Blue Remembered Earth

  ‘It wouldn’t begin to balance our misdeeds,’ Chama said. Then a softness entered his voice. ‘But it would be something.’

  The old place, Sunday was relieved to see, wasn’t as busy as she had feared. ‘Any chance of a table in the Japanese module?’ she asked as they stooped into the dingy, angular, off-white interior of the International Space Station.

  ‘Follow me,’ said a blue-boiler-suited staffer, shoulders embroidered with the patches of various barely remembered space agencies.

  It had been Sunday’s idea for them all to meet up again, Chama and Gleb included, when they were done with their day’s work. The zookeepers could be overwhelming until you built up sufficient exposure tolerance. Sunday had passed that point years ago: the wilder excesses of their starry-eyed idealism now ghosted through her like a flux of neutrinos.

  Besides, it was about time she broke something else to Geoffrey: the Akinyas were already embroiled.

  ‘So,’ she said, when they were on the first round of drinks, ‘what did you think of Chama and Gleb?’

  ‘They’ve achieved a lot,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I don’t necessarily approve of all of it, but I can’t deny the trouble they’ve gone to, or the risks they’ve taken.’

  ‘But you’re still uneasy about the whole Pan thing,’ Jitendra said, cradling a huge stein of beer.

  ‘I’m not big on cults or cultists, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Look,’ Sunday said, ‘there’s something that might put things in a different light. Like it or not, we’re already involved.’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘Us. The family. I’m talking ancient history now, but it’s the truth. Have you heard of a woman called Lin Wei?’

  Geoffrey made no visible effort to search his memory. ‘Can’t say I have.’

  ‘She’s the Prime Pan, the woman who started the whole movement way back when. Lot of radical thinkers around then. Extropians. Transhumanists. Long-lifers. The Clock of the Long Now. The Mars Society. A dozen other space-advocacy types, with – on the face of it – not a lot to agree on. Lin Wei still got them all to sit down and agree on common ground. Some of them said no thanks and went their own way. But Lin found points of agreement with others, shared objectives. She was very charismatic. Out of that came the Panspermian Initiative, and the basis for the UAN.’

  Geoffrey smiled nicely. ‘And your point is?’

  ‘Lin Wei and Eunice were best friends. That’s my point.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘Eunice was never a Pan, not on any formal level, but the connection was there right through her career. The Pans were heavy backers in something called Ocular.’ She took a sip of her wine. ‘You heard of it?’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Ocular was the first step towards exoplanet colonisation. A telescope big enough to image surface features on an Earthlike planet beyond our solar system. Well, they built it – nearly. The project fell to pieces halfway through, and that was the start of the big falling out between Lin and Eunice.’

  Geoffrey’s interest appeared to be perking up. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Hard to say, other than that it had something to do with Mercury. That was where they were assembling the parts for the telescope and launching them into space. We were helping with the shipment of materials and know-how. Not a free lunch, though: Eunice and Lin might have been pals, but this was business. But the Pans weren’t paying us directly. In return for our services, the Akinyas got to piggyback their own start-up venture on Mercury.’

  ‘What kind of venture?’

  ‘That’s where it gets murky. I’m in the family and even I can’t get to the bottom of what went wrong.’ Sunday couldn’t help but lower her voice: it was a pointless but unavoidable response. ‘We built a facility there, to tap into the same solar-power grid the Pans were using for their Ocular assembly and launch plant. What we did in that facility . . . well, that’s not easy to say. Cover story was physics research, which makes a sort of sense: we were involved in propulsion system design, and you’d need a lot of energy to do anything worthwhile in that area. But it appears that was just a smokescreen.’

  ‘Wish my family was half as interesting,’ Jitendra said. He had brought the plastic jewels with him, and was pushing them into cryptic little configurations around the damp circle left by his stein.

  ‘Trust me,’ Sunday said, ‘you really don’t need a family as interesting as ours.’

  ‘A smokescreen? For what, exactly?’ Geoffrey asked.

  ‘For bad machines,’ Sunday said. ‘Artilects. Like the one that got into my head when I fell down that hole. Nothing’s been proved, but it looks as if we were using our means and resources to smuggle contraband artilects to Mercury, under the noses of the authorities, for the purposes of reverse engineering and duplication. Making sure we’d be ahead of the game if and when the Gearheads relaxed the ties on AI research.’

  Her brother stroked a finger under his chin. ‘How much of this is guesswork?’

  ‘Lin Wei had her own suspicions, so she conducted some espionage against us,’ Sunday said. ‘Sent industrial spies into our organisation, found out about the artilect research. That was the start of the bad feeling: not only had we lied about our intentions, but we were developing thinking machines. Needless to say, Lin Wei took that as a grave personal insult. As well she might: it was a betrayal of a lifetime’s friendship and trust. Meanwhile, the Gearheads had been following their own lines of investigation. They closed in on Mercury, aiming to make a forced inspection.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘By the time they broke into the facility it had been trashed. Deliberate sabotage, to hide any evidence of a crime. Big stink at the time; damaged us and the Pans, but we both bounced back. Ocular was the only real casualty. With the breakdown in relations between the Akinyas and the Pans, the project was left half-finished.’ Sunday nodded in the vague direction of the ceiling, to the Lunar bedrock and the vacuum above their heads. ‘It’s still out there, still gathering data, just not as extensively as they planned.’

  ‘And the moral of this tale?’ Geoffrey asked.

  ‘Just that we’re already in bed with the Pans, brother. The marriage might not be something anyone likes to talk about now, but you can’t undo history.’

  ‘Whatever Eunice got up to, it’s nothing to do with me or my elephants.’

  ‘No, but it might have something to do with me,’ Sunday said. ‘Maybe they know stuff about Eunice I can’t find out from anyone else.’

  Something dawned in Geoffrey’s eyes. ‘So that’s why we have to dine with Chama and Gleb.’

  Sunday bottled up her exasperation. She was asking so little of Geoffrey: why, for once in his life, couldn’t he think of the bigger picture? ‘They’re just bit players, brother. They don’t have the keys to every Pan secret. But if we help them, maybe they can get someone else to help us. It’s reciprocity.’

  ‘That visit to the zoo didn’t just happen on the spur of the moment, did it?’

  Sunday noticed Chama and Gleb being shown to the table, stooping beneath the low-hanging handrails and equipment lockers bolted to what was now the ceiling, but which had once been just another usable surface of the ISS. Sunday and Jitendra budged up to make room for the zookeepers.

  Chama leaned in and reached for Geoffrey’s hand. ‘Good to see you again!’ he said, grinning broadly.

  Geoffrey returned the handshake, but his response was dour. ‘Nice to see you, too.’

  Gleb was no longer wearing his laboratory overcoat, and Chama had divested his waistcoat pockets of some of their bulkier contents. Other than that they hadn’t changed much since the meeting in the zoo.

  ‘So, Jitendra,’ Sunday said brightly, while Chama and Gleb buried their faces in the drinks menu, ‘any news on Eunice?’

  ‘Sunday . . .’ Geoffrey said.

  She fixed on a puzzled expression. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s something we really ought to be d
iscussing in public.’

  ‘Chama and Gleb have already confided in us about their own work,’ Sunday said. ‘The least we can do is return the favour, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Right,’ Geoffrey said, shooting her a look that let her know exactly what he thought about that.

  Chama looked up. ‘We don’t want to cause any awkwardness.’

  ‘My brother’s referring to some family business, not a state secret,’ Sunday said. ‘And I don’t think there will be any harm at all in you knowing about it.’

  Jitendra smiled awkwardly. ‘Maybe I’ve got something. Possibly. While you were out, I decided to sniff around Pythagoras, see what I could find. Ching resolution isn’t ideal – not enough public eyes on that part of the Moon to give seamless coverage. Which is a bit of a problem if you’re trying to do some amateur sleuthing—’

  ‘Which we’re not,’ Geoffrey said firmly.

  ‘But encouraging in another sense,’ Jitendra went on, ‘as it confirms what we suspected all along: any tracks Eunice put down there in 2059 won’t have been disturbed in the meantime.’ He beamed, deliciously pleased at his own cleverness. ‘Well, they have been and they haven’t.’

  He shoved aside the condiments, pushed the coloured gems into a huddle and voked a rectangular image onto the table. It was filled with the silver-grey, gritty, deep-shadowed terrain of the high-latitude Lunar landscape. Cross-haired and annotated with coordinates, the image must have been shot from some high-flying satellite.

  ‘Close-up of the interior of Pythagoras crater, time-stamped about eight weeks ago,’ Jitendra said. ‘Recent enough for our purposes.’

  ‘Have you found the crash point?’ Sunday asked.

  ‘That and more.’ He laced fingers and cracked knuckles. ‘Let me zoom in for you.’

  Gleb said, ‘The crash point of what?’

  ‘Eunice landed – or crashed – in this crater one hundred and three years ago,’ Sunday told him. ‘It’s looking as if she’s left us something related to that incident.’

  The rectangle stayed the same size, but now the image had enlarged to reveal the whitish, many-armed star – not exactly a crater, more a frozen splash – where something had splatted onto the Lunar surface. The star was elongated and asymmetric, as if the impacting object had skipped in obliquely. There was even a smaller blemish to one side of it, as if the object had bounced once before coming to rest.

  ‘It looks bad, but we know it was a survivable impact,’ Jitendra said.

  ‘No trace of a ship, though,’ Geoffrey said, reluctantly succumbing to curiosity. ‘You sure it’s the right place?’

  ‘Nowhere else fits. The ship isn’t there because it was recovered by that Indian salvage crew.’ Jitendra made the image zoom in again, jabbing his finger at the tabletop. ‘They had their own ship – here’s where they kicked up soil on landing, and here are their foot- and rover prints, scribbled all over Eunice’s crater, fresh now as when they were made. That’s all, though. No one’s been back to that landing site in a century.’

  ‘What about Eunice’s long walk out?’ Sunday asked.

  ‘We can follow her all the way out of the crater. Hers are the only footprints anywhere else in Pythagoras.’

  The view lurched to the right, tracking east. Sunday made out the prints, following an arrow-straight line with only occasional detours to avoid obstacles. It was a long, monotonous message in Morse code: stretches of hyphens, where she had been hop-skipping, interspersed with sequences of dots where she had slowed her progress to a walk. When Jitendra zoomed out again, reducing the prints to the faintest of scratches across the image, she understood how far Eunice had been forced to travel.

  A tiny human presence, a bag of air and warmth lost in the barren immensity of the Lunar landscape, like a bug crossing a runway.

  ‘We can follow these prints all the way to the wall and over and out, to where she met the Chinese rescue party,’ Jitendra said. ‘You can still see the hairpin where they turned the rover around and drove back home, with Eunice aboard. It all checks out.’

  Sunday exhaled. ‘OK. So her story checks out. Is that all you’ve got?’

  ‘There is something slightly weird.’ He let the image scroll and zoom again, once more picking up the line of prints. ‘We’re just over thirty kilometres from the touchdown site here,’ Jitendra said. ‘And suddenly there’s this.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Chama said.

  North of the prints – maybe a hundred metres – lay an area of blasted soil where a ship had touched down. Sunday could see clearly the cruciform pattern of depressions made by its landing legs.

  There were footprints as well – two rows, running from the ship to the original line of footprints and back again. It didn’t take a forensics expert to note that the spacing of the prints was similar, maybe identical, to Eunice’s walking pattern.

  Where the prints intersected the original line, there was a region of scuffed soil. For about five metres, Eunice’s original prints had been erased again.

  ‘She went back,’ Sunday said. ‘Grief. She actually went back.’

  Jitendra nodded. ‘That’s what it looks like. After the Chinese had rescued her – and we could be talking weeks, months, years, who the hell knows – she returned to this exact spot and did something.’

  ‘Looks as if she dug up the ground,’ Gleb said. ‘Either to recover something she buried there the last time, or to bury something new. Can you dig back and find older imagery?’

  ‘Gleb’s right,’ Sunday said. ‘If we can find a view taken after she was rescued but before the fresh prints came in, it’ll help us narrow things down.’

  ‘I’m searching,’ Jitendra said. ‘But I’m also being careful. Don’t want to leave my grubby fingerprints all over an image trawl.’

  ‘No one else is following this trail,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Or at least they weren’t, until my sister started talking about it to anyone who’d listen.’

  ‘What we really need to do is get out there, see what’s under that soil,’ Sunday said.

  ‘Might be a bit problematic,’ Jitendra said. ‘Pythagoras is under Chinese Lunar Administration now. You don’t mess with the Ghost Wall.’

  ‘Good job we won’t be doing that, then,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘Aren’t you even remotely curious?’ Sunday asked.

  ‘It’s all supposition, based on a few smudges.’

  ‘We’d know for sure if we went there,’ she said. ‘Take a couple of spades, maybe rent an excavator – how long do you think it would take us?’

  ‘With the Chinese breathing down our necks, wondering what we’re prospecting for? Exactly how long do you think it would be before word of that got back to the cousins?’

  ‘Going through official channels isn’t the way to do this,’ Jitendra said.

  ‘I have a suggestion,’ Chama said. He looked at his husband, Gleb giving only the tiniest of encouraging nods. Their drinks arrived. Chama made a point of swallowing a finger’s width from his before speaking again. ‘Whatever happens, this is going to be a possible arrest-and-detention scenario involving our good friends the Chinese. Now, while that’s not something either of us would rush into, it’s not like we don’t have prior experience in that area.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean they’ll let you go the next time,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘It’s not like we’re trafficking. We’ll just be doing some digging on Chinese soil: hardly the crime of the century, is it?’ Gleb was speaking now. ‘The Initiative isn’t without influence in Chinese circles, and you’ve got June Wing in your corner. The right words, the right persuasion, we’ll be back on the street soon enough.’

  ‘Or not,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘We’ll accept that risk.’ Chama leaned forwards, elbows on the table. ‘You find out what’s under that soil. We get something from you in return. How about it, elephant man?’

  He shook his head. ‘We went over this already. I’m not getting involved.’

  ‘All we??
?d want in return,’ Gleb said, ‘is to offer you the chance to help with our dwarves.’

  ‘I’m already being emotionally blackmailed by my family, thanks – I don’t need another dose.’

  ‘It’s really nothing, what we’re asking,’ Chama said reasonably. He took another gulp of his beer and wiped foam onto the back of his hand. ‘The risk’s all on our side. No one else needs to know about your involvement.’

  ‘There’s still the small matter of ethical oversight,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘Oh, screw that,’ Gleb said. ‘For a start, they’d have to learn of the existence of the dwarves – and we’re not ready to go public.’

  Geoffrey looked relieved, as if he’d finally found an insuperable objection. ‘Then it can’t be done. Even if we got the neuromachinery communicating, someone, somewhere, will want to know why there’s so much ching traffic between my elephants and the Descrutinised Zone.’

  ‘We can get round that,’ Chama said. ‘The Initiative already has more than enough surplus quangle paths between Earth and the Moon. Not unbreakable, of course, but the next best thing.’

  ‘You’re going to have to work pretty hard to think of something they haven’t already covered,’ Sunday said.

  ‘Other than the fact that if I take part in this, that makes me a criminal as well.’

  ‘No one need know,’ Gleb countered. ‘Anyway, in the scheme of things you’d still have the moral high ground, wouldn’t you? You were just presented with a situation, a fait accompli, which you agreed to improve.’ He looked at his husband and said something that the earpieces didn’t pick up: some language or dialect too obscure for translation.

  ‘I’m sure there could be financial incentives as well,’ Chama said, after a few moments’ reflection. ‘No promises, but . . . it wouldn’t be out of the question. You’re reliant on handouts from your family right now, aren’t you?’

  ‘My funding flows from a number of sources,’ Geoffrey said, glaring at Sunday.

  Chama shrugged. ‘But I’m sure more autonomy would always be welcome.’

  Sunday saw her chance. ‘While we’re thrashing out terms, I’d like some access to your archives.’