Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

‘Even Hector hasn’t gone that far.’

‘Give him time – if having a conscience comes between him and a profit margin, he’ll march straight down to the nearest neuropractor and have his own shunt put in.’

‘I’m glad I’m not like them.’

‘That doesn’t change the fact that you and I are always going to be a crushing disappointment to the rest of the family.’

‘If Father was here, he’d back me up.’

‘Don’t be so sure. He may not have quite as low an opinion of us as our cousins, but he still thinks you’re only pretending to have an occupation.’

Above the household, glowering down on Africa, the full Moon gave every impression of having been attacked by an exuberant child with a big box of poster paints. The Chinese, Indian and African sectors were coloured red, green and yellow. Blue swatches, squeezed between the major geopolitical subdivisions, indicated claims staked by smaller nation states and transnational entities. Arrows and text labels picked out the major settlements, as well as orbiting bodies and vehicles in cislunar space.

Geoffrey voked away the layer. The naked Moon was silver-yellow, flattened-looking. Any other time of the month, cities and industries would have spangled in lacy chains and arcs in the shadowed regions of the disc, strung out along transit lines, political demarcations and the ancient natural features of the Lunar surface. Rivers of fiery lava, seeping through a black crust. But the fully lit face, too bright for any signs of habitation to stand out, could not have looked so different to Geoffrey’s moonstruck hominid ancestors.

He still found it difficult to accept that Sunday wasn’t sitting right next to him, but was up there , on that bright nickel coin hammered into the sky.

‘Did you see that strange little girl at the scattering?’ he asked her.

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘I was going to ask if you knew who she was. I tried resolving her bind, but—’

‘It didn’t go anywhere.’ Geoffrey nodded. ‘That’s weird, isn’t it? You’re not meant to be able to do that.’

‘Doesn’t mean there aren’t some people capable of doing so.’

‘Like your friends?’

‘Ah, right. I see where this is going. You think she has something to do with the Descrutinised Zone. Well, sorry, but I don’t think she does. Plexus are monitoring Earth–Lunar traffic and they didn’t pick up anything that looked like an unresolved ching bind. Not that they’re infallible, of course, but my guess is that she wasn’t chinging in from Lunar space. Somewhere closer, maybe.’

‘Still doesn’t tell us who she is.’

‘No, but if I allowed myself to get sucked into every little mystery surrounding this family…’ Sunday left the remark unfinished. ‘Someone must know her, and that’s all that matters to me. What other possibility is there? Someone showed up at our scattering without an invitation?’

‘Maybe everyone just assumes she was invited.’

‘Good luck to her, in that case. No secrets were revealed, and if anyone wanted to eavesdrop, there were a million public eyes they could have used. Sorry, but I’ve got other things on my mind right now. Deadlines. Bills. Rent to pay. That kind of stuff.’

Sunday was right, of course – and given Geoffrey’s shaky grasp of the internal politics of his own family, it was entirely possible that the girl was some relative he’d forgotten about.

‘I can’t even point to the DZ,’ he said, grasping in a single remorseful instant how little he knew about her life.

‘It would be a bit weird if you could, brother – it’s on the other side of the Moon, so it’s never actually visible from here.’ She paused. ‘You know, the offer’s always there. You can get a tourist visa easily enough, spend a few days with us. Jitendra and I would love to show you around. There’s something else I’m dying to show you, too. That thing I did with Eunice’s face…’ Sunday hesitated. ‘There’s a bit more to it, it’s kind of a long-term project of mine. But you’d have to come and see it in person.’

Geoffrey delved into his box of delaying tactics. ‘I need to get a couple of papers out before I can take any time off. Then there’s an article I need to peer review for Mind .’

‘What you always say, brother. I’m not criticising, though. You love your work, I can see that.’

‘I’m flying out tomorrow. Want to come and see the herd?’

‘I… need to report back, about this body,’ Sunday said. ‘Sorry Like you say: maybe next time.’

Geoffrey smiled in the darkness. ‘We’re as bad each other, aren’t we?’

‘Very probably’ his sister answered, from wherever on the far side of the Moon her flesh-and-blood body presently resided. ‘Me, I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

He had hoped Sunday might change her mind – there was so much of his work he would have gladly shared with her – but when Geoffrey flew out in the morning it was on his own. The waterhole, he observed, was smaller than it had been at the start of the short dry season that accompanied the turning of the year. Patches of once-marshy ground were now hardened and barren of vegetation, forcing animals to crowd closer as they sought sustenance. Rather than the intense vivid green of the rainy season, the grass was now sun-bleached brown, sparse and lacking nourishment. Trees had been stripped of anything edible and within reach of trunks. Many decades had passed since the last prolonged drought in this part of Africa, and a real drought would never be permitted now, but it was still a testing time.

Soon he spotted a huddle of elephants near a grove of candelabra trees, and another about a kilometre further away, with a mother and calf trailing the group. Squinting as the sun flashed off what little water remained, he made out a lone bull picking its way through a stand of acacia and cabbage trees. The elephants were battleship grey, with only a few olive-green patches testifying that they had, against the odds, located some cool mud.

By the shape of his body, the relative length and curvature of his tusks and a certain sauntering quality to his gait, the lone adult male was almost certainly Odin, a generally bad-tempered bull with a range that encompassed most of the basin. Odin had his trunk curled nonchalantly over his left tusk and was making progress in the direction of the nearest grouping, the O-family into which he had been born some thirty years ago.

Geoffrey voked an aug layer, the aug dropping an arrow and data box onto the bull, confirming that it was indeed Odin.

The Cessna continued its turn. Geoffrey spotted another group of elephants, even further from the waterhole than the second. It was the M-family, his main study group. They had moved a long way since yesterday. ‘Turn north-west,’ he told the Cessna, ‘and take us down to about two hundred metres.’

The aircraft obeyed. Geoffrey counted the elephants by eye as best he could, but that was hard enough from a fixed position. He overflew the group once, had the Cessna make a loop and return, and got different numbers: eleven on the first pass, ten on the second. Giving in, he allowed the aug to label and identify the party. He was right about the M-family identification and the aug found only the expected ten elephants. He must have double-counted one of the rambunctious calves.

He had the Cessna overfly the M-family one more time, lower still, and watched elephants lift their heads to follow him, one of the older members even saluting him with her trunk. ‘Give me manual,’ he told the plane.

He selected a ribbon of land and came down three hundred metres from the M-family. The aug detected no other elephants – and certainly no bulls – within three kilometres. An adequate margin of error, and he would be alerted if the situation changed.