Blue Remembered Earth (63 page)

‘And now to me,’ Jonathan said.

‘Except I didn’t find you,’ Sunday said. ‘You found me. Soya knew I was on the planet: that’s why she contacted me in Crommelin.’

‘It was easy to track your arrival,’ Soya said. ‘Given the timing, there couldn’t be any other reason why you’d come to Mars, other than to find out what your grandmother had buried here.’

‘I failed,’ Sunday said.

Jonathan braced his hands on his knees and rose from his chair. ‘Do you have any idea where you are?’

‘Somewhere out in the sticks, I’m guessing. A camp or station everyone assumes to be unoccupied. Probably quite near the Evolvarium, since I doubt we travelled very far overnight.’ She was careful not to voice her suspicion that they were moving.

‘Not near,’ Jonathan corrected, with a smile. ‘In. We’ve never left it.’

It came back to her in disconnected glimpses, as of a dream forgotten until some chance association called it to mind, much later in the day. Jitendra had seen it first: that hill, a feature in the terrain that ought not to have been there, glimpsed from within their makeshift shelter as they waited for night and whatever it might bring. A hill that was approaching.

The Aggregate.

Not a hill, but a machine as large as a skyscraper, crunching slowly across the Evolvarium. Sunday remembered what she had learned regarding the Aggregate, aboard the Overfloater airship. It was not one machine, but a society of them. From the level of sifters to apex predators, they had organised in the interests of mutual reliance and interdependence. It was a stinging affront to the basic function of the Evolvarium. Whereas the other machines toiled and clashed and evolved, sparking off industrial novelties as a by-product of their struggle for survival, the Aggregate gave nothing back. Whatever it innovated, it kept to itself.

It had sent out an envoy to meet them. With that memory came the aftertaste of the fear they had both felt as they crouched in their makeshift shelter. The Aggregate’s envoy was a quick-scuttling thing like an iron ant, black-armoured and as large as the rover whose wreckage they had repurposed. Even if their suits had been working at full capacity, they could never have outrun it. It had ripped away the petals of their shelter, flinging them to the winds, and loomed over them in all its eyeless belligerence. Its head was a blank metal sphere, its torso a pinch-waisted cylinder. In addition to its pistoning black legs it had whipping cilia. It had plucked them from the ground, not without a certain carelessness, and a red-lit aperture had opened in its belly.

After that, Sunday didn’t remember very much.

Yet here they were, in the Aggregate. There was no need to take Jonathan Beza’s word for that. From a high vantage point, the queen of her own castle, Sunday was looking down on the very machine she had assumed meant to have her crushed and recycled for useful materials.

It was motley. Hundreds of basic organisms had fused or locked together to form the structural outline of the Aggregate, and that didn’t begin to touch the implied complexity of its interior. Not a skyscraper, then, for that conveyed entirely too much symmetry and orderliness. The Aggregate was more like a city block, a dense-packed huddle of buildings constructed at different times and according to varying objectives and governing aesthetics. It was approximately pyramidal in shape, wide and flat at the base, rising in steps and pinnacles and buttresses to a sort of summit, but there was nothing geometric or harmonious about it. Sunday saw where some of the machines had fused into the main mass, like gargoyles on a cathedral. Others must have changed beyond all recognition, so that it was not easy to tell where one began and another ended, or what their original forms and locomotive principles must have been like. From here, looking down, she couldn’t see how the Aggregate moved its colossal bulk. She presumed countless legs and feet were deployed under the flat base of the city, working in concert so that the ride was mostly smooth. Dust welled up constantly from the Aggregate’s margins, stirred by whatever mechanisms toiled underneath it.

‘No one ever mentioned anything about this thing being inhabited,’ Sunday said. They were in a many-windowed cupola, a hundred or more metres above the ground.

‘They don’t know,’ Jonathan said. ‘No one does, except Soya and me. Maybe some of the Overfloaters suspect, but that’s not the same thing as knowing and it’s certainly not something they’ll talk about in polite company. They can’t tell for sure, from the outside. The glass is one-way, and with all the waste heat and chemistry a machine like the Aggregate radiates, there’s no way of picking out the signatures of a couple of human occupants. Especially when the Aggregate doesn’t
want
anyone to know about us.’

‘So you’re its prisoners?’ she asked. But that didn’t work: Soya clearly had free roam of Mars, and must have come back here of her own volition.

‘No,’ Jonathan said. ‘I’m its client. The Aggregate benefits from a human consultant. That’s really all I am to it: just another modular component it can depend on when the need arrives. It makes me comfortable – more than comfortable, actually – and it tolerates my absence when I’m not here.’

‘It lets you come and go as you please?’

‘We agreed terms. It would rather put up with that than have me kill myself. Needless to say, I can’t go very far – that’s one of the drawbacks of being dead. But I’m not a prisoner.’

‘I’m finding all this a little difficult to take in. I’ve spent my whole life thinking you were dead.’

‘I’m afraid there was no other way. The best that Soya could do was warn you to be on your guard against the Pans. It was obvious to us that they couldn’t be trusted simply to let you walk away with the prize.’

‘You knew they were planning to steal it?’ Jitendra asked.

‘No, but there was a strong possibility of that happening. Had this all taken place in the Surveilled World, there wouldn’t have been much scope for treachery. But the Evolvarium gave them the perfect opportunity to commit an unwitnessed crime.’

‘I witnessed it,’ Sunday said.

Jonathan allowed a thin smile to play across his lips. ‘You don’t count.’

‘We’ll see about that, when I get back to Earth. They’re going to find out that I’m still an Akinya, and bad things happen when you cross us.’

‘Yes . . .’ Jonathan stretched the word, managing to sound less than entirely convinced by Sunday’s statement. ‘Funny how you’re so keen to slip back into the fold the moment you’re wronged. You’ve been running away from your family all these years, but the moment life throws something at you that you don’t like . . . you’re straight back into the arms of the household, a good little Akinya with the family behind her.’

Sunday bristled, but said nothing.

‘I don’t blame you for that,’ Jonathan continued, conveying entirely the opposite impression, ‘but it would be unwise in the extreme to underestimate the Pans. They’re not just a movement with a few ships and people. Behind the Initiative is the entire geopolitical armoury of the United Aquatic Nations. Take them on, you’re taking on half the planet.’

‘You’ve kept up with Earthside politics, then,’ Sunday said, her tone sour.

‘I may be dead, but I’m not a hermit.’

‘Well, it’s all for nothing anyway,’ Jitendra said. ‘We don’t have a clue what was in that box, and we can’t even prove they stole it. Without corroboration, the evidence of our eyes won’t be admissible in any court. Whatever’s in the box may mean nothing to them without Sunday’s background knowledge of Eunice. That’s assuming they ever gave a shit. Maybe all they wanted was for us not to get our hands on it. Well, they succeeded. We’re all losers now.’

‘The Overfloaters must have been surprised,’ Jonathan said.

‘Surprised by what?’ Sunday asked, irritated and fatigued.

‘That the object was still underground after so many years. Did they not express scepticism that it would still be there?’

‘Dorcas said it was strange that the machines hadn’t found it,’ Jitendra said. ‘But there it was.’

‘Or rather, there it wasn’t,’ Jonathan said. ‘Come, let’s go back downstairs. I have something you might be interested in.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

‘And there was I,’ Jumai said, ‘thinking maybe I’d get paid for nothing. Silly me. As if anything’s ever that easy.’

‘I didn’t mean to raise any unrealistic expectations,’ Geoffrey said.

They were moving side by side down the docking tube, brushing themselves along with fingertip pressure against the rough-textured walling.

‘Look at it this way, though,’ he went on. ‘You’re hoping this is going to do wonders for your reputation. Wouldn’t work if it turned out to be too easy, would it?’

‘Fuck my reputation. Right now I’ll settle for easy.’

They had matched the habitat’s spin in the moments before docking, but as they traversed the connecting tube Geoffrey still felt weightless, albeit with the sensation that the world was tumbling slowly around him. The docking tube was aligned with the Winter Palace’s axis of rotation, and he would therefore need to travel a lot further out before he felt anything resembling a normal gravitational pull. But even in the absence of visual cues that spin was impossible to ignore.

They were wearing spacesuits, of course: lightweight, hypermodern, form-fitting models from the
Quaynor
’s own equipment stores. Like the submarine harness in Tiamaat, Geoffrey’s suit had put itself on around him, splitting open, encasing him from head to toe and reassembling along a dozen improbable seams that were now completely invisible and airtight. Technology had come a long way since Eunice’s ancient gauntlet-like moonglove was state of the art.

Mira Gilbert’s mobility harness was not optimised for weightlessness, and since the station was presently denying aug reach, there was no way for Arethusa to ching a proxy. Given that someone had to physically enter the Palace to locate Hector, Geoffrey was glad it was just the two of them. Arethusa would want to know what they found, and she would ching aboard as soon as that became feasible, but for now the Pans would have to be patient. Even Eunice couldn’t stick her oar in.

They had passed without incident through the connected airlocks of the
Quaynor
and the Winter Palace, but now they came to the first obstruction: an internal door, armoured against pressure loss, blocked their progress. It was circular, cartwheeled with heavy bee-striped reinforcing struts. The manual control had no effect, and the door was certainly too large to force.

‘I keep having to remind myself, Hector didn’t come this way,’ Geoffrey said. ‘For all we know, this door hasn’t been opened in years.’

‘Give me a minute,’ Jumai answered. ‘I’ve cracked data vaults that haven’t been opened in a century. This is just warm-up stuff.’

Jumai had spent her time on the
Quaynor
profitably, packing a holdall full of anything she deemed useful. Now she rummaged through the bag’s weightless guts, pushing aside intestinal spools of data cables and stick-on sensor pads. She came out with a chunky rectangle of black plastic, geckoed it to the side of the door, over the operating panel, and connected a grey cable into her suit’s forearm.

She tapped a panel on the forearm, which sprang open to form a surprisingly large keypad and screen. The suits might be modern, but they’d been customised according to Pan specifications, which meant physical readouts and data-entry options.

‘What’s the story?’ Geoffrey ventured, when she’d been tapping keys and pursing her lips at scrolling numbers for several minutes.

‘The story is . . . we’re in.’

She tapped one last key, ripped the stick-on pad away from the panel. The door wheeled aside, recessing into a slot in the sidewall. The door’s bare metal edges were toothed like a cogwheel.

‘It was that easy?’

‘Easier than it looked. Wanted to make absolutely sure there was nothing nasty beyond the door, like fire or vacuum or sarin nerve gas.’

‘We’re in suits.’

‘I like additional guarantees.’ Jumai packed her equipment away and sealed the holdall. ‘No second chances in this line of work. Learned that in Lagos.’

They called back to the
Quaynor
, told them that they were passing through the door. There was still no aug reach, but for the moment simple comms were getting through.

‘We’ve reached a right-angled bend,’ Jumai reported. ‘It’s the only way forward. Looks like it runs all the way back out to the skin.’

‘That makes sense,’ Geoffrey said. ‘The
Winter Queen
fills the middle of the habitat, and her engines and aerobrake would block our progress if we tried to pass along the axis of rotation. We have to go up to move forward. Hector would have hit the same dead end coming in from his side.’

‘Assuming he got this far,’ Jumai said.

‘He was inside this thing for a while before calling for help.’

They started moving along the radial shaft. It was wide and set with multiple hand- and footholds, and to begin with there was no sense that they were climbing either up or down. But every metre took them further from the axis, thereby increasing the tug of centrifugal gravity, tending to push them still further from the axis. For a while, it was easy and pleasant to drift, but there came a point when it took more effort than anticipated to arrest his motion. In that moment Geoffrey’s inner ear decided, forcefully, that his local universe now contained a very definite up and down, and that he was suspended the wrong way up in what appeared to be an infinitely deep, plunging lift shaft.