Blue Remembered Earth Read online

  ‘To decline an offer now,’ Lucas said, ‘could prove disadvantageous when the next funding round arrives.’

  ‘No,’ Hector said gently. ‘He has made his point, and he is right to expect assurances. In his shoes, would we behave any differently?’

  Lucas looked queasy, as if the idea of being in Geoffrey’s shoes made him faintly nauseous. It was the first human emotion that had managed to squeeze past the empathy shunt, Geoffrey thought.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Lucas allowed.

  ‘He’s an Akinya – he still has the bargaining instinct. Are we agreed that Geoffrey’s terms are acceptable?’

  Lucas’s nod was as grudging as possible.

  ‘We have all committed this conversation to memory?’ Hector asked.

  ‘Every second,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘Then let it be binding.’ Hector offered his hand, which Geoffrey took after a moment’s hesitation, followed by Lucas’s. Geoffrey blinked the image of them shaking.

  ‘Don’t look on it as a chore,’ Hector said. ‘Look on it as a break from the routine. You’ll enjoy it, I know. And it will be good for you to look in on your sister.’

  ‘We would, of course, request that you refrain from any discussion of this matter with your sister,’ Lucas said.

  Geoffrey said nothing, nor made any visible acknowledgement of what Lucas said. He just turned and walked off, leaving the cousins standing there.

  Matilda was still keeping watch over her charges. She regarded him, emitted a low vocalisation, not precisely a threat rumble but registering mild elephantine disgruntlement, then returned to the examination of the patch of ground before her, scudding dirt and stones aside with her trunk in the desultory, half-hearted manner of someone who had forgotten quite why they had commenced a fundamentally pointless task in the first place.

  ‘Sorry, Matilda. I didn’t ask them to come out here.’

  She didn’t understand him, of course. But he was sure she was irritated with the coming and going of the odd-smelling strangers and their annoying, high-whining machine.

  He halted before her and considered activating the link again, pushing it higher than before, to see what was really going on in her head. But he was too disorientated for that, too unsure of his own feelings.

  ‘I think I might have made a mistake,’ Geoffrey said. ‘But if I did, I did it for the right reasons. For you, and the other elephants.’

  Matilda rumbled softly and bent her trunk around to scratch under her left ear.

  ‘I’ll be gone for a little while,’ Geoffrey went on. ‘Probably not more than a week, all told. Ten days at most. I have to go up to the Moon, and . . . well, I’ll be back as quickly as I can. You’ll manage without me, won’t you?’

  Matilda began poking around again. She wouldn’t just manage without him, Geoffrey thought. She’d barely notice his absence.

  ‘If anything comes up, I’ll send Memphis.’

  Oblivious to his reassurance, she continued her foraging.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The woman from the bank apologised for keeping him waiting, although in fact it had been no more than minutes. Her name was Marjorie Hu, and she appeared genuinely keen to be of assistance, as if he’d caught her on a slow day where any break in routine was welcome.

  ‘I’m Geoffrey Akinya,’ he said, falteringly. ‘A relative of the late Eunice Akinya. Her grandson.’

  ‘In which case I’m very sorry for your loss, sir.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said solemnly, allowing a judicious pause before proceeding with business. ‘Eunice held a safe-deposit box with this branch. I understand that as a family member I have the authority to examine the contents.’

  ‘Let me look into that for you, sir. There was some rebuilding work a while back, so we might have moved the box to another branch. Do you know when the box was assigned?’

  ‘Some time ago.’ He had no idea. The cousins hadn’t told him, assuming they even knew. ‘But it’ll still be on the Moon?’

  ‘Just up from Africa.’

  He’d travelled like any other tourist, leaving the day after his meeting with the cousins. After clearing exit procedures in Libreville, he’d been put to sleep and packed into a coffin-sized passenger capsule. The capsule had been fed like a machine-gun round into the waiting chamber of the slug-black, blunt-hulled thread-rider, where it was automatically slotted into place and coupled to internal power and biomonitor buses, along with six hundred otherwise identical capsules, densely packed for maximum transit efficiency.

  And three days later he’d woken on the Moon.

  No sense of having travelled further than, say, China – until he took his first lurching step and felt in his bones that he wasn’t on Earth any more. He’d had breakfast and completed immigration procedures for the African-administered sector. As promised, there’d been a message from the cousins: details of the establishment he was supposed to visit.

  Nothing about the Copernicus Branch of the CAB had surprised him, beyond the fact that it was exactly like every other bank he’d ever been in, from Mogadishu to Brazzaville. Same new-carpet smell, same wood-effect furniture, same emphatic courtesy from the staff. Everyone loped around in Lunar gravity, and the accents were different, but those were the only indicators that he wasn’t home. Even the images on the wall, cycling from view to view, were mostly of terrestrial locations. Adverts pushed travel insurance, retirement schemes, investment portfolios.

  Marjorie Hu had asked him to sit in a small windowless waiting room with a potted plant and a fake view of ocean breakers while she checked the location of the safe-deposit box. He had packed lightly for the trip, jamming everything he needed into a large black zip-up sports bag with a faded logo on the side. He kept the bag between his feet, picking at the terrestrial dirt under his nails until the door opened again and Marjorie Hu came in.

  ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘It’s still in our vaults. Been there for thirty-five years, which is about as long as we’ve had a branch in Copernicus. If you wouldn’t mind following me?’

  ‘I was assuming you’d want to screen me or something.’

  ‘We already have, sir.’

  She took him downstairs. Doors, heavy enough to contain pressure in the event of an accident, whisked open at the woman’s approach. She turned her head to look at him as they walked.

  ‘We’re about to pass out of aug reach, and I don’t speak Swahili.’ From a skirt pocket she pulled out a little plastic-wrapped package. ‘We have earphone translators available.’

  ‘Which languages do you speak?’

  ‘Mm, let’s see. Chinese and English, some Russian, and I’m learning Somali and Xhosa, although they’re both still bedding in. We can get a Swahili speaker to accompany you, but that might take a while to arrange.’

  ‘My Chinese is OK, but English will be easier for both of us, I suspect. I even know a few words of Somali, but only because my nanny spoke it. She was a nice lady from Djibouti.’

  ‘We’ll shift to English, then.’ Marjorie Hu put the earphones away. ‘We’ll lose aug in a few moments.’

  Geoffrey barely felt the transition. It was a withdrawing of vague floating possibilities rather than a sudden curtailment of open data feeds.

  ‘Anyone ever come in here that you couldn’t translate for?’ Geoffrey asked.

  ‘Not since I’ve been here. Anyone speaking a language that obscure, they’d better have backup.’ Marjorie Hu’s tone of voice had shifted microscopically now that he was hearing her actual larynx-generated speech sounds.

  A final set of pressure doors brought them to the vault. The morgue-like room’s walls were lined with small silver-and-orange-fronted cabinets, stacked six high, perhaps two hundred in all. Given the virtual impossibility of committing theft in the Surveilled World, there was no longer much need for this sort of safekeeping measure. Doubtless the bank regarded the housing of these boxes as a tedious obligation to its older clients.

  ‘That’s yours, sir,�
�� she said, directing him to a specific unit three rows up from the floor, the only cabinet in the room with a green light above the handle. ‘Open it whenever you like. I’ll step outside until you’re finished. When you’re done, just push the cabinet back into the wall; it will lock on its own.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Marjorie Hu made a small, nervous coughing sound. ‘I’m required to inform you that you remain under surveillance. The eyes aren’t public, but we would be obliged to surrender captured imagery in the event of an investigation.’

  ‘That’s fine. I wouldn’t have assumed otherwise.’

  She dispensed a businesslike smile. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

  Geoffrey put down his bag as she left the room, the door whisking shut between them. He wasted no time. At his touch, the cabinet eased out of the wall on smooth metal runners until it reached the limit of its travel. It was open-topped, with a smaller cream-coloured box resting inside. He lifted out the box and placed it on the floor. Even allowing for Lunar gravity, it struck him as unexpectedly light. No gold ingots, then. The box, stamped with the bank’s logo, had a simple hinged lid with no lock or catch. He opened it and looked inside.

  The box contained a glove.

  A glove, from a spacesuit. Fabric layers interspersed with plastic or composite plating, lending flexibility and strength. The fabric was silvery or off-white – hard to judge in the vault’s sombre lighting – and the plates were beige or maybe pale yellow. At the cuff-end of the glove was an alloy connector ring, some kind of blue-tinted metal inset with complicated gold-plated contacts that would presumably lock into place when the glove was fixed to the suit sleeve. The glove had been cleaned because, despite its apparent grubbiness, his hands stayed unsoiled.

  That was all there was. Nothing clutched in the fingers, nothing marked on the exterior. He couldn’t see anything lodged inside. He tried pushing his hand into it, but couldn’t get his thumb-joint past the wristband.

  Geoffrey didn’t know whether he felt disappointed or relieved. A bit of both, maybe. Relieved that there was nothing here to taint Eunice’s memory – no incriminating document linking her to some long-dead tyrant or war criminal – but subtly let down that there wasn’t something more intriguing, some flourish from beyond the grave, the fitting capstone that her life demanded. It wasn’t enough just to retire to Lunar orbit, live out her remaining days in the Winter Palace and die.

  He started to put the glove back in the box, preparing to stow the box back in the cabinet.

  And stopped. He couldn’t say why, save the fact that the glove seemed to merit more attention than he had given it. The one constant of Eunice’s life was that she was practically minded, scathing of sentiment and pointless gesture. She wouldn’t have put that glove there unless it meant something – either to her, or to whoever was supposed to find it after her death.

  Geoffrey slipped the glove into his sports bag. He put an Ashanti FC sweatshirt on top, jammed his baseball cap on top of that, resealed the bag and placed the now-empty box back into the cabinet. He pressed the cabinet back into the wall, whereupon it clicked into place and the green light changed to red.

  He opened the external door and stepped out of the vault.

  ‘All done,’ Geoffrey told the bank woman. ‘For now, anyway. I take it there’ll be no difficulties gaining access again?’

  ‘None at all, sir,’ Marjorie Hu said. If she had any interest in what he had found in the box, she was doing a good job of hiding it. This is a big deal for me, Geoffrey thought: family secrets, clandestine errands to the Moon, safe-deposit boxes with mysterious contents. But she must bring a dozen people down here every week.

  With the glove still in his possession, he made his way to the underground railway station. Transparent vacuum tubes punched through the terminal’s walls at different levels, threading between platforms connected by spiral walkways and sinuous escalators. Everything was glassy and semitranslucent. There were shopping plazas and dining areas, huge multi-storey sculptures and banners, waterfalls, fountains and a kind of tinkling, cascading piano music that followed him around like a lost dog.

  He strolled to a quiet corner of the concourse and voked a call to Lucas. When a minute had passed without Lucas picking up, he diverted the request to Hector. Three seconds later Hector’s figment – dressed in riding boots, jodhpurs and polo shirt – was standing in front of him.

  ‘Good of you to check in, Geoffrey. How’s your journey been so far?’

  ‘Pretty uneventful. How’re things back home?’

  ‘You haven’t missed any excitement.’ Lunar time lag made it seem as if Hector had given the question deep consideration. ‘Now – concerning that small matter we asked you to look into? Have you by any chance—’

  ‘It’s done, Hector. You can pass the word to Lucas as well – I tried calling him, but he didn’t answer. Maybe his empathy shunt short-circuited.’

  ‘Lucas broke a leg this morning – had a bad fall during the match. What should I tell him?’

  ‘That there was nothing in it.’

  Hector cocked his head. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing worth worrying about. Just an old glove.’

  ‘An old glove.’ Hector barked out a laugh. ‘Could you possibly be a little more specific, cousin?’

  ‘It’s from a spacesuit, I think – an old one. Can’t be worth much – must be millions like it still kicking around.’

  ‘She left it there for a reason.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Geoffrey gave an easy-going shrug, as if it was no longer his problem to worry about such things. ‘I’ll bring it home, if you’re interested.’

  ‘You’re at the premises now, right?’

  ‘No, I’m at the Copetown train terminal, on my way to Sunday. I couldn’t call you from the . . . premises – no aug reach.’

  ‘But the item is back where you found it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said, and for a moment the lie had emerged so effortlessly, so plausibly, that it felt as if he had spoken the truth. He swallowed hard, sudden dryness in his throat. ‘I can collect it before I come back down.’

  ‘Perhaps that wouldn’t be a bad idea.’ Hector’s figment was looking at him with . . . something. Naked, boiling contempt, perhaps, that Geoffrey had been so easily manipulated into doing the cousins’ bidding. Perhaps he should have shown more spine, talked up the offer even more. Maybe even told them to go fuck themselves. They’d have respected that.

  ‘I’ll bring it back. Seriously, though – it’s just an old glove.’

  ‘Whatever it is, it belongs in the family’s care now, not up on the Moon. How long before your train leaves?’

  Geoffrey made a show of looking up at the destination board. ‘A few minutes.’

  ‘It’s a shame you didn’t call me from the premises.’ Hector chopped his hand dismissively, as if he had better things to do than be cross with Geoffrey. ‘No matter. Fetch it on the way down, and enjoy the rest of your trip. Be sure to pass on my best wishes to your sister, of course.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘While remembering what we said about this matter staying between the three of us.’

  ‘My lips are sealed.’

  ‘Very good. And we’ll see you back at the household. Ching home if you need to discuss anything in depth, but otherwise consider yourself on well-deserved vacation. I’m sure Memphis will be in touch if anything requires your immediate input.’

  Geoffrey smiled tightly. ‘Wish Lucas well with his leg.’

  ‘I shall.’

  The figment vanished. Geoffrey found the next train to Verne – they ran every thirty minutes – and bought himself a business-class ticket. Damned if he was slumming it when the cousins were picking up the tab.

  He was soon on his way, sitting alone in a nearly empty carriage, digging through a foil-wrapped chicken curry, lulled into drowsiness by the hypnotic rush of speeding scenery. But all the while he was thinking about the thing inside his bag, now shoved i
n the overhead rack. But for the fact that he had sensed its bulk and mass inside his holdall as he made his way to the station, he could easily have imagined that he’d taken nothing with him after all.

  Copernicus had been sunlit when Geoffrey arrived, but ever since then he had been moving east, towards an inevitable encounter with the terminator, the moving line of division between the Moon’s illuminated and shadowed faces. They hit it just west of the Mare Tranquillitatis, as the train was winding its way down from the uplands between the Ariadaeus and Hyginus Rilles. Geoffrey happened to glance up, and for an awful, lurching moment it looked as if the train was about to hurtle off the top of a sheer cliff into an immense sucking black sea below. Just as suddenly they were speeding over that sea, the train casting a wavering, rippling pool of light across the gently undulating ground which served only to intensify the darkness beyond it. Against the unlit immensity of the great sea the train appeared to be speeding along a narrow causeway, arrowing into infinite, swallowing night.

  A few minutes into the crossing the cabin lights dimmed, allowing sleep for those who needed it. Geoffrey amped-up his eyes. He made out the occasional fleeting form in the middle distance, a boulder, escarpment or some other surface feature zipping by. And there were, of course, still communities out here, some of which were among the oldest in the Moon’s short history of human habitation. To the south lay the first of the Apollo landing sites, a shrine to human ingenuity and daring that had remained undisturbed – though now safely under glass – for nearly two centuries. Back when the idea of his visiting the Moon was no more than a distant possibility, Geoffrey had always assumed that, like any good tourist, he would find time to visit the landing site. But that pilgrimage would have to wait until his next visit, however many years in the future that lay.

  He chinged Sunday.

  ‘Geoffrey,’ she said, her figment appearing opposite him. ‘There’s got to be something screwed up with the aug, because it’s telling me your point of origin is the Moon.’