Blue Remembered Earth (12 page)

‘This is amazing,’ he cried, almost happy enough that he’d put the theft of the baseball cap behind him. ‘It’s like being five again!’

‘You get used to it after a while,’ Sunday said, deflatingly. ‘Then it starts feeling like ten stories again.’ She opened a cabinet and extracted a bottle of wine, a dry white Mongolian this time. ‘Guess neither of you have any objections to another drink? Take him into the living room, Jitendra. And try not to let him break his neck on any of your toys.’

Geoffrey had never seen the apartment, had never even chinged into it with full embodiment, yet he still felt as if he had been there before. It wasn’t the layout of the rooms, the divided partitions of the cargo module, or even the furniture and textiles used to screen off the bare composite walling of the original structure. It was the knick-knacks, the little ornaments and whatnots that could only have belonged to his sister.

Glad as he was to be surrounded by things that connected him to his past, they came from a time and a place neither of them could return to. They were both grown up now, and Memphis was old, and the household felt far too small ever to have contained the limitless rooms and corridors of Geoffrey’s childhood.

He forced himself out of his funk and accepted a glass from Sunday.

‘Apologies for the mess,’ she said.

Geoffrey had seen worse. On the shelves, in between Sunday’s numerous keepsakes and
objets d’art
, were many toy-sized robots, or the parts of robots, all of which had been repurposed. Jitendra had butchered and spliced, creating chimeric monstrosities. In their multilegged, segmented, goggle-eyed hideousness, they reminded Geoffrey of the fossil creatures of the Burgess Shale.

He was aware, even as he planted himself on a soft chair, that he was being surveilled. Eyes – some on single stalks, others in gun-barrel clusters – swivelled and focused. Limbs and body segments twitched and flexed.

‘Are you using any of these in the Robot Wars?’ Geoffrey asked.

Geoffrey’s question appeared to confuse Jitendra. ‘In the Robot Wars?’

‘Tomorrow. You said you’re a competitor in the Robot Wars.’

‘Ah,’ Jitendra said, something clicking. ‘Yes, I am, but no, it won’t be with these robots. They’re built for cleverness, not combat. These are my test-rigs, where I try out different cognitive approaches. The ones we use in the Wars . . . well, they’re bigger.’ He poured himself a half-glass of wine. ‘Quite a bit bigger.’

‘You have no idea, do you?’ Sunday was sprawling on the sofa, shoes kicked off, feet resting on the mirror-bright coffee table.

Geoffrey felt at a disadvantage. ‘Evidently not.’

She looked at him, marvelling. ‘Sometimes it’s as if you’re living a century behind the rest of us.’

‘Elephants don’t care what century it is. They care what
season
it is.’

‘I’m going to ching June,’ Jitendra said, jumping up and wandering into another area of the apartment. ‘Need to fine-tune plans for tomorrow. Back in a moment.’

Tiredness washed over Geoffrey, bringing with it a fizzing tide of stirred-up emotions. From one moment to the next he knew he couldn’t go on with the pretence.

‘Don’t hate me for this,’ he said, unable to meet his sister’s eyes, ‘but I didn’t just come here to see you.’

‘Like I ever thought that was the case.’

Geoffrey looked up – he’d been expecting a completely different reaction. ‘You didn’t?’

‘You can’t break the habits of a lifetime just like that.’

‘Are you cross?’

Sunday cocked her head from side to side. ‘Depends what the “something else” was.’

Geoffrey sighed. ‘I didn’t want to lie to you, but I was put in a position where I really had no choice.’

‘Someone pressured you.’

Geoffrey’s sigh turned into a huge, world-weary exhalation. He hadn’t realised the burden he had been carrying around until he finally opened up to Sunday.

‘Have a guess who.’

‘Mother and Father are too far away to have got to you that thoroughly. Which leaves . . . Hector and Lucas?’

He nodded slowly. ‘They came to me the day after the scattering, with a proposal. Which, incidentally, I’m not supposed to discuss with another living soul.’

He told her about the safe-deposit box, about his specific instructions and how he had already violated them.

‘Scheming, manipulative vipers,’ she said, squinting as if she’d just bitten into something sour.

‘It wasn’t technically blackmail.’

‘Don’t make excuses for those stepped-on turds, brother.’ She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Look, I can understand them not wanting Eunice’s name dragged through the dirt, but why use people this way? Why not just appeal to their better natures?’

‘I’m not sure I’ve got one.’

‘You’d have done it, if they made a good enough case. But they think everyone in the world works the way they do.’

‘Well, look,’ Geoffrey said, feeling an odd, inexplicable impulse to defend Hector and Lucas in their absence. ‘What’s done is done. Sorry I wasn’t upfront with you earlier, but at least now it’s all out in the open.’

‘Yes. Apart from one small thing.’ She eyed him levelly. ‘You still haven’t told me what was in the safe-deposit box.’

Sunday Akinya did not know whether she ought to be awed or disappointed by the glove. It was certainly an unremarkable-looking item: grubby and old-fashioned, the kind of thing that, had she put her mind to it, she could easily have found in a dozen Zone flea markets. In fact, she could probably have assembled an entire spacesuit, given time.

‘That,’ she said.

‘That,’ her brother affirmed. ‘And that alone. It was the only thing in the box.’

‘Either Eunice was mad, or that glove has to mean something.’

‘That’s what I reckon – as does Hector. Do you know much about spacesuits?’

‘It’s old-looking. And that dirt is Lunar, so even if that glove was made somewhere else, it’s spent time here.’

‘You can tell it’s Lunar dust that easily?’

‘I can smell it. Gunpowdery. Or what people tell me gunpowder ought to smell like. Kind of thing you get good at, when you’ve spent enough time up here. It’s been cleaned, but you never get rid of the traces.’ With a vague feeling of apprehension, Sunday continued to examine the glove. ‘But let me get this straight. Hector told you to leave it there while you visit me, but collect it on the way down?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then so far you’re only in
theoretical
breach of their instructions.’

‘I’m sure they’ll see it that way.’

The glove was heavier in her hand than she had expected. The articulation was stiff, like a rusted gauntlet from a suit of armour. ‘I just mean,’ she went on, ‘we have some breathing space.’ She pushed her hand into the open cuff, as far as her fingers would go.

‘There’s something jammed into three of the fingers,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I couldn’t even get my hand past the connecting ring.’

Sunday tried for a few moments, then withdrew her hand very slowly. ‘Guess we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that it’s some kind of . . . well, booby trap.’

‘From Eunice?’

‘If she was mad enough to put a glove in a bank vault, she was mad enough to turn it into a bomb.’

‘I never even thought of bombs,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You’ve spent too much time in the Surveilled World. Just because you can’t assemble a lethal mechanism out there doesn’t mean you can’t do it
here
– or that you couldn’t have done it a hundred years ago.’ Seeing her brother’s sceptical look, Sunday added, ‘Look, it probably
isn’t
a bomb, but that’s still no reason not to play safe, all right?’

Even with the glove tucked into his bag, Geoffrey must have been scanned and probed a dozen times just between the bank and the railway station. Every door he went through would have been alert to the presence of harmful materials or mechanisms, and he hadn’t been stopped or questioned once. If there was something nasty – or even just suspicious-looking – in the glove, it was concealed well enough to fool routine systems.

Jitendra, who had been observing silently until then, said, ‘We’ve got our own scanner. Might be an idea to run the glove through it and be sure.’

Sunday handed it to him warily, knowing how Jitendra liked to dismantle things, often without being entirely sure how to put them back together. ‘Until we know what it’s worth, I don’t want you putting a scratch on it.’

Active doorframes were frowned upon in the Descrutinised Zone – people didn’t like walking around feeling as if their bodies were living exhibits made of various densities of coloured glass. Equally discouraged were smart textiles, the kind that could be worn or slept in, invisibly woven with superconducting sensors. Sunday had a medical cuff, which was fully capable of detecting anything seriously amiss, but on a day-to-day, even month-to-month basis, what went on inside her body was her own business. In the Descrutinised Zone, it was even possible to get pregnant without the world and his wife being in on the secret.

‘There’s a community medical scanner downtown,’ Jitendra said. ‘It’s very old – a museum piece, really. We all get our turn in it. They’ll scan anything if it’s a slow day, but if we put the glove through it everyone will want to know why, and that’ll be the end of our mysterious little secret. Fortunately, there’s a better option right here.’

‘There is?’ Geoffrey asked innocently.

‘Follow me.’

Jitendra’s den was set up in what had been the pantry and broom cupboard. Decently screened off behind beaded curtains, it was even more of a mechanical charnel house than the rest of the apartment. Generally speaking, Sunday didn’t go near it unless there was no other option.

Clamped to the edge of his workbench were adjustable arms, magnifying lenses, precision manipulators and drills. On either side of the workbench, plastic tubs brimmed with wires and connectors, homemade circuits and gel-grown nervous systems. Mounted centrally on the bench was an elderly Hitachi desktop scanner the size of a small sewing machine: a heavy chassis supporting two upright moving scanning rings on tracks. It would have been laughed at in the Surveilled World – this machine had approximately the same resolution and penetrating power as a pillowcase or T-shirt – but in the Zone one took what one could get. Secretly, as Sunday had long since realised, Jitendra derived immense delight from working around arbitrary constraints and limitations.

The scanner currently held the torso and head assembly of a doll, with two- and three-dimensional magnified images pasted up on the walls around the bench, and what looked like acupuncture needles pin-cushioning the doll’s plastic scalp. His den gave every impression of being the epicentre of some obscure Voodoo death cult.

He pulled the pincushioned doll out of the scanner, fixed the glove in place instead, then set the scanner to work. The rings whirred up to speed and jerked back and forth along their tracks while images of the glove, colour-coded in blues and pinks, graphed onto the walls.

Jitendra tapped a finger against his teeth. ‘You’re right.’

‘About what?’ Sunday asked.

‘Definitely something blocking those three fingers. Soft packing around hard contents. Like little stones, or something.’

‘But not bombs,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Nope. There’s no machinery in there, no triggering mechanisms.’

‘Think you can get them out?’ Sunday asked. ‘I mean non-destructively.’ She looked at Geoffrey. ‘Why on Earth would she put stones in a glove?’

Her brother had no answer.

‘I think I can get the packages out,’ Jitendra said, rummaging through his workbench tools. ‘Give me a few minutes here. Any loud bangs, you can revise your bomb theory.’

Sunday had decided, provisionally, that she would forgive her brother. She had not arrived at this decision lightly, being very much of the opinion that forgiveness was a non-renewable resource, like petroleum or uranium. The world should not depend on its easy dispensation, nor should hers ever be counted upon.

Yet since Geoffrey was her brother, and since he was also not a true bloodsucking Akinya, she was inclined to generosity. As much as she detested lies and concealment, she accepted that the cousins had been playing on Geoffrey’s attachment to the elephants. Her brother had faults, as did she, but greed was not among them. She could also see how troubled he had been, and how relieved he was when at last he felt able to speak about the vault and the glove. And so she decided to make no more of the matter, even though she was still hurt that he had not confided in her immediately, from the very moment the cousins tabled their proposition. But the hurt would heal, and provided Geoffrey did not lie to her again, she would forget this blemish on his character.

She led him back into the living room and drew him down next to her on the couch.

‘I think it’s time you met the construct. In for a yuan, et cetera. Remember when I showed you the face, back at the scattering?’

‘Yes,’ he said cautiously.

‘That’s only part of it. A tiny part.’ She paused, assailed by last-minute doubts, before crushing them. ‘For the last couple of years I’ve been working on something big, all of it done in my spare time. I’m building Eunice.’