Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

‘Thank you for saving the Cessna,’ he said.

‘It was the least I could do. Well, almost the least. There is one other—’

But he cut her off. ‘You can take a message to Chama and Gleb for me. Will you do that?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Thank them for helping Sunday, while I was away. And tell them that the elephant work can continue. I have no objection to the establishment of a linked community. The Amboseli herds and the Lunar dwarves – they can share the same sensorium, the way Chama and Gleb planned. I’ll be glad to provide any technical assistance.’

‘I think they’ll be looking for more than just assistance,’ Sunday said. ‘Full collaboration, a shared enterprise.’

‘Then they’ve come to the wrong man.’ He walked on for a few more paces before elaborating. ‘I don’t work with elephants any more. That was something I used to do.’

Sunday could hardly believe what she was hearing. But she knew Geoffrey well enough to be certain that he wasn’t just saying that for dramatic effect, expecting everyone to put an arm around him and tell him how wonderfully important his work was, how he was undervalued and underappreciated, how he owed it to the elephants to keep on with the studies. She’d had that conversation often enough in the past.

This wasn’t it.

‘You’re serious.’

He nodded, but not with any sense of triumph. ‘I think we both have enough to keep us busy, don’t you?’

Lin Wei, to her credit, did not question Geoffrey’s sincerity. Perhaps it was just an outburst, something he’d retract in the days to come, but everything in her brother’s manner said otherwise.

‘Chama and Gleb will be sorry. I know they were looking forward to your involvement.’

‘They’re smart enough to manage without me. It was always the elephants they wanted, not the researcher.’

Lin Wei said, ‘I don’t think it’s very long to the scattering now.’ She made a gesture in the air, shaping a square, and the aug filled the square with darkness. ‘Can you all see this?’

They were still walking, but the square moved with them. One by one they confirmed that they were able to see it.

‘Sunday told Chama and Gleb about the numbers, and they in turn told me,’ Lin Wei went on. ‘The numbers wouldn’t have meant much to an outsider, but their meaning was immediately clear to me – as they would have been to Eunice.’

‘So what do they mean?’ Sunday asked.

The rectangle dappled itself with smudges of milky light. ‘Ocular pointing coordinates,’ Lin Wei said. ‘That’s what they are: a set of directions for the instrument. Before very long my adversaries will make it very difficult for me to access Ocular, but for the moment that is still my privilege – as well it should be, given that I conceived and birthed it. Needless to say, I did not hesitate to abuse that privilege by ordering Arachne to point Ocular in the direction corresponding to the coordinates.’

‘Mandala?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘No. Crucible lies in the constellation Virgo, and this is in the direction of Lyra, a completely different part of the sky. Close to Altair, in fact – one of the stars of the Summer Triangle. Arachne’s search algorithms eliminated any starlike objects from the immediate centre of the field, but you’ll note that there is still something there.’

‘What is it?’ Sunday asked.

‘I thought perhaps you might be able to tell me, given what the two of you have learned of your grandmother. It’s incredibly faint, and at first glance it appears quasarlike. But it’s not a quasar. It’s a… well, I don’t know. Neither does Arachne. She’s seen billions of astronomical objects, but nothing that looks remotely like this… energy source. That’s what it is – an energy source, highly Dopplered, we can tell from the spectrum – moving away from us along what appears to be a radial line of sight. We’ll have a better handle on that as time goes by, if we pick up lateral motion. But I don’t think we will. I think we will find that this thing, this object, started off in the solar system, about sixty years ago. And ever since then it’s been rushing away from us, falling into the summer stars.’

Geoffrey asked, ‘How far out is it now?’

Lin Wei’s smile was impish. ‘I think I’ve given you enough to be going on with, don’t you? Let’s just say it’s a long, long way – further than any human artefact has ever reached. And travelling at a quite ridiculous speed.’

‘To nowhere in particular?’ Sunday probed. ‘There’s no star along that exact line of sight?’

‘There are stars, to be sure. But none that strike us – Arachne or myself – as an obvious candidate.’ Lin Wei made a flicking gesture and the image disappeared.

‘That’s all you’re going to give us?’ Sunday asked.

‘For now. You want more, come and talk to me. I think we all have rather a lot to discuss, don’t you?’

‘She’s in that thing,’ Geoffrey said. ‘That’s what you think. That Eunice is in a ship , a ship that’s been heading away from Earth for sixty years.’

‘She spoke to me once,’ Sunday replied, ‘about how it would feel to just keep going. To never go home again.’ She paused, trying to call her grandmother’s exact words to mind. ‘Until Earth was just a blue memory. What I didn’t realise was… she meant to do it.’

‘She could still be—’ Geoffrey began. But he caught himself before the sentence was out.

Sunday nodded. He didn’t need to say what he was thinking. She was thinking the same thing herself.

She supposed the only way to know for sure would be to go out there. To catch up with that impossibly distant thing and see what was inside it.

A sleeping lion, perhaps. Senge Dongma.

Jitendra said, ‘I think it’s time.’

He was right, too. Sunday could feel the ground rumbling under them as the blowpipe sent its tiny package racing under the plains. As one they turned to face east. As if of its own volition, her hand rose to her neck, fingering the charm she had been given on Mars, binding her to the past, binding her to the future.

They watched the spark rise from the mountain, a tiny bright star climbing against the turn of the heavens. It was travelling ballistically now, carried on the momentum it had gained in the long acceleration as it rode the magnetic catapult. Some of that momentum was already ebbing: the package was encountering atmospheric resistance, albeit from air that was half as thick as at ground level, and gravity was beginning to reassert its claim. Ordinarily the launch lasers would have cut in by now, projecting their ferocious energies onto the underside of the package to give it that extra push into orbit. Some of the onlookers, Sunday felt certain, must already have come to the conclusion that the blowpipe had mistimed. Others, she felt equally sure, were entirely ignorant of the usual mechanics.

The star kept rising – from the party’s vantage point it appeared to be climbing vertically, but it was in fact following an arc, one that was already taking it east, out towards the Indian Ocean. Just when it looked on the point of falling, though, the lasers shone. Their beams scratched diamond-bright tracks in the sky, converging from Kilimanjaro’s summit to meet at a fixed focus point in space, where the air became a little ball of ionised hell. The focus would ordinarily have been immediately underneath the rising object, but the arrangements were different today; the lasers were now directing their energies directly ahead of the package. It had no protection against that; it had been designed to be pushed, not to hit that plasma head-on. With no frontal shielding beyond that necessary to withstand the aerodynamic stresses, the effect on the package was rapid and glorious. The star’s brightness flared by sudden magnitudes, until it looked as if a new day was dawning. Sunday raised her fingers against the dazzle, catching greens and pinks in the tiny blazing point. The light fluttered, and then – as quickly as it had begun – that little new sun began to break up, oozing molten droplets of itself. The colours subsided – gold turning to amber, amber to orange, orange to a slow dulling red. She tried to trace the falling sparks, but they were soon lost in the glow of the sky.