‘Thank you for saving the Cessna,’ he said.
‘It was the least I could do. Well, almost the least. There is one other—’
But he cut her off. ‘You can take a message to Chama and Gleb for me. Will you do that?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Thank them for helping Sunday, while I was away. And tell them that the elephant work can continue. I have no objection to the establishment of a linked community. The Amboseli herds and the Lunar dwarves – they can share the same sensorium, the way Chama and Gleb planned. I’ll be glad to provide any technical assistance.’
‘I think they’ll be looking for more than just assistance,’ Sunday said. ‘Full collaboration, a shared enterprise.’
‘Then they’ve come to the wrong man.’ He walked on for a few more paces before elaborating. ‘I don’t work with elephants any more. That was something I used to do.’
Sunday could hardly believe what she was hearing. But she knew Geoffrey well enough to be certain that he wasn’t just saying that for dramatic effect, expecting everyone to put an arm around him and tell him how wonderfully important his work was, how he was undervalued and underappreciated, how he owed it to the elephants to keep on with the studies. She’d had that conversation often enough in the past.
This wasn’t it.
‘You’re serious.’
He nodded, but not with any sense of triumph. ‘I think we both have enough to keep us busy, don’t you?’
Lin Wei, to her credit, did not question Geoffrey’s sincerity. Perhaps it was just an outburst, something he’d retract in the days to come, but everything in her brother’s manner said otherwise.
‘Chama and Gleb will be sorry. I know they were looking forward to your involvement.’
‘They’re smart enough to manage without me. It was always the elephants they wanted, not the researcher.’
Lin Wei said, ‘I don’t think it’s very long to the scattering now.’ She made a gesture in the air, shaping a square, and the aug filled the square with darkness. ‘Can you all see this?’
They were still walking, but the square moved with them. One by one they confirmed that they were able to see it.
‘Sunday told Chama and Gleb about the numbers, and they in turn told me,’ Lin Wei went on. ‘The numbers wouldn’t have meant much to an outsider, but their meaning was immediately clear to me – as they would have been to Eunice.’
‘So what do they mean?’ Sunday asked.
The rectangle dappled itself with smudges of milky light. ‘Ocular pointing coordinates,’ Lin Wei said. ‘That’s what they are: a set of directions for the instrument. Before very long my adversaries will make it very difficult for me to access Ocular, but for the moment that is still my privilege – as well it should be, given that I conceived and birthed it. Needless to say, I did not hesitate to abuse that privilege by ordering Arachne to point Ocular in the direction corresponding to the coordinates.’
‘Mandala?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘No. Crucible lies in the constellation Virgo, and this is in the direction of Lyra, a completely different part of the sky. Close to Altair, in fact – one of the stars of the Summer Triangle. Arachne’s search algorithms eliminated any starlike objects from the immediate centre of the field, but you’ll note that there is still something there.’
‘What is it?’ Sunday asked.
‘I thought perhaps you might be able to tell me, given what the two of you have learned of your grandmother. It’s incredibly faint, and at first glance it appears quasarlike. But it’s not a quasar. It’s a . . . well, I don’t know. Neither does Arachne. She’s seen billions of astronomical objects, but nothing that looks remotely like this . . . energy source. That’s what it is – an energy source, highly Dopplered, we can tell from the spectrum – moving away from us along what appears to be a radial line of sight. We’ll have a better handle on that as time goes by, if we pick up lateral motion. But I don’t think we will. I think we will find that this thing, this object, started off in the solar system, about sixty years ago. And ever since then it’s been rushing away from us, falling into the summer stars.’
Geoffrey asked, ‘How far out is it now?’
Lin Wei’s smile was impish. ‘I think I’ve given you enough to be going on with, don’t you? Let’s just say it’s a long, long way – further than any human artefact has ever reached. And travelling at a quite ridiculous speed.’
‘To nowhere in particular?’ Sunday probed. ‘There’s no star along that exact line of sight?’
‘There are stars, to be sure. But none that strike us – Arachne or myself – as an obvious candidate.’ Lin Wei made a flicking gesture and the image disappeared.
‘That’s all you’re going to give us?’ Sunday asked.
‘For now. You want more, come and talk to me. I think we all have rather a lot to discuss, don’t you?’
‘She’s in that thing,’ Geoffrey said. ‘That’s what you think. That Eunice is in a ship, a ship that’s been heading away from Earth for sixty years.’
‘She spoke to me once,’ Sunday replied, ‘about how it would feel to just keep going. To never go home again.’ She paused, trying to call her grandmother’s exact words to mind. ‘Until Earth was just a blue memory. What I didn’t realise was . . . she meant to do it.’
‘She could still be—’ Geoffrey began. But he caught himself before the sentence was out.
Sunday nodded. He didn’t need to say what he was thinking. She was thinking the same thing herself.
She supposed the only way to know for sure would be to go out there. To catch up with that impossibly distant thing and see what was inside it.
A sleeping lion, perhaps. Senge Dongma.
Jitendra said, ‘I think it’s time.’
He was right, too. Sunday could feel the ground rumbling under them as the blowpipe sent its tiny package racing under the plains. As one they turned to face east. As if of its own volition, her hand rose to her neck, fingering the charm she had been given on Mars, binding her to the past, binding her to the future.
They watched the spark rise from the mountain, a tiny bright star climbing against the turn of the heavens. It was travelling ballistically now, carried on the momentum it had gained in the long acceleration as it rode the magnetic catapult. Some of that momentum was already ebbing: the package was encountering atmospheric resistance, albeit from air that was half as thick as at ground level, and gravity was beginning to reassert its claim. Ordinarily the launch lasers would have cut in by now, projecting their ferocious energies onto the underside of the package to give it that extra push into orbit. Some of the onlookers, Sunday felt certain, must already have come to the conclusion that the blowpipe had mistimed. Others, she felt equally sure, were entirely ignorant of the usual mechanics.
The star kept rising – from the party’s vantage point it appeared to be climbing vertically, but it was in fact following an arc, one that was already taking it east, out towards the Indian Ocean. Just when it looked on the point of falling, though, the lasers shone. Their beams scratched diamond-bright tracks in the sky, converging from Kilimanjaro’s summit to meet at a fixed focus point in space, where the air became a little ball of ionised hell. The focus would ordinarily have been immediately underneath the rising object, but the arrangements were different today; the lasers were now directing their energies directly ahead of the package. It had no protection against that; it had been designed to be pushed, not to hit that plasma head-on. With no frontal shielding beyond that necessary to withstand the aerodynamic stresses, the effect on the package was rapid and glorious. The star’s brightness flared by sudden magnitudes, until it looked as if a new day was dawning. Sunday raised her fingers against the dazzle, catching greens and pinks in the tiny blazing point. The light fluttered, and then – as quickly as it had begun – that little new sun began to break up, oozing molten droplets of itself. The colours subsided – gold turning to amber, amber to orange, orange to a slow dulli
ng red. She tried to trace the falling sparks, but they were soon lost in the glow of the sky.
She knew the truth of it, that if any part of him was to rain down from that pyre, it would happen far out to sea. And perhaps no part had survived that incandescence. But from where Sunday was standing, from where everyone now stood, it was very hard not to believe that some part of their friend and mentor would end up touching the summit of that mountain, end up touching the snows of Kilimanjaro.
And that was enough.
We spoke of beginnings, at the start of this. It is well now to speak of endings. That was the last that Geoffrey had to do with Matilda, or the M-clan, or the Amboseli herds, or elephants in general. Or at least the last that any of us ever knew about. There was sadness at first, then anger and remorse, mingled with lingering self-disgust at what he believed he had caused to happen. Then just sadness again, long and slow-dying, like the endless collapsing roll of thunder across the plains. He could not have known, of course. And it took years before he was even ready to speak of what had happened, on that day when Matilda saw too deeply into his head, and understood Memphis for what he was.
Enemy of her kind. Murderer of elephants.
Even though Memphis had done it for no other reason than to protect us. But she could not see that. She was just an animal, after all, no matter how brightly her mind shone.
They’re still out there, the phyletic dwarves. There’s no harm in disclosing this information now. We don’t know where they are, and in all likelihood neither do the orthodox Pans. After the sundering, after the great parting of the ways between Truro and Arethusa, Chama and Gleb took their work deeper underground than it had been before. But somewhere out there, in a solar system still big enough to contain hiding places and dark corners, still big enough for secrets, the elephants thrive. Once in a while, conveyed to us through a labyrinth of quangle paths, all but untraceable, we hear from the zookeepers. They are still happily married, and the great work continues. The elephants are doing well. One day we may yet be a part of it.
Data packets still bind the dwarves to the M-clan, providing that essential socializing framework, but please do not go trying to follow that thread; it’ll get you nowhere. Besides, the bonds between the herds are much weaker now than they were when all this started. Twenty years on, the dwarves have grandchildren of their own, sons and daughters, matriarchs and bulls, family ties, the foundation of a complex, self-sustaining elephant society. One day, when resources allow, they may even be allowed to grow, to stop being dwarves. But perhaps that is for another century.
If Geoffrey misses his role in that enterprise, he is careful not to show it. No more, perhaps, than Sunday misses her former career as an artist, or Lucas misses his as a willing component in the family machine. We have all had other business to keep hands, hearts and minds occupied.
Sunday returned to the Descrutinised Zone, and for a little while she tried to submerge herself in the routines of her old life. She went back to the commissions she had abandoned, before her journey to Mars. Jitendra, too, tried to pick up the pieces of his former existence. But it was hard. They both carried too much knowledge, burning in their heads like a lit fuse. We all did.
For years Sunday had worked to bring the Eunice construct to fruition. That private project had been the mainspring of her life, the thing she cared about beyond any of her tiring, rent-paying commissions. She had abandoned physical sculpture in preference for the sculpting of a single human life, in all its dizzying fractal glory.
And she had not failed. But the construct had grown too clever, too complex. It had torn itself free of Sunday’s plans, become something she could influence but not control. And although Geoffrey and Jumai had tried to shield her from the truth, she had made the necessary deductions for herself. The artilect running Lionheart was everything she had ever hoped her construct might become. The work she strove to complete had already been achieved.
The construct abides. Like the dwarves, it is out there somewhere. Being a bodyless spirit, haunting the aug, there would be even less point in trying to pin it down. We long ago assigned it all the autonomy it craved. Once in a while, we hear from it. Perhaps it thinks of the woman in whose shadow it walks, the figure it can emulate but never become. Perhaps it is content to become something else entirely. Sometimes, when it offers us wise counsel, when it advises us on the intentions of those who would act against us, we are grateful that it is on our side. At other times we slightly fear it. And sometimes we forget that Eunice is an it, not a she.
Of the real Eunice, the living woman, our dead grandmother, things are simpler. At least we know where she is now.
There will, of course, be those who criticise us for waiting as long as we did, before making this decision. What choice did we have, though? When this burden was placed upon us we were, to be frank, little better than children. We needed time to think, time to judge the readiness of the world. Eunice could not make this decision sixty years earlier; we could not make it rashly either. We wished to see how the world would adapt to the new engines, and the knowledge of Mandala.
It’s been twenty years. But now we are ready.
This testimony, written in our shared hand as honestly as we are able, is our attempt at explaining ourselves. We did not go looking for this responsibility, but we have done our best to measure up to it. Looking back across these years, at the way we were then, all our enmities are matters of vanishing consequence, the squabbling of infants. We have moved beyond such things. If nothing else, we owed it to Hector and Memphis to rise above our former selves. Because if we couldn’t do it, if we couldn’t put aside the past, what hope could there be for anyone else?
Twenty years ago the world saw a glimpse of what lay ahead. The improved engines have shrunk the inner solar system, brought Jupiter and Saturn closer, and accelerated the development and colonisation of Trans-Neptunian space. There have been accidents and stupidities, but for the most part the technology has been absorbed without catastrophe. As well it should have been, for what we gave you then was really nothing at all. The real test of our collective wisdom begins here and now.
We call it the Chibesa Principle. The improved engines were merely a glimpse of what this new physics can give us. Properly tamed, the Chibesa Principle will not only shrink the solar system even further. It will put human starflight within our reach.
But understand the risk, as well as the promise. Like the discovery of fire, this is not something that can be uninvented. And in the wrong hands, used maliciously or foolishly, the Chibesa Principle is fully capable of murdering worlds.
That is why our grandmother deemed us unready. But that was more than eighty years ago, and much has changed since then. We think things are different now, and that the species is ready to demonstrate its collective wisdom. If we are wrong, if our wisdom is lacking, the Chibesa Principle will burn us. And if that is the case, and if there is anyone left to cast judgement on our actions, we shall gladly accept history’s verdict. But if we are right, it will give us everything that Soya Akinya showed her daughter, when she held her up in the velvet warmth of a Serengeti night: all these stars, all these tiny diamond lights.
We have been clever, and on occasion we have been foolish. For smart monkeys, we can, when the mood takes us, be exceedingly stupid. But it was cleverness that brought us to this point, and it is only cleverness that will serve us from now on.
We have no time for anything else.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Huge thanks are due to Tim Kauffman, Louise Kleba, Kotska Wallace and Joan Wamae – and not least my wife – for agreeing to read an early draft of this novel and offering their comments and suggestions. Up-and-coming writer Jonathan Dotse was also kind enough to make time during a visit to London to talk about Africa and science fiction, from a uniquely Ghanaian perspective. For specific discussions on exoplanets and breakthrough physics, I thank my brilliant and talented scientist friends Lisa Kaltenegger and Dave Clements. I am ind
ebted to all of you for your time and insights. The faults of the book, of course, remain my responsibility alone.
I spent the first decade of my professional writing career under the able editorship of Jo Fletcher, not only a trusted colleague but also a good friend. By the time Jo left to run her own imprint we had already been discussing this book for several years. There’s no doubting her influence on BLUE REMEMBERED EARTH, and some of that influence, I’m sure, will continue to be felt in later instalments of the Akinya saga. In particular, it was Jo’s immediate fondness for the elephants that made me determined to make them much more than background dressing. Thank you, Jo!
By the same token, it has been a delight to work with my new editor, Simon Spanton – all round good bloke and a man with a deep passion for the core virtues of science fiction. It is no easy thing to take on an established writer halfway through their career; Simon has given me nothing but support and friendship. Respect!
Once again, it has been a pleasure to work with the brilliant and meticulous Lisa Rogers, who has been my line editor for most of my career – there is, I suspect, no sharper pair of eyes in the business, nor anyone better equipped to impose sense on my often muddled approach to internal chronology. Thanks, Lisa!
I am also hugely indebted to my agent, Robert Kirby, for years of support and enthusiasm. Like Jo, Robert has been in on this book since the beginning. Deep into a big project, it’s easy to forget why one ever thought it was a great idea in the first place. Robert has always managed to give me that motivational impulse, whenever I felt my energy flagging. Again, it’s been a pleasure.
The genesis of this book – one strand of it, anyway – goes back to the first in a series of visits to the Kennedy Space Center. My wife and I have been fortunate enough to witness two launches of the Space Shuttle Atlantis – literally unrepeatable experiences. For allowing me to get closer to a launch than I ever dreamed I would, I thank Tim Kauffman, Louise Kleba and Piers Sellers – all fine people, still committed to the idea of human space exploration. It has also been a pleasure and privilege to spend time with Steve Agid, who knows more about the past, present and future of manned and unmanned spaceflight than almost anyone on the planet.