Blue Remembered Earth (54 page)

The conversation was flowing in at least two directions, maybe three. Jitendra relished the chance to learn as much as he could about the history and organisation of the Evolvarium, and his questions were divided equally between Dorcas and Gribelin. Dorcas, for her part, appeared willing to humour him . . . but she had her own interrogative agenda, too, with her probing directed mostly at Sunday. She wanted to know more about this buried secret, and why it might be of interest to more than one party.

‘I can’t tell you what she buried there,’ Sunday said. ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t have had to come all this way. I can’t even be sure this is where she meant me to go.’

‘And the Pans?’ Dorcas asked. ‘What’s their angle?’

Remembering Soya’s warning, Sunday wondered how much she was at liberty to discuss. ‘They have an interest in my grandmother,’ she said, circumspectly. ‘She knew Lin Wei, who’s as close to being the Pans’ founder as anyone.’

‘And that’s all it is – mere historical interest?’

‘I suppose they can’t help being curious now,’ Sunday said.

One of Dorcas’s staff approached, leaned down and whispered something in her ear. She nodded, danced her fingers above the table. The positions of some of the Evolvarium players shifted around. ‘Revised intel,’ she explained. ‘Increased sifter activity in sector eight, and two new hunter-killer subspecies out in three. Meanwhile, the Aggregate’s been unusually active these last few days.’

‘The Aggregate?’ Jitendra asked, beaming like a kid who was getting all his presents at once. ‘Have you encountered it?’

‘Grib’s had his share of run-ins with it, haven’t you?’ Dorcas said.

‘I keep out of its way, best as I’m able.’

Dorcas gave a knowing nod. ‘Sensible man.’

‘What is it?’ Sunday asked.

‘What happens when a bunch of machines get together and decide to act in unison, rather than fighting for scraps,’ Jitendra said. ‘A kind of emergent proto-civilisation. A quasi-autonomous motile city-state made up of hundreds of cooperating machine elements.’

‘A nuisance to some,’ Dorcas said. ‘An incipient Martian god to others. Isn’t that right, Grib? Or is that something you don’t like to talk about these days?’

‘All in the past, as you well know.’

Dorcas smiled once. ‘Did he tell you about the tattoos? I’m guessing not.’

‘If I was bothered about the tattoos, I’d have had them removed.’

‘Which would cost money, which you’d sooner spend on whores, narcotics or truck parts.’ Dorcas gave a little throat-clearing cough, now that she had their attention. ‘Thirty, forty years back, Gribelin ran into a little group of mental cases just outside the Evolvarium. Something about the scenery, the emptiness, the mind-wrenching desolation reaches in and presses the “god” button some of us still have inside us. What were these people called, Grib?’

‘Aggregationists,’ he said tersely. ‘Can we move on now?’

‘They’re all gone now. Word is their leader, the crackpot behind the whole thing, woke up one morning and realised he was surrounded by lunatics. Not only that, but fawning lunatics he’d helped along with their craziness. The Apostate, they call him. He cleared out and left them to get on with it. You met him, didn’t you, Grib?’

‘Our paths crossed.’

Dorcas poured some more chai for her guests. ‘Whatever became of the Apostate, the Aggregate’s doing pretty well for itself. It’s entirely self-sufficient, as far as we can tell, so it doesn’t have to deal with sifters. It’s also strong enough to be able to deter most mid-level threats, and agile enough to keep out of the way of anything large enough to intimidate it. If the original construct was a nation state, this is a walled city.’

‘I guess the next question is . . . is there any way to make money from it?’ Jitendra asked.

‘If there is, no one’s thought of it yet,’ Dorcas said, not appearing to mind the directness of his question. ‘The Aggregate doesn’t shed bits of itself, and until it dies, we can’t very well pick it apart and look inside. But someone will get there eventually. Our . . . rivals won’t stop trying, and nor will we. So far, it’s rebuffed our efforts at negotiated trade. But everything has a price, doesn’t it?’

‘Be careful you don’t end up evolving anything too clever,’ Sunday said. ‘We all know where that leads.’

Dorcas smiled tightly. ‘We have sufficient demolition charges on just this one ship to turn the entire Evolvarium into a radioactive pit, if we so wished. No one takes this lightly.’ She directed a sharp look at Sunday. ‘Of course, you’d rather we didn’t do that any time soon, wouldn’t you? Not while this secret of yours is still to be unearthed.’

‘I don’t even know if there is a secret,’ Sunday said.

‘You’ve come this far, you can’t have too many doubts. Nor the Pans, given their level of interest. What do you imagine she might have left behind?’

‘For all I know, it’s just another cryptic clue leading to somewhere else.’

Dorcas raised a finely plucked eyebrow. ‘On Mars?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘And if at the end of this there’s nothing, no bucket of gold, what then?’

‘We all go home and get back to our lives,’ Sunday said.

Another aide came to whisper something to Dorcas. She listened, nodded once.

‘The other vehicle has crossed the perimeter,’ she said. ‘Its point of entry was very close to your own, and it’s following roughly the same course you were on before we picked you up. You say there’s a golem in that thing?’

Sunday nodded. ‘It’s pretty likely.’

‘Then it must be acting near-autonomously by now. Does it know exactly where the burial might have taken place?’

‘The people behind the golem,’ Sunday said circumspectly, not wanting to give away more information about her family than she needed to, ‘they’re smart enough to have joined the same dots I did.’

‘Not much we can do about that,’ Dorcas said. She put down her teacup and rose from a kneeling position, smoothing the wrinkles out of her long black coat as she did so. ‘No matter: we have a good two hours on the rover, and we’re very nearly at the location.’

‘You don’t expect to find anything, do you?’ Sunday said.

‘The machines are thorough, but if something was buried sufficiently far down . . . well, there’s a possibility it’s still there, albeit a remote one.’

‘Except Eunice wouldn’t have seen any reason to bury something so deeply,’ Jitendra said.

‘Let’s err on the side of optimism,’ Dorcas said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Of the Russian weather station, of the evidence of Eunice’s return decades later, nothing now remained. All traces had been erased by wind and time; all artefacts and trash long since absorbed and recycled by the Evolvarium’s machines. But the location was known to within a handful of metres, and as
Lady Disdain
adjusted her engines to maintain a hovering posture, there could be no doubt that they were sitting over exactly the right patch of ground.

‘If there was anything large and magnetic sitting right below the dust, we’d already know about it,’ Dorcas said. ‘I’m afraid that’s not looking good right now. Same for gravitational anomalies. If there’s something buried right under us, within a couple of metres of the surface, it must have the same density as the rock, to within the limits of our mass sensors.’ She was standing at a pulpit-like console, arms spread either side of an angled display. ‘There are a few more things to try, though, before we think about looking deeper.’

‘Ground-penetrating radar?’ Gribelin asked.

‘Already down to a depth of three metres, over a surface area of fifty-by-fifty. We can expand the search grid, of course – but that’ll take time.’

Gribelin had his arms folded across his chest. ‘What about seismic?’

‘On the case – again, the data will take a little while to build up.’

From the gondola’s downward-looking windows, Sunday watched as the tentacles picked up loose-lying boulders, lofted them high into the air and then flung them back down at the ground. Other tentacles, spread out as far from the airship as was possible, brushed their tips against the surface to catch the vibrations transmitted through the underlying geography. The arrival times of the impulses would enable Dorcas to build up a seismographic profile of the local terrain, penetrating much deeper than was possible with radar. It was slow and haphazard, though – the airship obviously didn’t come equipped with specialised seismic probes or the routines to crunch the data swiftly – and Sunday wondered what effect all that crashing and banging was having on the Evolvarium’s native inhabitants. If they wanted to approach this search in a discreet manner, without drawing attention to their activities, this struck her as exactly the wrong way to go about it.

‘Eunice, Eunice, Eunice,’ she said under her breath. ‘Why couldn’t you make this simple for us?’

Now that the construct was denied her, she missed having it around. Eunice might be an illusion, a parlour trick that only looked and spoke like a thinking human being. But her eyes were not Sunday’s eyes. And she had seen things Sunday never would.

‘This wasn’t exactly how I was hoping things would pan out,’ Gribelin said, his musty aroma announcing his arrival by her side a moment before he spoke, ‘but I think we can trust Dorcas.’

Sunday was effectively alone now, the other Overfloaters busy with their instruments and technical systems, while Jitendra dug into firsthand summaries of the Evolvarium’s history. ‘You think or you know?’ she asked.

‘Nothing watertight where Dorcas is involved, kid.’ His voice was a low confiding rasp. ‘We’ll just have to take things as they come and . . . be flexible. She can be slippery, that’s a fact. But then so can we.’ He shifted something around in his throat, some loose phlegmy package that obviously felt at home. ‘My manner back there . . . when I first picked you up . . .’ He trailed off, as if he needed some invitation to continue.

‘Go on,’ Sunday obliged.

‘This line of work, you get to meet all sorts. Rich kids, especially. Thrill-seekers. I knew there was money behind you, but . . . you’re not really here for the thrills, are you?’

‘I had a good life on the Moon. I didn’t want any of this. It came after me, not the other way round.’ Sunday fell silent for a moment. ‘You wouldn’t be apologising, would you, Gribelin?’

‘For giving you a hard time?’ He shrugged, as if that was all that needed to be said on the subject. ‘From here on, though . . . whatever happens, when I take a job on, I don’t let my clients down.’

‘And if our host has other ideas?’

‘We’ll play things by ear. And if things get . . . intense, you and the beanpole do exactly what I tell you, all right? No second-guessing old Gribelin. Because if the shit comes down, there won’t be time for a nice chinwag about our options.’

‘We’ll listen,’ Sunday said. ‘Not as if we’re spoilt for choice with guides out here.’ Softly she added, ‘Thank you, Gribelin.’

He made to turn away – she thought he was done with her – but something compelled him to halt. After a silence he said, ‘You asked about the marks on my skull, back when we were driving. Dorcas mentioned my run-in with the Apostate. I figured you’d be even more curious after that.’

‘The way I see it, it’s none of my business.’

‘Way I see it, too. But not everyone would agree.’ Gribelin looked down before continuing, ‘I went a little mad out there. They put ideas in my head. Little dancing men, figures scratched in rock. The Apostate had gone mad himself, once, but I think he got better. It took me longer, and maybe some of it’s still lodged inside me. But that’s between me and the god I don’t believe in.’

The shadows had lengthened and evening winds had begun to howl in from the northern lowlands when Dorcas lifted her gaze from a hooded viewer. ‘I don’t know quite what to make of this,’ she said, fingering the fine-adjustment controls set into the viewer’s side.

‘Not sure how to break it to me that there’s nothing here?’ Sunday asked.

‘No.’ Dorcas pushed her hair back over one ear, to hook it out of her eyes. ‘How to break it to you that we’ve found something. There’s an object down there. It’s metal, and it’s not too far from the surface. Which, frankly, isn’t possible.’

But the digging would have to wait until daybreak. It got cold at night, and cold made everything harder, but that was not the reason for their delay. At night, as the cold and darkness clamped down, the bottom-feeding castes became much less active, generally opting both to conserve energy and cool their external shells as close to the ambient surroundings as possible, so that they were harder to detect. The predators, conversely, became more active. Kills remained difficult, but the likelihood of success, once a pursuit or strike had been initiated, was now much higher. There was never a good time to be down on the surface, Dorcas explained, but night was worse than day, even for Overfloaters, and they would not risk drilling until sunrise.

‘And the golem? We’ve gained this lead on it – what’s the point of throwing it all away now?’

‘Your golem is on land,’ Dorcas said. ‘That means it won’t be going anywhere until sun-up, either. Not if it knows the first thing about the Evolvarium, and wants to make it through to dawn in one piece. So get some sleep. Be our guests.’