Blue Remembered Earth

It was as if her mind had begun to make mental houseroom, clearing itself of furniture it no longer needed. Something else was going to be moving in, for months or years. Sunday wondered how grief would feel, when it arrived.

Jitendra returned to the compartment looking brighter and better rested than she felt he had any right to. He’d gone to get himself some breakfast, Sunday apologising for not having an appetite, and hoping he didn’t mind eating on his own. He was finishing off a paper-wrapped croissant.

‘We’re nearly in Vishniac,’ he said, rubbing a hand over a freshly shaven chin to dislodge crumbs. He looked different, and it took her a moment to identify the change. Normally he kept his scalp shaved so that the transcranial stimulator could work effectively, but now his hair was beginning to grow back. ‘I’m guessing our ride will be waiting for us,’ he went on, between mouthfuls. ‘Sure you want to go through with this? It’s not too late to call it all off.’

‘It’ll take my mind off things,’ she said.

‘This happening, maybe it’ll knock some sense into those cousins of yours.’ He offered her the remaining half of the croissant. She shook her head. ‘You sure? Got to eat.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

But she didn’t feel fine. She felt sick and light-headed, not quite in her own body, as if she was elsewhere and a ching bind was collapsing. It was not simply the news of Memphis’s death, though that was a significant part of it. She had been feeling disorientated ever since Soya had contacted her in Crommelin.

Soya of the mirrored visor and the face that echoed her own.

That’s all it had been – an echo. Later Sunday had played back the retinal capture, and while Soya’s face was very similar to Sunday’s, it was not an exact likeness – although in the moment, with the distortion of the intervening layers of glass, she could forgive herself for thinking otherwise. But a family resemblance? Unquestionably.

Which threw up more questions than it answered.

She did not think she recognised the name, but in fact that had been her own memory at fault. Eunice’s mother, of all people, had been named Soya. But that particular Soya had been dead more than a hundred years, and at least as crucially she had never left Earth. Born in the second half of the twentieth century, she had, by the standards of her age, lived a long and blessedly happy life. But she had not lived long enough to see more than the first flowering of her daughter’s accomplishments. In any case, the images of Soya Akinya did not match the face Sunday had seen, even those few grainy still frames that existed of Soya as a young woman. The Akinya genes were present in both women, but they had expressed themselves quite differently.

How easy it would have been to run an aug trace, if she hadn’t been stuck in that tourist suit. But that had evidently been the point: not just to shield their conversation, but to disclose as little as possible about Soya’s true identity.

All of that was suitably destabilising, but what had unsettled Sunday just as much as seeing her own face was the warning Soya had given. Not that Sunday had ever assumed the Pans could be trusted unquestioningly – she would be naive not to think otherwise – but given the fact that she had no alternative but to trust them, what precisely was she meant to do with that information?

And how did Soya know about the Pans, and Sunday, and Eunice’s trail of breadcrumbs anyway?

It was not good to feel like a cog in a machine, even a willing and submissive cog. Who could she turn to now? Sunday wondered. Jitendra for love and affection, all she could wish for in a partner. But Jitendra couldn’t help her make the decisions now being forced upon her. Her brother? In a heartbeat. But Geoffrey was on another planet and all her communications to him went through the Pans . . .

That left Eunice, an art project she herself had assembled and breathed life into. A patchwork thing, a collage, a wind-up doll. Eunice might serve as a handy, easily queryable repository of all-world-knowledge relating to her late namesake, and she might have a few data-sniffing tricks up her sleeve, but the idea that Sunday might turn to the construct for counsel, for wisdom, for succour in a time of crisis . . .

That was ridiculous.

I’m Sunday Akinya, she thought. I’m thirty-five years old. I’m fit and well. I am not the ugliest woman ever born. Barring accidents I’ll probably see out another hundred and twenty years, at the very minimum. I’m a talented if obscure artist, I live on the Moon and I’m currently walking around on Mars, with my boyfriend, with an expense account some people would kill for, if killing were still possible.

So why am I not having fun?

The Vishniac railway station was much smaller than the one in Crommelin, and smaller than those at many of the intermediate stops they had made on the way. It was pressurised – the train had passed through an airtight collar as it dived underground – but the air was cool and it felt thinner in her lungs, somehow. That was undoubtedly an illusion, owing as much to her mental state as her knowledge that they had gained considerable altitude. A few dozen passengers had alighted, and it did not take long to verify that the golem was not among them. Sunday waited, apprehensively, until the train slid out of the station, picking up speed so quickly that she felt the air being sucked in its wake. Then it was gone, and there was still no golem.

There were no customs or immigration formalities for travel between Martian administrative sectors, so they were quickly through the station and into the shabby glitz of the Vishniac public concourse. It had the look of a place that had been fresh and modern about thirty years ago, but had since been allowed to fade. Sunday located the cafe where they had been told to meet Gribelin; it was tucked between a florist and a closed-for-business nail salon.

Their guide was already there, sitting by himself at an outlying table with one leg hooked over the other, sipping from a white coffee cup not much larger than a thimble. His bug-eyed goggles appeared to have been surgically grafted to his face. He was bald and cadaverous.

‘Mister Gribelin?’ Sunday ventured.

He set the coffee down on the glass-topped table with a precise and delicate chink and stood up, retrieving a knee-length leather overcoat from the back of his chair. He was tall even by Lunar standards, towering over both Sunday and Jitendra.

‘Can’t hang around,’ he said, without a word of welcome. ‘Your friend caught the next train out of Crom. He’s been right behind you all the way.’