Blue Remembered Earth (45 page)

‘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?’

Sunday saw no point in denying it. ‘We currently have a mutually beneficial relationship.’

Soya laughed at that. ‘I don’t doubt it. But let’s not pretend that they’re in this out of the goodness of their hearts.’

‘Never said they were. They’re helping me, and my brother’s helping them. Everyone’s a winner.’

‘You may see it that way. I’m not sure they do.’

Sunday was wearying of this. ‘Get to the point, whatever it is.’

‘Let’s be clear. I’m not saying the Pans are evil. They’re zealous, certainly, and a little scary when they talk about their long-term goals, and how the rest of us are going to get sucked along for the ride whether we like it or not . . . but that doesn’t make them villains. But in it for themselves, when push comes to shove? Most definitely.’

‘We’re all in it for ourselves on some level.’

‘Indeed. Why are you here, if not driven by intellectual curiosity? Isn’t that a fundamentally selfish motivation, when you get down to it? You want those answers so you can feel better yourself, not because you think they’ll necessarily do the rest of us any good.’

‘Until I get the answers, I’m not going to know, am I?’

‘
If
you get the answers,’ Soya corrected. ‘That’s the point. The Pans have been watching you every step of your journey, haven’t they? Always there, always willing to be helpful. Who were you meeting on the cable car if it wasn’t the Pans?’

‘I can’t do this without them. I’m not the spoilt rich kid you might have heard about.’

‘I don’t doubt that. But be clear about one thing: whatever you find here, your powerful new allies are likely to be at least as interested in learning about it as you are – and they may well decide to cut you out of the loop at the last minute.’

‘This is nothing to do with them. Or you, for that matter.’ Sunday stepped back from the edge, but took care not to break contact with the other woman. ‘OK, you’ve told me your name. But that means nothing. Who are you, Soya? What’s your agenda?’

‘Consider me a friend,’ Soya said. ‘That’s all you need to know for the moment.’ Using her other hand, the one that wasn’t resting on Sunday’s sleeve, she reached up and touched a stud in the side of her helmet. The visor de-mirrored instantaneously. Soya looked around, letting Sunday see her face behind the glass, and for a moment it was all she could do to keep her balance.

The face was her own.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

They flew Geoffrey back to Africa early the next day. The sickle-shaped craft was supersonic, a gauche indulgence when even the fastest airpods didn’t break the sound barrier. Geoffrey was the flier’s only occupant, and for most of the journey he stood at the extravagant curve of the forward window, hand on the railing, Caesar surveying his Rome.

Once they were over open water, back into aug reach and outpacing every other flying thing for kilometres around, Eunice returned.

‘I’ve been worried about you. I hope no mischief occurred while I was absent.’

‘I’m capable of taking care of myself, Grandmother.’

‘Well, that’s a development, you calling me “grandmother”.’

‘It just slipped out.’

‘Evidently.’ She fell silent, Geoffrey hoping that was the last she had to say, but after a suitable interval she continued, ‘So what happened down there? Or are you not going to tell me?’

‘We talked about Lin Wei, the friend you duped.’

‘I don’t even know of any . . . oh, wait – you mentioned her already, didn’t you?’

‘What did you actually
do
on Mercury, Eunice?’

‘Whatever anyone does: collected a few souvenirs, soaked up the local colour.’

He abandoned that line of enquiry, guessing how far it would get him. ‘Lin Wei came to you just before you died.’

‘How would you know?’

‘Because I think I might have met her. She didn’t “drown” at all. Or if she did, it was only a metaphorical drowning. Becoming one with the sea. Changing name and form. She’s a whale now, did you know? Calls herself Arethusa.’

‘Try to make at least
some
sense.’

‘Ocular found something. You remember Ocular, don’t you? Or perhaps that’s another part of your past you’ve conveniently buried.’ He gave an uninterested shrug. ‘What does it matter? I’ll tell you anyway. Lin found evidence of alien intelligence, the Mandala structure, and she thought you ought to know about it. Obviously still felt she owed you that, despite whatever it was you did to her.’

Eunice was standing next to him at the window, with the African coast racing towards them. The off-white wall of the coastal barrage was like a sheer chalk cliff rising from the sea. Fishing boats and pleasure craft slammed by underneath. They were flying at scarcely more than sail height, but even at supersonic speed the Pan aircraft would have been all but silent.

‘My involvement with Ocular was no more than peripheral,’ Eunice’s figment said.

‘Maybe that’s what the public record says. But Lin must have known there was more to it than that. Reason she made a point of keeping her side of the bargain, by giving you this news. And then a little while later you go and die.’

‘And that sequence of events troubles you?’

‘Starting to feel like a bit too much of a coincidence. Lin must have felt the same way or she wouldn’t have told me. She came to your funeral, you realise. That little girl in a red dress, the one none of us knew? It was a ching proxy of Lin Wei, manifesting as a child. The way she’d have been when the two of you were friends.’ After a moment he added, ‘I’m going up to the Winter Palace. If there’s anything I need to know about it, now’s the time to tell me.’

‘What would I know?’

‘You lived there, Eunice. You created it.’