Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds [Reynolds, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101568859
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Even with her eyes cranked to maximum zoom, Sunday couldn’t see the far end of the cable car’s wire. It was braided spiderfibre, strung between pylons. A dust storm was curdling in from Crommelin’s far rim and all she could presently see was the line, suspended like a conjuring trick before it vanished into a wall of billowing butterscotch.

The car, as big as eight container modules blocked together, had two floors, a lavish promenade deck and a small restaurant. At least a hundred people were milling around in it with room to spare. The golem wasn’t on the car – unless it was wearing someone else’s face, and the Pan intelligence suggested otherwise – but that didn’t mean Sunday wasn’t being watched, observed, scrutinised to the pore. Certainly there were golems and proxies aboard, and in all likelihood one or two warmbloods as well. Chinging struck Sunday as profoundly meaningless in contexts like this. The whole point of being in the cable car was physical proximity to the landscape. One could passive ching as close as one wished, but that wasn’t the same as being here, suspended by a thread of spiderfibre. Or was she just being old-fashioned? She wondered what June Wing would have to say on the subject.

Jitendra came back from the other side of the observation deck carrying two coffees in a plastic tray. ‘We’re getting much lower now,’ he said excitedly. ‘The car’s dropping down from the main cable – there must be winches in the trolley, so we can go up and down according to the terrain.’

Sunday accepted the coffee. ‘You can draw me a sketch of it later. I’m sure I’ll find it riveting.’

‘Aren’t you enjoying this?’

‘Would be, if I’d come to gawp at the scenery. As it happens, there are a couple of other things on my mind.’

Jitendra’s good mood wasn’t going to be shattered that easily. Sipping his coffee, he studied his fellow tourists with avid interest. ‘And you’re sure this is the right car?’

‘I just got on the first one that came in. That was what Holroyd told me to do. Said our guide would make their presence known eventually.’

‘Fine. Nothing to do but wait and see, then, is there?’

The scenery, she had to admit, was something. No, she hadn’t come to play tourist – but she had come to play at being tourist, and the two were only a whisker apart.

In Crommelin, billions of years of ancient and secret Martian history had been flensed open for inspection, naked to the sky. Over time, over unimaginable and dreary Noachian ages, wind and water had laid down layers of sedimentary rock, one on top of the other, deposition after deposition, until they formed immense and ancient strata, as dusty and forbidding as the pages of some long-unopened history book. Crommelin’s interior – wide enough to swallow Nairobi or Lagos whole – was a mosaic of these sedimentary layers. Here, though, something remarkable and fortuitous had happened. Not so long ago –

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