Blue Remembered Earth

‘Still, a debt has been incurred. Chama and Gleb don’t speak for the entire Initiative, but they were right to recognise the importance of Geoffrey’s work, in regard to their own.’ Truro scanned the room, still wearing his black gash of a smile. ‘We have . . . leverage. The Chinese have been feeling history’s cold breath down their necks for decades. They’ve had their century and a half in the sun, the capstone to three thousand years of uninterrupted statehood. They did wonderful and glorious things. But now what? India has risen, and now it’s Africa’s turn. The wheel rolls on. The problem is, a state like that doesn’t turn on a dime. The Chinese need a new direction. So what they’re doing is returning to what they were always best at: thinking long-term, devising grand imperial ambitions. Needless to say, the Panspermian Initiative hasn’t escaped their attention. The Green Efflorescence is exactly the kind of life-swallowing enterprise they can really sink their teeth into. Of all the Dry and Sky member states, China has always had the most cordial relations with the United Aquatic Nations.’

  ‘How does this help us?’ Geoffrey asked.

  ‘Simply put, we are very anxious not to offend the Chinese, and they are very anxious not to offend us. You never know, we might be working together for an awfully long time. Either way, everyone’s being extremely careful about the next move, anxious not to do the slightest thing that might jeopardise future manoeuvres. Which is why Chama’s little expedition is causing so many difficulties. But not, I hope, insurmountable ones.’

  ‘You said we should do nothing,’ Sunday said.

  ‘Very soon, like clockwork, word will reach the relevant border authorities that Chama is to be shown unusual clemency. He will be released, and the whole sorry business put behind us.’ He leaned forward with particular urgency. ‘But the machinery of negotiation is delicate. The wrong intervention from Akinya Space or Plexus could derail the whole process. Perhaps catastrophically You do want to see your friend again, don’t you? With his memories still more or less intact? Then do nothing.’

  ‘You’d better be right about this,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘I’m never wrong,’ Truro replied. And now he was looking at Geoffrey, and only Geoffrey. ‘I’ll be in touch, Mister Akinya. About the elephants. I’m sure we have a long and fruitful relationship ahead of us.’

  The golem wilted. It slumped for a moment, until invisible strings jerked it back into life. The face danced through preloaded permutations, the clothes and hair shimmering and squirming with a slurping rustle. Then June Wing was back in the room.

  ‘Something outrageous just happened,’ she said.

  June Wing, it was clear, was not a woman accustomed to being hijacked.

  The robot proctors of the African Lunar Administration had the grey and steel sheen of expensive Swedish cutlery. Their helmets were chromed, their faces blank black fencing masks. They would not kill, but they packed myriad nonlethal modes of enforcement. Many of these were exquisitely unpleasant, quite liable to cause long-lasting damage to the central nervous system.

  ‘Which one of you is Gleb Ozerov?’ asked the first, the synthesised voice booming out of its meshwork face.

  ‘That’ll be me,’ Gleb answered timorously.

  ‘Gleb Ozerov, you are charged with the care of this individual under Lunar law. Indicate compliance.’

  ‘I comply,’ Gleb said. ‘I most definitely comply. Thank you. That’ll be fine.’

  There was rather more to it than that, of course, but the additional terms of Chama’s release were packed into a lengthy, clause-ridden aug summary that his husband had already read and acknowledged before the handover.

  Given the scope of possible repercussions, there was no denying that they had all got off lightly. After eight hours of detention and debriefing, Chama had been shipped back to Copetown by suborbital vehicle and released into the custody of the proctors. The robots had taken him to the railway station and onto the next available train. Chama was still standing meekly between his captors when Sunday, Geoffrey, Jitendra and Gleb met him at the tram terminal.

  ‘Wow,’ Sunday had breathed. ‘They really mean business. I’ve never even seen proctors before. I don’t think they even assemble the fuckers until they’re wanted somewhere.’

  ‘They were scary,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘That was the idea,’ Sunday answered.

  Once the boilerplate had been stripped away the terms looked generous. No charges had been issued against Chama, although he had been given a formal warning which would remain on file until well into the next century. He was forbidden from entering Chinese territory, on the Moon or anywhere else in the system, for another decade. Furthermore, he was required to remain in the Descrutinised Zone for the next hundred days, a form of soft detention that also forbade the use of passive ching or embodiment. Communications with any individual outside the Zone would be subjected to routine machine and human interception and analysis.

  Beyond that, Chama was technically ‘free’.

  Sunday harboured some qualms about going to meet Chama, fearing that it tied her too closely to the border incident. Jitendra insisted she had nothing to fear. ‘If Chama got into this without us being involved,’ Jitendra said, ‘we’d still have been dragged into it by now. We’re his friends.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘Of course he’s right,’ Gleb said. ‘But thanks for being there, anyway. I didn’t much care for those proctors.’

  ‘None of us did,’ Sunday said.

  Chama had precious little to say in the minutes after the handover. Perhaps he couldn’t quite believe that he wasn’t still in custody. Chama’s release, and his return to the Zone, had been played out in the full public gaze of the Surveilled World. Chama might only have had a small number of close friends, but he was familiar to hundreds of his fellow citizens, and they all wanted to know why he’d been dumped at the tram station by the evil-looking robots. By the time they reached the queue at the taxi stand, they were fending off enquiries from all corners. Well-wishers even began to ching in, a ghost crowd clotting around Chama and his friends like a gathering haze of cold dark matter.

  ‘This won’t make things any easier with Hector and Lucas,’ Geoffrey said as the taxi barged through midtown traffic.

  ‘Fuck ’em,’ Sunday said. ‘Hector was only calling to gloat. It’s not like he was ever going to lift a finger to help.’

  ‘They’ll still give me a hard time when I get back.’

  ‘So start working on your story. You found a glove, that’s all. If Hector and Lucas want to think there’s a connection to what happened in Pythagoras, that’s their problem. We don’t have to help them along the way.’

  ‘What about these?’ Jitendra asked, opening his fist to reveal the coloured gems. ‘Do they go back with Geoffrey or not?’

  Sunday reached over Jitendra’s shoulder and scooped them into her palm. ‘They stay with me. You weren’t even meant to take them out of the apartment.’

  ‘We’re all here,’ Jitendra said. ‘I was worried about someone turning the place over while we were out.’

  ‘Oh,’ Sunday said, her unhappy tone indicating that was a possibility she hadn’t even considered.

  Geoffrey and Jitendra were up front, Sunday, Chama and Gleb in the rear. Chama was still wearing the hard-shelled spacesuit, with the helmet cradled in his lap. He had his arms around it, chin resting on the bulbous crown. The Chinese had given the suit a thorough clean. It spangled with showroom freshness.

  ‘Looks like they were thorough,’ Geoffrey said.

  Chama’s head bobbed in the neck ring. ‘Enough.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose they changed their minds about letting you keep anything you dug up out there,’ Sunday said.

  Chama looked regretful. ‘I didn’t push my luck. They were doing me a big enough favour by letting me go.’

  ‘It was never going to work,’ Geoffrey said. ‘What did we actually get out of this except a close encounter with border security, a debt to pay back to
Truro and a few grey hairs?’

  ‘That’s for you to figure out.’ Chama rolled the helmet over and dug into its open neck. ‘Here. Make of it what you will.’

  He passed something to Sunday. It was a stiff off-white cylinder, like a section of bamboo.

  It took her a moment to realise it was paper, rolled up tight and bound with a rubber band. Sunday snapped off the rubber band and carefully unwound the scroll. It was a collection of pages, a dozen or so coiled loosely together. The paper felt delicate, ready to crumble at the least provocation. The text was in English, she could tell that much from the words, although the sentences were difficult to parse. Even when her eyes dropped a Swahili translation filter over the page, it still didn’t make much sense.

  ‘Is there some significance to this?’ she asked, leafing through the pages.

  ‘You tell me,’ Chama said. ‘That was the only thing in the box.’

  Geoffrey looked around the taxi. ‘We know what was in the box, Chama. We saw it. It was some junk, not a roll of paper. We’d have known if we saw a roll of paper.’

  Chama sighed. ‘The junk was for the Chinese. Figured they’d confiscate anything I turned up in that ditch, so I took something along with me. By the time you chinged into my sense-space, I’d already opened the box once, swapped the paper for the junk. Didn’t you notice that I got it open very easily the second time, as if I knew exactly what to do?’

  ‘You couldn’t have known that was going to work,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘You don’t get very far in life if you’re not prepared to take a few chances. So I had to be able to open the box and switch the contents without the drones getting a good look at what I was doing. Wasn’t all that hard, though, because the drones didn’t want to get too close, not with them being basically nuclear-powered missiles and me a fragile human in a spacesuit, on the surface of the fucking Moon.’

  ‘OK,’ Sunday said, accepting this explanation for the moment, ‘I can see how you might have switched the junk, and I can see how the Chinese would have confiscated the junk as if it was the thing inside the box all the time. But I can’t believe they didn’t spot the paper afterwards, when you were being debriefed.’

  ‘Oh, they did. But I told them I’d had it on me all the while. Said it was a keepsake, a lucky charm. Just a roll of paper, after all. Why would they doubt me? Why would they expect someone to have dug up some old papers on the Moon?’

  ‘Damn lucky,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You couldn’t have known there was paper in that box.’

  ‘Damn lucky, absolutely. Anyhow, regardless of what I’d found, the switch still bought me a little time to examine whatever was inside. The Chinese confiscated the box straight off. Didn’t get around to searching my suit until two hours later, when I was in their holding tank. Even if they had taken whatever was in the box, I’d still have had plenty of time to examine it.’

  According to the print at the top of the odd-numbered pages, the sheets had been liberated from a copy of Gulliver’s Travels. After a few moments’ mental searching, Sunday remembered the scattering, how Memphis had reminded them of that being one of Eunice’s favourite books, one she had liked to read under the acacia trees near the household.

  ‘Course, that wouldn’t necessarily have helped,’ Chama said, as if he had a hotline into Sunday’s head. ‘I mean, I’m assuming those pages mean something specific to you Akinyas, something way over my head.’

  ‘Eunice liked to read it,’ Geoffrey said. ‘That’s all. It ties the paper to her, but beyond that—’

  ‘She buried it for a reason,’ Sunday said. ‘You did well, Chama. To sneak this out, under the noses of the Chinese . . . that took some doing.’

  ‘I thought so,’ Chama said.

  ‘But it doesn’t get us anywhere,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘Yet,’ Sunday corrected. ‘We still need to run it by the construct, see what she makes of it. We can also run tests on the paper, check whether there’s something on it we can’t see right now – invisible ink, microdots, secret codes worked into the text, that kind of thing. Or maybe something in the words themselves.’

  ‘Have fun. Tomorrow I’m on my way back to Africa. Visa runs out in the afternoon, and I’m not going to push my luck for the sake of a few hours.’

  ‘So you’re just leaving this with me?’

  Geoffrey looked surprised at her question. ‘Do what you want with it. I’ll back you all the way.’

  ‘In mind, if not in body.’

  ‘I can’t be in two places at once. If I start chinging up here at every opportunity, the cousins will really start wondering what’s going on. And we don’t want that, do we?’

  ‘No,’ Sunday said, with reluctance. ‘That we don’t.’

  ‘But you should be ready for whatever Eunice throws at you,’ Chama said. ‘She’s taken you from Earth to the Moon. Do you honestly think she meant you to stop there?’

  ‘My sister has to pay the rent as well,’ Geoffrey said. ‘She can play Eunice’s little game up to a point but at some point reality has to kick in. We both have day jobs. And in case you got the wrong impression, neither of us has buckets of money to throw around.’

  ‘Then dinner’s on me,’ Chama said grandly. ‘That’s only fair, isn’t it? I feel like celebrating. It’s not every day you become a pawn in international relations.’

  So they went out that night, the five friends, to a good place that did East African and Indian, and when they had finished two courses and finally fended off the last of the inquisitive well-wishers, eager to congratulate Chama on his safe return, Sunday took out the cylinder of rolled paper, snapped it free of its rubber band and spread it carefully on a part of the table as yet unblemished by food and wine spillages. Two full wine bottles served as weights, to stop the pages curling back into a tube.

  ‘I think I have it,’ she said, hardly daring to voice her suspicion aloud, for fear that it would strike the others as foolish. ‘The fact that this is Gulliver’s Travels isn’t the only thing tying the book to Eunice.’

  Geoffrey sounded wary but curious. ‘Go on.’

  ‘When you get back home I want you to confirm that these pages really were ripped from the copy of the book in the household archive. I’m betting they were, though. I’m also betting that Eunice picked this part of the book very deliberately. It’s a signpost. It’s telling us where to look next.’

  ‘Which would be?’ Jitendra asked.

  Sunday sucked in a breath. ‘I have to go to Mars. Or rather, the moons of Mars. That’s the point, you see.’

  Chama looked up from the third course he had ordered while the others were on their seconds. ‘Gulliver went to Mars? I don’t remember that part.’

  ‘That was Robinson Crusoe,’ Gleb said firmly. ‘At least, I think he was on Mars. Otherwise why would there be a city there named after him?’

  ‘The point,’ Sunday said, before the conversation drifted irrevocably off course, ‘is that Gulliver met the Laputan astronomers. On their flying island. And the astronomers showed Gulliver their instruments and told him that there were two moons going around Mars.’

  ‘Which is sort of . . . unremarkable, given that there are two moons going around Mars,’ Jitendra said, with the slow, befuddled air of a man in deep surrender to intoxication. He picked up one of the wine bottles, causing the pages to revert to a tight off-white tube.

  Sunday gritted her teeth and pushed on. ‘This was before anyone knew of the real moons. Swift took a guess. Even put in their orbits and periods. Didn’t get them right, of course, but, you know, give the man credit for trying.’

  ‘And you think this is the clue?’ Geoffrey asked.

  ‘I ran it by the construct. She agrees with me.’

  ‘You made her,’ Geoffrey said. ‘That’s maybe not too surprising.’

  Sunday deployed a fierce frown. ‘She’s perfectly capable of shooting my theories down in flames, brother. This time she thinks I’m on the right lines.’

  ‘Mars
is a big planet,’ Gleb mused. ‘Where are you going to start?’

  ‘The clue indicates the moons, so that’s where I’ll look. And we can rule out Deimos immediately – Eunice was never there. Which leaves—’

  ‘Phobos,’ Chama said. ‘Fear, to Deimos’s Panic. Hmm. Are you really sure you want to go to a chunk of rock named Fear?’

  Jitendra was recharging their glasses. ‘It could be called Happy Smiley Fun Moon and it wouldn’t make it any easier to get to. Look, it’s a nice idea, all this adventuring, but we need to be realistic. We can’t afford Mars.’

  ‘I could go on my own,’ Sunday said.

  ‘And that suddenly makes it achievable?’ Jitendra shook his head, smiling with the supercilious air of the only grown-up in the room. ‘This is out of our league, I’m afraid. You have commissions to finish, I have research to complete for June Wing. We can’t afford to let people down, not when we’ve bills to pay.’

  Sunday was not proud of herself, but she pouted anyway. ‘Bills can fuck off.’

  ‘And so can Eunice,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘Even if she planted clues all over the system, she obviously did it decades ago. What difference does it make if we follow this up now, or wait a few years?’

  ‘Oh, brother. You really don’t get it, do you?’ She was shaking her head, stabbing her finger on the table. ‘This is life. It’s not a dress rehearsal. If we don’t do this now, we may as well start planning our own funerals. I don’t want to be sensible and prudent. Being sensible and prudent is for arseholes like Hector and Lucas. We turned away from all that, don’t you realise? We wanted life, surprises, risk . . . not stocks and shares and tedious fucking boardroom meetings about the cost of importing ice from fucking . . . Neptune.’ Realising that she was getting loud, drawing glances from across the restaurant, she dialled down her voice. ‘That’s not the life for me, all right? Maybe you’ve changed your mind. I haven’t. And if I have to find a way to get to Mars, I will.’

  Geoffrey gave her his most infuriating calm-down nod. ‘All right. I get it. Really, I do. And although you may not believe me, I agree. But if we do this, we have to do it together. A shared risk. And we mustn’t rush into it.’