Blue Remembered Earth

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘And that was a long time ago,’ Jitendra said.

  ‘You think so?’ the construct replied. ‘There are rocks out there, still sitting on the Lunar surface, that haven’t moved since the Late Heavy Bombardment.’

  ‘She might be right,’ Sunday said. ‘If Eunice crashed somewhere out of the way like Pythagoras, there’s a good chance her tracks are still there, from the landing site all the way out of the crater, to wherever the Chinese rescued her.’

  ‘Just so long as Pythagoras hasn’t been chewed over for water or helium,’ Jitendra said. ‘Or had casinos plastered all over it.’

  ‘The Chinese station at Anaximenes was a supply point for their hydroxyl mining and refining operations around the north pole,’ Eunice said, tapping her instantaneous knowledge base. ‘Once the pipelines were in and extraction became automated, there was no need to keep all the crewed stations open. There’s no longer a human presence in Anaximenes, and the last person to set foot in Pythagoras was me.’ She paused, catching herself before anyone else had a chance to speak. ‘Actually, I lie: a recovery team flew in to strip the ship for anything salvageable – ’tronics, fuel, shielding. They were Indian, and under space law they had the right to fillet the wreck. But that was only a few weeks later and they wouldn’t have touched most of the evidence.’

  ‘Evidence,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s like we’re already talking about a crime scene.’

  ‘Maybe we’re making a bit too much of it,’ Sunday said. ‘If the glove was meant to lead us to the crater, why didn’t it just come with a handy little map tucked into it?’

  ‘A test of your ability to draw the necessary conclusion from the clues, perhaps?’ Eunice suggested.

  ‘Well, good luck,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I’ll be deeply interested to hear what, if anything, you find out there.’

  ‘We’re all in this together, brother,’ Sunday said.

  ‘Speak for yourself. All I’ve done is examine a glove at the request of the family.’

  Sunday turned back to the construct. ‘Thank you for your time, Eunice – you’ve been most helpful.’

  ‘It’s over,’ Geoffrey said, when the figment had vanished. ‘There’s no mystery. No reason not to come clean about the glove, and the gemstones.’

  Sunday shrugged and decided, possibly with the assistance of mild intoxication, that she would call his bluff. ‘Fine. Call the cousins. Tell them what you found.’

  ‘They still think the glove’s in Copetown.’

  ‘Say you went back and got it. It’ll only be a white lie.’

  Jitendra sucked air through his teeth. ‘Beginning to wish I hadn’t been so clever after all.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Sunday said. ‘This is just a brother-and-sister thing.’

  ‘What Sunday doesn’t grasp,’ Geoffrey said, ‘is that there’s more at stake to me personally than the reputation of Eunice, or the family business.’

  ‘You think you’re the only one with responsibilities?’

  ‘I have to put the elephants first, and that means keeping the cousins happy. So I’ll take the glove back to Earth, and declare the contents to customs.’

  Sunday said nothing. She knew when her brother still had more to get off his chest.

  ‘But I won’t tell the cousins about the mathematical pattern. They can work that out for themselves, if they’re bright enough. And I won’t tell them what Eunice just told us either.’

  ‘They’re not fools,’ Sunday said.

  ‘It’s a compromise. You and Jitendra can keep digging into this little treasure hunt, if you wish. The cousins don’t need to know about that. Mainly they’ll be relieved that there wasn’t anything obvious and incriminating in the vault. Now they can go back to their polo with a clear conscience.’

  ‘At least we agree on one thing,’ Sunday said. ‘Neither of us likes the cousins very much.’

  ‘They’re Akinyas,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I think that says it all.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  In the morning he found Sunday in her studio. She had already been busy and industrious – she always had been a morning person. There was fresh bread and milk, the smell of powerful coffee permeating the apartment.

  ‘It’s very nice,’ he said, admiring the piece she was working on. It was some kind of half-scale Maasai-looking figure study: a skeletal stick-thin figure with a spear. Sunday was using a power tool to chisel away at the blade-edge of a cheekbone, biting her tongue in fierce concentration.

  ‘It’s shit, actually. Commissioned work. I’m doing two of them, to flank the doorway of an ethnic restaurant in the third cavern.’ She wore a long skirt, a black T-shirt and a red headscarf. Power tools, dappled with dried white specks, dangled from a belt hanging low around her hips. ‘What pays the rent around here, not digging into the past of a dead ancestor.’

  ‘It’s still art.’

  ‘That’s one point of view.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘They wanted something African. I said, you’re going to have to narrow it down a bit: are we talking west coast, east coast, are we even sub-Saharan? But no, they said, we want to keep it less specific than that.’

  ‘Like you say, it pays the rent.’

  ‘Guess I shouldn’t complain. Picasso drew on napkins to pay his bar tabs. And if this goes in on time, there may be more work when they open another concession across town.’ She hooked the power tool back into its loop and unbuckled the belt, draping it onto one of her paint-and-plaster-spattered work surfaces. ‘You’re up, anyway. You want breakfast? I thought we’d hit the zoo today.’

  ‘I just grabbed some bread,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Where’s Jitendra?’

  ‘Asleep. Does all his best thinking unconscious.’ She pottered over to a bowl and dipped her hands in water before drying them on her skirt. ‘Hope that wasn’t too heavy, all that business last night.’

  ‘Anything to do with family is bound to err on the heavy side.’ Geoffrey looked down, realising he’d trodden in something wet and sticky. ‘Look, I meant to say – it was absolutely wrong of me not to tell you straight away what I was doing up here, but I felt I was in a bind. If you can forgive me—’

  ‘I already have. This one time.’ She finished drying her fingers, leaving dark ovals on the skirt. ‘But listen – you and me, we have to be open with each other. Always used to be, didn’t we? You and me against the household, from the moment we worked out how to make nuisances of ourselves. How dear Memphis didn’t strangle us, I won’t ever know.’

  ‘Different back then, though. Being rebellious didn’t cost us anything except maybe being banished to our bedrooms before supper. Now we’ve got people and things that depend on us.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean we can’t be honest with each other, though, does it?’

  ‘The cousins didn’t want you to know. They’ll spit teeth if they find out I told you.’

  Sunday moved the sculpture by its base and positioned it under a cluster of blue-tinged lights. ‘Then we’d better make damn sure they don’t.’

  Children flew kites and balloons in the park. Others were preoccupied with enormous dragon-like flying contraptions not much smaller than the Cessna, the chief function of which appeared to be battling with other dragon-like flying contraptions. They had glittering foil plumage, bannered tails and marvellous anatomically precise wings that beat the air with the awesome slowness of a whale’s heart. Elsewhere there were amorous couples, outbreaks of public theatre or oratory, ice-cream stands, puppet shows and a great many fabulously costumed stilt-walkers. Geoffrey stared in wonder at an astonishingly beautiful stilt-walking girl covered with leaves and green face paint, like a tree spirit made carnal.

  ‘Do you think,’ Sunday asked, ‘that the cousins had any idea what you might find in the bank?’

  ‘If they did, they hid it well.’

  ‘Big risk, though, sending you up to look into the vault.’

  ‘Less of a risk than bringing an outsider into it.’ He tongued t
he ice cream Sunday had bought him from one of the stands. ‘Ideally, Hector and Lucas would have come up here in person, but then people would have started wondering why they needed to visit the Moon. Before you know it, the whole system would be poking its nose into Akinya business.’

  ‘You think Memphis knows about the vault?’

  ‘If he does, he’s said nothing to me.’ Geoffrey dripped some of the ice cream onto his sleeve. He lifted the fabric to his mouth and licked off the spillage. ‘Still, he knows something’s going on. I’m not sure what the rest of the family make of my absence, but Memphis knows I’ve gone to the Moon.’

  ‘Memphis had more contact with Eunice near the end than any of us.’

  ‘She might have told him things then, I suppose,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Or at any point during the exile. She was up here for more than sixty years.’

  ‘Maybe the simplest thing would be to ask him directly, in that case. See if he knows anything about the glove and the gemstones, and a possible connection to Pythagoras.’

  ‘If you’d like me to.’

  They navigated the edge of a small civic pond where children splashed in the shallows and little pastel-sailed boats bobbed and battled further out. On the far bank, Geoffrey caught the flash of something small and mammalian emerging from the water before vanishing immediately into tufts of grass. An otter, or maybe a rat, its fur silvery with water.

  ‘You’re not at all curious about any of this, are you?’ Sunday said, not bothering to hide her disapproval. ‘When you head home to Africa, it’s straight back to your old life.’

  ‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’

  ‘Just do that one thing for me – find out what Memphis knows.’

  ‘Look, before you dig any deeper into this – are you absolutely sure this is something you really want to mess with? You won’t be able to do a five-minute scrub on your own working memory.’

  ‘I know a good neuropractor.’

  ‘Not my point.’

  ‘She wasn’t a monster, Geoffrey. A less-than-perfect human being, maybe. And there’s another thing: she put that glove there, not someone else. Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that the details of this bank vault suddenly come to light in the weeks after her death? Eunice’s fingerprints are all over this.’

  ‘I hope you’re right about that.’

  After leaving the park they walked through into the next cavern and eventually stopped at the restaurant where Sunday’s commissioned sculptures would be installed. The place was closed for business, dusty from the renovation work. Sunday talked to the interior designer, going over a few details she needed to check before completing the project. She came out shaking her head, exasperated and befuddled. ‘Now they want them black,’ she said. ‘First it was white, now it’s black. I’ll have to redo them from scratch.’

  ‘What will you do with the white ones?’

  ‘Destroy them, probably. Too kitsch to sell.’

  ‘Please don’t destroy them,’ Geoffrey said urgently.

  ‘No use to me. Just clutter up my workplace.’

  ‘I’ll buy them or something. Ship them home. But don’t destroy them.’

  She looked touched and surprised. ‘You’d do that for me, brother?’

  He nodded solemnly. ‘Unless you’ve priced yourself out of my range.’

  Then they were on their way again, crossing a few more blocks before arriving at what appeared to be – at least by the Zone’s standards – an entirely nondescript commercial or residential building. Its bulging sides were a mosaic of mirror-bright scales, suggestive of reptilian integument. They went inside and rode an elevator down into its basement levels.

  Sunday passed Geoffrey a translation earpiece. ‘Put this on,’ she said. ‘Chama doesn’t do Swahili.’

  She had voked ahead and as the doors opened they were met by a big, intense-looking man. Geoffrey judged him to be about his own age, give or take a decade. Long black hair hung down the sides of his face in tousled curtains, his skin brown, his beard neat and black, trimmed with laser accuracy.

  ‘Chama,’ Sunday said, pushing in her own jewelled translator. ‘This is Geoffrey, my brother. Geoffrey: this is Chama Akbulut.’

  Chama reached out and took Geoffrey’s hand. He said something in a language Geoffrey didn’t recognise, while the translation rang clear and near-simultaneous. ‘Heard quite a bit about you.’

  ‘Nothing bad, I hope.’

  ‘No. Although Sunday did say you wouldn’t come up here in a million years. What changed your mind?’

  ‘Family business,’ Sunday cut in.

  ‘I hope we’re not intruding,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘Always glad of company here.’ Chama wore a loose-fitting smock with a drawstring neck under a long leather waistcoat with a great many pockets and pouches. ‘You up to speed on the menagerie, Geoffrey?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Oh, good. That’s always the best way.’

  Chama led them deeper into the building, until they were passing along a corridor dug out of solid Moon rock, sprayed over with smoke-tinted plastic insulation. Pipes and power lines ran along the ceiling, stapled messily in place.

  ‘There are strict rules governing the transport and utilisation of genetic materials within the system,’ Chama said, looking back over his shoulder. ‘And I’m very proud to say that Gleb and I have broken most of them.’

  ‘Aren’t there good reasons for those rules?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘No one wants to see people dying because of some ancient virus escaping into the wild.’

  ‘We’re not interested in anything hazardous,’ Chama said. ‘Gleb and I have committed criminal acts only because we were obliged to break certain badly constructed laws. Legislation made by stupid, short-sighted governments.’

  Geoffrey tensed. In his experience, governments were quite useful things: it was hard to see how the world could have come through the Resource and Relocation crises without them. But anti-centralist rhetoric came with the territory, here in the Descrutinised Zone.

  ‘Guess it depends on your intentions,’ he said.

  ‘Had a lot of time for your grandmother,’ Chama said. ‘You think dear old Eunice sat around analysing her every decision into the ground, looking at it from every possible ethical angle? Or did she just, you know, go for it?’

  They’d arrived at a heavy door, the kind that might lead out onto the surface or into a non-pressurised tunnel system. Chama stood to one side and allowed the basketball hoop of an eidetic scanner to lower down over his skull. Chama closed his eyes while he visualised the sphinxware image sequence.

  The door unlocked with the solid, reassuring clunk of a castle drawbridge and hinged slowly open.

  ‘Welcome to the menagerie,’ Chama said.

  The room beyond the door was bigger than Geoffrey had been expecting – much larger than the vault in the Central African Bank – but still nowhere near capacious enough to contain a zoo. His eyes took a few moments to adjust to the very low ambient lighting, a soft red radiance bleeding from the edges of the floor. Rectangular panels, two high, divided the walls, but beyond that he couldn’t make out more than the sketchiest of details. There was another door at the far end, outlined in pale glowing pink.

  ‘Feel I’m missing something here,’ Geoffrey said.

  Sunday smiled. ‘I think you’d better show him, Chama.’

  ‘Forgive the question, but you’re absolutely sure he can be trusted?’ Chama asked.

  ‘He’s my brother.’

  Chama voked something. Polarising screens winked to transparency. The panelled rectangles in the walls were in fact glass screens. Behind the screens were enclosures rife with vegetation.

  Geoffrey reeled. It was obvious, even from a moment’s glance, that the habitats differed in subtle and not so subtle ways. Some were flooded with bright equatorial sunlight – the blazing intensity of the noonday savannah. Others had the permanent gloom of the forest floor under a sun-sapping canopy of den
se tree cover. Others were steamy or desert-arid.

  He walked to the nearest pair of windows. They were stacked one above the other, with no sign that the habitats were in any way interdependent.

  ‘I don’t know as much botany as I should,’ Geoffrey said, peering at the amazing profusion of plants crammed into the upper window. Their olive leaves were diamonded with dewdrops or the remnants of a recent rain shower. Under Lunar gravity, surface tension shaped liquids into almost perfect hemispheres. ‘But if there’s as much biodiversity in this room as I think there is, this is a pretty amazing achievement.’

  ‘We’ve been growing plants in space since the first space stations,’ Chama said, ‘since the days of Salyut, Mir and the ISS. Some of the plant lines here go that far back: lines nurtured by the first thousand people to venture into space. Their hands touched these lineages.’ He said this as if he was talking about holy relics, fingered by saints. ‘But from the outset the work has always been scientifically and commercially driven – firstly, to explore the effects of weightlessness on growth mechanisms, then to push our understanding of hydroponics, aeroponics and so on. Once the ’ponics techniques had matured sufficiently, we stopped bringing new varieties into space. This is the first time that the majority of these plant species have been established beyond Earth. The difference here is that the driver isn’t science or commerce. It’s the Panspermian imperative.’

  ‘Ah,’ Geoffrey said, with a profound sinking feeling. ‘Right. Guess I should have seen that one coming.’

  ‘You don’t approve?’ Chama asked.

  ‘Colour me more than slightly sceptical.’

  ‘That’s my brother’s way of saying he thinks you’re all completely batshit insane,’ Sunday explained.

  He shot her an exasperated glance. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Best to get these things out in the open,’ Sunday said.

  ‘Quite,’ Chama agreed, cordially enough. ‘So yes – I’m a Panspermian. So’s Gleb. And yes, we believe in the movement. But that’s all it is – an idea, a driving imperative. It’s not some crackpot cult.’