‘It’s an extravagance, of course,’ Arethusa confided. Her voice came straight into his head via the ship’s onboard aug. ‘Moving me around. I’m not just meat and bone, like you. I weigh fifty tonnes to begin with, and I also need thousands of litres of water to float in. But they can owe me this one. We have fuel to spare – or at least we did, before your family decided to race us to the prize – and in an emergency my suspension fluid can always be used for coolant or reaction mass or radiation shielding.’
‘What would happen to you?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘I’d die, very probably. But I wouldn’t object to the basic unfairness of it. Doesn’t mean I’m tired of life, or ready to end it – not at all. But I’ve long since reached the point where I accept that I’m living on borrowed time. Every waking instant.’
‘I still don’t understand. Why now?’
‘Why what now?’ She sounded unreasonably prickled by the question.
‘Don’t tell me you just decided to leave the planet at the drop of a hat, Arethusa. Something’s prompted this. Where are you going, anyway? You can’t stay in the Winter Palace.’
‘I don’t plan to. But it’s been time to move on for a while now. I bore easily, Geoffrey. Life in the aqualogy stopped offering me challenges decades ago, and for that reason alone I need new horizons. Ocular’s finally given me the spur to make the transition.’
‘To leave Earth.’
‘I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time. But this news – the Crucible data, the Mandala and the death of my old friend Eunice – it really feels as if the time is right.
‘You mean to stay in space, then?’
‘I’m not going back,’ she affirmed. ‘And most certainly not after all the fuel expenditure it took to haul me up here. Do I want to look profligate?’ She fell silent, ruminating in darkness. The tank chugged and whirred. ‘There’s a whole system to explore, Geoffrey,’ she said eventually. ‘Worlds and moons, cities and vistas. Wonder and terror. More than Lin Wei could ever have imagined, bless her. And that’s just this little huddle of rock and dust around this one little yellow star.’
‘You are Lin Wei,’ he said quietly. ‘You never drowned. You just became a whale.’
She sounded more disappointed than angered. ‘Can we at least maintain the pretence, for the sake of civility?’
‘Why did this happen to you?’
‘I made it happen. Why else?’ She sounded genuinely perplexed that the question needed answering. ‘It was a phase.’
‘Being a whale?’
‘Being human.’ Then, after a moment: ‘We both became strange, Eunice and I, both turned our backs on what we’d once been. Me in here. Eunice in her prison. We both lived and loved, and after all that, it wasn’t enough.’
The impulse to defend his grandmother was overwhelming, but he knew it would have been a mistake. ‘At least you haven’t turned into a recluse. You’re still in the world, on some level. You still have plans.’
‘Yes,’ Arethusa acknowledged. ‘I do. Even if, now and then, I scare myself with them.’
‘Do you know why she hid herself away?’
‘She was never the same after Mercury. But then again, who was?’ Arethusa paused. She was still Arethusa to him: try as he might, he couldn’t relate this floating apparition to his notion of Lin Wei, the little Chinese girl who had befriended his grandmother, back when the world was a simpler place. ‘My doctors – the people who helped shape me – tell me I could live a very long time, Geoffrey. One way to cheat death is to just keep growing, you see. I’m still forming new neural connections. My brain astonishes itself.’
‘How long?’
‘Decades, maybe even a century: who knows? No different for you, really. You’re a young man. A hundred years from now, do you honestly expect medicine not to have made even more progress?’
‘I don’t think that far ahead.’
‘It’s time we got into the habit. Every living, breathing human being. Because we’re all in this together, aren’t we? We endured the turmoil of climate change, the Resource and Relocation wars, the metaphorical and literal floods and storms, didn’t we? Or if we didn’t, we at least had the marvellous good fortune to have ancestors who did, to allow us to be born into this time of miracles and wonder, when possibilities are opening rather than closing. We’re all Poseidon’s children, Geoffrey: whether we like it or not.’
‘Poseidon’s children,’ he repeated. ‘Is that supposed to mean something?’
‘We came through. That’s all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it’s time to start doing something useful with our lives.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sunday’s boots crunched into Tharsis dust. This, she was startled to realise, was the first time that she had actually set foot on Martian soil. The strip of plasticised ground in the arrivals terminal hadn’t counted, nor the spidering walkway in Crommelin. She was outside now, hundreds of kilometres from anything that might even loosely be termed civilisation. Between her body and the dust and rock of this vastly ancient planet lay only the thinnest membrane of air and alloy and plastic. She was a cosy little fiefdom of warmth and life, enclaved by dominions of cold and death.
She was accustomed to wearing a suit, accustomed to being outside in the Moon’s vacuum and extremes of temperature. Mars was different, though. It lulled with its very familiarity. It didn’t look airless, or even particularly antipathetic to life. She had spent enough time on Earth to recognise the handiwork of rain and weathering. The sky wasn’t black, it was the pale pink of a summer’s twilight. There were clouds and corkscrewing dust-devils. The ground, its temperature and texture transmitted through the soles of her boots, did not feel unwelcoming. She felt as if she could slip the boots off and pad barefoot through the dust, as if on a beach.
