Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

‘He’s headed beyond the orbit of Neptune, Sunday. From that far out, the difference between being on Earth or Mars is nothing. Besides – even our fastest ship would take more than eight months to get there.’ The proxy let that sink in before continuing. ‘You can’t do anything for Geoffrey here, and nor can I for Hector. That’s why I’m still in Africa. And we all have to come home eventually.’

‘I’ve only just got to Mars.’

‘Mars isn’t going anywhere,’ the proxy said. ‘It’ll still be here waiting for you.’

So she went home. Vishniac to Herschel, Herschel to the elevator. As the thread-rider took her higher she watched Mars fall away under her feet, receding and paling like some memory of a dream that began to perish at the touch of daylight. Considered in those terms it had been a strange one, a restless fever stalked by scuttling iron monsters and grinning, bad-smelling madmen. She had nearly died in it, too, but now she was sad because there seemed to be something final in this ascent, some unaccountable certainty that there would be no return. Goodbye, Mars , she thought: Goodbye, cold little world of broken promises . The planet might not be going anywhere, but there was no reason to assume that the trajectory of her life was ever going to intersect with Mars again.

In orbit, she snatched only glimpses of the requisitioned freighter. Ugly as sin, all fuel tanks and radiators, with a random plaque of airtight shipping containers fixed around its skeletal chassis, thousands of them, like blocky 3-D pixels implying a fatter shape she couldn’t quite visualise. The nameless vehicle had no permanent crew and only a tiny life-rated habitat module. They put Sunday and Jitendra asleep before loading them, and then there was nothing, five weeks of oblivion and then the grog and haze of revival. She’d felt like a god, like the centre of her own personal universe, when they brought her back to consciousness on Phobos. Now some switch had flipped in her skull and she felt like a piece of grit that the universe was trying very hard to expel.

But that passed, gradually. And from orbit Earth was marvellous, impossibly blue, lit up like an indigo lantern with its own interior glow. She longed to touch it, to stroke her fingers through that atmosphere, cleaving white billowing clouds and glittering salty seas, until she felt the hard scabbed crust beneath them. She wanted to walk on Earth, breathe its ancient airs, feel the tectonic murmur of its still-beating heart. To be somewhere where she didn’t need to rely on machines and glass and pressure seals to keep her alive. Which was absurd, given the amount of her life that she’d happily spent in a roofed-over cave on the Moon. But Mars had done something to her.

‘I can’t go back to the Zone,’ she told Jitendra. ‘I mean, not right now. Not this moment.’

‘One of us has to.’

He was right, too: their affairs couldn’t just be left to moulder. So two days after revival, they separated: Jitendra returning to the Moon, and the Descrutinised Zone, where he would attempt to resolve any minor emergencies that had arisen since their departure; and Sunday to the elevator, and to Libreville, and to Africa. It was bad, saying goodbye to Jitendra. It might be many weeks, even months, before they were properly reunited – and Sunday doubted that ching was going to offer much in the way of consolation while they were apart. But she had to do this, and Jitendra understood.

She had not walked under terrestrial gravity for years, and the transition was far harder than she had anticipated. Medicine helped, and so did an exo – she did not feel in the least bit conspicuous wearing it, since her predicament was hardly a rare one – but what she had not counted on was the near-permanent ache in her bones and muscles, or the constant fear of tripping, of damaging herself. The ever-vigilant exo would not permit injury, and the ache was only a consequence of her body reconfiguring itself for locomotion on Earth. But neither of these realisations helped in the slightest. She still felt awkward, top-heavy, fragile as porcelain.

But that passed, too – or at least became no more than a tolerable background nuisance. She did not return to the household directly, for she was not yet ready to deal with Lucas. Instead she travelled, tapping funds that were effectively inexhaustible. Libreville to the Brazzaville – Kinshasa sprawl, where there were friends and fellow artists she’d once collaborated with. B – K to Luanda, where she spent long hours losing herself in the surge and retreat of the ocean, its mindless assault on the mighty Cho sea walls. She never had much trouble finding somewhere to stay, company to pass the evenings. Her friends wanted to know what had happened on Mars, why she had been all that way only to come home again. As politely as she could, she rebuffed their questions. Most of her friends were wise enough not to push.

But they wanted to know about Geoffrey, and she could hardly blame them for that. Unlike the death of her grandmother, this wasn’t some seven-day wonder. Winter Queen , or whatever name that ship merited, had defied expectations by not destroying itself. It was still out there, further from the sun than it had any right to be given the mere weeks that it had been under way. It had long since stopped accelerating, but it would need to decelerate if it was to rendezvous with its presumed destination. The ship’s exhaust would be directed away from Earth when that happened, much harder to detect from the inner system. But countless eyes would be straining for a glimpse of those improbable energies, trying to tease out a hint at the unexpected physics underpinning them. Some of the minds behind those eyes, undoubtedly, would be half-hoping for the ship to wipe itself out in a single information-rich flash, all the better for unravelling.

In fact, she wasn’t worried about that herself. By now she had some faith in Eunice. If the ship was capable of getting Geoffrey, Hector and Jumai most of the way to Lionheart, it wasn’t going to screw up the last part of that journey. But she was much more concerned about what would happen to the three of them when they arrived. What awaited them out there? If the ship used up all its fuel getting to the iceteroid, could they get back home again – or survive long enough to await rescue? But again she fell back on that faith. This was engineered, part of a plan concocted by Eunice more than sixty years earlier. There had to be a point to it, beyond an elaborate form of punishment aimed at her descendants. So she hoped, anyway.

Meanwhile, Geoffrey was not in Africa. When he left Earth it had not been under ideal circumstances, and he could not have known how long it would take to break into the Winter Palace and ferret out its secrets. But he had surely not counted on being away for months. Since he had been involved with the Amboseli elephants, Sunday knew, Geoffrey had very rarely been away from them for more than a couple of weeks at a time. A month would have been exceptional. He’d often told her how much effort he had invested in establishing a rapport with the study group, and how easily that rapport could be undermined.

That, fundamentally, was what had brought her back to Africa, although she had not been quite ready to admit it to herself at first. The elephants had never meant much to her, even though she had shared very similar childhood experiences with Geoffrey. But if she had been pulled away from the Moon unexpectedly, and if something she had nurtured was in danger of suffering through neglect, she had no doubt that Geoffrey would have been there for her.

In Luanda her funds provided an airpod. Still awkward in the exo, she folded herself into its interior and told it to fly to the Amboseli basin. She would be within a stone’s throw of the household, but the household could wait.