Blue Remembered Earth

by Alastair Reynolds

  The elevator had arrived. The door opened and Eunice made to stand. ‘What do you know about Mercury, Geoffrey?’ she asked, her tone turning brisk and businesslike again.

  ‘Are you talking about the falling-out between Akinya Space and the Panspermian Initiative?’

  ‘Very good. At least you’re up to speed on that.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Jumai said.

  ‘The Pans constructed a facility on Mercury,’ Geoffrey said, recalling what he had already learned from Sunday and Arethusa, ‘to build and launch Ocular. It was a telescope, a massive one – made of tens of thousands of individual parts, floating much further from the sun than we are now. To make that happen, they needed Akinya Space involvement. A deal was cut – we’d supply the components, shipping them from Earth and the Moon. In return, we’d get to piggyback our own research outpost on the Pans’ facility.’

  He looked at Eunice, waiting for her to contradict him. Instead she offered her palm, encouraging him to continue. ‘The facility needed to be on Mercury because that was the easiest place in the system to tap into lots of free energy. The Pans had already put in place a solar collecting grid to power their assembly line and launcher; we used a fraction of that energy to run some experiments in propulsion physics.’ Geoffrey took a moment to order his thoughts. ‘That was a decoy, though. The real purpose of the Mercury facility was to conduct research into Turing-level artilects. By doing their dirty work on Mercury, my family hoped to keep away from the Cognition Police.’

  ‘The Pans knew about this?’ Jumai asked.

  ‘No, and they weren’t happy when they found out. They pulled the plug on the collaboration, booted us off Mercury. We managed to burn the evidence before the Gearheads got a close look: they couldn’t pin anything on us, so they went home empty-handed. That was 2085 – fifteen years before Eunice went to the edge of the system.’

  ‘At least we know what happened to one of the artilects,’ Jumai said. ‘What has Mercury got to do with this, here and now?’

  ‘Ocular found something,’ Geoffrey said, ‘just before Eunice died. Arethusa – Lin Wei – felt enough of a debt to her old friend to believe that Eunice ought to be told about the discovery. That seems to have been the trigger for . . . something.’ He offered an apologetic shrug. It was as much as he’d managed to piece together.

  ‘There’s a little more to it,’ the golem said. Eunice was leading them down an ice-walled tunnel. It had been bored roughly, then fixed with spray-on sealant. A walkway had been fastened to the floor, handrails and grabs to the walls, lights to the ceiling. The air was turning cold again. ‘Mercury was a double-blind. The artilect research was genuine, but that wasn’t the sole point of our being there. The basic physics research wasn’t just a screen. It was as equally valid – if not more important.’ She was skimming the tunnel in long, loping strides – human locomotion, not the limb-over-limb tumble that the golem had demonstrated earlier. And looking back, smiling with uncontained pleasure. It was the delight of someone who hadn’t had an audience in a very long while. She was enjoying the showmanship, her moment in the spotlight. ‘On Mercury, we tested a hypothesis. We constructed a relatively small-scale experimental physics facility to probe certain obscure byways of high-energy quark-quark interactions. There were bigger physics labs elsewhere – in Earth orbit, on the Moon – but we needed discretion. Above all, we had energy in abundance.’

  ‘What did you find?’ Geoffrey asked.

  ‘What appeared to be an unpromising little side-avenue . . . that turned out to lead to something astonishing. Utterly unsuspected, utterly unexplored. We’d broken through into an entire garden of new physics. We were breaching unification energies almost without trying. Seeing exotic-matter by-products that shouldn’t have been created since the universe was more than a couple of Planck-lengths wide.’ Eunice shook her head in amazement. ‘The wonder was that we didn’t blow ourselves off Mercury. We came close, in the early days. Then we dialled it back a bit and became cautious. Very cautious. It was clear that the physics we were investigating needed a bigger experimental facility.’

  ‘You say “we”,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Who else was in on this? You can’t keep that kind of thing secret if more than a handful of people are involved.’

  ‘Only a handful were,’ Eunice said. ‘With artilects and robots handling the complex construction and analysis tasks, it was easy enough to run the physics facility with just a skeleton crew – and most of them thought they were working on minor refinements to propulsion design. As to who knew the full story, there were just two of us.’

  ‘You were never a physicist,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘I didn’t say I was.’

  They’d reached the end of the ice-walled tunnel. The door here was as heavy and sturdily armoured as a surface airlock, fixed inside a frame that was obviously well braced into the surrounding ice. It opened for the golem, and she led Geoffrey and Jumai through it.

  Inside was a small control room – just a couple of consoles and buckle-in seats facing three large triangular-framed windows screened with heavy-duty slats. The wall behind them, flanking either side of the door, was lined with grey lockers and equipment racks. There was some kind of decorative sculpture on the wall to Geoffrey’s right, while the one to his left was occupied by a single large display which appeared to show Lionheart and its environs at a variety of logarithmic scales, culminating in one that was big enough to encompass the iceteroid’s orbit around the sun. Geoffrey’s eyes tracked to the smaller orbits of the outer gas giants; then inwards to the still smaller paths of Saturn and Jupiter. Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury fell into an area he could easily have covered with the palm of his hand.

  They were a long way out. Every now and again something would remind him of that, and the feeling was like vertigo. How could his grandmother ever willingly have sought this isolation, this sense of immense displacement from home?

  ‘It’s a shame your sister isn’t here,’ Eunice said. ‘I’d have liked her to see this.’

  ‘This’ was the sculpture, on the wall to his right. It was a slightly irregular rectangle, about the size of a Persian rug, fixed vertically against the wall. The rectangle was in fact a mosaic of smaller pieces – black shapes, mostly about the size of his hand, which, to judge by their jagged outlines, must once have fitted together to form a single whole. Now there were gaps and fissures where they didn’t quite join. There were also entire pieces missing from the edges and the middle – bites and absences where the grey backing of the wall showed through.

  For all that their edges were irregular, the surfaces of the pieces – the visible faces – were as smooth as if they’d been chiselled along fracture lines. Aside from the occasional chipped or cratered piece, the dark mosaic was uniform in thickness. It gleamed with a magpie lustre, blues and greens shimmering back at Geoffrey, and within the shimmer the suggestion of faint intersecting scratches. Studying the scratches more intently, he made out what could almost have been totemic figures in cave art – a dance of headless, splayed-limb psychopomps made up of dashes and squiggles and spirals.

  ‘Would Sunday have recognised this?’ He wondered, momentarily, whether it might actually be his sister’s work, but he didn’t think so. With solid forms, her work tended towards the figurative. When she worked with abstract compositions, she employed every colour in the paintbox.

  ‘That would depend,’ Eunice said. She had positioned herself at one of the consoles and now opened the shutters covering the main windows. They whisked away with a series of loud clunks, leaving only glass between the control room and what was obviously a very large vacuum-filled cavity inside the iceteroid. ‘That shielding was never going to make much difference if one of the reactions went critical,’ Eunice remarked, ‘but it made me feel marginally safer knowing it was in place.’

  They might have been looking at the interior of the drilling operation, spotlit for visitors. The cavity was impressively large – an easy kilometre across,
stretching away to the left and right around a great curve so that the far ends were not visible from their vantage point. If in fact there were ends at all, for, Geoffrey decided, it was just as likely that the cavity was toroidal, a doughnut-shaped hole dug out of the middle of Lionheart. Bolstering that suspicion was the fact that a metal tube came around the bend of the cavity, passed by the observation point and continued on its arcing trajectory around the other end. The tube was fixed to the inner walls of the cavity by cartwheel-shaped assemblies, each shock-absorbing spoke as thick as a railway carriage. The tube itself was as wide as a major thoroughfare. Like a sated python, it bulged here and there, and secondary pipes branched out from it at various angles, plunging into the cavity wall.

  ‘A lot of metal,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘Twenty million tonnes,’ Eunice said, with a touch of pride. ‘All of it shipped up from the main belt under the pretence that it was for normal mining operations. Would have been impossible if we didn’t already have a massive system-wide manufacturing and transportation network in place. A few thousand tonnes diverted from this facility, a few more from that . . . over time, it added up. But books still had to be cooked. One thing to keep a commercial secret from our competitors; another to run a secret project within the family. It took ten years, and there were many occasions when it nearly came undone. I couldn’t have done it without help – someone to cover my tracks, make sure there were no loose ends in the administration.’

  ‘So that’s two people who knew, other than yourself,’ Jumai said.

  Eunice smiled tersely. ‘I made the initial discovery. But – as Geoffrey so kindly pointed out – I’m no physicist. Never was. I could be guided into a kind of understanding, but it was never more than a shallow approximation of the real thing.’

  Geoffrey asked, ‘How could you make a discovery, without being a physicist?’

  ‘By luck. Luck and the wit to know that what I’d found might be useful, and that I should speak to someone who might be better informed than me.’ She touched a control and the shutters slammed back into place with the sound of a dozen rivet-guns firing simultaneously. ‘The experiment’s powered down now,’ she said, ‘but it still gives me the flutters, seeing that thing out there.’

  ‘You needed the solar grid on Mercury to run the first experiment,’ Jumai said. ‘Sun’s colder than a witch’s tit out here. How did you find the energy?’

  Eunice laughed – not because it was a stupid question, Geoffrey decided, but rather one she liked. ‘That’s simple. I ran the second experiment off a small reactor derived from the first.’

  She moved to the black tableau on the right-hand wall and detached one of the fist-sized fragments. It came off easily, leaving no trace of a hook or adhesive.

  ‘A piece of Chakra’s Folly,’ she said, tossing the item to Geoffrey. In Lionheart’s low gravity, he had ample time to catch it. ‘The Phobos Monolith. Your sister would have seen it, I think – on her way to the Indian settlement where I spent some time before descending to Mars.’

  Geoffrey caressed the black fragment, convinced that he’d already handled it. ‘This is a piece of Phobos?’

  ‘Something that ended up there. People have known about the Monolith for at least a hundred and fifty years – they saw the shadow it cast long before they got a good close-up look at the thing itself. For a while, there were cranks who thought it might be an alien artefact – a ship, a sentinel, something like that. But when we got there we found that it was exactly what all reasonable people had always expected: a very big boulder, jammed into Phobos like a splinter. Impressive, hard to miss – a viable tourist attraction. But not an alien machine.’

  ‘Then why am I holding this?’

  ‘I wasn’t the first to see it up close. Not even the fiftieth. By the time I got there, nearly a hundred people had already come through Phobos on their way to Mars – I was the ninety-eighth. And countless robot eyes had already scanned and photographed the Monolith. They’d seen it for what it was: a clearly natural feature, the result of some ancient collisional process.’ Eunice waited a breath, then added, ‘But they’d all missed something.’

  ‘Something you didn’t,’ Jumai said.

  ‘I found debris,’ Eunice said, ‘near the base of the Monolith, loosely scattered over the Phobos surface material – bound there only weakly, due to the low gravity. That thing had been sticking up from the crust like a target in a shooting gallery for countless millions of years. Eventually something had hit it, some speck of cosmic dirt, and chipped off an entire face. I was looking at the debris, the shards of that high-velocity impact. Others must have realised what had happened, I suppose. But it had never occurred to any of them to pay attention to the debris.’

  Geoffrey was still studying the piece in his hand. ‘You realised there was more to it than just debris.’

  ‘You can’t have missed those fine surface markings. On the face of it, they could be anything: spallation tracks from cosmic rays, crystalline defects . . . but something about them held my eye. I picked up another piece, lying close by. Then another. Eventually – and my suit air was running low by then – I found a matching pair. I fitted them together and saw that the scratches connected, and that they appeared to form part of some larger . . . diagram.’

  ‘I’d laugh if there was any possibility you might be joking,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘I went back out there many times over the following weeks. I gathered as many of the fallen shards as I could find, bringing them back to the encampment. It was easy enough to keep the pieces hidden in my personal effects, and since we were going into a gravity well, not crawling out of one, there was no mass restriction for the trip down to Mars.’

  ‘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!’