get in the way of my business, would it?’

‘You know what the Evolvarium is to me, Dorcas – just a place I like to get in and out of as quickly as possible.’

‘And your clients?’

Sunday leaned forward. ‘We’ll be in and out of here as swiftly as we can, and nothing we do will have any impact on your line of work.’

‘And I’m supposed to just take that on trust?’

Sunday closed her eyes while she organised her thoughts. ‘I’m going to tell you the truth. Whether you believe me or not is entirely up to you. My name is Sunday Akinya.’

‘As in—’

‘Sixty-odd years ago, my grandmother buried something here, smack in the middle of the Evolvarium. Of course, it wasn’t the Evolvarium then. It was just an area of Mars that meant something to her. Now I’m here to find out what she considered important enough to bury, and that means I have to locate the burial spot and dig.’

‘I’ve already told her she’s crazycakes if she thinks there’ll be anything to dig up,’ Gribelin said, ‘but she’s fixed on seeing this through.’

‘You have coordinates?’

Sunday nodded. ‘There’s some uncertainty, but I think I can get close. My grandmother spent time at an abandoned Russian weather station near here, before she came back to bury whatever it was. The station’s location is known, and there haven’t been any geological changes since she last visited.’

‘We’re about two hundred kays out,’ Gribelin said. ‘We can be there in two hours, maybe three if we have to run around any big players.’

‘By which time it’ll be dark,’ Dorcas said. ‘Not much you’ll be able to do then.’

‘At least we’ll be there first.’

Dorcas considered this at length before responding, taking whispered asides from her crew while she contemplated her answer. ‘We’ve always had a good working arrangement, haven’t we, Grib?’

‘It’s had its ups and downs,’ Gribelin said.

‘Neither of us is a philanthropist. But over the years we’ve mostly managed not to tread on each other’s tails.’

‘Fair assessment.’

‘Even, some might say, helped each other when the situation demands it.’

‘Which it does now.’

‘Indeed. In that spirit, I’m going to make you an offer. I’ll get you closer to the landing site in much less than three hours. We’ll use the full resources of
Lady Disdain
to search for your object, and I’ll hand it to you intact when – if – we locate it. In return, you’ll give me twenty-five per cent of whatever you’re being paid. Whether or not we find anything.’

‘I’m not made of money,’ Gribelin said.

‘But someone else is. One way or the other, I’ll find out who’s involved and what they’re paying you.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of fobbing you off, Dorcas.’ For a moment, Gribelin looked paralysed with indecision, before deciding that honesty was the only viable option. ‘It’s the Pans,’ he said, letting out a small audible sigh. ‘You’d have figured that out sooner or later, based on the comms trickery.’

Dorcas sneered. ‘Why are you letting the Pans yank your chain?’

‘They pay well. Amazingly well. And my clients—’

‘We’re not Pans,’ Sunday said emphatically. ‘We’ve just got mixed up with them. What I want, and what they want . . . they coincide, up to a point. That’s why they’ve paid for me to be here, and why they’re helping slow down the golem. But we’re not Pans.’

‘Yes.’ Dorcas allowed herself the thinnest of smiles. ‘Think I got that the first time.’

It was teatime on the
Lady Disdain
. They knelt around a table while one of Dorcas’s underlings attended to their white porcelain Marsware cups. Tactical status maps, vastly more complicated than Gribelin’s simple readout, jostled for attention on the table’s slablike surface. These real-time summaries of the Evolvarium were accompanied by a constant low murmur of field analysis from the crew. Around the walls, systemwide stock exchange summaries tracked technologies commodities from Mercury to the Kuiper belt. Histograms danced to hidden music. Market analysis curves rose and fell in regular sinus rhythms like the Fourier components of some awesome alien heartbeat. Newsfeeds dribbled updates. Outside, the sun was beetling towards the horizon as if it had work to be getting on with.

The chai was watery but sweet – infused with jasmine, Sunday decided. She and Jitendra were kneeling on one side of the table, Gribelin and Dorcas on the other. Kneeling was very nearly as comfortable in Martian gravity as it was on the Moon, which was to say a lot easier on the knees than on Earth.