Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

The other five elephants had begun to drift back, though their attention was divided equally between Matilda and the human who had interrupted their communal food-gathering.

Matilda stopped ten paces from Geoffrey. Her trunk was raised, her forehead wide and powerful as a battering ram. He could hardly see her eyes.

‘I know what happened,’ he said, pushing aside thoughts of how absurd it was, to be talking to an elephant. These words weren’t for Matilda, though. ‘I did what I’d been too fearful to do before. I correlated your movements, on the day Memphis died. And I know you were there. I know you were with him.’

He had meant to end it there, to turn around and return to the airpod. Now that the moment was upon him, though, he knew that he would always regret wasting this final opportunity.

He voked the command, opened the neurolink. Her brain appeared next to his, two weird squirming sea-sponges, pulsing with blood and heat and the endless chatter of electrochemical signalling. His own fear centre was already lit up like a football stadium, glowing across the night.

He wasted no time. Up through the tens, twenties, thirties. Forty per cent, then fifty. Her state of mind subsumed his own, crushing his fear, replacing it with something much closer to annoyance, only slightly tempered by wariness. Up through sixty, seventy per cent. Her body image had dismantled his own, distorting his perception of scale. He was huge but tiny; she was tiny but huge.

At ninety per cent, he allowed the neurolink to stabilise.

He knew what she had done. The mind dambursting into his was the mind of a premeditated and calculating killer. Memphis had been careless, it was true: too much on his mind, and when he went out to do Geoffrey’s errands, he hadn’t taken the precautions that would normally have been second nature. Above all, he had made the fatal error of trusting Matilda, simply because she had never once shown the slightest intent to harm him.

It must have been quick. One day, perhaps, Geoffrey would have the courage to review the record of events captured by her own eyes and those of any other elephants close enough to witness the murder – there’d been several. It didn’t really matter, though. He had placed her at the scene of the crime and that was sufficient.

How was the easy part. Memphis had been distracted, and Matilda had closed in on him too quickly for him to react. The aug was thin here, the Mechanism toothless. Had the Mech detected the imminent nature of that violent and terminal act of aggression, it might have done something. But there’d been no time – either for the Mech to intervene, or for Memphis to save himself.

The why was more speculative. Geoffrey had a theory, though.

Matilda had committed the deed, but the fault was not really hers. She had developed a grudge against Memphis, and given his years of uneventful interaction with the herd, there could only be one explanation for that. Geoffrey had implanted the idea in her head that Memphis was an elephant-killer.

Because it was true. Because Geoffrey had known that his whole adult life, and longer. He had known it since the day Memphis came to rescue Sunday from the hole, the depression in the ground where the artilect had been washed out of the earth. When they had been making their way back to the airpod, following a trail through a grove of trees, a bull had blocked their path. Memphis had told Geoffrey to look away, and he had, for a few moments. But he had not been able to resist looking back, thinking that Memphis would never know. And he had seen the fallen bull.

It was only later that he had come to a full understanding of what had happened in that confrontation. Memphis had reached into the adult bull’s mind and used his human privilege to submit a killing command to its implanted neuromachinery A whispered death-order, one softly voked incantation, and that was all it had taken to bring the bull down. At any other time, Memphis might have risked sending a less lethal command, one that would simply put the elephant to sleep.

But he had taken no chances that day. Two children’s lives were in his hands.

Geoffrey had carried the memory of that day ever since, so much a part of him that he barely noticed it. Memphis had taken no pleasure in the act; he’d done it not because he despised or feared the bull but because he had an absolute and binding duty of care to the children in his charge that took precedence over all other considerations. He had dispensed death only as a last resort, and to Geoffrey’s knowledge that was the only time Memphis had ever been called upon to kill another creature. Kill rather than stun, so that the bull never troubled another human being. Geoffrey didn’t doubt that the act had troubled Memphis in the days that followed.

But there had been no witnesses to that act, and the bull had not been part of a herd. Was it really possible that Matilda’s decision to kill Memphis could be in any way linked to that incident from Geoffrey’s childhood?

It wasn’t quite the case that there’d been no witnesses, though. Geoffrey himself had seen what happened, or its aftermath, at least. And, years later, he had welcomed Matilda into his head.

He thought back to the time when he had allowed the neurolink to transmit his mental state into hers, letting her share in the pain of the scorpion sting. He had no conscious recollection of associating Memphis with the death of the bull. But had he inadvertently communicated that association to Matilda? Had he, in the opening of his mind, planted the symbolic notion in hers that Memphis killed elephants?

He wanted to dismiss the idea as absurd. But the more repellent he found it, the more it kept coming back. It wasn’t Memphis’s fault, for being inattentive. It wasn’t even Matilda’s, for taking defensive action against what she now understood to be a threat. She had her herd to think of, after all. She was only doing right by them.

Inescapably, he was forced back to one truth: the fault was his, and his alone.

Intentionally or otherwise, Geoffrey had killed Memphis.

All at once the resolve left him. He had intended to push the neurolink to one hundred per cent, just this once. But the moment had passed. If that meant he was too timid to follow his own investigations to their logical conclusion, then so be it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have known better.’

He closed the connection and turned back for the airpod.

More visitors had arrived by the time he returned to the household, judging by the airpods gathered along the parking area. Jumai was waiting for him, already dressed for the scattering. She wore a tight-fitting black jacket and a slim black skirt, offset with flashes of red around the waistline. She brushed a hand against his arm as they met in one of the hallways, lowering her voice to a concerned hush. ‘How did it go out there?’

‘I had some unfinished business,’ Geoffrey said.

She nodded slowly. ‘And is it finished now?’

‘I think so.’

‘I’ll be heading back to Lagos tomorrow. Not to my old job, but Lagos is still where my contacts are. I’m hoping I might be able to leverage my recent experiences into a new contract, maybe off-Earth. Still a lot of stuff out there that needs cleaning up.’

‘Aren’t you fed up with excitement?’

‘If you mean do I want to dodge high-velocity ice packages for the rest of my life, then the answer’s no. But I do need challenges. I certainly got them when I signed up to help you break into the Winter Palace.’

He smiled tightly. ‘More than you were counting on, I’m sure.’

‘Something’s definitely changed. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s me.’ Jumai looked up and down the hall, holding her tongue as a proxy strode past – not one of the household units, Geoffrey decided. ‘Look, I’ll only say this once. Being here isn’t normal for either of us, and I’m not one for funerals at the best of times. But when I get back to Lagos, will you come over and spend a few days? I mean, work permitting.’