Blue Remembered Earth

Most of that original shanty town was gone now, swallowed into the Stickney developments. But there had been a few outposts scattered elsewhere on Phobos, including the one where Eunice had spent most of her time.

When something began to push over the horizon, Sunday assumed they were coming up on the camp. But the object reared too high for that.

It was as dark, if not darker, than the rest of Phobos, and it rose a good ninety metres from the surface. They crept up to the shattered terrain around its base, where it had daggered into Phobos countless ages ago. A couple of other suits were wandering around the scene, shining spotlights onto the object’s upper reaches. Where the lights fell, they picked out intricate carved detail: flanges, pipes, repetitive iterations of the same elements, like spinal vertebrae or ribs. Bony outgrowths fused with ancient fossilised machine parts. Rocket exhausts like eye sockets, docking ports like gaping jawbones or reproductive organs. Hull armour spidered with fontanelle cracks.

‘They called it the Monolith,’ Eunice said. ‘Found it in photographs of Phobos, way back at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Couldn’t resolve the thing itself, just its shadow, but the shadow told them it had to be big. Needless to say, it was a prime target for close-up examination by the first landers.’

Sunday’s eyes tracked the mesmerising, morbid detail. The object was lumpy and asymmetrical, but it was clearly a vehicle of some kind, nose-down in the crust. ‘Somehow, I think I’d have heard about a crashed alien spaceship by now.’

‘Some of the early explorers got bored, cooped up here with a lot of time on their hands and not enough to do. One of them was a woman called Chakrabarty. Indian, I think. Or maybe Pakistani. One day, for kicks, she draws up a plan, very detailed and meticulous, and starts carving stuff into the Monolith. Her team had cutting gear, explosives, everything she needed. She started at the bottom and worked her way up. It was pretty easy. You can climb all the way up without any kind of safety line, and even if you fall off the top, it’s no worse than jumping off a garden wall back on Earth.’

‘This was all done by . . . this one woman?’

‘Chakrabarty started it. Then she went down to Mars and a while later word came back that she’d been killed – suit malfunction, I think. Her plans were still on file at the camp, though. After that, it became a sort of tradition. Anyone who was stuck here for more than a few days . . . they’d suit-up and head out to the Monolith to add a contribution to Chakra’s Folly. It was a way of honouring her memory – and of saying, We were here, we did this. Millions of years from now, the Monolith’s still going to be here. Until Phobos falls into Mars.’

‘Is it finished now?’

‘They reached the top decades ago. They’ve even sprayed the whole thing with plastic, to stop vandals and micrometeorite damage.’

Sunday made out fist-sized craters where tiny particles had hit Chakra’s Folly after it had been carved and decorated, chipping away at the details. She presumed the damage had been done before the protective layer was added.

‘Did you add to it?’ she asked.

‘I suppose I must have.’

‘You suppose?’

‘I don’t remember whether I did or not. Is that good enough for you?’

Sunday tempered her frustration. She couldn’t blame the construct for not knowing things that it had never been told. ‘There must be a record of who did what somewhere.’

‘Don’t count on it. And maybe I didn’t add anything. At this point, there may be no way of ever telling.’ Eunice stooped to pick something up from the ground, some chunk of material lying loose on the surface – blasted from the Monolith, perhaps – but her fingers slipped right through it. ‘You didn’t need to come all this way to examine the Folly,’ she said, standing up with a grunt of irritation. ‘You could have called up a figment of it and examined it in detail back on the Moon. Anyway, I don’t think this can be the reason I wanted you here. Everything about the Folly is public. I couldn’t have hidden a message in it if I’d tried.’

‘Something worked into the pattern, perhaps?’

‘Difficult. They didn’t like it when you deviated from Chakrabarty’s plan. It was supposed to bring bad luck.’

‘Like you ever believed in that.’

‘I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to court trouble.’ Eunice craned her head back, holding one hand above her visor. ‘It’s magnificent, though. No, really: isn’t it?’

‘It’s a shame Chakra never got to see it finished.’

‘We ’re seeing it for her,’ Eunice said.

Sunday wanted to dispute that – there was no ‘we’ as far as she was concerned, just her own pair of eyes, her own mind and her own feelings. As absurd as it made her feel, though, she did not have the heart to contradict Eunice. Let her believe she was capable of honouring a dead woman’s memories, if that was what she wished.

It did not take long to reach the Indian encampment, once they’d set off from the Monolith. It surmounted the horizon like an approaching galleon, masts and sails the towers and reflector arrays of a long-abandoned communications node. Smaller buildings surrounded the main huddle. It was a ghost town, long derelict.

‘Bad blood between the Indians and the Chinese back in the mid-fifties,’ Eunice explained, Sunday reminding herself that this was the mid-twenty-fifties she was talking about, not the twenty-one- fifties. ‘Never blew up into anything involving tanks and bombs, but there was sufficient animosity for the Indians not to want to have anything to do with the Chinese encampment. So they came all the way to Phobos and built this place, practically walking distance from the original shanty town.’

‘Couldn’t they have done us all a favour and left the Old-World politics behind?’

‘We were young, the world was young.’