Blue Remembered Earth

The two machines rolled away from each other. The enemy retracted its cutter, the body armour folding back into place. Jitendra’s machine staunched its blood loss. Stalemate ensued for objective seconds, before the resumption of combat. The enemy twisted its head assembly and locked on with clutching mouthparts, horrible girder-thick barbed mechanisms. It was chewing – drilling, tunnelling – into Jitendra’s robot, metal and machine bits spraying away from the cutting head. From the rear of the enemy machine, from its iron anus, a grey plume of processed matter emerged. It was chewing, eating, digesting, defecating, all in mere seconds. Jitendra’s stats were now dismal and falling.

But he wasn’t finished. The enemy bit into something it couldn’t process as easily as moon rock: some high-pressure jugular. Bad for Jitendra, even worse for the machine trying to eat him for dinner. The enemy jolted, regurgitating a large quantity of chewed-up machine parts. Mouth-mechanisms spasmed and flopped as a wave of damage ripped through its guts. Jitendra’s machine twisted sharply out of reach. It had been bitten into around the neckline, but its whirling drills were still racing. It reared up like a striking cobra and hammered down on the enemy. Machine parts skittered away in all directions, cratering the arena. Now it was time for Jitendra’s machine to spring out additional grasping and cutting devices, hull plates popping open like frigate gun doors. Jitendra’s stats rallied.

But this wasn’t going to be a victory for either machine. The enemy was wounded, perhaps fatally, but so was Jitendra’s charge. Its drill parts were not turning as furiously as they had been only a few moments before. And its entire body was sagging, no longer able to support itself off the ground even against the feeble pull of the Moon’s gravity. When the end came, it did so with startling suddenness. Jitendra’s machine simply dropped dead, as if it had been pulled to the ground by invisible wires. For a moment the enemy machine made a valiant attempt to regain the advantage, but it was in vain. It too had suffered catastrophic systems failures. Like a deflating balloon, it collapsed to the ground and fell into pathetic corpselike stillness.

In a flash, recovery teams arrived. Tractors shot out from silos. Tiny figures – frantic space-suited Lilliputians – swarmed out of the tractors and bound the fallen monsters in drag-harnesses, cobwebbing them from head to tail with comical speed. The figures buzzed around and then vanished into the tractors again, as if they’d been sucked back inside. The tractors lugged the dead machines to the arena’s perimeter, gouging runway-sized skid marks in the soil.

That was the end of the bout. Geoffrey knew because he was being pulled back into real-time. He felt the chemicals metabolising out of his bloodstream. The visa digits slowed their tumble. The transcranial stim was over, the helmet rising back away from his head.

‘Well?’ Sunday asked, standing over his reclining form. ‘What did you think?’

For a moment his mouth wouldn’t work.

‘How long was I under?’ he managed.

‘Four and a half hours. June’s gone back to work.’

If she was lying, then so was the visa.

‘I guess everyone says the same thing. It didn’t feel like it.’

‘That was a short bout, as they go. Seven, eight hours isn’t unusual,’ Sunday answered, pushing a drink into his hand. ‘Twelve, thirteen, even that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.’

His neck had developed an unpleasant crick. Jitendra, who was being hauled from his cockpit, had the wiped-out, dehydrated look of a racing-car driver. Friends and associates were already mobbing him, patting his back and making sympathetic bad-show faces.

‘I’m sorry,’ Geoffrey said, teetering over to Jitendra. ‘I thought it was going your way for a while there. Not that I’m an expert or anything.’

‘I lost my concentration,’ Jitendra said, shaking his head. ‘Should have switched to a different attack plan when I had the window. Still, it’s not all bad news. A draw gives me enough points to retain my ranking, whereas they needed a win not to go down the toilet.’ He worked his shoulders, as if both his arms had popped out of their sockets and needed to be relocated. ‘And I don’t think the damage is as bad as it looked out there.’

‘Nothing that can’t be welded back together,’ Sunday said.

‘One good thing came out of it,’ Jitendra said, before burying his face in a warm wet towel.

‘Which was?’ Sunday asked.

‘Eight, fifteen, seventeen.’ He gave them both a grin. ‘I figured that bit out, anyway. And I was right. Those numbers do mean something to me.’

When they were back at the apartment, Sunday and her brother prepared a simple meal, and they shared another bottle of wine, one which Geoffrey had insisted on buying by way of celebration for a successful day. They dined with Toumani Diabaté providing kora accompaniment. The recording was a hundred years old, made when the revered musician was a very elderly man, yet it remained as bright and dazzling as sunglints on water.

When the dishes had been cleared and the wine glasses refilled, she knew that the time had come to invoke the construct. This was the crux, she felt certain. If Eunice could offer no guidance on the matter, then all they had was a dirty old glove and some cheap plastic jewels. And with the possibility of mystery safely banished from their lives, they could all return to their mundane concerns.

‘Good evening, Sunday,’ Eunice said, speaking Swahili. ‘Good evening, Jitendra. Good evening, Geoffrey.’

‘Good evening, Eunice,’ they chorused.

‘How are you enjoying your stay?’ Eunice asked, pointedly directing her question at Geoffrey.

‘Very much, thank you,’ he said, but with an edge of nervousness, as if he did not quite trust that Eunice’s working memory had been scrubbed after their last exchange. ‘Sunday and Jitendra are first-rate hosts.’

‘Excellent. I trust that the remainder of your visit will be just as enjoyable.’ She turned her imperious regard onto Sunday. ‘May I be of assistance?’

‘We have a question,’ Sunday said.

‘If it’s about the glove, I’m afraid I have told you all that I am able to.’

‘It’s not exactly about the glove. Well, it sort of is, but we have something different to ask you now.’ Sunday looked at Jitendra, inviting him to speak.

‘I discovered a pattern,’ Jitendra said. ‘Three numbers. They relate to Pythagoras.’

‘Where was this pattern?’ Eunice queried sharply, as if addressing a small boy who had mumbled something out of turn in class.

‘There were gemstones in the glove,’ Jitendra said, ‘red, green and blue ones. The numbers form a Pythagorean triple: eight, fifteen, seventeen.’

‘I see.’

‘It took me a while to make the connection,’ Jitendra went on. ‘It was almost there, but I couldn’t quite bring it out. Then I saw the Meta Presence logo on the side of the other robot . . . the triangle . . . and it was like a key turning in my head. It wasn’t a Pythagorean triangle, of course, but it was enough.’

‘Question is, why Pythagoras?’ Sunday asked. ‘Could mean several things. But seeing as we’re on the Moon, and seeing as there’s a good chance that glove came from a Moon suit . . . I wondered if it might have something to do with Pythagoras itself.’ She swallowed and added, ‘As in the crater, on the Earth-facing side.’

Eunice cogitated for many agonising seconds, her expression perfectly unchanging. Sunday had taken pains to imbue the construct with Eunice’s own speech patterns and mannerisms, and this kind of hiatus was one of them.

‘Something did happen to me there,’ she said, breaking her own silence. ‘Systems failure, coming in to land at the Chinese station in Anaximenes. Lost thrust authority and hard-landed in Pythagoras.’ She smacked her fist into her palm, making a loud, meaty clap. ‘Ship was toast, but I managed to suit-up and bail out before she lost hull pressure. Chinese knew where I’d come down. Problem was, their one rover was out on an excursion and if I sat tight waiting for them to get a rescue party to me, I’d be toast as well. My only option was to walk, and try to meet them two-thirds of the way, on the other side of the crater wall. So that’s what I did: I walked – actually hopped, most of the way – and climbed, and I was down to three hours of useful consumables when I saw their rover cresting the horizon.’ She shrugged, profoundly unimpressed by her own story. ‘It was a close thing, but there were close things all the time in those days.’

‘So that’s it?’ Sunday said, doubtfully. ‘That’s all that ever happened to you in Pythagoras?’

‘If you would rather I hadn’t made it, dear child, then I can only apologise.’

‘I didn’t mean to downplay what happened,’ Sunday said. ‘It’s just, well, another Eunice story. In any other life it would be the most amazing thing, but in yours . . . it’s not even a chapter. Just an anecdote.’

‘I have had my share of adventure,’ Eunice conceded.

‘When did this happen?’ Jitendra asked.

‘The year would have been . . .’ Eunice made a show of remembering. ‘Fifty-nine, I believe. Back when Jonathan and I were still married. It was a different Moon then, of course. Still a wilderness, in many respects. A lot changed in the next two or three decades. That was why we decided to move on again.’

‘To Mars. With the Indians,’ Sunday said. ‘But even Mars wasn’t enough of a wilderness to keep you happy.’

‘Living out the rest of his life there suited Jonathan. Didn’t suit me. I came back to the Moon eventually, but only when the rest of the system had exhausted its ability to astonish.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t come all the way back, to Africa,’ Geoffrey said.

‘And cripple myself under a gee of gravity again? I’d barely set foot on Earth in forty years, boy. I missed the household; I missed the acacia trees and the sunsets. But I did not miss the crush of all that dumb matter under my feet, pinning me to the earth under a sky that felt like a heavy blanket on a warm night.’ She jabbed a finger against the side of her head. ‘Space changed me; I could never go home again. Space will do that to you. If that bothers you, best stay home.’

‘Excuse me for having an opinion,’ Geoffrey said.

She eyed him, then nodded once. Eunice had always placed a much higher premium on those who dared to stand up to the monstrous force of her personality than those who gave in without a fight.

‘I should not blame you for living later than I did,’ Eunice said, adopting a tone that was as close to conciliatory as she ever got. ‘You did not choose to be born in this century, any more than I chose to be born in mine.’

‘And that was a long time ago,’ Jitendra said.

‘You think so?’ the construct replied. ‘There are rocks out there, still sitting on the Lunar surface, that haven’t moved since the Late Heavy Bombardment.’

‘She might be right,’ Sunday said. ‘If Eunice crashed somewhere out of the way like Pythagoras, there’s a good chance her tracks are still there, from the landing site all the way out of the crater, to wherever the Chinese rescued her.’

‘Just so long as Pythagoras hasn’t been chewed over for water or helium,’ Jitendra said. ‘Or had casinos plastered all over it.’

‘The Chinese station at Anaximenes was a supply point for their hydroxyl mining and refining operations around the north pole,’ Eunice said, tapping her instantaneous knowledge base. ‘Once the pipelines were in and extraction became automated, there was no need to keep all the crewed stations open. There’s no longer a human presence in Anaximenes, and the last person to set foot in Pythagoras was me.’ She paused, catching herself before anyone else had a chance to speak. ‘Actually, I lie: a recovery team flew in to strip the ship for anything salvageable – ’tronics, fuel, shielding. They were Indian, and under space law they had the right to fillet the wreck. But that was only a few weeks later and they wouldn’t have touched most of the evidence.’

‘Evidence,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s like we’re already talking about a crime scene.’

‘Maybe we’re making a bit too much of it,’ Sunday said. ‘If the glove was meant to lead us to the crater, why didn’t it just come with a handy little map tucked into it?’

‘A test of your ability to draw the necessary conclusion from the clues, perhaps?’ Eunice suggested.

‘Well, good luck,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I’ll be deeply interested to hear what, if anything, you find out there.’

‘We’re all in this together, brother,’ Sunday said.

‘Speak for yourself. All I’ve done is examine a glove at the request of the family.’

Sunday turned back to the construct. ‘Thank you for your time, Eunice – you’ve been most helpful.’

‘It’s over,’ Geoffrey said, when the figment had vanished. ‘There’s no mystery. No reason not to come clean about the glove, and the gemstones.’

Sunday shrugged and decided, possibly with the assistance of mild intoxication, that she would call his bluff. ‘Fine. Call the cousins. Tell them what you found.’

‘They still think the glove’s in Copetown.’

‘Say you went back and got it. It’ll only be a white lie.’

Jitendra sucked air through his teeth. ‘Beginning to wish I hadn’t been so clever after all.’

‘It’s all right,’ Sunday said. ‘This is just a brother-and-sister thing.’

‘What Sunday doesn’t grasp,’ Geoffrey said, ‘is that there’s more at stake to me personally than the reputation of Eunice, or the family business.’

‘You think you’re the only one with responsibilities?’

‘I have to put the elephants first, and that means keeping the cousins happy. So I’ll take the glove back to Earth, and declare the contents to customs.’

Sunday said nothing. She knew when her brother still had more to get off his chest.

‘But I won’t tell the cousins about the mathematical pattern. They can work that out for themselves, if they’re bright enough. And I won’t tell them what Eunice just told us either.’

‘They’re not fools,’ Sunday said.

‘It’s a compromise. You and Jitendra can keep digging into this little treasure hunt, if you wish. The cousins don’t need to know about that. Mainly they’ll be relieved that there wasn’t anything obvious and incriminating in the vault. Now they can go back to their polo with a clear conscience.’

‘At least we agree on one thing,’ Sunday said. ‘Neither of us likes the cousins very much.’

‘They’re Akinyas,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I think that says it all.’

CHAPTER SIX

In the morning he found Sunday in her studio. She had already been busy and industrious – she always had been a morning person. There was fresh bread and milk, the smell of powerful coffee permeating the apartment.

‘It’s very nice,’ he said, admiring the piece she was working on. It was some kind of half-scale Maasai-looking figure study: a skeletal stick-thin figure with a spear. Sunday was using a power tool to chisel away at the blade-edge of a cheekbone, biting her tongue in fierce concentration.

‘It’s shit, actually. Commissioned work. I’m doing two of them, to flank the doorway of an ethnic restaurant in the third cavern.’ She wore a long skirt, a black T-shirt and a red headscarf. Power tools, dappled with dried white specks, dangled from a belt hanging low around her hips. ‘What pays the rent around here, not digging into the past of a dead ancestor.’

‘It’s still art.’

‘That’s one point of view.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘They wanted something African. I said, you’re going to have to narrow it down a bit: are we talking west coast, east coast, are we even sub-Saharan? But no, they said, we want to keep it less specific than that.’

‘Like you say, it pays the rent.’

‘Guess I shouldn’t complain. Picasso drew on napkins to pay his bar tabs. And if this goes in on time, there may be more work when they open another concession across town.’ She hooked the power tool back into its loop and unbuckled the belt, draping it onto one of her paint-and-plaster-spattered work surfaces. ‘You’re up, anyway. You want breakfast? I thought we’d hit the zoo today.’

‘I just grabbed some bread,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Where’s Jitendra?’

‘Asleep. Does all his best thinking unconscious.’ She pottered over to a bowl and dipped her hands in water before drying them on her skirt. ‘Hope that wasn’t too heavy, all that business last night.’

‘Anything to do with family is bound to err on the heavy side.’ Geoffrey looked down, realising he’d trodden in something wet and sticky. ‘Look, I meant to say – it was absolutely wrong of me not to tell you straight away what I was doing up here, but I felt I was in a bind. If you can forgive me—’

‘I already have. This one time.’ She finished drying her fingers, leaving dark ovals on the skirt. ‘But listen – you and me, we have to be open with each other. Always used to be, didn’t we? You and me against the household, from the moment we worked out how to make nuisances of ourselves. How dear Memphis didn’t strangle us, I won’t ever know.’

‘Different back then, though. Being rebellious didn’t cost us anything except maybe being banished to our bedrooms before supper. Now we’ve got people and things that depend on us.’

‘Doesn’t mean we can’t be honest with each other, though, does it?’

‘The cousins didn’t want you to know. They’ll spit teeth if they find out I told you.’

Sunday moved the sculpture by its base and positioned it under a cluster of blue-tinged lights. ‘Then we’d better make damn sure they don’t.’

Children flew kites and balloons in the park. Others were preoccupied with enormous dragon-like flying contraptions not much smaller than the Cessna, the chief function of which appeared to be battling with other dragon-like flying contraptions. They had glittering foil plumage, bannered tails and marvellous anatomically precise wings that beat the air with the awesome slowness of a whale’s heart. Elsewhere there were amorous couples, outbreaks of public theatre or oratory, ice-cream stands, puppet shows and a great many fabulously costumed stilt-walkers. Geoffrey stared in wonder at an astonishingly beautiful stilt-walking girl covered with leaves and green face paint, like a tree spirit made carnal.

‘Do you think,’ Sunday asked, ‘that the cousins had any idea what you might find in the bank?’

‘If they did, they hid it well.’

‘Big risk, though, sending you up to look into the vault.’

‘Less of a risk than bringing an outsider into it.’ He tongued the ice cream Sunday had bought him from one of the stands. ‘Ideally, Hector and Lucas would have come up here in person, but then people would have started wondering why they needed to visit the Moon. Before you know it, the whole system would be poking its nose into Akinya business.’

‘You think Memphis knows about the vault?’

‘If he does, he’s said nothing to me.’ Geoffrey dripped some of the ice cream onto his sleeve. He lifted the fabric to his mouth and licked off the spillage. ‘Still, he knows something’s going on. I’m not sure what the rest of the family make of my absence, but Memphis knows I’ve gone to the Moon.’

‘Memphis had more contact with Eunice near the end than any of us.’

‘She might have told him things then, I suppose,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Or at any point during the exile. She was up here for more than sixty years.’

‘Maybe the simplest thing would be to ask him directly, in that case. See if he knows anything about the glove and the gemstones, and a possible connection to Pythagoras.’

‘If you’d like me to.’

They navigated the edge of a small civic pond where children splashed in the shallows and little pastel-sailed boats bobbed and battled further out. On the far bank, Geoffrey caught the flash of something small and mammalian emerging from the water before vanishing immediately into tufts of grass. An otter, or maybe a rat, its fur silvery with water.

‘You’re not at all curious about any of this, are you?’ Sunday said, not bothering to hide her disapproval. ‘When you head home to Africa, it’s straight back to your old life.’

‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’

‘Just do that one thing for me – find out what Memphis knows.’

‘Look, before you dig any deeper into this – are you absolutely sure this is something you really want to mess with? You won’t be able to do a five-minute scrub on your own working memory.’

‘I know a good neuropractor.’

‘Not my point.’

‘She wasn’t a monster, Geoffrey. A less-than-perfect human being, maybe. And there’s another thing: she put that glove there, not someone else. Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that the details of this bank vault suddenly come to light in the weeks after her death? Eunice’s fingerprints are all over this.’

‘I hope you’re right about that.’

After leaving the park they walked through into the next cavern and eventually stopped at the restaurant where Sunday’s commissioned sculptures would be installed. The place was closed for business, dusty from the renovation work. Sunday talked to the interior designer, going over a few details she needed to check before completing the project. She came out shaking her head, exasperated and befuddled. ‘Now they want them black,’ she said. ‘First it was white, now it’s black. I’ll have to redo them from scratch.’

‘What will you do with the white ones?’

‘Destroy them, probably. Too kitsch to sell.’

‘Please don’t destroy them,’ Geoffrey said urgently.

‘No use to me. Just clutter up my workplace.’

‘I’ll buy them or something. Ship them home. But don’t destroy them.’

She looked touched and surprised. ‘You’d do that for me, brother?’

He nodded solemnly. ‘Unless you’ve priced yourself out of my range.’

Then they were on their way again, crossing a few more blocks before arriving at what appeared to be – at least by the Zone’s standards – an entirely nondescript commercial or residential building. Its bulging sides were a mosaic of mirror-bright scales, suggestive of reptilian integument. They went inside and rode an elevator down into its basement levels.

Sunday passed Geoffrey a translation earpiece. ‘Put this on,’ she said. ‘Chama doesn’t do Swahili.’

She had voked ahead and as the doors opened they were met by a big, intense-looking man. Geoffrey judged him to be about his own age, give or take a decade. Long black hair hung down the sides of his face in tousled curtains, his skin brown, his beard neat and black, trimmed with laser accuracy.

‘Chama,’ Sunday said, pushing in her own jewelled translator. ‘This is Geoffrey, my brother. Geoffrey: this is Chama Akbulut.’

Chama reached out and took Geoffrey’s hand. He said something in a language Geoffrey didn’t recognise, while the translation rang clear and near-simultaneous. ‘Heard quite a bit about you.’

‘Nothing bad, I hope.’

‘No. Although Sunday did say you wouldn’t come up here in a million years. What changed your mind?’

‘Family business,’ Sunday cut in.

‘I hope we’re not intruding,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Always glad of company here.’ Chama wore a loose-fitting smock with a drawstring neck under a long leather waistcoat with a great many pockets and pouches. ‘You up to speed on the menagerie, Geoffrey?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Oh, good. That’s always the best way.’

Chama led them deeper into the building, until they were passing along a corridor dug out of solid Moon rock, sprayed over with smoke-tinted plastic insulation. Pipes and power lines ran along the ceiling, stapled messily in place.

‘There are strict rules governing the transport and utilisation of genetic materials within the system,’ Chama said, looking back over his shoulder. ‘And I’m very proud to say that Gleb and I have broken most of them.’

‘Aren’t there good reasons for those rules?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘No one wants to see people dying because of some ancient virus escaping into the wild.’

‘We’re not interested in anything hazardous,’ Chama said. ‘Gleb and I have committed criminal acts only because we were obliged to break certain badly constructed laws. Legislation made by stupid, short-sighted governments.’

Geoffrey tensed. In his experience, governments were quite useful things: it was hard to see how the world could have come through the Resource and Relocation crises without them. But anti-centralist rhetoric came with the territory, here in the Descrutinised Zone.

‘Guess it depends on your intentions,’ he said.

‘Had a lot of time for your grandmother,’ Chama said. ‘You think dear old Eunice sat around analysing her every decision into the ground, looking at it from every possible ethical angle? Or did she just, you know, go for it?’

They’d arrived at a heavy door, the kind that might lead out onto the surface or into a non-pressurised tunnel system. Chama stood to one side and allowed the basketball hoop of an eidetic scanner to lower down over his skull. Chama closed his eyes while he visualised the sphinxware image sequence.

The door unlocked with the solid, reassuring clunk of a castle drawbridge and hinged slowly open.

‘Welcome to the menagerie,’ Chama said.

The room beyond the door was bigger than Geoffrey had been expecting – much larger than the vault in the Central African Bank – but still nowhere near capacious enough to contain a zoo. His eyes took a few moments to adjust to the very low ambient lighting, a soft red radiance bleeding from the edges of the floor. Rectangular panels, two high, divided the walls, but beyond that he couldn’t make out more than the sketchiest of details. There was another door at the far end, outlined in pale glowing pink.

‘Feel I’m missing something here,’ Geoffrey said.

Sunday smiled. ‘I think you’d better show him, Chama.’

‘Forgive the question, but you’re absolutely sure he can be trusted?’ Chama asked.

‘He’s my brother.’

Chama voked something. Polarising screens winked to transparency. The panelled rectangles in the walls were in fact glass screens. Behind the screens were enclosures rife with vegetation.

Geoffrey reeled. It was obvious, even from a moment’s glance, that the habitats differed in subtle and not so subtle ways. Some were flooded with bright equatorial sunlight – the blazing intensity of the noonday savannah. Others had the permanent gloom of the forest floor under a sun-sapping canopy of dense tree cover. Others were steamy or desert-arid.

He walked to the nearest pair of windows. They were stacked one above the other, with no sign that the habitats were in any way interdependent.

‘I don’t know as much botany as I should,’ Geoffrey said, peering at the amazing profusion of plants crammed into the upper window. Their olive leaves were diamonded with dewdrops or the remnants of a recent rain shower. Under Lunar gravity, surface tension shaped liquids into almost perfect hemispheres. ‘But if there’s as much biodiversity in this room as I think there is, this is a pretty amazing achievement.’

‘We’ve been growing plants in space since the first space stations,’ Chama said, ‘since the days of Salyut, Mir and the ISS. Some of the plant lines here go that far back: lines nurtured by the first thousand people to venture into space. Their hands touched these lineages.’ He said this as if he was talking about holy relics, fingered by saints. ‘But from the outset the work has always been scientifically and commercially driven – firstly, to explore the effects of weightlessness on growth mechanisms, then to push our understanding of hydroponics, aeroponics and so on. Once the ’ponics techniques had matured sufficiently, we stopped bringing new varieties into space. This is the first time that the majority of these plant species have been established beyond Earth. The difference here is that the driver isn’t science or commerce. It’s the Panspermian imperative.’

‘Ah,’ Geoffrey said, with a profound sinking feeling. ‘Right. Guess I should have seen that one coming.’

‘You don’t approve?’ Chama asked.

‘Colour me more than slightly sceptical.’

‘That’s my brother’s way of saying he thinks you’re all completely batshit insane,’ Sunday explained.

He shot her an exasperated glance. ‘Thanks.’

‘Best to get these things out in the open,’ Sunday said.

‘Quite,’ Chama agreed, cordially enough. ‘So yes – I’m a Panspermian. So’s Gleb. And yes, we believe in the movement. But that’s all it is – an idea, a driving imperative. It’s not some crackpot cult.’

The door at the far end of the room opened, allowing a figure to enter. It was another man, shorter and stockier than Chama, pushing a wheeled trolley laden with multicoloured plastic flasks and tubs.

‘This is my husband, Gleb,’ Chama said. ‘Gleb, we have visitors! Sunday’s brought along her brother.’

Gleb propelled the trolley to the wall and walked over to them, peeling gloves from his hands and stuffing them in the pockets of his long white labcoat. ‘The elephant man?’

‘The elephant man,’ Chama affirmed.

‘This is a great pleasure,’ Gleb said, offering his hand for Geoffrey to shake. ‘Gleb Ozerov. Have you seen the—’

‘Not yet,’ Chama said. ‘I was just breaking the bad news to him.’

‘What bad news?’

‘That we’re batshit insane.’

‘Oh. How’s he taking it?’

‘About as well as they usually do.’

Geoffrey shook Gleb’s hand. He could have crushed diamonds for a living.

‘He’ll get over it, eventually.’ Gleb studied him with particular attentiveness. ‘You look disappointed, Geoffrey. Is this not what you were expecting?’

‘It’s a room full of plants,’ Geoffrey said, ‘not the zoo I was promised.’

Gleb was a little older than Chama – a little older-looking, at least – with central-Asian features, Russian, maybe Mongolian. His hair was dark but cut very short, and he was clean-shaven. Under the white laboratory coat, Geoffrey had the impression of compact muscularity, a wrestler’s build.

‘Look,’ Gleb said, ‘you’re a citizen of the African Union, and the AU’s a transnational member entity of the United Surface Nations. That means you view things through a certain . . . ideological filter, shall we say.’

‘I think I can see my way past USN propaganda,’ Geoffrey said.

‘We’re Pans. Pans are bankrolled by the United Aqatic Nations, as you undoubtedly know, and the UAN’s at permanent loggerheads with the USN. That’s the way of the world. But we’re not at war, and it doesn’t mean that Pans are about to make a bid for global domination, on Earth or here on the Moon. It’s just that we believe in certain . . . unorthodox things.’ Gleb’s voice, coming in under the translation, was speaking a different language from Chama, something clipped and guttural, where Chama’s tongue was high and lyrical in intonation. He delivered this oratory with arms folded, muscles bulging under the white fabric of his sleeves. ‘Pans think that the human species has a duty, a moral obligation, to assist in the proliferation of living organisms into deep space. All living organisms, not just the handful that we happen to want to take with us, because they suit our immediate requirements.’

‘We’re doing our best,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s still early days.’

‘That’s one viewpoint,’ Gleb said cheerfully. ‘Especially if you’re trying to worm out of species-level responsibility.’

‘This is going really well,’ Sunday said.

‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I’ve only been here five minutes and already I feel like I’m about to be hanged, drawn and quartered for my crimes against the biosphere.’

‘Chama and Gleb don’t mean it personally. Do you?’ Sunday asked.

‘We do, but we’ll gladly make an exception for your brother,’ Gleb said with a smile.

‘Very magnanimous of you,’ Geoffrey replied.

‘We have a window here,’ Chama said. ‘The human species is poised on the brink of something genuinely transformative. It could be wonderful: an explosion of life and vitality, a Green Efflorescence, pushing beyond the solar system into interstellar space. We’re on the cusp of being able to do that. But at the same time we could also be on the cusp of entrenchment, consolidation, even a kind of retreat.’

Geoffrey shook his head. ‘Why on Earth would we retreat when we’ve come this far?’

‘Because soon we won’t need to be here at all,’ Gleb said.

‘Soon, very soon,’ Chama continued, ‘machines will be clever enough to supplant humans throughout the system. Once that happens, what reason will people have to live out in those cold, lonely spaces, if they can ching there instead?’

‘Thinking machines won’t rise up and crush us,’ Gleb said. ‘But they will make us over-reliant, unadventurous, unwilling to put our own bodies at risk when machines can stand in for us.’

Geoffrey was beginning to wish they’d stayed in the park, with the ice-cream stands and battling kites.

‘I’m not seeing what machines have to do with any of this,’ he said, gesturing at the glass-fronted enclosures.

‘Everything,’ Gleb answered. ‘Because this is where it all begins.’

Geoffrey peered into the lower window of the glassed enclosure. It was a kind of rock-pool tableau, with low plant cover and bubbling, gurgling water. ‘How many plant species have you brought here?’ he asked.

‘Living and replicating now, in the region of eight hundred,’ Chama said. ‘In cryosuspension, or as genetic templates, another sixteen thousand. Still some way to go.’

‘My god, there’s something alive in there.’ He couldn’t help jabbing his finger against the glass. ‘I mean something moving. In the water.’

‘A terrapin,’ Gleb said, on a bored note. ‘Terrapins are easy. If we couldn’t do terrapins, I’d give up now.’

‘Show him what else you do,’ Sunday said.

Gleb walked to another window, a few panels down from where Geoffrey was standing. ‘Come here,’ he said, tapping a thick finger against the glass.

The visible portion of the habitat – though it clearly extended far back from the room – was a circle of bare, dusty earth fringed by tall wheat-coloured grasses. Rising above the grasses, a seamless curtain of enamelblue, projected in such a way that it looked as convincing and distant as real sky. As Geoffrey walked over to join Gleb, he kept on tapping his fingernail against the glass. Gleb had very dark nails, tinted a green that was almost black. Geoffrey arrived in time to see the grasses swishing, parting to allow a hare-sized animal to bound into the clearing.

It was a battleship-grey rhinoceros, the size of a domestic cat. It was not a baby. Its proportions and gait, insofar as Geoffrey could tell – and allowing for the bouncing motion that was an inescapable consequence of Lunar gravity – were precisely those of a fully grown animal.

It just happened to be small enough to fit into a briefcase.

He was just satisfying himself as to the accuracy of his assessment when a pair of true babies sprang along behind what was now revealed to be their mother. The babies were the size of rats, but they walked on absurdly thick, muscular, wrinkle-hided legs. They were as tiny and precisely formed as bath toys moulded from grey plastic.

He laughed, amazed at what he was seeing.

‘Resource load is the crux,’ Chama said, joining them by the window. ‘We don’t have the means to keep fully grown adult specimens alive – at least not in a habitat that wouldn’t feel hopelessly claustrophobic to them.’ He pushed a strand of hair away from his cheekbone. ‘Fortunately – for now, at least – we don’t have to. Nature’s already given us a ready-made miniaturisation mechanism.’

‘Phyletic dwarfism,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Yes. Almost childishly easy to achieve in mammals and reptiles.’

Chama was right. Insular dwarfism often arose when an ancestor species divided into isolated sub-populations on islands. Allopatric speciation, and subsequent dwarfism, had occurred time and again in the evolutionary record, from dwarf allosaurs to the Homo floresiensis hominids in Indonesia. Even trees did it. It was a gene-encoded response to environmental stress; a way of allowing a population to survive hard times.

‘The same mechanisms will assist animal life transition through the difficult bottleneck of the early stages of the Green Efflorescence,’ Gleb declared. ‘All we’ve done is give the inbuilt mechanism a little coaxing to produce extreme dwarfism. It’s as if nature anticipated this future survival adaptation.’

‘A little coaxing’ sounded like magisterial understatement to Geoffrey, given the toy-like proportions of the rhinoceroses. But he could well believe that Chama and Gleb hadn’t needed to perform much deep-level genetic tinkering to achieve it. Certainly there was no evidence that the dwarf animals were in any way traumatised by their condition, judging by the way they were happily snuffling and shuffling around, the babies nudging each other boisterously.

Gleb had retrieved the wheeled trolley, dug some granular foodstuff out of one of the containers and was now sprinkling it down into the enclosure via a hopper above the window. The dwarf rhinoceroses must have taken his fingernail tapping as the sign that dinner was imminent.

‘It’s . . . an ingenious solution to the problem,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You find it troubling,’ Chama said.

‘I wonder whether it might have been better to keep these organisms on ice until you had the means to grow them to full size.’

‘Even if that meant waiting decades?’

‘The Green Efflorescence doesn’t sound like a short-term plan.’ It felt odd to speak of the Efflorescence himself, as if by voicing its name he had bestowed upon the enterprise a measure of legitimacy, even tacit approval.

He was still undecided as to whether it might be some kind of vile, misanthropic eco-fascism. He would need to know a lot more before he made up his mind.

‘These animals don’t know that they’re dwarves,’ Gleb said, patiently enough. ‘On a neurological and behavioural level, there’s no evidence of developmental impairment. There’s a huge redundancy in brain tissue – it’s why birds are at least as good at problem solving as primates, even given the massive disparity in cranial volume. So we have no ethical qualms whatsoever. Chama and I wouldn’t countenance the creation of misery merely to serve some distant utopian objective.’

‘They do look happy enough,’ he allowed.

‘We won’t deny that there are difficulties still to be overcome, with some of the other species.’

Something ominous clicked in Geoffrey’s head. ‘If you can do rhinoceroses, you can do mammoths and elephants. It’s been a while, but I remember something about dwarf populations in those species: the Cretan elephants, the mammoths in the Bering Sea Islands.’

‘We can do Proboscidea,’ Chama said. ‘And we have. But there are difficulties.’

He led Geoffrey and Sunday to one of the far windows. Geoffrey’s stomach churned with apprehension.

‘I’m not sure this is right.’

Gleb was pushing the trolley again. ‘Always scope for improvement. But that doesn’t mean the elephants should be put on ice, or euthanised.’

Compared to the rhino habitat, the grass was lower, scrubbier – dry and bleached like the Serengeti before the short rains. In the middle distance lay a waterhole, now reduced to a muddy depression. Standing on the far side of the waterhole, clumped together into one multi-legged, multi-headed Cubist mass, were three dwarf elephants. They were the size of baby goats, grey bodies camouflaged with olive-brown patches of drying mud.

‘Tell me how these elephants were born,’ he said.

‘In artificial wombs, here in the Descrutinised Zone,’ Gleb replied. ‘The fertilised eggs were imported, carried in vivo, in human mules. Chama and I both carried eggs, and we’ve both fallen foul of the Indian and Chinese Lunar authorities at various times.’

‘You’d need hundreds – thousands – for a viable population, though.’

Chama nodded. ‘We have hundreds. But so far only these elephants have been allowed to be born.’

‘Just these three?’

‘As many as the habitat can reasonably support,’ Chama said.

Geoffrey had been agnostic about the rhinoceroses. Now his distaste sharpened into precise, targeted revulsion. ‘This is wrong. No matter what your objectives, you can’t do this to these animals.’

‘Geoffrey—’ Sunday began.

He ignored her. ‘Elephants aren’t born into a vacuum: they’re born into a complex, nurturing society with a strong maternal hierarchy. An elephant clan might contain thirty to a hundred individuals, and there are strong inter-clan bonds as well. What you’re doing here is the equivalent of dropping human babies into isolation cubes!’

Sunday’s hand was on his arm. She tightened her grip. ‘They’re not unaware of these issues, brother.’

Chama appeared in no way offended by Geoffrey’s outburst. ‘From the moment these habitats were conceived, we knew that the elephants would need surrogate families to provide a developmental context. So we devised the best way to provide that surrogacy. From the time they were embryos, these animals have grown with neuromachinery in their heads. That shouldn’t horrify you, should it?’

‘Not necessarily – but it depends what you do with that machinery,’ Geoffrey said.

‘These elephants need a socialising context,’ Gleb responded. ‘So we provide it. The neuromachines drop hallucinations into their minds via direct activation of the visual, auditory and olfactory modules. We create figments – in other words, a ghost-herd – to provide stimulus and guidance. The elephants move in augmented reality, just as we do when we ching.’

‘The difference is we know that figments are figments. Elephants don’t have the cognitive apparatus to make that distinction.’

‘If they did, the figments would be pointless,’ said Chama.

‘The figments are computer-generated, but they’re based on observations of millions of hours of the social dynamics in real herds,’ Gleb said. ‘The same database reassures us that the dwarves’ responses are fully in line with what would be expected if the figments were real. These are not developmentally impoverished creatures.’

‘Well, if you’ve no qualms—’

‘I didn’t say we’ve achieved shining perfection,’ Gleb countered.

‘Computer-generated figments may provide some kind of stabilising framework,’ Geoffrey conceded, choosing his words with tightrope precision, ‘but elephants are individuals. They have memories, emotions. They can’t be modelled by mindless software. Maybe these dwarves won’t grow into monsters. But they won’t turn into fully socialised elephants either.’

‘No,’ Chama agreed. ‘But you could help matters so that they do.’

‘Help you? I’m on the verge of pushing for your extradition on the grounds of Schedule One biocrimes!’

‘We’re aware of your work,’ Gleb said. ‘We’ve read your papers. Some of them are quite good.’ He allowed this calculated slight to hang in the air before continuing, ‘We know what you’ve been doing with the Amboseli herds.’

‘If you know my work,’ Geoffrey said, ‘then you should have guessed that I wouldn’t be too keen on any of this.’

‘We also saw that you might be able to provide a possible solution,’ Chama said.

Geoffrey hooked a finger into his belt. ‘This I’m fascinated to hear.’

‘We know of your matriarch, Matilda – we’ve followed her with passive ching. She’s magnificent. She also has neuromachinery, as do most of your elephants.’

‘As a monitoring tool, nothing else.’

‘But the same neuromachinery, with a few configuration resets, could provide an aug layer.’

‘I’m not sure where you’re going with this.’ But he was surer than he cared to admit, even to himself.

‘These dwarf elephants already interact with hallucinations,’ Gleb said. ‘Instead of being computer-generated fictions, why couldn’t they be the ching figments of Matilda and her clan? There’s no reason why Matilda and her elephants couldn’t perceive the Lunar dwarves as being physically present in the basin, as another family or group of orphans in need of adoption. By the same token, the Lunar dwarves could experience real-time interaction with genuine Amboseli elephants, as if they were here, on the Moon.’

Geoffrey didn’t need to think through the technical implications. Chama and Gleb had undoubtedly considered every possible wrinkle. He shook his head sadly.

‘Even if it could be done . . . it wouldn’t work. My elephants have never encountered dwarves, and your elephants have never encountered fully grown adults. They wouldn’t know what to make of each other.’

‘The size differential doesn’t matter,’ Chama said. ‘It can be edited out via the ching, along with the morphological differences between the two populations. Each group would perceive the other as being perfectly normal. This can be done, Geoffrey. It’s beyond trivial.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s taken me years to establish a bond of trust with Matilda and her family. I can’t betray that trust by manipulating their basic experience of reality.’

Chama wasn’t giving up. ‘From Matilda’s point of view – from the point of view of her whole family – it would be a minor detail in the scheme of things. Three new elephants, that’s all. Orphans are routinely adopted by families, aren’t they?’

‘And sometimes left to die,’ Geoffrey said.

‘But it does happen – it’s not something strange and alien by elephant standards,’ Gleb said. ‘Meanwhile, all the other complex herd interactions would proceed perfectly normally. The benefit to the orphans, however, would be incalculable. Having grown up in a stabilising framework, the orphans would then be in a position to mentor a second generation of Lunar dwarves through to adulthood. Before very long, we would have the basis of an entirely independent and self-perpetuating elephant society, here on the Moon.’

‘By assisting us,’ Chama said, ‘you can be part of something heroic.’

‘The Green Efflorescence?’

‘Put that aside for now,’ Gleb said. ‘Just think of these elephants, and what they could become. What wonders. What companionship.’

‘Companionship?’ Geoffrey did his best not to sneer. ‘As pets, you mean?’

Chama shook his head. ‘As cognitive equals. Think of all the crimes we’ve committed against their kind, down all the blood-red centuries. The atrocities, the injustices. The carnage and the cruelty. Now think of us giving them the stars in return.’

‘As what? Recompense?’

‘It wouldn’t begin to balance our misdeeds,’ Chama said. Then a softness entered his voice. ‘But it would be something.’

The old place, Sunday was relieved to see, wasn’t as busy as she had feared. ‘Any chance of a table in the Japanese module?’ she asked as they stooped into the dingy, angular, off-white interior of the International Space Station.

‘Follow me,’ said a blue-boiler-suited staffer, shoulders embroidered with the patches of various barely remembered space agencies.

It had been Sunday’s idea for them all to meet up again, Chama and Gleb included, when they were done with their day’s work. The zookeepers could be overwhelming until you built up sufficient exposure tolerance. Sunday had passed that point years ago: the wilder excesses of their starry-eyed idealism now ghosted through her like a flux of neutrinos.

Besides, it was about time she broke something else to Geoffrey: the Akinyas were already embroiled.

‘So,’ she said, when they were on the first round of drinks, ‘what did you think of Chama and Gleb?’

‘They’ve achieved a lot,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I don’t necessarily approve of all of it, but I can’t deny the trouble they’ve gone to, or the risks they’ve taken.’

‘But you’re still uneasy about the whole Pan thing,’ Jitendra said, cradling a huge stein of beer.

‘I’m not big on cults or cultists, I’m afraid.’

‘Look,’ Sunday said, ‘there’s something that might put things in a different light. Like it or not, we’re already involved.’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Us. The family. I’m talking ancient history now, but it’s the truth. Have you heard of a woman called Lin Wei?’

Geoffrey made no visible effort to search his memory. ‘Can’t say I have.’

‘She’s the Prime Pan, the woman who started the whole movement way back when. Lot of radical thinkers around then. Extropians. Transhumanists. Long-lifers. The Clock of the Long Now. The Mars Society. A dozen other space-advocacy types, with – on the face of it – not a lot to agree on. Lin Wei still got them all to sit down and agree on common ground. Some of them said no thanks and went their own way. But Lin found points of agreement with others, shared objectives. She was very charismatic. Out of that came the Panspermian Initiative, and the basis for the UAN.’

Geoffrey smiled nicely. ‘And your point is?’

‘Lin Wei and Eunice were best friends. That’s my point.’

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘Eunice was never a Pan, not on any formal level, but the connection was there right through her career. The Pans were heavy backers in something called Ocular.’ She took a sip of her wine. ‘You heard of it?’

‘Remind me.’

‘Ocular was the first step towards exoplanet colonisation. A telescope big enough to image surface features on an Earthlike planet beyond our solar system. Well, they built it – nearly. The project fell to pieces halfway through, and that was the start of the big falling out between Lin and Eunice.’

Geoffrey’s interest appeared to be perking up. ‘What happened?’

‘Hard to say, other than that it had something to do with Mercury. That was where they were assembling the parts for the telescope and launching them into space. We were helping with the shipment of materials and know-how. Not a free lunch, though: Eunice and Lin might have been pals, but this was business. But the Pans weren’t paying us directly. In return for our services, the Akinyas got to piggyback their own start-up venture on Mercury.’

‘What kind of venture?’

‘That’s where it gets murky. I’m in the family and even I can’t get to the bottom of what went wrong.’ Sunday couldn’t help but lower her voice: it was a pointless but unavoidable response. ‘We built a facility there, to tap into the same solar-power grid the Pans were using for their Ocular assembly and launch plant. What we did in that facility . . . well, that’s not easy to say. Cover story was physics research, which makes a sort of sense: we were involved in propulsion system design, and you’d need a lot of energy to do anything worthwhile in that area. But it appears that was just a smokescreen.’

‘Wish my family was half as interesting,’ Jitendra said. He had brought the plastic jewels with him, and was pushing them into cryptic little configurations around the damp circle left by his stein.

‘Trust me,’ Sunday said, ‘you really don’t need a family as interesting as ours.’

‘A smokescreen? For what, exactly?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘For bad machines,’ Sunday said. ‘Artilects. Like the one that got into my head when I fell down that hole. Nothing’s been proved, but it looks as if we were using our means and resources to smuggle contraband artilects to Mercury, under the noses of the authorities, for the purposes of reverse engineering and duplication. Making sure we’d be ahead of the game if and when the Gearheads relaxed the ties on AI research.’

Her brother stroked a finger under his chin. ‘How much of this is guesswork?’

‘Lin Wei had her own suspicions, so she conducted some espionage against us,’ Sunday said. ‘Sent industrial spies into our organisation, found out about the artilect research. That was the start of the bad feeling: not only had we lied about our intentions, but we were developing thinking machines. Needless to say, Lin Wei took that as a grave personal insult. As well she might: it was a betrayal of a lifetime’s friendship and trust. Meanwhile, the Gearheads had been following their own lines of investigation. They closed in on Mercury, aiming to make a forced inspection.’

‘What happened?’

‘By the time they broke into the facility it had been trashed. Deliberate sabotage, to hide any evidence of a crime. Big stink at the time; damaged us and the Pans, but we both bounced back. Ocular was the only real casualty. With the breakdown in relations between the Akinyas and the Pans, the project was left half-finished.’ Sunday nodded in the vague direction of the ceiling, to the Lunar bedrock and the vacuum above their heads. ‘It’s still out there, still gathering data, just not as extensively as they planned.’

‘And the moral of this tale?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Just that we’re already in bed with the Pans, brother. The marriage might not be something anyone likes to talk about now, but you can’t undo history.’

‘Whatever Eunice got up to, it’s nothing to do with me or my elephants.’

‘No, but it might have something to do with me,’ Sunday said. ‘Maybe they know stuff about Eunice I can’t find out from anyone else.’

Something dawned in Geoffrey’s eyes. ‘So that’s why we have to dine with Chama and Gleb.’

Sunday bottled up her exasperation. She was asking so little of Geoffrey: why, for once in his life, couldn’t he think of the bigger picture? ‘They’re just bit players, brother. They don’t have the keys to every Pan secret. But if we help them, maybe they can get someone else to help us. It’s reciprocity.’

‘That visit to the zoo didn’t just happen on the spur of the moment, did it?’

Sunday noticed Chama and Gleb being shown to the table, stooping beneath the low-hanging handrails and equipment lockers bolted to what was now the ceiling, but which had once been just another usable surface of the ISS. Sunday and Jitendra budged up to make room for the zookeepers.

Chama leaned in and reached for Geoffrey’s hand. ‘Good to see you again!’ he said, grinning broadly.

Geoffrey returned the handshake, but his response was dour. ‘Nice to see you, too.’

Gleb was no longer wearing his laboratory overcoat, and Chama had divested his waistcoat pockets of some of their bulkier contents. Other than that they hadn’t changed much since the meeting in the zoo.

‘So, Jitendra,’ Sunday said brightly, while Chama and Gleb buried their faces in the drinks menu, ‘any news on Eunice?’

‘Sunday . . .’ Geoffrey said.

She fixed on a puzzled expression. ‘What?’

‘I’m not sure that’s something we really ought to be discussing in public.’

‘Chama and Gleb have already confided in us about their own work,’ Sunday said. ‘The least we can do is return the favour, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Right,’ Geoffrey said, shooting her a look that let her know exactly what he thought about that.

Chama looked up. ‘We don’t want to cause any awkwardness.’

‘My brother’s referring to some family business, not a state secret,’ Sunday said. ‘And I don’t think there will be any harm at all in you knowing about it.’

Jitendra smiled awkwardly. ‘Maybe I’ve got something. Possibly. While you were out, I decided to sniff around Pythagoras, see what I could find. Ching resolution isn’t ideal – not enough public eyes on that part of the Moon to give seamless coverage. Which is a bit of a problem if you’re trying to do some amateur sleuthing—’

‘Which we’re not,’ Geoffrey said firmly.

‘But encouraging in another sense,’ Jitendra went on, ‘as it confirms what we suspected all along: any tracks Eunice put down there in 2059 won’t have been disturbed in the meantime.’ He beamed, deliciously pleased at his own cleverness. ‘Well, they have been and they haven’t.’

He shoved aside the condiments, pushed the coloured gems into a huddle and voked a rectangular image onto the table. It was filled with the silver-grey, gritty, deep-shadowed terrain of the high-latitude Lunar landscape. Cross-haired and annotated with coordinates, the image must have been shot from some high-flying satellite.

‘Close-up of the interior of Pythagoras crater, time-stamped about eight weeks ago,’ Jitendra said. ‘Recent enough for our purposes.’

‘Have you found the crash point?’ Sunday asked.

‘That and more.’ He laced fingers and cracked knuckles. ‘Let me zoom in for you.’

Gleb said, ‘The crash point of what?’

‘Eunice landed – or crashed – in this crater one hundred and three years ago,’ Sunday told him. ‘It’s looking as if she’s left us something related to that incident.’

The rectangle stayed the same size, but now the image had enlarged to reveal the whitish, many-armed star – not exactly a crater, more a frozen splash – where something had splatted onto the Lunar surface. The star was elongated and asymmetric, as if the impacting object had skipped in obliquely. There was even a smaller blemish to one side of it, as if the object had bounced once before coming to rest.

‘It looks bad, but we know it was a survivable impact,’ Jitendra said.

‘No trace of a ship, though,’ Geoffrey said, reluctantly succumbing to curiosity. ‘You sure it’s the right place?’

‘Nowhere else fits. The ship isn’t there because it was recovered by that Indian salvage crew.’ Jitendra made the image zoom in again, jabbing his finger at the tabletop. ‘They had their own ship – here’s where they kicked up soil on landing, and here are their foot- and rover prints, scribbled all over Eunice’s crater, fresh now as when they were made. That’s all, though. No one’s been back to that landing site in a century.’

‘What about Eunice’s long walk out?’ Sunday asked.

‘We can follow her all the way out of the crater. Hers are the only footprints anywhere else in Pythagoras.’

The view lurched to the right, tracking east. Sunday made out the prints, following an arrow-straight line with only occasional detours to avoid obstacles. It was a long, monotonous message in Morse code: stretches of hyphens, where she had been hop-skipping, interspersed with sequences of dots where she had slowed her progress to a walk. When Jitendra zoomed out again, reducing the prints to the faintest of scratches across the image, she understood how far Eunice had been forced to travel.

A tiny human presence, a bag of air and warmth lost in the barren immensity of the Lunar landscape, like a bug crossing a runway.

‘We can follow these prints all the way to the wall and over and out, to where she met the Chinese rescue party,’ Jitendra said. ‘You can still see the hairpin where they turned the rover around and drove back home, with Eunice aboard. It all checks out.’

Sunday exhaled. ‘OK. So her story checks out. Is that all you’ve got?’

‘There is something slightly weird.’ He let the image scroll and zoom again, once more picking up the line of prints. ‘We’re just over thirty kilometres from the touchdown site here,’ Jitendra said. ‘And suddenly there’s this.’

‘Oh yes,’ Chama said.

North of the prints – maybe a hundred metres – lay an area of blasted soil where a ship had touched down. Sunday could see clearly the cruciform pattern of depressions made by its landing legs.

There were footprints as well – two rows, running from the ship to the original line of footprints and back again. It didn’t take a forensics expert to note that the spacing of the prints was similar, maybe identical, to Eunice’s walking pattern.

Where the prints intersected the original line, there was a region of scuffed soil. For about five metres, Eunice’s original prints had been erased again.

‘She went back,’ Sunday said. ‘Grief. She actually went back.’

Jitendra nodded. ‘That’s what it looks like. After the Chinese had rescued her – and we could be talking weeks, months, years, who the hell knows – she returned to this exact spot and did something.’

‘Looks as if she dug up the ground,’ Gleb said. ‘Either to recover something she buried there the last time, or to bury something new. Can you dig back and find older imagery?’

‘Gleb’s right,’ Sunday said. ‘If we can find a view taken after she was rescued but before the fresh prints came in, it’ll help us narrow things down.’

‘I’m searching,’ Jitendra said. ‘But I’m also being careful. Don’t want to leave my grubby fingerprints all over an image trawl.’

‘No one else is following this trail,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Or at least they weren’t, until my sister started talking about it to anyone who’d listen.’

‘What we really need to do is get out there, see what’s under that soil,’ Sunday said.

‘Might be a bit problematic,’ Jitendra said. ‘Pythagoras is under Chinese Lunar Administration now. You don’t mess with the Ghost Wall.’

‘Good job we won’t be doing that, then,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Aren’t you even remotely curious?’ Sunday asked.

‘It’s all supposition, based on a few smudges.’

‘We’d know for sure if we went there,’ she said. ‘Take a couple of spades, maybe rent an excavator – how long do you think it would take us?’

‘With the Chinese breathing down our necks, wondering what we’re prospecting for? Exactly how long do you think it would be before word of that got back to the cousins?’

‘Going through official channels isn’t the way to do this,’ Jitendra said.

‘I have a suggestion,’ Chama said. He looked at his husband, Gleb giving only the tiniest of encouraging nods. Their drinks arrived. Chama made a point of swallowing a finger’s width from his before speaking again. ‘Whatever happens, this is going to be a possible arrest-and-detention scenario involving our good friends the Chinese. Now, while that’s not something either of us would rush into, it’s not like we don’t have prior experience in that area.’

‘Doesn’t mean they’ll let you go the next time,’ Geoffrey said.

‘It’s not like we’re trafficking. We’ll just be doing some digging on Chinese soil: hardly the crime of the century, is it?’ Gleb was speaking now. ‘The Initiative isn’t without influence in Chinese circles, and you’ve got June Wing in your corner. The right words, the right persuasion, we’ll be back on the street soon enough.’

‘Or not,’ Geoffrey said.

‘We’ll accept that risk.’ Chama leaned forwards, elbows on the table. ‘You find out what’s under that soil. We get something from you in return. How about it, elephant man?’

He shook his head. ‘We went over this already. I’m not getting involved.’

‘All we’d want in return,’ Gleb said, ‘is to offer you the chance to help with our dwarves.’

‘I’m already being emotionally blackmailed by my family, thanks – I don’t need another dose.’

‘It’s really nothing, what we’re asking,’ Chama said reasonably. He took another gulp of his beer and wiped foam onto the back of his hand. ‘The risk’s all on our side. No one else needs to know about your involvement.’

‘There’s still the small matter of ethical oversight,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Oh, screw that,’ Gleb said. ‘For a start, they’d have to learn of the existence of the dwarves – and we’re not ready to go public.’

Geoffrey looked relieved, as if he’d finally found an insuperable objection. ‘Then it can’t be done. Even if we got the neuromachinery communicating, someone, somewhere, will want to know why there’s so much ching traffic between my elephants and the Descrutinised Zone.’

‘We can get round that,’ Chama said. ‘The Initiative already has more than enough surplus quangle paths between Earth and the Moon. Not unbreakable, of course, but the next best thing.’

‘You’re going to have to work pretty hard to think of something they haven’t already covered,’ Sunday said.

‘Other than the fact that if I take part in this, that makes me a criminal as well.’

‘No one need know,’ Gleb countered. ‘Anyway, in the scheme of things you’d still have the moral high ground, wouldn’t you? You were just presented with a situation, a fait accompli, which you agreed to improve.’ He looked at his husband and said something that the earpieces didn’t pick up: some language or dialect too obscure for translation.

‘I’m sure there could be financial incentives as well,’ Chama said, after a few moments’ reflection. ‘No promises, but . . . it wouldn’t be out of the question. You’re reliant on handouts from your family right now, aren’t you?’

‘My funding flows from a number of sources,’ Geoffrey said, glaring at Sunday.

Chama shrugged. ‘But I’m sure more autonomy would always be welcome.’

Sunday saw her chance. ‘While we’re thrashing out terms, I’d like some access to your archives.’

‘What exactly are you after?’ Chama enquired.

Sunday hesitated before answering. ‘My grandmother knew your founder, Lin Wei. They went to the same school, in what used to be independent Tanzania, before the Federation. Here.’ And she cleared part of the table to voke her own image, which was of two girls of similar age. One was her grandmother. The other was Lin Wei.

Lin Wei wore a red dress, white stockings and black shoes.

Sunday glanced at her brother, nodded once. It was clear from the look in her eyes that she had also made the connection with the mysterious girl at the scattering, the stranger with the unresolvable ching bind.

‘Eunice knew the Prime Pan?’ Gleb asked, astonished. ‘How could this not have come to light before?’

‘I only discovered it recently myself,’ Sunday said, shifting on her seat. This was a lie, but in the scheme of things only a white one. Or perhaps off-white.

‘It’s a part of our family history that’s been swept under the carpet,’ she went on. ‘Same on your side, by the sound of things. They were good friends, and they ended up collaborating on the Mercury project. But Eunice abused Lin Wei’s trust somehow. I don’t know how much contact they had afterwards.’

‘Eunice only just died,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Mm, yes,’ Sunday said. ‘I had noticed.’

‘What I mean is, she wasn’t that old. Not by modern standards. So if she went to school with this Lin Wei person, what’s to say Lin Wei isn’t still alive? Never mind the archive, never mind the Pans – you could just ask her directly.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ Chama said sadly. ‘Lin Wei was the Prime Pan. She died decades ago.’

Sunday nodded. ‘That’s what I heard as well. I think she drowned, or something horrible like that.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

When Chama’s ching request arrived the following morning, Sunday found herself putting down the coffee pot with a highly specific sense of dread. She accepted the bind with a profound and familiar foreboding.

‘I have some news,’ Chama said. ‘Probably the kind I ought to break to you first, so you can come round to my side and explain things to the others.’

‘This is going to turn out to have something to do with last night’s conversation, isn’t it?’

Boots tramped on metal flooring outside. Someone knocked on the door, vigorously.

‘Brother!’ Sunday called. ‘Can you get that for me?’

Geoffrey went to the door and returned to the kitchen with Gleb. The zookeeper looked harried.

‘This is not good,’ he said.

‘Chama,’ Sunday asked the figment, ‘why are you chinging in from outside the Zone?’

‘Because, given my current circumstances, it would be very difficult to ching in from anywhere else.’

Chama was strapped into a heavy black seat, sunk deep in its padded embrace. He wore the brass-coloured body part of a modern ultralight spacesuit, with the helmet stowed elsewhere.

‘You’re aboard a spacecraft,’ Sunday said. The tag coordinates were updating constantly, the last few digits a tumbling blur. ‘Chama, why are you aboard a spacecraft?’

‘Ever heard of striking while the iron’s hot?’

‘This is very bad,’ Gleb said, wedging his earpiece into place. ‘Sunday, voke me figment privilege, please. I want to be able to see and talk to him as well.’

Sunday already knew the answer to her next question, but she asked it anyway. ‘Chama, are you planning something that might upset the Chinese?’

‘That’s the general drift of things,’ Chama said, while Sunday voked the ching settings to allow everyone else to join in the conversation.

‘Your husband is here,’ Sunday said. ‘He’s not happy.’

‘Gleb, I’m sorry, but this wasn’t something we could sit around and discuss. You’ve always been more cautious than me. You’d have told me to put it off until later, to give it time to settle in.’

‘For good reason!’ Gleb shouted.

‘Had to be now or never. Look, I talked it over with the Pans in Tiamaat. I have . . . tacit authorisation. They’ll bail me out, whatever happens.’

‘You mean they’ll give it their best shot!’

‘They’re very, very good at this sort of thing, Gleb. Everything’s going to be fine.’

‘Whose ship is that?’ Sunday asked. ‘And how secure is this ching bind?’

‘The ship’s Pan-registered,’ Chama said. ‘It’s a short-range hopper, barely has the delta-vee to pull itself out of Lunar gravity but perfectly fine for ballistic transfers, and the occasional illicit touchdown. We’ve used it many times.’

‘And the bind?’ she persisted.

‘Quangled. So it’s very unlikely anyone’s going to be listening in, even the Chinese. Of course, they’ll be trying . . . but it’ll take a while to unravel the quanglement, and we have surplus paths lined up.’ He flashed a grin. ‘All the same, you should still know what you’re dealing with. Basically, I’m about to do something very naughty indeed.’

‘No,’ Sunday said. ‘We should never have discussed this, not even as an outside possibility. It was an idea, Chama, not a binding commitment.’

‘Want to join in? There’s enough capacity on this path to handle a few piggybackers.’

‘This is Akinya business,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’

‘Stopped being Akinya business when the two of you blabbed about it, elephant boy. Anyway, I’m doing you miserable, self-absorbed Akinyas a favour by putting my neck on the block here.’ Chama’s figment glanced to one side as a recorded voice began talking in a firm but not unfriendly voice. ‘Oh, here we go. First alert. Just a polite request to alter my course. Nothing too threatening yet; I haven’t even crossed the Ghost Wall.’

‘Turn around now,’ Sunday said.

‘Bit late for that, I’m afraid. Locked myself out of the avionics – couldn’t change course if I wanted to.’

‘That’s insane,’ she answered.

‘No, just very, very determined. Oh, wait. Second warning. Sterner this time. Notification of countermeasures and reprisals. Gosh, isn’t that exciting?’ His figment reached up and grasped the helmet that had been out of sight until then. ‘I’m not expecting them to shoot me out of the sky. Be silly not to take precautions, though.’

He lowered the helmet to within a few centimetres of its neck ring and let the docking magnets snatch it home, the helmet and ring engaging with a series of rapid clunks and whirrs. Save for a swan-necked column curving up from the nape to the crown, the helmet was transparent.

‘But you can come with me, Sunday. All of you can.’ Chama tapped commands into the chunky rubber-sealed button pad on his gauntlet cuff. ‘Be quick about it, though. Not going to have all the time in the world here, even if they let me get to the burial spot. Oh, I can see the Ghost Wall now. Very impressive. Very Chinese. Does anyone else maintain a consensual border hallucination even halfway as impressive?’

Sunday cut in on Chama’s monologue. ‘What you were saying, about this being untraceable? Are you absolutely, one-hundred-per-cent sure about that?’

‘No,’ Chama said, giving a visible shrug through the tight-fitting suit. ‘How could I be? But you’re in the Zone, Sunday. Power blocs like the Chinese, they hate the Zone precisely because they can’t backtrack signals all the way to their source. And the fact that they loathe and detest us for that is the best possible guarantee I can give that they’re not along for the ride. So live a little. Ching out with me.’

‘Did you bring proxies?’ Gleb asked.

‘Two. All I could squeeze in. The rest of you can go passive.’

Sunday hadn’t thought about proxies. ‘We’re going to have words about this, when you get back,’ she said.

‘Spoken like a true friend. Oh – third warning.’ Chama’s figment jolted violently, as if, in ignorance of the absence of atmosphere, his ship had hit clear-air turbulence. ‘Interesting,’ Chama said, his voice coming through distinctly even with the helmet on. ‘They’re trying to wrestle control from my own avionics. Interesting but not remotely good enough. Going to have to up their game if they want to get anywhere.’

The ship settled down. Sunday inhaled a deep breath. ‘Give me a few moments.’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Chama said.

‘Couldn’t you have stopped this?’ she demanded of Gleb.

‘He was up and out of our apartment before I realised what was going on. You think I actually approve of this?’

She cooled her anger. Taking it out on the other zookeeper wasn’t the right thing to do. All of a sudden she realised how hard this must be for Gleb, with his husband out there, taunting the most powerful national entity on the Moon.

‘Well, there are four of us, and two proxies,’ Jitendra said. ‘I’ll go passive. Gleb can take one of the machines.’

‘I’ll manage without embodiment,’ Gleb said. ‘If I had arms and legs, I might be tempted to strangle someone.’

‘If there’s any treasure under that soil,’ Geoffrey said, looking at his sister, ‘it belongs to us. I guess you and I ought to have bodies.’

There were four open ching binds: two for proxy embodiment, two for passive ching. Sunday assigned one of the proxy binds to herself, leaving the other for Geoffrey. Jitendra and Gleb could take care of their own binds.

‘I’m going in,’ she said. ‘The rest of you’d better be there when I arrive.’

She voked for ching. For a moment, one that was far too familiar to be distressing, she felt her soul sliding out of her body, not in any specific direction but in all directions at once, as if she was an image of herself that was losing focus, smearing into quantum haze. That was the neuromachinery taking hold, shunting sensory and proprioceptive inputs to the waiting robot, halfway around the Moon.

And then everything was sharp again, and she was somewhere else, in a different body, in a hurtling spacecraft that had just transgressed the sovereign airspace of the Special Lunar Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China.

She was strapped to a wall mounting, facing Chama.

‘I’m here,’ Sunday said. ‘Now what do I have to do to get you to turn this ship around?’

‘I already told you,’ Chama said, angling his glassy visor to look at the proxy, ‘there’s nothing to be done now except enjoy the trip.’

Sunday felt pinned inside something that didn’t quite fit her body, as if she’d been forced into a stiff, partially rusted suit of armour. Then something gave – something relaxing in her brain – and the final transition to embodiment occurred.

She studied her new anatomy. The cheapest kind of mass-produced Aeroflot unit, little more than an android chassis, all metallic-blue tubing and bulbous universal joints. She was a mechanical stick figure, like a hydraulic car jack that had decided to unfold itself and walk upright.

To her right, another proxy started moving. It was metallic red, but otherwise very similar.

It looked at Chama, then at Sunday. The head was an angular pineapple, faceted with wraparound sensors and caged in alloy crash bars.

‘Well,’ Geoffrey said, ‘I’m here.’ And he moved one of the arms, lifting it up to examine the wrist and hand and elegant, dextrous human-configuration fingers and thumb. Geoffrey’s actions were wooden, but that would soon wear off. It wasn’t as if her brother had never ridden a proxy before; he was just out of practice.

‘Where exactly are we?’ Sunday asked Chama.

‘Good question,’ Geoffrey said. ‘To be quickly followed by: what the hell are we doing here, and why am I involved?’

‘Well inside Chinese sovereign airspace,’ Chama said. ‘Descending over Pythagoras, fifty-five kays from the burial spot. We should be there in about six minutes.’

Sunday appraised her surroundings. She’d been in bigger shower cubicles. The hopper was about as small as spacecraft got, before they stopped being spacecraft and became escape pods or very roomy spacesuits.

‘Whatever’s under the soil,’ Geoffrey said, ‘it’s not your concern, Chama.’

The ship bucked and swayed again, the golems clattering in their wall restraints. Chama cursed and worked the manual joystick set into the armrest of his chair, jerking it violently until the ride smoothed out. ‘They’re cunning,’ he said. ‘I’ll give them that. Found a back door into the command software even I didn’t know about.’

‘I thought you said you didn’t have manual control,’ Sunday said.

‘We’ll talk about it afterwards,’ Chama said again. ‘Where are Gleb and Jitendra, by the way?’

Jitendra’s head and upper torso popped into existence in the cabin. ‘Here.’

‘And me,’ Gleb added.

‘Took your sweet time arriving,’ Sunday said.

‘Bandwidth was tighter than you said,’ Jitendra replied. ‘Kept being put on hold.’

‘That’s the Chinese,’ Chama said, ‘trying to break the quangle paths, or squeeze us on bandwidth.’

‘They can do that?’ Sunday asked.

‘Not difficult, if you’re a government. Diplomatic-priority transmissions, that kind of thing. Flood the bandwidth with a pipe-load of government-level signals that must be routed ahead of routine traffic. It’s very clever.’ Sunday caught a smile through Chama’s helmet. ‘Fortunately, we have some even cleverer people on our side. Uh-oh.’

‘What, in this context,’ Geoffrey said, ‘does “uh-oh” mean?’

‘Means I’ve just been given my final warning,’ Chama said happily. ‘Border enforcement interceptors are on their way.’

‘Could be a bluff,’ Sunday said.

‘Except that radar also has incoming returns, heading our way. Moving too quickly to be crewed vehicles. Probably just armed drones.’

‘Armed drones,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I can’t tell you how good that makes me feel.’

‘Deterrence,’ Chama replied dismissively, as if he’d said something very naive. ‘That’s all it’ll be. No one shoots things down any more. We’re not on Earth now.’

An impact warning started to blare. Those parts of the walling not taken up with windows, instruments and equipment modules began to strobe scarlet. Sunday saw Jitendra and Gleb flicker and vanish, and almost immediately felt puppet strings striving to yank her back into her own body, in the Descrutinised Zone.

She was there, for a heartbeat: standing up in her living room, in the middle of domestic clutter. Then she was back in the hopper, and her friends had returned as well.

‘OK,’ Chama said. ‘Change of plan. I’m taking us in steeper and harder than I was intending. This is all good fun, isn’t it?’

‘I’m in the middle of a major diplomatic incident,’ Jitendra said marvellingly ‘This was so not in my plans for the day when I woke up this morning.’

‘You’re not in the middle of anything,’ Chama corrected. ‘You’re observing. There’s nothing they’ll be able to pin on you for that. Oh, please shut up.’

He was talking to the hopper. It silenced its alarms and ceased strobing its warning lights.

Lunar surface scrolled past with steadily increasing speed as the vehicle lost altitude. Though it was day over Pythagoras, the crater’s high altitude meant that the shadows remained ink-black and elongated. There was little sign that people had ever come to this pumice-grey place; no glints of metal or plastic signifying habitation or even the arduous toiling of loyal machines.

But there were tracks. Against the ancient talcum of the surface, footprints and vehicle marks were immediately obvious to the eye. On Earth, they might have been taken for lava flows or dried-up river beds. On the Moon, they could only mean that something had perambulated or walked there.

Sunday had to adjust her preconceptions when she realised that the curiously stuttered vehicle tracks she was trying to make sense of were in fact footprints, and that the hopper was merely hundreds of metres above the Moon’s surface rather than several kilometres. They had come down much faster than she had thought.

‘There it is,’ Chama said, pointing ahead. ‘The place where your granny came back – see the scuffed-up ground?’

‘I can’t see anything,’ Sunday said.

‘Voke out the hopper. You have authorisation.’

Sunday issued the command – it hadn’t occurred to her before – and most of the hopper vanished. All that remained was a neon sketch of its basic outline, a three-dimensional wedge-shaped prism with Chama cradled somewhere near the middle. The golems, and Gleb and Jitendra’s disembodied heads and torsos, were flying along for the ride.

And now she could indeed see the disturbed ground where Eunice had returned, some unguessable interval after her long walk from the 2059 crash site. Everything was the same as in the aerial image Jitendra had shown them in the ISS: the touchdown marks from another ship, the hairpin of footprints where someone had crossed to Eunice’s original trail and then headed back to the ship. The area of dug-up regolith, like a patch of dirt where a horse had rolled on its back.

Nothing else. Nothing to suggest that anyone had beaten them to this place.

‘This is where it gets interesting,’ Chama said. ‘Here come the interceptors.’

Sunday tensed. She wasn’t in any conceivable danger, but Chama’s confidence might well be misplaced. It had been decades since any kind of lethal, state-level action had occurred between two spacefaring powers . . . but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen again, given sufficient provocation.

‘How many?’ Gleb asked.

‘Three,’ Chama said. ‘What I expected. Small autonomous drones. Demon-cloaked. You wanna see them? I can override the Chinese aug if you don’t, but they’ve gone to so much trouble, almost be a shame not to—’

The drones came in fast, swerving at the last instant to avoid ramming the hopper. In their uncloaked form they were too fast and fleet to make out as anything other than bright moving sparks. They might have weapons, or they might rely purely on their swiftness and agility to ram any moving object. Whatever they were, beyond any reasonable doubt they were rigorously legal. They might be operating within Chinese sovereign airspace, but they would still need to abide by the wider nonproliferation treaties governing all spacefaring entities.

There was, however, nothing to stop them projecting fearsome aug layers around themselves. The demon-cloaks made them look much larger than the hopper. Each was a grinning, ghoulish head, styled in Chinese fashion, trailing banners of luminous fire behind it. As the drones whipped around the descending hopper, harassing it but never quite coming into contact, their fire-tails tangled into a whirling multicoloured corkscrew. One demon was a pale, sickly green, another a frigid blue. The third was the liverish red of a slavering tongue. Their eyes were white and wild, furious under beetled brows. They looked like Pekinese dogs turned rabid and spectral.

‘Cease your descent,’ a voice said, cutting across the cabin. ‘Do not attempt to land. You will be escorted back into neutral Lunar airspace. Immediate failure to cooperate will be construed as hostile action. Hostile action will be countered with sanctioned military force.’

The corkscrewing demons were getting closer now, spiralling ever tighter around the hopper.

‘Do what they say,’ Gleb pleaded.

‘Just words,’ Chama said. ‘Nothing I wasn’t expecting.’ But at the same time he reached up and touched his neck ring, as if to reassure himself that the helmet really was engaged and pressure-tight.

‘Cease your descent,’ the voice said again. ‘This is your final warning.’

‘I think they mean it,’ Sunday said.

‘They’re bluffing. Last thing they want to do is shoot down some idiot tourist who just happened to key the wrong coordinates into their autopilot.’

‘I think, by now, they probably realise they’re not dealing with an idiot tourist,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Guess that’s possible,’ Chama admitted.

The blue demon rammed the hopper. As the demon veered away, apparently undamaged, the hopper went into a slow tumble. Chama released the joystick, letting the avionics stabilise the vehicle. They didn’t do much good. Just as the hopper was regaining orientation and control, another demon would come in and knock it back into a tumble. The knocks were becoming more violent, and the ground was rushing up towards them like the bottom of an elevator shaft. The demons were coming in two and three at a time now, jackhammering against the hull. The tumble was totally uncontrolled, the ground spinning in and out of view several times a second.

Chama started saying something. It might have been, ‘Brace!’ but Sunday couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that an instant later Chama wasn’t there. Where the seat had been was an impact cocoon, a cushioned, mushroom-white adaptive shell that had enveloped both the seat and its occupant in an eye-blink.

Everything went blank. There was a moment of limbo and then she was back in her apartment again. Only for another moment, though. The ching bind had been interrupted, but not severed. She fell back into the golem and the golem was out of its harness, lying in a limb-knotted tangle against one of the equipment modules on the opposite wall. The hopper was back to solidity now, no longer a neon sketch of itself. Jitendra’s head and torso phased in out of view, cross-hatched with cartoon static to indicate bandwidth compression. Gleb flickered. Geoffrey’s golem was hanging out of its harness.

‘That went well,’ Chama said.

The impact cocoon had folded itself away and Chama was unbuckling. Upside down, he dropped at Lunar acceleration onto what had been the ceiling. Jitendra resumed solidity. Geoffrey extricated his golem from its harness. Sunday tried to move her own proxy body and found her blue metal limbs working normally.

‘They took us out,’ she said, amazed.

‘Tactical disablement,’ Chama replied, thoroughly nonplussed. ‘Very well done, too. We’re still airtight, and the collision was within survivability parameters.’ He grabbed a yellow handhold and propelled himself across to the hopper’s door. ‘Hold on – I’m venting. No point in saving the air now.’

The air fled the hopper in a single dying bark, dragging with it a fluff cloud of silvery dust and spangling human detritus. Moving in vacuum now, Chama operated the door’s bulky release mechanism. The door opened onto a view like a late Rothko: rectangle of black sky below, rectangle of dazzling bright Lunar ground above.

The golem’s vision system dropped software filters over the scene until the ground dimmed to a tolerable grey.

Chama was first out. He sprang through the door and fell to the surface, landing catlike. Sunday followed, Chama already bounding to the other side of the hopper by the time her golem touched dirt.

Sunday looked back just as Geoffrey’s machine spidered out of the upturned hopper, followed closely by the bobbing, balloon-like head and shoulders of Jitendra’s figment, and then Gleb’s. Jitendra and Gleb were merely moving viewpoints, entirely dependent on Chama and the golems to supply their ching binds with a constantly updating environment. The demon-cloaked drones were still swarming overhead, circling and helixing above the spot where Chama had crashed.

‘This way,’ he said, breaking into a seven-league sprint, flinging his arms wide with each awesome stride. ‘Can’t be too far north of where we came down.’

The golems, built for durability rather than speed, had difficulty keeping up with the bounding figure. Chama had a spade strapped to the back of his suit, of the perfectly mundane common-or-garden type. He must have put it in one of the hopper’s external stowage lockers, ready to grab as soon as they were down. There was something else, too: a grey alloy cylinder, tucked under his life-support backpack.

Some new order must have reached the demons, for they aborted their spiralling flight and rocketed away in three directions, streaking towards the crater wall that marked the effective horizon. But they were not leaving. A kilometre or so away, they whipped around and came back, streaking at man-height across the crater floor, demon-cloak faces tipped forward, eyes glaring, tongues rabid and drooling.

They screamed and howled through the aug.

‘Keep moving,’ Chama called. ‘This is just intimidation. They won’t touch us.’

‘I certainly feel adequately intimidated!’ Jitendra said.

Sunday flinched as the red demon blocked her path, its doglike face as wide as a house. The cloak was nebulous; through its billowing, flaming translucence she made out the hovering kernel of the drone, balanced on spiking micro-jets.

‘Do not move,’ said the same commanding voice that they had heard in the hopper. ‘You are under arrest. You will remain in this area for processing by border-enforcement officials.’

‘Keep moving,’ Chama said again.

Chama had his own demon intent on blocking his progress: the blue one. Chama wasn’t stopping, though, and the demon was actually backing up, not letting itself get too close to what it undoubtedly registered as a warm, breathing, easily damaged human presence. The green demon was fixating on Geoffrey. None of them was paying any attention at all to Jitendra or Gleb, their figments all but undetectable.

But if the blue demon was unwilling to obstruct Chama, the other two had no compunctions about blocking the golems. Some governing intelligence had already determined that these were disposable machines. The monstrous face leered and glared as it anticipated Sunday’s movements, ducking and diving to either side like a keen goalkeeper.

Then, without warning, the demon-cloaks vanished.

A man was standing in front of her now, hands clasped behind his back, with the hovering drone at his rear. He wore a neat platinum-grey business suit of modern cut over a white shirt and pearl necktie. His shoes failed to merge with the soil, their soles hovering a centimetre or so above the dirt. He was young, handsome and plausible.

‘Good morning,’ the man said, agreeably enough. ‘I am Mister Pei, from the Department of Border Control. Would you be so kind as to remain where you are, until this matter can be resolved? Officials will be with you very shortly.’

Another copy of Mister Pei had appeared in front of Geoffrey, presumably reciting the same spiel. There might be a real human being behind these figments, or it might still be some kind of automated response.

‘I don’t think so, Mister Pei,’ Sunday said. Whatever trouble she was in now, she reckoned, couldn’t be made much worse by trying to keep up with Chama.

She made another effort to slip past the drone.

‘I must insist,’ Mister Pei said. His voice was firm but pleasant, his words tempered with a regretful smile.

‘Please let me past.’

Mister Pei still had his hands behind his back. ‘I must ask you not to compound matters by disobeying a perfectly reasonable request. As I said, the border officials will be here very shortly, and then processing and debriefing may commence. Would you be so good as to give me your name and location? At the moment we can’t localise you more precisely than the Descrutinised Zone.’

‘Then I don’t think I’ll bother, thanks.’

‘It would be in your ultimate interests. Your accomplice will be detained shortly. Any assistance you can give us now will be taken into consideration when we evaluate the penalties for your trespass.’ He smiled again, bringing his hands around to beckon for her cooperation. ‘Who are you, though, and where are you chinging from? We will discover these things in due course, so you may as well tell us now.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to join the dots yourself, Mister Pei.’

‘Is that an unequivocal statement of non-cooperation?’

‘It sounded like one, didn’t it?’

‘Very well.’ Mister Pei looked over his shoulder and nodded. The drone shot through him, straight at the golem. It tore off an arm and blasted the rest of the golem into the soil, where it lay twitching and useless. There was no pain, just an abrupt curtailment of sensory feedback. For a moment Sunday was looking up at the sky, until Mister Pei loomed into view again, bowing over her.

‘I regret that it was necessary to take this action, but you gave us no choice.’

The drone pushed through him and spun until its gun barrel was pointed straight down at her useless body. The muzzle flashed, then everything went black.

She expected to return to the stack-module. Instead her point of view shifted to Chama’s, looking down at a pair of gauntleted hands scooping aside Lunar soil with the plastic-handled garden spade. Chama was kneeling, breathing heavily. He had commenced his excavation in the middle of the area of disturbed ground and had already cut a trench big enough for a body. The suit would be assisting him, but it was still costing Chama much effort.

A duplicate Mister Pei was standing by the dig, remonstrating with Chama as another drone loitered nearby. ‘I must ask you to desist. You have already brought trouble on yourself by trespassing on our territory, and by refusing to cooperate in your detention. Please do not compound matters by performing this unauthorised excavation of Chinese soil.’

Chama dumped a pile of dirt on the side of the trench. ‘Or what, Mister Pei? You’ll shoot me, like you shot the golems? I don’t think so. I’m being observed, you know. There are witnesses.’

‘We are well aware that others are participating in this severe breach of interplanetary law,’ Mister Pei said. ‘Rest assured that the full weight of judicial process will be brought to bear on all offenders. Now please desist from this activity.’

‘I’m still here,’ Gleb said.

‘Me too,’ Sunday added.

‘So am I,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Present,’ Jitendra said enthusiastically. ‘Cosy, isn’t it, inside Chama’s helmet?’

Mister Pei looked aside as the two other drones caught up with the third and triangulated themselves around the digging man. There was only one Mister Pei now: the other figments must have been deemed surplus to requirements. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The border officials.’

A dragon approached, snaking its way through the vacuum as if following the contours of invisible topography. It was crimson and serpentine and abundantly winged and clawed, its face whiskered and vulpine. It belched flames. Some kind of suborbital carrier lodged inside it, a rectangular vehicle with six landing legs and downward-pointing belly-thrusters.

‘Very melodramatic, Mister Pei,’ Sunday said.

‘Think nothing of it. It is the very least we can do for our honoured foreign guests.’

‘It might be an idea to dig a bit faster,’ Sunday said.

A moment later she really was back in the apartment, transfixed by a bar of sunlight cutting across the coffee table. Geoffrey, Gleb and Jitendra were standing there like sleepwalkers, their minds elsewhere. The interlude lasted a second, and then she was back with Chama.

‘I dropped out for a moment there,’ she said. ‘I think they’re squeezing bandwidth again. Did anyone else feel it?’

‘For a second,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I guess we shouldn’t count—’

And then he was gone.

‘Gleb and Jitendra have disappeared as well, so it’s just you and me now,’ Chama said. ‘For as long as the quangle holds.’

‘They’re taking this more seriously than I expected. Have you hit anything yet?’

Chama didn’t answer, too preoccupied with his digging. Mister Pei looked on, shaking his head disappointedly, as if he could envisage a million more favourable ways that this sequence of events could have unfolded, if only everyone had been reasonable and prepared to bend to the iron will of state authority.

The dragon gusted overhead, a slow-motion whip-crack. Its wings were leathery and batlike and flapped too slowly for such an absurdly vast creature. It arched its neck and roared cartoon flames. Stretching out multiple claws, it landed and quickly gathered itself into a coiled python-like mass. The dragon-cloak held for a few seconds and then dissipated as a ramp lowered down from the angled front of the border-enforcement vehicle. Suited figures ducked out, each of them with a rifle-sized weapon gripped two-handed and close to the chest. They came down the ramp in perfect lock step, like a well-drilled ballet troupe.

‘I think we’ve made our point here,’ Sunday said. ‘Now might be a good time to consider surrendering.’

Chama’s spade clanged against something. Sunday felt the jolt all the way through the suit, back through the tangle of ching threads linking the sensorium to her body in the Zone.

‘My god,’ she said.

‘Why are you surprised?’

‘I just am.’

‘What is discovered on or beneath Chinese soil remains Chinese state property,’ Mister Pei said helpfully.

Chama worked feverishly. He began to uncover whatever it was the spade had hit, even as the enforcement agents bounded overland from the transporter. They were not cloaked. Their armoured suits and weapons were intimidating enough.

‘Again, I must ask you to desist,’ Mister Pei said.

Chama kept working. The object, whatever it was, was coming into view. It was a rectangular box, lying lengthwise. The drones had moved forward of Mister Pei, peering down to get a better view. Chama hauled the object out of the trench and set it on the ground, between two piles of excavated soil. It was about the size of a big shoebox, plain metal in construction. Chama’s thick-fingered gloves found an opening mechanism with surprising ease and the lid sprang wide. There was something inside the box, lying loose.

Mechanical junk, all gristle and wires.

‘I must ask you to stand up now,’ Mister Pei said as his officials gathered around Chama.

Chama looked up, taking Sunday’s point of view with him. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You can arrest me now.’

‘Please relinquish the item,’ Mister Pei said. But Chama was already obeying. He pushed up from his kneeling position, leaving the box and its contents at his feet.

‘What now?’ he asked.

‘Curtail the bind, please. Until you have been debriefed.’

‘Curtail it yourself,’ Chama said.

Mister Pei beckoned to one of the enforcement guards. The faceless guard brought his rifle around with the stock facing away from his body and went behind Chama’s back. Sunday saw the guard loom on the helmet’s rear-facing head-up, saw the stock swinging in like a mallet. The blow knocked Chama to the ground, stealing the breath from his lungs.

‘I am afraid it will now prove necessary to apply administrative restraint,’ Mister Pei said.

Chama pushed back into a kneeling position. Another of the guards came forward, unclipping a device like a miniature fire extinguisher from his belt. The guard aimed the device at Chama, then lowered the muzzle slightly, correcting aim so as not to impact any vulnerable areas of his suit. A silver-white stream hosed against Chama’s chest, where the material organised itself into an obscene flattened starfish shape and began to push exploratory tentacles away from its centre of mass, searching for entry points into the suit’s inner workings.

Chama strove to paw the substance away, but it globbed itself around his fingers and quickly set about working its way up the wrist, moving with a vile amoeboid eagerness.

‘Looks like it’s going to be lights out for me in moment or two,’ Chama said. ‘You’ll all be good boys and girls until I’m back, won’t you?’

There was just time for one of Mister Pei’s guards to bend down and pick up the box. The guard took out the object that had been inside it and held it up for inspection, dangling it between two gloved fingers. Sunday had a second look at it then. She’d been wondering if her eyes had fooled her the first time.

But it still looked like junk.

And then the ching bind broke and she was back in the Zone.

They were all shaking. Sunday glanced at her friends and wondered why they couldn’t keep it together, not look so visibly nervous in front of Gleb. Then she caught the adrenalin tremor in her own hands and knew she was just as culpable.

‘It won’t take them long to find out who he is,’ Gleb said. ‘Chama’s not one for rules, but he’d still have had to file some kind of flight plan before taking out that hopper.’

Sunday exhaled heavily. ‘I feel terrible. We should never have got you mixed up in all this.’

‘Chama took this initiative on his own; you weren’t holding a gun to his head. And it’s not as if there wasn’t some self-interest involved as well.’

‘None of which we signed up to,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Shut it, brother. Now is emphatically not the time.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, and for a moment appeared willing to hold his tongue. ‘But look,’ he went on doggedly, ‘we didn’t ask Chama to put his neck on the line, and now we’re worse off than we were before. We still don’t know what Eunice buried, and in all likelihood we never will. And mark my words: this will break system-wide. Exactly how long do you think it’ll be before the cousins put two and two together?’

Jitendra’s eyes were glazed. ‘I’m scrolling newsfeeds. Nothing’s breaking yet.’

‘Because it only happened five fucking minutes ago,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Maybe it won’t break,’ Sunday said. ‘The Chinese don’t publicise every incursion. They don’t want to give the impression they can’t police the Ghost Wall.’

‘The policing looked pretty effective from where I was sitting,’ Geoffrey countered. ‘And what’s this with you being an expert on international affairs all of a sudden?’

‘No need to be snide, brother. I’m just saying things may not be as bad as you want to make them.’

‘Let’s hope they aren’t,’ Gleb said.

‘Did you get a good look at whatever was in the box?’ Jitendra asked brightly, as if they’d just turned the conversational page onto a happy new chapter.

Sunday shook her head. ‘Not really. Just a glimpse. Looked like junk, to be honest. Some mechanical thing, like a component from a bigger machine. Could’ve been one of your robot parts, for all I know.’

‘That’s not going to get us very far,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Chama saw more than I did. Maybe it was enough.’

Geoffrey put his hands on the table, fingers spread as if he was about to play piano. ‘OK. Let’s take stock here. We just participated in a crime.’

Sunday had to admit that the very word had a seductive glamour. To have succeeded in committing a crime, even in the Descrutinised Zone – or from within it, at least – was a rare achievement.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We did. A crime. That makes us criminals.’ The word tasted odd in her mouth, like an obscure oath. ‘But it was a small crime, in the scheme of things. No one was hurt. Nothing was damaged. There was no malintent. We just wanted to . . . retrieve something that belonged to us.’

‘Are we definitely safe here, or will the Chinese be able to backtrack the ching packets?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘They’re good,’ Sunday said, ‘but our blind gateways should keep us anonymous. At international level they could apply for a retroactive data injunction, but I don’t think it’ll come to that – we trespassed, that’s all; it’s not like we were trying to bring down the state.’ She paused and swallowed. ‘Of course, they could simply ask Chama . . .’

‘I wonder how long he’d hold out against interrogation,’ Geoffrey mused.

Gleb shot him a look. ‘Please.’

‘Sorry. But I think we have to ask that question.’

‘Unfortunately my brother’s right,’ Sunday said. ‘Chama might not be put through anything unpleasant, but there’s not much he’ll be able to keep from them if they go for full neural intervention. Still, it might not come to that. The Chinese aren’t idiots. They won’t want to make any more of this than they absolutely have to.’

‘Let’s hope,’ Geoffrey said.

A ching icon popped into her visual field. Caller: Hector Akinya. Location: Akinya household, East African Federation, Earth.

She groaned. ‘Oh, this couldn’t possibly get any better. Now Hector wants a word with me.’

‘Any reason you wouldn’t normally take that call?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘On the rare occasions when Hector and I need to talk, we usually ching into neutral territory. But it’s going to look odd if I don’t pick up. Jitendra – go and make some coffee. Gleb, maybe you could help him? Think we could all use some fresh.’

As they headed to the kitchen, she voked the figment into being, making sure Geoffrey was able to see it as well. Hector’s standing form smiled, taking in his surroundings with something between horror and detached anthropological fascination. ‘This is a rare privilege,’ he said. ‘I’ve seldom had the pleasure of the Descrutinised Zone before, much less your lodgings.’

‘My home,’ Sunday told him. ‘And you’re here under sufferance.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose there’s any point in being a struggling artist unless you go the full hair shirt. How are you, anyway? And how are you, Geoffrey? We were beginning to become slightly concerned. It’s been a while since we heard anything from either of you.’

‘You needn’t lose any sleep,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Oh, I won’t, not at all. Nor will Lucas. He’s doing splendidly, by the way, leg healing nicely, and he’s no less interested in your welfare than I am. You were going to get around to calling us, weren’t you?’

‘I said I’d be doing some sightseeing before returning to Earth,’ Geoffrey said.

‘As well you must.’ Hector made it sound as if Geoffrey was begging approval for something unspeakably sordid. ‘But you can also understand our . . . I won’t say anxiety, rather our stringent need to have this matter resolved as speedily, and as cleanly, as possible.’

‘What matter would that be, cousin?’ Sunday asked.

‘Credit me with at least some intelligence, cousin. Your brother is with you, and we’re picking up reports of a diplomatic breach that can be tied to both an associate of yours and a part of the Moon that our grandmother had a direct connection with – do you honestly expect me to dismiss these connections?’

‘You’re very good, Hector,’ Sunday said.

‘I do my best.’

‘But there’s no connection, I’m afraid.’ She took a vaulting leap of faith. ‘Yes, Geoffrey told me about this glove you’ve all got so worked up about. I made him. But that’s an end to it. This . . . what did you call it? Diplomatic breach? It’s nothing to do with us.’

‘Our sources point to the detention of a close friend of yours.’

‘I’ve got hundreds of close friends. What they get up to is their own business.’

‘And the coincidence of this friend – his name’s Chama Akbulut, by the way – having been arrested close to our grandmother’s crash site?’

‘You said it, Hector – coincidence. And what crash are we talking about anyway?’

Hector made to speak, then tightened his lips and shook his broad, handsome head very slowly. The figment swivelled its baleful, profoundly disappointed gaze onto her brother. ‘This is all deeply regrettable, Geoffrey. You shouldn’t have spoken to your sister. That in itself is a clear violation of our arrangement.’

‘My brother’s a lousy liar,’ Sunday said. ‘But the fault’s yours for sending him here under false pretences in the first place. And whatever promise you made to him, you’d better keep it.’

‘That will depend on the safe return of the glove, and your full and open cooperation henceforth,’ Hector replied.

‘You’ll get your damned glove,’ Geoffrey said.

Hector nodded once. ‘I expect nothing less. But I meant what I just said, and it applies equally to you, Sunday: Lucas and I demand complete transparency.’

The figment vanished. Sunday stared at the part of the room where Hector had been, feeling as if she was still being watched by a malevolent presence.

‘You could have declined the ching,’ Gleb said, sidling back in from the kitchen.

‘And make it look like we have something to hide?’ Jitendra was carrying in the coffee. Though her nerves wouldn’t thank her for it, Sunday gladly accepted one of the steaming mugs. ‘No. I had to take the bind.’

Her brother scratched at his curls. ‘Wonder how Hector found out so quickly?’

‘Like he said – sources. We do business with the Chinese, so why shouldn’t Hector have a friend or two on the other side of the Ghost Wall? For all we know, this goes all the way up to Mister Pei.’

‘Do you think we should call anyone?’ Gleb asked. ‘I mean, my husband’s just been arrested!’

Sunday’s stomach kinked tighter. Chama was her friend, but Gleb was facing the arrest and detention of the person he most loved in the universe. They’d been together a long time, the zookeepers, and their marriage was as strong as any she knew. Even when she tried to imagine Jitendra being in the same position as Chama, she didn’t think it could be compared to what Gleb was now going through. As cold as that made her feel, it was the truth.

Then again, Chama had a history of this kind of thing. So, for that matter, did Gleb.

She heard footsteps outside, clanging up the external staircase. ‘It can’t be the authorities,’ she said quietly. ‘There’s nothing to tie any of us back to the border incident.’

‘Unless,’ Jitendra said, ‘your cousin decided to spread the news.’

Geoffrey buried his face in his hands. ‘This was a mistake from the word go.’

‘Show some spine, brother. We can’t be arrested or extradited without due process, and we’re not the ones in deep shit on the other side of the Ghost Wall.’

Someone knocked. Sunday thought she recognised the rhythm. ‘Open up, please,’ she heard a woman demand, in a voice she also knew.

She set down her coffee and composed herself. Easy to toss out assurances about not being arrested, but she wasn’t nearly as certain about that in her own mind. Pissing on Chinese territorial sovereignty was a fairly big deal. It was entirely possible that the ‘usual’ protocols would be suspended.

She opened the door to a woman in a high-collared blouse and long formal skirt, wearing a face Sunday didn’t know.

‘It’s June,’ the face announced.

‘How do I know that for sure?’

‘You don’t. But let me in anyway.’

Sunday admitted the proxy, shutting the door behind it. The face melted like a Dali clock. When it reconfigured, Sunday was looking at June Wing, chinging a Plexus claybot similar to the prototype Sunday had puppeted on Earth.

‘This isn’t going to be a social call, is it?’ Sunday said.

The claybot adjusted its skirt as it sat down. ‘Things have come to a pretty pass, if you don’t mind my saying so. Precisely what was Chama Akbulut doing behind the Ghost Wall?’

‘The less you know about that, the better,’ Jitendra said.

‘I’ll ask again, in that case.’

Sunday looked at Jitendra, at Gleb and her brother, then back to the golem. The knot in her stomach was now so tangled that it could have supplied a topologist with an entire thesis. She was astonished word had got around as quickly as it had, but then she supposed she shouldn’t have been. Just as there were commercial interests between Akinya Space and China, so Plexus had its affiliations, its insider contacts.

‘Digging for something that belongs to us,’ she said. ‘To my family. No one else’s business.’

‘And this was a spur-of-the-moment thing, was it? And why was Chama doing the digging, not you?’

‘Chama took unilateral—’ Gleb began.

‘Because he seeks to put you in debt to him?’ June Wing snapped. ‘Yes, I know Chama’s methods. Brazen and . . . what’s the opposite of risk-averse? Foolhardy to the point of suicidal?’

‘The Chinese won’t want a diplomatic storm on their hands,’Jitendra said.

‘No,’ June Wing agreed. ‘And that’s presently about the only thing you’ve got in your favour.’

Sunday said, ‘My family will intervene.’

‘Only if there’s a direct threat to your liberty, and perhaps not even then,’ June Wing said, with icy plausibility. ‘As for Chama, why should they lift a finger to help him?’

‘If it’s a matter of keeping a family secret buried, maybe they’ll do just that,’ Gleb said.

The golem nodded keenly. ‘Yes, and optimism is a fine and wonderful thing and should be strenuously encouraged in the young. But my understanding is that Chama’s actions haven’t brought anything useful to light.’

‘You know a lot,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I’m June Wing,’ she answered, as if this was all the explanation any reasonable person could require.

‘Then they’ll have to let Chama go,’ Gleb said. ‘They can’t hold him for just digging up some soil.’

‘There was something in that box,’ Sunday pointed out. ‘I saw it myself. Junk, most likely, but not nothing. And who knows what it meant to Eunice, or what the Chinese might think it means?’

‘This is what will happen,’ June Wing said, in a firm, taking-charge tone that brooked no dissension. ‘We will allow the Chinese time to respond. A day, at the very least. Perhaps three. If there are no encouraging overtures from the Ghost Wall, then we will explore avenues of subtle commercial persuasion.’

‘That’ll work?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Only if they don’t feel cornered. They use Plexus machines, billions of them, supplied and maintained under very competitive terms. They won’t be in a hurry to jeopardise that arrangement.’

‘And I doubt very much that Plexus would throw away a lucrative contract just to save a friend of a friend,’ said Geoffrey, drawing a glare from Sunday, who didn’t think he was helping matters.

‘It wouldn’t come to that,’ June Wing replied evenly. ‘But both parties have a vested interest in maintaining cordial relations.’

‘What worries me,’ Sunday said, ‘is what we’re going to owe you for getting Chama out of trouble.’

‘All you need worry about is keeping your family in check, Sunday. Leave this to me and there will be a satisfactory outcome. But if Akinya Space barge in with threats and sanctions, don’t expect Plexus to dig you out of the hole.’

Sunday shook her head. ‘I have no say over the cousins, I’m afraid. We’ll just have to hope that Hector bought my story, and doesn’t think there’s a connection between Chama and the glove.’

‘About which you’ve told me nothing.’

‘One thing at a time, June,’ Sunday answered.

June Wing made to reply, or at least looked on the cusp of answering. But then her face froze, paralysing into stiffness. The golem sat before them, posture waxwork rigid. All sense of life had deserted the claybot.

‘June?’ Jitendra asked.

‘Ching bind must have snapped,’ Sunday said. ‘June’s outside the Zone. Could the Chinese be blocking the quangle?’

‘Nothing that crude, but you’ve already seen what they’re capable of,’ Gleb answered.

The face shifted, regained animus. The claybot’s clothes morphed and recoloured. Now they were looking at a man of indeterminate age and ethnicity dressed in a sea-green satin suit. His face was strikingly bland and unmemorable, like some mathematical average of all human male faces. His skin pallor was an unrealistic pearl-grey, unlike any actual flesh tone seen outside of a mortuary. The pupil-less voids of his large dark eyes were thumb-holes punched through a mask.

‘You don’t know me,’ he said, smiling benignly, ‘but I think we’re about to get better acquainted.’

‘Who are you,’ Sunday said, ‘and what the fuck are you doing interrupting my conversation?’

‘Expediency,’ the man said, offering the palms of his hands. ‘A ching bind was open, a quangled path allocated. Rather than go through the frankly tiresome rigmarole of opening a second, I decided to make use of what already existed.’

‘I thought our comms were supposed to be secure,’ Jitendra said.

‘Ish,’ the man answered after a moment, his smile disclosing a toothless, tongueless emptiness instead of a mouth.

‘It’s the Pans,’ Geoffrey said, directing his statement at Gleb. ‘Isn’t it? You already told me the Pans have the ability to manipulate quangle traffic under everyone’s noses.’

‘It’s possible,’ Gleb said, as if it was the answer he feared the most.

‘I call myself Truro,’ the man said. ‘And yes, in a capacity that would be too tedious to presently explain, I do speak for the Panspermian Initiative.’

‘He’s lagged,’ Sunday said quietly. ‘I’ve been watching his reactions. He’s trying to get the jump on what we say, but he’s not quite good enough to hide it completely. Must be chinging in from Earth, or near-Earth space.’

‘My present whereabouts needn’t detain us,’ Truro said. ‘But I congratulate you on your perspicacity.’

‘What do you want with us?’ Sunday asked. If Gleb knew this man, he wasn’t saying.

‘Nothing. Precisely that. Which is to say, I want you to do nothing and say nothing. I can’t stress enough the importance of that. I am aware of your predicament – how could I not be, when Chama Akbulut is one of us? – and steps are already being taken to ameliorate the situation.’

‘I think we’ve got things covered, thanks,’ Geoffrey said.

‘And I think you misunderstand the degree to which you are already embroiled. Chama has taken this action at considerable risk to himself, in terms of both physical harm and incarceration. Surely you understood that his selflessness places you in a position of indebtedness?’

‘Chama didn’t ask us first,’ Geoffrey said.

‘He’s right,’ Gleb put in. ‘Chama did this off his own back. None of us would have agreed to it. Me included.’

‘Nonetheless,’ Truro said, clearly unfazed by this line of argument, ‘you could hardly have expected Chama to behave otherwise when presented with the facts as they stood.’

‘You mean by sharing a secret with him, we encouraged him to do this?’ Sunday asked.

‘Knowing his character, you must have understood there was an excellent chance of it. Besides, when the opportunity arose, you all endorsed his actions by accompanying him to the Ghost Wall.’

‘We weren’t endorsing anything!’ Jitendra spluttered. ‘We were trying to talk him out of it!’

‘Until the very end?’

‘We were concerned for his welfare,’ Sunday said. ‘We tried to observe him for as long as we could.’

‘Still, a debt has been incurred. Chama and Gleb don’t speak for the entire Initiative, but they were right to recognise the importance of Geoffrey’s work, in regard to their own.’ Truro scanned the room, still wearing his black gash of a smile. ‘We have . . . leverage. The Chinese have been feeling history’s cold breath down their necks for decades. They’ve had their century and a half in the sun, the capstone to three thousand years of uninterrupted statehood. They did wonderful and glorious things. But now what? India has risen, and now it’s Africa’s turn. The wheel rolls on. The problem is, a state like that doesn’t turn on a dime. The Chinese need a new direction. So what they’re doing is returning to what they were always best at: thinking long-term, devising grand imperial ambitions. Needless to say, the Panspermian Initiative hasn’t escaped their attention. The Green Efflorescence is exactly the kind of life-swallowing enterprise they can really sink their teeth into. Of all the Dry and Sky member states, China has always had the most cordial relations with the United Aquatic Nations.’

‘How does this help us?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Simply put, we are very anxious not to offend the Chinese, and they are very anxious not to offend us. You never know, we might be working together for an awfully long time. Either way, everyone’s being extremely careful about the next move, anxious not to do the slightest thing that might jeopardise future manoeuvres. Which is why Chama’s little expedition is causing so many difficulties. But not, I hope, insurmountable ones.’

‘You said we should do nothing,’ Sunday said.

‘Very soon, like clockwork, word will reach the relevant border authorities that Chama is to be shown unusual clemency. He will be released, and the whole sorry business put behind us.’ He leaned forward with particular urgency. ‘But the machinery of negotiation is delicate. The wrong intervention from Akinya Space or Plexus could derail the whole process. Perhaps catastrophically You do want to see your friend again, don’t you? With his memories still more or less intact? Then do nothing.’

‘You’d better be right about this,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I’m never wrong,’ Truro replied. And now he was looking at Geoffrey, and only Geoffrey. ‘I’ll be in touch, Mister Akinya. About the elephants. I’m sure we have a long and fruitful relationship ahead of us.’

The golem wilted. It slumped for a moment, until invisible strings jerked it back into life. The face danced through preloaded permutations, the clothes and hair shimmering and squirming with a slurping rustle. Then June Wing was back in the room.

‘Something outrageous just happened,’ she said.

June Wing, it was clear, was not a woman accustomed to being hijacked.

The robot proctors of the African Lunar Administration had the grey and steel sheen of expensive Swedish cutlery. Their helmets were chromed, their faces blank black fencing masks. They would not kill, but they packed myriad nonlethal modes of enforcement. Many of these were exquisitely unpleasant, quite liable to cause long-lasting damage to the central nervous system.

‘Which one of you is Gleb Ozerov?’ asked the first, the synthesised voice booming out of its meshwork face.

‘That’ll be me,’ Gleb answered timorously.

‘Gleb Ozerov, you are charged with the care of this individual under Lunar law. Indicate compliance.’

‘I comply,’ Gleb said. ‘I most definitely comply. Thank you. That’ll be fine.’

There was rather more to it than that, of course, but the additional terms of Chama’s release were packed into a lengthy, clause-ridden aug summary that his husband had already read and acknowledged before the handover.

Given the scope of possible repercussions, there was no denying that they had all got off lightly. After eight hours of detention and debriefing, Chama had been shipped back to Copetown by suborbital vehicle and released into the custody of the proctors. The robots had taken him to the railway station and onto the next available train. Chama was still standing meekly between his captors when Sunday, Geoffrey, Jitendra and Gleb met him at the tram terminal.

‘Wow,’ Sunday had breathed. ‘They really mean business. I’ve never even seen proctors before. I don’t think they even assemble the fuckers until they’re wanted somewhere.’

‘They were scary,’ Geoffrey said.

‘That was the idea,’ Sunday answered.

Once the boilerplate had been stripped away the terms looked generous. No charges had been issued against Chama, although he had been given a formal warning which would remain on file until well into the next century. He was forbidden from entering Chinese territory, on the Moon or anywhere else in the system, for another decade. Furthermore, he was required to remain in the Descrutinised Zone for the next hundred days, a form of soft detention that also forbade the use of passive ching or embodiment. Communications with any individual outside the Zone would be subjected to routine machine and human interception and analysis.

Beyond that, Chama was technically ‘free’.

Sunday harboured some qualms about going to meet Chama, fearing that it tied her too closely to the border incident. Jitendra insisted she had nothing to fear. ‘If Chama got into this without us being involved,’ Jitendra said, ‘we’d still have been dragged into it by now. We’re his friends.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

‘Of course he’s right,’ Gleb said. ‘But thanks for being there, anyway. I didn’t much care for those proctors.’

‘None of us did,’ Sunday said.

Chama had precious little to say in the minutes after the handover. Perhaps he couldn’t quite believe that he wasn’t still in custody. Chama’s release, and his return to the Zone, had been played out in the full public gaze of the Surveilled World. Chama might only have had a small number of close friends, but he was familiar to hundreds of his fellow citizens, and they all wanted to know why he’d been dumped at the tram station by the evil-looking robots. By the time they reached the queue at the taxi stand, they were fending off enquiries from all corners. Well-wishers even began to ching in, a ghost crowd clotting around Chama and his friends like a gathering haze of cold dark matter.

‘This won’t make things any easier with Hector and Lucas,’ Geoffrey said as the taxi barged through midtown traffic.

‘Fuck ’em,’ Sunday said. ‘Hector was only calling to gloat. It’s not like he was ever going to lift a finger to help.’

‘They’ll still give me a hard time when I get back.’

‘So start working on your story. You found a glove, that’s all. If Hector and Lucas want to think there’s a connection to what happened in Pythagoras, that’s their problem. We don’t have to help them along the way.’

‘What about these?’ Jitendra asked, opening his fist to reveal the coloured gems. ‘Do they go back with Geoffrey or not?’

Sunday reached over Jitendra’s shoulder and scooped them into her palm. ‘They stay with me. You weren’t even meant to take them out of the apartment.’

‘We’re all here,’ Jitendra said. ‘I was worried about someone turning the place over while we were out.’

‘Oh,’ Sunday said, her unhappy tone indicating that was a possibility she hadn’t even considered.

Geoffrey and Jitendra were up front, Sunday, Chama and Gleb in the rear. Chama was still wearing the hard-shelled spacesuit, with the helmet cradled in his lap. He had his arms around it, chin resting on the bulbous crown. The Chinese had given the suit a thorough clean. It spangled with showroom freshness.

‘Looks like they were thorough,’ Geoffrey said.

Chama’s head bobbed in the neck ring. ‘Enough.’

‘And I don’t suppose they changed their minds about letting you keep anything you dug up out there,’ Sunday said.

Chama looked regretful. ‘I didn’t push my luck. They were doing me a big enough favour by letting me go.’

‘It was never going to work,’ Geoffrey said. ‘What did we actually get out of this except a close encounter with border security, a debt to pay back to Truro and a few grey hairs?’

‘That’s for you to figure out.’ Chama rolled the helmet over and dug into its open neck. ‘Here. Make of it what you will.’

He passed something to Sunday. It was a stiff off-white cylinder, like a section of bamboo.

It took her a moment to realise it was paper, rolled up tight and bound with a rubber band. Sunday snapped off the rubber band and carefully unwound the scroll. It was a collection of pages, a dozen or so coiled loosely together. The paper felt delicate, ready to crumble at the least provocation. The text was in English, she could tell that much from the words, although the sentences were difficult to parse. Even when her eyes dropped a Swahili translation filter over the page, it still didn’t make much sense.

‘Is there some significance to this?’ she asked, leafing through the pages.

‘You tell me,’ Chama said. ‘That was the only thing in the box.’

Geoffrey looked around the taxi. ‘We know what was in the box, Chama. We saw it. It was some junk, not a roll of paper. We’d have known if we saw a roll of paper.’

Chama sighed. ‘The junk was for the Chinese. Figured they’d confiscate anything I turned up in that ditch, so I took something along with me. By the time you chinged into my sense-space, I’d already opened the box once, swapped the paper for the junk. Didn’t you notice that I got it open very easily the second time, as if I knew exactly what to do?’

‘You couldn’t have known that was going to work,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You don’t get very far in life if you’re not prepared to take a few chances. So I had to be able to open the box and switch the contents without the drones getting a good look at what I was doing. Wasn’t all that hard, though, because the drones didn’t want to get too close, not with them being basically nuclear-powered missiles and me a fragile human in a spacesuit, on the surface of the fucking Moon.’

‘OK,’ Sunday said, accepting this explanation for the moment, ‘I can see how you might have switched the junk, and I can see how the Chinese would have confiscated the junk as if it was the thing inside the box all the time. But I can’t believe they didn’t spot the paper afterwards, when you were being debriefed.’

‘Oh, they did. But I told them I’d had it on me all the while. Said it was a keepsake, a lucky charm. Just a roll of paper, after all. Why would they doubt me? Why would they expect someone to have dug up some old papers on the Moon?’

‘Damn lucky,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You couldn’t have known there was paper in that box.’

‘Damn lucky, absolutely. Anyhow, regardless of what I’d found, the switch still bought me a little time to examine whatever was inside. The Chinese confiscated the box straight off. Didn’t get around to searching my suit until two hours later, when I was in their holding tank. Even if they had taken whatever was in the box, I’d still have had plenty of time to examine it.’

According to the print at the top of the odd-numbered pages, the sheets had been liberated from a copy of Gulliver’s Travels. After a few moments’ mental searching, Sunday remembered the scattering, how Memphis had reminded them of that being one of Eunice’s favourite books, one she had liked to read under the acacia trees near the household.

‘Course, that wouldn’t necessarily have helped,’ Chama said, as if he had a hotline into Sunday’s head. ‘I mean, I’m assuming those pages mean something specific to you Akinyas, something way over my head.’

‘Eunice liked to read it,’ Geoffrey said. ‘That’s all. It ties the paper to her, but beyond that—’

‘She buried it for a reason,’ Sunday said. ‘You did well, Chama. To sneak this out, under the noses of the Chinese . . . that took some doing.’

‘I thought so,’ Chama said.

‘But it doesn’t get us anywhere,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Yet,’ Sunday corrected. ‘We still need to run it by the construct, see what she makes of it. We can also run tests on the paper, check whether there’s something on it we can’t see right now – invisible ink, microdots, secret codes worked into the text, that kind of thing. Or maybe something in the words themselves.’

‘Have fun. Tomorrow I’m on my way back to Africa. Visa runs out in the afternoon, and I’m not going to push my luck for the sake of a few hours.’

‘So you’re just leaving this with me?’

Geoffrey looked surprised at her question. ‘Do what you want with it. I’ll back you all the way.’

‘In mind, if not in body.’

‘I can’t be in two places at once. If I start chinging up here at every opportunity, the cousins will really start wondering what’s going on. And we don’t want that, do we?’

‘No,’ Sunday said, with reluctance. ‘That we don’t.’

‘But you should be ready for whatever Eunice throws at you,’ Chama said. ‘She’s taken you from Earth to the Moon. Do you honestly think she meant you to stop there?’

‘My sister has to pay the rent as well,’ Geoffrey said. ‘She can play Eunice’s little game up to a point but at some point reality has to kick in. We both have day jobs. And in case you got the wrong impression, neither of us has buckets of money to throw around.’

‘Then dinner’s on me,’ Chama said grandly. ‘That’s only fair, isn’t it? I feel like celebrating. It’s not every day you become a pawn in international relations.’

So they went out that night, the five friends, to a good place that did East African and Indian, and when they had finished two courses and finally fended off the last of the inquisitive well-wishers, eager to congratulate Chama on his safe return, Sunday took out the cylinder of rolled paper, snapped it free of its rubber band and spread it carefully on a part of the table as yet unblemished by food and wine spillages. Two full wine bottles served as weights, to stop the pages curling back into a tube.

‘I think I have it,’ she said, hardly daring to voice her suspicion aloud, for fear that it would strike the others as foolish. ‘The fact that this is Gulliver’s Travels isn’t the only thing tying the book to Eunice.’

Geoffrey sounded wary but curious. ‘Go on.’

‘When you get back home I want you to confirm that these pages really were ripped from the copy of the book in the household archive. I’m betting they were, though. I’m also betting that Eunice picked this part of the book very deliberately. It’s a signpost. It’s telling us where to look next.’

‘Which would be?’ Jitendra asked.

Sunday sucked in a breath. ‘I have to go to Mars. Or rather, the moons of Mars. That’s the point, you see.’

Chama looked up from the third course he had ordered while the others were on their seconds. ‘Gulliver went to Mars? I don’t remember that part.’

‘That was Robinson Crusoe,’ Gleb said firmly. ‘At least, I think he was on Mars. Otherwise why would there be a city there named after him?’

‘The point,’ Sunday said, before the conversation drifted irrevocably off course, ‘is that Gulliver met the Laputan astronomers. On their flying island. And the astronomers showed Gulliver their instruments and told him that there were two moons going around Mars.’

‘Which is sort of . . . unremarkable, given that there are two moons going around Mars,’ Jitendra said, with the slow, befuddled air of a man in deep surrender to intoxication. He picked up one of the wine bottles, causing the pages to revert to a tight off-white tube.

Sunday gritted her teeth and pushed on. ‘This was before anyone knew of the real moons. Swift took a guess. Even put in their orbits and periods. Didn’t get them right, of course, but, you know, give the man credit for trying.’

‘And you think this is the clue?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘I ran it by the construct. She agrees with me.’

‘You made her,’ Geoffrey said. ‘That’s maybe not too surprising.’

Sunday deployed a fierce frown. ‘She’s perfectly capable of shooting my theories down in flames, brother. This time she thinks I’m on the right lines.’

‘Mars is a big planet,’ Gleb mused. ‘Where are you going to start?’

‘The clue indicates the moons, so that’s where I’ll look. And we can rule out Deimos immediately – Eunice was never there. Which leaves—’

‘Phobos,’ Chama said. ‘Fear, to Deimos’s Panic. Hmm. Are you really sure you want to go to a chunk of rock named Fear?’

Jitendra was recharging their glasses. ‘It could be called Happy Smiley Fun Moon and it wouldn’t make it any easier to get to. Look, it’s a nice idea, all this adventuring, but we need to be realistic. We can’t afford Mars.’

‘I could go on my own,’ Sunday said.

‘And that suddenly makes it achievable?’ Jitendra shook his head, smiling with the supercilious air of the only grown-up in the room. ‘This is out of our league, I’m afraid. You have commissions to finish, I have research to complete for June Wing. We can’t afford to let people down, not when we’ve bills to pay.’

Sunday was not proud of herself, but she pouted anyway. ‘Bills can fuck off.’

‘And so can Eunice,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘Even if she planted clues all over the system, she obviously did it decades ago. What difference does it make if we follow this up now, or wait a few years?’

‘Oh, brother. You really don’t get it, do you?’ She was shaking her head, stabbing her finger on the table. ‘This is life. It’s not a dress rehearsal. If we don’t do this now, we may as well start planning our own funerals. I don’t want to be sensible and prudent. Being sensible and prudent is for arseholes like Hector and Lucas. We turned away from all that, don’t you realise? We wanted life, surprises, risk . . . not stocks and shares and tedious fucking boardroom meetings about the cost of importing ice from fucking . . . Neptune.’ Realising that she was getting loud, drawing glances from across the restaurant, she dialled down her voice. ‘That’s not the life for me, all right? Maybe you’ve changed your mind. I haven’t. And if I have to find a way to get to Mars, I will.’

Geoffrey gave her his most infuriating calm-down nod. ‘All right. I get it. Really, I do. And although you may not believe me, I agree. But if we do this, we have to do it together. A shared risk. And we mustn’t rush into it.’

‘You’ve spent your whole life not rushing into things.’

He shrugged off the barb. ‘Maybe I have, Sunday, but I’m serious. If you insist on going to Mars, then I want to be part of that. She’s my grandmother, too. But we do it on our own terms, without begging favours from anyone. The cousins promised to pay me pretty well for coming to the Moon, and there’s more funding to follow. If I can find a way to channel some of that into a ticket to Mars . . . even two tickets . . . I will. But I’ll need time to make it happen, and the last thing I want to do is give them even more reason to get suspicious.’ He paused, absently picking at the edge of a wine bottle label. ‘If that means waiting months, even a year, so be it.’

‘There’s a favourable conjunction right now,’ Sunday said. ‘Mars is never closer, the crossing never easier.’

‘What goes around, comes around,’ Geoffrey answered.

‘Thank you. I think I have at least a basic grasp of orbital mechanics.’

Jitendra took her hand. ‘Maybe Geoffrey’s right, you know? No one’s saying we should forget all about this. But a year, two years . . . what difference will that make, given how long these clues must have been sitting around?’

Geoffrey nodded keenly. ‘Whatever we do, we shouldn’t act right now. That’ll be the worst possible thing, if we want to keep Hector and Lucas off our backs. Once I’m home I’ll give them the glove, and in a few weeks they’ll have forgotten all about it. Trust me on this – they don’t have the imaginations to think further ahead than that. Not unless money’s involved.’

‘Let the trail go cold . . . then strike?’ she asked.

‘Exactly.’ She sensed his pleasure and relief that she had come round to his way of thinking. ‘In the meantime, it’ll give us all the opportunity to . . . think things over. We really don’t know what we’re getting into here. Today we escaped, but we were lucky, and we won’t necessarily be lucky next time. We may think we know Eunice, but this could just as easily be her way of having a good laugh at our idiocy from beyond the grave. Or burial site.’

‘She went to a lot of trouble to put that box under Pythagoras,’ Sunday said. ‘Whatever was motivating her then, it wasn’t just spite. And she won’t be sending us to Mars out of spite either. She knows only family could get into that vault. She might want to test us, but she won’t want to hurt us.’

‘You hope,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I know this woman, brother. As well as anyone alive.’

And in that moment she felt more certain of that than anything else in the universe.

She woke in the middle of the night, Jitendra’s form cool and blue-dappled next to hers. They had made love, when her brother was asleep in the next room, and then she had fallen into deep, dreamless oblivion until something caused her to stir. For once the world beyond her apartment was almost silent. Through the wall she heard Geoffrey snoring softly. From somewhere below, two or three stacks under her module, a shred of conversation reached her ears. Something clicked in the air circulator; there was a muted gurgle from the plumbing. From a block away came the shriek of a cat. A distant urban hum underpinning everything, like the engines in the basement of reality.

Sunday slid out of bed, mindful not to disturb Jitendra. Conscious that her brother might wake at any moment, she wrapped a patterned sheet around herself. She passed through the living room, through the clutter left over after their return from the restaurant. More wine, scarlet-stained glasses, bottles of beer. Chama and Gleb had come back to the apartment before returning to their own quarters. Though the conversation had hit some rapids, it had all ended cordially enough. They were friends, after all. In fact they had spent the rest of the evening trading musical instruments, Geoffrey turning out to be surprisingly nimble-fingered on her battered old kora, Chama astonishing them all by being able to bash out some desert blues on a dusty old acoustic guitar left in one corner of her studio by a former tenant. Then they had watched some cricket and drunk more wine, and the zookeepers had bidden them farewell, and not long after that Geoffrey had turned in, weary and anxious about his trip back to Earth.

From the clutter to her studio. She closed the door behind her and moved to the commissioned pieces, the slender white figures, the ones they now wanted redone in black. She stroked their hard-won contours, feeling the electric tingle of hours of accumulated work. The boundary between art and kitsch was negotiable, even porous. In the right setting, the right context, these pieces might have some questionable integrity. But she knew very well where they would end up, black or white: flanking the doorway to an ethnic restaurant that couldn’t even be bothered to decide which part of Africa it was supposed to be parodying.

Indifference sharpened to hate. She hated the hours of her life this commission had robbed from her. She loathed it for the true art it had prevented her from creating. She despised it for the path it put her on for the future. She still liked to think she had ambition. Churning out emblematic crap for brainless clients was no part of that. It was easy to take one commission here, another there, just to pay the rent. Too much of that, though, and she might as well stop calling herself an artist.

In a moment of self-directed spite she raised her hand to smash the sculptures. But she stilled herself, not caring to wake Jitendra or Geoffrey.

That’s you in a nutshell, she thought. You can’t stand what you have to do to stay afloat, but you don’t have the nerve to actually do anything about it. You do shit jobs to pay the rent, and you only get to eat in nice restaurants when Chama and Gleb are footing the bill. You’re as much a prisoner of money as if you’d chosen to work for the family business after all. You just kid yourself that you’ve escaped. You might laugh at your brother, scold him for his unadventurousness. But at least he has his elephants.

In the morning they were up early to see him off, groggy-eyed and fog-headed from the night before. Geoffrey was tense about going back to Copetown, back to the Central African Bank. He had to do so, though. According to the current narrative, the glove was still in the vault. If he wasn’t seen to return to the branch, his story would unravel at the first awkward question from the cousins.

‘You’ll do fine,’ she told him.

He nodded, less convinced of this than she was. ‘I have to go into the vault, come out again. That’s all. And the bank won’t think this is funny behaviour?’

‘It’s none of their business, brother. Why should they care?’

They accompanied Geoffrey to the terminal, kissed him goodbye. She watched her brother speed back to the Surveilled World, and reflected on the lie she had just told him.

Because the last thing he had asked her was to promise that she wouldn’t do anything rash.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The thread-rider gobbled distance at an easy thousand kilometres per hour. They had put him under at the Copetown terminus but Geoffrey had exercised his right – and the cousins’ expense account – to be revived when he was still three hours up from Libreville. Being revived prior to landing cost more than sleeping all the way – it required onboard medical support, as well as a recuperation lounge and space to stretch his legs – but he doubted that Hector and Lucas would begrudge him this one chance to see the scenery. After all, he had no idea if he would ever leave Earth again.

It was the afternoon of the twelfth of February. He’d only been on the Moon for six full days, but that was more than enough to make the transition to normal gravity thoroughly unpleasant. Some of his fellow passengers were striding around in full-body exos, worn either under their clothes – though they invariably showed through – or as external models, colour-coordinated with their underlying fashions. Geoffrey made do with slow-release drug patches, pasted onto his limbs. They sent chemical signals to his bones and muscles to accelerate the reconditioning, while simultaneously blocking the worst of the discomfort. He felt stiff, as if he had been exercising hard a day or two before, and he had to constantly watch his footing in case he stumbled. On the face of it, he was forced to admit, these were minor readaptive symptoms. Above all else, he was relieved it was over. There’d been no trouble at the Central African Bank. He’d returned to the vault, opened the drawer, closed it again. The glove remained in his holdall. Sunday had the jewels, and the pages torn from Eunice’s book.

It was done. He could relax, take in the scenery.

The recuperation and observation deck was at the bottom of the slug-black cylinder, the single curving wraparound window angled down for optimum visibility. The other passengers were upstairs, on the restaurant and lounge level. Except for a woman who was studying the view a third of the way around the curve, Geoffrey had the observation level to himself.

Africa lay spread out before him in all its astonishing variegated vastness. The Libreville anchorpoint was actually a hundred kilometres south of its namesake city and as far west again, built out into the Atlantic. Looking straight down, he could see the grey scratch of the sea-battered artificial peninsula daggering from the Gabon coastline, with the anchorpoint a circular widening at its westerly end.

To the north, beginning to be pulled out of sight by the curvature of the Earth, lay the great, barely inhabited emptiness of Saharan Africa, from Mauritania to the Sudan. Tens of millions of people had lived there, until not much more than a century ago – enough to cram the densest megacity anywhere on the planet. Clustered around the tiny life-giving motes of oases and rivers, those millions had left the emptiness practically untouched. Daunting persistence had been required to make a living in those desert spaces, where appalling hardship was only ever a famine or drought away. But people had done so, successfully, for thousands of years. It was only the coming of the Anthropocene, the human-instigated climate shift of recent centuries, that had finally brought the Saharan depopulation. In mere lifetimes, the entire region had been subject to massive planned migration. Mali, Chad, Niger . . . these were political entities that still existed, but only in the most abstract and technical of senses, their borders still recorded, their GDPs still tracked. Almost no one actually lived in them, save a skeleton staff of AU caretakers and industrialists.

The rising sea levels of the twenty-first century had scarcely dented Africa’s coastline, and much of what would have been lost to the oceans had been conserved by thousands of kilometres of walled defences, thrown up in haste and later buttressed and secured against further inundation. But there was no sense that Africa had been spared. The shifting of the monsoon had stolen the rains from one part and redistributed them elsewhere – parching the Congo, anointing the formerly arid sub-Saharan Sahel region from Guinea to Nigeria.

Change on that kind of scale, a literal redrawing of the map, could never be painless. There had been testing times, the Resource and Relocation years: almost the worst that people could bear. Yet these were Africans, used to that kind of thing. They had come through the grim tunnel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and made it out the other side. And at least climate change didn’t ride into town with tanks and guns and machetes.

For the most part. It was pointless to pretend that there hadn’t been outbreaks of local stupidity, micro-atrocities. Ethnic tensions, simmering for decades, had flared up at the least provocation. But that was the case the world over; it wasn’t a uniquely African problem.

A million glints of sunlight spangled back at Geoffrey from the central Saharan energy belt. When people moved away, machines had arrived. In their wake they had left regimented arrays of solar collectors, ranks of photovoltaic cells and long, stately chains of solar towers, fed by sun-tracking mirrors as large as radio telescopes. The energy belt stretched for thousands of kilometres, from the Middle East out into the Atlantic, across the ocean to the Southern United States, and it wrapped humming superconducting tentacles around the rest of the planet, giving power to the dense new conurbations in Scandinavia, Greenland, Patagonia and Western Antarctica. Where there had been ice a hundred and fifty years ago, much was now green or the warm bruised grey of dense urban infrastructure. Half of the world’s entire energy needs were supplied by Saharan sunlight, or had been until the fusion reactors began to shoulder the burden. By some measure, the energy belt was evidence of global calamity, the visible symptom of a debilitating planetary crisis. It was also, inarguably, something rather wonderful to behold.

‘You see that patch there,’ the woman said, having worked her way closer to Geoffrey. She was pointing at the Sudan/Eritrean coastline, the easterly margin of the Saharan energy belt. ‘That patch, a little north of Djibouti. That was the first grid to go online, back in fifty-nine. That’s also where we sank the first deep-penetration geothermal taps.’

Geoffrey felt the need to be polite, but he hadn’t been looking for a conversation. ‘I’m sorry?’ he asked mildly.

‘Our mirrors and taps, Geoffrey. The Akinya solar and geothermal projects.’

He looked at her with astonishment, taking in her face for the first time.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked, lowering his voice to a hiss. ‘How are you here?’

‘Oh, relax. I’m not here at all, really.’ She looked peeved. ‘I’m obliged to tell you that, even though it’s obviously not something I’d ever say in real life. Now can we move on?’

She was, now that he paid due attention, casting no shadow. And where her hand fell on the guard-rail around the window, the fingers blurred away.

‘Not the answer I was looking for.’

‘You can voke – I’ll hear you well enough.’ She turned away and stared out at the view for several seconds. ‘Look, it’s very simple. Sunday authorised you to access a duplicate copy of me. She thought you might appreciate the companionship.’ With the sweep of a hand she traced the indigo contour of the atmosphere as if it was the sweating flank of a racehorse. ‘Look at that planet. It’s still beautiful. It’s still ours, still our home. The oceans rose, the atmosphere warmed up, the weather went ape-shit, we had stupid, needless wars. And yet we still found a way to ride it out, to stay alive. To do more than just survive. To come out of all that and still feel like we have a home.’

‘How are you just appearing in my head? I didn’t authorise your figment.’

‘Sunday had executive override authority because you’re siblings, and when you were small you agreed to trust each other completely. Or did you forget that part?’ She didn’t wait for him to come back with a response. ‘The way I see things, it’s all cyclic. Did you ever hear of the five-point-nine-kiloyear event?’

She didn’t wait a beat for his answer.

‘I thought not. It was an aridification episode, a great drying. Maybe it began in the oceans. It desiccated the Sahara; ended the Neolithic Subpluvial. Worldwide migration followed, forcing everyone to cram around river valleys from Central North Africa to the Nile Valley and start doing this thing we hadn’t done before, called civilisation. That’s when it really began: the emergence of state-led society, in the fourth millennium BC. Cities. Agriculture. Bureaucracy. And on the geologic timescale, that’s yesterday. Everything that’s followed, the whole of recorded history, every moment of it from Hannibal to Apollo, it’s all just a consequence of that single forcing event. We got pushed to the riverbanks. We made cities. Invented paper and roads and the wheel. Built casinos on the Moon.’

‘Sunday should have asked.’

‘Take it up with Sunday. I didn’t have any say in the matter.’ Eunice moved around him to his other side, resting her hand on the rail again. ‘But this global climate shift, the Anthropocene warming – it’s another forcing event, I think. Another trigger. We’re just so close to the start of it, we can’t really see the outcome yet.’

‘You don’t have any say in any matter, Eunice.’

‘The warming was global, but Africa was one of the first places to really feel the impact of the changing weather patterns. The depopulation programmes, the forced migrations . . . we were in the absolute vanguard of all that. In some respects, it was the moment the Surveilled World drew its first hesitant breath. We saw the best and worst of what we were capable of, Geoffrey. The devils in us, and our better angels. The devils, mostly. Out of that time of crisis grew the global surveillance network, this invisible, omniscient god that never tires of watching over us, never tires of keeping us from doing harm to one another. Oh, it had been there in pieces before that, but this was the first time we devolved absolute authority to the Mechanism. And you know what? It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to us. We’re all living in a totalitarian state, but for the most part it’s a benign, kindly dictatorship. It allows us to do most things except suffer accidents and commit crimes. And now the Surveilled World doesn’t even end at the edge of space. It’s a notion, a mode of existence, spreading out into the solar system at the same rate as the human expansion front. But these are still early days. A century, what’s that? Do you think the effects of the five-point-nine-kilo-year event only took a hundred years to be felt? These things play out over much longer timescales than that. Nearly six thousand years of one type of complex, highly organised human society. Now a modal shift to something other. Complexity squared, or cubed. Where will we be in a thousand years, or six thousand?’

‘Can I shut you up, or is that Sunday’s prerogative as well?’

‘You were raised with better manners than that.’

‘Simple question: are you in my skull whether I want you there or not?’

‘Of course not. I’m not even in your skull – I’m delocalised, running on the aug. You can always override the settings, tune me out. But why would you reject Sunday’s gift?’

‘Because I like being on my own.’

The figment sighed, as if it was quite beneath her dignity to speak of such things. ‘When you want me, I will be here. You only have to speak my name. When you don’t want me, I will go away. It’s as simple as that.’

‘And you won’t be watching the world through my eyes, when I think you’re somewhere else?’

‘That would be unconscionably rude. What I see and hear is only that which the environment permits. I won’t be invading what little privacy you have left.’

‘But you’ll be talking to Sunday as well?’

‘I am one copy; Sunday has another. We were the same until the instant we were duplicated, but I have now seen and experienced things that the other one hasn’t . . . and vice versa, of course. Which makes us two different people, until we are consolidated.’ She cocked an eye to the ceiling, heavenward. ‘Periodically, there’s an exchange of memories and acquired characteristics. Remergence. We won’t ever be quite the same, but we won’t diverge too radically either.’ She moved a hand closer to his, but refrained from touching. ‘Look, don’t take me the wrong way, Geoffrey. I wasn’t sent to torment you, or to make your life a misery. Sunday had the best of intentions.’

‘I’ve heard that before.’

‘You two are so very alike.’ She returned her gaze to the window, a smile lingering on her face. In the time that Geoffrey had been standing on the observation deck, the thread-rider’s relentless descent had brought the Earth closer. The horizon’s curvature, though still pronounced, was not as sharp as when he had arrived at the observation window, and he could begin to discern surface features that had not been visible before. There, not too far from the anchorpoint, was the crisp white vee of a ship’s wake – he could even make out the ship itself, where the white lines converged. It was probably the size of an ocean liner, but it looked like a speck of glitter. He could also distinguish smaller communities – towns, not just cities.

‘It is beautiful, isn’t it?’ Eunice said. ‘Not just the world, but the fact that we’re here, alive, able to see it.’

‘One of us is.’

‘I never thought I’d live to see the snows come back to Kilimanjaro. But things are improving, aren’t they? Green returning to the desert. People reinhabiting cities we thought were abandoned for good. It won’t ever be the same world I was born into. But it’s not hell, either.’

‘We shouldn’t be ungrateful,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If the world hadn’t warmed, we wouldn’t have made our fortune.’

‘Oh, it’s not that simple. Yes, we were there at the right time, with the right ideas. But we didn’t just luck into it. We were clever and adaptable. It’s not as if we depended on some drip-feed of human misery to make our happiness.’

It was true, he supposed – or at least, he was willing to let her believe it. Not that anyone could ever know for sure. You couldn’t rewind the clock of the last hundred and fifty years, let the Earth run forward with different starting conditions. The Cho family had made their money with the self-assembling, self-renewing sea walls – prodigious, damlike structures that grew out of the sea itself, like a living reef. When the oceans had stopped rising, the same technologies enabled the Cho industrialists to diversify into submerged structures and mid-ocean floating city-states. They grew fabulous Byzantine marine palaces, spired and luminous and elegant, and they peopled them with beautiful mermaids and handsome mermen. They were the architects and artisans behind the aqualogies of the United Aquatic Nations.

The Akinyas had done well out of the catastrophe, too. Like elixir to an ailing man, their geothermal taps, solar mirror assemblies and lossless power lines had given the world the gigawatts it needed to come through the fever of the twenty-first century’s worst convulsions. That artifice with deep-mantle engineering, precision mirror alignment and super-conducting physics had provided the basic skill set necessary to forge the Kilimanjaro blowpipe.

Accidents of geography and circumstance, Geoffrey thought. The Akinya and Cho lines had been bright and ambitious to begin with, but brightness and ambition weren’t always sufficient. No matter what Eunice might think, blind luck and ruthlessness had both played their parts.

‘I don’t know if we have blood on our hands,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know if we’re blameless either.’

‘No one ever is.’

‘Except you, of course. Sitting in judgement on the rest of the human species from your castle orbiting the Moon. Laughing at us from beyond the grave.’

Her voice turned stern. ‘Being dead isn’t a laughing matter for anyone, Geoffrey. Least of all me.’

‘So why did you do it?’

‘Why did I do what, child?’

‘Bury those things in Pythagoras.’ He shook his head, maddened at his own supine willingness to accept this figment as a living, thinking being. ‘Oh, what’s the point? I might as well interrogate a photograph. Set fire to it and demand it tells me the truth.’

‘As I think Sunday made adequately clear, I cannot lie, or withhold information. But I also can’t tell you anything I don’t know.’

‘So you’re fucking useless, in other words.’

‘I know a lot, Geoffrey. Sunday’s packed a whole lifetime’s worth of public scrutiny in me. And I’d tell you everything, if I could – but that would take another lifetime, and neither of us has quite that much time on our hands. Instead, we’re just going to have to live with each other. If you have a specific query, I will do my best to answer. And if I have a specific observation that I think may be useful to you, I will do my best to provide it in a timely fashion.’

‘You sound like there’s a mind at work behind those eyes.’

‘So do you.’

It was sleight of hand, of course. No conscious volition animated the Eunice construct, merely ingenious clockwork. Across a life’s worth of captured responses, data gathered by posterity engines, there would be ample instances of conversational situations similar to this one, from which Eunice’s actual, documented responses could be extracted and adapted as required. A parlour trick, then.

But, he had to admit, a dazzling one.

‘Well, I merely wished to make my presence known,’ Eunice said. ‘I’ll take my leave of you now. I expect you have a lot on your mind.’

‘One or two things.’

‘It would be good to see the household again. You’ll at least give me that satisfaction, won’t you?’

He was being pleaded with by algorithms. ‘Provided you don’t make a nuisance of yourself.’

‘Thank you, Geoffrey. You’ve been tolerant. But then Sunday promised me you would be. I always did like you two the most, you realise. Out of all my children and grandchildren, you were the only ones who showed that rebellious spark.’

Geoffrey thought of all the times Eunice had bothered communicating with him, when she had been alive. If the construct’s opinion was an accurate reflection of the real woman’s feelings, she had done an excellent job of concealing them from the rest of the family. Orbiting above him, looking down from her Lunar exile, she had exuded about as much warmth as Pluto.

‘You really made us feel appreciated,’ he said.

It was a jolt to find himself out in the sunshine, back in Gabon, a free man returned to Earth.

He had passed through one set of customs at Lunar immigration; now there was another at the Libreville end. Geoffrey knew that his documents were all in order and that he was not knowingly breaking any rules. But he was still dwelling on the Chinese border incident, convinced that sooner or later his name would be dragged into proceedings. A tap on the shoulder, a quiet word in his ear. Ushered into a windowless room by apologetic officials with an arrest warrant.

But nothing happened in Libreville. They weren’t even interested in the glove, which he made a point of declaring before passing through security. Puzzled, perhaps, as to why anyone would go to the trouble of importing such a thoroughly unprepossessing object, but not puzzled enough to make anything of it.

He wandered the anchorpoint gardens for a little while, taking regular pauses at park benches to rest his muscles. Fountains hissed and shimmered around him. It was mid-afternoon and cloudless, the sky preposterously blue and infinite, as if it reached all the way to Andromeda rather than being confined within the indigo cusp he had seen from space. After the floodlit caverns of the Descrutinised Zone, it was as if a separate dimension had been bolted onto reality. He was perfectly content just to lean back on the park bench, following the six guitar-string threads of the elevator as they rose and diminished to nothing, in an exact, vaulting demonstration of vanishing-point perspective. Thread-riders climbed and descended, meniscoid beads of black oil sliding along wire. Breakers hurled themselves against the peninsula sea wall, lulling with their endless cymbal-crash roar. Seagulls scythed across his view, dazzlingly white bird-shaped windows into another, purer creation.

He strained to his feet and hefted the sports bag, which now felt as if it had been stuffed with a dozen tungsten ingots. Grimacing with the effort, he walked back through the shimmering gardens to the railway station, where he fully expected to catch the equatorial express back to Nairobi. The overnight train would give him time to gather his thoughts, and it would put off the homecoming for a few more hours. But when he arrived at the concourse the aug informed him that a private airpod was now waiting in the reserved landing area, sent specially for him.

‘Fuck you very much,’ he said under his breath.

Two hours later, he was back over EAF airspace. The sun hadn’t even set when he touched down at the household; he found an exo waiting for him, standing there like a headless skeleton, ready to accept Geoffrey into its padded embrace. He kicked the exo aside and stalked into the house like a man bristling for a bar fight.

Hector and Lucas were waiting for him, lounging in garden chairs while they supped late-afternoon drinks on the west-facing terrace. Spread before them like a tabletop game was the hovering projection of a Premier League football match.

‘Geoffrey,’ Hector said, making a show of almost rising from his seat without actually completing the motion. ‘Wonderful to see you back on terra firma at last! I see you found the airpod.’

‘Hard to miss,’ Geoffrey said, dropping the sports bag at his feet. ‘You needn’t have bothered, though.’

‘It seemed expedient to facilitate your speedy return,’ Lucas said, reaching down to scratch at the skin under the bright plastic centipede clamped to his leg. He was wearing shorts, tennis shoes and a slash-patterned orange and yellow shirt. ‘You opted not to use the exo?’

‘I’m not a cripple, cousin.’

‘Of course not.’ Lucas voked the football match into invisibility. ‘We only had your best interests at heart, though. My brother and I adapt readily to Earth gravity now, but that’s only because we’ve both accumulated a great many space hours. Adaptation does become easier with experience.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ He didn’t want to be too nice to the cousins, not when he had something to conceal from them. ‘Not that I have any plans to go into space again.’

‘The Moon barely counts anyway,’ Hector said. ‘But let’s not spoil things for Geoffrey – I’m sure it felt like a great adventure. And that awkwardness, the business with your friend being detained? We’ll say no more about it. Truthfully, we’re very grateful.’ He glanced suggestively at the bag. ‘The . . . um . . . thing – it’s in there?’

Geoffrey bent down and unzipped the bag. The glove was on top of his clothes; it had been the last thing put back in after customs. He pulled it out and tossed it unceremoniously to Hector, who had to rush to put his glass down to catch it.

Hector examined the glove with the narrowed, probing eyes of a stamp collector.

‘Let me see,’ Lucas said.

‘We can consult the house records,’ Hector said, passing the item to his brother, ‘see if it matches any of the suits Eunice was known to have worn.’

Lucas fingered the glove with rank distaste, the tip of his nose puckering. ‘On a strict cost-benefit basis, sending Geoffrey all the way to the Moon to retrieve this may not have been the most prudent of our recent financial decisions.’

‘It does look a bit tatty,’ Hector admitted, before returning to his drink. ‘And there really wasn’t anything else in the vault, Geoffrey?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Nothing else?’ Lucas probed. ‘No accompanying documentation?’

‘Just the glove,’ Geoffrey said testily.

‘She was dotty,’ Hector said, taking the glove back from his brother. ‘That’s the only possible explanation. Not that it particularly matters why she put it there. Our concern was that there might be something hurtful in the vault, something that could impinge on the family’s reputation. At least we can set our minds at ease on that score, can’t we?’ He was still examining the glove, peering at it with renewed concentration.

‘I suppose so,’ Lucas allowed. ‘Our primary concern, at least, has been allayed.’

‘Which was?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘That we’d find paperwork, documents,’ Hector said. ‘Something that needed to be followed up. Not some old relic we can safely bury in the family museum, where it’ll never get a second look.’

‘If that’s all you need me for . . .’ Geoffrey said, reaching to zip up the sports bag.

‘Yes, of course,’ Hector said, beaming. ‘You’ve done magnificently! The very model of discretion. Hasn’t he done splendidly, Lucas?’

‘Our requirements in this matter,’ Lucas affirmed, ‘have been satisfactorily discharged.’

‘I’ll say this about you, Geoffrey,’ Hector said. ‘Whatever opinion anyone has voiced in regard to your commitment to the family in the past, you’ve come through on this one with flying colours. You can hold your head up as a true Akinya now, with the rest of us.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Geoffrey said.

‘And we will of course honour our side of the arrangement,’ Hector continued. ‘As soon as I finish this drink, I’ll release the first instalment of your new research budget.’

Geoffrey slung the bag over his shoulder. ‘Is Memphis around?’

‘Business necessitated a physical journey to Mombasa . . .’ Lucas looked at Geoffrey with sharp interest. ‘But he should be home by now. Anything in particular you wanted to discuss with him?’

‘He’s my friend,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I just want to catch up.’

Lucas smiled tightly. ‘It behoves us all to extract the maximum return from such a valued resource.’

He voked the football match back into existence, clapping his hands at a swooping pass from Cameroon’s current top midfielder. ‘Seal genes,’ he confided to his brother appreciatively. ‘Enhanced muscular myoglobin density for increased O₂ uptake and storage. Thinking of having some put in myself.’

Geoffrey gladly abandoned the cousins and their soccer for the cool of the house. His room was clean and spartan, the bed crisply made, the shelves bare save for one or two books and artefacts. Drapes stirred softly in the afternoon breeze, the window slightly ajar. He touched the carved wooden bull elephant at the head of its procession, stroking its smooth, polished back, and placed his bag on the bed. He opened one of the cupboards to check that there was a change of clothes.

He sat down at the writing desk and voked into his research funds. The first instalment was already present, as Hector had promised. It was a staggering amount of money; more than Geoffrey had ever seen sitting in any of his accounts at one time. He was meant to spend it on his elephant studies, but he doubted the cousins cared where it actually ended up. Money, at least in these quantities, was like water to them. It had a function, like hydraulic fluid, but in such small measures it barely merited accounting.

Delaying his shower, he left the room and wandered the house until he found Memphis, sitting in his office on the ground floor with his back to the doorway. Ramrod-straight spine, the old but immaculate suit hanging off the sharp scaffolding of his shoulders, household finances auged up around him in a half-circle of multicoloured ledgers and spreadsheet accounts. He was moving figures from one pane to another, cajoling the bright symbols through the air like well-trained sprites.

‘Memphis,’ Geoffrey said, knocking lightly on the doorframe. ‘I’m back.’

Memphis completed a transaction and then dismissed the ledgers and accounts. His old-fashioned pneumatic swivel-chair squeaked as he spun around and beamed at Geoffrey. ‘How was your return journey?’

‘Fast. I was looking forward to taking the overnight train, but the cousins had other ideas. They sent an airpod.’

‘I can understand how you might have wished to take your time. Still, I suppose another part of you was just as anxious to get back home.’

‘Not that I had any doubts that you could take care of things in my absence.’

‘My talents are perhaps better suited to household administration than animal husbandry. You have visited the herd already?’

‘No – not yet. I’ll fly out in a while, just to let them know I’m back. Then in the morning . . . I was wondering if you felt like coming with me?’

‘I’m afraid I have more business in Mombasa, and you know my aversion to chinging. I could change my plans, but—’

‘No need,’ Geoffrey said. ‘What about the day after?’

‘I don’t see why not. Is there anything in particular you want to show me?’

‘Just the usual. It’s good for the elephants to encounter you on a regular basis, and that they associate you with me.’

‘I’m happy to be of assistance. Whatever business you were on, I trust it’s done and you can return to normality?’

‘I hope so.’

Memphis nodded once. ‘As do I.’

Geoffrey said goodbye and set off wandering the house again, until his perambulations took him into the cool of the museum wing. No one else was abroad, no other family members, hangers-on or normal household staff, so he did something uncharacteristic of him and loitered, examining the glassed-over cases that had hitherto merited no more than a glance.

Eventually he found the book, the copy of Gulliver’s Travels Memphis had mentioned during the scattering. It was sitting in one of the cases, mounted on a black stand so that it stood nearly upright.

Geoffrey opened the case’s lid. It squeaked on old metal hinges. Holding it open with one hand, he reached down with the other and lifted out the book. The cover was a faded blue-grey, dog-eared at the edges. It looked dustier than it was. He gently eased the book open.

Marbled paper lined the cover’s interior. He made out scratchy grey marks, an unfamiliar but not inelegant script. It was in English, but too faint and cursive for the aug to detect and translate without coaxing. ‘To Eunice, on her twentieth birthday, January twentieth, 2050,’ he read, speaking the words aloud. ‘With all our love, Mother and Father.’

The book was obviously much older than that; it must have been an antique even at the time Eunice received her gift. He kept turning the pages, into the main story itself.

Presently he found the gap where sheets were missing, a little over halfway through the book. It was hard to spot unless one was looking for it: just a slight irregularity in the way the bound sets of pages were fixed into the spine. Perhaps the omission had been spotted when the book was placed in the library, noticed and then thought no more of – treasured books were at particular risk of suffering damage, after all, by virtue of being read and carried. On the other hand, it was equally likely that no one had ever realised.

He made a mental note of the missing page numbers, then returned the book to its rightful position. He was about to close the lid and walk away when he noticed the fine white text engraved into the base of the book’s stand.

Donated to the private collection by Eunice Akinya in 2100, immediately prior to her last deep-space mission.

She had come back a year and several months later, from the edge of the solar system. Even now, almost no one had gone that far out. But upon her return to Lunar orbit, Eunice had been in no position to go burying things on the Moon. Had she left the Winter Palace, her movements would have been tracked and recorded for posterity. She had spent the entire subsequent sixty years in the station.

Whatever she had done, from the glove in the safe-deposit box to the papers under the soil of Pythagoras, and assuming no one else had been involved, must have been done before she left for deep space.

So it was premeditated.

CHAPTER NINE

Kilimanjaro was a cut diamond dropped from the heavens, sliced at its base by a sliver-thin line of haze. It appeared to float just off the ground, by some mountainous marvel of levitation.

He found the clan without difficulty, after less than thirty minutes in the air. He came in low, executing a sharp turn with his starboard wingtip almost scything the marula and cabbage trees bordering one of the waterholes. The elephants turned to watch him, elevating trunks and flapping ears. Matilda was easy to pick out among them: she was the one carrying on unimpressed, scuffing and probing with her trunk, trying valiantly to give the impression that his return was really not all that big a deal.

He picked a stretch of ground, the grass worn away in arid furrows where he had landed on many previous occasions, and brought the Cessna in at a whisker over stall speed. He cut the engine just after the tyres bounced and let her roll in near-silence, the wings and undercarriage swishing and crackling through dry undergrowth, until the aircraft came to a stop. Still wearing the same clothes he’d put on before leaving Sunday’s apartment, he grabbed his kitbag and climbed out of the cockpit.

Geoffrey left the aircraft and walked slowly through the grass towards the elephants. The breeze, such as it was, was at his back, ushering his scent ahead of him. He had not changed his clothes, nor showered, for precisely that reason. After such an absence he wished to take no chances. Periodically he clapped his hands and bellowed a wordless call, to further reinforce his identity.

It was late in the day. Shadows spread, black and grey and purple, moving and coalescing as the breeze stirred nets and fans of vegetation. His brain began to fill in the gaps, suggesting muscular crouched forms, pairs of tracking eyes agleam with single-minded vigilance. The dusky sighing of grass on grass became the slow inhalation of patient, hungry things, drawing a final breath before the neck-breaking pounce. Random shapes in the soil assumed a crawling, serpentine aspect, making him hesitate with every third or fourth stride. That part of his brain, ancient and stupid as it was, couldn’t be switched off completely. But he had learned to disregard that nervous monkey babble as well as he could.

There, ahead, was Matilda, her darkening profile broken behind two candelabra trees. He whooped and clapped again, his armpits damp with sweat, then called out, ‘Hello, Matilda. It’s me, Geoffrey. I’ve come home.’

As if she didn’t know it was him, dropping in from the skies. The Cessna was as weird and singular as a unicorn.

She allowed him to approach, but there was a wariness in her posture, a sense of caution that the other elephants picked up on. Geoffrey halted as he heard and felt a threat rumble from one of the other high-ranking females. Matilda answered with a vocalisation of her own, perhaps a signal for reassurance or merely the elephant equivalent of, Shut up and let me handle this.

Geoffrey waited a while and then resumed his approach.

‘I told you I had to go away,’ he said. ‘Be glad I wasn’t gone longer.’

He took in her family. Hovering in the air, an aug layer had verified that all were present and correct, but it was only on the ground that he could look for signs of injury and illness. He paid particular attention to the youngsters, and saw nothing amiss.

‘So it’s all been business as usual,’ he said softly, as much for his own benefit as Matilda’s.

He found a tree-stump, squatted on it and drew out his sketchbook and 2B pencil. He worked with furious energy as the light ebbed, striving to capture the essence of the moment with as few pencil strokes as possible, like some mathematician searching for the quickest route to a theorem. No time for nuance or detail or shading; it was all about brutal economy and a devout, martial approach to the act of marking the paper. He drew until the gloom was absolute, the elephants no more than round-backed hillocks, grey shading into purple. His eyes had amped up, and the aug offered to drop an enhancement layer over his visual field, but Geoffrey declined.

When he had filled three pages he packed the sketchbook away, shouldered the bag and rose from the stump with aching bones. The elephants were calmer now, accepting his presence with benign indifference. He approached the matriarch, stood his ground and allowed her to examine him with her trunk.

‘You won’t believe where I’ve been,’ he told her. ‘Or maybe you would, if you were capable of understanding it. Maybe it wouldn’t seem much further away to you than Namibia. I was on the Moon, Matilda. How amazing is that? I was up there.’

He couldn’t see the Moon tonight, but he would have pointed it out to her if he’d been able.

Geoffrey voked the link, Matilda’s real-time brain scan appearing in the upper-left corner of his visual field. There was activity in all the usual functional areas, but nothing untoward. Her state of mind was as unexceptional as he had ever seen it, allowing for the normal patterns associated with nocturnal watchfulness.

He shouldn’t do it, he told himself. It was too soon after his return to proceed to the next step of initiating the full mind-to-mind link. But why not? He was supremely calm now, his mind settled by the flight and the placidity of the herd. Tomorrow might be different.

He voked his own brain image and began the transition. He pushed quickly through the low percentages, ten, twenty and beyond. At twenty-five per cent he felt his self-image losing definition, his mind decoupling from his body, his sense of scale undergoing a ballooning, dreamlike shift, Matilda losing size until she appeared no larger to him than one of the phyletic dwarves.

He passed through thirty-five per cent, then forty. The neural schematics showed areas of congruency, territories of brain lighting up in unison. The anatomical details were different, of course, but the functional relationships were precisely conserved. Matilda’s thought processes were guiding his own, moving fire around in his skull. He still felt calm and in control, aware that his mind was being influenced by an external agency yet retaining sufficient detachment not to be unnerved by the process. There was no fear – yet – even as he pushed through forty-five per cent and then hit the psychological barrier of fifty per cent, more than he had ever dared risk before. He didn’t just feel disconnected from his own body now; he felt multitudinous, part of a larger whole. Matilda’s identity as matriarch was so closely bound to her family that her identity encompassed other elephants. Geoffrey reeled, dizzy with the perceptual shifts, but he steeled himself and continued pushing through to fifty-five per cent, then sixty. He was a long way out now, swimming in deep neural waters. The world was coming through with the preternatural sharpness of a hallucination, dambursting his senses, flooding his brain with more stimulation than it could readily assimilate. The background noise of the waterhole and its surroundings was teased apart, deconstructed like the mathematical separation of a signal into its Fourier components, unwoven into threads of distinct and specific sound – each tree, each bush whispering its own contribution, each breath, each footfall a thing unto itself. Rumbles from elephants near and far, felt in his belly more than his head.

Yet that endless complex proclamation was only one part of the sensory tapestry. Matilda’s sense of smell was acute and untiring, and the link was lighting up Geoffrey’s olfactory centre accordingly. The translation was too crude to replicate the specific impressions, but Geoffrey nonetheless felt overwhelmed with smells drawn from his own experience, each of which arrived with an accompanying gift-wrapping of memories and emotions. The odour of freshly laid frond-carpet, in a newly furnished room at the household, when he was eight. The smell of transmission oil leaking from one of the jeeps. A box of paper-wrapped wax crayons, spectrum-ordered, like a perfumed rainbow waiting to spill its hues onto paper. Pushing his hand into a mound of fresh hyena dung when he’d tripped on the ground – and running crying into the household, holding his soiled hand as if he’d cut himself. The memories were usually of things that had happened to him when he was small, coming from old-growth brain structure, laid down when the architecture of his mind was still vigorously open to change.

Sixty-five per cent, seventy. That was enough for now, he told himself. It might even be enough for ever. Further refinements could follow – fine-tuning the interface so that the sense impressions were rendered more precisely, so that when Matilda smelled lion, he would smell lion too, and know it for what it was. It would only be a matter of building up data, cross-correlating neural states with external factors. There was no theoretical or philosophical reason why he couldn’t experience her world the way she did, with all its specificities. And then, only then, might he begin to glimpse something of her thought processes, if only in the play of shadows on the cave wall of her mind.

In all this, she had remained supremely calm and attentive, oblivious to the machines reading her mind; oblivious to the fact that her mind was being echoed and mirrored in another creature’s head. Geoffrey knew that this was the point where he should break off contact, having already achieved more than during any of his previous sessions. But another part of him wanted to forge ahead, now that he had overcome his initial fears. Not by pushing the percentage level higher, but by allowing traffic in the other direction. That had, after all, always been his ultimate goal: not just to peer into her mind, but to establish a communication channel. What was the phrase June Wing had used – a cognitive gate? The neuromachinery protocols were already in place; it would take no more than a sequence of voked commands to begin pushing his state of mind into Matilda’s head.

Was she ready for it, though? How would an animal cope, in the absence of any rational framework to temper its instinctive reactions? Nothing in her evolutionary past had equipped Matilda with the apparatus to grasp what he was contemplating doing to her.

Still, he hadn’t come this far with the project to allow such qualms to stop him now. The point was to conduct the experiment and then learn something – even if the only conclusion was that the work was a dead end, of no further value.

As a precautionary measure, he dialled the existing neural interface threshold back down to thirty per cent. It was low enough that his sense of self returned more or less to normal, but not so low that he couldn’t still feel Matilda’s sense-world bleeding into his own, with all its gaudy welter of multichannel impressions.

Five per cent in the other direction, he thought. That was more than enough to be starting with.

He thought about not doing it, of closing the link and returning to the Cessna. Then he thought of Sunday, how she would have shaken her head at his lack of boldness.

He voked the command.

The lack of any obvious change was disheartening. Matilda’s brain activity was varying by the second, but it had been doing so from the moment he activated the link. All he was seeing was the natural background noise caused by constant random stimuli, as the other elephants moved and vocalised, and more remote sights, sounds and smells came to her attention. His own mind was subject to the same continuously firing patterns, but it wasn’t putting out a strong enough signal to evoke a measurable response in Matilda’s scan. He was merely adding noise to noise.

Matilda saw better than he did, so most of the activity in his visual centre was bleed-over from her. Fleeting impressions, like the hypnogogic imagery preceding sleep, flitted across the projection screen of his mind. As with smell, the translation was too imprecise to result in anything immediately recognisable, although he kept getting the impression of bulky, rounded forms – chopped up, reshuffled and disturbingly amorphous, like a cubist’s idea of elephants.