Blue Remembered Earth

by Alastair Reynolds

  Geoffrey opened the case’s lid. It squeaked on old metal hinges. Holding it open with one hand, he reached down with the other and lifted out the book. The cover was a faded blue-grey, dog-eared at the edges. It looked dustier than it was. He gently eased the book open.

  Marbled paper lined the cover’s interior. He made out scratchy grey marks, an unfamiliar but not inelegant script. It was in English, but too faint and cursive for the aug to detect and translate without coaxing. ‘To Eunice, on her twentieth birthday, January twentieth, 2050,’ he read, speaking the words aloud. ‘With all our love, Mother and Father.’

  The book was obviously much older than that; it must have been an antique even at the time Eunice received her gift. He kept turning the pages, into the main story itself.

  Presently he found the gap where sheets were missing, a little over halfway through the book. It was hard to spot unless one was looking for it: just a slight irregularity in the way the bound sets of pages were fixed into the spine. Perhaps the omission had been spotted when the book was placed in the library, noticed and then thought no more of – treasured books were at particular risk of suffering damage, after all, by virtue of being read and carried. On the other hand, it was equally likely that no one had ever realised.

  He made a mental note of the missing page numbers, then returned the book to its rightful position. He was about to close the lid and walk away when he noticed the fine white text engraved into the base of the book’s stand.

  Donated to the private collection by Eunice Akinya in 2100, immediately prior to her last deep-space mission.

  She had come back a year and several months later, from the edge of the solar system. Even now, almost no one had gone that far out. But upon her return to Lunar orbit, Eunice had been in no position to go burying things on the Moon. Had she left the Winter Palace, her movements would have been tracked and recorded for posterity. She had spent the entire subsequent sixty years in the station.

  Whatever she had done, from the glove in the safe-deposit box to the papers under the soil of Pythagoras, and assuming no one else had been involved, must have been done before she left for deep space.

  So it was premeditated.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Kilimanjaro was a cut diamond dropped from the heavens, sliced at its base by a sliver-thin line of haze. It appeared to float just off the ground, by some mountainous marvel of levitation.

  He found the clan without difficulty, after less than thirty minutes in the air. He came in low, executing a sharp turn with his starboard wingtip almost scything the marula and cabbage trees bordering one of the waterholes. The elephants turned to watch him, elevating trunks and flapping ears. Matilda was easy to pick out among them: she was the one carrying on unimpressed, scuffing and probing with her trunk, trying valiantly to give the impression that his return was really not all that big a deal.

  He picked a stretch of ground, the grass worn away in arid furrows where he had landed on many previous occasions, and brought the Cessna in at a whisker over stall speed. He cut the engine just after the tyres bounced and let her roll in near-silence, the wings and undercarriage swishing and crackling through dry undergrowth, until the aircraft came to a stop. Still wearing the same clothes he’d put on before leaving Sunday’s apartment, he grabbed his kitbag and climbed out of the cockpit.

  Geoffrey left the aircraft and walked slowly through the grass towards the elephants. The breeze, such as it was, was at his back, ushering his scent ahead of him. He had not changed his clothes, nor showered, for precisely that reason. After such an absence he wished to take no chances. Periodically he clapped his hands and bellowed a wordless call, to further reinforce his identity.

  It was late in the day. Shadows spread, black and grey and purple, moving and coalescing as the breeze stirred nets and fans of vegetation. His brain began to fill in the gaps, suggesting muscular crouched forms, pairs of tracking eyes agleam with single-minded vigilance. The dusky sighing of grass on grass became the slow inhalation of patient, hungry things, drawing a final breath before the neck-breaking pounce. Random shapes in the soil assumed a crawling, serpentine aspect, making him hesitate with every third or fourth stride. That part of his brain, ancient and stupid as it was, couldn’t be switched off completely. But he had learned to disregard that nervous monkey babble as well as he could.

  There, ahead, was Matilda, her darkening profile broken behind two candelabra trees. He whooped and clapped again, his armpits damp with sweat, then called out, ‘Hello, Matilda. It’s me, Geoffrey. I’ve come home.’

  As if she didn’t know it was him, dropping in from the skies. The Cessna was as weird and singular as a unicorn.

  She allowed him to approach, but there was a wariness in her posture, a sense of caution that the other elephants picked up on. Geoffrey halted as he heard and felt a threat rumble from one of the other high-ranking females. Matilda answered with a vocalisation of her own, perhaps a signal for reassurance or merely the elephant equivalent of, Shut up and let me handle this.

  Geoffrey waited a while and then resumed his approach.

  ‘I told you I had to go away,’ he said. ‘Be glad I wasn’t gone longer.’

  He took in her family. Hovering in the air, an aug layer had verified that all were present and correct, but it was only on the ground that he could look for signs of injury and illness. He paid particular attention to the youngsters, and saw nothing amiss.

  ‘So it’s all been business as usual,’ he said softly, as much for his own benefit as Matilda’s.

  He found a tree-stump, squatted on it and drew out his sketchbook and 2B pencil. He worked with furious energy as the light ebbed, striving to capture the essence of the moment with as few pencil strokes as possible, like some mathematician searching for the quickest route to a theorem. No time for nuance or detail or shading; it was all about brutal economy and a devout, martial approach to the act of marking the paper. He drew until the gloom was absolute, the elephants no more than round-backed hillocks, grey shading into purple. His eyes had amped up, and the aug offered to drop an enhancement layer over his visual field, but Geoffrey declined.

  When he had filled three pages he packed the sketchbook away, shouldered the bag and rose from the stump with aching bones. The elephants were calmer now, accepting his presence with benign indifference. He approached the matriarch, stood his ground and allowed her to examine him with her trunk.

  ‘You won’t believe where I’ve been,’ he told her. ‘Or maybe you would, if you were capable of understanding it. Maybe it wouldn’t seem much further away to you than Namibia. I was on the Moon, Matilda. How amazing is that? I was up there.’

  He couldn’t see the Moon tonight, but he would have pointed it out to her if he’d been able.

  Geoffrey voked the link, Matilda’s real-time brain scan appearing in the upper-left corner of his visual field. There was activity in all the usual functional areas, but nothing untoward. Her state of mind was as unexceptional as he had ever seen it, allowing for the normal patterns associated with nocturnal watchfulness.

  He shouldn’t do it, he told himself. It was too soon after his return to proceed to the next step of initiating the full mind-to-mind link. But why not? He was supremely calm now, his mind settled by the flight and the placidity of the herd. Tomorrow might be different.

  He voked his own brain image and began the transition. He pushed quickly through the low percentages, ten, twenty and beyond. At twenty-five per cent he felt his self-image losing definition, his mind decoupling from his body, his sense of scale undergoing a ballooning, dreamlike shift, Matilda losing size until she appeared no larger to him than one of the phyletic dwarves.

  He passed through thirty-five per cent, then forty. The neural schematics showed areas of congruency, territories of brain lighting up in unison. The anatomical details were different, of course, but the functional relationships were precisely conserved. Matilda’s thought processes were guiding his own, moving fire aroun
d in his skull. He still felt calm and in control, aware that his mind was being influenced by an external agency yet retaining sufficient detachment not to be unnerved by the process. There was no fear – yet – even as he pushed through forty-five per cent and then hit the psychological barrier of fifty per cent, more than he had ever dared risk before. He didn’t just feel disconnected from his own body now; he felt multitudinous, part of a larger whole. Matilda’s identity as matriarch was so closely bound to her family that her identity encompassed other elephants. Geoffrey reeled, dizzy with the perceptual shifts, but he steeled himself and continued pushing through to fifty-five per cent, then sixty. He was a long way out now, swimming in deep neural waters. The world was coming through with the preternatural sharpness of a hallucination, dambursting his senses, flooding his brain with more stimulation than it could readily assimilate. The background noise of the waterhole and its surroundings was teased apart, deconstructed like the mathematical separation of a signal into its Fourier components, unwoven into threads of distinct and specific sound – each tree, each bush whispering its own contribution, each breath, each footfall a thing unto itself. Rumbles from elephants near and far, felt in his belly more than his head.

  Yet that endless complex proclamation was only one part of the sensory tapestry. Matilda’s sense of smell was acute and untiring, and the link was lighting up Geoffrey’s olfactory centre accordingly. The translation was too crude to replicate the specific impressions, but Geoffrey nonetheless felt overwhelmed with smells drawn from his own experience, each of which arrived with an accompanying gift-wrapping of memories and emotions. The odour of freshly laid frond-carpet, in a newly furnished room at the household, when he was eight. The smell of transmission oil leaking from one of the jeeps. A box of paper-wrapped wax crayons, spectrum-ordered, like a perfumed rainbow waiting to spill its hues onto paper. Pushing his hand into a mound of fresh hyena dung when he’d tripped on the ground – and running crying into the household, holding his soiled hand as if he’d cut himself. The memories were usually of things that had happened to him when he was small, coming from old-growth brain structure, laid down when the architecture of his mind was still vigorously open to change.

  Sixty-five per cent, seventy. That was enough for now, he told himself. It might even be enough for ever. Further refinements could follow – fine-tuning the interface so that the sense impressions were rendered more precisely, so that when Matilda smelled lion, he would smell lion too, and know it for what it was. It would only be a matter of building up data, cross-correlating neural states with external factors. There was no theoretical or philosophical reason why he couldn’t experience her world the way she did, with all its specificities. And then, only then, might he begin to glimpse something of her thought processes, if only in the play of shadows on the cave wall of her mind.

  In all this, she had remained supremely calm and attentive, oblivious to the machines reading her mind; oblivious to the fact that her mind was being echoed and mirrored in another creature’s head. Geoffrey knew that this was the point where he should break off contact, having already achieved more than during any of his previous sessions. But another part of him wanted to forge ahead, now that he had overcome his initial fears. Not by pushing the percentage level higher, but by allowing traffic in the other direction. That had, after all, always been his ultimate goal: not just to peer into her mind, but to establish a communication channel. What was the phrase June Wing had used – a cognitive gate? The neuromachinery protocols were already in place; it would take no more than a sequence of voked commands to begin pushing his state of mind into Matilda’s head.

  Was she ready for it, though? How would an animal cope, in the absence of any rational framework to temper its instinctive reactions? Nothing in her evolutionary past had equipped Matilda with the apparatus to grasp what he was contemplating doing to her.

  Still, he hadn’t come this far with the project to allow such qualms to stop him now. The point was to conduct the experiment and then learn something – even if the only conclusion was that the work was a dead end, of no further value.

  As a precautionary measure, he dialled the existing neural interface threshold back down to thirty per cent. It was low enough that his sense of self returned more or less to normal, but not so low that he couldn’t still feel Matilda’s sense-world bleeding into his own, with all its gaudy welter of multichannel impressions.

  Five per cent in the other direction, he thought. That was more than enough to be starting with.

  He thought about not doing it, of closing the link and returning to the Cessna. Then he thought of Sunday, how she would have shaken her head at his lack of boldness.

  He voked the command.

  The lack of any obvious change was disheartening. Matilda’s brain activity was varying by the second, but it had been doing so from the moment he activated the link. All he was seeing was the natural background noise caused by constant random stimuli, as the other elephants moved and vocalised, and more remote sights, sounds and smells came to her attention. His own mind was subject to the same continuously firing patterns, but it wasn’t putting out a strong enough signal to evoke a measurable response in Matilda’s scan. He was merely adding noise to noise.

  Matilda saw better than he did, so most of the activity in his visual centre was bleed-over from her. Fleeting impressions, like the hypnogogic imagery preceding sleep, flitted across the projection screen of his mind. As with smell, the translation was too imprecise to result in anything immediately recognisable, although he kept getting the impression of bulky, rounded forms – chopped up, reshuffled and disturbingly amorphous, like a cubist’s idea of elephants.

  Geoffrey closed his eyes, blocking what little extraneous input was now reaching them. He concentrated on a particular mental puzzle: holding an Escher figure in his mind, the Meta Presence triangle, and then rotating it, all the while trying to keep the details in sharp focus. It required an intense conscious effort, and because the exercise drew on his mind’s visual machinery, it elicited a response in the neural map of his own brain, still hanging there in the upper-left corner of his visual field. His visual cortex was glowing, as bloodflow and neurochemical markers signalled a concentration of resources.

  It required an even greater effort to hold the Escher figure in mind and also track the neural changes in the side-by-side scans, but he had trained for that, over and over, until he was capable of making the rapid attentional shifts that allowed him to both perform the concentration exercises and monitor their effects.

  Now it was paying off: Matilda’s visual cortex was beginning to light up as well, in response to his own. He had no idea what that felt like to her, but she couldn’t be experiencing that level of stimulus without feeling something. For a moment, he too felt the rising potential as the visual response he was generating in her began to spill back into his head. It died down just as quickly, though: he had installed dampening protocols to guard against that kind of positive feedback.

  He stopped holding the Escher figure in his head and opened his eyelids again. Their minds had returned to quiescence, with no exceptional activity in either visual cortex.

  Geoffrey didn’t doubt that the link had worked as intended, and that the observed response would be repeatable. He’d done nothing that broke the laws of physics, just wired two minds together in a particular way. It would have been strange if it hadn’t worked.

  Time to try something else.

  Geoffrey did not care for scorpions. He had trodden on one as a child – it had found its way into his shoe one night – and the memory of that lancing, electric pain as the venom touched his nervous system was no less sharp the better part of thirty years later. He had learned to overcome his fear – it would have been difficult to function otherwise, when there were so many other things that could sting and injure – but that childhood incident had imprinted a deep-seated phobia that would be with him for the rest of his life. He’d had occasion to curse th
at fear, but at last it was going to do something for him instead.

  Merely thinking about the scorpion was enough to bring on unpleasant feelings, but now he forced himself not just to return to the incident, but to imagine it in as much fetishistic detail as he could. He’d been old enough to understand that he ought to check for scorpions, old enough to grasp that it would be very bad to be stung, but at the age of five, he hadn’t acquired the tedious adult discipline of checking every time. Still, when his foot contacted the scorpion, and the sting sank in, there had been a moment of delicious clarity, a calm hiatus in which he understood precisely what had happened, precisely what was about to happen, and that there was nothing in the universe that could stop it. It had come like a wind-whipped fire, spreading up his leg, through the branching intricacy of his nervous system – his first real understanding that he even had a nervous system.

  But there it was, traced out in writhing, luminous glory, like a ship’s rigging wreathed in St Elmo’s fire. In that moment he could have drawn an anatomical map of himself.

  It was a memory he had tried his best not to return to, but perhaps because of that it remained raw, the edges still sharp, the colours and sensations bright. He felt his chest tighten, his heart rate increase, sweat prickle his back. In the neural scan of his brain, he saw the fear response light up.

  Matilda was feeling it now as well. In response she issued a threat rumble, and Geoffrey took a step back as he sensed her growing agitation. His eyes were wide open now. He let go of the memory, forced it back into the mental box where he had kept it all these years. Enough for now; he’d gone sufficiently far to prove his point. It was unfortunate that the first demonstration of that had involved fear, but he’d needed something capable of producing an unambiguous signal. Matilda’s neural pattern was settling down now; he hoped that she would not be troubled by what had happened.

  He was about to suspend the link when, without warning, Eunice appeared. She was standing to his right, watching proceedings with her hands behind her back.