Blue Remembered Earth

by Alastair Reynolds

  Geoffrey had never seen the apartment, had never even chinged into it with full embodiment, yet he still felt as if he had been there before. It wasn’t the layout of the rooms, the divided partitions of the cargo module, or even the furniture and textiles used to screen off the bare composite walling of the original structure. It was the knick-knacks, the little ornaments and whatnots that could only have belonged to his sister.

  Glad as he was to be surrounded by things that connected him to his past, they came from a time and a place neither of them could return to. They were both grown up now, and Memphis was old, and the household felt far too small ever to have contained the limitless rooms and corridors of Geoffrey’s childhood.

  He forced himself out of his funk and accepted a glass from Sunday.

  ‘Apologies for the mess,’ she said.

  Geoffrey had seen worse. On the shelves, in between Sunday’s numerous keepsakes and objets d’art, were many toy-sized robots, or the parts of robots, all of which had been repurposed. Jitendra had butchered and spliced, creating chimeric monstrosities. In their multilegged, segmented, goggle-eyed hideousness, they reminded Geoffrey of the fossil creatures of the Burgess Shale.

  He was aware, even as he planted himself on a soft chair, that he was being surveilled. Eyes – some on single stalks, others in gun-barrel clusters – swivelled and focused. Limbs and body segments twitched and flexed.

  ‘Are you using any of these in the Robot Wars?’ Geoffrey asked.

  Geoffrey’s question appeared to confuse Jitendra. ‘In the Robot Wars?’

  ‘Tomorrow. You said you’re a competitor in the Robot Wars.’

  ‘Ah,’ Jitendra said, something clicking. ‘Yes, I am, but no, it won’t be with these robots. They’re built for cleverness, not combat. These are my test-rigs, where I try out different cognitive approaches. The ones we use in the Wars . . . well, they’re bigger.’ He poured himself a half-glass of wine. ‘Quite a bit bigger.’

  ‘You have no idea, do you?’ Sunday was sprawling on the sofa, shoes kicked off, feet resting on the mirror-bright coffee table.

  Geoffrey felt at a disadvantage. ‘Evidently not.’

  She looked at him, marvelling. ‘Sometimes it’s as if you’re living a century behind the rest of us.’

  ‘Elephants don’t care what century it is. They care what season it is.’

  ‘I’m going to ching June,’ Jitendra said, jumping up and wandering into another area of the apartment. ‘Need to fine-tune plans for tomorrow. Back in a moment.’

  Tiredness washed over Geoffrey, bringing with it a fizzing tide of stirred-up emotions. From one moment to the next he knew he couldn’t go on with the pretence.

  ‘Don’t hate me for this,’ he said, unable to meet his sister’s eyes, ‘but I didn’t just come here to see you.’

  ‘Like I ever thought that was the case.’

  Geoffrey looked up – he’d been expecting a completely different reaction. ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘You can’t break the habits of a lifetime just like that.’

  ‘Are you cross?’

  Sunday cocked her head from side to side. ‘Depends what the “something else” was.’

  Geoffrey sighed. ‘I didn’t want to lie to you, but I was put in a position where I really had no choice.’

  ‘Someone pressured you.’

  Geoffrey’s sigh turned into a huge, world-weary exhalation. He hadn’t realised the burden he had been carrying around until he finally opened up to Sunday.

  ‘Have a guess who.’

  ‘Mother and Father are too far away to have got to you that thoroughly. Which leaves . . . Hector and Lucas?’

  He nodded slowly. ‘They came to me the day after the scattering, with a proposal. Which, incidentally, I’m not supposed to discuss with another living soul.’

  He told her about the safe-deposit box, about his specific instructions and how he had already violated them.

  ‘Scheming, manipulative vipers,’ she said, squinting as if she’d just bitten into something sour.

  ‘It wasn’t technically blackmail.’

  ‘Don’t make excuses for those stepped-on turds, brother.’ She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Look, I can understand them not wanting Eunice’s name dragged through the dirt, but why use people this way? Why not just appeal to their better natures?’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve got one.’

  ‘You’d have done it, if they made a good enough case. But they think everyone in the world works the way they do.’

  ‘Well, look,’ Geoffrey said, feeling an odd, inexplicable impulse to defend Hector and Lucas in their absence. ‘What’s done is done. Sorry I wasn’t upfront with you earlier, but at least now it’s all out in the open.’

  ‘Yes. Apart from one small thing.’ She eyed him levelly. ‘You still haven’t told me what was in the safe-deposit box.’

  Sunday Akinya did not know whether she ought to be awed or disappointed by the glove. It was certainly an unremarkable-looking item: grubby and old-fashioned, the kind of thing that, had she put her mind to it, she could easily have found in a dozen Zone flea markets. In fact, she could probably have assembled an entire spacesuit, given time.

  ‘That,’ she said.

  ‘That,’ her brother affirmed. ‘And that alone. It was the only thing in the box.’

  ‘Either Eunice was mad, or that glove has to mean something.’

  ‘That’s what I reckon – as does Hector. Do you know much about spacesuits?’

  ‘It’s old-looking. And that dirt is Lunar, so even if that glove was made somewhere else, it’s spent time here.’

  ‘You can tell it’s Lunar dust that easily?’

  ‘I can smell it. Gunpowdery. Or what people tell me gunpowder ought to smell like. Kind of thing you get good at, when you’ve spent enough time up here. It’s been cleaned, but you never get rid of the traces.’ With a vague feeling of apprehension, Sunday continued to examine the glove. ‘But let me get this straight. Hector told you to leave it there while you visit me, but collect it on the way down?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then so far you’re only in theoretical breach of their instructions.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll see it that way.’

  The glove was heavier in her hand than she had expected. The articulation was stiff, like a rusted gauntlet from a suit of armour. ‘I just mean,’ she went on, ‘we have some breathing space.’ She pushed her hand into the open cuff, as far as her fingers would go.

  ‘There’s something jammed into three of the fingers,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I couldn’t even get my hand past the connecting ring.’

  Sunday tried for a few moments, then withdrew her hand very slowly. ‘Guess we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that it’s some kind of . . . well, booby trap.’

  ‘From Eunice?’

  ‘If she was mad enough to put a glove in a bank vault, she was mad enough to turn it into a bomb.’

  ‘I never even thought of bombs,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘You’ve spent too much time in the Surveilled World. Just because you can’t assemble a lethal mechanism out there doesn’t mean you can’t do it here – or that you couldn’t have done it a hundred years ago.’ Seeing her brother’s sceptical look, Sunday added, ‘Look, it probably isn’t a bomb, but that’s still no reason not to play safe, all right?’

  Even with the glove tucked into his bag, Geoffrey must have been scanned and probed a dozen times just between the bank and the railway station. Every door he went through would have been alert to the presence of harmful materials or mechanisms, and he hadn’t been stopped or questioned once. If there was something nasty – or even just suspicious-looking – in the glove, it was concealed well enough to fool routine systems.

  Jitendra, who had been observing silently until then, said, ‘We’ve got our own scanner. Might be an idea to run the glove through it and be sure.’

  Sunday handed it to him warily, knowing how Jitendra liked to dismantle t
hings, often without being entirely sure how to put them back together. ‘Until we know what it’s worth, I don’t want you putting a scratch on it.’

  Active doorframes were frowned upon in the Descrutinised Zone – people didn’t like walking around feeling as if their bodies were living exhibits made of various densities of coloured glass. Equally discouraged were smart textiles, the kind that could be worn or slept in, invisibly woven with superconducting sensors. Sunday had a medical cuff, which was fully capable of detecting anything seriously amiss, but on a day-to-day, even month-to-month basis, what went on inside her body was her own business. In the Descrutinised Zone, it was even possible to get pregnant without the world and his wife being in on the secret.

  ‘There’s a community medical scanner downtown,’ Jitendra said. ‘It’s very old – a museum piece, really. We all get our turn in it. They’ll scan anything if it’s a slow day, but if we put the glove through it everyone will want to know why, and that’ll be the end of our mysterious little secret. Fortunately, there’s a better option right here.’

  ‘There is?’ Geoffrey asked innocently.

  ‘Follow me.’

  Jitendra’s den was set up in what had been the pantry and broom cupboard. Decently screened off behind beaded curtains, it was even more of a mechanical charnel house than the rest of the apartment. Generally speaking, Sunday didn’t go near it unless there was no other option.

  Clamped to the edge of his workbench were adjustable arms, magnifying lenses, precision manipulators and drills. On either side of the workbench, plastic tubs brimmed with wires and connectors, homemade circuits and gel-grown nervous systems. Mounted centrally on the bench was an elderly Hitachi desktop scanner the size of a small sewing machine: a heavy chassis supporting two upright moving scanning rings on tracks. It would have been laughed at in the Surveilled World – this machine had approximately the same resolution and penetrating power as a pillowcase or T-shirt – but in the Zone one took what one could get. Secretly, as Sunday had long since realised, Jitendra derived immense delight from working around arbitrary constraints and limitations.

  The scanner currently held the torso and head assembly of a doll, with two- and three-dimensional magnified images pasted up on the walls around the bench, and what looked like acupuncture needles pin-cushioning the doll’s plastic scalp. His den gave every impression of being the epicentre of some obscure Voodoo death cult.

  He pulled the pincushioned doll out of the scanner, fixed the glove in place instead, then set the scanner to work. The rings whirred up to speed and jerked back and forth along their tracks while images of the glove, colour-coded in blues and pinks, graphed onto the walls.

  Jitendra tapped a finger against his teeth. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘About what?’ Sunday asked.

  ‘Definitely something blocking those three fingers. Soft packing around hard contents. Like little stones, or something.’

  ‘But not bombs,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘Nope. There’s no machinery in there, no triggering mechanisms.’

  ‘Think you can get them out?’ Sunday asked. ‘I mean non-destructively.’ She looked at Geoffrey. ‘Why on Earth would she put stones in a glove?’

  Her brother had no answer.

  ‘I think I can get the packages out,’ Jitendra said, rummaging through his workbench tools. ‘Give me a few minutes here. Any loud bangs, you can revise your bomb theory.’

  Sunday had decided, provisionally, that she would forgive her brother. She had not arrived at this decision lightly, being very much of the opinion that forgiveness was a non-renewable resource, like petroleum or uranium. The world should not depend on its easy dispensation, nor should hers ever be counted upon.

  Yet since Geoffrey was her brother, and since he was also not a true bloodsucking Akinya, she was inclined to generosity. As much as she detested lies and concealment, she accepted that the cousins had been playing on Geoffrey’s attachment to the elephants. Her brother had faults, as did she, but greed was not among them. She could also see how troubled he had been, and how relieved he was when at last he felt able to speak about the vault and the glove. And so she decided to make no more of the matter, even though she was still hurt that he had not confided in her immediately, from the very moment the cousins tabled their proposition. But the hurt would heal, and provided Geoffrey did not lie to her again, she would forget this blemish on his character.

  She led him back into the living room and drew him down next to her on the couch.

  ‘I think it’s time you met the construct. In for a yuan, et cetera. Remember when I showed you the face, back at the scattering?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘That’s only part of it. A tiny part.’ She paused, assailed by last-minute doubts, before crushing them. ‘For the last couple of years I’ve been working on something big, all of it done in my spare time. I’m building Eunice.’

  ‘Right . . .’ Geoffrey said, on a falling note.

  ‘A fully interactive construct, loaded with every scrap of information anyone has on her. So far, so unexceptional.’

  ‘I’ll take your word on that.’

  ‘Please do. This may be a back-room project but it’s still a level above any other construct currently in existence . . . or at least any I know about. The routines she’s built on aren’t proprietary. They’re highly experimental Bayesian algorithms, based on the free-energy mini-malisation paradigm. Jitendra calls her a fembot. That makes her as close to Turing-compliant as anything out there, and if the Gearheads knew they’d probably be knocking holes in the cavern about now. That’s not the main thing I want you to keep in mind, though. This is a person, brother. It’s not some made-up personality – it’s the simulation of a real but deceased individual. And sometimes that can trip you up – especially if that person happens to be someone you knew. You forget, maybe for just a second, that it isn’t her.’

  ‘What makes you think she knows anything at all?’

  ‘I’m not certain that she does, but it’s still possible that she might. I’ve been studying her life and . . .’ She held up her hands as if she was trying to bend a long piece of wood between them. ‘It’s like measuring a coastline. From a distance, it looks simple enough. But if I wanted to make a thorough study of her life, down to the last detail, it would cost me more than my life to do it. So that’s not an option. The best I can do – the best any one human being is capable of doing – is to plot major landmarks and survey as much of the territory between them as I can. Her birth in Africa. Marriage to Jonathan Beza. Time on Mars, and elsewhere. The construct actually knows far more than I ever will, but it won’t tell me anything unless I ask the right questions. And that’s before we even get into the voids, the areas of her life I can’t research.’ She shrugged apologetically. ‘But it’s worth a try. Anything’s worth a try.’

  ‘How do I see her?’

  ‘As a figment. Privacy-locked, so only people I allow to can see her. You’ll need access to our local version of the aug for that. It’s deliberately very basic, but it allows us to ching and interact with figments. Can I go ahead and authorise that?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  Sunday voked the appropriate commands, giving her brother unrestricted access to the Eunice construct. But even Geoffrey was forbidden from tampering with the construct’s deep architecture; he could tell it things, facts that it would absorb into its knowledge base, but he could not instruct it to forget or conceal something, or to alter a particular behavioural parameter.

  Only Sunday could reach in and edit Eunice’s soul.

  ‘Invoke Eunice Akinya,’ she said under her breath.

  Her grandmother assumed reality. She was as solid as day, casting a palpable aug-generated shadow.

  Sunday had opted to depict Eunice as she had been upon her last return from deep space, just before the start of her Lunar exile in 2101. A small, lean woman with delicate features, she didn’t look remotely resilient enoug
h to have done half the things credited to her. That said, her genetic toughness was manifest in the fact that she did not look quite old enough to be at the end of her seventh decade. Her hair was short and luminously white. Her eyes were wide and dark, brimming with an intelligence that could be quick and discriminating as well as cruel. She looked always on the point of laughing at something, but if she laughed, it was only ever at her own witticisms. She wore – or at least had been dressed in – clothes that were both historically accurate and also nondescript enough not to appear jarringly old-fashioned: lightweight black trousers, soft-soled running shoes with split toes and geckopad grip patches for weightlessness, a short-sleeved tunic in autumnal reds and golds. No jewellery or ornamentation of any kind, not even a watch.

  She was sitting; Sunday had crafted a virtual chair, utilitarian and Quaker-plain. Eunice Akinya leaned forward slightly, hands joined in her lap, her head cocked quizzically to one side. The posture was one of attentiveness, but it also suggested someone with a hundred other plans for the day.

  ‘Good evening, Sunday,’ Eunice said.

  ‘Good evening, Eunice,’ Sunday said. ‘I’m here with Geoffrey. How are you?’

  ‘Very well, thank you, and I trust Geoffrey is well. Can I help you with something?’ That was Eunice to a tee: small talk was for people who had time on their hands.

  ‘It’s about a glove,’ Sunday said. ‘Tell her the rest, Geoffrey.’

  He glanced at her. ‘Everything?’

  ‘Absolutely – the more she knows, the more complete she becomes.’

  ‘Please don’t talk about me as if I’m not in the room.’

  ‘My apologies, Eunice,’ Sunday answered. She did not, of course, ever refer to her as ‘grandmother’. Even if that had been Eunice’s chosen form of address, Sunday would have found it inappropriate. Eunice was a label, a name pasted onto a bundle of software reflexes that only happened to look like a living human being.