Blue Remembered Earth

  ‘We’re running away, aren’t we?’ Jumai said, fiddling with her seat buckle. ‘That’s basically the deal here, right?’

  Geoffrey lined up the plane for take-off. ‘I screwed up. I hit Hector.’

  She said it back to him as if she might have misheard.

  ‘You “hit” Hector.’

  ‘Tried. Before the Mech intervened and dropped a boulder on my skull.’

  ‘Ho boy.’ She was grinning, caught somewhere between delight and horror. ‘Way to go with the conflict resolution, Geoffrey.’

  ‘I’m at war with my family. Escalation was the logical next step.’

  ‘Yeah. You know, I think that’s what they call pretaliation.’ She was shaking her head. ‘And now what?’

  He pushed the throttle to take-off power. The Cessna surged forward, the ride bumpy at first until sheer speed smoothed out the undulations in the ground. ‘We’re on our way to Tiamaat.’

  ‘Too cheap to send their own plane?’

  ‘They can’t now I’ve got myself into trouble with the Mechanism. They won’t be rushing into a direct stand-off with the family, either.’

  They were at take-off speed. He rotated and took them into the air.

  ‘Something about you has changed,’ Jumai said. ‘I’m not sure it’s good, but something’s definitely changed. You used to be boring.’

  ‘And now?’ Geoffrey made a steep left turn, bringing them back over the white and blue ‘A’ of the household.

  ‘Less so.’ Jumai loosened her seat buckle. ‘So – how far to the coast?’

  ‘About five hundred kilometres.’ He eyed the fuel gauge again, wondering if he was being optimistic. ‘Call it two hours of flight time. And then we still have to get out to Tiamaat.’ He patted the console. ‘But we’re good.’

  ‘We’d be better off walking.’

  ‘She’s an old machine, but that’s good – cousins can’t touch old machines.’

  ‘Maybe it isn’t the cousins we should be worrying about,’ Jumai said. ‘Especially if you’ve just pissed off the Mechanism.’

  Geoffrey smiled. The household wheeled below. Two figures were standing by one of the walls, looking up at him with hands visoring their eyes. He waggled the wings and aimed for the ocean.

  Not that it was ever going to be that simple, of course. They had not been in the air for more than ten minutes when two airpods closed in, one on each side, pincering the Cessna with only a wing’s width to spare. Geoffrey took his eyes off the horizon just long enough to confirm that it was the cousins. They were flying in the same two machines that had been parked on the ground near Memphis’s body: Hector to starboard, Lucas to port.

  ‘I think they want to talk,’ Jumai said. ‘Someone keeps trying to push a figment through.’

  ‘They can fuck off. We’re long past the point of reasoned discussion.’ He had been rebuffing figment requests since he had taunted the cousins from the air. There was nothing he wanted to hear from them now.

  ‘They’re getting pretty close. I know airpods can’t collide with each other, but . . .’ She left the sentence hanging.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If they do anything that even looks as if it’s an attempt to force us down, suddenly I’m not going to be the main thing on the Mechanism’s mind.’

  ‘That’ll be a great consolation as they’re scooping me off the ground.’

  ‘We’re not going to crash. Anyway, this should be a walk in the park for you, the queen of high-risk data recovery. You laugh in the face of explosives and nerve gas.’

  ‘Geoffrey,’ a voice said, cutting through his thoughts like an icebreaker. ‘I’m sorry to use this channel, but you’ve left me with no option.’

  ‘Get out of my skull, Lucas.’

  Jumai looked at him in dismay, not hearing the cousin.

  ‘I would,’ Lucas said, ‘if I thought you’d accede to communication through a more orthodox channel.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ Jumai asked.

  ‘Lucas has found a way into my head,’ Geoffrey said, having to shout to drown out the voice that was still droning on between his ears. ‘Don’t know how.’

  He didn’t. Even Memphis couldn’t reach him when he didn’t want to be reached, and there was no reason to suppose that the cousins had any secret voodoo that offered them a back door into Geoffrey’s mind. They’d have used it already if that was the case, when they were trying to contact him about Memphis being killed.

  ‘It’s simple enough,’ Lucas was saying. ‘You’ve fled the scene of a high-level intervention before a risk-assessment team had the chance to interview you. The Mechanism takes a fairly dim view of that. They’d shut you down again if there wasn’t a risk of endangering both you and your hostage.’

  ‘She’s not my hostage,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘Tell that to the authorities, cousin. The Mech’s given me direct-access privilege because I’m kin and I might be able to talk you out of making this worse for yourself.’

  ‘Well, you can tell them you tried. Now fuck off.’

  ‘Geoffrey, listen to me. We understand that this has been a difficult and emotional time for you, but don’t compound matters by behaving rashly.’

  ‘Don’t blame me, Lucas. You started this, by sending me to the Moon.’

  ‘There are things best left in the past,’ Lucas said. ‘If you cared about this family, and its obligations, you’d understand that. There are millions of people who depend on us, who depend on stability.’

  ‘Our stocks barely faltered, Lucas. Other than us, no one gives a shit about Eunice.’

  ‘Which is exactly why none of this is worth what you’re doing. She’s history, Geoffrey. A ghost.’

  ‘Leave it to the Mechanism. This isn’t your problem any more.’

  He hadn’t expected Lucas to take him at his word, but after a few moments the cousins’ airpods peeled away, leaving the Cessna alone in the sky. Geoffrey was surprised at how shaken that left him feeling. He twisted around in his seat to watch the two vehicles dwindling aft.

  ‘Lucas is gone,’ he said softly.

  ‘There was nothing they could do,’ Jumai said. ‘You said it yourself – knocking us out of the sky was never an option.’

  But eventually the Mechanism came, as he had always known it would. They were over the ocean by then, and the fuel warning had sounded three times. Two Civil Administration vehicles approached, official blue-and-whites garbed in aug-generated EAF and AU insignia, vectoring out to sea from Nairobi or maybe Mombasa, bigger and faster than the cousins’ airpods, blunt-hulled, stub-winged, barnacled with duct-fans, rhino-ugly with angular chiselled hull plates and the hornlike black protuberances of weapons systems. Quite something, in this day and age, to be confronted with such an overt display of peacekeeping authority. Geoffrey couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything like it, on Earth at least. All this, for little old me? he felt like asking. Really, you shouldn’t have.

  ‘Maybe quitting the day job was a mistake,’ Jumai said.

  ‘They think you’re my hostage,’ Geoffrey said. ‘At least, that’s the stance they’ve decided to take, so I wouldn’t worry if I were you – they’re not going to say or do anything that might put you in danger.’

  ‘Until they dig around in my background and decide, hey, maybe his Nigerian ex-girlfriend might be an accomplice after all.’

  ‘They’re still not going to do anything stupid. I haven’t committed any crime. I just fled the scene of one I didn’t succeed in committing.’

  ‘Tell that to the judge.’ She was looking through the windows, jerkily alternating between starboard and port like someone following a vigorous tennis match. ‘I’ve seen some mean machinery in my time, Geoffrey, even driven some of it—’

  ‘They’re designed to intimidate. Which is why we won’t be intimidated.’

  The enforcement vehicles, insignia hovering around them like bright neon banners caught in their slipstreams, were much bigger than
the Cessna. But that worked to Geoffrey’s advantage, too. The pilots would look at his little white toy of an aeroplane and see something preposterously old and fragile, not realising that the ancient airframe was in fact much tougher than it looked.

  ‘Geoffrey Akinya,’ a voice said, cutting through everything just as Lucas’s had done. ‘This is the Civil Administration. Please return to your place of origin.’

  ‘Sorry, no can do,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘An intervention was necessary to prevent the completion of a violent act, Geoffrey.’ He was being spoken to like a child, with great forbearance. ‘Under such circumstances, a process of review must always take place. Submit yourself to probationary restraint and you have nothing to fear. I urge you now to turn around.’ The voice was deep, male, unmistakably Tanzanian.

  ‘You can’t stop me, can you? There’s nothing in the world you can do to make me alter my course.’

  The vehicles came closer. They were as big as houses, armoured like bunkers. This kind of military-spec enforcement technology was like a coelacanth: it had no business still existing in the present. Yet, Geoffrey now realised, it had been there all along, a covert part of his world, tucked decently out of sight until he transgressed against the Mechanism.

  ‘This is your last warning,’ the voice said. ‘Turn around now.’

  That was when the fuel ran out. Geoffrey had never ditched an aircraft before, never even considered that he might one day face the possibility of ditching. Ditching was what happened when things went wrong, when things were miscalculated.

  Yet here he was, ditching the Cessna. He came in at just above stall speed, full flaps, and flared steeply at the last moment. The wheels bit water. The aircraft slowed quickly, nose pitching into the sea, and then leaned slowly to starboard until the wingtip was submerged. The engine had stopped. The Cessna rocked in the green swell of the Indian Ocean, silent save for an occasional creak from the airframe, as if it had always been waiting for its time as a boat.

  ‘Life jacket under your seat,’ Geoffrey said. The sea air tickled his nose. ‘We have to get out. She’s not built for floating.’

  Jumai extracted her life jacket. ‘Meaning we swim for it?’

  ‘Not much choice, I’m afraid.’

  ‘There are sharks in these waters.’

  He nodded. ‘We should be all right. The Mechanism’s probably already clearing any large predators from the area, or euthanising those that don’t take the hint.’

  ‘You hope.’

  ‘Right now, being eaten is the least of our worries.’

  The Administration vehicles loitered overhead. That was good, in one sense, because it meant they wouldn’t have to wait long for rescue – Mechanism or not, Geoffrey didn’t relish the prospect of spending hours in the ocean. Bad in another sense, though, because once Geoffrey and Jumai were floating, it wouldn’t take the authorities long to work out a way of scooping them into custody.

  But the Cessna was definitely sinking. Water had been lapping in from the moment they ditched, splashing through the door seals and engine openings. With their life jackets on, Geoffrey and Jumai climbed onto the sloping surface of one wing, but that would buy them minutes, no more. Jumai was sitting on the inclined wing, her feet dangling over the edge. Geoffrey stood, hands on hips, knees bent for balance, anxiously surveying the horizon. He’d been able to see land from the air, but not now they were down.

  ‘Whatever happens,’ Jumai said, ‘I’m sorry about your plane.’

  ‘Me too.’

  There was a clunk from under the fuselage: softened by suspension, as if the submerged undercarriage had just touched dry land. With a lurch, the Cessna righted itself, the wing becoming horizontal once more. Geoffrey staggered, nearly losing his footing. Jumai reached out and grabbed his ankle, and nearly lost her own purchase in the process. Water sluiced away in rivulets.

  With the smoothness of a rising elevator, the Cessna emerged from the sea.

  ‘The fuck?’ Jumai said.

  Geoffrey offered her a shrug of incomprehension.

  There was a black road under the wheels. The black road was rising, forcing itself into daylight: ocean was sluicing off the road as well, down its broad curving flanks. Geoffrey turned slowly around, half-knowing what he’d see. In the opposite direction, the road ran into a sheer-sided black tower, its rounded, tapering form rising to a hammerhead lookout deck.

  ‘We’re on a submarine,’ Geoffrey said. He had to say it twice just to convince himself. ‘We’re on a submarine.’

  Jumai dropped from the wing onto the slick rubber-treaded deck. ‘And is this good, or bad?’

  ‘I think it’s good. For now.’

  The submersible was from Tiamaat; he knew this even before a door opened in the base of the tower and an exo’d merperson came striding out. He squinted against a sudden salty lash of sea-spray.

  It was Mira Gilbert. Behind her were three other exo-clad merpeople.

  ‘Hello, lubbers!’ she said, beckoning. ‘Come inside. We’ll secure the plane, then get under way.’

  Geoffrey climbed off the wing, touched a hand to the side of the engine cowling, reassuring it that he would be back. In truth, he had little idea what was going to happen next. His ordered plans, such as they had been, were in tatters. He had done a shameful thing, then fled the scene of the crime. He had refused to submit to Mech authority, and now he was surrendering himself to people he barely knew, let alone trusted.

  It wasn’t too late. The Administration vehicles were still loitering. He could still take his chances with the ocean, let them swoop him into their custody. For a moment, caught between branching possibilities, two versions of his life peeling away from each other like aircraft contrails, he was paralysed.

  ‘We’re waiting, Mister Akinya,’ Mira Gilbert said.

  ‘You don’t need to be a part of this,’ he told Jumai. ‘You could still—’

  ‘Fuck that,’ she said, shooting a dismissive glance at the hovering machines. ‘Sooner take my chances with the aquatics, if that’s all right with you. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same.’

  She was right, of course. He’d committed to this path from the moment he tried flying the airpod. No point in second-guessing himself now.

  So they went inside, and the Administration vehicles were still loitering when the submarine filled its tanks and slipped under the waves. The craft turned out to be the Alexander Nevsky, one of Tiamaat’s small fleet of subsurface freighters. The Nevsky’s function was to carry or haul cargoes that were too heavy, bulky or hazardous for the elegant, hyper-efficient wind-driven cyberclippers that now moved nine-tenths of the world’s global freight.

  The Nevsky was a good hundred and fifty years old, rehabilitated from some dark former career as a nuclear-deterrent vessel. Now the only atomic technology aboard was its engine. Missile bays had been gutted of their terrible secrets and turned into storage holds. Behind it came a ponderous string of cargo drogues, hulled with sharkskin polymer to minimise drag, each as large as the submarine itself.

  The Nevsky demanded little in the way of a crew, judging by the exceedingly sparse onboard provisions for cabin space. In fact, it probably ran most of its duties entirely unmanned, save for any passengers who might be along for the ride.

  ‘How did you get here so quickly?’ Geoffrey asked Mira Gilbert when they were under way again, and after he had asked for the twentieth reassurance that the Cessna was being taken care of.

  ‘The Nevsky was already operating in the area,’ the merwoman said. ‘Routine cargo run. I podded aboard when it looked likely we’d be able to make a rendezvous.’

  Geoffrey and Jumai had been given dry clothes, towels and brimful mugs of salty sea-green chai. They were underwater now, travelling at maximum subsurface cruise speed, but there was no way to tell that from inside the Nevsky. No aug reach, no means of opening a window through the iron dermis of its hull.

  ‘I don’t know how much Truro told you,’ Geoffrey
said, ‘but I’m in a lot of trouble with the Mechanism. I don’t think they’re going to let me get away with it this easily.’

  ‘We can hold them off for the time being,’ Gilbert said. ‘Technically, you trespassed on Initiative property, you see.’

  ‘By ditching my plane?’

  Gilbert nodded enthusiastically. ‘Over our submarine.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was there,’ Geoffrey said in benign exasperation. ‘How can that possibly count as trespass?’

  ‘It’s all for the best. You’re in our immediate jurisdiction now, which means we can activate various quasi-legal stalling measures.’

  Geoffrey shivered. It was cold inside the Nevsky, even with the warm clothes they’d been given. ‘Won’t that get you into a stand-off with the Mechanism?’

  ‘You came to us, not the other way around,’ Gilbert said. ‘That changes the landscape. There are now . . . procedures which can be brought into play.’

  ‘Such as?’ Jumai asked.

  ‘If Geoffrey applies for Tiamaat citizenship, the Mech has to wait until we’ve completed our own battery of psych assessments . . . which, within reason, could take just about as long as we like.’

  ‘And then what – you hand me back anyway?’

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge later. For now, let’s get started on the citizenship application.’ She smiled at his hesitation. ‘It’s just a formality. You’re not signing over your immortal soul to Neptune and his watery minions.’

  ‘What do I have to do?’

  She voked text into the air. ‘Just read these words, and we’re good to go.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  During the night they had crossed and recrossed the complex fault-and-rift system of the Valles Marineris many times. As they swooped over impossibly high and narrow bridges – barely wide enough for the train’s single gleaming monorail, which gave the disconcerting illusion that they were flying over these immense gaps – Sunday had looked out for evidence of the buildings she had seen from Holroyd’s room, set into the canyon’s walls. A window, a nurse, a green-thorned man in a surgical bath. But she’d seen no sign of human habitation at all, not a single light or pipeline or road in all the empty hours. Valles Marineris was wide enough to span Africa from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian: you could lose entire countries in that kind of area, let alone buildings and windows.