Blue Remembered Earth

instrument panel, merely a couple of additional lounge seats for those who wanted to take advantage of the forward view.

Behind them, the steps folded back into the plane and the door sealed itself. The engines revved up again and Geoffrey felt the aircraft turning on the airstrip.

‘And you’ve no idea what this is about?’

‘You, ultimately,’ Geoffrey said.

Soon they were bouncing along the airstrip, and then aloft, climbing shallowly, skimming the treetops by no more than hand-widths.

‘Well, this is grand fun,’ Eunice said, striding imperiously from window to window. ‘I’m still here, too. Whoever’s sent this thing is allowing you full access to the aug. That’s reassuring, isn’t it? You’re not being kidnapped.’

‘I never thought I was.’

Eunice soon tired of the view and sat herself down in one of the seats. ‘So who sent this aircraft?’

‘The Panspermian Initiative. You know about them – you used to hang out with Lin Wei.’

‘I don’t know anyone called Lin Wei.’

‘You should do, but there’s a part of your life missing. Sunday established the connection with Lin, but she doesn’t have enough information to fill in the rest of the void.’

‘Have to take your word for it, then. So we’re going to see this Lin Wei?’

‘I doubt it, seeing as she’s dead. My point of contact is someone called Truro.’

‘Whom you trust enough to get aboard this plane?’

‘I’m in his debt. Actually, we’re all in his debt, but I’m the one who seems to be expected to do the paying back.’

‘The Panspermian Initiative,’ Eunice said languidly, drawing out the words as if she was reading them, signwritten across the sky. She was tapping the aug, glugging gallons of data. ‘You need to watch people like that. All that species-imperative stuff? Self-aggrandising horse-piss.’

‘They think we might be in a critical period, a window of opportunity. If we don’t seize the moment now, we might never get beyond the system, into the wider galaxy.’

‘Which would automatically be a good thing, would it?’

‘You weren’t exactly short of grand visions in your day.’

She scoffed. ‘I didn’t have any noble intentions for the rest of humanity. I was in it for myself, and anyone else smart enough to go along with me.’

‘No,’ Geoffrey said, shaking his head. ‘You were a pioneer and a risk-taker, sure, but you also had ambitions. You didn’t go to Mars just to stamp your footprint into that soil and come home again. You wanted to live there, to prove it was something we could do.’

‘Me and a thousand others.’

‘Doesn’t matter – you got there as soon as you could. But your problem was that you couldn’t stand still. You had to keep moving, pushing outwards. You liked the idea of living on one planet more than the actuality. That’s why you left your husband behind.’

‘Jonathan and I grew apart. What has that got to do with anything?’

‘If you were alive now, with enough influence to be part of this, you’d be one of the main drivers.’

‘Spoken with the assurance of youth. Well, I’m sorry to prick your bubble, but did you ever wonder why I came back to the Winter Palace? Everything Eunice Akinya used to stand for started to bore me senseless.’

‘So you decided to become a witchy old recluse, counting her money and tut-tutting at her offspring.’

‘Since you put it so charmingly, yes.’

They had been travelling for two hours straight before they left Africa behind, crossing the buttressed white margin of the self-renewing sea wall and into the airspace above the Indian Ocean.

There were boats at sea, fishing and leisure craft, even some of the elegant multi-masted cyberclippers: benign Marie Celestes, holds abrim with bulky, non-perishable cargoes. To the south, the edge of one of the floating platelets, an artificial island capped by its own fevered little weather system. Another island, smaller this time, bore a dense thicket of skyscrapers, as if Singapore had become unmoored and drifted halfway around the world. As the DC-3 approached, the city revealed itself to be a congregation of stack farms, rising two kilometres from sea level. The stacks were mossy with vegetation, green-carpeted up their sheer flanks. Robot dirigibles harvested the tops of the stacks, crowding around them like fattened bumblebees as they waited their turn. Aside from a skeleton staff of technicians, no one would live on that island.

The DC-3 kept flying. Geoffrey checked his watch. It was two in the afternoon; they’d been in the air for four hours. He hadn’t expected the journey to take this long.

Just when he was starting to worry that the plane was going to carry him all the way to India – however many hours that might entail – something loomed from the ocean haze. Whatever it was rose straight from the sea, a solid-looking mass with a rounded, symmetrical summit. It was a structure, a very large one, with the open maw of a snorkel facing him. The DC-3 was headed straight for it.

Geoffrey knew better than to be alarmed; if the Pans were going to kill him, there were simpler ways of going about it than a plane crash. The engine note changed, the floor tilting as the aircraft lost altitude.

‘Do you know what that is?’

‘An aqualogy transit duct,’ Eunice said. ‘They’re built up from the seabed, raised on stilts of artificial coral, grown and replenished like the self-renewing sea walls.’