Blue Remembered Earth

‘Geoffrey,’ Hector said, ‘please try to see things from our point of view. You must have said or done something that has put her on this course. What we would like to know is exactly what that was.’ He smiled, but there was no warmth in it, only a cryogenic chill. ‘So. Shall we discuss this like adults, or are you going to continue insulting our intelligence?’

‘I couldn’t if I tried,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Well, it’s good to establish a basis for further negotiations,’ Lucas said. He was still two metres from Geoffrey, standing further away than his brother, but in a single swift motion he brought up the shaft of the parasol and whipped the end of it hard against the stock of the pistol, the impact knocking the weapon out of Geoffrey’s hand, sending it careening into the dirt. Geoffrey jerked back his hand in shock, half-expecting to find his fingers broken by the jolt.

Hector knelt down and picked up the fallen pistol. ‘My brother has very fast reflexes,’ he explained. ‘Squid axon nerve shunts – it’s the latest thing. Long-fibre muscle augmentation, too – he could wrestle a chimp and win. It’s all really rather unsporting of him.’

‘My surgeon offers very favourable terms to family,’ Lucas said, adjusting his shirtsleeve. ‘I should put you in touch, Hector. No point being at such a miserable disadvantage in life.’

Hector was still holding the pistol. He looked at it distastefully, worked the mode selector and fired one of the tranquilliser darts into the ground. Then he passed it back to Geoffrey as if it was a toy he’d been deemed big enough to play with.

‘Best put it away, I think,’ Hector said confidingly.

Geoffrey was still shaking. He had witnessed very few violent acts in his life, much less been on the wrong end of one.

‘Have a think,’ Lucas said, ‘about what you said to Sunday, and how much this work really means to you. You’ll schedule some time for that, won’t you?’

‘Of course he will,’ Hector said. ‘Geoffrey’s close to his sister, and we can’t fault him for that. But ultimately he knows what’s best for him, and for his elephants. Don’t you, old fellow?’

‘Pass on our best regards to the herd,’ Lucas said.

The two cousins turned away and walked back towards their airpod. Geoffrey stood at the door, pistol quivering in his hand, heart racing, lungs heaving with each breath. He could still feel the sweat on his back as the airpod lifted into the sky, tumbled like a thrown egg and aimed itself at the household.

PART TWO

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sunday’s state of mind as she returned to consciousness was one of supreme ease and contentment. With all worldly concerns on hold, she nonetheless retained sufficient detachment to appreciate that the cause of this euphoria was rooted in profound biochemical and transcranial intervention. That understanding, however, in no way undermined the bliss. Something joyous lay in that very realisation, too, for the machines would not be waking her unless the journey had been successful; she would not be waking unless the swiftship had crossed space to its destination. Mars.

She had reached Mars – or was at least close enough that it made no difference now. And that in itself was astonishing. It bordered on the miraculous that she had gone to sleep around the Moon and was now . . . here, around that baleful pinprick of golden light she had sometimes seen in the sky. In a flash she understood herself for what she was: an exceedingly smart monkey. She was a smart monkey who had travelled across interplanetary space in a thing made by other smart monkeys. And the fact of this was enough to make her laugh out loud, as if she had suddenly, belatedly, grasped the punchline to a very involved joke.

I’m the punchline, Sunday thought. I’m the period, the full stop at the end of an immensely long and convoluted argument, a rambling chain of happenstance and contingency stretching from the discovery of fire down in the Olduvai Gorge, through the inventions of language and paper and the wheel, through all the unremembered centuries to . . . this. This condition. Being brought out of hibernation aboard a spaceship orbiting another planet. Being alive in the twenty-second century. Being a thing with a central nervous system complex enough to understand the concept of being a thing with a central nervous system. Simply being.

Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to be a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the whole damned universe.

She had threaded the needle of creation and stabbed the cosmic bullseye.

That, she thought, was some fucking achievement.

‘Good morning, Sunday Akinya,’ said an automated but soothing voice. ‘I am pleased to inform you that your hibernation phase has proceeded without incident. You have reached Mars administrative airspace and are now under observation in the Maersk Intersolar postrevival facility in Phobos. For your comfort and convenience, voluntary muscular control is currently suspended while final medical checkout is completed. This is a necessary step in the revival process and is no cause for distress. Please also be aware that you may experience altered emotional states while your neurochemistry is stabilising. Some of these states may manifest as religious or spiritual insights, including feelings of exaggerated significance. Again, this is no cause for distress.’

She couldn’t move any part of her body, including her eyes, but the aug was active and able to supply a fully coherent visual stream in whatever direction she intended to look. She was resting on a couch, held there by a pull heavier than Lunar gravity but not nearly as strong as Earth’s.

The couch was also a medical scanner; she knew this because a hoop was gliding up and down its length, and there was a more elaborate hemispherical device enclosing her head. The couch lay in a narrow room, furnished in white, with a curving glass wall along one side, merging seamlessly into a transparent ceiling. Beyond the glass, a meadow, a pond, some dense-leaved, deciduous-looking trees. Cloudless blue skies. Birdsong and the sound of wind in branches pushed through the glass. None of it looked like Africa but she could not deny that it was therapeutic, in a calculated, manipulative sort of way.

In fact, it was hard to think of anything that wouldn’t have been therapeutic, given the deep and intrusive stimulation currently being worked on her brain. She decided to lie there and accept it. With nothing better to do, she skimmed systemwide newsfeeds, mildly disappointed that no events of epochal consequence had happened while she was under. No famous person had died; no one had gone to war with anyone else; there had been a