Blue Remembered Earth

exercise.’

‘You’ll let us take the ship back?’ Jumai asked.

‘After it’s refuelled and repaired, which – with all of Lionheart turned to the task – shouldn’t take more than a week. Then you can go back into hibernation. Perhaps when you arrive, you’ll be closer to your decision.’

‘I still don’t know what happened to you,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I know you didn’t die in the Winter Palace because there was nobody up there to die, and consequently no ashes to be brought home, either. Which means that the last time anyone saw you alive – anyone we can trust, that is – was before you left for your final mission.’

‘Lin Wei was kind enough to think of me,’ Eunice said. ‘The least I can do is pay her back, in some small measure. Remember these numbers, and give them to Lin. I think they will answer at least one of your questions.’ She reeled off a string of digits, then repeated them. ‘Lin Wei will understand.’

‘There’s one more thing,’ Jumai said. ‘You talk as if you’re the only person . . . the only thing . . . that knows any of this. Fine, you’re an artilect – I’m ready to accept that there isn’t another living soul in this iceteroid. But your husband knew, and you’ve told us about the physicist. You’ve also told us that it took insider help to pull all this off without the rest of your family finding out. So we’re not the only ones, are we?’

‘My husband died a long time ago,’ Eunice said. ‘Long before the true significance of the rock drawings became clear. And anyway, even if he’d lived, and known . . . I’d still have trusted him to keep it all a secret. This information will be destabilising, whenever it’s made public knowledge, and Jonathan liked stability more than anything else. That’s why I left him on Mars.’

‘And the physicist?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘He was a brilliant young Tanzanian,’ Eunice said. ‘A brave and courageous thinker. But the rock drawings destroyed him. Not as a human being, but as a scientist. He’d . . . seen too much. Glimpsed too much of the inner workings of the universe, too soon and too quickly. He was a searcher after truth, and to have it revealed to him so readily, without effort . . . the entire intellectual purpose of his life was undermined in one blow. Once the experiments were designed, he pulled back – left the detailed running and interpretation to the artilects.’

‘And the insider?’ Geoffrey probed.

‘The same person,’ Eunice told him. ‘When he turned his back on physics . . . he returned to Africa. He was a very good man, and none of this could have been achieved without him.’ Then her voice softened. ‘And now he has died, and you must go home to bury him.’

CHAPTER FORTY

They were in Lionheart for a week, as the golem had anticipated. The ship was allowed to approach and dock, and soon after that robots were swarming all over it, attending to the damage and preparing it for the return journey home.

‘We never had a name for it,’ Geoffrey said, ‘since it obviously isn’t the ship you left in.’

‘Call it Summer Queen, if you like,’ Eunice told them.

Since the repairs and refuelling were entirely automated processes, there was nothing Geoffrey and Jumai needed to do but wait until their ride was ready. They had been given the option of re-entering hibernation early, but both had decided against that. Neither wished to go to sleep until the ship was already on its way, putting distance between itself and the iceteroid.

Geoffrey couldn’t speak for Jumai, but he had no difficulty analysing his own reluctance. He simply didn’t have unquestioning confidence in Eunice, or in the artilect emulating her. It had already proven fallible, and for all that it articulated regret and sadness about Hector’s death, and even Memphis’s, he had no reason to suppose that those utterances carried the slightest emotional weight. It was making placating noises, but behind them, as Jumai had already pointed out, was just stuff. Machinery. And while machinery might ponder a set of actions that had led to a less than desirable outcome and adjust its future behaviour accordingly, it was a stretch to call that remorse.

Lionheart had been equipped to care for human visitors, and that was where they spent the week while Summer Queen – that name was as good as any – was overhauled. There was a suite of rooms and modules, a recreation complex, a gymnasium and a couple of centrifuges, one large enough to contain a commons and dining area – enough to keep a team of technical staff comfortable for months. They chose separate rooms and adjusted the furnishings accordingly to suit their preferences. There was entertainment, incoming transmissions – not full aug, but enough to keep them up to date on developments elsewhere in the system – and they had the means to send and receive private communications.

There was a limit to what Geoffrey was willing to discuss until he was face to face with his sister, but he told Sunday that they were both safe, and would be returning home as soon as the ship was cleared for departure. Allowing for the preparations, and the fifty-odd days of journey time it would take to reach near-Earth space, they would be back in two months.

‘We’ll be difficult to miss,’ he said.

Then he called Lucas, and gave him the news about Hector.

Ten hours later, return transmissions arrived from Sunday and Lucas. Neither of them had a lot to say, simply expressing relief that Geoffrey and Jumai were alive, and would soon be on their way home. Lucas thanked Geoffrey for the news about his brother, but beyond that he was implacable, as if he wasn’t entirely ready to take the news at face value. Even Sunday had appeared reticent to comment on it. She was in Africa, Geoffrey learned: after returning from Mars, she had travelled to the household to keep an eye on his elephants. Not just chinging, but physically there, in body and mind. He was grateful, and when he considered that by being in Africa she was necessarily neglecting her own life back on the Moon, her work and commissions, his gratitude became boundless. But Geoffrey and Jumai were coming back now, and Sunday didn’t need to spend all that time waiting on Earth. He asked her to promise him that she would return to the Moon before his arrival.

Later, when Jumai and Geoffrey were dining in the centrifuge, being waited on by Plexus machines, she said, ‘They’re not sure we’re us. That’s why they’re holding back, I think. That and the fact that we’re obviously holding back something as well. Can you blame them? We’ve been duped and manipulated by artilects; Sunday’s been cheated by the Pans. Right now no one knows who or what to trust. For all they know, we might be dead by now.’

Geoffrey agreed. The fact that they couldn’t give a plausible account of what had happened in Lionheart wasn’t helping their case, either. It would be better when they got home, and he could talk properly. Not just with Sunday and Jitendra, but with Lucas as well. There was no escaping that. Lucas would have to be told about Lionheart.

‘That’s not really true,’ Jumai said delicately. ‘Hector never got to find out why Eunice wanted us here.’