Blue Remembered Earth

Dali: a tombstone in a desert, maybe.

Sunday was the first to reach it. She sent the proxy away, not willing to let anyone else open the lid now that she had come this far. Different on the Moon, when Chama had been the one who had that privilege. Then, she’d barely known what she was getting involved with. Now it was as personal as anything in her universe.

Sunday knelt next to the box. Jitendra was behind her, but the others were still keeping their distance. Let them, she thought as she worked her gloved fingers under the catches and applied pressure. They flipped open obligingly, and Sunday had her first real inkling of disquiet. She’d never been entirely persuaded by Dorcas’s argument that a box could not have been under the surface all this time and not be found by the machines. But catches that had been snapped shut sixty or more years ago and then exposed to six decades of Martian cold ought to feel tighter than these.

The lid swung open just as easily. It was only then that Sunday realised she should have considered the possibility that the box had been packed and sealed under normal pressure conditions rather than in the thin air on the face of Mars.

Too late . . . But no: it either hadn’t been pressure-sealed, or the air had leaked away over the decades.

She looked inside. The box contained another box: a lacquered black receptacle with a flower pattern worked into its lid. There was just enough room around the outside of the smaller box to get her fingers in. She reached for it.

And felt something touch the back of her head.

‘It’s not a weapon,’ Dorcas said. ‘We need to be clear about that. I am not holding a weapon against your helmet. I would never do that. What I am doing is holding a non-weapon, a tool, a normal part of our equipment, in such a way that harm could conceivably come to you if I were careless. Which I won’t be, provided you do nothing that might . . . distract me.’

Sunday was surprised by how calm her own voice sounded. ‘What would you like me to do, Dorcas?’

‘I’d like you to let go of that box, the smaller one, and step away from the big box. I’m right behind you, and I’m going to stay right behind you.’

Sunday removed her fingers from the gap between the boxes. She’d budged the small box just enough to feel that it was light, if not empty.

‘I don’t understand what’s going on,’ she said, standing and moving away from the box as she’d been told to. ‘Other than the fact that it feels criminal.’

‘Not at all,’ Dorcas said. ‘Quite the opposite, really. I’m intervening to prevent the execution of a criminal act. In the absence of an effective Mechanism, I’m obliged to do so. Now kneel again.’

‘If there was a Mechanism,’ Sunday answered, lowering down as she’d been ordered, ‘I doubt very much whether you’d be holding something against the back of my helmet.’

‘That’s as may be. But as I said, what we’re trying to do here is stop a crime, not create one.’

‘The crime being . . . ?’

‘The removal of artefacts from the Evolvarium without the necessary authorisation. I’m afraid everything here that isn’t geology belongs to the Overfloater Consortium. You should have realised that before you came blundering in.’

From her kneeling position Sunday looked around slowly, careful not make any sudden movements. She had walked perhaps twenty paces from the big box when Dorcas ordered her to kneel again. The woman was still behind her. Sibyl, the other Overfloater, was holding a kind of pneumatic drill, double-gripped like a gangster-era machine gun. It was heavy and green and wrapped in a gristle of cabling. Gribelin and Jitendra were kneeling on the ground before her, their hands raised as high as their suit articulation allowed.

‘Piton-drivers,’ Dorcas said. ‘We use them to fire anchors into the ground when we need to moor-up during a storm. They use compressed air to drive self-locking cleats fifty centimetres into solid rock. Just think what that would do to common-or-garden suit armour.’

‘I didn’t come to steal from the Overfloaters. You know why I’m here. Whatever’s in that box is family property, that’s all, and it was buried here before the Evolvarium was created. It’s got nothing to do with you or your machines. If I take it, nothing changes. No one gets richer or poorer.’

‘If that’s the case,’ Dorcas said, ‘then you won’t mind if I have it instead, will you?’

‘I said it belongs to me, to my family.’

‘Can you prove this?’

‘Of course. I didn’t end up here by accident. I followed clues, all the way from the Moon.’

‘Then you can submit a claim for return of confiscated property through the usual channels.’ Dorcas seemed to think for a moment. ‘Of course, to prove that you followed those clues, you’ll have to mention that incident with the Chinese, to which your name hasn’t hitherto been linked.’

‘Who’s behind this?’ Jitendra asked.

‘There’s no one “behind” anything,’ Dorcas said. ‘I’m merely asserting the rule of law.’

‘It’s just that you’d only know about what happened on the Moon if the Pans had told you,’ Jitendra said.

‘I’m not surprised,’ Sunday said. ‘If anything, I’m amazed it’s taken them this long.’

‘To do what?’ Gribelin asked.

‘To steal the box from under my nose. It’s been too easy, hasn’t it? They’ve been falling over themselves to help us get this far. Now they’ve decided: enough is enough. We don’t need Sunday to follow the rest of the clues. We can do that on our own, thanks very much, or just not bother.’ She shook her head, disgusted at her own unwillingness to see things clearly until this lacerating moment. ‘Soya warned me,’ she said.

‘Soya?’ Dorcas asked. ‘Who the hell is Soya?’

‘Someone I should have listened to when I had the chance. Not that it would have made much difference. How