Blue Remembered Earth

Sunday couldn’t tell if anyone had been near the outpost lately. There were no footprints on Phobos, and the indentations left by the surface suits were indistinguishable from the pitting and gouging already worked into the terrain over billions of years. Still, why would anyone bother giving the settlement more than a glance?

Maybe in a hundred years historians would look back on this neglected site and find its dereliction unforgivable. But here, now, it was just more human litter, roadside junk left behind when people had moved elsewhere.

Off to one side, Eunice walked by a curious, rack-like structure that had been planted into the Phobos topsoil. It had a makeshift, lopsided look, as if knocked together in a burst of misguided enthusiasm after a lengthy drinking session. Eunice brushed her hand against the wheels that had been fixed into the frame, mounted on vertical spindles so that their rims could be easily turned. ‘Tibetans and Mongolians,’ she explained. ‘They were on the original Indian mission, or ended up here later – I can’t remember which.’

‘What the hell are those things?’

‘Prayer wheels. What the Tibetans used to call ’khor. Ceramic gyroscopes and reaction-control discs from spacecraft stabilisation systems. The things painted on the rim are Buddhist incantations, mainly – the eight auspicious symbols of the Ashtamangala. Supposed to notch up good karma by turning the wheels whenever you were coming and going from the camp.’

Eunice’s ghost-hand brushed through the prayer wheels without turning them.

‘Don’t tell me you believed that stuff.’

‘You don’t have to believe something to keep on good terms with your neighbours. Their cooking was great, and it cost me nothing to turn their silly old wheels. I even suggested we should rig them up to dynamos, make some extra energy.’ She made a tooth-sucking noise. ‘Didn’t go down well.’

‘So why touch the wheels now?’

‘Old habits.’ Eunice hesitated. ‘Respect for the people who once lived here. There was one . . . there was this young Tibetan. I think space had already got to him by the time he reached Phobos. Cooped up here, the poor kid went completely off the rails. Just sat there rocking and chanting, mostly. Then he latched on to me. My fault, really. Had this helmet . . . I’d painted a lion’s face around the visor. We’d all customised our suits, so it was no big deal to me.’

‘And?’

‘This poor young man . . . there’s this figure, they call her the Dakini. Khandroma in Tibetan – “she who traverses the sky”. One of her manifestations is Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one. She’s on some of those wheels. When I showed up with my helmet . . . let’s just say he had a few adjustment issues.’

Sunday had no recollection of ever having heard this story before. Yet it was out there, somewhere in Eunice’s documented life – either in the public record, or captured in some private recording snared by the family’s posterity engines. The construct could not have known it otherwise.

How marvellous a life was, how effortlessly complex, how full of astonishments.

‘You pushed him over the edge,’ Sunday said. ‘Into madness.’

‘Wasn’t my fault that he was already primed to believe that claptrap,’ Eunice said. ‘This was before the Mandatory Enhancements, remember. But he was a sweet little boy. I tried to downplay my karmic stature as best as I could, but I didn’t want to undermine his entire belief system.’

‘How considerate of you.’

‘I thought so.’

At the base of the comms tower was a low rock-clad dome – inflated and pressurised and then layered over with a scree of insulating rubble, fused to a lustrous ebony. Radiating out from this central dome were three semicircular-profiled tunnels connected to three hummocks, each of which had an igloo-like airlock and a thick- paned cartwheel-shaped window set into its apex.

The entire Indian complex was smaller than one wing of the household, but this was where Eunice had spent months of her existence, holed up with a dozen or so fellow travellers while they waited for the storm to blow over.

‘How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’

‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.’

‘I know about books,’ Sunday said. ‘It’s one of your stupid books that’s brought me here.’’

‘Well, we read a lot. And watched movies and listened to music and indulged in this strange behaviour called “making our own entertainment”.’ She paused. ‘We weren’t just sitting around watching the days go by. We had work to do, keeping the base operational, drilling into Phobos, even, very occasionally meeting the Chinese and other settlers in Stickney. Just because the governments made us build separate bases didn’t mean we couldn’t hang out.’

Sunday had walked the suit all the way around the main dome and its three satellites.

‘I can’t see a way in. There are airlocks on each of the smaller domes, but they’re all sealed over. Even if they weren’t sealed, I’m not sure this suit would fit through the doorway.’

‘The camp was abandoned by the end of the century, which is when I’d have had to come back here. But that sprayed-on sealant must be newer than that.’

‘Did it occur to you sixty years ago, while you were busy thinking of ingenious ways to waste my time, that I might not even be able to get in there now?’

Eunice bent to peer through the viewport in the nearest airlock, wiping the glass with her ghost-hands. ‘You’re making an unwarranted assumption. There may be no need for physical entry into the domes. There’s aug here, self-evidently. If it reaches into the domes, then we can ching inside.’

‘I already tried that. There’s no way into the domes, active or passive.’

Eunice stalked around to the next airlock. ‘Let me make absolutely sure of that.’