Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

Geoffrey was glad to be moving. It was beginning to work the blood back into his limbs and fingers.

‘Is this what you were expecting?’ Jumai asked.

‘Hector would have known better than me what to expect,’ Geoffrey said, between breaths. ‘But if you’d asked me to guess what the inside of one of our mining plants looked like, it wouldn’t be far off this. There has to be pressure and warmth, for the technicians who come out here once in a blue moon. There have to be machine parts and supplies for the things the robots can’t make on their own, or aren’t allowed to make. And we know the facility’s still working as an ice mine.’

‘Eunice didn’t drag us all this way just to inspect the troops.’

‘No.’

At the far end of the covered walkway was another door, heavy enough to contain pressure, but not an airlock. It opened as they approached, revealing a cabin-like compartment set with restraints and four buckle-in chairs. It was an elevator, Geoffrey supposed, or what passed for an elevator on a world that was virtually weightless.

‘We’ve come this far,’ he said, in response to Jumai’s unspoken question.

They chose seats and buckled in – Jumai having to adjust her restraint to fit around the extra bulk of her suit. Only when they were secure did the door close on them. Geoffrey felt an immediate surge of smooth acceleration. Insofar as he trusted his sense of orientation, it felt as if they were heading down, deeper into Lionheart.

‘Eunice?’ Jumai asked, more in hopefulness than expectation.

But there was no answer. The elevator sped on, still accelerating.

The ride lasted a minute or three, long enough – given their evident speed – to reach at least a couple of kilometres into the iceteroid’s interior. It slowed quickly, but it was only when the door opened again that Geoffrey could be sure they had stopped.

They pushed out of the elevator into a white room about the size of a small hotel lobby. With its coved corners and bright handrails, it had the modular and utilitarian feel of a piece of spacecraft, transplanted deep underground. Circular doors led off from three of the walls into curving, red-lit corridors. The generator throb was much more prominent now, and the walls displayed a constant succession of scrolling status updates and complicated multicoloured diagrams. Nothing he wouldn’t have expected in a remotely operated mining facility. That underlying throb might have been the vibration of monstrous drills, gnawing ever deeper into the cold husk of this stillborn comet…

Or something else.

The floor shook.

‘You feel that?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Package launch,’ Jumai said. ‘I felt one earlier, when we were in that tunnel. You must have been airborne when it happened. Seem to be going off on schedule, as before. Business as usual.’

They both tensed. What they heard were not footsteps, precisely, but the unmistakable approach of something , propelling itself limb over limb in the near-weightless conditions. It was coming along one of the red-lit shafts, its busy, bustling sound preceding it. Defenceless, Geoffrey’s only response was to find a handhold and reach for it. Jumai made to seal her visor, then drew her hand slowly back before she’d completed the gesture.

The thing was a golem. He could tell that much as it came around the curve. It was humanoid, but it moved with the manic, limb-whirling energy of a gibbon, the quadruped gait too rhythmic and choreographed to look entirely natural. It was tumbling head over heels, yet maintaining impressive forward momentum. Only when the golem neared the door did its movements settle into something more plausibly organic.

Sunday’s construct had emulated Eunice at the end of her public life, as she had been before going into exile. She’d lived seven decades by then, and taken no great pains to disguise that age. This was different. They were looking at a much younger incarnation now – perhaps half the age of the original construct.

The golem had arrived dressed in a simple one-piece black garment, marked on the sleeves with various flags and emblems. Eunice’s hair was long and black, thick and without a trace of grey, though she had combed it back from her forehead and gathered it into an efficient bun, secured with a black mesh hairnet. The hairstyle was austere, suited for weightlessness rather than fashion, but the effect on the golem was one of understated and modest elegance. Geoffrey had seen countless images of his grandmother as a young woman, but he had never once thought of her as beautiful. She was, though. Small-boned, long-necked, with prominent cheekbones and wide eyes that cut right through him. And the thing he’d never really detected, in all those images – that quiet, knowing smile.

He still hated her for what she had done to Hector. Which was ridiculous, of course: this wasn’t Eunice, even if it was convenient to think of the golem as such.

Yet he had to remind himself of that.

‘I always hoped it might be you, Geoffrey,’ she said, casting a long and appraising glance over him. She had come to rest standing up, her feet on the floor. ‘I didn’t count on it, and it wouldn’t have mattered if someone else had come instead. They’d have been tested as well, and if they were blood Akinyas, with strong ties to the household, I don’t doubt that they’d have passed the eidetic scan just as capably.’

He had too many questions to know where to start. ‘The only reason I’m here is because Hector and Lucas decided to ask me to investigate the safe-deposit box. If they’d sent someone else to do that, you’d be talking to them now.’

‘But would anyone else have had the fortitude to come this far?’ She cocked her head. ‘I extracted some of your memories, during the eidetic scan. Unethical, but it had to be done. I know something of what you’ve been through. And I’m sorry that it was necessary.’

‘She’s bullshitting,’ Jumai said. ‘Eidetic scans can’t extract and process memories that easily. They look for correlations with known image patterns; they can’t just rummage through your head indiscriminately, like someone searching a sock drawer. Machines just don’t have the intelligence to make sense of the raw data. You’d need something with artilect-level cognition, at the very—’

‘Then it’s a good job there’s an artilect running me,’ Eunice said, cutting her off with savage discourtesy. ‘Not one of those modern, declawed weaklings, either. Military grade, more than eighty years old, fully Turing compliant – the kind of thing that the Cognition Police were set up to pulverise.’

‘Should you have told us that?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘Or are you not planning on us ever going home again?’

‘No – you can go home. I’ll put no constraints on that. I’d be a very ungracious host otherwise, wouldn’t I? There’s fuel here and the damage to your ship is nothing that can’t be fixed, given Lionheart’s resources.’

‘For an artilect, you were pretty slow to realise we meant no harm,’ Jumai said.

‘I’m but one facet of the artilect,’ Eunice said, ‘and I was only activated after you had already established your credentials. Until then, Lionheart was guarding itself, as it has done for more than sixty years. If certain autonomic vigilance protocols acted with excessive zeal… then you must forgive me.’

‘If you’ve read my memory, you’ll know that you killed one of us,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I didn’t pick that up,’ Eunice said, and for a moment there was something like contrition in her tone. ‘It must have happened very shortly before the scan. The memories hadn’t had time to cross the hippocampus, to be encoded into long-term storage. If there were casualties—’