Blue Remembered Earth (78 page)

‘Much damage?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Nothing that should prevent us from getting home, provided we can find fuel and make some basic repairs. You think it’s safe to leave the packs and suits here?’

‘Keep your suit on,’ he advised. ‘One of us should maintain a link back to the ship. Besides, it’s cold.’

‘You could put your own suit back on.’

‘Or I could walk through that door
now
, and find out why we’ve been brought here.’ He clapped his arms against his chest, deciding he could deal with the cold for the time being. ‘Guess which one I’m going for?’

Geoffrey opened the inner lock and pushed through into the iceteroid. He was doing his best not think about Hector.

The door led into a reception bay and storage chamber as large as a warehouse, as deep as a cargo ship’s hold. It plunged down many levels below the point where they’d emerged, all filled with racked machine parts and stacked cargo pods, gaudy with primary-colour paintwork, insignia and warning labels. There was Akinya property here, as well as products and supplies from companies that Geoffrey felt certain had not existed for decades. The ceiling, a level or so overhead, must have pushed above Lionheart’s surface, forming one of the bunkerlike structures Geoffrey had seen upon landing. It was windowless but covered with a matrix of lighting elements. A walkway, enclosed in a grilled tube with numerous hand- and footholds, pushed out from a small ledge at the airlock’s entrance. The bay was brightly illuminated and smelled showroom clean. From somewhere below came the monklike chant of generators and heavy-duty life-support equipment. The throb worked its way through the grilled walkway, trembling it under the push of his fingers. Walking didn’t really work in the iceteroid’s practically non-existent gravity. Geoffrey and Jumai were making long, slow arcing jumps, pushing back from the curve of the ceiling when they rose too high.

Geoffrey was glad to be moving. It was beginning to work the blood back into his limbs and fingers.

‘Is this what you were expecting?’ Jumai asked.

‘Hector would have known better than me what to expect,’ Geoffrey said, between breaths. ‘But if you’d asked me to guess what the inside of one of our mining plants looked like, it wouldn’t be far off this. There has to be pressure and warmth, for the technicians who come out here once in a blue moon. There have to be machine parts and supplies for the things the robots can’t make on their own, or aren’t allowed to make. And we know the facility’s still working as an ice mine.’

‘Eunice didn’t drag us all this way just to inspect the troops.’

‘No.’

At the far end of the covered walkway was another door, heavy enough to contain pressure, but not an airlock. It opened as they approached, revealing a cabin-like compartment set with restraints and four buckle-in chairs. It was an elevator, Geoffrey supposed, or what passed for an elevator on a world that was virtually weightless.

‘We’ve come this far,’ he said, in response to Jumai’s unspoken question.

They chose seats and buckled in – Jumai having to adjust her restraint to fit around the extra bulk of her suit. Only when they were secure did the door close on them. Geoffrey felt an immediate surge of smooth acceleration. Insofar as he trusted his sense of orientation, it felt as if they were heading down, deeper into Lionheart.

‘Eunice?’ Jumai asked, more in hopefulness than expectation.

But there was no answer. The elevator sped on, still accelerating.

The ride lasted a minute or three, long enough – given their evident speed – to reach at least a couple of kilometres into the iceteroid’s interior. It slowed quickly, but it was only when the door opened again that Geoffrey could be sure they had stopped.

They pushed out of the elevator into a white room about the size of a small hotel lobby. With its coved corners and bright handrails, it had the modular and utilitarian feel of a piece of spacecraft, transplanted deep underground. Circular doors led off from three of the walls into curving, red-lit corridors. The generator throb was much more prominent now, and the walls displayed a constant succession of scrolling status updates and complicated multicoloured diagrams. Nothing he wouldn’t have expected in a remotely operated mining facility. That underlying throb might have been the vibration of monstrous drills, gnawing ever deeper into the cold husk of this stillborn comet . . .

Or something else.

The floor shook.

‘You feel that?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Package launch,’ Jumai said. ‘I felt one earlier, when we were in that tunnel. You must have been airborne when it happened. Seem to be going off on schedule, as before. Business as usual.’

They both tensed. What they heard were not footsteps, precisely, but the unmistakable approach of
something
, propelling itself limb over limb in the near-weightless conditions. It was coming along one of the red-lit shafts, its busy, bustling sound preceding it. Defenceless, Geoffrey’s only response was to find a handhold and reach for it. Jumai made to seal her visor, then drew her hand slowly back before she’d completed the gesture.

The thing was a golem. He could tell that much as it came around the curve. It was humanoid, but it moved with the manic, limb-whirling energy of a gibbon, the quadruped gait too rhythmic and choreographed to look entirely natural. It was tumbling head over heels, yet maintaining impressive forward momentum. Only when the golem neared the door did its movements settle into something more plausibly organic.

Sunday’s construct had emulated Eunice at the end of her public life, as she had been before going into exile. She’d lived seven decades by then, and taken no great pains to disguise that age. This was different. They were looking at a much younger incarnation now – perhaps half the age of the original construct.

The golem had arrived dressed in a simple one-piece black garment, marked on the sleeves with various flags and emblems. Eunice’s hair was long and black, thick and without a trace of grey, though she had combed it back from her forehead and gathered it into an efficient bun, secured with a black mesh hairnet. The hairstyle was austere, suited for weightlessness rather than fashion, but the effect on the golem was one of understated and modest elegance. Geoffrey had seen countless images of his grandmother as a young woman, but he had never once thought of her as beautiful. She was, though. Small-boned, long-necked, with prominent cheekbones and wide eyes that cut right through him. And the thing he’d never really detected, in all those images – that quiet, knowing smile.

He still hated her for what she had done to Hector. Which was ridiculous, of course: this wasn’t Eunice, even if it was convenient to think of the golem as such.

Yet he had to remind himself of that.

‘I always hoped it might be you, Geoffrey,’ she said, casting a long and appraising glance over him. She had come to rest standing up, her feet on the floor. ‘I didn’t count on it, and it wouldn’t have mattered if someone else had come instead. They’d have been tested as well, and if they were blood Akinyas, with strong ties to the household, I don’t doubt that they’d have passed the eidetic scan just as capably.’

He had too many questions to know where to start. ‘The only reason I’m here is because Hector and Lucas decided to ask me to investigate the safe-deposit box. If they’d sent someone else to do that, you’d be talking to them now.’

‘But would anyone else have had the fortitude to come this far?’ She cocked her head. ‘I extracted some of your memories, during the eidetic scan. Unethical, but it had to be done. I know something of what you’ve been through. And I’m sorry that it was necessary.’

‘She’s bullshitting,’ Jumai said. ‘Eidetic scans can’t extract and process memories that easily. They look for correlations with known image patterns; they can’t just rummage through your head indiscriminately, like someone searching a sock drawer. Machines just don’t have the intelligence to make sense of the raw data. You’d need something with artilect-level cognition, at the very—’

‘Then it’s a good job there’s an artilect running me,’ Eunice said, cutting her off with savage discourtesy. ‘Not one of those modern, declawed weaklings, either. Military grade, more than eighty years old, fully Turing compliant – the kind of thing that the Cognition Police were set up to pulverise.’

‘Should you have told us that?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘Or are you not planning on us ever going home again?’

‘No – you can go home. I’ll put no constraints on that. I’d be a very ungracious host otherwise, wouldn’t I? There’s fuel here and the damage to your ship is nothing that can’t be fixed, given Lionheart’s resources.’

‘For an artilect, you were pretty slow to realise we meant no harm,’ Jumai said.

‘I’m but one facet of the artilect,’ Eunice said, ‘and I was only activated after you had already established your credentials. Until then, Lionheart was guarding itself, as it has done for more than sixty years. If certain autonomic vigilance protocols acted with excessive zeal . . . then you must forgive me.’

‘If you’ve read my memory, you’ll know that you killed one of us,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I didn’t pick that up,’ Eunice said, and for a moment there was something like contrition in her tone. ‘It must have happened very shortly before the scan. The memories hadn’t had time to cross the hippocampus, to be encoded into long-term storage. If there were casualties—’

‘You killed Hector,’ Jumai told her. ‘He was your grandson as well.’ She shook her head in self-disgust. ‘What am I doing, trying to make an artilect feel guilty? She’s only a mask. Behind her is just . . . stuff.’

‘Are you finished?’ Eunice asked. ‘I apologised. I did not mean it to happen. But the stakes have always been high. Impossibly so. Do you think any of this was done without good reason?’

‘I have no idea what any of “this” is, other than a means of wasting time and killing innocent people,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We’ll add Memphis to that tally as well. He’d be alive if I hadn’t been dragged into your fun and games.’

‘Memphis is dead?’ The golem looked away, as if there was something on Eunice’s face that she did not wish them to see. ‘I didn’t know,’ she added, in a softer voice than she’d used so far. ‘When did it happen?’

Geoffrey was about to say that it had only been a few days ago, but then he remembered the time he had spent travelling to Lionheart. ‘Seven weeks ago. There was an accident, with the elephants.’

‘If his death was a consequence of my actions . . . I can’t begin to tell you how that makes me feel.’

‘You don’t
feel
anything,’ Jumai said.

‘You’re wrong about me,’ the golem told her. ‘This had to be done. Don’t you understand?’

‘We don’t,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You came all this way. Surely you must have an inkling of what this is all about by now?’ She searched their faces for a glimmer of comprehension. ‘You don’t know anything, do you?’

‘My sister said you’d spoken of a gift, something that was both a blessing and a curse,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Yes.’ Eunice nodded keenly. ‘Yes, there was a gift. And you must know about the jewels to have made it this far. And the engine that brought you to Lionheart – surely that can’t have escaped your attention? You made the connection, obviously?’

‘The engine’s better than anything else out there,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It got us to Trans-Neptunian space in weeks rather than months. Is that what this is all about?’

‘No,’ Eunice said, before adding, ‘Well, yes, in one sense. But the engine is . . . was . . . only a means of bringing you here, and of demonstrating my, shall we say, sincerity?’ She smiled encouragingly. ‘So that whatever else I do or show you, you’ll have good grounds to take my words at face value?’

‘Every commercial interest in the system is going to want to pick that thing apart,’ Geoffrey said, and suddenly Hector was speaking through him. ‘The ship may be Akinya Space property, but we won’t be able to sit on a secret like that for ever.’

‘You won’t have to – I’ve already made provisions for the engine. And keep in mind that while I live and breathe, I am still running this firm.’

Geoffrey sneered. ‘I hate to break it to you, but the only reason we’re here is because you upped and died at the end of last year.’

‘You and I need a word,’ Eunice said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Jumai had given up trying to contact the version of Eunice back inside the ship. She had removed her helmet and now sat with it in her lap, eyeing Geoffrey as the elevator car sped deeper into Lionheart. The suit rendered her both monstrous and comical.

‘You’ve come a long way,’ the golem said, ‘and I don’t doubt that you both have lives and responsibilities of your own. Unfortunately, you are about to get a severe case of perspective readjustment. Even the most difficult decisions you’ve ever had to make in your lives simply don’t register on this new scale.’ She was sitting with her head low and fingers laced together, looking up at Geoffrey and Jumai as if pleading or begging. ‘That was all inconsequential fluff, like choosing a brand of toothpaste.’

‘We’ve both made life-and-death decisions lately,’ Geoffrey said. ‘So did Hector. So did my sister.’

‘Decisions of strictly local consequence. If you died, your family would continue. If the family ended, that would be an economic catastrophe, but it would not be the end of all things. Do you see what I mean? Local responsibility. Contained consequences. That’s not how it’s going to be from now on.’ Eunice looked down at her interlaced fingers – they were knitting and re-knitting nervously. ‘A hundred years ago, more or less, I stumbled on something. It led, indirectly, to this moment. I’ve lived with the knowledge of that discovery ever since – although even I didn’t grasp the full implications until decades later. Still, I knew it was something worth keeping close to my chest. And I was right about that. If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here now. We’d be a lot of dead dust and rubble piles orbiting the sun, where once there were settled worlds and people.’ She looked up sharply. ‘Doubtless you think I’m exaggerating. I don’t do exaggeration.’