Blue Remembered Earth

by Alastair Reynolds

  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 emo
tional 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.

  There was a limit to what Geoffrey was willing to discuss until he was face to face with his sister, but he told Sunday that they were both safe, and would be returning home as soon as the ship was cleared for departure. Allowing for the preparations, and the fifty-odd days of journey time it would take to reach near-Earth space, they would be back in two months.

  ‘We’ll be difficult to miss,’ he said.

  Then he called Lucas, and gave him the news about Hector.

  Ten hours later, return transmissions arrived from Sunday and Lucas. Neither of them had a lot to say, simply expressing relief that Geoffrey and Jumai were alive, and would soon be on their way home. Lucas thanked Geoffrey for the news about his brother, but beyond that he was implacable, as if he wasn’t entirely ready to take the news at face value. Even Sunday had appeared reticent to comment on it. She was in Africa, Geoffrey learned: after returning from Mars, she had travelled to the household to keep an eye on his elephants. Not just chinging, but physically there, in body and mind. He was grateful, and when he considered that by being in Africa she was necessarily neglecting her own life back on the Moon, her work and commissions, his gratitude became boundless. But Geoffrey and Jumai were coming back now, and Sunday didn’t need to spend all that time waiting on Earth. He asked her to promise him that she would return to the Moon before his arrival.

  Later, when Jumai and Geoffrey were dining in the centrifuge, being waited on by Plexus machines, she said, ‘They’re not sure we’re us. That’s why they’re holding back, I think. That and the fact that we’re obviously holding back something as well. Can you blame them? We’ve been duped and manipulated by artilects; Sunday’s been cheated by the Pans. Right now no one knows who or what to trust. For all they know, we might be dead by now.’

  Geoffrey agreed. The fact that they couldn’t give a plausible account of what had happened in Lionheart wasn’t helping their case, either. It would be better when they got home, and he could talk properly. Not just with Sunday and Jitendra, but with Lucas as well. There was no escaping that. Lucas would have to be told about Lionheart.

  ‘That’s not really true,’ Jumai said delicately. ‘Hector never got to find out why Eunice wanted us here.’

  ‘So you’re saying that because he was never let in on the secret, I don’t have to share it with Lucas?’

  ‘I’m saying you don’t owe him anything. You didn’t drag Hector into this – it was the other way around. Later, you saved his neck.’

  ‘Didn’t do him any good, did it? I just postponed it.’

  ‘If Hector hadn’t died . . . it would probably have been one of us. So consider that score settled. Did you hate him at the end?’

  Geoffrey had to search himself for the honest answer. The automatic reply was to say that no, he had forgiven Hector everything. But the reality was more complicated than that. ‘We saw things differently,’ he said, fingering the stem of his wine glass. ‘I believe there are absolutes. Rights and wrongs, lines in the sand. Moral certainties. I think Hector was wrong to go about things the way he did. He and Lucas shouldn’t have blackmailed me, they shouldn’t have used the elephants as a bargaining chip, and they shouldn’t have put the family name above all other considerations.’ He smiled at himself. ‘But I understand some of the cousins’ fears now. More so than I ever have. I thought we might end up uncovering something, but I had no idea it was going to be this momentous. And Eunice was right: it is dangerous, and this knowledge shouldn’t be shared until we’re absolutely sure it won’t rip humanity apart. Maybe we are ready for it, and maybe we’re not – just yet. Either way, we know about it – you and me, and soon Sunday and Lucas. That means it’s already out there, in a small way. And maybe Eunice was right about that but wrong about something else: that it’ll take an enormous amount of luck for someone to go from Summer Queen to the physics behind the stardrive. If she’s wrong about that, then the genie’s already out of the bottle.’

  He paused and gazed at the wine still in the glass. ‘Which means Hector and Lucas were right to be cautious, right to be concerned about something from the past upsetting the present. They couldn’t have known how potentially damaging it was all going to turn out to be, but their instincts were right. And if their instincts were right, then maybe their methods were as well. Maybe the means do sometimes justify the ends.’ He emptied the glass and waited for Jumai to pour him another measure from the bottle, which was a satisfying Patagonian red – shipped up from the inner system in 2129, if the label was to believed.

  The year of his birth, not that he attached any significance to that.

  ‘So they were wrong,’ Jumai said, ‘but maybe they were right as well. And that line in the sand might not be as simple as it looks.’

  ‘I didn’t hate Hector,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘I used to, I won’t pretend that I didn’t. But not near the end. I can’t say I ever got close to liking him, but when all’s said and done . . .’

  ‘He was your cousin, and he did do one brave thing.’ Jumai raised her own glass. ‘To Hector, in that case.’

  ‘To Hector.’

  ‘Although Lucas will always be a prick.’

  ‘One we have to work with, unfortunately,’ Geoffrey said. He sipped the wine, placed the glass down and continued with his meal for a few mouthfuls. ‘Although it’s Sunday that worries me.’

  ‘I don’t see Sunday as the problem in this situation – especially as she already knows ninety per cent of the story.’

  ‘It’s the artilect,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Remember what Eunice told us, about how Memphis’s entire mission in life was undermined by the rock diagrams? That’s how it’s going to be with Sunday. She’s spent years creating the Eunice construct, and now I’m going to have to tell her it’s all been wasted effort. That there’s a simulation of Eunice in Lionheart that’s at least as believable as the one she’s created. How’s she going to take that?’

  ‘She won’t have to.’

  It was not Jumai that had spoken, but the golem. It had arrived unbidden and was standing in the doorway to the kitchen area.

  ‘What do you want?’ Geoffrey asked, considering its uninvited arrival a violation of their privacy.

  ‘Sunday need never know about me. You haven’t mentioned me in your transmissions home. I’d know if you had, and . . . well, you couldn’t have, shall we say.’

  ‘Because you’d have doctored our messages?’ Jumai asked.

  ‘Better that than have the authorities know the artilect law was breached,’ Eunice said. ‘Things may have relaxed in recent years, but you can never be too careful. No: the world doesn’t need to know about me, and neither does Sunday.’

  ‘I’m not going to lie to my sister, if she asks a direct question,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘Tell her that Lionheart was being run by machines, and that the machines had a figurehead. There’s no lie in any of that.’

  He shook his head. ‘You’ll still exist.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’ The golem moved to their table, drew out a chair for itself, sat down. ‘I had a function, a very limited and speci
fic one, which was to be here for you. I’ve done that now, and there’s no further reason for my existence. You know what you need to know. If you return to Lionheart, the other machines will take care of your needs. They are fully capable of running the experiment should you wish to see it reactivated. And I, for my part, will cease to exist. The routines emulating me will be erased. There will still be an artilect, but it won’t have a human face, or my memories. It won’t even remember being me.’

  ‘That’s suicide,’ Jumai said.

  ‘It would only be suicide if I had ever lived.’ Eunice hesitated. ‘Might I ask one indulgence, though? Summer Queen will be made ready regardless of what happens to me, so it would make no practical difference to you if I ended myself now. I’d rather not, though. Not while there’s still the possibility of conversation.’

  ‘We can’t mean anything to you,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You didn’t even exist before we arrived. You said so yourself.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Eunice looked at her hands, resting on the edge of the table. ‘I was only actualised at the moment when you proved your identity, in the airlock. Before that . . . I was a potential in the artilect, a set of dormant routines.’

  ‘So you shouldn’t have experienced anything before you were actualised,’ Jumai said.

  ‘I shouldn’t have, and I can’t say I did. But those years of waiting . . .’ She frowned, as if examining some puzzle or conundrum that refused to make sense. ‘I felt them. Each and every second. And when you came, when human voices returned to this place . . . I was glad. And I still am. And I do not welcome that which must be done.’ Then her frown softened and she produced a sad and defiant smile. ‘I’m not asking the world, am I? Just a little conversation and companionship, before you go.’