Blue Remembered Earth

the end opening. Then the swiftship fired its own steering motors – a strobe-flicker of blue-hot pinpricks running the length of the vehicle – and began to turn, flipping end-over-end as it aimed itself at Mars, or rather the point on the ecliptic where Mars would be in four weeks.

The liner drifted slowly out of sight, the tugs still clamped on. Eunice’s ghost hand tugged at Geoffrey’s ghost sleeve. ‘Let’s go to the other window. I don’t want to miss this.’

The other watchers had drifted to an external port for a better view. Geoffrey and Eunice followed them unhurriedly. For an hour the liner just sat there, backdropped by the slowly turning Moon. Now and then a steering jet would fire, performing some micro-adjustment or last-minute systems check. Some of the spectators drifted away, their patience strained. Geoffrey waited, fully intent on seeing this through to the end. He’d almost begun to forget that his body was still back in Africa, still waiting on a warm rooftop, when some kindly insect opted to sink its mouthparts into his neck.

Presently the swiftship’s engines were activated. Three stilettos of neon-pink plasma spiked out of the drive assembly, and then brightened to a lance-like intensity. The tugs had unclamped, using steering rockets to boost quickly away from the sides of the larger ship before any part of it stood a chance of colliding with them. Geoffrey concentrated his attention on the background stars. It took nearly a minute for the swiftship to traverse its own length. And then it was clearly moving, accelerating, every second putting another metre-per-second of speed on its clock. It was like watching a house slide down a mountainside, gathering momentum with awful inevitability.

She would keep those motors burning for another day of steady acceleration, by which point the ship would be moving at a hundred kilometres per second . . . faster than anything he could easily grasp, but still – he did the sums in his head – a blistering one-thirtieth of one per cent of the speed of light. That was wrong, surely? He must have dropped a decimal point, maybe two. But no, his calculations were correct. Two hundred years of spaceflight, two hundred years of steady, methodical progress combined with bold, intuitive leaps . . . and this was still the very best the human species could do: attain a speed so slow that, in cosmic terms, it barely counted as movement at all.

‘I thought one day we’d do better than this,’ Eunice said, as if she’d been reading his thoughts. ‘They had most of my lifetime to do it in, after all.’

‘Sorry we let you down.’

‘We?’

‘The rest of the human species,’ Geoffrey said. ‘For not living up to your exacting standards.’

‘You tried,’ Eunice said. ‘I’ll give you that much.’

In the morning he returned to the elephants. Memphis came with him in the Cessna, and they landed at the semi-permanent airstrip adjacent to Geoffrey’s research station. It was a trio of modular huts set around three sides of a square compound, where an ancient zebra-striped truck and an even more ancient zebra-striped jeep stood dormant. Wheat-coloured grass fingered mudguards and armoured bumpers.

He helped the old man out of the aircraft. If he’d had any doubts about his own muscular readjustment to Earth gravity, they were silenced when he took Memphis’s weight, supporting him under the elbow as he climbed out of the cockpit. Memphis felt as light and dry as a bag of sticks.

‘Sorry,’ Geoffrey said as Memphis’s polished black lace-ups touched the ground. ‘I shouldn’t have put you through this. No reason we couldn’t have taken one of the pods.’

The three stilt-mounted huts, soap-like plastic structures with rounded corners, were respectively an accommodation module, research area and storage building. In practice Geoffrey only needed the research hut, since that was where he usually ended up sleeping and cooking for himself. All his equipment, samples, veterinary medicines and documentation only filled a third of the storage unit, with the rest set aside for utilisation by the graduate or postgraduate assistants Geoffrey’s research budget had not yet made possible. He supposed that was all going to change now. The new funds would certainly pay for one helper, probably two, as well as a mountain of gleaming new study tools. He’d have to move his domestic arrangements back into the accommodation shack, to free up room and lend a semblance of order to the research space. The place could use some sprucing up, that was true. But it was only now that he realised that the days of solitude, the peace and quiet, might be numbered.

For now they were just passing through. Geoffrey made chai for Memphis and sat him down in the research hut while he sorted out equipment, packing gear into boxes which he then secured in the Cessna. He walked out to one of the perimeter towers and swapped a module in the solar collector, then replaced a cable leading from another. All the while his mind was turning over, wondering how he was going to raise the subject of Eunice with Memphis.

In the end Memphis made it easy. They were up in the air again, buzzing west a hundred metres above the treetops.

‘I might be mistaken,’ he said, ‘but something tells me this trip isn’t entirely about visiting the elephants.’

Geoffrey tried to smile the remark away, glancing at his passenger before snapping his attention back to the controls. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘You have been thinking of tasks you need to do, but which could easily be put off for a week or a month. As if you feel you need an excuse for this whole day.’

‘I can only put things off so long,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You know how it is.’

‘Nonetheless,’ Memphis said. He looked out of the window, spotting some giraffe in the distance and following them with his gaze. They were loping, crossing the ground in great scissoring strides, like pairs of draughtsmen’s compasses being walked across a map. They’d been seeing flying machines for two hundred and fifty years and still acted as if each time was the first. Panicked bundles of instinct and fear, forever startled by their own shadows.

‘Actually, there is something.’

‘Of course,’ Memphis said. ‘And one must presume it relates to your recent journey. And that it is also something you didn’t wish to talk about in the household, for fear of being overheard.’

‘You know me too well, I’m afraid. Look, I’m sorry for the subterfuge, but I couldn’t think of any other way to have this conversation.’

‘You need not apologise, Geoffrey. I think we both understand each other perfectly well.’

Geoffrey cast around for his next landing site and put the Cessna down with barely a bump, paying extra attention because of his passenger. They got out, Memphis helping himself down unassisted this time. They were