Blue Remembered Earth (80 page)

‘Did Jonathan know?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘I saw no reason to keep it from him. He was my husband, after all. And I didn’t have any notion of what the scratches would actually turn out to symbolise. Obviously, their mere existence was astonishing. But beyond that . . . even if I went public, I couldn’t see it being more than a seven-day wonder. So what if the scratches appeared to point to an alien presence on Phobos? It couldn’t be proved, not rigorously. Someone could always claim that the shards had been faked by one of the first hundred. And if aliens had been there, a million or a billion years ago, they’d done nothing beyond leave that one set of scratches. Like someone stopping to take a piss at the roadside before carrying on.’

‘Graffiti. Scratched on the Monolith,’ Jumai said. ‘The kind of thing someone might do if they were stuck somewhere, bored, with nothing else to occupy them.’

‘Jonathan had studied electrical engineering before making his fortune in telecomms,’ Eunice said. ‘As part of his studies, he’d taken modules in modern physics. When I showed him the pieces, arranged as well as I was able, he said that the scratched forms reminded him of something. They look like little men, don’t they, or demons?’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Geoffrey said.

‘To Jonathan they were reminiscent of Feynman diagrams: little conceptual drawings encoding the interaction histories of subatomic particles. They weren’t Feynman diagrams, clearly – that would be as unlikely as finding inscriptions in our own alphabets or number systems. But they were analogous. The lines are the trajectories of particles. The squiggles are the forces mediating the reactions between them. The spirals are by-products of those reactions – other particles, packets of energy. That was just intuition, though. It would take a working physicist to say more than that. A good one, too. And someone I could trust.’

‘And you just happened to know someone,’ Jumai said.

‘We established contact while I was on Mars,’ Eunice answered. ‘He was fascinated by the rock drawings. He said that they already encoded the entire edifice of existing physics, as well as implying the correctness of several models that were still at the preliminary stage. What was more important, though, was that the diagrams pointed to physics we hadn’t begun to probe. Quark-quark interactions that seemed forbidden, on the basis of the known gauge symmetries. Do you know much about quarks? No, obviously not, or you’d have realised that they come in three colours: blue, red and green, like cheap plastic jewels. Or that when Sunday finds me reading a copy of
Finnegans Wake
, there’s a
reason
for that.’

‘I don’t think we did too badly to get this far,’ Geoffrey said.

‘The point was, if the diagrams were right . . .’ Eunice shook her head, as if she was still experiencing the awe of that moment. ‘We could do incredible things. We could build engines powerful enough to fling a ship to Neptune in weeks. But that was just the start of it – the
least
dramatic breakthrough.’ She smiled again. ‘My physicist was right, too. The engine that brought you to Lionheart was the fruit of that very early research. Really, it’s just a standard VASIMR motor with a few wrinkles smoothed out. The kind of thing we’d probably have stumbled on eventually, given enough time. But this wasn’t a stumble. We saw how to make it better, and it worked. You can’t know how that made us feel. We’d proven that there was testable science in the rock diagrams. But if the least dramatic predictions gave us an engine five times faster than anything else out there, what would we be getting into when we started testing the
really
frightening predictions?’

‘You tell us,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Even with the scope of the equipment in Lionheart, we could only probe the margins of the new physics. But that was enough, for now. These basic experiments have already pointed to a technology so potent that it would make the engine in that ship look like a toy.’ Eunice gestured at the black mosaic. ‘We can do much better than that. For a hundred and fifty years we’ve been locked into a few hours of space around one little star. Even being able to reach Neptune in a few weeks doesn’t alter that. But now we have the means to break out of the solar system. A
stardrive
, if you will. If the physics is to be believed, then true interstellar travel is now within our grasp. Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s still going to take a long time. A few per cent of the speed of light, that’s what we’re looking at. Pitiful and inadequate compared to the scale of things. Horsepiss against all that cosmic immensity. Even the nearest solar system will still be hundreds of years away. But that’s hundreds, not tens of thousands!’

She was becoming increasingly animated, as if this whole speech was approaching a carefully scripted climax.

‘We already think on that kind of timescale, as a species. We’re starting to live long enough, and we’ve accepted the burden of century-long endeavours like the repairing of Earth’s climate. So it’s not completely abhorrent to think of interstellar travel in those terms. Of course, there’s a catch.’

‘There’d have to be,’ Geoffrey said, ‘or else why wouldn’t you have gone public sixty years ago?’

She nodded, with what looked to Geoffrey to be inexpressible relief and gratitude, as if her most dire fear had been that he would not understand. ‘I said it wasn’t a toy. Sixty years ago, I did not think that as a species we had the wisdom to accept these gifts. Not at the end of that century, when there were still people who not only remembered wars, but had experienced them . . . Would you have felt any more confident, in my shoes?’

Geoffrey discarded the flip answer he’d been about to give. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Probably not.’

‘The energy implicit in the rock diagrams would have been enough to wipe us out many times over,’ Eunice said. ‘We’d dodged that bullet once, in the era of nuclear weapons. Did we have the collective smarts to dodge it a second time? I thought not – or at least had such grave doubts that I could not leave matters to chance. So I didn’t. I followed what struck me as the only rational course, under the circumstances. I decided to sleep on matters, and see what happened.’

‘You didn’t sleep,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You went into seclusion, for the next sixty-two years – or however long it was after you figured all this out. Then you died.’

‘I didn’t die,’ Eunice said. ‘I just put other arrangements in place. Lin Wei and I might have had our differences, but I’d always hoped that Ocular would find something remarkable. When Lin came to me, when she presented the evidence of the Mandala structure on Sixty-One Virginis f, a series of processes were set in irrevocable motion. For the first time, we had a clear objective: a target for interstellar exploration. It felt right that we should also have the means to reach that target, if we so chose.’

‘But you can’t decide if the time is right,’ Jumai said. ‘Maybe we’re a fraction smarter than we were a hundred years ago, but is that smart enough? You’re just an artilect. You can’t possibly make that kind of choice.’

‘I don’t have to,’ Eunice said. ‘I’ve merely passed on my responsibility. Now it’s yours.’

‘You’re not serious,’ Geoffrey said.

Eunice’s smile was not without sympathy. ‘I did warn you that I was about to place a heavy burden on you.’ She offered her hand, not for him to take, but to sweep majestically around the room. ‘All this is yours now. The experiment, the rock carvings . . . do with them as you will. If you think humanity deserves this gift, is ready for it . . . then it’s yours to disseminate. Not as a commercial property, but as freely distributed knowledge. We’re rich enough as it is, wouldn’t you say? We can afford to give this away. If we’re wise enough to deal with this as a species, then we’re wise enough to deal with it collectively.’

‘And if we don’t think we’re ready?’ Jumai asked.

‘Forget about what you’ve seen in Lionheart, or better still destroy it. You have the resources of the family at your disposal; shouldn’t be too difficult.’

‘Everyone’s seen what the engine can do,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Even if we wanted to keep this quiet, people will want to know how we did that.’

‘Have the engine,’ Eunice said dismissively. ‘Without the conceptual framework of the new physics, it’s an awfully long leap from that to the stardrive.’

‘Even that small advance changes everything,’ Jumai said. ‘Just being able to get out here in a few weeks rather than months is going to shake things up. The outer solar system isn’t going to look so far away any more.’

‘So push the frontier back a little further,’ Eunice said. ‘It’s what I always did.’ She clasped her hands. ‘Now, this may sound ungracious given that you’ve really only just arrived, but we should begin making preparations for your return journey. I was perfectly serious about not keeping you prisoner here. That wasn’t the point of this exercise.’

‘You’ll let us take the ship back?’ Jumai asked.

‘After it’s refuelled and repaired, which – with all of Lionheart turned to the task – shouldn’t take more than a week. Then you can go back into hibernation. Perhaps when you arrive, you’ll be closer to your decision.’

‘I still don’t know what happened to you,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I know you didn’t die in the Winter Palace because there was nobody up there to die, and consequently no ashes to be brought home, either. Which means that the last time anyone saw you alive – anyone we can trust, that is – was before you left for your final mission.’

‘Lin Wei was kind enough to think of me,’ Eunice said. ‘The least I can do is pay her back, in some small measure. Remember these numbers, and give them to Lin. I think they will answer at least one of your questions.’ She reeled off a string of digits, then repeated them. ‘Lin Wei will understand.’

‘There’s one more thing,’ Jumai said. ‘You talk as if you’re the only person . . . the only
thing
. . . that knows any of this. Fine, you’re an artilect – I’m ready to accept that there isn’t another living soul in this iceteroid. But your husband knew, and you’ve told us about the physicist. You’ve also told us that it took insider help to pull all this off without the rest of your family finding out. So we’re not the only ones, are we?’

‘My husband died a long time ago,’ Eunice said. ‘Long before the true significance of the rock drawings became clear. And anyway, even if he’d lived, and known . . . I’d still have trusted him to keep it all a secret. This information will be destabilising, whenever it’s made public knowledge, and Jonathan liked stability more than anything else. That’s why I left him on Mars.’

‘And the physicist?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘He was a brilliant young Tanzanian,’ Eunice said. ‘A brave and courageous thinker. But the rock drawings destroyed him. Not as a human being, but as a scientist. He’d . . . seen too much. Glimpsed too much of the inner workings of the universe, too soon and too quickly. He was a searcher after truth, and to have it revealed to him so readily, without effort . . . the entire intellectual purpose of his life was undermined in one blow. Once the experiments were designed, he pulled back – left the detailed running and interpretation to the artilects.’

‘And the insider?’ Geoffrey probed.

‘The same person,’ Eunice told him. ‘When he turned his back on physics . . . he returned to Africa. He was a very good man, and none of this could have been achieved without him.’ Then her voice softened. ‘And now he has died, and you must go home to bury him.’

CHAPTER FORTY

They were in Lionheart for a week, as the golem had anticipated. The ship was allowed to approach and dock, and soon after that robots were swarming all over it, attending to the damage and preparing it for the return journey home.

‘We never had a name for it,’ Geoffrey said, ‘since it obviously isn’t the ship you left in.’

‘Call it
Summer Queen
, if you like,’ Eunice told them.

Since the repairs and refuelling were entirely automated processes, there was nothing Geoffrey and Jumai needed to do but wait until their ride was ready. They had been given the option of re-entering hibernation early, but both had decided against that. Neither wished to go to sleep until the ship was already on its way, putting distance between itself and the iceteroid.

Geoffrey couldn’t speak for Jumai, but he had no difficulty analysing his own reluctance. He simply didn’t have unquestioning confidence in Eunice, or in the artilect emulating her. It had already proven fallible, and for all that it articulated regret and sadness about Hector’s death, and even Memphis’s, he had no reason to suppose that those utterances carried the slightest emotional weight. It was making placating noises, but behind them, as Jumai had already pointed out, was just stuff. Machinery. And while machinery might ponder a set of actions that had led to a less than desirable outcome and adjust its future behaviour accordingly, it was a stretch to call that remorse.

Lionheart had been equipped to care for human visitors, and that was where they spent the week while
Summer Queen
– that name was as good as any – was overhauled. There was a suite of rooms and modules, a recreation complex, a gymnasium and a couple of centrifuges, one large enough to contain a commons and dining area – enough to keep a team of technical staff comfortable for months. They chose separate rooms and adjusted the furnishings accordingly to suit their preferences. There was entertainment, incoming transmissions – not full aug, but enough to keep them up to date on developments elsewhere in the system – and they had the means to send and receive private communications.