Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

More by luck than judgement, he found himself settling gently down – or was it sideways? There was still no appreciable gravity – onto Lionheart. There was red ground below him, grey bunkerlike surface installations all around, veined with pipes and gridded with radiators. The tallest structure was a buttressed tower with docking clamps arranged around its top, wide open like a grasping hand. That was where the ship would have berthed, if their approach had been orthodox. The airlock had to be nearby.

His feet touched down, crunching into the surface as if he was breaking through the crust of a cake, into the soggy interior. That was just momentum, not his own weight.

‘I see you,’ Jumai said.

She came down like a strobing angel, and at first he feared that she’d initiated slowdown too high up; that she might yet attract Lionheart’s attention the way Hector had. But her judgement was no worse than his own. She landed a few metres away, and for a moment it was all they could do to stare at their own stupefied cartoon faces.

‘I’m sorry about—’ Jumai started saying.

‘Later,’ Geoffrey said, startled by his own callousness, but knowing that was how it had to be, until they were safe.

They found an airlock easily enough, set at ground level. Geoffrey didn’t doubt that there was another one situated near the docking clamps, for the convenience of arriving ships. Jumai slapped her palm against the green-lit entry panel and the outer door opened without complaint. The iceteroid’s defences, geared towards the interception of arriving ships, paid no heed to anything happening on the surface.

There was room enough for both of them inside the lock, even with their thruster packs. The outer door closed; air gushed in through slats.

‘We’ve lost contact with the ship,’ Jumai said. ‘Eunice was right – the airlock’s blocking signals.’

When pressure normalised, Geoffrey took off his helmet and allowed it to drift down to the floor.

‘Eidetic scanner,’ Jumai said, directing his attention to a hooplike device set just below the ceiling. ‘And a gene reader, in that wall panel under the scanner. You’ll need to make skin contact with it.’

Geoffrey ordered the suit to remove itself. He stepped out, wearing just his inner layer, shivering as the coldness of the air touched him for the first time. He positioned himself under the eidetic scanner, remembering the similar device in Chama and Gleb’s menagerie. The scanner lowered down until it formed a halo around his head. The device would be primed to respond to visual memories of specific events or locations; it would easily be capable of distinguishing between memories laid down directly and those confabulated from second-hand experience. At the same time he pressed his bare palm against the grey rectangle of the gene reader. He felt the tingle as the reader drew a representative sample of skin cells.

‘State your name,’ a machine-generated voice said, in Swahili.

He swallowed before answering. ‘Geoffrey Akinya.’

‘State your relationship to Eunice Akinya.’

‘I am her grandson. Please cease attack on the approaching ship. It is not hostile. Repeat, it is not hostile.’

If the scanner understood his words, or cared about them, it gave no sign. The hoop tracked up and down, ghost symbols fluttering across his vision – weird and senseless hieroglyphs, in colours that the naked eye could not quite perceive: yellow-blues, red-greens. The scanner was pushing deep and intrusive fingers into his skull. It was reading the architecture of his brain the way a blind person might trace the profile of a human face.

‘Visualise the household, Geoffrey Akinya. You are walking through the west wing, away from the garden. It is late afternoon.’

Picking one memory out of the thousands he held felt dangerously arbitrary. He tried to focus on the details, the specific and telling texture of things. The gleam of polished flooring, the squeak of it under his shoes, the white-plastered walls, the way the light fell on the brown-framed cabinets and cases of the private museum. Dust in lazy suspension, pinned in bars of sunlight. The smell from the kitchen, which managed to infiltrate every corner of the household.

‘Go to your room.’

He walked there, rather than simply imagining the transition. He pushed open the door, trying to recall the precise heft of it. He had been in the room recently, at least by his own sense of time, so it was not difficult to bring to mind its dimensions, the simple layout and sparse furnishings.

‘Sit on the bed. Look around.’

He did as he was told, forcing the act of conscious and continuous recollection – not just bringing to mind disconnected objects and impressions, but replaying the visual scene as a smoothly flowing sequence, his point of view tracking fluidly.

‘Focus your attention on the elephants.’

He had called them to mind, but only as one element of the room’s interior. Then he remembered how the Winter Palace had also narrowed its focus onto the elephants, as if they were a key component in the establishing of his identity.

That had merely been a question about his age when he’d received the gift. This was an altogether more intense act of scrutiny. He sensed that to fail in this specific reconstruction would be to fail entirely. Lionheart was holding its breath, as he held his.

He visualised the elephants. He held them in his mind’s eye as six distinct forms, recalling the weight of them, the smoothness of the carved wood in his hands, the sharpness of the tusks against his fingertips, the rough, dark feel of their bases. The elephants were all slightly different, even allowing for their diminishing sizes. He strove to visualise the distinguishing details, the subtle variations of head, ear and trunk postures, the leg positions. He concentrated until the act of sustained recollection was unbearable.

The image collapsed. The room evaporated from recall.

‘Welcome, Geoffrey Akinya,’ the voice said. ‘You have authorisation to proceed.’

The eidetic scanner slid back towards the ceiling. He removed his palm from the gene reader.

‘Cease the attack against the incoming ship,’ he said again, hoping that the system was sophisticated enough to understand and comply. ‘It is not hostile.’

‘Approach defences have been stood down. Do you have further instructions regarding the ship?’

‘Give me back comms.’

Jumai, who still had her helmet on, said, ‘Link re-established. Eunice – do you hear us?’ She waited a few moments, listening to the voice at the other end of the link. ‘Good. The bombardment should have stopped. I think we’ve managed to persuade Lionheart that we’re not a threat, but it’s probably best if we keep the ship out of immediate harm’s way for the moment. If we can work out how to bring you in under automatic guidance, we’ll be in touch.’

‘Much damage?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Nothing that should prevent us from getting home, provided we can find fuel and make some basic repairs. You think it’s safe to leave the packs and suits here?’

‘Keep your suit on,’ he advised. ‘One of us should maintain a link back to the ship. Besides, it’s cold.’

‘You could put your own suit back on.’

‘Or I could walk through that door now , and find out why we’ve been brought here.’ He clapped his arms against his chest, deciding he could deal with the cold for the time being. ‘Guess which one I’m going for?’

Geoffrey opened the inner lock and pushed through into the iceteroid. He was doing his best not think about Hector.

The door led into a reception bay and storage chamber as large as a warehouse, as deep as a cargo ship’s hold. It plunged down many levels below the point where they’d emerged, all filled with racked machine parts and stacked cargo pods, gaudy with primary-colour paintwork, insignia and warning labels. There was Akinya property here, as well as products and supplies from companies that Geoffrey felt certain had not existed for decades. The ceiling, a level or so overhead, must have pushed above Lionheart’s surface, forming one of the bunkerlike structures Geoffrey had seen upon landing. It was windowless but covered with a matrix of lighting elements. A walkway, enclosed in a grilled tube with numerous hand- and footholds, pushed out from a small ledge at the airlock’s entrance. The bay was brightly illuminated and smelled showroom clean. From somewhere below came the monklike chant of generators and heavy-duty life-support equipment. The throb worked its way through the grilled walkway, trembling it under the push of his fingers. Walking didn’t really work in the iceteroid’s practically non-existent gravity. Geoffrey and Jumai were making long, slow arcing jumps, pushing back from the curve of the ceiling when they rose too high.