Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds
‘What?’ Sunday asked, wary of a diversion.
‘Check the dust tracks on the floor. It’s been moved. Those may even be my own footprints.’
Sunday could no more grip the locker than she could the mug or the glove, but in Phobos’s gravity it wasn’t hard to shove it sideways until it toppled in slow motion. Sunday directed the helmet torch at the portion of the wall that had been hidden by the locker until then.
Eunice’s intuition had been correct. It was a painting, more properly a mural: brushed directly onto the dome’s curving wall.
Sunday stared at it in wonderment. For a moment, she forgot all about the corpse suit.
‘I know this.’
‘Of course you know it. It’s a copy of the one in my room, back in the household. I take no responsibility for the original, but I’m certain I made this copy.’
‘You painted this?’
‘Projected the original onto the wall, copied it. It doesn’t make me an artist.’
She wished that the construct had permitted the tingle of recognition to endure for at least a few moments before shattering the spell. Eunice was quite right, of course. Sunday had visited her grandmother’s abandoned bedroom on a handful of solemn occasions – it had always felt like the room of someone dead, not merely absent – and she recognised the mural from those visits.
‘Who’d have thought it?’
The construct looked at her sharply. ‘Who’d have thought what, child?’
‘That you, the great and fierce Eunice Akinya, could ever have been homesick. Why else would you have brought this piece of your past with you?’
Executed with childlike boldness, the mural was a vivid, colour-drenched painting of Kilimanjaro. The mountain’s steepness was exaggerated, its snow-cap diamond-faceted against deep-blue sky. Cutting across the middle of the painting was a horizontal swathe of trees, depicted with naive exactness and symmetry. Ornamenting the trees, perched on the branches like jewels and lanterns, were many colourful birds with long tails and horned beaks. In the foreground were ochre grasses and emerald shrubs. Woven into the grasses, striped and counter-striped like partial ciphers, were many different kinds of animal, from lions to zebra to giraffe and rhino, snakes and scorpions. There were even Maasai, their tall black and red spear-clutching forms the only recurrent vertical elements in the composition.
‘I wasn’t homesick,’ Eunice said, after a great while. ‘Home-proud. That’s not the same thing.’
Sunday blinked the mural. ‘I’ve captured an image. But I’m not sure this is the thing we were meant to find.’
‘And I’m sure it is. When I came back here, I must have changed the picture. It was well done, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps I redid the whole thing, to make sure the joins wouldn’t show.’
‘What are you on about?’
‘It doesn’t match. I have a memory of the original, and . . . something’s different.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Let’s be sure of ourselves, shall we? I can’t be certain that my memory of the mural is accurate. But your brother’s still in Africa. Have him visit my room and blink the image up to us. Then we can talk.’
Jitendra was on the drowsy cusp of consciousness, in the same kind of room where she had been revived earlier in the day. Sunday sat down in the chair next to the bed and was smiling when he surfaced, squinting against the light and licking sleep-parched lips. ‘Welcome back, lover. We’re on Mars. Almost.’
Jitendra had already been reassigned voluntary muscle function, so he was able to tilt his head and smile back. His face was slack, but the tone would return soon enough.
‘We made it,’ he said, slurring and pausing. ‘Not that I ever had doubts . . . but still.’
‘It’s still a miracle.’ The technician had given her a box holding six little cuboid sponges, stuck on the end of sticks like lollipops. They were soaked with something sweet, chemically tailored to Jitendra’s palate. She leaned over and dabbed his lips with one.
‘Thank you,’ Jitendra said.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Like I’ve been dead for a month.’
‘You have, Mister Gupta. It’s called space travel.’
He struggled into a sitting-up position, propping himself with an elbow. He was wearing silver pyjamas. They had even shaved him, so that when Sunday kissed his cheek his skin was peach soft and perfumed, smelling of violets. Jitendra took in his surroundings, studying the white room and the false window with its ever-breaking waves. ‘Everything went OK, didn’t it?’
Sunday dabbed at his lips again. ‘Not a hitch. They brought me out sooner, but apparently that’s what happens sometimes. Just time to take a little stroll outside, see the scenery.’
‘Please don’t tell me you’ve seen Mars ahead of me.’
‘No,’ she said, just a bit too quickly. ‘Not yet. It was on the other side. We’ll see it together.’
‘I’d like that.’ Jitendra rubbed his slightly stubbled scalp. ‘I need a haircut.’
‘We found something,’ she blurted.
‘We?’
‘Eunice and I. I need to talk to my brother, but . . . I think I already know where we’re going next.’
Jitendra sat in silence, waiting for her to elaborate. ‘Are you going to let me in on the big secret?’ he asked eventually.
‘It’s Mars,’ Sunday said. ‘Which is where we were going anyway, of course. But there’s a complication.’
Jitendra managed a smile. ‘Why am I not surprised?’
When Mars lifted into view its aspect was different, but she made no mention of that. In a way it helped, because this was a different face of the world, not the one she had already seen, and she could study it afresh without having to pretend. Sunday regretted her lie, but it had been a small one.
They were standing next to each other, far enough away from the other tourists that they could imagine themselves alone on this airless ridge, the only living people on Phobos. Soon this would be the memory she chose to hold on to, letting the earlier one wither. And in time she might even come to believe that this was, indeed, the first time she had seen Mars rising, in all its ancient, time-scarred immensity.
‘It’s wonderful,’ Jitendra said.
‘It’s a world. Worlds are wonderful.’
They stood in silence, transfixed, until a soft chime from the console told them it would soon be time to return their rented suits, and make ready for the rest of their journey.
‘Before we go inside,’ Sunday said, ‘you should see Chakra’s Folly. Reckon we’ve still got time. On the way, you can tell me all about the Evolvarium.’
‘Why are you interested in that all of a sudden? I thought that was more my area.’
‘Because that’s where we’re going.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The ching was passive, but the resolution more than adequate for his purposes. He exited his standing body, rose into the air and drifted over the treetops, gaining speed and altitude. Sometimes it was good not to take the Cessna, or one of the other machines; just to become a disembodied witness, with a viewpoint assembled from distributed public eyes. The scene was rendered with exacting thoroughness down to the last leaf, the last hoofprint or elephant footprint in the dust. Any uncertainty in the image flow was seamlessly interpolated long before his brain had to fill in any gaps.
He found the herd soon enough. Whatever status Matilda might have lost among the other females when she was startled by Eunice’s figment had been regained over the ensuing weeks. Her position and body posture were as authoritative as ever. She was leading her family along a narrow trail bordered by acacia and cabbage trees.
Revelling in the freedom – as much as he loved flying the Cessna, there was something delicious about lacking body and inertia, the ability to traverse the sky like a demon, at the merest whim – Geoffrey scouted the other herds, taking the opportunity to refresh his memories of their structures and hierarchies. He also pinpointed the roving
Minds were deeply strange things. When these elephants were young, it had required no great effort to see the sparks of human awareness in their curiosity and playfulness. It was even possible to think that their minds were in fact more human before adulthood clamped down and locked those attributes away, secure behind iron walls of dominance and aggression.
Elephant society was a product of necessity, shaped by environmental factors over countless millions of years. But what did that mean, here and now? Things were changing for the elephants; had been changing for centuries. Humans had come, and the humans had done things to the climate that had made the world convulse. Steamships to space elevators: all that in a Darwinian eye-blink, a strobe-flash of massively compressed change. Elephants were still dealing with the fact that monkeys had fire and spears; they hadn’t even begun to process the industrial revolution, let alone the space age or the Anthropocene.
Bolder changes still were coming down the line, changes that even humans would struggle to accommodate. Panspermian Initiatives, the Green Efflorescence.
Observing elephants, monitoring them – even creeping into their skulls – that was acceptable to Geoffrey. But making them into something else, rewiring their society as if it was no more than a defective mechanism, transforming it into something better equipped to survive . . . ? He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. People had done enough harm, even with the best of intentions.
When he chinged back into his body, someone was waiting for permission to manifest. The tag was unfamiliar, so for a moment he presumed it was Sunday, coming in via an unorthodox, highly quangled routing.
He took the call in the research shack. He had made coffee before chinging and now, as the figment assumed reality, he drained the bitter dregs into his cup.
‘I hope I haven’t caught you at an inopportune moment, Mister Akinya. I did say I’d be back in touch, didn’t I?’
Geoffrey studied the blank-eyed man, with his sea-green suit and toothless gash of a mouth, his skin so pale that it might have been grafted from a reptile’s belly.
‘Kind of hoping you might have forgotten, Truro.’
‘Well, I can’t fault your honesty. But no, we don’t forget our debts. Especially when they’ve been extended. Remortgaged.’
‘If Sunday cut a deal with you, that’s between you and her.’
‘Ah, but it doesn’t work like that. If it ever did. We’ve done you two favours now, Mister Akinya. I’d very much like us at least to begin to discuss something by way of reciprocity.’
‘You can start by telling me where you’re chinging from.’
‘Oh, not so very far from you. Your sister correctly deduced that I was based on or near Earth. As it happens, I’m practically within spitting distance. I’m calling from Tiamaat, not too far from your Somalian coast. You’ll have heard of it, of course.’
‘I’m not an idiot. Why have you waited until now to contact me?’
‘You needed time to reflect, to assess your obligations to family. Sunday has arrived at her destination: we facilitated her visit, and the quangled bind from Phobos. She is awake. History has begun again. It felt like an appropriate time to resume negotiations.’
Geoffrey knew that Sunday was safe. He had received her message and made a point of blinking her a view of Kilimanjaro by way of reply.
‘I’m not sure anything needs negotiating.’
‘Chama Akbulut . . . found something, didn’t he? On the Moon, in the Chinese sector?’
Geoffrey picked a fly out of the coffee’s cold meniscus. ‘If you say so.’
‘I’ll confess, there are two reasons why we ought to meet in person, and with some urgency. One is the business with Chama, Gleb and the phyletic dwarves. It’s a marvellous little project and it has my absolute support. There’s something else, though. You’ve come to the attention of . . . well, I shan’t say for the moment. But a colleague of mine has requested an audience.’
‘Thing is, my calendar’s a little full.’
‘And this is science, Mister Akinya. Whatever your plans, I doubt there’s anything so pressing that it can’t wait a few days.’
Geoffrey opened his mouth to argue, but beyond the usual vague notions of getting ahead on paperwork, he had no detailed intentions. ‘You’re not going away, are you?’
‘As you’ll find, I’m a remarkably persistent soul.’
‘You’re going to keep bothering me, I suppose I might as well get it over with.’
‘Splendid,’ Truro said, as if he had been expecting no other response. ‘You shall come to Tiamaat, and the pleasure will be all mine! I have your ching coordinates. Shall we say . . . this location, tomorrow morning? Ten a.m.? Very good.’
The knob clicked, the door emitting a mouselike squeak of protestation as it opened. Eunice’s room was cool, the windows permanently shuttered. A ceiling fan stirred the air to no detectable benefit. Geoffrey had peered into this room at various points during his childhood and adolescence, but not often since his late teens. Eunice’s figment had sometimes manifested here, but as often as not it had appeared somewhere else in the household or its grounds. Whatever the case, Geoffrey had usually done his best to be elsewhere.
The room was a time capsule, a piece of the twenty-first century lodged in the present. The rose-printed wallpaper was paper, not active material: it was pasted onto the walls and couldn’t be altered at a moment’s whim. Rectangular fade marks hinted at the locations of old pictures, join lines where the sheets didn’t quite match, and little white lesions where the paper had been scuffed. The rug on the floor was a kind of textile rather than a self-cleansing frond-carpet. When he stood on it, it didn’t ooze over his shoes and try to pick them clean of nourishment. The furniture was wooden: not the kind of wood that grew purposefully into furniture shapes, but the kind that started off as trees, before being hacked and rolled and sawed and steamed into shape. There were things in this room older than the Cessna.
One wall wasn’t papered, or had been papered and then painted over. The mural didn’t fill the entire area; it was bordered in white and smaller than Geoffrey remembered. The wall faced east, towards the real Kilimanjaro.
‘I was right,’ Eunice said. ‘You can blink it for Sunday’s sake, but I’ve seen it through your eyes now and that’s much the same thing.’
‘I haven’t seen the other one. What’s different?’
‘Directly below the mountain, here.’ She was pointing at a long-legged bird, maybe a crane or ibis. ‘The etymology of Kilimanjaro isn’t very clear, but it may mean “white mountain” or “white hill”. This bird is white, do you see?’
‘I do.’
‘In the version on Phobos, it’s a different bird. I saw it immediately, but I had to be sure. Sunday would never have realised, but—’
‘Get to it, Eunice.’ His nerves were addled after the visitation from Truro. ‘Some of us have lives to be getting on with.’
‘It’s a peacock,’ she said, ‘painted in exactly the same position. That’s the only point of difference between the two murals. We have stills of the Indian camp taken around 2062, and some of them show the mural. There was no difference between this one and that one at that point, so I must have made the change when I returned to Phobos in 2099.’
‘Fine. And this is supposed to mean something to me?’
‘From white mountain to peacock mountain, Geoffrey. Must I labour the point? The original mural refers to Kilimanjaro; the one on Phobos can only refer to Pavonis Mons.’
‘Pavonis Mons,’ he repeated.
‘On Mars. It’s the—’
‘Highest mountain. Or volcano. Or something.’
‘That’s Olympus Mons,
‘Then all Sunday has to do is . . .’ Geoffrey trailed off. ‘She mentioned complications, Eunice.’
The figment swallowed audibly. ‘There are . . . difficulties.’
‘Such as?’
‘That part of Mars . . . the Tharsis Bulge . . . it’s changed a little since my time.’
Memphis motioned Geoffrey to take a seat until his call was done. Geoffrey poured himself some water from the jug set on a low table near Memphis’s desk.
‘What can I do for you, Geoffrey?’ Memphis asked pleasantly, when he had come out of ching.
‘I have to go away, just for a couple of days, leaving tomorrow morning. Could you check on things while I’m gone?’
‘It is rather short notice.’
‘I know, but I’d feel a lot happier if you could do that for me.’
Memphis shook his head, a gesture of good-natured exasperation that Geoffrey remembered well from his earliest days. What are we going to do with you, young man?
‘Couple of days, you said?’
‘That’s all. And you don’t need to spend hours out there.’
‘Could you not ching, from wherever you’ll be?’
‘That may not be possible. Anyway, I’d rather someone went there in person. You know how it is.’
‘Yes,’ Memphis said, in long-suffering tones. ‘One does. Well, you would not ask this lightly, I think. I will inspect Matilda’s herd from an airpod. Will that suffice?’
‘If you could also land and inspect the perimeter monitors, and then check on the camp, that would be even better.’
‘Will one inspection per day suffice?’
Geoffrey shifted on his seat. ‘If that’s all you can give me—’
‘Which is your way of saying you would rather I made at least two.’
Geoffrey smiled softly. ‘Thank you, Memphis.’