Blue Remembered Earth Read Online Free Page B

would never see her again.
    For all that Eunice’s death hit the family hard, it wasn’t long before she was shunted from the headlines. A simmering sex/vote-rigging scandal in the Pan-African Parliament, a dispute between the East African Federation and the African Union about cost overruns on a groundwater bioremediation programme in former Uganda, a stand-off between Chinese tecto-engineers and Turkish government mandarins concerning the precise scheduling of a stress-management earthquake along the North Anatolian Fault. On the global scale, continued tensions between the United Surface Nations and the United Aquatic Nations regarding extradition rules and the extent of aug access rights and inter-regional Mechanism jurisdiction. Talk of expanding the scope of the Mandatory Enhancements. A murder attempt in Finland. Threat of industrial action at the Pontianak space elevator in western Borneo. Someone in Tasmania dying of a very rare type of cancer, something of a heroic achievement these days.
    Only at the household, only in this part of the East African Federation, had the clocks stopped. A month had passed since Geoffrey was called from the sky with news of his grandmother’s death. The scattering had been delayed until the twenty-ninth of January, which would give most of the family time to make reasonable travel arrangements for their journeys back to Earth. Miraculously, the delay was deemed agreeable to all the involved factions.
    ‘Do try not to scowl, brother,’ Sunday said in a low voice as she walked alongside him. ‘Anyone who didn’t know better would think you’d rather be somewhere else.’
    ‘They’d be absolutely right.’
    ‘At least we’re doing this to honour her,’ Sunday replied, after the standard Earth–Moon time lag.
    ‘Why are we bothering, though? She didn’t go out of her way to honour anyone else while she was alive.’
    ‘We can give her this one.’ Sunday wore a long skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, both in black velvet offset with luminous entwining threads. ‘She may not have expressed much in the way of love and affection, but without her we’d be less filthily rich than we actually are.’
    ‘You’re right about the filthy rich part. Look at them all, circling like flies.’
    ‘I suppose you mean Hector and Lucas.’ Sunday kept her voice low. The cousins were not very far away in the procession.
    ‘They’ve been hanging around like ghouls ever since she died.’
    ‘You could also say they’re taking on a burden so that the rest of us don’t have to.’
    ‘Then I wish they’d get a move on with it.’
    The cousins had been born on Titan. They were the sons of Edison Akinya, one of the three children Eunice had had with Jonathan Beza. Until recent years the cousins hadn’t spent a lot of time on Earth, but with Edison showing no signs of relinquishing his particular corner of the business empire, Hector and Lucas had turned their attentions sunwards. Geoffrey had no choice but to deal with them during their frequent visits to the household. The cousins had a large say in how the family’s discretionary funds were allocated.
    ‘Bad day at the office?’
    ‘My work’s suffering. They’ve blocked grant allocations while they sort through Eunice’s finances. That makes it difficult for me to plan ahead, which in turn isn’t doing wonders for my mood.’ He walked on a few paces. ‘Difficult for you to grasp, I know.’
    Sunday’s look was sharp. ‘Meaning I haven’t got a clue about planning and responsibility because I don’t live in the Surveilled World? Brother, you really have no idea. I didn’t move to the Zone to escape responsibility. I went there to find out what it feels like to actually have some.’
    ‘Right. And you think the Mech treats us all like a bunch of helpless babies.’ He closed his eyes in weariness – this was a spiralling conversation they’d had a hundred times already, without ever reaching a conclusion. ‘It’s not