Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

‘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.