celebrate. Get a drink, now. Before the moment passes.’
‘So there’s this amazing, precious experience, this once-in-a-lifetime thing, and before it has a chance to form deep neural connections you want to batter it into submission with toxic chemicals?’
Jitendra gave the matter due consideration. ‘Basically, if you must put it that way, that’s exactly what I had in mind.’
‘Fine,’ Sunday said, deciding that it was much easier to go along with him than otherwise. ‘I’m up for that as well.’
But first there was some business to attend to. The Pans had given Sunday a ching address to call upon her arrival. As tempting as it was to put the matter off, it would only be delaying the inevitable. She found a quiet corner of the arrivals lounge and voked the request.
The bind went through with a high level of quangle, and she found herself in a room which – judging by the high aspect of the sun – lay some distance west of Crommelin. Under her feet was glass, and under the glass was empty air, plunging all the way down to the scoured red ground, so far below that she might as well have still been in orbit. To either side, ancient weathered cliffs receded into mist-hazed obscurity. A handful of sleek discus-shaped buildings were cut into the cliffsides, or buttressed out from them.
‘Welcome, Sunday,’ she heard. ‘How was your journey?’
‘No complaints, apart from the friendly welcome at Crommelin.’
‘You’ll have to excuse our customs and immigration staff: they preach courtesy and respect while demonstrating exactly the opposite.’
Sunday took a nervous step sideways, distrusting the flooring. Even in ching it was hard to suppress vertigo, or the instinctive urge for self-preservation. This was especially the case when the proxy was a living, breathing human organism.
The warmblood belonged to a woman of about her age and build, although the skin was paler than her own. She wore a business outfit: colour-coordinated skirt and blouse, dark green offset with silver piping, black stockings and sensible low-heeled black shoes.
Sunday certainly wouldn’t have trusted heels on that floor.
She flexed the warmblood’s fingers. She’d only chinged this way a couple of times before but had already cultivated an intense loathing for the arrangement.
‘Where am I?’
‘The Pan outpost at Valles Marineris,’ the voice said. ‘We’re on the very edge of the deepest canyon, the greatest rift valley anywhere in the solar system. I thought you would appreciate seeing the view through human eyes. My transform-surgeon, Magdalena, consented to be driven.’
‘It’s very thoughtful.’
‘Entirely appropriate, too. You’re both sculptresses. You work with stone and clay, Magdalena with the living flesh. Now you are as one.’
Sunday turned from the view of Valles Marineris. Her speaker faced her from a kind of bed, resting on an oblong of white self-sterilising frond-carpet. The bed was as heavy and complicated-looking as some ghastly iron lung or CAT scanner from the medical Dark Ages. It was plumbed into the wall behind it, and it hummed and gurgled like an espresso machine. It was actually more like a bath than a bed, for the occupant was mostly immersed in fluid, contained by high-walled, slosh-proof sides. The treacle-thick fluid had a bluish chemical tint.
‘Come closer,’ the patient said. ‘I won’t bite. Biting is one of the very many things not presently an option for me.’
Two green-uniformed female nurses stood by the bedside: one with a surgical trolley, the other with a kind of Pan-compliant clipboard and stylus computer. Without a word they took their leave, striding like catwalk models, one of them pushing the trolley before her. A door in the rear of the room snicked open and shut like an iris.
Sunday came closer. She couldn’t smell anything through the ching bind, but wondered if the fluid – or indeed the patient – had a strong odour.
‘I am Holroyd,’ the voice said. ‘You mustn’t be alarmed. I’m actually in no great distress, and despite appearances I do not believe success to be completely ruled out, at least not yet.’
There was a man in the fluid, but only just. Her first thought had been: cactus. His form, what she could see of it, was covered with jagged dark growths, erupting from every inch of his skin. They were glossy and leaflike, sharp-edged, studded with barbs and thorns. His upper torso, his submerged limbs, his head and face . . . there was no part of him where the growths were not rampant. His eyes peered through tunnels of pruned-back growth. She wondered how much of the world he could see.
‘What happened to you, Mister Holroyd?’
He did not sound in the least bit upset by the directness of her question. ‘Hubris, I suppose. Or impatience. Or some combination of the two.’ She couldn’t see a mouth making the words. ‘I was a genetic volunteer. A Pan, of course – an old friend of Truro’s, too, though I doubt we’ll ever meet again. Our paths have taken us in very different directions. His to the oceans. Mine to . . . well, this.’
‘Did Magdalena do this to you?’
‘Magdalena was part of the team that, with my consent, proceeded with the genetic intervention . . . now she is part of the team attempting to undo the effects of that intervention.’ A hand, spined and spiked to the point of uselessness, like a cross between a mace and a gauntlet, emerged from the cloying fluid. There were wounds in the armour, pale healed-over scars and white-seeping gashes. ‘The intention was to change my body, to armour it to the point where, with only the minimum of additional life-support measures, I could survive outside without a surface suit. Thermal insulation, pressure and moisture containment . . . they were within our grasp. I’d still need an air supply, of course, and there’d always be parts of Mars that would be unendurable, even for me, but it was worth attempting. A gesture of intent, if nothing else. A sign that we are here for good. That we’ll do whatever we can to make this work. Even change our basic humanity.’
‘How did it go wrong?’
‘There are no catastrophes in science, Sunday, only lessons. I’d far rather live in a universe capable of
