Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

‘Look, in a thousand years, the difference between people and machines… it’s going to seem about as relevant as the difference between Protestants and Catholics: some ludicrous relic of Dark Age thinking.’ Jitendra gave a self-conscious shrug. ‘I’m not on the side of the machines or people. I’m on the side of the convergent intelligences that will supplant both.’

Geoffrey was leaning back in his seat, blasted by the G-force of Jitendra’s conviction. ‘And this… free energy? It’s a way of making better machines?’

‘It may be,’ Jitendra conceded. ‘Don’t know yet. Too many variables, not enough data. The construct looks promising… but it’s early days and I don’t doubt we’ll take a few wrong turns along the way. All I know is that we’re unwinding two hundred years of orthodox robotics development and heading off in a completely different direction.’

‘Bet that’s what they really want to hear at the shareholder meetings,’ Sunday said.

Jitendra picked at something stuck between his teeth. ‘It’s harsh medicine. But June Wing, bless her, is at least slightly open-minded to new possibilities.’

‘Especially if there might be a dazzling commercial return at the end of it,’ Sunday said.

‘Businesswoman first, a scientist second,’ Jitendra said. ‘No sense in blaming her for that – she wouldn’t have her hands on the purse strings otherwise.’

‘Talking of purse strings,’ Sunday said, brushing crumbs from the napkin she’d tucked into her collar, ‘something I’ve been meaning to ask my brother: did the cousins cough up any more money?’

Geoffrey blinked, attempting to marshal his swirling, wine-addled thoughts into some semblance of clarity. The question had blindsided him.

‘The cousins?’ he asked.

‘As in Lucas and Hector. As in the men with the ability to end all your funding difficulties.’

Geoffrey poured some more wine and sipped before answering. ‘Why would they give me more funding?’

‘Because you showed up at the scattering, because you acted like a good little boy and didn’t get into any upsetting arguments.’

He smiled at his sister. ‘You showed up as well, and it’s not like they started showering you with benevolence, is it?’

‘I’m a lost cause; you’re not completely beyond salvation.’

‘In their eyes.’

Sunday nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘I think some more funds might be forthcoming,’ he said neutrally. ‘I obviously made a good case for the elephants. Now and then even hard-line Akinyas take a break from rabid capitalism to feel guilty about their neglected African heritage.’

‘For about thirty seconds.’

He shrugged. ‘That’s all it takes to transfer the funds.’

‘Reason I asked,’ Sunday said, stretching in her seat, ‘is that I wondered if you were up here for fund-raising purposes? It’s not like you come here very often, and the last time – if I’m remembering rightly – it was definitely cap-in-hand.’

‘I just thought it was about time I came up to see you. Are you going to throw a fit the one time I actually listen to you?’

‘All right,’ Sunday said, holding her hands up to forestall an argument. ‘I was just saying.’

Over coffee the conversation headed back into less treacherous waters: Sunday and Geoffrey trading stories about their childhood in the household, encounters with animals, encounters with Maasai, funny things that had happened between them and Memphis, Jitendra putting on a good impression of being interested and inquisitive.

When Sunday had picked up the tab and they went out onto the restaurant’s circular roof, the air had cooled and with the dimming of the ceiling lights the nocturnal effect was complete. Not that there was any sense that the city was winding down for the night, judging by the continued traffic sounds, music, shouts and laughter billowing up from below.

Sunday pointed out landmarks. Older buildings, newer ones, places she liked and didn’t like, favoured restaurants, disfavoured ones, clubs and places neither she nor Jitendra could afford. Or rather, Geoffrey thought, places that she chose not to be able to afford, which was far from the same thing. Sunday had spurned Akinya money, but that didn’t mean the floodgates couldn’t be opened at a moment’s notice, if she ever changed her mind. All she would have to do is renounce her decadent artistic ways and agree to become a profit-sharing partner in the collective enterprise.

As, indeed, could he, just as easily.

‘We’re going that way,’ Sunday said, pointing to a wide semicircular hole in the far side of the cavern wall. She was, Geoffrey realised, much less intoxicated than either of her two companions. He began to wonder, with a sense of dim foreboding, whether she had been softening him up for interrogation.

At street level they came out into some kind of all-night souk, a place of winding, labyrinthine passages roofed over with strips of tattered canvas and latticed bamboo. Food, animals, garments, consumer goods, cosmetics, surgical services and robotics parts lined the lantern-lit stalls and booths. Huge muscled snakes like coiled industrial ducting extruded from lurid green and yellow plastics. Jewel-eyed seahorses, dappled with spangling iridophores. Tiny, dollhouse-sized ponies, pink and blue and anatomically perfect. Vendors selling what Geoffrey at first took to be sheets of black, brown and pink textiles – dress fabric, curtains, perhaps – until he realised that he was looking at custom skins, vat-grown flesh sold by the metre. New skin, new eyes, new organs, new bones. Most of these commodities, being illegal elsewhere, must have been fabricated in or around the Zone itself. There was industry here, as well as artistry and anarchy. Like Dakar or Mogadishu, a hundred or more years ago: the dusty, squabblesome past that every clean, ordered, glittering African city was trying hard to put behind it.

They jostled through the souk’s crowds. Jitendra spent several minutes digging cheerfully through plastic crates of salvaged robot parts, picking up a piece then discarding it, rooting out another, holding it up to the lantern light with narrowed, critical eyes.

‘Watch your bag,’ Sunday said as they waited for Jitendra to strike a deal. ‘Thieves and pickpockets abroad.’

Geoffrey swung the sports bag around, clutching it to his chest like an overpadded comfort blanket. ‘Really? I’d have thought most of your fellow citizens went through Mandatory Enhancement screening at birth, the way you and I did.’

‘That’s true,’ Sunday conceded, while Jitendra continued his haggling, ‘but there isn’t some handy colour-coded brain module labelled “the impulse to commit crime”. What is crime, anyway? We might both agree that rape and murder are objectively bad things, but what about armed resistance to a despotic government, or stealing from the rich to feed the poor?’

‘The last time I looked, there was a distinct shortage of both despotic governments and poor people.’

‘Crime has a social context. In the Surveilled World, you’ve engineered criminality out of society using mass observation, ubiquitous tagging and targeted neural intervention. Good luck with the long-term consequences of that.’

Geoffrey shrugged. ‘Locksmiths find another line of work.’

‘I’m talking about societal timescales. Centuries, thousands of years. That’s what we’re concerned with here; it’s not all about being crypto-anarchists and throwing wild parties.’

‘You think criminality’s a good thing?’

‘Who knows? Maybe the same clusters of genes that give rise to what we loosely label “criminality” may also be lurking behind creativity, the impulse to experiment, the urge to test social boundaries. We think that’s quite probable, even likely, which is why we’ve gone to such lengths to re-engineer the public space to make crime viable again.’