Blue Remembered Earth (40 page)

‘Since I’ve already been dragged here,’ Geoffrey said, ‘I may as well speak to anyone who wants a conversation. Will the Prime Pan be coming here?’

Truro’s minimalist features nonetheless evinced apology. ‘The mountain must go to Mohammed, I’m afraid. Are you up for a bit more swimming?’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

According to the aug they were somewhere over the equatorial highlands of Syrtis Major, on the other side of Mars from Pavonis Mons.

They had gone down in the cheapest kind of cut-price shuttle. Sunday had no regrets about taking the fast way: she was too excited for that. Jitendra shared her anticipation, his grin only intensifying as re-entry commenced. They’d gone from Stickney’s centrifugal gravity to the free fall of the shuttle, and now weight was returning as the shuttle hit atmosphere and enveloped itself in a blistering cocoon of neon-pink plasma. As the deceleration peaked, the seats adjusted to provide fullbody support. It was more gravity than Sunday had experienced in years. She loved watching the plasma snap and ripple around the hull, like a flag in a stiff breeze.

And then it eased, and they were flying as much as falling. The shuttle’s hull was reshaping itself all the while, optimising to the changing conditions, resisting gravity to the last instant. Gullies and craters slid underneath, sharp-shadowed, Sunday certain that she could stretch out her hand and feel the leathery texture of the surface, scraping beneath her palm like the cover of an old book. So far, at least, there was nothing down there to suggest that they were anything other than the very first people to reach this world. No settlements, no roads, not even the glint of some long-abandoned mechanical envoy, dust-bound for centuries. It was staggering, all that emptiness.

Jitendra saw something, pointing excitedly at a dark worming trail, the furiously gyring knot at its head etching a meandering track across the surface. ‘It’s a vehicle, I think. A Mars rover, or maybe some kind of low-altitude aircraft.’

Sunday had already voked the mag to maximum. ‘Kicking up a lot of dust. Moving pretty quickly, too.’

‘It’s a dust-devil,’ Eunice said, cutting into Sunday’s thoughts. ‘Just a whirlwind.’

She turned to Jitendra, and repeated Eunice’s words.

‘Oh,’ he said, on a falling note.

‘Raised on the Moon,’ Eunice said disapprovingly. ‘Doesn’t have the first foggiest notion of terrestrial planet weather systems.’

Sunday voked, ‘Didn’t think you’d show up until we were down, Eunice.’

‘There’s local aug, enough of a network for me to utilise. I’m synching with my Earthside self as we speak. That’s going to take some time. Have you heard from your brother?’

‘We talked just before I got on the shuttle. He knows I’m OK.’ Sunday still had one eye on the scrolling view. ‘Have you been in contact with him?’

‘Not since he went off-grid.’

Sunday tensed. ‘What do you mean, “off-grid”?’

‘Your brother’s currently a guest of the United Aquatic Nations, in Tiamaat. Truro sent a plane to pick him up.’

‘I wasn’t expecting him to forget the favours we owe him for. The only reason I’m here is because the Pans took care of my ticket.’

‘They’re more interested in us than I expected, though. This isn’t just about reciprocity. I worry that it’s me they’re really after.’

‘You don’t exist. And at the risk of wounding your ego, not everyone in the known universe is obsessed with you and your secret history.’

‘Let’s be honest, though, a fair few are.’

‘But only because you spent half your life turning yourself into a puzzle. Geoffrey blinked me a copy of the mural in your bedroom – seems you were right about the alterations in Phobos.’

‘Good to have my suspicions confirmed. I’m not infallible, and I can’t vouch for the absolute reliability of my memories.’

‘Trust me, I never once thought you were infallible. What do you know about Truro?’

‘He’s not top dog, although he’s not far off it either. He answers to the Prime Pan, whoever that is. Here’s the catch, though. Sift through my logged conversations – as I myself have done – and you’ll find ample evidence of occasional traffic between myself and Tiamaat. Highly quangled, so you can’t get into deep content, but someone there was clearly of interest to me. For years, decades. Going all the way back to Mercury.’

‘You have a theory.’

‘My . . . death has stirred up ghosts, Sunday. I can’t be certain of anything. But there aren’t many people I’d have been capable of sustaining a lifelong association with, without one or both of us going mad with boredom. What I’m getting at is this: did the Prime Pan know me? Did I know the Prime Pan?’

‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’

‘Not yet. I’ll wait for more data, until I’m not only fully synched but back in touch with Geoffrey.’

Sunday seethed. ‘I’m ordering you to tell me.’

‘And I’m refusing. This is a deep-level epistemological conflict, granddaughter. You can’t force me to
be more like myself
and then throw a tantrum when I decide to act entirely in character. Live with your handiwork, my dear. You made me the high-minded bitch that I am.’

It wasn’t long before human presence asserted itself in the form of what might have been a pipeline or power-conduction conduit lancing across the surface in bold tangents. A little later, as the line zagged to match their course, they passed over a frogspawn clump of silvery domes, an outpost or some kind of maintenance complex. Even at full magnification, Sunday couldn’t see a living soul. Then, five or six minutes later, the line met another trunk branching in from the north, and there was something like a village or hamlet at the junction: multiple domes, square buildings, a geometric quilt of copper-green hexagons spreading to the south – solar collectors, or perhaps cropbeds – and a pale finger-scratch arrowing west that was too purposefully Euclidean to be a dust-devil track.

She followed it – they were moving west as well – until she picked out the bumbling, bouncing form of what was unmistakably a surface vehicle. It was a silver beetle with six huge wheels, plodding its way home.

After that, signs of civilisation only increased. More villages, and then a town, domes laid out in curling galactic spirals from a central core. She couldn’t see anyone moving around, even at full magnification, and when she tried to ching down to street level her request was politely rebuffed.

The town had a railway line, also punching west, slicing through some craters, angling around others, occasionally diving underground for no particular reason. Then she saw a train, speeding along the track in the opposite direction from their motion – six silver cylinders with surprisingly blunt test-tube-shaped ends.

They followed the railway line until it passed through another big town, and then a city twinkled on the western horizon. Crommelin Edge, said the aug, and Sunday remembered that this was where they were going to be processed for final Martian immigration. The elevator’s anchorpoint was halfway around Mars, so Crommelin Edge – located close to the equator, close to the zero meridian, in the cratered plateau of Arabia Terra – was one of the two main entry points for arriving travellers.

The shuttle made a pass over the city, sloughing altitude and speed. The settlement took the form of a crescent, partly tracing the outer wall of its namesake crater. Scant evidence of planning here, just a bubbling froth of variegated domes and other structures, cubes and rhomboids and cylinders, pylons and vanes, looking less like an organised settlement than a bag of marbles and toy building blocks spilt out onto the floor and gathered into rough formation. The artist in Sunday appreciated the ordered form of the spiral she had seen earlier, but there was something haphazardly human about this arrangement that also appealed to her. She liked her cities best when they contained gnarly, counter-intuitive geometries.

The shuttle came down on a landing strip surrounded by domes and soggy-looking amoeboid terminal buildings. The hull flicked to perfect transparency and their seatbelts slithered away. Service vehicles were already surrounding the shuttle, while a docking tube extended itself into position, flexing and probing like the trunk of an inquisitive elephant. The sky over the spaceport was a darkening mauve, fretted by wisps of high-altitude clouds.

‘Welcome to Mars,’ said a piped voice. ‘The Mars Sol Date is one hundred and two thousand, four hundred and forty-seven sols. Local Mean Solar Time is eighteen hours and thirty-one minutes. For the benefit of passengers arriving from Earth, it is sixteen thirty-five Coordinated Universal Time on March thirteen.’

Cavernous and bright, the terminal could have been any shopping mall from Mombasa to the Moon. Exos loitered to assist those struggling with the gravity, but no one was having any obvious difficulties. Adverts jostled for attention, pushing services and products that were for the most part uniquely Martian.

Sunday wasn’t at all surprised when she was taken aside for additional interviewing and background examination. They had reported the dead body on Phobos before boarding the shuttle and had been detained while bureaucratic procedure was observed. No crime had been committed: she’d been perfectly within her rights to trample all over the moon, and she’d broken no rules by chinging into the abandoned camp. Of necessity, they had to wait while the Stickney authorities sent their own investigators into the sealed-up dome, verifying Sunday’s side of the story, but once that was done, they were allowed to be on their way.

Flags had been raised, though. It was difficult enough travelling incognito as an Akinya, but now there was the matter of the corpse and her Panspermian affiliation.

They were in the holding area when word came down from Phobos: the investigators had run a trace on the suit and crossmatched the DNA of the body inside with their records. The corpse belonged to Nicolas Escoffery, a Martian citizen who’d gone missing on Phobos nearly fifty years earlier. Escoffery was a broker in second-hand equipment, a wheeler and dealer who made frequent trips between the moon and the surface, and whose operations often skirted the edge of legality. At the time of his disappearance, Escoffery was under investigation for customs irregularities and appeared to have made efforts to conceal his true whereabouts. An area of Mars had been searched, but no one had guessed that he was actually on Phobos.

‘Wouldn’t happen now,’ it was explained to Sunday. ‘You just can’t get away with that kind of crap these days.’

How Escoffery had died was a different matter. He hadn’t been imprisoned in the camp, and the doors hadn’t been sealed over until after his death. The best guess was that his suit had malfunctioned, its servo-systems jamming into immobility, turning itself into a man-shaped coffin. Sunday remembered the white spider she had dislodged from Escoffery’s suit, though, and wasn’t so sure . . . but she thought it advisable to say no more on the subject.

They were eventually allowed on their way. As distasteful as the authorities found Sunday’s Panspermian association, it wasn’t a sufficient pretext for denying her entry. All the same, she could sense the resentment that they hadn’t found something to pin on either her or Jitendra.

They collected their luggage, which was already waiting by the time they cleared immigration. Sunday made a conscious effort to put recent events behind her. She wasn’t looking forward to what was ahead, and she could still see that paper-skinned skull, grinning through her own visor . . . But that was over, and if she dwelt on it, it was going to ruin this delicious experience: her first few steps on another world. She could return to this place a thousand times and it would never be this new.

‘We’re here,’ she said, hugging Jitendra. ‘I can’t believe it. Under my feet . . . it’s Mars.’

Literally so. In the arrivals plaza, a strip of flooring had been cut back to raw Martian soil, like a lumpy red carpet. It must have been sprayed over with some atom-thin polymer to eliminate dust, but she could not have told that from the feel of the ground under her feet or the palm of her hand. For a ridiculous moment she had to fight the urge to kneel down and kiss it.

Jitendra finished rearranging the contents of the suitcases, to make them easier to carry. ‘We need to celebrate. Get a drink, now. Before the moment passes.’

‘So there’s this amazing, precious experience, this once-in-a-lifetime thing, and before it has a chance to form deep neural connections you want to batter it into submission with toxic chemicals?’

Jitendra gave the matter due consideration. ‘Basically, if you must put it that way, that’s exactly what I had in mind.’

‘Fine,’ Sunday said, deciding that it was much easier to go along with him than otherwise. ‘I’m up for that as well.’

But first there was some business to attend to. The Pans had given Sunday a ching address to call upon her arrival. As tempting as it was to put the matter off, it would only be delaying the inevitable. She found a quiet corner of the arrivals lounge and voked the request.

The bind went through with a high level of quangle, and she found herself in a room which – judging by the high aspect of the sun – lay some distance west of Crommelin. Under her feet was glass, and under the glass was empty air, plunging all the way down to the scoured red ground, so far below that she might as well have still been in orbit. To either side, ancient weathered cliffs receded into mist-hazed obscurity. A handful of sleek discus-shaped buildings were cut into the cliffsides, or buttressed out from them.