Blue Remembered Earth

‘I don’t know what she had in mind for us. All I know is it can’t be personal. She didn’t know it was going to be my brother who looked into that bank vault.’

‘She knew it would be one of you, though. Definitely an Akinya. Whatever she’s doing, she seems very determined to keep it in the family, doesn’t she?’

Sunday flicked her wrist through part of the sculpture, cleaving matter the way prophets parted waters. The sculpture didn’t really look like a man, she had to admit. More like a lung, or a tree dipped in molten lead. But the prickliness of it, the densely packed spines and thorns, was suggestive of her host.

‘If she’s testing us, I suppose there has to be a reason.’

‘Gold at the end of the rainbow? Or just a dead woman playing malicious games with her descendants?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever Eunice planned, though, it was put in place before her last mission. She may have gone a little mad up in the Winter Palace – who wouldn’t? – but she was sane when she took Winter Queen out for its last expedition.’

‘Plenty of imagery and footage from then, in that case.’

Sunday nodded, cajoling an arc of clay out on its own lazy Martian parabola, freezing into the crooked curve of a gull’s wing. She didn’t get to work with active clay very often; it was too expensive for her usual commissions and there were strict conditions on the importing of nanotechnology into the Zone. ‘That’s what unsettles me. Ever since she came back, the whole time she’s been up there, orbiting the Moon . . . she’s known about this . . . plot of hers.’

‘You speak as if she’s still alive.’

‘I don’t mean to, but when you dig into a person’s past, and you have—’

‘I know about the construct, Sunday. A data entity like that, distributed cloudware – we could hardly fail to detect its presence in the Martian aug.’

She hid her shock. If the Pans were going to rip into her secrets, she was damned if she’d give them the pleasure of looking surprised about it.

‘Of course. It’s just that sometimes, if only for a moment, I forget that it isn’t my grandmother.’

‘An understandable error. But not, I’d imagine, one that you make all that often.’

‘I try not to.’

After a moment, Holroyd said, ‘Your grandmother was born in a different world, Sunday. A different century. She lived through difficult times; saw the best and the worst of what we are capable of. So did billions of others . . . But she was in a privileged, possibly even unique position. She may not have experienced wars first hand, but she would have met many people who were touched by them, and touched badly. There were no Mandatory Enhancements in Eunice’s day, either. She would have understood that there are times, many times, when we can’t always be trusted to do the right and proper thing. Even with the Mechanism guiding our actions, even when the neuropractors have knifed villainy out our heads.’

‘I’m not sure where this is leading, sir.’

‘All I mean to say is . . . no one would have been better placed than your grandmother to see the truth about humanity. And given everything that happened to her, no one would have been better placed to stumble on dangerous knowledge.’

Sunday paused in her sculpting. ‘Dangerous knowledge?’

‘I speculate, that’s all. But if your grandmother did learn something, by whatever means . . . something that she didn’t think the rest of us were ready for . . . do you really think she’d be so selfish as to take that knowledge to her grave, for all of time?’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Geoffrey went deep. At length the transit flume opened out into a submarine chamber the size of which he could only guess at. It was large, definitely: probably big enough to have swallowed both wings of the household and a fair part of the grounds as well. It was spherical and the walls were black, but the equator of this sphere was dotted with entry and exit flumes at regular intervals, and these luminous red and green circles offered some sense of scale and perspective.

Opposite him – the water was as clear as optical glass – hovered a glowing image, projected onto the curvature of the sphere’s far side. For a moment he took it to be Earth, seen from space: it didn’t look all that different from the view he’d had coming down the Libreville elevator. A moment’s further scrutiny told him that this was not Earth, nor any world in the solar system. It had surface oceans and continents and weather systems, but they were fundamentally unrecognisable.

Like an eclipsing moon, a partner world to this alien planet, a dark form interposed itself between Geoffrey and the image.

Through the harness’s headset he heard, ‘You can leave him with me, thank you. I’ll show him out when we’re done.’

And at the same time as he heard those words, spoken in almost accentless Swahili by a woman’s voice, he felt a subsonic component, deep as an elephant’s musth rumble, conveyed through the water, into his belly, into his nervous system.

As if the Earth itself had made an utterance, shaping words through the tectonic grind of crustal plates.

He glanced around. His guides had departed.

‘Welcome, Geoffrey Akinya,’ the female voice said, with the same accompanying rumble. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me. Your meeting with Truro – it was suitably productive?’

Geoffrey was staring into the water, still trying to map the shape and extent of the dark form and hoping it was not as far away – and therefore as large – as his eyes were insisting.

‘Arethusa?’ he asked.

‘My apologies. One tends to assume that my visitors need no introduction, but that’s an inexcusable rudeness on my part. Yes, I am Arethusa.’

Geoffrey decided that it might be prudent to answer her question. ‘Truro had some . . . interesting