Blue Remembered Earth (34 page)

Panspermian funds allowed Sunday the rental of a Phobos surface suit. A tunnel brought her to the edge of Stickney, into an underground enclosure where rental employees surveyed proceedings with bored, seen-it-all expressions.

Risk had been engineered out of the Phobos suits. They came wobbling in via a ceiling track, like cable cars. Each consisted of an ovoid life-support capsule with a perfectly transparent upper hemisphere, ringed by a thick mechanical girdle. Four infinitely flexible segmented legs were anchored to the girdle, with one of the legs hooked onto the ceiling rail and the other three curled up around the ovoid like the arms of a chandelier. There was no means of picking up or prodding anything.

Sunday was helped into the next available suit, inside which she found a seat and basic directional controls. The dome clamped down and went pressure-tight, and then she was carried through a series of dilating pressure locks, finally exiting via a bunker-like entrance ringed by pulsing green bars. The suit’s curled-up legs flexed down and dug traction pitons into the light-sucking asphalt-black surface of the moon. The fourth leg uncoupled from the ceiling rail, and she was free. She could move the rover-suit in any direction she wanted just by tapping arrows or pushing a simple joystick. The suit took care of locomotion, maintaining a tarantula death grip against the moon’s feeble gravity.

Wherever Sunday looked there was another primary-coloured spider clambering with fluid agility over the soot-black undulating ground. No matter what contortions the legs had to perform as they navigated craters and grooves at all scales, the pressure capsules followed graceful trajectories. The more distant the spiders, the more acute the angle of view. She watched them tilt around the curvature of the world.

‘Phobos feels like a long way from Earth,’ Eunice said, her suited figure walking alongside Sunday’s rover. ‘But that’s not how it works, when you factor in the orbital-transfer mechanics.’

‘Right. I was wondering when you’d pop up.’

‘Not like I was going to miss an opportunity to revisit the old place, given the time I spent here.’ Eunice’s purposeful, bouncing stride belied the feeble gravity.

‘I don’t see how this place can be anything other than a long way from home,’ Sunday said.

‘Energetics, dear girl. Delta-vee. If you start from Earth, it costs you more fuel to land on the Moon than it does to reach Phobos. Counterintuitive, I suppose – although not if you have a thorough grasp of the principles.’

‘That’s me ruled out, then.’

‘Nature gave us this stepping stone for free. It’s just been sitting around Mars, waiting to be exploited. So we came and we saw and we conquered.’ Eunice swivelled her helmet to track Sunday. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Your old base camp. Where else are you likely to have buried a clue?’

‘Let’s look at Mars first,’ Eunice declared. ‘Then we’ll go to the base camp. You owe me that much.’

Sunday felt that she owed the construct nothing, but she caught her tongue before answering. Any utterance that was not the sort of thing she might have said to her living grandmother was at best noise, at worse a potentially damaging input.

‘You’ll get your wish.’

The rover-suit’s whirling, whisking limbs made brisk work of the necessary kilometres, processing the terrain with furious scuttling precision. Soon Mars began to rise over the horizon’s sharp black ridge.

Sunday did not stop until the clock was reading two hours, halfway into her rental agreement. Then it was time to take in the glory of this new world.

Mars ruled the sky. It was half-illuminated, the shadowed hemisphere serving only to emphasise that this was a three-dimensional thing, a sphere bulging out towards her. With no air between her and the atmosphere of Mars – and very little air in the atmosphere to begin with – the ground features appeared preternaturally sharp, defined with a mapmaker’s fastidiousness. The lit hemisphere was a warm salmon hue, tinged here and there with dusty swathes of ochre and burnt sienna. White snow frosted the visible pole. Cutting across the face, the claw-marks of some staggering canyon system gouged deep into the flesh of the world.
Valles Marineris
, Sunday thought: she knew that much, at least. And that fracture zone, where the canyons dissolved into a quilt of shattered intricacy, was the Noctis Labyrinthus, the Maze of Night. The three volcanoes beyond the maze: Ascreaus Mons, Pavonis Mons, Arsia Mons.

She was about to voke the aug to request a detailed topographic overlay when she realised that she was already travelling with the best possible guide.

‘Fond memories?’ Sunday asked.

‘It wasn’t like this when Jonathan and I landed on Phobos,’ Eunice said. ‘A planetwide dust storm had brewed up while we were on our way, so when we got here we couldn’t see much at all. We had no choice but to sit it out before we could head down to Mars.’

‘There were already people down there, though.’

Eunice used one gloved hand to screen glare from her helmet. ‘They had enough provisions and supplies to see out the storm, provided it didn’t last for months. But they couldn’t move around much, and it was far too dangerous to send anything up or down. This was before the elevator, of course.’

‘That much I figured.’

‘It wasn’t like Earth. Miss your landing point on Earth and you’re never far from rescue. Didn’t work that way on Mars, especially not in those days.’

Eunice had been thirty-one when she came with her husband to Phobos in 2062; not much younger than Sunday was now. She had been the ninety-eighth human being to set foot on that rusted soil, just before the influx became an inundation.

‘Can we look at the camp now?’ she said. ‘Clock’s ticking on my rental agreement.’

‘Follow me,’ Eunice said, sighing. ‘It’s not too far. Nothing’s far on Phobos.’

The dust storm wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. Nevertheless, none of the early explorers had been pleased to have their journeys to Mars interrupted by surface weather. Phobos had benefited, though. Long a convenient staging point for Martian exploration, by 2062 an entire transnational shanty town had spontaneously self-organised on the little moon, consisting of a ramshackle, barely planned assortment of domes, surface shacks and dugout habitats, and home to a semi-permanent population already numbering dozens.

Even in those early days, some had already decided that they actually preferred life in orbit, rather than down in the Martian gravity well or back on the Moon or Earth. They got all the scenery they could take just by looking out of the window or venturing onto the moon’s surface, and the steady succession of arriving and departing ships made for endless variety. Their technical services were also highly valued, in a variety of enterprises ranging from vehicle maintenance to the supply of narcotics and paid sex.

Most of that original shanty town was gone now, swallowed into the Stickney developments. But there had been a few outposts scattered elsewhere on Phobos, including the one where Eunice had spent most of her time.

When something began to push over the horizon, Sunday assumed they were coming up on the camp. But the object reared too high for that.

It was as dark, if not darker, than the rest of Phobos, and it rose a good ninety metres from the surface. They crept up to the shattered terrain around its base, where it had daggered into Phobos countless ages ago. A couple of other suits were wandering around the scene, shining spotlights onto the object’s upper reaches. Where the lights fell, they picked out intricate carved detail: flanges, pipes, repetitive iterations of the same elements, like spinal vertebrae or ribs. Bony outgrowths fused with ancient fossilised machine parts. Rocket exhausts like eye sockets, docking ports like gaping jawbones or reproductive organs. Hull armour spidered with fontanelle cracks.

‘They called it the Monolith,’ Eunice said. ‘Found it in photographs of Phobos, way back at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Couldn’t resolve the thing itself, just its shadow, but the shadow told them it had to be big. Needless to say, it was a prime target for close-up examination by the first landers.’

Sunday’s eyes tracked the mesmerising, morbid detail. The object was lumpy and asymmetrical, but it was clearly a vehicle of some kind, nose-down in the crust. ‘Somehow, I think I’d have heard about a crashed alien spaceship by now.’

‘Some of the early explorers got bored, cooped up here with a lot of time on their hands and not enough to do. One of them was a woman called Chakrabarty. Indian, I think. Or maybe Pakistani. One day, for kicks, she draws up a plan, very detailed and meticulous, and starts carving stuff into the Monolith. Her team had cutting gear, explosives, everything she needed. She started at the bottom and worked her way up. It was pretty easy. You can climb all the way up without any kind of safety line, and even if you fall off the top, it’s no worse than jumping off a garden wall back on Earth.’

‘This was all done by . . . this one woman?’

‘Chakrabarty started it. Then she went down to Mars and a while later word came back that she’d been killed – suit malfunction, I think. Her plans were still on file at the camp, though. After that, it became a sort of tradition. Anyone who was stuck here for more than a few days . . . they’d suit-up and head out to the Monolith to add a contribution to Chakra’s Folly. It was a way of honouring her memory – and of saying,
We were here, we did this.
Millions of years from now, the Monolith’s still going to be here. Until Phobos falls into Mars.’

‘Is it finished now?’

‘They reached the top decades ago. They’ve even sprayed the whole thing with plastic, to stop vandals and micrometeorite damage.’

Sunday made out fist-sized craters where tiny particles had hit Chakra’s Folly after it had been carved and decorated, chipping away at the details. She presumed the damage had been done before the protective layer was added.

‘Did you add to it?’ she asked.

‘I suppose I must have.’

‘You suppose?’

‘I don’t remember whether I did or not. Is that good enough for you?’

Sunday tempered her frustration. She couldn’t blame the construct for not knowing things that it had never been told. ‘There must be a record of who did what somewhere.’

‘Don’t count on it. And maybe I didn’t add anything. At this point, there may be no way of ever telling.’ Eunice stooped to pick something up from the ground, some chunk of material lying loose on the surface – blasted from the Monolith, perhaps – but her fingers slipped right through it. ‘You didn’t need to come all this way to examine the Folly,’ she said, standing up with a grunt of irritation. ‘You could have called up a figment of it and examined it in detail back on the Moon. Anyway, I don’t think this can be the reason I wanted you here. Everything about the Folly is public. I couldn’t have hidden a message in it if I’d tried.’

‘Something worked into the pattern, perhaps?’

‘Difficult. They didn’t like it when you deviated from Chakrabarty’s plan. It was supposed to bring bad luck.’

‘Like you ever believed in that.’

‘I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to court trouble.’ Eunice craned her head back, holding one hand above her visor. ‘It’s magnificent, though. No, really: isn’t it?’

‘It’s a shame Chakra never got to see it finished.’

‘We ’re seeing it for her,’ Eunice said.

Sunday wanted to dispute that – there was no ‘we’ as far as she was concerned, just her own pair of eyes, her own mind and her own feelings. As absurd as it made her feel, though, she did not have the heart to contradict Eunice. Let her believe she was capable of honouring a dead woman’s memories, if that was what she wished.

It did not take long to reach the Indian encampment, once they’d set off from the Monolith. It surmounted the horizon like an approaching galleon, masts and sails the towers and reflector arrays of a long-abandoned communications node. Smaller buildings surrounded the main huddle. It was a ghost town, long derelict.

‘Bad blood between the Indians and the Chinese back in the mid-fifties,’ Eunice explained, Sunday reminding herself that this was the mid-
twenty
-fifties she was talking about, not the twenty-one-fifties. ‘Never blew up into anything involving tanks and bombs, but there was sufficient animosity for the Indians not to want to have anything to do with the Chinese encampment. So they came all the way to Phobos and built this place, practically walking distance from the original shanty town.’

‘Couldn’t they have done us all a favour and left the Old-World politics behind?’

‘We were young, the world was young.’

Sunday couldn’t tell if anyone had been near the outpost lately. There were no footprints on Phobos, and the indentations left by the surface suits were indistinguishable from the pitting and gouging already worked into the terrain over billions of years. Still, why would anyone bother giving the settlement more than a glance?

Maybe in a hundred years historians would look back on this neglected site and find its dereliction unforgivable. But here, now, it was just more human litter, roadside junk left behind when people had moved elsewhere.

Off to one side, Eunice walked by a curious, rack-like structure that had been planted into the Phobos topsoil. It had a makeshift, lopsided look, as if knocked together in a burst of misguided enthusiasm after a lengthy drinking session. Eunice brushed her hand against the wheels that had been fixed into the frame, mounted on vertical spindles so that their rims could be easily turned. ‘Tibetans and Mongolians,’ she explained. ‘They were on the original Indian mission, or ended up here later – I can’t remember which.’