It was a request for ‘disposal of abandoned asset’. The asset in question was an axially stabilised free-flying habitable structure, better known as the Winter Palace. The request came from Akinya Space, to the United Orbital Nations Circumlunar Space Traffic Administration.
It had been submitted on February 12.
The day he got back from the Moon. The day he handed the glove to the cousins.
‘If I were you,’ Arethusa said, ‘I wouldn’t wait too long before taking a look up there. Of course, if you need any help with that, you know who to call.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Even with her eyes cranked to maximum zoom, Sunday couldn’t see the far end of the cable car’s wire. It was braided spiderfibre, strung between pylons. A dust storm was curdling in from Crommelin’s far rim and all she could presently see was the line, suspended like a conjuring trick before it vanished into a wall of billowing butterscotch.
The car, as big as eight container modules blocked together, had two floors, a lavish promenade deck and a small restaurant. At least a hundred people were milling around in it with room to spare. The golem wasn’t on the car – unless it was wearing someone else’s face, and the Pan intelligence suggested otherwise – but that didn’t mean Sunday wasn’t being watched, observed, scrutinised to the pore. Certainly there were golems and proxies aboard, and in all likelihood one or two warmbloods as well. Chinging struck Sunday as profoundly meaningless in contexts like this. The whole point of being in the cable car was physical proximity to the landscape. One could passive ching as close as one wished, but that wasn’t the same as being here, suspended by a thread of spiderfibre. Or was she just being old-fashioned? She wondered what June Wing would have to say on the subject.
Jitendra came back from the other side of the observation deck carrying two coffees in a plastic tray. ‘We’re getting much lower now,’ he said excitedly. ‘The car’s dropping down from the main cable – there must be winches in the trolley, so we can go up and down according to the terrain.’
Sunday accepted the coffee. ‘You can draw me a sketch of it later. I’m sure I’ll find it riveting.’
‘Aren’t you enjoying this?’
‘Would be, if I’d come to gawp at the scenery. As it happens, there are a couple of other things on my mind.’
Jitendra’s good mood wasn’t going to be shattered that easily. Sipping his coffee, he studied his fellow tourists with avid interest. ‘And you’re sure this is the right car?’
‘I just got on the first one that came in. That was what Holroyd told me to do. Said our guide would make their presence known eventually.’
‘Fine. Nothing to do but wait and see, then, is there?’
The scenery, she had to admit, was something. No, she hadn’t come to play tourist – but she had come to play at being tourist, and the two were only a whisker apart.
In Crommelin, billions of years of ancient and secret Martian history had been flensed open for inspection, naked to the sky. Over time, over unimaginable and dreary Noachian ages, wind and water had laid down layers of sedimentary rock, one on top of the other, deposition after deposition, until they formed immense and ancient strata, as dusty and forbidding as the pages of some long-unopened history book. Crommelin’s interior – wide enough to swallow Nairobi or Lagos whole – was a mosaic of these sedimentary layers. Here, though, something remarkable and fortuitous had happened. Not so long ago – aeons in human terms, a mere Martian eye-blink – an asteroid or shard of comet had rammed into the ground, drilling down through Crommelin’s layers.
The impactor, whatever it had been, had made stark and visible the sedimentary deposits, exposing them as a grand series of horizontal steps, dozens upon dozens in height. Awesome and patient weathering processes had toiled on this scene to produce a landscape of alien strangeness. Flat-topped mesas, pyramids and sphinxlike formations rose from a dark floor, tiered sides contoured in neat horizontal steps as if they’d been laser-cut from mile-thick plywood. Some of the formations were bony, making Sunday imagine the calcified vertebrae of colossal dead monsters, half-swallowed into the Martian crust.
Others had the random, swirling complexity of partly stirred coffee, or caramel syrup in vanilla or pecan ice cream. It was gorgeous, moving, seductive. But like everywhere else on Mars, it was also both deadly and dead.
The cable car dipped again – Sunday felt the descent this time as its suspending line spooled out a little more – and they sailed over the edge of a tawny cliff as high as any building in the Zone. Her stomach did a little butterfly flutter. Tiny bright-green and yellow multilimbed robots clung to the cliff’s side, glued like geckos. She voked a scale-grid. Actually, they weren’t tiny at all, but as large as bulldozers. Not rock climbers, or even ching proxies, she was given to understand, but scientific machines, still conducting sampling operations.
The cable car rose and dipped again, clearing a long stepped ridge. Another line came in from the north-east, intersecting theirs at an angle. Sunday watched as a car on the other line lowered down to a railinged platform buttressed off the side of one of the rock formations. A handful of suited figures were waiting on the platform to board; others got off the cable car and began to follow a meandering metal path bolted to the cliffside. The cable car climbed away, reeling in its line to gain height, and soon it was lost in the butterscotch dust.
A sharp voice asked, ‘Sunday Akinya?’
The voice belonged to a proxy, a brass-coloured robot chassis with many gears and ratchets ticking and whirring in the open cage of its skull. Its eyes were like museum-piece telescopes, goggling out of its dialled face.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Since you’re obviously not Holroyd, I’m guessing you’re our guide?’
Sunday was alone. Jitendra had wandered off to use one of the swivel-mounted binoculars situated around the promenade deck.
‘Gribelin will meet you in Vishniac. He knows the Evolvarium. He’s already been very well paid, so don’t let him talk you into any extra fees. Here are your train tickets.’
The proxy offered her its hand to shake and Sunday slipped her hand into its brass grip. The ruby-nailed fingers tightened. An icon appeared in her left visual field, signifying that she was now in possession of the relevant documents. Two seats, a private compartment on the overnight bullet from Crommelin to Vishniac, leaving tomorrow.
‘This Gribelin doesn’t sound very trustworthy.’
‘Gribelin’s mercenary, but he’s also dependable. There’s a coffee bar in the public concourse at Vishniac – he will be waiting for you.’
Sunday studied the bind tag. The proxy was being chinged from Shalbatana, but with the Pans’ expertise in manipulating quangle paths that meant little.
‘Did Holroyd mention the golem?’
‘We know about that and we’ll do what we can to slow it down, but beyond that there are no guarantees.’
‘Can’t you just . . . stop it? Have someone break its legs?’
‘It wouldn’t achieve anything, other than drawing the wrong sort of attention. Your cousin could easily obtain another body, even if it didn’t look like him. We can stop him chinging ahead to Vishniac by renting all available proxies at that end, but we can’t be seen to act in open opposition to Akinya interests.’ The proxy looked around, its telescope-eyes clicking and rotating. ‘We’ve block-booked half the train, so the golem won’t be able to buy a ticket at the last minute. All the same, you mustn’t give it the chance. The station isn’t far from your hotel, so don’t arrive any earlier than you need to.’
‘We won’t,’ Sunday said.
‘Holroyd will be in touch when you return. I was told to let you know that he’s very satisfied with the work so far.’
‘I’m . . . glad to hear it,’ Sunday said.
The brass proxy nodded and walked away, melting into the milling tourists.
‘Give them credit,’ Eunice said. ‘They’ve covered all the bases, or as many as they’re able to. Block-
booking the train, renting the proxies in Vishniac . . . that’s only the half of it, too. I’ve been having difficulties synching with my Earthside counterpart ever since we arrived. It’s not just that your brother’s in Tiamaat, either. Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to tie up Earth–Mars comms by all legal means available.’
‘Then they’re on our side, even if it inconveniences you.’
‘My suspicion,’ the construct said, ‘is that they’re on whichever side works best for them from one moment to the next.’
Sunday felt a touch on her arm. She turned, expecting it to be Jitendra, or just possibly the proxy, back to tell her something it had forgotten to mention before. But the young man looking at her in a crisp maroon and silver-trimmed uniform was one of the cable car’s staff. ‘The suit you reserved, Miss Akinya,’ he said, smiling from beneath a pillbox hat. ‘We were expecting you about ten minutes ago.’
Sunday narrowed her eyes. ‘I didn’t book any suit.’
‘There’s definitely one reserved, Miss Akinya. I can cancel it, of course, but if you’d care to take up the reservation, we’ll be making our next stop in about ten minutes?’ His smile was starting to crumble around the edges. ‘You’ll have about an hour on the ground before the last pickup of the day.’
‘Did Jitendra book this?’
‘I don’t know, sorry.’
‘No, he didn’t,’ Eunice said, answering her question. ‘Not unless he managed to do so without me knowing about it, and as clever as Jitendra undoubtedly is, he’s not that clever. So someone else has booked this suit for you, and if the Pans knew about it, the proxy would presumably have mentioned it.’
‘If you’d care to come this way,’ the young man said.
‘I wouldn’t,’ Eunice said.
‘It can’t be Lucas. If Lucas wants to talk to me, he can just stroll straight on up, the way he did when we landed.’
‘So you don’t know who’s behind this. All the more reason to be suspicious of it, you ask me.’
‘Which I didn’t.’ Sunday looked through the windows, wondering what was the worst that could happen.
The suit would be the property of the cable-car company, so she could presume it would be in good repair, and it wasn’t as if she’d be going off into the wilderness. The metal walkways down in the crater were fenced off, there were safety lines, the Mech would be as thick as anywhere else in Crommelin and there were sightseers coming and going all the time.
No possible harm could come to her: this was, if anything, an even safer place than the Descrutinised Zone.
‘On your head be it,’ Eunice said.
‘Just do one thing for me. Tell Jitendra where I’ve gone. You can do that, can’t you?’
‘It won’t overtax my capabilities, no.’
‘Tell him to hang around at the cable-car terminal where we got on. I’ll be back as soon as I’m able.’
‘Why not tell him yourself?’
‘Because he won’t like it.’
‘Indeed. That’s because it’s a mistake.’
‘Then allow me the luxury of making it on my own, Grandmother.’ She caught herself. ‘I didn’t mean to say that.’
‘But you did,’ Eunice answered, looking back at Sunday with a smile of quiet delight. ‘You forgot, just for a moment. You forgot that I’m not really me.’
Sunday turned away, before the construct could see the shame on her face.
There were three other tourists on the landing platform: the last drop-off of the day. The suit was a little stiff, its locomotor functions lagging intent by just enough milliseconds for her brain to register the resistance. In all other respects it appeared to be in perfect working order, with a clean visor and all life-support indices in the green. The railing’s cold came through her glove. She could feel the scabby roughness where the paint had flaked off the metal.
One of the cable-car employees latched a gate behind the surface party and the car pulled away, receding and rising into the air at the same time. She watched it fade into the dust, hoping Jitendra wouldn’t be too alarmed by this sudden course of action.
Three metal-fenced paths led away from the landing platform, soon winding their way out of sight around rocks and cliffs. There was no guided tour, not even a suggested direction of progress, so Sunday waited until the other tourists had drifted off before choosing her own route, the one that struck her as the least popular.
The paths were bolted to the sheer sides of the rock formations, suspended dozens and sometimes hundreds of metres above solid ground. The floor was coated with some grippy anti-slip compound. A continuous rail along the cliffside allowed her to clip on a sliding safety line, with the other end tethered to her waist. There was no real possibility of falling, but she clipped on anyway.
Sunday walked as quickly as the suit allowed, conscious that she would need to be back at the platform for the final cable car of the day. The suit had more than enough reserves for an overnight stay, if it came to that, but it wasn’t a prospect she viewed with any particular enthusiasm. For Jitendra’s sake she vowed not to be late for the pickup.
But – and this was the thing – the scenery in Crommelin was literally awesome. There really was no other word for it. The Moon had its magnificent desolation, airless and silent as the space between thoughts, but it had taken rain and wind, insane aeons of it, to sculpt these astonishing and purposeful shapes.
Nature shouldn’t be able to do this, Sunday thought. It shouldn’t be able to produce something that resembled the work of directed intelligence, something artful, when the only factors involved were unthinking physics and obscene, spendthrift quantities of time. Time to lay down the sediments, in deluge after deluge, entire epochs in the impossibly distant past when Mars had been both warm and wet, a world deluded into thinking it had a future. Time for cosmic happenstance to hurl a fist from the sky, punching down through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling through geological chapters like a bullet through a book. And then yet more time – countless millions of years – for wind and dust to work their callous handiwork, scouring and abrading, wearing the exposed layers back at subtly different rates depending on hardness and chemistry, until these deliberate-looking right-angled steps and contours began to assume grand and imperial solidity, rising from the depths like the stairways of the gods.
Awe-inspiring, yes. Sometimes it was entirely right and proper to be awed. And recognising the physics in these formations, the hand of time and matter and the nuclear forces underpinning all things, did not lessen that feeling. What was she, ultimately, but the end product of physics and matter? And what was her art but the product of physics and matter working on itself?
She rounded a bend. There was a figure, another spacesuited sightseer, leaning over the outer railing, arms folded on the top of the fence. Sensing her approach – her footsteps reverberated along the path – the figure looked at her for a few seconds, then returned its gaze to the canyon below. She continued her progress, never doubting that this was the person who had arranged for her suit.
The figure’s gold and chrome suit differed from hers. It was older-looking – not antique-old, but certainly not made in the last twenty or thirty years. The suit appeared well looked after, though, and she didn’t doubt that it was still in perfectly serviceable condition.
Sunday joined the figure, hooking her own arms over the railing and looking down. As the day cooled, winds stirred dust eddies in the nooks and chicanes of the crater formations. Panther-black shadows stole up from the depths.
The figure touched a hand to Sunday’s sleeve, establishing a suit-to-suit link. ‘I know who you are,’ she heard, the voice female, the words Swahili but with a distinct Martian lilt. No translation layer was in effect, at least not on her side.
‘That’s easy to say,’ Sunday answered.
‘Sunday Akinya.’ The woman said her name slowly, so there could be no mistaking it. ‘You’ve come to Mars to find out about your grandmother.’
‘Knowing my name’s no great trick. Despite my best efforts, it’s not like I’m travelling incognito, is it? You could easily have run an aug query on me before I left the cable car, or at any time since I landed.’
‘And the other part?’
‘Doesn’t take a genius to draw that conclusion, does it? My grandmother died recently. Within a few days of her scattering I’m on my way to Mars. How likely is it that the two events aren’t related?’
‘Maybe you had to get away from things for a while. But that’s not really the case, is it? You’re searching for something.’
‘Aren’t we all?’ Sunday turned to look at the woman but her visor was mirrored, throwing back Sunday’s own reflection and a fish-eye distortion of the landscape. ‘You know my name. How about telling me yours?’
‘Soya,’ the woman answered, easily, as if the information cost her nothing.
‘That’s an African name, I think. And you appear to speak Swahili very well.’
‘My ancestors were Nigerian, but I was born here.’ Soya deliberated. ‘Your intentions are to travel west, I think. We needn’t go into specifics, but you have in mind somewhere quite dangerous.’
‘Say it, if you’re so damned sure.’
‘I’d rather not. We’re quite safe from eavesdroppers here, which is why I went to the trouble of renting that suit for you, and making sure aug reach was disabled – did you even notice that? But it’s not wholly safe. Nowhere is.’
‘Fine, talk in riddles, then.’ Sunday admitted to herself that she hadn’t noticed the absence of the aug. Unlike some people, and especially those who lived beyond the Zone, she didn’t swim in it every waking moment of her existence. It was there, on tap when she needed it. And right now she would have been very glad of it. ‘Are you working for the same people as Holroyd?’ she ventured.
‘I’m not “working” for anyone at all. I’m just here to warn you to be careful.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘What could I threaten you with? Violence? Don’t be silly. No: the people you need to be careful of are those who’ve bankrolled this expedition. Holroyd’s people, in other words. They’ve been very helpful so far, haven’t they?’