Blue Remembered Earth

something you don’t like to talk about these days?’

‘All in the past, as you well know.’

Dorcas smiled once. ‘Did he tell you about the tattoos? I’m guessing not.’

‘If I was bothered about the tattoos, I’d have had them removed.’

‘Which would cost money, which you’d sooner spend on whores, narcotics or truck parts.’ Dorcas gave a little throat-clearing cough, now that she had their attention. ‘Thirty, forty years back, Gribelin ran into a little group of mental cases just outside the Evolvarium. Something about the scenery, the emptiness, the mind-wrenching desolation reaches in and presses the “god” button some of us still have inside us. What were these people called, Grib?’

‘Aggregationists,’ he said tersely. ‘Can we move on now?’

‘They’re all gone now. Word is their leader, the crackpot behind the whole thing, woke up one morning and realised he was surrounded by lunatics. Not only that, but fawning lunatics he’d helped along with their craziness. The Apostate, they call him. He cleared out and left them to get on with it. You met him, didn’t you, Grib?’

‘Our paths crossed.’

Dorcas poured some more chai for her guests. ‘Whatever became of the Apostate, the Aggregate’s doing pretty well for itself. It’s entirely self-sufficient, as far as we can tell, so it doesn’t have to deal with sifters. It’s also strong enough to be able to deter most mid-level threats, and agile enough to keep out of the way of anything large enough to intimidate it. If the original construct was a nation state, this is a walled city.’

‘I guess the next question is . . . is there any way to make money from it?’ Jitendra asked.

‘If there is, no one’s thought of it yet,’ Dorcas said, not appearing to mind the directness of his question. ‘The Aggregate doesn’t shed bits of itself, and until it dies, we can’t very well pick it apart and look inside. But someone will get there eventually. Our . . . rivals won’t stop trying, and nor will we. So far, it’s rebuffed our efforts at negotiated trade. But everything has a price, doesn’t it?’

‘Be careful you don’t end up evolving anything too clever,’ Sunday said. ‘We all know where that leads.’

Dorcas smiled tightly. ‘We have sufficient demolition charges on just this one ship to turn the entire Evolvarium into a radioactive pit, if we so wished. No one takes this lightly.’ She directed a sharp look at Sunday. ‘Of course, you’d rather we didn’t do that any time soon, wouldn’t you? Not while this secret of yours is still to be unearthed.’

‘I don’t even know if there is a secret,’ Sunday said.

‘You’ve come this far, you can’t have too many doubts. Nor the Pans, given their level of interest. What do you imagine she might have left behind?’

‘For all I know, it’s just another cryptic clue leading to somewhere else.’

Dorcas raised a finely plucked eyebrow. ‘On Mars?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘And if at the end of this there’s nothing, no bucket of gold, what then?’

‘We all go home and get back to our lives,’ Sunday said.

Another aide came to whisper something to Dorcas. She listened, nodded once.

‘The other vehicle has crossed the perimeter,’ she said. ‘Its point of entry was very close to your own, and it’s following roughly the same course you were on before we picked you up. You say there’s a golem in that thing?’

Sunday nodded. ‘It’s pretty likely.’

‘Then it must be acting near-autonomously by now. Does it know exactly where the burial might have taken place?’

‘The people behind the golem,’ Sunday said circumspectly, not wanting to give away more information about her family than she needed to, ‘they’re smart enough to have joined the same dots I did.’

‘Not much we can do about that,’ Dorcas said. She put down her teacup and rose from a kneeling position, smoothing the wrinkles out of her long black coat as she did so. ‘No matter: we have a good two hours on the rover, and we’re very nearly at the location.’

‘You don’t expect to find anything, do you?’ Sunday said.

‘The machines are thorough, but if something was buried sufficiently far down . . . well, there’s a possibility it’s still there, albeit a remote one.’

‘Except Eunice wouldn’t have seen any reason to bury something so deeply,’ Jitendra said.

‘Let’s err on the side of optimism,’ Dorcas said.

CHAPTER TWENTY- FIVE

Of the Russian weather station, of the evidence of Eunice’s return decades later, nothing now remained. All traces had been erased by wind and time; all artefacts and trash long since absorbed and recycled by the Evolvarium’s machines. But the location was known to within a handful of metres, and as Lady Disdain adjusted her engines to maintain a hovering posture, there could be no doubt that they were sitting over exactly the right patch of ground.

‘If there was anything large and magnetic sitting right below the dust, we’d already know about it,’ Dorcas said. ‘I’m afraid that’s not looking good right now. Same for gravitational anomalies. If there’s something buried right under us, within a couple of metres of the surface, it must have the same density as the rock, to within the limits of our mass sensors.’ She was standing at a pulpit-like console, arms spread either side of an angled display. ‘There are a few more things to try, though, before we think about looking deeper.’

‘Ground-penetrating radar?’ Gribelin asked.

‘Already down to a depth of three metres, over a surface area of fifty-by-fifty. We can expand the search grid, of course – but that’ll take time.’