Blue Remembered Earth

Lin Wei said, ‘I don’t think it’s very long to the scattering now.’ She made a gesture in the air, shaping a square, and the aug filled the square with darkness. ‘Can you all see this?’

They were still walking, but the square moved with them. One by one they confirmed that they were able to see it.

‘Sunday told Chama and Gleb about the numbers, and they in turn told me,’ Lin Wei went on. ‘The numbers wouldn’t have meant much to an outsider, but their meaning was immediately clear to me – as they would have been to Eunice.’

‘So what do they mean?’ Sunday asked.

The rectangle dappled itself with smudges of milky light. ‘Ocular pointing coordinates,’ Lin Wei said. ‘That’s what they are: a set of directions for the instrument. Before very long my adversaries will make it very difficult for me to access Ocular, but for the moment that is still my privilege – as well it should be, given that I conceived and birthed it. Needless to say, I did not hesitate to abuse that privilege by ordering Arachne to point Ocular in the direction corresponding to the coordinates.’

‘Mandala?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘No. Crucible lies in the constellation Virgo, and this is in the direction of Lyra, a completely different part of the sky. Close to Altair, in fact – one of the stars of the Summer Triangle. Arachne’s search algorithms eliminated any starlike objects from the immediate centre of the field, but you’ll note that there is still something there.’

‘What is it?’ Sunday asked.

‘I thought perhaps you might be able to tell me, given what the two of you have learned of your grandmother. It’s incredibly faint, and at first glance it appears quasarlike. But it’s not a quasar. It’s a . . . well, I don’t know. Neither does Arachne. She’s seen billions of astronomical objects, but nothing that looks remotely like this . . . energy source. That’s what it is – an energy source, highly Dopplered, we can tell from the spectrum – moving away from us along what appears to be a radial line of sight. We’ll have a better handle on that as time goes by, if we pick up lateral motion. But I don’t think we will. I think we will find that this thing, this object, started off in the solar system, about sixty years ago. And ever since then it’s been rushing away from us, falling into the summer stars.’

Geoffrey asked, ‘How far out is it now?’

Lin Wei’s smile was impish. ‘I think I’ve given you enough to be going on with, don’t you? Let’s just say it’s a long, long way – further than any human artefact has ever reached. And travelling at a quite ridiculous speed.’

‘To nowhere in particular?’ Sunday probed. ‘There’s no star along that exact line of sight?’

‘There are stars, to be sure. But none that strike us – Arachne or myself – as an obvious candidate.’ Lin Wei made a flicking gesture and the image disappeared.

‘That’s all you’re going to give us?’ Sunday asked.

‘For now. You want more, come and talk to me. I think we all have rather a lot to discuss, don’t you?’

‘She’s in that thing,’ Geoffrey said. ‘That’s what you think. That Eunice is in a ship, a ship that’s been heading away from Earth for sixty years.’

‘She spoke to me once,’ Sunday replied, ‘about how it would feel to just keep going. To never go home again.’ She paused, trying to call her grandmother’s exact words to mind. ‘Until Earth was just a blue memory. What I didn’t realise was . . . she meant to do it.’

‘She could still be—’ Geoffrey began. But he caught himself before the sentence was out.

Sunday nodded. He didn’t need to say what he was thinking. She was thinking the same thing herself.

She supposed the only way to know for sure would be to go out there. To catch up with that impossibly distant thing and see what was inside it.

A sleeping lion, perhaps. Senge Dongma.

Jitendra said, ‘I think it’s time.’

He was right, too. Sunday could feel the ground rumbling under them as the blowpipe sent its tiny package racing under the plains. As one they turned to face east. As if of its own volition, her hand rose to her neck, fingering the charm she had been given on Mars, binding her to the past, binding her to the future.

They watched the spark rise from the mountain, a tiny bright star climbing against the turn of the heavens. It was travelling ballistically now, carried on the momentum it had gained in the long acceleration as it rode the magnetic catapult. Some of that momentum was already ebbing: the package was encountering atmospheric resistance, albeit from air that was half as thick as at ground level, and gravity was beginning to reassert its claim. Ordinarily the launch lasers would have cut in by now, projecting their ferocious energies onto the underside of the package to give it that extra push into orbit. Some of the onlookers, Sunday felt certain, must already have come to the conclusion that the blowpipe had mistimed. Others, she felt equally sure, were entirely ignorant of the usual mechanics.

The star kept rising – from the party’s vantage point it appeared to be climbing vertically, but it was in fact following an arc, one that was already taking it east, out towards the Indian Ocean. Just when it looked on the point of falling, though, the lasers shone. Their beams scratched diamond-bright tracks in the sky, converging from Kilimanjaro’s summit to meet at a fixed focus point in space, where the air became a little ball of ionised hell. The focus would ordinarily have been immediately underneath the rising object, but the arrangements were different today; the lasers were now directing their energies directly ahead of the package. It had no protection against that; it had been designed to be pushed, not to hit that plasma head-on. With no frontal shielding beyond that necessary to withstand the aerodynamic stresses, the effect on the package was rapid and glorious. The star’s brightness flared by sudden magnitudes, until it looked as if a new day was dawning. Sunday raised her fingers against the dazzle, catching greens and pinks in the tiny blazing point. The light fluttered, and then – as quickly as it had begun – that little new sun began to break up, oozing molten droplets of itself. The colours subsided – gold turning to amber, amber to orange, orange to a slow dulling red. She tried to trace the falling sparks, but they were soon lost in the glow of the sky.

She knew the truth of it, that if any part of him was to rain down from that pyre, it would happen far out to sea. And perhaps no part had survived that incandescence. But from where Sunday was standing, from where everyone now stood, it was very hard not to believe that some part of their friend and mentor would end up touching the summit of that mountain, end up touching the snows of Kilimanjaro.