Blue Remembered Earth

proposals.’

‘And your response?’

‘I suspect I’m not really in a position to say no, after what happened on the Moon.’

‘You feel indebted.’

‘Made to feel indebted. Amounts to the same thing, I guess.’

‘I was informed about Chama and Gleb’s endeavours with the phyletic dwarves. It’s a small aspect of our work, but an important one nonetheless. They deserve success. I’m sure you could play a vital role in making that happen.’

‘And risk ruining my entire career.’

‘Or creating a shiny new one. Why be a prisoner of your past?’

He took that as an invitation to steer the conversation in the vague direction of Eunice. ‘I was told you knew Lin Wei.’

‘We were close. She spoke often of your grandmother.’

‘You never met Eunice yourself, though?’

‘Lin painted a vivid picture. Warts and all, as the expression goes. Did you know your grandmother well?’

‘Not particularly. She was already in the Winter Palace by the time I was born, and she didn’t ching down to Africa very often. To be honest, I don’t think she was interested in us any more.’

‘But she’s of interest to you, now.’

Obviously Arethusa knew about the glove, the burial in Pythagoras, the Martian angle. ‘I’ve become tangled up in something I’d rather not have had anything to do with. But my sister’s been digging into Eunice’s past a lot longer than I have. There’s this project of hers—’

‘The construct, yes. I know of it. A valiant effort.’

‘I’m surprised you approve. It’s a thinking machine, for a start. And Sunday told me that my grandmother broke her side of the bargain with Lin Wei.’

‘Water under the bridge. Lin Wei bore her no ill will, in later years. I see no reason why Sunday’s project shouldn’t be celebrated.’

‘There are gaps in the construct’s knowledge. It doesn’t even remember Lin Wei.’

‘No?’

His eyes had acclimatised to the darkness by small degrees. Arethusa was an elongated form, hovering in the water at an angle, her head closest to him, her tail further away and lower. He was fairly sure that she was a whale. The size and shape, the flippers on either side of her streamlined body, the subsonic communication. The only remaining question was whether she’d been born a whale, or had attained this form by post-natal genetic and surgical intervention.

He knew of nothing like her, anywhere in creation. A whale with a human-level intellect, or a person turned cetacean. He wasn’t sure which would be the more miraculous.

‘You know what really happened on Mercury?’

‘I know that there was deceit,’ Arethusa replied, with evident caution. ‘More recently I’ve found myself wondering how far down that deceit extended.’ She paused, and with a languid wave of her flippers began to gyre her massive form.

Across metres of water Geoffrey felt the awesome backwash. ‘When was the last time you two spoke?’

‘Just before she died. I chinged up to the Winter Palace, spoke to her in that mad jungle of hers. I may have been one of the last people to speak to her.’

‘I’m surprised you had much to talk about.’

‘I felt obliged. Your grandmother played a pivotal role in Ocular.’

He recalled what Sunday had told him. ‘That was some kind of telescope, right?’

‘A machine for mapping exoplanets,’ Arethusa corrected in scholarly tones. ‘The Oort Cloud Ultra-Large Array: a swarm of eyes, cast into the outer darkness, linked together laser-interferometrically so they could function as a single vast lens wider than the solar system. Even half-finished, it was an astounding technical feat. But it broke Lin Wei’s heart, to see what became of her beautiful child.’

‘I know a little about Eunice’s connection.’

‘Your family was brought in to help with the heavy lifting. In return, we gave them the Mercury leasehold. Akinya Space built their polar facility, saying it was for physics research.’

‘Which was a lie.’ Geoffrey presumed there was now no harm in recounting what he had been told. ‘They were doing illegal work on artilects.’

‘That was what we thought at the time. But Eunice was much too clever to allow herself to be nearly caught out that way. If she really, badly wanted to conduct illicit artilect studies, she’d have found somewhere else to do it, somewhere just as far away from the Cognition Police as Mercury. There’s a whole system out there, after all. No shortage of dark corners.’

‘What are you saying – that there was something else going on, apart from the artilects?’

‘The facility drew power from the Ocular launch grid. It was doing something.’

‘Eunice put up a smokescreen to conceal a smokescreen?’

‘You’ve heard of hiding in plain sight? Even Lin Wei didn’t guess at the time. She was so fixated on the idea that