Blue Remembered Earth (6 page)

‘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.

He told the Cessna that he would return within two hours, grabbed his shoulder bag from behind the pilot’s seat and then set off in the direction of the herd. Leaving nothing to chance, Geoffrey hefted a dead branch from the ground and used it to beat the earth as he walked, occasionally raising his voice to announce his arrival. The last thing he wanted to do was startle a dozing elephant that had somehow managed not to pick up on his approach.

‘It’s me, Geoffrey.’

He pushed through the trees, and at last the elephants were in sight. Ten, as the aug had confirmed – grazing peacefully, snuffling and rooting through dried-up grass. The matriarch, Matilda, was already aware of his presence. She was a big elephant with a broad face, missing a tusk on the right side and possessed of a distinctive Africa-shaped notch in the side of her left ear.

Geoffrey discarded the stick. ‘Hello, big girl.’

Matilda snorted and threw back her head, then returned to the business of foraging. Geoffrey surveyed the rest of the party, alert for signs of illness, injury or belligerent mood. One of the younger calves – Morgan – still had the same limp Geoffrey had noted the day before, so he voked a specific biomedical summary. Bloodstream analysis showed normal white cell and stress hormone counts, suggesting that there was no infection or skeletal injury, only a moderately debilitating muscle sprain that would clear up with time. Babies were resilient.

As for the rest of the M-family, they were relaxed and peaceable, even Marsha, the daughter who had recently mock-charged Geoffrey. She appeared sheepishly absorbed in her foraging, as if trusting that the incident was something they could both put behind them.

He paused in his approach, framed the view with his fingers like a budding auteur and blinked still frames. Sometimes he even took a small folding chair from the Cessna and sat down with a sketchbook and sharpened 2B pencil, trying to capture the ponderous majesty of these wise and solemn creatures.

‘So, old lady,’ he said quietly as he came nearer to the matriarch, ‘how are things today?’

Matilda eyed him with only mild curiosity, as if he would suffice until something more interesting came along. She continued to probe the ground with her trunk while one of the calves – Meredith’s boy, Mitchell – nosed around her hindquarters, flicking flies away with his tail.

Geoffrey voked the link with Matilda. A graphic of her brain appeared in the upper-left corner of his visual field, sliced through and colour-coded for electrical and chemical activity, all squirming blues and pinks, intricately annotated.

Geoffrey placed his bag on the ground and walked up to Matilda, all the while maintaining an unthreatening posture and letting her see that his hands were empty. She allowed him to touch her. He ran his palm along the wrinkled, leathery skin at the top of her foreleg. He felt the slow in-and-out of her breathing, like a house-sized bellows.

‘Is this the day?’ he asked.

After six months’ careful negotiation he had flown to a clinic in Luanda, on the Angolan coast, and completed the necessary paperwork. The changes to his own aug protocols were all legal and covered by watertight non-disclosure statutes. The new taps had been injected painlessly, migrating to their chosen brain regions without complication. Establishing the neural connections with his own brain tissue took several weeks, as the taps not only bonded with his mind but carried out diagnostic tests on their own functioning.

In the late summer of the previous year he’d had strange machine-like dreams, his head filled with luminous gridlike patterns and insanely complex tapestries of pulsing neon. He’d been warned. Then the taps bedded down, his dreams returned to normal and he felt exactly as he had done before.

Except now there was a bridge in his head, and on the other side of that bridge lay a fabulous, barely charted alien kingdom.

All he had to do was summon the nerve to cross into it.

Geoffrey walked around Matilda once, maintaining hand-to-skin contact so that she always knew where he was. He felt the other elephants studying him, most of them adult enough to know that if Matilda did not consider him a threat, nor should they.

Geoffrey voked his own real-time brain image into position next to Matilda’s. Mild ongoing activity showed in the visual and auditory centres, as she watched him and at the same time kept vigil over the rest of her family. He, on the other hand, was showing the classic neurological indicators of stress and anxiety.

Not that he needed the scan to tell him that: it was there in his throat, in his chest and belly.

‘Show some backbone,’ Geoffrey whispered to himself.

He voked the aug to initiate the transition. A sliding scale showed the degree of linkage, beginning at zero per cent and rising smoothly. At ten per cent there was no detectable change in his mental state. On the very first occasion, six months ago now, he’d reached fifteen and then spooked himself out of the link, convinced that his mind was being slowly infiltrated by tendrils of unaccountable dread. The second time, he’d convinced himself that the dread was entirely of his own making and nothing to do with the overlaying of Matilda’s state of mind. But at twenty per cent he had felt it coming in again, spreading like a terror-black inkblot, and he had killed the link once more. On the five subsequent occasions, he had never taken the link beyond thirty-five per cent.

He thought he could do better this time. There had been sufficient opportunity to chide himself for his earlier failures, to reflect on the family’s quiet disappointment in his endeavours.

As the scale slid past twenty per cent, he felt superhumanly attuned to his surroundings, as if his visual and auditory centres were beginning to approach Matilda’s normal state of activity. Each blade of glass, each midday shadow, appeared imbued with vast potentiality. He wondered how any creature could be that alert and still have room for anything resembling a non-essential thought.

Perhaps the relative amplification levels needed tweaking. What might feel like hyper-alertness to him might be carefree normality to Matilda.