‘This mysterious trip of yours . . . you’ll be sure to tell me what it’s all about, when you get back?’
‘I will, I promise. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us.’
‘Nor I.’
There was a lull. Memphis looked ready to return to his work, so Geoffrey made to stand up. But his old mentor was not quite done.
‘Now that Eunice is never coming back, we should give some thought to what happens to her room. She would not have wanted it kept as some miserable, dusty shrine.’
‘There are plenty of rooms in the household going spare.’
‘When we have many guests – as we did during the scattering – we are considerably stretched. If the subject upsets you, I won’t raise it again. But I know your cousins will be anxious to move on.’
‘Bury the past, you mean.’
‘We must all do that, if we are to keep living,’ Memphis said.
In the morning, Geoffrey saw a glint of moving silver, an aircraft with an upright tail fin, sharking low over the trees. Gradually he heard the drone of . . . He shook his head, ready to laugh at the patent absurdity of it. The only thing in his experience that made a sound anything like that was the Cessna, and the Cessna was sitting in plain view.
‘Eunice,’ he said quietly, ‘I could use some help here.’
She was with him in an instant, as if she had never been more than a few paces away. ‘What is it, Geoffrey?’
‘Need a reality check. Tell me I’m not looking at an aeroplane even older than my own.’
Geoffrey was shielding his eyes from the sun. Eunice echoed his gesture, but at the same time – from where, he hadn’t noticed – produced a pair of slim grasshopper-green binoculars, which she held to her eyes single-handed, as daintily as if they were opera glasses. She tracked the moving form of the aircraft, now almost nose-on.
‘If I’m not very much mistaken, that is a DC-3. Is there any particular reason why a DC-3 would be coming down to land, miles from anywhere, in the middle of equatorial East Africa?’
‘It’s my ride,’ Geoffrey said.
Eunice lowered the binoculars. ‘To where?’
‘Somewhere interesting, I hope.’
The DC-3 dropped under the treeline, its engines throttling back. They walked over to meet it.
‘They were extraordinarily numerous and long-lived,’ Eunice said as they picked their way through dry brush. ‘Sixteen thousand, and that’s not including all the copies and knock-offs. Even when they were old, you could strip out the avionics, put in new engines and begin again with a zero fatigue rating. Dakotas were still flying when I was a child.’
‘Did you like planes?’
‘Adored them.’ Eunice was stomping her merry way through thigh-high grass as if it wasn’t there at all. ‘Look at it this way. You’ve been born in a time when it’s possible to fly through the air in machines. Who wouldn’t fall in love with the idea of that?’
The DC-3 sat tail-down at the end of the airstrip. It was quite astonishingly beautiful: a gorgeous sleek thing, as curvaceous and purposeful as a dolphin.
But, incongruously, there was no sign of a welcoming committee. A door had been opened and a set of steps lowered, but no one was standing at the top of those steps, beckoning him aboard.
‘Are you sure this is for you?’
‘I thought so,’ he said, but with ebbing confidence.
Yet what else could it be but the transport Truro had promised? Then he saw a neat little logo on the tail fin, a spiral galaxy painted green, the only marking anywhere on the highly reflective silver fuselage.
If that didn’t clinch it, nothing would.
They climbed aboard. It was cool inside, with seats and settees laid out lounge-fashion and a bar situated at the rear of the fuselage. The compartment ran all the way to the nose: there was no cockpit, no flight controls or instrument panel, merely a couple of additional lounge seats for those who wanted to take advantage of the forward view.
Behind them, the steps folded back into the plane and the door sealed itself. The engines revved up again and Geoffrey felt the aircraft turning on the airstrip.
‘And you’ve no idea what this is about?’
‘You, ultimately,’ Geoffrey said.
Soon they were bouncing along the airstrip, and then aloft, climbing shallowly, skimming the treetops by no more than hand-widths.
‘Well, this is grand fun,’ Eunice said, striding imperiously from window to window. ‘I’m still here, too. Whoever’s sent this thing is allowing you full access to the aug. That’s reassuring, isn’t it? You’re not being kidnapped.’
‘I never thought I was.’
Eunice soon tired of the view and sat herself down in one of the seats. ‘So who sent this aircraft?’
‘The Panspermian Initiative. You know about them – you used to hang out with Lin Wei.’
‘I don’t know anyone called Lin Wei.’
‘You should do, but there’s a part of your life missing. Sunday established the connection with Lin, but she doesn’t have enough information to fill in the rest of the void.’
‘Have to take your word for it, then. So we’re going to see this Lin Wei?’
‘I doubt it, seeing as she’s dead. My point of contact is someone called Truro.’
‘Whom you trust enough to get aboard this plane?’
‘I’m in his debt. Actually, we’re all in his debt, but I’m the one who seems to be expected to do the paying back.’
‘The Panspermian Initiative,’ Eunice said languidly, drawing out the words as if she was reading them, signwritten across the sky. She was tapping the aug, glugging gallons of data. ‘You need to watch people like that. All that species-imperative stuff? Self-aggrandising horse-piss.’
‘They think we might be in a critical period, a window of opportunity. If we don’t seize the moment now, we might never get beyond the system, into the wider galaxy.’
‘Which would automatically be a good thing, would it?’
‘You weren’t exactly short of grand visions in your day.’
She scoffed. ‘I didn’t have any noble intentions for the rest of humanity. I was in it for myself, and anyone else smart enough to go along with me.’
‘No,’ Geoffrey said, shaking his head. ‘You were a pioneer and a risk-taker, sure, but you also had ambitions. You didn’t go to Mars just to stamp your footprint into that soil and come home again. You wanted to live there, to prove it was something we could do.’
‘Me and a thousand others.’
‘Doesn’t matter – you got there as soon as you could. But your problem was that you couldn’t stand still. You had to keep moving, pushing outwards. You liked the idea of living on one planet more than the actuality. That’s why you left your husband behind.’
‘Jonathan and I grew apart. What has that got to do with anything?’
‘If you were alive now, with enough influence to be part of this, you’d be one of the main drivers.’
‘Spoken with the assurance of youth. Well, I’m sorry to prick your bubble, but did you ever wonder why I came back to the Winter Palace? Everything Eunice Akinya used to stand for started to bore me senseless.’
‘So you decided to become a witchy old recluse, counting her money and tut-tutting at her offspring.’
‘Since you put it so charmingly, yes.’
They had been travelling for two hours straight before they left Africa behind, crossing the buttressed white margin of the self-renewing sea wall and into the airspace above the Indian Ocean.
There were boats at sea, fishing and leisure craft, even some of the elegant multi-masted cyberclippers: benign Marie Celestes, holds abrim with bulky, non-perishable cargoes. To the south, the edge of one of the floating platelets, an artificial island capped by its own fevered little weather system. Another island, smaller this time, bore a dense thicket of skyscrapers, as if Singapore had become unmoored and drifted halfway around the world. As the DC-3 approached, t
he city revealed itself to be a congregation of stack farms, rising two kilometres from sea level. The stacks were mossy with vegetation, green-carpeted up their sheer flanks. Robot dirigibles harvested the tops of the stacks, crowding around them like fattened bumblebees as they waited their turn. Aside from a skeleton staff of technicians, no one would live on that island.
The DC-3 kept flying. Geoffrey checked his watch. It was two in the afternoon; they’d been in the air for four hours. He hadn’t expected the journey to take this long.
Just when he was starting to worry that the plane was going to carry him all the way to India – however many hours that might entail – something loomed from the ocean haze. Whatever it was rose straight from the sea, a solid-looking mass with a rounded, symmetrical summit. It was a structure, a very large one, with the open maw of a snorkel facing him. The DC-3 was headed straight for it.
Geoffrey knew better than to be alarmed; if the Pans were going to kill him, there were simpler ways of going about it than a plane crash. The engine note changed, the floor tilting as the aircraft lost altitude.
‘Do you know what that is?’
‘An aqualogy transit duct,’ Eunice said. ‘They’re built up from the seabed, raised on stilts of artificial coral, grown and replenished like the self-renewing sea walls.’
He’d moved to the forward seats for the best view. A pale, batlike craft emerged from the snorkel and sped south. One of the harvester dirigibles loitered near the entrance, awaiting clearance to proceed. Rafts of green biomass drooled from its collector baskets.
The DC-3 had approach priority. The descent steepened, and then they were inside the snorkel, flying down a completely enclosed air-corridor. Geoffrey tried to judge the angle of descent, but without a visible horizon it was hard to estimate. It felt much steeper than his usual landing pattern in the Cessna, but at the same time there was a sense of calm routine, the ride elevator-smooth. He hadn’t even been told to sit down or buckle-up.
The corridor darkened as the sunlit mouth receded. Red lights slipped by on either side, marking their progress. Once, another batwing craft sped by in the opposite direction: silver-bodied with the Initiative’s green whorl painted on its skin.
‘We’ve descended a long way,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We must be underwater by now.’
‘They’re blocking me.’
‘What?’
‘Aug degradation. The duct must be interfering with the signal. I imagine that’s not accidental.’
‘Can’t you do anything about it?’
‘Dear me – that almost sounds like concern for my welfare.’
‘It’s not. I just value a second pair of eyes.’ He paused. ‘Eunice?’
His visual field clotted with error messages. She was gone.
His ears popped. The ride levelled out for a stretch. Then, softly enough that he almost thought it might be his imagination, the DC-3 was down. It rolled for a short while, as smoothly as if sliding on ice, and then came to a halt. The tunnel had widened out into a larger space, lit by banks of blue lights.
The door whirred open, the stairs lowering simultaneously. Geoffrey grabbed his overnight bag and climbed out of the now silent transport. He stepped onto hard black ground, sheened like wet asphalt. The chamber was large enough to hold half a dozen other aircraft, though none were as old as the DC-3. Nearby a harvester was having its collector baskets raked clean.
Without Eunice, and without the aug, Geoffrey felt more vulnerable than he’d been expecting. He didn’t want to think about all the megatonnes of seawater somewhere over his head, especially as some of it appeared to be dripping through the ceiling.
‘Well, thanks for the welcome,’ he said quietly.
A merwoman strode out of the darkness. Her mobility prosthesis encased her body from the ribcage down, gripping corset-tight. Mechanical legs emerged from the exo’s pelvic girdle, spaced wide on complex joints. They were articulated backwards, giving the merwoman the look of some giant strutting bird. The exo whirred and clanked, as if it wasn’t in the best repair. The framework was bottle-green, traced with luminous kelp-like patterns.
In impeccable Swahili she said, ‘Good afternoon, Mister Akinya. I hope your journey was a pleasant one.’
‘Whose idea was the Dakota?’
‘Truro thought you’d appreciate the antique touch. Rest assured, though, that you’ll be going home by conventional means. I am Mira Gilbert – UAN Office of Scientific and Technological Liaison. It’s a pleasure to welcome you to Tiamaat. I trust the absence of aug isn’t too distressing?’
‘I’m coping.’
‘We have our own local aug here, and something very like the Mechanism. You’ll be given access to the baseline functions, but before that, I’m afraid we’ll need to neutralise any recording devices you might be carrying.’
‘I’m not.’
‘That also includes your eyes, Mister Akinya. Their capture-and-record function must be disabled.’ Her tone was apologetic but insistent. ‘I trust this isn’t too great an inconvenience? Any information already on the eyes should be safe.’
Geoffrey bristled, but he’d come too far to throw a tantrum now. ‘If that’s what it takes.’
‘Please follow me.’
She whirred around in the exo and clanked away, leading Geoffrey through a door in the side of the cavern and along a dank, wet-floored corridor.
‘You speak Swahili very well,’ he told her.
‘Helps, in this region. I understand you’ve been in space recently?’
‘The Moon and back, assuming that counts. Do you leave Tiamaat very often?’
‘I don’t leave water very often, let alone the city. Frankly, I can’t wait to get out of this clanking contraption. It’s not that I minded meeting you, though.’ After a few paces she added, ‘I have been to space, though. I was a pilot, before I was seconded to Tiamaat.’
‘How long have you been . . . ?’ He felt tongue-tied.
‘Aquatic? Thirteen years now. Takes a little while to get used to the alterations – the brain has to learn a whole new way of moving, a whole new hydrodynamics. The first six months were difficult. After that, I never looked back.’
‘And could you be . . . reversed? If you wanted to?’
‘Perhaps,’ Gilbert said, managing to sound as if the notion had never really occurred to her. ‘Some have defected back to lubber. But they must have been ’formed for the wrong reasons.’ She turned to look back over her shoulder. ‘People think becoming like this is the magic spell that’ll sort out their lives, put an end to all their worldly woes. Nowadays the psych screening’s much more rigorous. There’s also a huge waiting list for new surgery. You can’t just wake up one morning and decide to become aquatic.’
‘You’re not worried about overcrowding, surely?’
‘Not really. There’s more surface area down here than on all the dry land masses combined. Earth coexists with a planet as large as Mars, and all you have to do to cross from one to the other is swim. But there are bottlenecks. Our clinics can only cope with so many transformations, and with the germline programmes making ever more headway, there’ll soon be second-generation aquatics who never came through the clinics – merchildren born of merpeople. Then we’ll have to impose much stricter quotas. Needless to say, our offspring will have priority. It’s not too late to join us, though.’
‘Become a citizen? Thanks, but I’ve got other plans for the rest of my life.’
They rode an elevator upshaft and emerged into a clean white-tiled room. With the tiled floor eventually giving way to a shimmering rectangle of turquoise water, accessed at various points by stairs and ramps, it resembled a large indoor swimming pool. Dim greenish light filtered through heavily strutted ceiling windows. That must be ocean above his head, he thought: enough of it that the full glare of sunlight was reduced to this soupy, olive-stained radiance.
‘You can locomote the rest of the way if you want to,’ Gilbert said, ‘but it would really make a lot
more sense if you travelled by water instead. Do you swim?’
Geoffrey couldn’t recall the last time he’d set foot in water. ‘A bit.’
The merwoman gestured to a white door in the tiled wall to Geoffrey’s right. ‘Wetsuit in there. Leave your clothes and belongings there – they’ll be forwarded to your quarters later.’
With some diffidence, Geoffrey locked himself in the changing room and removed his clothes. He bundled them up in a wireframe basket, then examined the waiting wetsuit. It was fixed against the wall by some hidden means, legs and arms spread wide. It was a vivid yellow-green colour, with a texture like fine-grained sandpaper. He was just starting to work out the best way to get into it when the suit peeled open along hidden seams, exactly as if a kindly poltergeist were offering assistance.
Geoffrey turned and shuffled backwards, arms and legs mirroring the suit’s posture, and waited for the fabric to seal itself around his body. At first it tightened alarmingly, sucking onto his skin as if vacuum-formed. Rather to his surprise, he found that he could still breathe without difficulty. He felt, in fact, completely unclothed, and when he brushed his bare fingertips across his fabric-clad chest, it felt as if he was touching his own skin. High-res tactile-transmission system, he supposed, the kind they had in spacesuits these days. He walked out of the room, feeling more self-conscious than he would have liked. The suit enclosed him from ankle to neck, but its tight-fitting contours were barely sufficient to preserve his modesty.
‘Good,’ Gilbert said, giving him no more than a momentary glance. ‘Now for the aqua-mobility harness.’
She walked him over to the far wall, where a dozen or so sleek white devices were racked in a line. They resembled the partial skeletons of marine mammals, each with a segmented spine, a fluke, articulated side-flippers, a lacy suggestion of a skull. There was also a kind of cracked-open ribcage.
‘I’m meant to get into that?’
‘You want to keep up with me,’ Gilbert said, ‘you’d better. Back into the harness, it’ll do the rest.’
Geoffrey did as he was told, selecting the first of the harnesses. The ribcage pincered slowly around him, clutching his chest firmly, the padded insides of the ‘ribs’ reshaping to provide maximum surface-area contact. The skull enclosed his head, forming an openwork cage equipped with a breathing apparatus and suction goggles. He felt the harness detach from the wall mounting, so that he was bearing what little weight it possessed. It felt as flimsy as a cheaply made carnival costume.