Blue Remembered Earth

He felt the surge as the tunnel’s current seized him, and then he was racing along it, glassy walls speeding by, Gilbert not far ahead. As the tube twisted and turned, the water inside it flowing up and down, he wondered what drove that flow: he couldn’t see any visible fans or pumps, unless they retracted out of the way as the swimmers passed. Perhaps it was peristalsis, a gentle but continuous impulsion, driven by the walls themselves.

He had no sooner formulated that idea than they were, startlingly, outside – crossing between one part of Tiamaat and another, with only the tube’s glass between them and the crush of the surrounding water. They were crossing through a forest of night-lit towers, turreted and flanged and cupolaed, submarine skyscrapers pushing up from black depths, garlanded with myriad coloured lights. The buildings were cross-linked and buttressed by huge windowed arches, many stories high, and the whole city-district, as far as he could see, lay entwined in a bird’s-nest tangle of water-filled tubes. He could, in fact, make out one or two tiny moving forms, far above and far below – swimmers carrying their own illumination, so that they became glowing corpuscles in some godlike arterial system. Elsewhere there were ocean-swimming aquatics, moving outside of the tubes, and all manner of submersible vehicles, ranging from person-sized miniature submarines to servicing craft at least as large as one of the cyberclippers he had seen from the air.

Geoffrey reeled. He knew about Tiamaat; he knew about the United Aquatic Nations and had some idea of what they were getting up to under the waves. But the scale of the thing was startling.

He realised that he’d been operating under a gross misapprehension. Living on dry land, it was easy to think that the aquatics constituted no more than a faltering experiment in undersea living, like an early moonbase.

But this was a kingdom. For a moment, dizzied, he began to wonder if it was his existence that was the failed experiment.

As quickly as it had been disclosed, the view of Tiamaat was snatched away and he was back inside, the tube hairpinning again, ducking and diving with joyous abandon through a series of vertical S-bends until it deposited the two of them in another swimming pool – or rather what he now appreciated to be a kind of interchange between the various tube systems, with its own colour-coded portals. It was a bigger junction, and they were not alone this time. Other aquatics loitered in the pool, not too close to the entrance/exit points with their strong currents. There were even some visitors or newcomers, wearing harnesses like his own. They were gathered into groups, talking and laughing.

Some were fully aqua-formed, like Gilbert, but there were others who still retained basic lubber anatomy, with a normal complement of limbs. Some of these borderline cases appeared happy with prolonged submersion, while others wore lightweight breathing devices of various kinds. From what Geoffrey had gathered, the process of full aqua-transformation wasn’t an overnight thing; there were many way stations along the route, and not everyone opted to proceed with further surgery once they’d received the basic modifications.

Gilbert swam to an orange portal, and then they were rushing down another tube – not as far, this time – until they came out into another junction, this one not much larger than the first. This pool had its share of portals, but there were also colour-coded exits that were not yet open to the water. Gilbert swam to one of these exits and pressed a webbed hand into the panel to its right; the circular door rolled aside, revealing an illuminated, water- filled corridor.

After a short distance they emerged into a pool that was scarcely larger than a private jacuzzi. It occupied a curving, green-walled room with windows set into one side. Geoffrey made to stand up, pushing his head into open air, the mask and goggles unclasping automatically with a soft pop of released suction. Water stampeded off him in a thousand beetle-sized droplets.

Through the windows in one half of the room he saw another aspect of Tiamaat’s abundant underwater sprawl: towers, a fungal growth of geodesic domes, glowing from within with floodlit greenery. Tiamaat went on for kilometres.

A kind of channel or ditch ran away from the jacuzzi, through an arch, into an adjoining room. Gilbert swam ahead, but with her face and upper body mostly out of the water. Geoffrey, now upright, shuffled behind. The harness retracted its flippers, tucking them away like folded angel’s wings. He’d only been aquatic for a few minutes, and already walking felt like an absurd evolutionary dead end.

The water-filled ditch led them into Truro’s presence.

‘So very glad you accepted my invitation,’ he said grandly. ‘You were, of course, never under any binding obligation to deal with us again.’

‘That’s not how it felt,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Well, let’s look on the positive side. You’re here now, and we have every likelihood of finding common ground.’

Truro had changed. He wasn’t the man in the sea-green suit any more.

Now he floated in a green-tiled, kidney-shaped pool, bubbling with scented froth. His head merged seamlessly with the smooth ovoid of his torso, all details of his underlying skeleton and musculature rendered cryptic beneath layers of insulating blubber. His grey skin, which was completely hairless, shone with waxy pearlescence. He had no external ears and scarcely any nose. His nostrils were two muscle-activated slits that opened and closed with each breath. He had large, almost round eyes, very dark and penetrating. They blinked a complicated double-membrane blink.

‘Why didn’t your figment look like this?’

‘It would only have complicated the issue further, I think. Besides, when I manifest I tend to revert to my former anatomy. Call it a nostalgic attachment.’ Truro touched a web-fingered hand against the area where, prior to his surgery, his nose must have been. ‘Not that I have any regrets. But sometimes, you know, for old time’s sake.’

Consoles and data displays with chunky waterproof keypads bobbed in the water like brightly coloured bath toys. Geoffrey couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen actual, solid data-visualisation and interface systems outside of a museum. Books were more common than screens and keypads.

Truro barged the yoke of a keypad aside, clearing room in front of him. ‘Come in. Join me,’ he said, ushering them forward. ‘We’ve much to talk about.’

‘May I leave you now, sir?’ asked Gilbert.

‘Of course. Thank you, Mira.’

When they were alone, Geoffrey divested himself of the mobility harness, leaving it propped against a wall while he returned to the pool. He eased into the turbulent, fizzing waters, sitting cross-legged opposite the