Blue Remembered Earth (82 page)

‘Fine,’ Geoffrey said dismissively. ‘If they have a problem, they know where to find me. Now can we talk about something other than elephants?’

From Libreville, they rode a pair of airpods back to household – Geoffrey and Jumai in one, Sunday and Jitendra in the other. It was late when they arrived, the house magnificently gloomy and expansive, full of echoing halls and empty rooms. Lucas was waiting for them, evidently saddened yet bearing up – Geoffrey was surprised at first, until he remembered that he’d had many weeks to adjust to his brother’s death. They hugged like politicians at a summit, holding an uneasy embrace before pulling away and meeting each other’s gaze.

Later, when they were dining, Lucas declared, ‘I am ready to turn over a new page. We had our . . . differences, I won’t pretend otherwise. But my brother would not have wished there to be any further animosity between us.’ He blew out a breath through pursed lips, as if this utterance alone had already drained him to the marrow. ‘I think it is fair to say that none of us knew what we were getting into.’

‘I wouldn’t quibble with that,’ Geoffrey said.

‘For what it’s worth, you have my word that we will honour our pledges with regard to your funding.’

Geoffrey broke bread. ‘That may not be necessary, Lucas. Although I do appreciate the sentiment.’

Sunday looked at him doubtfully. ‘If you’re still expecting research backing from the Pans, I think you might need to recalculate. I’ve been in touch with Chama and Gleb . . .’ She hesitated before continuing. ‘They may not be able to count on the full support of the Panspermian Initiative any more.’

‘They didn’t do anything wrong,’ Jitendra said.

‘It’s not them. It’s the organisation. From what they can gather, the events on Mars have caused a rift. There’s disunity at high levels – talk of splinter movements, even.’

‘So much for finding out what those numbers mean,’ Sunday said.

‘Numbers?’ Lucas asked.

Geoffrey was conscious that he’d yet to give Sunday a complete account of what had happened, let alone his cousin. But she knew about the numbers. He invited her to continue.

‘My brother and Jumai encountered a construct in Lionheart,’ she said, ‘a low-level emulation of Eunice, a bit like the one guarding the Winter Palace. It mentioned a sequence of numbers, said they’d mean something to Lin Wei. We’ve no idea what they signify.’

‘You could tell me now,’ Lucas said. ‘I could make enquiries.’

‘They may not be the thing you need to know first,’ Geoffrey said. He took a moment to refill the glasses, including Lucas’s. ‘We’ve been confronted with two difficult decisions, cousin. I’ll come to the second in a moment – it’s complicated, and you may need a little while to take it all on board.’

Lucas gave an easy-going shrug. ‘And the first?’

‘Whether or not to tell you about the second,’ Sunday said. ‘Hell, even I don’t know more than the barest sketch of what happened out there. But my brother says you have a right to know, and I’m prepared to trust him on that.’

Geoffrey smiled and leaned in closer. ‘Think of the most difficult business decision you’ve ever had to make, Lucas. The single hardest choice, in your entire life. Now multiply it by twenty.’

‘You’re not even close,’ Jumai said.

Lucas looked like a man who suspected he might be the butt of a joke. ‘Obviously there are commercial repercussions . . . we’ll want to reverse-engineer
Summer Queen
’s engine, lock down all the necessary patents—’

‘The engine’s a detail,’ Geoffrey said. ‘All the construction schedules are aboard the ship. They’re ours. But we don’t get to make one yuan out of it.’

The skin at the side of Lucas’s mouth twitched. ‘If they’re ours—’

‘We get to build copies of that prototype,’ Geoffrey continued, ‘but we waive exclusivity on the design. The licence and all associated technical data are to be held and administered by the United Orbital Nations, or some equivalent body with reach beyond Earth – we’ll figure out the details later. They’ll assign construction rights to any commercial or transnational interest with the necessary background and experience in high-energy propulsion.’

‘That’s a world-changing technology. You’re saying we just give it away?’ Lucas squinted, as if his reality had suddenly loomed slightly out of focus.

‘It’s a sweetener,’ Geoffrey said. ‘There’s no doubt that the new engine will change things – it’ll shrink the solar system overnight, for a start. It could also do a lot of damage, if mishandled. Obviously we’ll have to assess things very carefully. That’s where you come in, Lucas. We want you to be a part of this.’

‘After everything that has happened between us?’

‘Hector would have been involved,’ Sunday said. ‘Whether he liked it or not, he’d have been in on this. Forced to accept his share of responsibility. Now you get to take his place.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Lucas said. ‘You say that this new engine is just a sweetener, as if it’s not even the most important outcome of recent events.’

‘It isn’t,’ Geoffrey said.

Lucas was looking down at his meal, as if somewhere in it there might be at least the hint of an answer. ‘Then perhaps you had better start at the beginning,’ he said.

When they had finished dining, and while Jumai was settling into her room, Geoffrey went wandering, listlessly at first and then with a growing determination. He patrolled the west wing, with its dark-framed cabinets and plinthed and labelled curiosities from his grandmother’s life. That had always been the museum wing, but suddenly it felt as if the museum had swelled to encompass the entire building, for all that it was clearly much too large for the meagre collection it was required to house. He wondered what the point of all this was, now that he knew so much of Eunice’s life had been a lie, or at least an incomplete and misdirecting version of events. Nothing that had really mattered to her was commemorated here. Not Phobos, not her friendship with Memphis, not the truth about Memphis himself, not Lionheart.

For one hot moment Geoffrey was struck by the mad impulse to grab a spade from the garden stores and start smashing wood and glass, reducing this lying past to shards and splinters. A few wheelbarrow loads, that was all it would be.

But the urge passed as quickly as it had arrived. Entirely too melodramatic, and in any case he only had to think of the patient hours Memphis had spent among these artefacts, tending them with devotion and loyalty. Even though he knew at least part of the truth.

He walked to Memphis’s room and pushed open the door. Nearly four months had passed since he was last there, but hibernation had compressed that time into little more than a week and a half of lived experience. He’d been speaking to Memphis, leaning on him to visit the herds. Memphis had obliged, as he always obliged. The next time he’d seen him, Memphis had been lying dead on the ground.

‘Why did you die?’ he asked, to the back of the empty office chair, still parked at its desk. ‘Why couldn’t you have waited until all this was over? The one person I could have used, to give me some guidance—’

‘He didn’t mean to,’ Eunice said.

He’d been wondering when the construct would reassert itself. There had been no sign of her in the Zone, and none on the descent to Libreville. He hadn’t discussed the matter with Sunday – he was still skirting around the subject, hoping she wouldn’t force him to speak about the artilect in Lionheart – and at the back of his mind was the faint and not unwelcome suspicion that his sister had used her privileges to remove the construct from his head.

Evidently not.

‘How could you know?’ he asked her, the wine fuelling his indignation. ‘How could you possibly fucking know?’

She did not appear upset by his tone of address. ‘I knew Memphis, Geoffrey, as well as anyone. He was an old man, but he still loved life. Whatever happened out there . . . it could only have been an accident.’

‘After all the years he’d been helping me? Why then and there?’

‘You don’t still believe Lucas and Hector were behind it, do you? Not now.’

‘No,’ he said, and it was true; he didn’t. Even though that realisation slammed one door and opened another, revealing an alternative no more pleasing to behold.

‘Memphis had a lot on his mind after my death,’ the construct said. ‘Too much, for one man. When things started to get complicated, and when you started asking tricky questions . . . I think he found it difficult to focus on everything. That was all it was: the understandable carelessness of a man under pressure.’

‘Then exactly whose fault was that?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Mine, and mine alone,’ Eunice said. ‘I’m willing to accept that responsibility, if you accept yours.’

He kept having to remind himself that this version of Eunice was at least hazily cognisant of his grandmother’s true history. Before his arrival at Lionheart, Sunday had already integrated the contents of the helmet with her own version of the construct. The file she had uploaded to
Summer Queen
had been stripped down, but there was no reason to assume that this version, the one haunting him right now, was not the most complex iteration to date. Provided that he dismissed all knowledge of the artilect.

‘He never said a word about his past,’ Geoffrey told her.

‘There was no need. He’d shed it, moved on. Would it have changed anything, if you’d known Memphis was more than just a caretaker? Would you have respected him more?’ She shook her head, answering for him. ‘Don’t say “yes” because then you’d disappoint me, and I’d rather you didn’t. He was a good and loyal man, and he served this family well, and raised you and Sunday when your parents were halfway to Neptune, and neither of you turned into monsters, and that’s
enough
. That’s all anyone could ever ask.’ She touched her ghost hand against the back of his chair. ‘The scattering is tomorrow, isn’t it? I’d like to see it. Would that offend you?’

‘You don’t have to ask my permission,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You can be there whether I like it or not, and I wouldn’t even have to know about it.’

‘That’s exactly why I’m asking,’ Eunice said.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The next day he took an airpod out to the basin, grateful when no one else had made any overtures about accompanying him. Under other circumstances he might have put that down to their lack of interest, and been suitably offended by it. He doubted that was the case now. Sunday, Jitendra and Jumai knew he had matters of his own to attend to, and they were giving him the privacy he needed.

He flew low and fast, trying to empty his mind. It was easier said than done. Though the rains had come in force, greening land that had been parched in January, he knew the old landmarks too well for it to look truly new. He had put down too much of his life here, scratched too much of his history into the terrain. Every waterhole, every copse of trees, every trail had some personal significance, however slight. He had travelled far but he hadn’t broken the ties to this tiny part of Africa. Or the ties hadn’t let him escape.

He circled his usual study areas, relying on his own eyes to pick out the herds and lone males. It was trickier with the increased tree cover, but he’d had enough practice to be sure of not missing much. He knew the elephants’ seasonal movements, their habits and customs and favoured meeting places, and his eyes and brain were attuned to picking out shapes and associations that might have eluded the less experienced.

It did not take him long to locate Matilda and her clan – they were less than half a kay from where he’d assumed they would be – and a quick series of looping inspections established that the M-group had suffered no losses since his last survey. Indeed, there were a couple of babies calved while he was away. There’d been several pregnancies in the group at the time of his departure, so that wasn’t surprising. From the movements of the calves it was impossible to tell who the mothers had been – the babies ambled playfully from one adult to another, sharing in the overall protection and nurturing environment of the M-group.

He made one low pass, to let the elephants know he was arriving – or that someone was arriving, anyway, as they’d normally associate him with the Cessna, not an airpod – and then selected a landing site within easy range of the group. Thick lush grass buckled under the airpod’s skis. He opened the canopy and climbed out, grunting as his shoulders protested with the effort. His muscles and bones were still aching after the prolonged period of weightlessness aboard
Summer Queen
and Lionheart, but not so much that he felt in need of an exo.

The day was hot, dry and windless. There were no clouds and that was a propitious omen for the scattering. He had learned of the plans and approved of them, although there was still a tiny twinge of doubt at the back of his mind. Memphis had never been one for the attention-seeking gesture, and perhaps he would not entirely approve of the arrangements. But then, if the Akinya family wished to honour him, wasn’t that their prerogative?

That was for later, though. Geoffrey had other business now.

He sealed the airpod and strode through the undergrowth towards the herd. After a few paces he found a stick and grabbed it to beat the ground ahead of him. He carried nothing with him – no monitoring equipment, no sports bag stuffed with pencils and paper. Just the clothes he had on, which were already beginning to stick to his skin. He had made a mental note to allow himself time to change before they all went out from the household – Sunday wasn’t going to get a chance to accuse him of smelling of dung this time. It wasn’t the heat making him sweat, though. Geoffrey was nervous.