Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

‘Bad day at the office?’

‘My work’s suffering. They’ve blocked grant allocations while they sort through Eunice’s finances. That makes it difficult for me to plan ahead, which in turn isn’t doing wonders for my mood.’ He walked on a few paces. ‘Difficult for you to grasp, I know.’

Sunday’s look was sharp. ‘Meaning I haven’t got a clue about planning and responsibility because I don’t live in the Surveilled World? Brother, you really have no idea. I didn’t move to the Zone to escape responsibility. I went there to find out what it feels like to actually have some.’

‘Right. And you think the Mech treats us all like a bunch of helpless babies.’ He closed his eyes in weariness – this was a spiralling conversation they’d had a hundred times already, without ever reaching a conclusion. ‘It’s not like that either.’

‘If you say so.’ She exhaled a long sigh, her capacity for argument evidently just as exhausted as his own. ‘Maybe you’ll get your funding back soon, anyway. Memphis told me there isn’t much more to be done now, just a few loose ends. What the cousins are telling him, anyway.’

Geoffrey hoped that was the case. The scattering, symbolic as it was – Eunice had been a lifelong atheist, despite being born to Christian parents – ought to draw a line under the recent limbo. The wheels of the Akinya juggernaut would start to turn again, from Earth to the Moon, out to their automated mining facilities in the asteroids and the Kuiper belt. (Not that the machines had ever stopped, of course, but it was tempting to think of the robots standing to attention, heads tilted in deference.)

Then they could all get on with their fantastically glamorous lives, and Geoffrey could go back to his dull grey elephants.

‘I did consider coming in person,’ Sunday said.

‘I thought for a minute you had, at least when you first showed up.’

‘Even you can’t have missed the time lag, brother.’ She ran a hand down her sternum. ‘It’s a prototype, a kind of claybot – I’m road-testing it.’

‘For… what’s the name of that boyfriend of yours?’

‘Oh, this is way out of Jitendra’s league. It’s a friend of his, someone working in mainstream robotics. I’m afraid I’m under strict orders not to mention the firm involved, but if I said it rhymed with Sexus—’

‘Right.’

Sunday grabbed his hand before he could react. ‘Here. Tell me how it feels.’

Her fingers closed around his.

‘Creepy.’

The hand felt colder than it should have, but the effect was otherwise convincing. Her face was almost as realistic. It was only when she pushed the sunglasses back onto her scalp that the spell failed. There was a deadness to the eyes, the difference between paste jewellery and the real thing.

‘It’s pretty good.’

‘Better than good. But you haven’t seen the half of it. Watch this.’

Between one breath and the next, Sunday departed. He was suddenly looking at an old woman, grey hair tied back in an efficient bun, her skin a map of thirteen decades.

Geoffrey barely had time to react before Eunice vanished and Sunday returned.

‘Given the circumstances,’ he said, ‘that was very disrespectful.’

‘She’d have forgiven me. That’s the breakthrough, the reason for the prototype. The rapid-morph material came from the Evolvarium on Mars – it’s some kind of adaptive camouflage, in its original context. Plexus… did I just say that? They’ve got exclusivity on it. They’re calling it “Mercurial”. Faster and more realistic than anything else out there.’

‘So you see a big market for this?’

‘Who knows? I’m just along for a free ride while someone else gets test data.’ Sunday let go of Geoffrey’s hand and tapped a finger against her cheekbone. ‘We’re recording constantly. Every time someone sees me, their reactions are filed away – micro-expressions, eye saccades, that kind of thing – then fed into the system and used to tweak the configuration algorithms.’

‘What about manners? It’s not good form to let people think they’re talking to a real person when they’re not.’

‘Their fault for not having the right layers enabled,’ Sunday said. ‘Anyway, it’s not just me: there are twenty of us walking around now, all chinging in from the Zone. We’re not just testing the realism of the configs. We’re seeing how well they can maintain that realism even with Earth–Lunar time lag thrown in.’

‘So you could go to the trouble of sending down a body, but you couldn’t come in person?’

She gave him a quizzical look. ‘I showed up, didn’t I? It’s not like Eunice would have cared whether any of us was physically present.’

‘I’m not sure I knew her well enough to say for sure.’

‘I doubt she’d have given a damn who’s here in the flesh and who isn’t. And she’d have hated all this fuss. But Memphis had a bee in his bonnet about us all leaving the household on time.’

‘I noticed. My guess is that Eunice stipulated something, and he’s just following the script.’

After a moment, Sunday said quietly, ‘He looks really old now.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I was thinking exactly the same thing.’

Memphis was leading the procession, walking ahead of the main party with an earthenware jar in his hands. Since leaving the house they had been walking due west towards the grove of acacia trees that marked the limit of the crumbling boundary wall.

‘Still got the old suit, though,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I think he’s only ever had the one.’

‘Either that or hundreds of exactly the same style.’

The favoured black business suit remained immaculate, but it draped off his thin frame as if tailored for some other, bulkier man. The hands that had carried Sunday out of the hole all those years ago must have been the same ones now gripping the earthenware jar, but that seemed impossible. Where once Memphis had walked with confident authority, now his gait was slow and measured, as if in every footfall lay the prospect of humiliation.

‘At least he dressed for the occasion,’ Sunday said.

‘And at least there’s a heart beating under these clothes.’

‘Even if they do reek ever so slightly of elephant dung.’

‘I thought I’d have time to get back to the research station and change, but then I lost track and—’

‘You’re here, brother. That’s all anyone would have expected.’

The party numbered around thirty, including the two of them. He’d done his best to identify the various family branches and alliances that were present, but keeping tabs on the wilder offshoots of the Akinya tree had never been his strong suit. At least elephants had the decency to drop dead after fifty or sixty years, instead of hanging around and procreating into their second century. In the Amboseli basin there were nearly a thousand individuals. Geoffrey could identify at least a hundred of them with a single glance, assessing shape and size and posture with barely any conscious application of effort, calling to mind age, lineage and kin affiliations, status within family, bond group and clan. Tracking Akinyas ought to have been trivial in comparison. There was even a matriarch, bull males and a watering hole.

Predators and scavengers, too.

What were they all doing here? Geoffrey wondered. What did they all expect to get out of it? More pertinently: what did he expect to get out of it?

A pat on the head for being a dutiful grandson? Not from his father and mother, who – like Uncle Edison – were still on Titan. Kenneth Cho and Miriam Beza-Akinya had sent golems of themselves, but the time lag was so acute that the machines were acting under full autonomy, mostly witnessing rather than interacting.