Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page B

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