But Sunday couldn’t sleep much, not while that thing was down in the rock, calling to her. So that night, while the Overfloater held station and a skeleton crew manned the graveyard shift, she stood in darkness aboard the gondola and watched. Radar and infrared sensors swept the parched, dust-tormented plateau. Very occasionally, halfway to the horizon or further, something would break cover. Fleeting and swift, it would slink across the land’s contours. The ambush predators were experts at concealment, from jack-in-the-box variants that dug themselves into rock holes and natural fissures, compressed like springs, to shapeshifting forms that were able to pancake their bodies into the very top layer of the dust, to lurk unseen. There were things like flatfish and things like snakes. There were also stalking, prowling horrors that quartered the night on endless deterrent patrols, searching for the weak, the maimed or the dead. She saw one of these loping jackal-like things traverse the horizon line: it had so many jointed legs that it appeared to move in spite of itself, riding a bickering tumble of independent limbs. There was also something like a convoy of scorpions, one after another, that might (horrifyingly) have been a single entity, and a flat-topped creature like a house-sized hairbrush, supported on countless bristling centipede legs, that could have been a grazer or a killer.
It was wonderful in a way, she supposed. There was astonishing variation in the Evolvarium, a staggering panoply of evolutionary strategies, bodyplans, survival mechanisms. Life on Earth had taken three and a half billion years to achieve the radiative diversity that these swift, endlessly mutable machines had produced in a matter of decades. Artificially imposed selection pressures had turned life’s clock into a screaming flywheel. The arms race of survival had been harnessed for the purposes of product development, feeding an endless supply of new technologies, new materials and concepts, into the systemwide marketplace. In that sense, it was almost miraculous: something for nothing, over and over again.
But it wasn’t free, was it? The Evolvarium was death and fear, terror and hunger, on endless repeat. The machines might not have enough cognitive potential to trouble the Gearheads, but that didn’t make them mindless, no matter what Jitendra might care to think. She thought of the sifter Gribelin had told them about, the machine that had begged. Maybe he’d been exaggerating. Maybe he’d been imposing human values on an exchange that was fundamentally alien, beyond a gulf of conceptualisation that could never be crossed.
She wondered. She wondered and knew that she would be very, very glad when they were out of this place.
Jitendra slipped his arm around her waist. ‘I’m sorry about Memphis,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sorry that we aren’t back home, with your brother. But I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this for the world.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s marvellous,’ he said.
Beyond the horizon, red and green radiance underlit the night’s dust clouds. Something was dying in fire and light. Sunday shivered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
By the time he came to groggy consciousness, Geoffrey was already halfway to the Moon, and a minor diplomatic squall was busy playing itself out back on Earth. Mechanism apparatchiks were not at all happy about Geoffrey having absconded before submitting to a pysch assessment, and they were taking an increasingly sceptical stance regarding Jumai’s supposed innocence in the whole affair. The Nigerian had committed no direct wrongdoing, but the message – in no uncertain terms – was that it would be in her absolute best interests if she were to submit to Mech jurisdiction at her earliest convenience. In other words, she was a whim away from being declared a fugitive herself. Tiamaat, meanwhile – and by extension the Panspermian Initiative – was using every stalling measure in its arsenal, arguing that because Geoffrey had requested aqualogy citizenship, it had no option but to discharge its own procedural obligations in this regard, and that if it did not do so, it would be in grave dereliction of its charter.
Smoke and mirrors, bluff versus bluff, two geopolitical superpowers playing an old, old game. As long as it bought Geoffrey time, he didn’t really care. Worse, as far as he was concerned, was the reaction of the cousins.
Lucas and Hector had been trying to ching from the moment he was picked up by the Nevsky. Their requests had been systematically rebuffed – and Geoffrey had been unconscious for much of the ensuing time – but the cousins hadn’t been daunted. They’d had no trouble tracking the Nevsky – the movements of any seagoing vessel, let alone one as large and ponderous as a former Soviet nuclear submarine, were publically visible – and they’d had no trouble making the obvious connection between the Nevsky’s destination and the lifter’s ascent into orbit. Geoffrey had dropped off the Mechanism’s radar, so they couldn’t be sure that he was in space. But he wasn’t anywhere else under Mechanism jurisdiction either, which did rather argue for him being aboard the rocket. It would not have taken limitless resources to track the rocket’s rendezvous with the deep-space vehicle Quaynor, and to presume that Geoffrey and Jumai were now aboard that ship.
When they had eventually given up on trying to speak to him directly, Hector had recorded a statement, one that Geoffrey had finally felt obliged to listen to.
‘We know what you intend to do, cousin. We know what your new friends think they will help you to achieve. But you are wrong. This will not work. And you are making a very, very serious mistake. You have no business in the Winter Palace, and you have no right to trespass where you are not welcome.’
‘I have as much right to it as you do,’ Geoffrey mouthed.
‘If you have ever thought of yourself as an Akinya,’ Hector went on, ‘do the right thing now. Turn around. Abandon this folly. Before you damage the family name beyond repair.’
‘Fuck the family name,’ Geoffrey said. Then, softly: ‘Fuck the family while you’re at it. I’m out.’
There was a dull propellant roar from somewhere in the ship, a ghost of gravity as the ship trimmed its course, and from that moment on the Quaynor was aimed like an arrow for the orbiting prison where his grandmother had ended her days.
‘Not much to look at,’ Jumai said, six hours later, when they had their first good view of the Winter Palace. ‘I don’t know what I was expecting. Bit more than this, though.’ She paused to tap her medical cuff, instructing it to up her anti-vertigo dosage. Geoffrey had caught her vomiting into a sick bag a few hours into the flight, curled into a foetal ball in the module that had been assigned as her temporary quarters, making dry retching sounds. He’d asked her why she hadn’t managed the nausea, and she’d said that the cuff’s chemicals took the edge off her concentration, and for Jumai that was less acceptable than the occasional heave.
‘We need you sharp at the station,’ he’d argued. ‘That means not being worn out from puking your guts up before we get there.’ And he took her wrist, gently, and tapped up her discretionary dosage to match his own.
‘Yes, Doctor,’ she’d said, half-sullenly, but the message – he was relieved to see now – had got through.
‘She had it built around her old ship, the Winter Queen,’ he said, when the grey cylinder hung before them, massively magnified. They were still fifty thousand kilometres out, so the imagery was synthesised from distributed public eyes in cislunar space rather than the Quaynor’s own low-res cameras. ‘I never went inside it, of course – never even chinged up there. But I know what it’s like. Saw images often enough, whenever she deigned to address us from her throne. It’s a jungle, humid and sticky as a hothouse. Ship’s a rust-bucket; it was just about capable of keeping her alive, supplying power to the station, but no more than that. That’s why the cousins can make a good case for decommissioning it – the reactor’s almost as old as the one in that submarine.’
The cylinder had the proportions of two or three beer cans stuck together top to bottom, bristling with docking/service equipment at either end. It was rotating slowly, spinning on its long axis, bringing most of the surface into view. Between the endcaps, the station’s outer skin was
smooth, uninterrupted by machinery, sensory gear or anything that might indicate scale. Eunice had wrapped her own iron microcosm around herself, and she’d never felt the slightest inclination to see what was outside.
‘She never left this?’ Jumai asked, the horror seeping through her voice. ‘I mean, not even to step outside, in a suit? In all that time?’
‘We’d have known. There was never a point when someone, somewhere, wasn’t watching the Winter Palace. Ships came and went occasionally – automated supply vehicles, Memphis on one of his errands – but no one else ever came out. Her star may have faded, but even in her last years she was still enough of a celebrity for that to have made the news, if it had happened.’
‘But to live inside that thing – after all she’d done, all she’d seen. How could she do that to herself?’
‘By going a little mad,’ Geoffrey said.
‘She could ching, I suppose. But that wouldn’t have been enough consolation for me.’
‘You’re not my grandmother. Whatever she needed, it was in there.’
‘That’s not living.’
‘Never said it was,’ Geoffrey replied.
After a silence Jumai went on, ‘Well, we dock first. That’s clear. Then we see how easy it is to break inside. Figure you expect some complications, or you wouldn’t have brought me along.’
‘If you don’t have to lift a finger, you’ll still get paid,’ he reassured her.
‘You still think I’m a mercenary to the core.’
‘I think you like risk. Not quite the same thing.’
‘In your book.’ Jumai gave an unconcerned shrug, her nausea blasted away for the time being. ‘So: let’s see what our docking options are.’ And she reached out and tumbled the image of the Winter Palace like a toy suspended over a cot until she’d brought one of the endcaps into view. She plucked her fingers to zoom in, frowning at the details. ‘See anything out of the ordinary? You’re the seasoned space traveller, not me.’
‘Can’t say I’m any kind of expert on docking systems.’
‘You don’t need to be,’ said a voice behind them. It was Mira Gilbert, weightless now, fully divested of her mobility harness but equally at home in zero gravity as she was under water. She wore a skintight zip-up orange and grey outfit fitted with pockets and grab-patches. ‘We’ve assessed the situation. Perfectly standard interfaces and capture clamps: the Quaynor will be able to hard-dock without difficulty.’
‘You came just to tell us that?’ Geoffrey asked. He’d barely seen Gilbert since his revival.
‘Actually, I came to tell you that there’s been a development back in the East African Federation. Public eyes detected the activation of the Kilimanjaro ballistic launcher.’
‘Fuck,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Not sure what came up: could be a test package, a cargo pod, or something else. Right now we’re leaning towards “something else”. Whatever it was got pushed all the way to orbit, where it was met by another vehicle.’
‘What kind?’ Jumai asked.
‘The Kinyeti, an asteroid miner registered to Akinya Space,’ Gilbert answered slowly, so the words had time to hit home. ‘Something with at least the range and capabilities of the Quaynor, if not greater.’
She pulled up an image: either a long-range real-time grab or an archival picture of the same ship. As far as Geoffrey was concerned, he could have been looking at another view of the ship he was travelling in. The Kinyeti had the same skeletal outline, built for operations in vacuum with no requirement to withstand atmosphere or hard acceleration/deceleration. It had engines and fuel tanks at one end, docking and mining equipment at the other, and a pair of contra-rotating centrifuge arms mounted at the midsection bulge of her main crew quarters, with habitat modules on the end of each arm.
He’d seen the Quaynor’s arms from inside the ship. They were static, welded into immobility, their only remaining function to serve as outriggers for comms gear and precision manoeuvring systems.
‘Been on high-burn ever since it met the blowpipe package,’ Gilbert went on. ‘Keeps that up, it’ll reach the Winter Palace about ninety minutes ahead of us.’
‘Has to be one or both of the cousins,’ Geoffrey said.
‘This caught us with our flippers off,’ Gilbert said. ‘We didn’t think the blowpipe was working yet.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Geoffrey told her. ‘Not properly. They tested it when my grandmother was scattered, but it wasn’t ready for people . . . not by a long margin. Only Lucas or Hector would be fucking mad enough to risk their necks riding the blowpipe.’
‘They want to catch up with us, they wouldn’t have had much choice,’ Gilbert said. ‘Libreville would have taken too long to get to, and they didn’t have access to their own rocket. Would’ve been blowpipe or nothing.’
‘Someone means business,’ Jumai said. ‘But we knew that already. OK, what does this change?’
‘Nothing,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘We’re not turning around. Can we squeeze some more speed out of this thing, Mira? Now that we no longer need to hide our intentions?’
‘Depends how fast you want to go,’ the merwoman said. ‘And how many space-traffic violations you want to stack up.’
‘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 ter
ror. 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.’
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