Blue Remembered Earth (73 page)

Sunday was already answering before Gleb had finished his piece. ‘How much do you know about what happened on Mars?’

It wasn’t just time lag that delayed his answer. ‘I was hoping to hear your side of the story before making my mind up. Chama’s been trying to find out what he can, but he’s still under lockdown, which complicates things.’

‘You screwed us. Your people, Gleb. The ones I thought I could trust.’

‘
My
people.’ He sounded stung by this, as if what she’d said was somehow beneath her. As if she had failed to live up to his hitherto unblemished image of her.

‘Truro, Holroyd, whoever. I don’t give a fuck. I was lied to. Told I’d be helped, when all they wanted was to get to the box before me. Jitendra and I nearly died out there, Gleb. The Evolvarium nearly ate us alive, and that wouldn’t have happened if we’d got in and out without being betrayed. Gribelin died out there.’

Gleb selected another tool and nipped a leaf sample. He held the wispy green sliver up to his eyes for inspection, frowning slightly.

‘Nobody comes out of this looking good, Sunday. But if it’s any consolation, Chama and I had nothing to do with what happened on Mars. When Chama put his neck on the line in Pythagoras, he was doing you a favour.’

‘To buy a favour back from my brother.’

‘Perhaps. But beyond that, he had no ulterior motives.’ Gleb placed the nipped-off leaf sample into one of his specimen boxes, clipping shut the airtight lid. ‘Arethusa contacted us, it might interest you to hear – not long after that unpleasantness on Mars.’

‘I’ve no reason to trust her either.’

‘Trust who you like, Sunday – I’m not here to make your mind up for you. She spoke about Truro, though. Said things were possibly going to become difficult for Chama and me, since our sponsorship was so closely tied to Truro and his allies.’ He paused to drag a stylus from behind his ear, using it to scribe a note on the specimen box. ‘Arethusa said things were going to become difficult for her, too – it seems this whole sorry business has precipitated a bit of a rift.’

‘I thought Arethusa was in charge.’

‘So did she. So did
we
. But it appears there are elements who feel she’s not been promoting the Panspermian ideology with sufficient vigour, at least in recent years.’

‘My brother and I had our theories about Arethusa. If we’re right, then there wouldn’t be a Panspermian ideology without her.’ Sunday hesitated on the threshold of what she hardly dared say, because it felt almost blasphemous to voice such speculation in Gleb’s presence. But the time for tact, she decided, was long past. ‘I think I met Lin Wei, your founder. I think she’s still alive. I think all of you owe Arethusa more than you realise.’

Gleb nodded slowly. ‘I won’t say the possibility had never occurred to us. Given your family’s connection to Lin Wei—’

‘She was at Eunice’s scattering. Arethusa was behind the proxy, of course. And she could only have chosen the form she did because she half-wanted one of us to make the connection.’

Gleb wheeled the trolley to the next vivarium. ‘She still has influence, still has allies. For the time being, I’m fairly hopeful that she can still protect Chama and me. Even ensure a continuation of basic funds and amenities. But that isn’t guaranteed, and right now we need all the friends we can find. Actually, screw us. We don’t matter at all. But the dwarves do. This collaboration is vital, Sunday. We can’t let it fall apart just because of a squabble between Arethusa and her rivals.’

‘Funnily enough, it’s elephants I’m calling about.’

For the first time since she had chinged in Gleb smiled. ‘Yours or mine? I should say, the dwarves, or the Amboseli herd?’

‘Both, ultimately. Right now I need help with the big ones. You know about my brother’s situation, I take it?’

‘Difficult not to. I . . . hope things work out, Sunday. Our thoughts are with Geoffrey.’ Hastily he added, ‘And the other two . . . your cousin, and the woman.’

‘Hector and Jumai. Yes, we’re concerned about them all. But there’s nothing we can do for them and there
is
something we can do for the elephants. Geoffrey wasn’t expecting to be away this long, and I’m worried about the herd. That’s why I’m back in Africa. I feel I should be doing something.’

‘They are, fundamentally, elephants,’ Gleb said thoughtfully. ‘They’ve been managing on their own for millions of years. It would be presumptuous to assume they can’t do without us for a little longer.’

‘But they’re elephants with machines in their heads, elephants my brother has been interacting with for most of his adult life. They’re used to him coming and going, studying them. He
speaks
to them, for pity’s sake. I don’t know what his not being there is going to do to them. And that’s before I start worrying about medical issues or pregnancies or anything else going on with the herd. My brother would have known what to do. I don’t.’

‘Did he leave specific instructions?’

She thought back to the message Geoffrey had recorded, before entering cryosleep. ‘Nothing too detailed. I don’t think he wanted to burden me, and anyway, he had enough on his mind back then.’

‘If there was anything vital, he’d have told you.’ She nodded, wanting to believe it, but Gleb sounded much surer than Sunday would have been. ‘All the same, our hands aren’t completely tied. Your ching tag places you . . . very near the herd.’

‘On my way to it right now.’

‘Chama and I know our way around the M-group – remember that we’ve been taking an interest in Geoffrey’s work for years. We know the hierarchies, the bloodlines, and I can probably identify two dozen individuals by sight alone even though I’ve never been to Africa. You’ve never had much contact with them, have you?’

It felt like an admission of weakness, a duty she had shirked. ‘Virtually none.’

‘In which case we won’t risk direct contact. Leave that to your brother, for when he gets home. But we can at least monitor the M-group, and any other parties that take our interest. And – not inconsequentially – maintain enough of a presence to deter any researchers who feel like claim-jumping. Although I hope no one would be that irresponsible, given the very public reasons for your brother’s absence.’

‘I hope not.’

‘But human nature being what it is, we’d best take no chances. Will you be maintaining a physical presence in the area?’

‘For the time being.’ Which meant: until she had news from Geoffrey, good or bad. However long that took.

‘Chama had best not risk involvement, at least until his hundred-day lockdown expires, and there’s no reason for me to be there in person. But I can give you as much support as you need, for as long as you want it. That’s my promise, Sunday. If you feel we’ve wronged you, then I aim to do my small part in rectifying that. I may not succeed, but I’m prepared to give it a damned good try.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. And it was a heartfelt thanks, although it was only in this moment that she realised how much she had been counting on his help.

The airpod’s console chimed, pulling her back into its sensorium. She was nearing home.

PART THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

When the hibernation casket brought him to consciousness, Geoffrey’s first intelligible thought was that there’d been a mistake; that something had gone wrong with the process and it must only have been minutes since the casket’s bioprobes had sunk their sterile fangs into his flesh and begun pumping his blood full of sedatives. It was a perfectly human response, after all. He had no memory of dreams, no sense of elapsed time. But it only took him a little longer to realise that matters were not as they had been when he entered the chamber. He was weightless, for one thing. They had been under thrust when he climbed in; now his body was at rest within the casket, cushioned against movement but otherwise floating, with the anxious feeling of falling in his belly.

A glass-mottled form drifted over him. His eyes tried to focus. They were bleary and the sudden intrusion of brightness and colour felt like a billion tiny needles pricking his retinas. He heard a clunk and felt cooler air touch his face. That was nice. The casket’s lid was sliding off him. The blurred form pushed itself closer and assumed the approximate proportions of a human woman.

‘Welcome back, sleepyhead.’

He grasped for her name. His memories weren’t where he’d left them. It was as if they’d been temporarily boxed away in an attic: still in his head, but poorly organised and labelled. Dimly, he began to realise that he might have been in the casket longer than his initial impressions had suggested.

‘Jumai?’ he managed.

‘Looks like we’ve got us a functioning central nervous system, at least.’ She hauled in closer still, fiddling with his restraints. ‘Hector was the first out. He’s been through this kind of thing dozens of times, so it was no biggie to him. I’ve been up about ten minutes. I think we’re all right, for the time being. The ship’s in one piece, and we’re . . . somewhere, I guess.’

Her words were arriving too quickly, like tennis balls spat out by a service machine. Geoffrey tried to formulate a question. ‘How long?’

‘How long have we been under? Fifty-one days, as far as Hector and I can tell, which is exactly what we dialled in at the start. It’s early May. Isn’t that weird? I skipped a whole birthday while we were out.’

Geoffrey winced as the bioprobes withdrew from his skin. He tried using his arms. They barely felt like a part of him. He had spent some of the Earth-Moon journey unconscious, but nothing about that had prepared him for the fifty-one days he’d been under while the ship took them wherever it was headed. Nonetheless, his arms responded, albeit sluggishly.

‘Muscle tone shot to shit,’Jumai said. ‘What happens when you spend seven weeks weightless. The engine must have cut off within a few hours of us going under; we’ve been coasting most of the way, except for the slowdown at the end.’

Systems in the casket would have done their best to prevent muscle wastage and loss of bone density, but Geoffrey knew nothing was as effective as simply moving around under plain old gravity.

He fumbled his way free of one of the restraints and began to drift out of the casket. Jumai arrested his motion with a gentle application of the palm of her hand. ‘Easy does it, soldier.’

‘We’ve stopped?’ he asked. ‘We’re still a day out, aren’t we?’

‘Ship must have shaved a little time off its estimate. As far as Hector and I can tell, we’ve reached our destination. He’s trying to verify that it’s the same place the ship said it was. I can tell you one thing already.’

‘Which is?’

‘Whatever shit we have to deal with out here, dying of sunstroke isn’t going to be part of it.’

Half an hour later, Geoffrey had made his aching and uncoordinated way up front to join Jumai and Hector in the command deck. All three were buckled into their seats, even though the ship was now floating at rest. They had not needed to provide further blood samples, and what limited control they had possessed before going into hibernation was still theirs. The ship was even willing to let Jumai access some of its top-level systems. She had assigned external views to two of the displays: one showing the view back towards the inner system, the other of the object they were now holding station from at twenty kilometres.

It was the view back home that chilled Geoffrey the most. It was one thing to be aware that they were now beyond the orbit of Neptune, well into the long light-hours on the solar system’s edge. Travel far enough, and that was what happened. It was another thing entirely actually to see how pitifully small and faint the sun now looked from this distance.

Geoffrey had never been further than the Moon in his life. The sun was now more than thirty times as distant as it appeared from his home, and the light it offered was over nine hundred times fainter. It was a bullet hole punched in the sky, admitting a pencil-shaft of watery yellow illumination, too feeble to be called sunshine. For the first time in his life he truly understood that his home orbited a star.

And he felt some sense of the true scale of things. That bullet hole was still the brightest thing in his sky, but he could imagine it shrinking, diminishing, sphinctering tight as he fell further into the outer darkness. Until even that pencil-shaft became just a wavering trickle of ice-cold photons.

He smiled at that, because he had not even come a thousandth of a light-year.

The sun might have been the brightest thing in the sky, but it was not the largest. The iceteroid, which sat in the opposite direction – its visible face illuminated – was fifty kilometres across at its widest point. It was a dark-red potato, its hidelike surface only lightly cratered. Like all Kuiper belt objects, it had been ticking around the sun largely unmolested for more than four billion years. Once in a stupendous while, the gravitational influence of one of the major planets might kick a Kuiper belt object onto a cometary orbit. For the majority of objects, no such glory awaited. They would spend their existences out here, going about their lonely business until the sun swelled up. If, that was, humanity’s machines did not arrive first, to tap their riches.

‘Is it ours?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘If we are where the ship claims to be, then this is Lionheart,’ Hector said. ‘We should be able to cross-check that in a little while, but for the moment I see no reason to doubt it. We’ve come a long way, and that’s pretty obviously an iceteroid.’ He dragged his gaze from the display for a second to meet Geoffrey’s eyes. ‘How are you feeling?’