Blue Remembered Earth Read online

  The door at the far end of the room opened, allowing a figure to enter. It was another man, shorter and stockier than Chama, pushing a wheeled trolley laden with multicoloured plastic flasks and tubs.

  ‘This is my husband, Gleb,’ Chama said. ‘Gleb, we have visitors! Sunday’s brought along her brother.’

  Gleb propelled the trolley to the wall and walked over to them, peeling gloves from his hands and stuffing them in the pockets of his long white labcoat. ‘The elephant man?’

  ‘The elephant man,’ Chama affirmed.

  ‘This is a great pleasure,’ Gleb said, offering his hand for Geoffrey to shake. ‘Gleb Ozerov. Have you seen the—’

  ‘Not yet,’ Chama said. ‘I was just breaking the bad news to him.’

  ‘What bad news?’

  ‘That we’re batshit insane.’

  ‘Oh. How’s he taking it?’

  ‘About as well as they usually do.’

  Geoffrey shook Gleb’s hand. He could have crushed diamonds for a living.

  ‘He’ll get over it, eventually.’ Gleb studied him with particular attentiveness. ‘You look disappointed, Geoffrey. Is this not what you were expecting?’

  ‘It’s a room full of plants,’ Geoffrey said, ‘not the zoo I was promised.’

  Gleb was a little older than Chama – a little older-looking, at least – with central-Asian features, Russian, maybe Mongolian. His hair was dark but cut very short, and he was clean-shaven. Under the white laboratory coat, Geoffrey had the impression of compact muscularity, a wrestler’s build.

  ‘Look,’ Gleb said, ‘you’re a citizen of the African Union, and the AU’s a transnational member entity of the United Surface Nations. That means you view things through a certain . . . ideological filter, shall we say.’

  ‘I think I can see my way past USN propaganda,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘We’re Pans. Pans are bankrolled by the United Aqatic Nations, as you undoubtedly know, and the UAN’s at permanent loggerheads with the USN. That’s the way of the world. But we’re not at war, and it doesn’t mean that Pans are about to make a bid for global domination, on Earth or here on the Moon. It’s just that we believe in certain . . . unorthodox things.’ Gleb’s voice, coming in under the translation, was speaking a different language from Chama, something clipped and guttural, where Chama’s tongue was high and lyrical in intonation. He delivered this oratory with arms folded, muscles bulging under the white fabric of his sleeves. ‘Pans think that the human species has a duty, a moral obligation, to assist in the proliferation of living organisms into deep space. All living organisms, not just the handful that we happen to want to take with us, because they suit our immediate requirements.’

  ‘We’re doing our best,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s still early days.’

  ‘That’s one viewpoint,’ Gleb said cheerfully. ‘Especially if you’re trying to worm out of species-level responsibility.’

  ‘This is going really well,’ Sunday said.

  ‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I’ve only been here five minutes and already I feel like I’m about to be hanged, drawn and quartered for my crimes against the biosphere.’

  ‘Chama and Gleb don’t mean it personally. Do you?’ Sunday asked.

  ‘We do, but we’ll gladly make an exception for your brother,’ Gleb said with a smile.

  ‘Very magnanimous of you,’ Geoffrey replied.

  ‘We have a window here,’ Chama said. ‘The human species is poised on the brink of something genuinely transformative. It could be wonderful: an explosion of life and vitality, a Green Efflorescence, pushing beyond the solar system into interstellar space. We’re on the cusp of being able to do that. But at the same time we could also be on the cusp of entrenchment, consolidation, even a kind of retreat.’

  Geoffrey shook his head. ‘Why on Earth would we retreat when we’ve come this far?’

  ‘Because soon we won’t need to be here at all,’ Gleb said.

  ‘Soon, very soon,’ Chama continued, ‘machines will be clever enough to supplant humans throughout the system. Once that happens, what reason will people have to live out in those cold, lonely spaces, if they can ching there instead?’

  ‘Thinking machines won’t rise up and crush us,’ Gleb said. ‘But they will make us over-reliant, unadventurous, unwilling to put our own bodies at risk when machines can stand in for us.’

  Geoffrey was beginning to wish they’d stayed in the park, with the ice-cream stands and battling kites.

  ‘I’m not seeing what machines have to do with any of this,’ he said, gesturing at the glass-fronted enclosures.

  ‘Everything,’ Gleb answered. ‘Because this is where it all begins.’

  Geoffrey peered into the lower window of the glassed enclosure. It was a kind of rock-pool tableau, with low plant cover and bubbling, gurgling water. ‘How many plant species have you brought here?’ he asked.

  ‘Living and replicating now, in the region of eight hundred,’ Chama said. ‘In cryosuspension, or as genetic templates, another sixteen thousand. Still some way to go.’

  ‘My god, there’s something alive in there.’ He couldn’t help jabbing his finger against the glass. ‘I mean something moving. In the water.’

  ‘A terrapin,’ Gleb said, on a bored note. ‘Terrapins are easy. If we couldn’t do terrapins, I’d give up now.’

  ‘Show him what else you do,’ Sunday said.

  Gleb walked to another window, a few panels down from where Geoffrey was standing. ‘Come here,’ he said, tapping a thick finger against the glass.

  The visible portion of the habitat – though it clearly extended far back from the room – was a circle of bare, dusty earth fringed by tall wheat-coloured grasses. Rising above the grasses, a seamless curtain of enamelblue, projected in such a way that it looked as convincing and distant as real sky. As Geoffrey walked over to join Gleb, he kept on tapping his fingernail against the glass. Gleb had very dark nails, tinted a green that was almost black. Geoffrey arrived in time to see the grasses swishing, parting to allow a hare-sized animal to bound into the clearing.

  It was a battleship-grey rhinoceros, the size of a domestic cat. It was not a baby. Its proportions and gait, insofar as Geoffrey could tell – and allowing for the bouncing motion that was an inescapable consequence of Lunar gravity – were precisely those of a fully grown animal.

  It just happened to be small enough to fit into a briefcase.

  He was just satisfying himself as to the accuracy of his assessment when a pair of true babies sprang along behind what was now revealed to be their mother. The babies were the size of rats, but they walked on absurdly thick, muscular, wrinkle-hided legs. They were as tiny and precisely formed as bath toys moulded from grey plastic.

  He laughed, amazed at what he was seeing.

  ‘Resource load is the crux,’ Chama said, joining them by the window. ‘We don’t have the means to keep fully grown adult specimens alive – at least not in a habitat that wouldn’t feel hopelessly claustrophobic to them.’ He pushed a strand of hair away from his cheekbone. ‘Fortunately – for now, at least – we don’t have to. Nature’s already given us a ready-made miniaturisation mechanism.’

  ‘Phyletic dwarfism,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘Yes. Almost childishly easy to achieve in mammals and reptiles.’

  Chama was right. Insular dwarfism often arose when an ancestor species divided into isolated sub-populations on islands. Allopatric speciation, and subsequent dwarfism, had occurred time and again in the evolutionary record, from dwarf allosaurs to the Homo floresiensis hominids in Indonesia. Even trees did it. It was a gene-encoded response to environmental stress; a way of allowing a population to survive hard times.

  ‘The same mechanisms will assist animal life transition through the difficult bottleneck of the early stages of the Green Efflorescence,’ Gleb declared. ‘All we’ve done is give the inbuilt mechanism a little coaxing to produce extreme dwarfism. It’s as if nature anticipated this future survival adaptat
ion.’

  ‘A little coaxing’ sounded like magisterial understatement to Geoffrey, given the toy-like proportions of the rhinoceroses. But he could well believe that Chama and Gleb hadn’t needed to perform much deep-level genetic tinkering to achieve it. Certainly there was no evidence that the dwarf animals were in any way traumatised by their condition, judging by the way they were happily snuffling and shuffling around, the babies nudging each other boisterously.

  Gleb had retrieved the wheeled trolley, dug some granular foodstuff out of one of the containers and was now sprinkling it down into the enclosure via a hopper above the window. The dwarf rhinoceroses must have taken his fingernail tapping as the sign that dinner was imminent.

  ‘It’s . . . an ingenious solution to the problem,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘You find it troubling,’ Chama said.

  ‘I wonder whether it might have been better to keep these organisms on ice until you had the means to grow them to full size.’

  ‘Even if that meant waiting decades?’

  ‘The Green Efflorescence doesn’t sound like a short-term plan.’ It felt odd to speak of the Efflorescence himself, as if by voicing its name he had bestowed upon the enterprise a measure of legitimacy, even tacit approval.

  He was still undecided as to whether it might be some kind of vile, misanthropic eco-fascism. He would need to know a lot more before he made up his mind.

  ‘These animals don’t know that they’re dwarves,’ Gleb said, patiently enough. ‘On a neurological and behavioural level, there’s no evidence of developmental impairment. There’s a huge redundancy in brain tissue – it’s why birds are at least as good at problem solving as primates, even given the massive disparity in cranial volume. So we have no ethical qualms whatsoever. Chama and I wouldn’t countenance the creation of misery merely to serve some distant utopian objective.’

  ‘They do look happy enough,’ he allowed.

  ‘We won’t deny that there are difficulties still to be overcome, with some of the other species.’

  Something ominous clicked in Geoffrey’s head. ‘If you can do rhinoceroses, you can do mammoths and elephants. It’s been a while, but I remember something about dwarf populations in those species: the Cretan elephants, the mammoths in the Bering Sea Islands.’

  ‘We can do Proboscidea,’ Chama said. ‘And we have. But there are difficulties.’

  He led Geoffrey and Sunday to one of the far windows. Geoffrey’s stomach churned with apprehension.

  ‘I’m not sure this is right.’

  Gleb was pushing the trolley again. ‘Always scope for improvement. But that doesn’t mean the elephants should be put on ice, or euthanised.’

  Compared to the rhino habitat, the grass was lower, scrubbier – dry and bleached like the Serengeti before the short rains. In the middle distance lay a waterhole, now reduced to a muddy depression. Standing on the far side of the waterhole, clumped together into one multi-legged, multi-headed Cubist mass, were three dwarf elephants. They were the size of baby goats, grey bodies camouflaged with olive-brown patches of drying mud.

  ‘Tell me how these elephants were born,’ he said.

  ‘In artificial wombs, here in the Descrutinised Zone,’ Gleb replied. ‘The fertilised eggs were imported, carried in vivo, in human mules. Chama and I both carried eggs, and we’ve both fallen foul of the Indian and Chinese Lunar authorities at various times.’

  ‘You’d need hundreds – thousands – for a viable population, though.’

  Chama nodded. ‘We have hundreds. But so far only these elephants have been allowed to be born.’

  ‘Just these three?’

  ‘As many as the habitat can reasonably support,’ Chama said.

  Geoffrey had been agnostic about the rhinoceroses. Now his distaste sharpened into precise, targeted revulsion. ‘This is wrong. No matter what your objectives, you can’t do this to these animals.’

  ‘Geoffrey—’ Sunday began.

  He ignored her. ‘Elephants aren’t born into a vacuum: they’re born into a complex, nurturing society with a strong maternal hierarchy. An elephant clan might contain thirty to a hundred individuals, and there are strong inter-clan bonds as well. What you’re doing here is the equivalent of dropping human babies into isolation cubes!’

  Sunday’s hand was on his arm. She tightened her grip. ‘They’re not unaware of these issues, brother.’

  Chama appeared in no way offended by Geoffrey’s outburst. ‘From the moment these habitats were conceived, we knew that the elephants would need surrogate families to provide a developmental context. So we devised the best way to provide that surrogacy. From the time they were embryos, these animals have grown with neuromachinery in their heads. That shouldn’t horrify you, should it?’

  ‘Not necessarily – but it depends what you do with that machinery,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘These elephants need a socialising context,’ Gleb responded. ‘So we provide it. The neuromachines drop hallucinations into their minds via direct activation of the visual, auditory and olfactory modules. We create figments – in other words, a ghost-herd – to provide stimulus and guidance. The elephants move in augmented reality, just as we do when we ching.’

  ‘The difference is we know that figments are figments. Elephants don’t have the cognitive apparatus to make that distinction.’

  ‘If they did, the figments would be pointless,’ said Chama.

  ‘The figments are computer-generated, but they’re based on observations of millions of hours of the social dynamics in real herds,’ Gleb said. ‘The same database reassures us that the dwarves’ responses are fully in line with what would be expected if the figments were real. These are not developmentally impoverished creatures.’

  ‘Well, if you’ve no qualms—’

  ‘I didn’t say we’ve achieved shining perfection,’ Gleb countered.

  ‘Computer-generated figments may provide some kind of stabilising framework,’ Geoffrey conceded, choosing his words with tightrope precision, ‘but elephants are individuals. They have memories, emotions. They can’t be modelled by mindless software. Maybe these dwarves won’t grow into monsters. But they won’t turn into fully socialised elephants either.’

  ‘No,’ Chama agreed. ‘But you could help matters so that they do.’

  ‘Help you? I’m on the verge of pushing for your extradition on the grounds of Schedule One biocrimes!’

  ‘We’re aware of your work,’ Gleb said. ‘We’ve read your papers. Some of them are quite good.’ He allowed this calculated slight to hang in the air before continuing, ‘We know what you’ve been doing with the Amboseli herds.’

  ‘If you know my work,’ Geoffrey said, ‘then you should have guessed that I wouldn’t be too keen on any of this.’

  ‘We also saw that you might be able to provide a possible solution,’ Chama said.

  Geoffrey hooked a finger into his belt. ‘This I’m fascinated to hear.’

  ‘We know of your matriarch, Matilda – we’ve followed her with passive ching. She’s magnificent. She also has neuromachinery, as do most of your elephants.’

  ‘As a monitoring tool, nothing else.’

  ‘But the same neuromachinery, with a few configuration resets, could provide an aug layer.’

  ‘I’m not sure where you’re going with this.’ But he was surer than he cared to admit, even to himself.

  ‘These dwarf elephants already interact with hallucinations,’ Gleb said. ‘Instead of being computer-generated fictions, why couldn’t they be the ching figments of Matilda and her clan? There’s no reason why Matilda and her elephants couldn’t perceive the Lunar dwarves as being physically present in the basin, as another family or group of orphans in need of adoption. By the same token, the Lunar dwarves could experience real-time interaction with genuine Amboseli elephants, as if they were here, on the Moon.’

  Geoffrey didn’t need to think through the technical implications. Chama and Gleb had undoubtedly considered every possible w
rinkle. He shook his head sadly.

  ‘Even if it could be done . . . it wouldn’t work. My elephants have never encountered dwarves, and your elephants have never encountered fully grown adults. They wouldn’t know what to make of each other.’

  ‘The size differential doesn’t matter,’ Chama said. ‘It can be edited out via the ching, along with the morphological differences between the two populations. Each group would perceive the other as being perfectly normal. This can be done, Geoffrey. It’s beyond trivial.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s taken me years to establish a bond of trust with Matilda and her family. I can’t betray that trust by manipulating their basic experience of reality.’

  Chama wasn’t giving up. ‘From Matilda’s point of view – from the point of view of her whole family – it would be a minor detail in the scheme of things. Three new elephants, that’s all. Orphans are routinely adopted by families, aren’t they?’

  ‘And sometimes left to die,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘But it does happen – it’s not something strange and alien by elephant standards,’ Gleb said. ‘Meanwhile, all the other complex herd interactions would proceed perfectly normally. The benefit to the orphans, however, would be incalculable. Having grown up in a stabilising framework, the orphans would then be in a position to mentor a second generation of Lunar dwarves through to adulthood. Before very long, we would have the basis of an entirely independent and self-perpetuating elephant society, here on the Moon.’

  ‘By assisting us,’ Chama said, ‘you can be part of something heroic.’

  ‘The Green Efflorescence?’

  ‘Put that aside for now,’ Gleb said. ‘Just think of these elephants, and what they could become. What wonders. What companionship.’

  ‘Companionship?’ Geoffrey did his best not to sneer. ‘As pets, you mean?’

  Chama shook his head. ‘As cognitive equals. Think of all the crimes we’ve committed against their kind, down all the blood-red centuries. The atrocities, the injustices. The carnage and the cruelty. Now think of us giving them the stars in return.’

  ‘As what? Recompense?’