Blue Remembered Earth (56 page)

‘Enough to make sure the cousins don’t get there ahead of us. All we need to do is shut them out – shouldn’t be too hard, should it? We get in, find out what, if anything, Eunice left behind up there, and leave. And then, if at all possible, we can all get on with our lives.’

‘
This
is your life now,’ Gilbert reminded him gently. ‘Citizen Akinya.’

Geoffrey touched the damp, warm glass of Arethusa’s container, trying to make out the form it held. With the way the hold’s lights were arranged, he could discern little more than a dark hovering shadow in the green-stained murkiness of the water tank.

‘It’s an extravagance, of course,’ Arethusa confided. Her voice came straight into his head via the ship’s onboard aug. ‘Moving me around. I’m not just meat and bone, like you. I weigh fifty tonnes to begin with, and I also need thousands of litres of water to float in. But they can owe me this one. We have fuel to spare – or at least we did, before your family decided to race us to the prize – and in an emergency my suspension fluid can always be used for coolant or reaction mass or radiation shielding.’

‘What would happen to you?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘I’d die, very probably. But I wouldn’t object to the basic unfairness of it. Doesn’t mean I’m tired of life, or ready to end it – not at all. But I’ve long since reached the point where I accept that I’m living on borrowed time. Every waking instant.’

‘I still don’t understand. Why now?’

‘Why what now?’ She sounded unreasonably prickled by the question.

‘Don’t tell me you just decided to leave the planet at the drop of a hat, Arethusa. Something’s prompted this. Where are you going, anyway? You can’t stay in the Winter Palace.’

‘I don’t plan to. But it’s been time to move on for a while now. I bore easily, Geoffrey. Life in the aqualogy stopped offering me challenges decades ago, and for that reason alone I need new horizons. Ocular’s finally given me the spur to make the transition.’

‘To leave Earth.’

‘I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time. But this news – the Crucible data, the Mandala and the death of my old friend Eunice – it really feels as if the time is right.
Carpe diem
, and all that. If I don’t do this now, what else will it take? We Pans preach outward migration, exploration and colonisation as a species imperative. The least I can do is offer deeds instead of words.’

‘You mean to stay in space, then?’

‘I’m not going back,’ she affirmed. ‘And most certainly not after all the fuel expenditure it took to haul me up here. Do I want to look profligate?’ She fell silent, ruminating in darkness. The tank chugged and whirred. ‘There’s a whole system to explore, Geoffrey,’ she said eventually. ‘Worlds and moons, cities and vistas. Wonder and terror. More than Lin Wei could ever have imagined, bless her. And that’s just this little huddle of rock and dust around this one little yellow star.’

‘You are Lin Wei,’ he said quietly. ‘You never drowned. You just became a whale.’

She sounded more disappointed than angered. ‘Can we at least maintain the pretence, for the sake of civility?’

‘Why did this happen to you?’

‘I made it happen. Why else?’ She sounded genuinely perplexed that the question needed answering. ‘It was a phase.’

‘Being a whale?’

‘Being human.’ Then, after a moment: ‘We both became strange, Eunice and I, both turned our backs on what we’d once been. Me in here. Eunice in her prison. We both lived and loved, and after all that, it wasn’t enough.’

The impulse to defend his grandmother was overwhelming, but he knew it would have been a mistake. ‘At least you haven’t turned into a recluse. You’re still in the world, on some level. You still have plans.’

‘Yes,’ Arethusa acknowledged. ‘I do. Even if, now and then, I scare myself with them.’

‘Do you know why she hid herself away?’

‘She was never the same after Mercury. But then again, who was?’ Arethusa paused. She was still Arethusa to him: try as he might, he couldn’t relate this floating apparition to his notion of Lin Wei, the little Chinese girl who had befriended his grandmother, back when the world was a simpler place. ‘My doctors – the people who helped shape me – tell me I could live a very long time, Geoffrey. One way to cheat death is to just keep growing, you see. I’m still forming new neural connections. My brain astonishes itself.’

‘How long?’

‘Decades, maybe even a century: who knows? No different for you, really. You’re a young man. A hundred years from now, do you honestly expect medicine not to have made even more progress?’

‘I don’t think that far ahead.’

‘It’s time we got into the habit. Every living, breathing human being. Because we’re all in this together, aren’t we? We endured the turmoil of climate change, the Resource and Relocation wars, the metaphorical and literal floods and storms, didn’t we? Or if we didn’t, we at least had the marvellous good fortune to have ancestors who did, to allow us to be born into this time of miracles and wonder, when possibilities are opening rather than closing. We’re all Poseidon’s children, Geoffrey: whether we like it or not.’

‘Poseidon’s children,’ he repeated. ‘Is that supposed to mean something?’

‘We came through. That’s all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it’s time to start doing something useful with our lives.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Sunday’s boots crunched into Tharsis dust. This, she was startled to realise, was the first time that she had actually set foot on Martian soil. The strip of plasticised ground in the arrivals terminal hadn’t counted, nor the spidering walkway in Crommelin. She was outside now, hundreds of kilometres from anything that might even loosely be termed civilisation. Between her body and the dust and rock of this vastly ancient planet lay only the thinnest membrane of air and alloy and plastic. She was a cosy little fiefdom of warmth and life, enclaved by dominions of cold and death.

She was accustomed to wearing a suit, accustomed to being outside in the Moon’s vacuum and extremes of temperature. Mars was different, though. It lulled with its very familiarity. It didn’t look airless, or even particularly antipathetic to life. She had spent enough time on Earth to recognise the handiwork of rain and weathering. The sky wasn’t black, it was the pale pink of a summer’s twilight. There were clouds and corkscrewing dust-devils. The ground, its temperature and texture transmitted through the soles of her boots, did not feel unwelcoming. She felt as if she could slip the boots off and pad barefoot through the dust, as if on a beach.

This was how Mars murdered, with an assassin’s stealth and cunning. People came from Earth or elsewhere with the best of intentions. They knew that the environment was lethal, that only suits and walls would protect them. Yet time and again, men and women were found outside, dead, half-out of their suits. They weren’t mad, exactly, and most of them had not been suicidal. But something in the landscape’s familiarity had worked its fatal way into their brains, whispering reassurance, even friendliness.
Trust me. I look welcoming, because I am. Take off that silly armour. You don’t need it here
.

This was not the Mars that Eunice had first set foot on a hundred years earlier, Sunday reminded herself. She might be a long way from Vishniac, and Vishniac might be a long way from the nearest city, but, crucially, there were cities. There’d been none in Eunice’s time. No trains, no space elevator, no infrastructure.

If Sunday’s suit failed now, which was about as mathematically probable as her being hit by a falling meteorite, Dorcas and her crew were close at hand. And if Dorcas and her crew ran into trouble, help would arrive from other Overfloaters soon enough. Vishniac could send an airship or plane, and by bullet train nowhere on Mars was more than a day from Vishniac. She was plugged into a planetary life-support system no less capable than the one clamped onto her back.

Sunday’s courage wasn’t lacking; she did not need anyone to tell her that. But it was a different order of courage that had brought Eunice to this world, one that had no currency on this prosperous and confident new Mars, with its casinos and hotels and rental firms. Even here, in the Evolvarium, the risk to which Sunday exposed herself was measured, quantifiable – and if she didn’t like it, she could leave easily enough. And in the worst of scenarios, it would not be Mars that killed her. It would be the things people had brought to Mars, and set amok.

‘We start here,’ Gribelin said, nudging the drill into place. ‘If we’re off, it’s not by more than a couple of centimetres, and we should be able to refine our bore once we get closer.’

‘How long?’ Sunday asked.

‘To chew down?’ He shrugged through the tight-fitting armour of his surface suit. ‘Two, three hours, if it was solid Tharsis lava. But it’s not. It’s been shattered and poured back into the shaft, so progress’ll be a lot easier. Shouldn’t take us much more than an hour.’

The Overfloaters had lowered his truck back down from their ship, depositing it gently a few metres from the drill site. The truck had deployed bracing legs, and then Gribelin had swung a vertical drill out from the rear of the cargo bed, directing the heavy equipment into place with gestures, voked commands and the occasional shove from his shoulder. The drill was greasy with low-temperature lubricant and anti-dust caulk. He guided the bit into position, allowed it to rotate slowly as it chewed through the top layer of dust and reached rock. Then it began to spin faster, a tawny plume of digested rock arcing out from the top of it. Sunday could feel its grinding labours through the soles of her boots.

‘See now why we held off until sun-up?’ Dorcas said, angling her head back to track the plume’s trajectory, making sure it went nowhere near her precious airship. ‘Machines hunt with vibrations. Would’ve been a very bad idea to be sat here at night, practically inviting them to come and take a closer look.’

Sunday nodded: she could see the prudence in that, but she could also see the sense in being done with this as quickly as possible. The drill was already making tangible progress, its cutting head a hand’s depth into the solidified lava.

There were five of them in suits: Gribelin, Jitendra and Sunday, Dorcas and one of her senior crew, another Martian woman who Sunday had gathered was called Sibyl. The Overfloaters had their own suits, very sleek and modern, with Neolithic and Australian aboriginal animal designs embossed on them in luminous holographic inks. Jitendra and Sunday made do with the units Gribelin carried on his truck for emergency use. They were clunkier, with stiffer articulation and no fancy ornamentation, but they worked well enough, and there was sufficient comms functionality to facilitate a sparse local aug. Tags identified the other suited figures, and a simplified version of the tactical map hovered in Sunday’s upper visual field, ready to swell and assume centrality when she needed it. There had been no significant alterations to the map during the night, but in the morning the Overfloaters had acquired intelligence from their fellow brokers, and the positions of the Evolvarium’s chief protagonists had been updated.

There were shifting networks of rivalry and cooperation, favour and obligation. It wasn’t transparently clear that all this intelligence was reliable, but Dorcas was used to applying her own confidence filters. Her high-value allies had reported that the golem was on the move again, heading their way after spending the night immobile. ‘But it’s taking a big chance,’ Dorcas had explained, while they were suiting up.

‘Aren’t we all?’ Sunday asked.

Dorcas tapped a version of the map. ‘Two C-class collectors moved into this sector since we passed through. A pair of hammerheads. Not the worst, but bad enough. If your golem carries on, it’ll pass within two or three kays of their present positions.’

It’s not my golem
, Sunday thought sourly. ‘Is that going to be a problem for him . . . I mean, it?’

Dorcas nodded sagely. ‘He won’t
automatically
be ambushed, not in daylight. But then again one or both of the hammerheads may decide to have a go at
him
, if it thinks the likelihood of reprisal is small. Which it would be – the golem’s not even a warmblood – but the hammerheads probably don’t know that.’

‘Probably?’

‘Don’t put anything past these things. Sniffing comms traffic, distinguishing between a human pilot and a chinged proxy – that’s within their cognitive bound, just as it’s within ours.’

Sunday brushed a gauntleted finger against the largest icon on the map. ‘The Aggregate?’

‘Yes,’ Dorcas said.

‘Maybe it’s me, but it looks closer than it did yesterday.’

‘It’s covered some ground overnight. It probably doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Probably,’ Sunday echoed once more.

‘It can’t know what we’re doing here,’ Dorcas said. ‘It can’t know, and even if it did, it wouldn’t be interested. I told you, it’s like a city-state. We’re nothing to it.’

Sunday watched the drill bite deeper, its progress plain to the naked eye – it had reached at least a metre into the ground, perhaps more. That there was something down there was now beyond doubt. The radar and seismic profiles had improved since Dorcas’s first detection, and now revealed what appeared to be a purposefully buried box, not so very different in size and proportions from the container Chama had uncovered on the Moon. A rectangular shaft must have been excavated, the box lowered into it lengthwise and the waste material dropped back over it, before being tamped down. With better equipment, they might even have been able to peer inside the box without bringing it to the surface. Not that it mattered: they’d have the thing in their hands before very long. Gribelin was digging a circular shaft slightly wider than the original bore, and he would stop short of the item itself, for fear of damaging it or triggering some destruct mechanism or booby trap. To be sure, they would send in the proxy Gribelin carried attached to the front of his vehicle.