Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

>>origin: Lagos, Nigeria, WAF

>>client: Jumai Lule

>>accept/decline ching?

He placed the bull back at the head of its family and returned to the bed, accepting Jumai’s call with a single voked command. The bind established. Geoffrey’s preference was always for inbound ching, remaining in his local sensorium, and Jumai would have expected that. He placed her figment by the door, allowing her a moment to adjust to her surroundings.

‘Hello, Jumai,’ he said quietly. ‘I guess I know why you’re calling.’

‘I just got the news. I’m really sorry, Geoffrey. It must be a big blow to the family.’

‘We’ll weather it,’ he said. ‘It’s not exactly unexpected.’

Jumai Lule was wearing brown overalls, hair messy and tied up in a meshwork dust cap, marks on her face from the goggles and breathing gear now hanging around her neck. She was in Lagos working on high-risk data archaeology, digging through the city’s buried, century-old catacombs for nuggets of commercially valuable information. It was dangerous, exacting work: exactly the kind of thing she thrived on, and which he hadn’t been able to offer her.

‘I know you weren’t that close to her, but—’ Jumai began.

‘She was still my grandmother,’ Geoffrey countered defensively, as if she was accusing him of indifference to the matter of Eunice’s death

‘I didn’t mean it that way, as you well know.’

‘So how’s work?’ Geoffrey asked, trying to sound as if it mattered to him.

‘Work is… fine. Always more than we can keep up with. New challenges, most of the time. I probably need to move on at some point, but…’ Jumai let the sentence hang.

‘Don’t tell me you’re getting bored already?’

‘Lagos is close to being tapped out. I thought maybe Brazilia, even further afield. Like, maybe space. Still a lot of militarised crap left lying around the system, nasty shit they could use people like me to break into and decommission. And I hear the Gearheads pay pretty well.’

‘Because it’s dangerous.’

Jumai offered the palm of her hand to the ceiling. ‘What, and this isn’t? We hit Sarin nerve gas last week. Anti-tamper triggers, linked to what we thought was part of a mainframe’s cryogenic cooling reservoir.’ She grinned impishly. ‘Not the kind of mistake you make twice.’

‘Anyone hurt?’

‘Nothing they couldn’t fix, and they upped our hazard bonus as a consequence.’ She looked around the room again, scanning it as if she half-expected booby traps in the made bed, or lurking on the neat white shelves. But anyway, this isn’t about me – are you all right?’

‘I’ll be fine. And I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have snapped. You’re right – Eunice and I were never that close. I just don’t really like having my face rubbed in it.’

‘What about your sister?’

‘I’m sure she feels the same way I do.’

‘You never did take me up to meet Sunday. I always wanted to meet her. I mean properly, face to face.’

He shifted on the bed. ‘Full of broken promises, that’s me.’

‘You can’t help the way you are.’

‘Maybe not. But that doesn’t stop people telling me I should broaden my horizons.’

‘That’s your business, no one else’s. Look, we’re still friends, aren’t we? If we weren’t, we wouldn’t keep in touch like this.’

Even if it had been months since the last call, he thought. But he had no wish to sound sour. ‘We’re good,’ he affirmed. ‘And it’s very thoughtful of you to call me.’

‘I couldn’t not call you. The whole world knows – it wasn’t news I could easily miss.’ Jumai reached down for her goggles. ‘Look, I’m only on a break – got to get back to the front line or my extraction chief will be yelling her head off – but I just wanted to say I’m here if you need someone to talk to.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You know, we could still go to the Moon one day. Just as friends. I’d like that.’

‘One day,’ he agreed, safe in the knowledge that she didn’t really mean it either.

‘Tell me when they sort out a date for the funeral. If I can make it, and if it isn’t a family-only thing…’ she trailed off.

‘I’ll let you know,’ Geoffrey said.

Jumai settled the goggles over her eyes and eased the breathing mask into place. He’d tell her about the funeral plans, yes – but he doubted she’d come, even if the ceremony was extended to include friends of the Akinyas, rather than just close relatives. This call had already been awkward enough. There’d be a reason, a plausible excuse, to keep her away. And that, in truth, would be easiest on both of them.

Jumai waved a hand and chinged out of his life. Geoffrey considered it quite likely that he would never see her again.

For all that Eunice’s death hit the family hard, it wasn’t long before she was shunted from the headlines. A simmering sex/vote-rigging scandal in the Pan-African Parliament, a dispute between the East African Federation and the African Union about cost overruns on a groundwater bioremediation programme in former Uganda, a stand-off between Chinese tecto-engineers and Turkish government mandarins concerning the precise scheduling of a stress-management earthquake along the North Anatolian Fault. On the global scale, continued tensions between the United Surface Nations and the United Aquatic Nations regarding extradition rules and the extent of aug access rights and inter-regional Mechanism jurisdiction. Talk of expanding the scope of the Mandatory Enhancements. A murder attempt in Finland. Threat of industrial action at the Pontianak space elevator in western Borneo. Someone in Tasmania dying of a very rare type of cancer, something of a heroic achievement these days.

Only at the household, only in this part of the East African Federation, had the clocks stopped. A month had passed since Geoffrey was called from the sky with news of his grandmother’s death. The scattering had been delayed until the twenty-ninth of January, which would give most of the family time to make reasonable travel arrangements for their journeys back to Earth. Miraculously, the delay was deemed agreeable to all the involved factions.

‘Do try not to scowl, brother,’ Sunday said in a low voice as she walked alongside him. ‘Anyone who didn’t know better would think you’d rather be somewhere else.’

‘They’d be absolutely right.’

‘At least we’re doing this to honour her,’ Sunday replied, after the standard Earth–Moon time lag.

‘Why are we bothering, though? She didn’t go out of her way to honour anyone else while she was alive.’

‘We can give her this one.’ Sunday wore a long skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, both in black velvet offset with luminous entwining threads. ‘She may not have expressed much in the way of love and affection, but without her we’d be less filthily rich than we actually are.’

‘You’re right about the filthy rich part. Look at them all, circling like flies.’

‘I suppose you mean Hector and Lucas.’ Sunday kept her voice low. The cousins were not very far away in the procession.

‘They’ve been hanging around like ghouls ever since she died.’

‘You could also say they’re taking on a burden so that the rest of us don’t have to.’

‘Then I wish they’d get a move on with it.’

The cousins had been born on Titan. They were the sons of Edison Akinya, one of the three children Eunice had had with Jonathan Beza. Until recent years the cousins hadn’t spent a lot of time on Earth, but with Edison showing no signs of relinquishing his particular corner of the business empire, Hector and Lucas had turned their attentions sunwards. Geoffrey had no choice but to deal with them during their frequent visits to the household. The cousins had a large say in how the family’s discretionary funds were allocated.