Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

‘You killed Hector,’ Jumai told her. ‘He was your grandson as well.’ She shook her head in self-disgust. ‘What am I doing, trying to make an artilect feel guilty? She’s only a mask. Behind her is just… stuff.’

‘Are you finished?’ Eunice asked. ‘I apologised. I did not mean it to happen. But the stakes have always been high. Impossibly so. Do you think any of this was done without good reason?’

‘I have no idea what any of “this” is, other than a means of wasting time and killing innocent people,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We’ll add Memphis to that tally as well. He’d be alive if I hadn’t been dragged into your fun and games.’

‘Memphis is dead?’ The golem looked away, as if there was something on Eunice’s face that she did not wish them to see. ‘I didn’t know,’ she added, in a softer voice than she’d used so far. ‘When did it happen?’

Geoffrey was about to say that it had only been a few days ago, but then he remembered the time he had spent travelling to Lionheart. ‘Seven weeks ago. There was an accident, with the elephants.’

‘If his death was a consequence of my actions… I can’t begin to tell you how that makes me feel.’

‘You don’t feel anything,’ Jumai said.

‘You’re wrong about me,’ the golem told her. ‘This had to be done. Don’t you understand?’

‘We don’t,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You came all this way. Surely you must have an inkling of what this is all about by now?’ She searched their faces for a glimmer of comprehension. ‘You don’t know anything, do you?’

‘My sister said you’d spoken of a gift, something that was both a blessing and a curse,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Yes.’ Eunice nodded keenly. ‘Yes, there was a gift. And you must know about the jewels to have made it this far. And the engine that brought you to Lionheart – surely that can’t have escaped your attention? You made the connection, obviously?’

‘The engine’s better than anything else out there,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It got us to Trans-Neptunian space in weeks rather than months. Is that what this is all about?’

‘No,’ Eunice said, before adding, ‘Well, yes, in one sense. But the engine is… was… only a means of bringing you here, and of demonstrating my, shall we say, sincerity?’ She smiled encouragingly. ‘So that whatever else I do or show you, you’ll have good grounds to take my words at face value?’

‘Every commercial interest in the system is going to want to pick that thing apart,’ Geoffrey said, and suddenly Hector was speaking through him. ‘The ship may be Akinya Space property, but we won’t be able to sit on a secret like that for ever.’

‘You won’t have to – I’ve already made provisions for the engine. And keep in mind that while I live and breathe, I am still running this firm.’

Geoffrey sneered. ‘I hate to break it to you, but the only reason we’re here is because you upped and died at the end of last year.’

‘You and I need a word,’ Eunice said.

Jumai had given up trying to contact the version of Eunice back inside the ship. She had removed her helmet and now sat with it in her lap, eyeing Geoffrey as the elevator car sped deeper into Lionheart. The suit rendered her both monstrous and comical.

‘You’ve come a long way,’ the golem said, ‘and I don’t doubt that you both have lives and responsibilities of your own. Unfortunately, you are about to get a severe case of perspective readjustment. Even the most difficult decisions you’ve ever had to make in your lives simply don’t register on this new scale.’ She was sitting with her head low and fingers laced together, looking up at Geoffrey and Jumai as if pleading or begging. ‘That was all inconsequential fluff, like choosing a brand of toothpaste.’

‘We’ve both made life-and-death decisions lately,’ Geoffrey said. ‘So did Hector. So did my sister.’

‘Decisions of strictly local consequence. If you died, your family would continue. If the family ended, that would be an economic catastrophe, but it would not be the end of all things. Do you see what I mean? Local responsibility. Contained consequences. That’s not how it’s going to be from now on.’ Eunice looked down at her interlaced fingers – they were knitting and re-knitting nervously. ‘A hundred years ago, more or less, I stumbled on something. It led, indirectly, to this moment. I’ve lived with the knowledge of that discovery ever since – although even I didn’t grasp the full implications until decades later. Still, I knew it was something worth keeping close to my chest. And I was right about that. If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here now. We’d be a lot of dead dust and rubble piles orbiting the sun, where once there were settled worlds and people.’ She looked up sharply. ‘Doubtless you think I’m exaggerating. I don’t do exaggeration.’

The elevator had arrived. The door opened and Eunice made to stand. ‘What do you know about Mercury, Geoffrey?’ she asked, her tone turning brisk and businesslike again.

‘Are you talking about the falling-out between Akinya Space and the Panspermian Initiative?’

‘Very good. At least you’re up to speed on that.’

‘I’m not,’ Jumai said.

‘The Pans constructed a facility on Mercury,’ Geoffrey said, recalling what he had already learned from Sunday and Arethusa, ‘to build and launch Ocular. It was a telescope, a massive one – made of tens of thousands of individual parts, floating much further from the sun than we are now. To make that happen, they needed Akinya Space involvement. A deal was cut – we’d supply the components, shipping them from Earth and the Moon. In return, we’d get to piggyback our own research outpost on the Pans’ facility.’

He looked at Eunice, waiting for her to contradict him. Instead she offered her palm, encouraging him to continue. ‘The facility needed to be on Mercury because that was the easiest place in the system to tap into lots of free energy. The Pans had already put in place a solar collecting grid to power their assembly line and launcher; we used a fraction of that energy to run some experiments in propulsion physics.’ Geoffrey took a moment to order his thoughts. ‘That was a decoy, though. The real purpose of the Mercury facility was to conduct research into Turing-level artilects. By doing their dirty work on Mercury, my family hoped to keep away from the Cognition Police.’

‘The Pans knew about this?’ Jumai asked.

‘No, and they weren’t happy when they found out. They pulled the plug on the collaboration, booted us off Mercury. We managed to burn the evidence before the Gearheads got a close look: they couldn’t pin anything on us, so they went home empty-handed. That was 2085 – fifteen years before Eunice went to the edge of the system.’

‘At least we know what happened to one of the artilects,’ Jumai said. ‘What has Mercury got to do with this, here and now?’

‘Ocular found something,’ Geoffrey said, ‘just before Eunice died. Arethusa – Lin Wei – felt enough of a debt to her old friend to believe that Eunice ought to be told about the discovery. That seems to have been the trigger for… something.’ He offered an apologetic shrug. It was as much as he’d managed to piece together.

‘There’s a little more to it,’ the golem said. Eunice was leading them down an ice-walled tunnel. It had been bored roughly, then fixed with spray-on sealant. A walkway had been fastened to the floor, handrails and grabs to the walls, lights to the ceiling. The air was turning cold again. ‘Mercury was a double-blind. The artilect research was genuine, but that wasn’t the sole point of our being there. The basic physics research wasn’t just a screen. It was as equally valid – if not more important.’ She was skimming the tunnel in long, loping strides – human locomotion, not the limb-over-limb tumble that the golem had demonstrated earlier. And looking back, smiling with uncontained pleasure. It was the delight of someone who hadn’t had an audience in a very long while. She was enjoying the showmanship, her moment in the spotlight. ‘On Mercury, we tested a hypothesis. We constructed a relatively small-scale experimental physics facility to probe certain obscure byways of high-energy quark-quark interactions. There were bigger physics labs elsewhere – in Earth orbit, on the Moon – but we needed discretion. Above all, we had energy in abundance.’