Blue Remembered Earth

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘In other words,’ Jumai said, ‘MH is so scary that it makes normal hydrogen, this horrible flammable substance, this stuff that explodes and kills people, seem like the safe, cuddly option.’

  ‘It gets better,’ Gilbert said, cheerfully indifferent to the dangers. ‘You’re going up in it, both of you. Lifters are normally cargo-only shots but they are fully human-rated. It’s bumpy, but you don’t need to worry about that: you’ll be sedated for the ride.’

  ‘All that, just to get us to the Winter Palace?’ Geoffrey asked.

  ‘The launch was scheduled anyway,’ Gilbert said, deflating him slightly. ‘Besides, you’re not the only living, breathing passengers.’ And she nodded down towards one of the conveyor belts, at the torpedo-shaped cargo pod that was being fed into the lifter’s side. It was much larger than any of the other containers they had seen, and it was accompanied by six or seven technicians, mer and lubber, riding alongside like pall-bearers, giving every impression of attending to the pod with particular diligence.

  ‘What’s inside that?’ Jumai asked.

  ‘Not what,’ Gilbert corrected gently. ‘Who.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The ground refused to stop rising. Ever since leaving Vishniac they had been driving into the cold afternoon of an early spring day on Mars, ascending, always ascending. They were high up on the Tharsis plateau now, nine kilometres above the mean surface level of the rest of the planet, traversing a vast continent-sized lava bulge higher than Kilimanjaro, higher than Everest, higher than any spot on the surface of the Earth. Even now the terrain forged up towards the cone of Pavonis Mons.

  Peacock Mountain. They couldn’t see it yet – the summit was mist-shrouded, and the volcano wouldn’t appear as much more than a gentle bump even in clear visibility.

  And this wasn’t even the tallest volcano on Mars.

  They’d passed nothing in the way of functioning civilisation. A handful of abandoned vehicles, the descent-stage of a long-abandoned or forgotten rocket, the shrivelled, wind-ripped carcass of a transport dirigible that must have come down decades ago. Once they’d passed near a tiny hamlet, a cluster of pewter-coloured domes with fantails of dust on their leeward sides. Lights were on in the comms towers above the domes, but there was no other indication that anyone lived there. None of these dismal landmarks merited even the briefest of glances from Gribelin. Sunday supposed that he drove this way often enough that the scenery offered little in the way of interest. That had been two hours into the trip. They’d gone a long way since then.

  ‘Here’s your fence, kids,’ Gribelin said eventually, slowing to guide the truck between a line of transponder masts, most of them leaning away from the prevailing wind direction. ‘Don’t mean a whole lot, truth to tell. Machines sense it, and they know they’ll be punished if they cross over. But that doesn’t mean they don’t try it on for size now and then. Also doesn’t mean we’re going to run into machines as soon as we cross it.’ He tapped a finger against a fold-down map, a physical display of the area east of Pavonis Mons. The display flickered and bled colour under his fingernail. Contour lines showed terrain elevation. Cryptic symbols, horse heads and castles and knights and pawns – like chess notation, except that there were also scorpions and snakes and skulls – were dotted in clumps and ones and twos throughout the roughly circular demarcation of the Evolvarium. There were hundreds of pawns, not so many scorpions, snakes and horse heads, only a few knights and skulls and castles. ‘It’s a big area, and there’s a fuck of a lot of room to get lost in,’ he said.

  ‘Are those symbols telling you where the machines are?’ Sunday asked.

  ‘Telling me where the best guess for their location might be, based on the last hard sighting, which could be hours or days ago. Bit of a head-trip for you, the concept of not knowing where something is?’

  ‘I’m from the Descrutinised Zone,’ Sunday said. ‘There’s no aug, no Mech, in the Zone – at least, not as most people would understand those terms.’

  ‘But that’s intentional,’ Jitendra said. ‘In the Zone, they’ve chosen to go that way. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to know where these machines are.’

  ‘There are public eyes in orbit,’ Gribelin said, ‘but when the dust’s up they can’t see shit. Machines are sly – they’ll exploit the dust whenever they can, and if there’s no dust many of them are able to kick some up or tunnel underground or use camouflage. Your next question’s going to be: why don’t they just carpet-bomb the whole fucking landscape with eyes?’

  Sunday bristled. That had indeed been her next question. ‘And?’

  ‘Machines ate ’em. You’re basically throwing down foodstuff, nourishment, in a desert. Yum, yum.’

  ‘Fix trackers to the machines, then,’ Jitendra said.

  ‘Same problem. Any kind of parasite like that, anything not directly beneficial to the host, gets picked off and eaten like a grub.’ He tapped the map again. ‘Lame as it is, this is the best we’ve got. Based on intel compiled and shared by the Overfloaters, when they’re feeling in a compiling and sharing mood.’

  ‘Overfloaters?’ Sunday asked.

  Jitendra cut in before Gribelin had a chance to reply: maybe he wanted to show that he wasn’t completely ignorant of the situation here; that he had done at least some homework. ‘The brokers who run the Evolvarium. Think of them like . . . cockfighters, trying to create the ideal fighting animal. They’re always dreaming up new ways to stress the population, to force the machines to keep evolving. And whenever the machines throw up something useful, some innovation or wrinkle on an existing idea, the brokers race each other to skim it off and make some money on the technologies exchange. That’s why this place is on June Wing’s radar.’

  ‘June Wing?’ Gribelin asked.

  Jitendra smiled quickly. ‘A . . . friend of mine. With an interest in fringe robotics. How much do you know about us?’

  ‘Just that there’s a job, that the fish-faces are behind it, and beyond that I’m not to ask questions.’

  ‘You knew about the golem,’ Sunday said.

  ‘The Pans said not to hang around once you were off the train. I was also told to watch out for a claybot, in case your follower got the march on you. As to why the golem’s on your tail, sweet cheeks, I didn’t ask and they didn’t tell.’ He grinned a mouthful of weirdly carved and metal-capped teeth at her. ‘Shit, I called you it again, didn’t I?’

  ‘We’re not tourists,’ Sunday said levelly, deciding to let her earlier threat slide. ‘The Pans will have told you to take me as near as possible to a set of coordinates in the Evolvarium. There’s a reason for that.’

  ‘Which is?’

  Sunday and Jitendra exchanged glances before she spoke. ‘There’s something buried in the area, something that belongs to me.’

  ‘Belongs?’

  ‘Family property,’ she said. ‘But not property that I’d want the golem to get hold of ahead of me.’

  ‘And you know it’s buried?’ Gribelin asked.

  ‘If it isn’t, what are the odds of it still being here?’

  ‘Pretty fucking slim.’

  ‘I still have to be sure,’ Sunday said.

  Gribelin’s skull bobbed up and down as he shrugged. ‘Your call.’

  After a moment she asked, ‘What are those things on your skull?’

  ‘Ears.’

  ‘I mean the tattoos. Do they signify something? They look like rock art or something.’

  ‘Rock art.’ He grinned again. ‘Yeah, that’d be about right.’

  They passed their first carcass an hour into the Evolvarium.

  Dust-scouring wind and the graft of enthusiastic scavengers, both human and mechanical, had stripped the war machine back to a rust-coloured skeleton, a hundred metres from tip to tail. Formed from dozens of articulated modular segments, the ruined robot resembled the vulture-picked spine of some much larger creature. The dust was thin on the Tharsis Bulge, a layer only a centimetre deep covering lav
al rock, so the war machine’s metal bones were exposed almost entirely to the sky. Gribelin slowed to skirt around the corpse, eyeing it warily.

  ‘Been here longer than most,’ he said in a low murmur. ‘Deadsville, completely harmless and pecked clean of pretty much anything usable. But sometimes active units use it as a place of concealment. Ambush predators. I think we’re good today, but—’

  ‘Would they attack us?’ Sunday asked.

  ‘Mostly, the machines are smart enough to leave us alone.’ He shot her a glance, Sunday’s face bulbous in his goggles. ‘Basic self-preservation: fight each other, use whatever they can, evolve, but don’t piss off the Overfloaters.’

  ‘You said “mostly”,’ Jitendra said.

  ‘Darwinism in action, my friend. Every now and then something comes along and tears up the rule book.’

  ‘You’re risking a lot, bringing us here,’ Jitendra said.

  ‘I know the terrain.’ He eyed the map again. ‘And I know who to keep away from. You think I’d be here if I didn’t believe the odds were in my favour? Your friends are paying well, but nothing’s worth suicide.’

  At four in the afternoon, a quill of orange-red dust feathered up from the horizon. It scribed its way across the landscape, propelled by an invisible hand. Sunday’s first thought was that they were watching a dust-devil, but Gribelin’s map showed a pawn symbol close to their present location.

  ‘Sifter,’ he said. ‘Your basic low-down grazing caste. Chew through the dust and the top layer of rock, looking for anything recyclable. What they can use to repair or fuel themselves, they use. What’s left over, they barter between themselves or trade on up the food chain.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Sunday asked, pointing dead ahead, up the gently rising lie of the land. A grey-black smudge floated in the sky, like a dead fly on the windshield, just above the horizon. It dangled entrails, as if it had been swatted. She had tried zooming, but the aug was all but absent.

  Gribelin tugged down a pair of binoculars fixed to the ceiling on a scissoring mount and settled his goggled eyes into the rubber-shielded cups. ‘Lady Disdain,’ he said quietly. ‘Not usually this far east. Might be following the sifter, looking for anything thrown up behind it.’

  ‘Can we avoid her?’ Jitendra said.

  ‘Only if Dorcas is feeling nice.’ Gribelin steered left, the Overfloater craft veering slowly to the right in the window. He slid the binoculars towards Sunday. ‘Be my guest.’

  The rubber eye-cups were greasy with sweat and tiny skin flakes. It took a moment for the binoculars to sense her intended point of interest. The view leapt, stabilised, snapped to sharpness, overlaid with cross hairs and distance/alt-azimuth numerics.

  The Overfloater machine was a fat-bellied airship, approximately arrowhead-shaped. Slung under it, blended into the deltoid profile of its gas envelope, was an angular gondola. The ‘entrails’ were sinuous, whiplike mechanical tentacles, a dozen of them, emerging from the base of the gondola. The airship skimmed the surface at a sufficiently low altitude that the arms were able to pluck things from the ground. That was what Lady Disdain was doing right now: loitering, examining.

  It brought to Sunday’s mind one of Geoffrey’s elephants, nosing the dirt with its trunk. Or a family of them, bunched into a single foraging organism.

  ‘Is Dorcas a friend of yours?’ Sunday asked.

  ‘Friend,’ Gribelin said, chewing over the word as if it was a new one on him. ‘That’s a tricky concept out here. Pretty much dog eat dog all the way down. Machines fuck each other over, Overfloaters fuck the machines over, Overfloaters fuck each other for a profit margin. I fight for the scraps. Me and Dorcas? We go back some. Don’t exactly hate each other. Doesn’t mean we’re kissing cousins either.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather be at the top of the rat heap?’ Sunday asked. She had some idea of how it worked: how the machines, in their endless evolutionary struggle, occasionally splintered off some novelty or gadget or industrial process that the rest of the system could use. Like the technology behind the prototype claybot, the one she’d chinged to the scattering. That rapidly morphing material had been a spin-off from the Evolvarium, and now it stood to make trillions for Plexus. ‘Floating up there like a god, being worshipped. Because that’s what’s going on here, isn’t it? Gods hovering over mortals, taking amusement in their endless warfare and misery.’

  ‘Wouldn’t go that far,’ Jitendra said. ‘These machines might be super-adaptive, but there’s no actual cognition going on down here. The machines don’t understand that they’re machines. All they know how to do is survive, and try not to fall behind in the arms race. They’re no more capable of religion than lobsters.’

  ‘Nice if it was that clear-cut,’ Gribelin said. ‘Me, I ain’t so sure. Spend as much time out here as I have, you’ll see some things that make you question your certainties.’

  ‘Really?’ Jitendra asked sceptically.

  ‘You think these machines don’t grasp what they are, that they don’t get the difference between existence and non-existence?’ He paused to take a sip from his liquor bottle, flicking the cap off with his thumb while steering one-handed. ‘Once, out by the western flanks, I saw a sifter begging for its life, begging not to be destroyed by a rogue collector.’

  ‘An evolved response, like a whimpering dog,’ Jitendra said dismissively. ‘Doesn’t prove there’s anything going on inside its head.’

  ‘You’d seen what I saw, you’d feel differently.’

  ‘Show me the imagery, I’ll make up my own mind.’

  ‘Not enough public eyes to catch it,’ Gribelin answered. ‘My own eyes were surrendered to the Overfloaters. They wiped the evidence.’

  ‘I can see why they might want to,’ Sunday said.

  Lady Disdain was powering downslope, three or four tentacles dragging the ground. Sunday had a better impression of the manta-like vehicle now. It was enormous – as it had to be, given the tenuousness of the Martian atmosphere. Ducted engines as large as ocean turbines were bracketed to the drab green gondola.

  She felt that it ought to make a sound, a terrible droning approach, but there was nothing.

  ‘Can you outrun it?’ Jitendra asked.

  Gribelin gave a brief shake of his head. ‘Not a hope in hell, and even if we did, we’d only run into more Overfloaters further into the Evolvarium. But don’t worry – I’m sure I’ll find a way to sweet talk Dorcas.’

  ‘Using your natural charm and diplomacy,’ Sunday said.

  ‘You’d be surprised how far it gets me.’

  The airship circled the moving truck then headed slightly south, dropping its triangular shadow over them like a cloak. Gribelin was still driving, but he was making no effort to push the truck to its limits. Sunday looked up, watching as the underside of the airship, hundreds of metres across and speckled with patch repairs, began to eclipse the sky. The gondola was as large as the Crommelin cable car, aglow with tiny yellow windows.

  Figures stole around up there, backlit and mysterious.

  Something clanged against them. Sunday jumped. Jitendra grabbed for the nearest handhold. Gribelin swore, but appeared otherwise resigned. The truck pitched as if it had just run into a sand-trap. The ground pulled away, dust cataracting from the wheels. Lady Disdain was lifting them into the sky, hauling them up with one or more of her tentacles.

  Fifty metres, then maybe a hundred. The horizon began to rotate, the deltoid canopy gyring slowly overhead. The tentacles held them level with the front of the gondola so that they were looking back at the deep, slanted windows of what was evidently the airship’s bridge. The bridge was wide, and there were at least six visible crew, none of whom were obviously proxies.

  One figure drew Sunday’s attention. A woman garbed in a long black coat that went all the way to her boots strode from one side of the bridge to the other, pointing and jabbing at her underlings. She came to rest at a console or podium, then angled some cumbersome speaking device to her lips.

>   A head and shoulders appeared in the truck, hovering above the dashboard and rendered with slight translucence.

  ‘Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something here, Gribelin?’ She was ghost-pale, slender-faced, with a sharp chin and long ash-grey hair brushed in a side-parting so that a curtain of it covered half her features. Her nose was pierced and many rings hung from the lobe of her one visible ear.

  ‘We’re kind of in the middle of something, too, Dorcas,’ Gribelin said. ‘As you’ve probably worked out. You mind letting us go, while there’s still some daylight?’

  ‘You cross the ’varium on our terms, when we feel like letting you. Why do I have to keep reminding you of that?’

  ‘Look, it would be nice to chat, but . . .’

  The woman combed fingers through her hair, allowing it to fall back into place. ‘You’re not usually in this much of a hurry. Anything to do with the vehicle following you from Vishniac?’

  Sunday glanced at her driver. ‘Ask her how far behind it is.’

  ‘No need, I heard you anyway,’ Dorcas said. ‘You weren’t aware of it until now?’

  ‘You know how tenuous things get out here,’ Gribelin said.

  ‘Especially after someone went to a lot of trouble to tie up all the proxies and swamp the public eyes with dumb queries. You usually operate alone, Grib. Why do I have the feeling someone’s pulling strings behind your back this time?’

  ‘Tell me about the vehicle,’ Sunday said. ‘Please.’

  Something in Dorcas appeared to relent, albeit only for the moment. ‘A rented surface rover, a little smaller than your truck. About two and a half hours behind you, maybe a little less.’

  ‘Lucas,’ Sunday said, as if there could be any doubt. ‘Quick off the mark, too. He must have arranged the vehicle rental before the train got in.’

  ‘Not a friend of yours?’ Dorcas asked.

  ‘I’m on an errand for a couple of clients,’ Gribelin explained. ‘A golem’s been following them since they left Crommelin.’

  ‘This errand . . . it wouldn’t be anything that will get in the way of my business, would it?’