Blue Remembered Earth

It was wonderful in a way, she supposed. There was astonishing variation in the Evolvarium, a staggering panoply of evolutionary strategies, bodyplans, survival mechanisms. Life on Earth had taken three and a half billion years to achieve the radiative diversity that these swift, endlessly mutable machines had produced in a matter of decades. Artificially imposed selection pressures had turned life’s clock into a screaming flywheel. The arms race of survival had been harnessed for the purposes of product development, feeding an endless supply of new technologies, new materials and concepts, into the systemwide marketplace. In that sense, it was almost miraculous: something for nothing, over and over again.

But it wasn’t free, was it? The Evolvarium was death and fear, terror and hunger, on endless repeat. The machines might not have enough cognitive potential to trouble the Gearheads, but that didn’t make them mindless, no matter what Jitendra might care to think. She thought of the sifter Gribelin had told them about, the machine that had begged. Maybe he’d been exaggerating. Maybe he’d been imposing human values on an exchange that was fundamentally alien, beyond a gulf of conceptualisation that could never be crossed.

She wondered. She wondered and knew that she would be very, very glad when they were out of this place.

Jitendra slipped his arm around her waist. ‘I’m sorry about Memphis,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sorry that we aren’t back home, with your brother. But I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this for the world.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s marvellous,’ he said.

Beyond the horizon, red and green radiance underlit the night’s dust clouds. Something was dying in fire and light. Sunday shivered.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

By the time he came to groggy consciousness, Geoffrey was already halfway to the Moon, and a minor diplomatic squall was busy playing itself out back on Earth. Mechanism apparatchiks were not at all happy about Geoffrey having absconded before submitting to a pysch assessment, and they were taking an increasingly sceptical stance regarding Jumai’s supposed innocence in the whole affair. The Nigerian had committed no direct wrongdoing, but the message – in no uncertain terms – was that it would be in her absolute best interests if she were to submit to Mech jurisdiction at her earliest convenience. In other words, she was a whim away from being declared a fugitive herself. Tiamaat, meanwhile – and by extension the Panspermian Initiative – was using every stalling measure in its arsenal, arguing that because Geoffrey had requested aqualogy citizenship, it had no option but to discharge its own procedural obligations in this regard, and that if it did not do so, it would be in grave dereliction of its charter.

Smoke and mirrors, bluff versus bluff, two geopolitical superpowers playing an old, old game. As long as it bought Geoffrey time, he didn’t really care. Worse, as far as he was concerned, was the reaction of the cousins.

Lucas and Hector had been trying to ching from the moment he was picked up by the Nevsky. Their requests had been systematically rebuffed – and Geoffrey had been unconscious for much of the ensuing time – but the cousins hadn’t been daunted. They’d had no trouble tracking the Nevsky – the movements of any seagoing vessel, let alone one as large and ponderous as a former Soviet nuclear submarine, were publically visible – and they’d had no trouble making the obvious connection between the Nevsky’s destination and the lifter’s ascent into orbit. Geoffrey had dropped off the Mechanism’s radar, so they couldn’t be sure that he was in space. But he wasn’t anywhere else under Mechanism jurisdiction either, which did rather argue for him being aboard the rocket. It would not have taken limitless resources to track the rocket’s rendezvous with the deep-space vehicle Quaynor, and to presume that Geoffrey and Jumai were now aboard that ship.

When they had eventually given up on trying to speak to him directly, Hector had recorded a statement, one that Geoffrey had finally felt obliged to listen to.

‘We know what you intend to do, cousin. We know what your new friends think they will help you to achieve. But you are wrong. This will not work. And you are making a very, very serious mistake. You have no business in the Winter Palace, and you have no right to trespass where you are not welcome.’

‘I have as much right to it as you do,’ Geoffrey mouthed.

‘If you have ever thought of yourself as an Akinya,’ Hector went on, ‘do the right thing now. Turn around. Abandon this folly. Before you damage the family name beyond repair.’

‘Fuck the family name,’ Geoffrey said. Then, softly: ‘Fuck the family while you’re at it. I’m out.’

There was a dull propellant roar from somewhere in the ship, a ghost of gravity as the ship trimmed its course, and from that moment on the Quaynor was aimed like an arrow for the orbiting prison where his grandmother had ended her days.

‘Not much to look at,’ Jumai said, six hours later, when they had their first good view of the Winter Palace. ‘I don’t know what I was expecting. Bit more than this, though.’ She paused to tap her medical cuff, instructing it to up her anti-vertigo dosage. Geoffrey had caught her vomiting into a sick bag a few hours into the flight, curled into a foetal ball in the module that had been assigned as her temporary quarters, making dry retching sounds. He’d asked her why she hadn’t managed the nausea, and she’d said that the cuff’s chemicals took the edge off her concentration, and for Jumai that was less acceptable than the occasional heave.

‘We need you sharp at the station,’ he’d argued. ‘That means not being worn out from puking your guts up before we get there.’ And he took her wrist, gently, and tapped up her discretionary dosage to match his own.

‘Yes, Doctor,’ she’d said, half-sullenly, but the message – he was relieved to see now – had got through.

‘She had it built around her old ship, the Winter Queen,’ he said, when the grey cylinder hung before them, massively magnified. They were still fifty thousand kilometres out, so the imagery was synthesised from distributed public eyes in cislunar space rather than the Quaynor’s own low-res cameras. ‘I never went inside it, of course – never even chinged up there. But I know what it’s like. Saw images often enough, whenever she deigned to address us from her throne. It’s a jungle, humid and sticky as a hothouse. Ship’s a rust-bucket; it was just about capable of keeping her alive, supplying power to the station, but no more than that. That’s why the cousins can make a good case for decommissioning it – the reactor’s almost as old as the one in that submarine.’

The cylinder had the proportions of two or three beer cans stuck together top to bottom, bristling with docking/service equipment at either end. It was rotating slowly, spinning on its long axis, bringing most of the surface into view. Between the endcaps, the station’s outer skin was smooth, uninterrupted by machinery, sensory gear or anything that might indicate scale. Eunice had wrapped her own iron microcosm around herself, and she’d never felt the slightest inclination to see what was outside.

‘She never left this?’ Jumai asked, the horror seeping through her voice. ‘I mean, not even to step outside, in a