Blue Remembered Earth

the last time we speak, will it?’

‘We’ve barely begun,’ Sunday said.

‘Count on it,’ Jitendra said. ‘Even if she doesn’t come back, I will. I’m serious about ruffling those feathers. And I have a feeling there’s a lot you and I could talk about.’

‘I think so too,’ Jonathan said. Then he frowned slightly, turning back to Sunday. ‘What you said just now, about it all being horsepiss?’

‘What?’ Sunday asked.

‘Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you sounded just like your grandmother.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Geoffrey heard his own footsteps through the suit’s auditory-acoustic pickup and the timbre was different now, each footfall accompanied by a distinct steel-edged echo. The open door had shown only darkness, and it was no lighter now that they were on the other side of it, cut off from the Quaynor. He felt as if he’d climbed into the hold of a ship: some huge metal-walled void with no windows.

‘There’s an image-intensifier mode on these things,’ Jumai said, quietly, as if there were things astir that she did not wish to alert. ‘Voke amplification, see what you make of it.’

Jumai was never more than arm’s reach away, her form outlined on the helmet’s display. Geoffrey did as she had suggested, voking the suit to apply a light-enhanced overlay. Grey-green perspectives raced away from him, curving in one direction, arrow-straight in the other. He pivoted around, Jumai manifesting as a blazing white smudge. The floor angled up behind her, commencing its great steepening arc, the arc that would eventually bring it soaring overhead and back down behind him. At right angles to the direction of curvature, the floor stretched all the way to the far endcap. He couldn’t see anything of the endcap. There wasn’t enough ambient light for that.

‘This isn’t right,’ he said, shaking his head inside the helmet. ‘It shouldn’t be like this.’

‘You want to let me in on what you were expecting?’

‘I’ve never been here before,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but I’m very familiar with this space – from whenever she talked to us, whenever she delivered one of her sermons.’ The words were a struggle. ‘This wasn’t just an empty shell. It was full of trees, full of greenery and light. Like a jungle. There were plants, borders, paths and stairs. It rained. There should be a whole closed-cycle ecology running in here.’

‘Looks more like a big room full of nothing to me,’ Jumai said.

‘Arethusa was here. She chinged aboard, not long before Eunice died. She’d have noticed anything strange. She’d have said something to me.’

Jumai had her hands on her hips. She was looking up, towards the central axis of the empty chamber. ‘Least there’s a ship. That is a ship, isn’t it?’

‘I think so.’ But he could hardly tell. It was nearly seventy-five metres away. All he could make out was a spine of organised darkness running from one end of the chamber to the other. ‘We need more light,’ Geoffrey said decisively. ‘Is there a flashlight mode somewhere? I’m surprised it hasn’t cut in automatically.’

‘Maybe there are situations where you wouldn’t want that to happen. Wait a second.’ Jumai reached up and started fiddling with the crown of her helmet. ‘Thought I saw something while we were suiting up. Got some flares in my toolkit, all else fails.’

Light blazed from her helmet. She doused the blue-white beam against the central axis, picking out details of the Winter Queen. Geoffrey felt his world lurch slightly back into sanity, if only for a few lucid moments. He was still reeling from the absence of the jungle. Even if the air in the chamber had been swapped for pure oxygen and allowed to consume itself, there’d still be ashes . . . scorching. Yet there was nothing. The flooring under his feet had the improbable antiseptic gleam of an airpod showroom.

But the ship was real. He’d activated his own helmet lamp and was sweeping the beam along the nearest part of the Winter Queen. The deep-space explorer was a kilometre long, and even though part of that length was now absorbed into the endcaps, he still couldn’t see more than a fifth of it. Yet the anatomy was unmistakable, from the cluster of fuel tanks above him to the delicate filigreed spine with its branching black complexity of fractally folded radiator vanes.

He’d seen this ship a thousand times, in countless family histories. Everything about it looked correct. But this wasn’t the rotting, rusted, tree-encased carcass he’d been expecting. Winter Queen wasn’t garlanded with humid green overgrowth and she wasn’t laced with solar lights and an irrigation system. There were no spiral staircases rising from the floor to puncture her hull. She did not look as if she’d been stuck in here for decades.

She looked ravishingly, sparklingly new.

‘Enough of this shit,’ Jumai said. Her glowing form reached down and scooped something out of the holdall she’d dropped at her feet. She did something to the object in her hand and it quickened into impossible brilliance.

She tossed the little ball of light along the floor, where it bounced and rolled and then began to propel itself with a curious willingness, until it came to a rolling stop two or three hundred metres away.

Jumai did the same thing with a second flare.

They lit the entire chamber. Geoffrey squinted against the brightness until his eyes amped down their response. His suspicions were confirmed now: the ship looked as pristine as its surroundings. The two opposed centrifuge arms, one hundred and eighty metres from tip to tip, were still turning, whooshing around like the blades of a wind turbine. The capsule-shaped living pods at either end of the arms skimmed the ground with only a metre or so to spare.

‘Why are they still turning?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘There’s already gravity in this place.’

Jumai looked at the swinging arms. ‘How fast are we spinning?’

Geoffrey recalled what he’d learned on the approach. ‘About three times a minute, give or take.’

‘Then they’re not spinning fast enough to counteract the habitat’s rotation, either. I thought maybe someone had gone to a lot of trouble to recreate weightlessness, for whatever reason. But that’s not it. Those arms can’t be swinging around faster than once every couple of minutes, relative to us.’