Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

‘Sunday need never know about me. You haven’t mentioned me in your transmissions home. I’d know if you had, and… well, you couldn’t have, shall we say.’

‘Because you’d have doctored our messages?’ Jumai asked.

‘Better that than have the authorities know the artilect law was breached,’ Eunice said. ‘Things may have relaxed in recent years, but you can never be too careful. No: the world doesn’t need to know about me, and neither does Sunday.’

‘I’m not going to lie to my sister, if she asks a direct question,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Tell her that Lionheart was being run by machines, and that the machines had a figurehead. There’s no lie in any of that.’

He shook his head. ‘You’ll still exist.’

‘No, I won’t.’ The golem moved to their table, drew out a chair for itself, sat down. ‘I had a function, a very limited and specific one, which was to be here for you. I’ve done that now, and there’s no further reason for my existence. You know what you need to know. If you return to Lionheart, the other machines will take care of your needs. They are fully capable of running the experiment should you wish to see it reactivated. And I, for my part, will cease to exist. The routines emulating me will be erased. There will still be an artilect, but it won’t have a human face, or my memories. It won’t even remember being me.’

‘That’s suicide,’ Jumai said.

‘It would only be suicide if I had ever lived.’ Eunice hesitated. ‘Might I ask one indulgence, though? Summer Queen will be made ready regardless of what happens to me, so it would make no practical difference to you if I ended myself now. I’d rather not, though. Not while there’s still the possibility of conversation.’

‘We can’t mean anything to you,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You didn’t even exist before we arrived. You said so yourself.’

‘That’s true.’ Eunice looked at her hands, resting on the edge of the table. ‘I was only actualised at the moment when you proved your identity, in the airlock. Before that… I was a potential in the artilect, a set of dormant routines.’

‘So you shouldn’t have experienced anything before you were actualised,’ Jumai said.

‘I shouldn’t have, and I can’t say I did. But those years of waiting…’ She frowned, as if examining some puzzle or conundrum that refused to make sense. ‘I felt them. Each and every second. And when you came, when human voices returned to this place… I was glad. And I still am. And I do not welcome that which must be done.’ Then her frown softened and she produced a sad and defiant smile. ‘I’m not asking the world, am I? Just a little conversation and companionship, before you go.’

In that moment he thought he could forgive her everything.

‘Of course,’ Geoffrey said.

Summer Queen took them home – back to the inner system, back to Lunar orbit. Jumai and Geoffrey spent a few days with Sunday and Jitendra in the Descrutinised Zone – Sunday had returned home for the last two weeks before his arrival – and then they all took the sleeper down to Libreville. As before, Geoffrey opted to be woken a few hours out from the surface terminal, when they were still high enough to see the blue-bowed curvature of the horizon, the immense, planet-girdling vastness of Africa. On the Moon, Sunday had told him about the pull Earth had exerted on her, when she came back from Mars. He felt something of that now: a deep biological calling, as if a ghostly umbilical linked him with this place where he had been born, where his ancestors had lived and died across numberless generations. That imperative would always be there, he sensed. The outward urge was just as powerful, just as heartfelt, but it wouldn’t go unchallenged. No matter how far out people went, this longing would be present. They could try to ignore it, but this world had been their womb and cradle and that connection was too ancient and strong to be denied. He thought back to the day they had woken near Lionheart, when the sun had been reduced to a single white eye. To imagine going further out than that was to imagine a fundamental wrongness, an act of treason against his basic nature. He didn’t think this made him weak, just human. But evidently his was not a universal reaction. His grandmother had stared into that void and shrugged. Is that the best you’ve got? Impress me. But by no reasonable measure had Eunice been ordinary.

Jumai, Geoffrey felt certain, felt much the same way he did. Giddy with the thrill of having gone as far as they had, but profoundly glad to be on her way home. When she joined him, looking down at Africa, she took a childlike delight in picking out places she knew, communities and landmarks along the coast from Lagos. He couldn’t help but be caught up in her enthusiasm.

Yet it was strange to return. He’d had one set of burdens on his back when he came down the first time; now there was another. Even stranger not to feel entirely at odds with his family, although there would undoubtedly be complications and tensions to come, in the months and years that lay ahead.

‘I’ve been talking to Lucas,’ Sunday said, joining them on the viewing deck. ‘The scattering’s set for the day after tomorrow.’

‘Did you tell him I was sorry we couldn’t bring Hector home?’

‘I did, but you can tell him to his face when you see him.’ She rubbed a hand down her belly, in a gesture he didn’t remember her ever making before. It must have been unconscious, because her eyes were still fixed on the ground, far beneath them. ‘He’s not going to blame you for what happened,’ she went on. ‘If anything, he’s grateful that you tried to save Hector when you did. A lot’s changed, brother. Which is good. We could hardly go on the way we were, especially not now.’

They’d said very little about Lionheart in the Zone, and even less on the elevator. None of them would feel entirely safe until they were back in the household, and even then they would need to be circumspect, guarding a secret that could not be allowed to permeate the Akinya business empire, let alone the outside world. Not until they’d all agreed on the best course of action.

‘I’m just glad some of us made it back,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Including you and Jitendra.’

‘Considering I smashed Lucas’s proxy’s face to a pulp with my foot, he was remarkably accommodating. I think we’ll get on.’ She set her jaw determinedly. ‘We’d better. If the family can’t organise a united front, what hope is there for the rest of humanity?’ She leaned further over the rail, peering down at the wakes of huge ships off the Cameroonian coast: white vees, precise and economical as if they’d been inked in quick slashes by a master calligrapher. ‘I’m still not sure where the Pans fit into all this harmony and niceness, though. They gained nothing, and I’m not even sure what they did counts as a crime. Still leaves a sour taste, though.’

‘We needed them,’ Geoffrey said. ‘They needed us. It was a working relationship that served us all while it lasted.’

‘Have you given any thought to—’ Seeing his reaction, Sunday held up a hand before she’d finished her own sentence. ‘Never mind. You didn’t want to talk about them in the Zone; I shouldn’t have expected you to change your mind this quickly. We owe Chama and Gleb some kind of answer, though.’

‘We don’t owe them anything. Any debt we had to the Pans was wiped clean the moment they decided to shaft you on Mars.’

‘They’re my friends,’ Sunday said. ‘Whatever happened, they weren’t responsible for that. And they’ll still be just as keen to continue work with the Amboseli herd.’

‘Fine,’ Geoffrey said dismissively. ‘If they have a problem, they know where to find me. Now can we talk about something other than elephants?’