Blue Remembered Earth

CHAPTER ONE

He was on his way back from the edge of the study area towards the research station, just him and the Cessna and the open skies above the Amboseli basin, his mood better than it had been in weeks, when the call arrived.

‘Geoffrey,’ a voice said in his skull. ‘You must come to the household immediately.’

Geoffrey sighed. He should have known better than to expect this untroubled state of mind to last.

He was over the property ten minutes later, searching the white-walled and blue-tiled buildings for evidence of disruption. Nothing struck him as out of the ordinary. Everything about the A-shaped residence, from its secluded courtyards and gardens to its swimming pools, tennis courts and polo field, was as neat and orderly as an architect’s model.

Geoffrey lined up with the rough track that served as his runway and brought the Cessna home. He bounced down, the fat-tyred wheels kicking up dirt and dust, braked hard and taxied to a vacant spot at the end of the row of airpods belonging to the household and its guests.

He let the engine die and sat in the cockpit for a few moments, gathering his thoughts.

He knew what it was, deep down. This day had been in his future for so long that it had taken on the solidity and permanence of a geographical feature. He was just surprised that it was finally upon him.

He disembarked into the morning heat, the aeroplane issuing quiet, ruminative sounds as it cooled down. Geoffrey took off his faded old Cessna baseball cap and used it to fan his face.

From the arched gatehouse in the wall emerged a figure, walking towards Geoffrey with slumped shoulders, solemn pace and grave demeanour.

‘I am very sorry,’ he said, raising his voice only when they were almost close enough to speak normally.

‘It’s Eunice, isn’t it?’

‘I am afraid she has passed away.’

Geoffrey tried to think of something to say. ‘When did it happen?’

‘Six hours ago, according to the medical report. But it only came to my attention an hour ago. Since then I’ve been busy verifying matters and informing close family.’

‘And how?’

‘In her sleep, peacefully’

‘One hundred and thirty’s a pretty good age, I guess.’

‘One hundred and thirty-one, by her last birthday,’ Memphis said, without reproach. ‘And yes, it is a good age. Had she returned to Earth, she might even have lived longer. But she chose her own path. Living all alone up there, with just her machines for company… the wonder is that she lasted as long as she did. But then she always did say that you Akinyas are like lions.’

Or vultures, Geoffrey thought. Aloud, he said, ‘What happens now?’

Memphis draped an arm around his shoulders and steered him towards the gatehouse. ‘You are the first to arrive back at the household. Some of the others will begin chinging in shortly. Within the day, some may begin to arrive in person. The others, those who are in space… it will take much longer, if they are able to come at all. They will not all be able to.’

They entered the shade of the gatehouse, where whitewashed walls cast cool indigo shadows.

‘It feels odd to be meeting here, when this isn’t the place where she died.’

‘Eunice left specific instructions.’

‘No one told me about them.’

‘I have only just become aware of them myself, Geoffrey. You would have been informed, had I known earlier.’

Beyond the gatehouse, fountains hissed and burbled from the ornamental ponds. Geoffrey shoed aside an armadillo-sized gardening robot. ‘I know this is as difficult for you as it is for the family, Memphis.’

‘There may be a difficult period of transition. The family… the business… will have to adjust to the absence of a figurehead.’

‘Fortunately, that doesn’t really concern me.’

‘You may not think so. But even on the periphery of things, you are still an Akinya. That goes for your sister as well.’

Geoffrey said nothing until they were standing in the spacious entrance lobby of the household’s left wing. The place was as crypt-silent and forbidding as a locked museum. Glass cabinets, minor shrines to his grandmother’s illustriousness, trapped her past under slanted sunlight. Spacesuit components, rock and ice samples gathered from all over the solar system, even an antiquated ‘computer’, a hinged grey box still fixed together with yellow and black duct tape. Printed books, with dusty, time-faded covers. A dismal assortment of childhood toys, no longer loved, abandoned.

‘I don’t think you realise how little effect this is going to have on Sunday and me,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Eunice was never that interested in either of us, once we strayed from the path.’

‘You are quite wrong about Sunday. Eunice meant a great deal to her.’

Geoffrey decided not to press Memphis on that. ‘Do my mother and father know?’

‘They’re still on Titan, visiting your Uncle Edison.’

He smiled quickly. ‘That’s not something I’d forget.’

‘It will be a couple of hours before we are likely to hear from them. Perhaps longer, if they are occupied.’

They had nearly reached the ground-floor office where Memphis spent most of his time, managing the household’s affairs – and by implication a business empire as wide as the solar system – from a room not much larger than a decent-sized broom cupboard.

‘Anything I can do?’ Geoffrey asked, feeling awkwardly as if there was some role he was expected to play, but which no one had told him about.

‘Nothing immediately. I shall be going up to the Winter Palace in due course, but I can take care of that on my own.’

‘To bring back her body?’

Memphis gave a half-nod. ‘She wishes her remains to be scattered in Africa.’

‘I could go with you.’

‘Very kind, Geoffrey, but I am not too old for spaceflight just yet. And you must be very busy with your elephants.’ He lingered at the threshold of his office, clearly anxious to return to his duties. ‘It’s good that you are back here now. If you could stay a day, that would be even better.’

‘I feel like a loose end.’

‘Be here for the rest of your family. You will all need to draw strength from each other.’

Geoffrey offered a sceptical smile. ‘Even Hector and Lucas?’

‘Even them,’ Memphis said. ‘I know that you do not get on, but perhaps now you will be able to find some common ground. They are not bad men, Geoffrey. It may feel like a long time ago to you, but I can still remember when you were all young enough not to hate the sight of each other.’

‘Times change,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Still, I’ll make an effort.’

He sat on the edge of his crisply made bed, in the room he had spent hardly any time in these recent years. In his hands was one of the wooden elephants Eunice had given him as a birthday gift. It was the bull, one of a set of six, diminishing in size down to the baby. The other five were still on the shelf where he had left them the last time he’d handled them. They stood on black plinths of some flinty, coal-like material.

He couldn’t remember how old he had been when the elephants arrived, packed in a stout wooden box with tissue paper to protect them. Five or six, maybe. The time when the nanny from Djibouti was still taking care of his education and upbringing. The same year he stepped on the scorpion, perhaps?

It had taken him a little while to realise that his grandmother lived in orbit around the Moon, not on or in it, and even longer to appreciate that her infrequent gifts did not actually come from space. They were made somewhere on Earth; all she did was arrange for them to be sent to him. Later it had even occurred to him that someone else in the family – the nanny, perhaps Memphis – was choosing them on her behalf.

He’d been disappointed with the elephants when he opened the box, but not quite adult enough to hide that disappointment. He had wanted an aeroplane, not useless wooden animals that didn’t do anything. Later, after a gentle reprimand, he had been made to speak to Eunice’s figment and tell her how grateful he was. She had addressed him from the green jungle core of the Winter Palace.

He wondered how good a job of it he had made.

He was reaching to put the bull back on the shelf when the request began pulsing with gentle insistence in his visual field.

He placed the bull back at the head of its family and returned to the bed, accepting Jumai’s call with a single voked command. The bind established. Geoffrey’s preference was always for inbound ching, remaining in his local sensorium, and Jumai would have expected that. He placed her figment by the door, allowing her a moment to adjust to her surroundings.

‘Hello, Jumai,’ he said quietly. ‘I guess I know why you’re calling.’

‘I just got the news. I’m really sorry, Geoffrey. It must be a big blow to the family.’

‘We’ll weather it,’ he said. ‘It’s not exactly unexpected.’

Jumai Lule was wearing brown overalls, hair messy and tied up in a meshwork dust cap, marks on her face from the goggles and breathing gear now hanging around her neck. She was in Lagos working on high-risk data archaeology, digging through the city’s buried, century-old catacombs for nuggets of commercially valuable information. It was dangerous, exacting work: exactly the kind of thing she thrived on, and which he hadn’t been able to offer her.

‘I know you weren’t that close to her, but—’ Jumai began.

‘She was still my grandmother,’ Geoffrey countered defensively, as if she was accusing him of indifference to the matter of Eunice’s death

‘I didn’t mean it that way, as you well know.’

‘So how’s work?’ Geoffrey asked, trying to sound as if it mattered to him.

‘Work is… fine. Always more than we can keep up with. New challenges, most of the time. I probably need to move on at some point, but…’ Jumai let the sentence hang.

‘Don’t tell me you’re getting bored already?’

‘Lagos is close to being tapped out. I thought maybe Brazilia, even further afield. Like, maybe space. Still a lot of militarised crap left lying around the system, nasty shit they could use people like me to break into and decommission. And I hear the Gearheads pay pretty well.’

‘Because it’s dangerous.’

Jumai offered the palm of her hand to the ceiling. ‘What, and this isn’t? We hit Sarin nerve gas last week. Anti-tamper triggers, linked to what we thought was part of a mainframe’s cryogenic cooling reservoir.’ She grinned impishly. ‘Not the kind of mistake you make twice.’

‘Anyone hurt?’

‘Nothing they couldn’t fix, and they upped our hazard bonus as a consequence.’ She looked around the room again, scanning it as if she half-expected booby traps in the made bed, or lurking on the neat white shelves. But anyway, this isn’t about me – are you all right?’

‘I’ll be fine. And I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have snapped. You’re right – Eunice and I were never that close. I just don’t really like having my face rubbed in it.’

‘What about your sister?’

‘I’m sure she feels the same way I do.’

‘You never did take me up to meet Sunday. I always wanted to meet her. I mean properly, face to face.’

He shifted on the bed. ‘Full of broken promises, that’s me.’

‘You can’t help the way you are.’

‘Maybe not. But that doesn’t stop people telling me I should broaden my horizons.’

‘That’s your business, no one else’s. Look, we’re still friends, aren’t we? If we weren’t, we wouldn’t keep in touch like this.’

Even if it had been months since the last call, he thought. But he had no wish to sound sour. ‘We’re good,’ he affirmed. ‘And it’s very thoughtful of you to call me.’

‘I couldn’t not call you. The whole world knows – it wasn’t news I could easily miss.’ Jumai reached down for her goggles. ‘Look, I’m only on a break – got to get back to the front line or my extraction chief will be yelling her head off – but I just wanted to say I’m here if you need someone to talk to.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You know, we could still go to the Moon one day. Just as friends. I’d like that.’

‘One day,’ he agreed, safe in the knowledge that she didn’t really mean it either.

‘Tell me when they sort out a date for the funeral. If I can make it, and if it isn’t a family-only thing…’ she trailed off.

‘I’ll let you know,’ Geoffrey said.

Jumai settled the goggles over her eyes and eased the breathing mask into place. He’d tell her about the funeral plans, yes – but he doubted she’d come, even if the ceremony was extended to include friends of the Akinyas, rather than just close relatives. This call had already been awkward enough. There’d be a reason, a plausible excuse, to keep her away. And that, in truth, would be easiest on both of them.

Jumai waved a hand and chinged out of his life. Geoffrey considered it quite likely that he would never see her again.

For all that Eunice’s death hit the family hard, it wasn’t long before she was shunted from the headlines. A simmering sex/vote-rigging scandal in the Pan-African Parliament, a dispute between the East African Federation and the African Union about cost overruns on a groundwater bioremediation programme in former Uganda, a stand-off between Chinese tecto-engineers and Turkish government mandarins concerning the precise scheduling of a stress-management earthquake along the North Anatolian Fault. On the global scale, continued tensions between the United Surface Nations and the United Aquatic Nations regarding extradition rules and the extent of aug access rights and inter-regional Mechanism jurisdiction. Talk of expanding the scope of the Mandatory Enhancements. A murder attempt in Finland. Threat of industrial action at the Pontianak space elevator in western Borneo. Someone in Tasmania dying of a very rare type of cancer, something of a heroic achievement these days.

Only at the household, only in this part of the East African Federation, had the clocks stopped. A month had passed since Geoffrey was called from the sky with news of his grandmother’s death. The scattering had been delayed until the twenty-ninth of January, which would give most of the family time to make reasonable travel arrangements for their journeys back to Earth. Miraculously, the delay was deemed agreeable to all the involved factions.

‘Do try not to scowl, brother,’ Sunday said in a low voice as she walked alongside him. ‘Anyone who didn’t know better would think you’d rather be somewhere else.’

‘They’d be absolutely right.’

‘At least we’re doing this to honour her,’ Sunday replied, after the standard Earth–Moon time lag.

‘Why are we bothering, though? She didn’t go out of her way to honour anyone else while she was alive.’

‘We can give her this one.’ Sunday wore a long skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, both in black velvet offset with luminous entwining threads. ‘She may not have expressed much in the way of love and affection, but without her we’d be less filthily rich than we actually are.’

‘You’re right about the filthy rich part. Look at them all, circling like flies.’

‘I suppose you mean Hector and Lucas.’ Sunday kept her voice low. The cousins were not very far away in the procession.

‘They’ve been hanging around like ghouls ever since she died.’

‘You could also say they’re taking on a burden so that the rest of us don’t have to.’

‘Then I wish they’d get a move on with it.’

The cousins had been born on Titan. They were the sons of Edison Akinya, one of the three children Eunice had had with Jonathan Beza. Until recent years the cousins hadn’t spent a lot of time on Earth, but with Edison showing no signs of relinquishing his particular corner of the business empire, Hector and Lucas had turned their attentions sunwards. Geoffrey had no choice but to deal with them during their frequent visits to the household. The cousins had a large say in how the family’s discretionary funds were allocated.

‘Bad day at the office?’

‘My work’s suffering. They’ve blocked grant allocations while they sort through Eunice’s finances. That makes it difficult for me to plan ahead, which in turn isn’t doing wonders for my mood.’ He walked on a few paces. ‘Difficult for you to grasp, I know.’

Sunday’s look was sharp. ‘Meaning I haven’t got a clue about planning and responsibility because I don’t live in the Surveilled World? Brother, you really have no idea. I didn’t move to the Zone to escape responsibility. I went there to find out what it feels like to actually have some.’

‘Right. And you think the Mech treats us all like a bunch of helpless babies.’ He closed his eyes in weariness – this was a spiralling conversation they’d had a hundred times already, without ever reaching a conclusion. ‘It’s not like that either.’

‘If you say so.’ She exhaled a long sigh, her capacity for argument evidently just as exhausted as his own. ‘Maybe you’ll get your funding back soon, anyway. Memphis told me there isn’t much more to be done now, just a few loose ends. What the cousins are telling him, anyway.’

Geoffrey hoped that was the case. The scattering, symbolic as it was – Eunice had been a lifelong atheist, despite being born to Christian parents – ought to draw a line under the recent limbo. The wheels of the Akinya juggernaut would start to turn again, from Earth to the Moon, out to their automated mining facilities in the asteroids and the Kuiper belt. (Not that the machines had ever stopped, of course, but it was tempting to think of the robots standing to attention, heads tilted in deference.)

Then they could all get on with their fantastically glamorous lives, and Geoffrey could go back to his dull grey elephants.

‘I did consider coming in person,’ Sunday said.

‘I thought for a minute you had, at least when you first showed up.’

‘Even you can’t have missed the time lag, brother.’ She ran a hand down her sternum. ‘It’s a prototype, a kind of claybot – I’m road-testing it.’

‘For… what’s the name of that boyfriend of yours?’

‘Oh, this is way out of Jitendra’s league. It’s a friend of his, someone working in mainstream robotics. I’m afraid I’m under strict orders not to mention the firm involved, but if I said it rhymed with Sexus—’

‘Right.’

Sunday grabbed his hand before he could react. ‘Here. Tell me how it feels.’

Her fingers closed around his.

‘Creepy.’

The hand felt colder than it should have, but the effect was otherwise convincing. Her face was almost as realistic. It was only when she pushed the sunglasses back onto her scalp that the spell failed. There was a deadness to the eyes, the difference between paste jewellery and the real thing.

‘It’s pretty good.’

‘Better than good. But you haven’t seen the half of it. Watch this.’

Between one breath and the next, Sunday departed. He was suddenly looking at an old woman, grey hair tied back in an efficient bun, her skin a map of thirteen decades.

Geoffrey barely had time to react before Eunice vanished and Sunday returned.

‘Given the circumstances,’ he said, ‘that was very disrespectful.’

‘She’d have forgiven me. That’s the breakthrough, the reason for the prototype. The rapid-morph material came from the Evolvarium on Mars – it’s some kind of adaptive camouflage, in its original context. Plexus… did I just say that? They’ve got exclusivity on it. They’re calling it “Mercurial”. Faster and more realistic than anything else out there.’

‘So you see a big market for this?’

‘Who knows? I’m just along for a free ride while someone else gets test data.’ Sunday let go of Geoffrey’s hand and tapped a finger against her cheekbone. ‘We’re recording constantly. Every time someone sees me, their reactions are filed away – micro-expressions, eye saccades, that kind of thing – then fed into the system and used to tweak the configuration algorithms.’

‘What about manners? It’s not good form to let people think they’re talking to a real person when they’re not.’

‘Their fault for not having the right layers enabled,’ Sunday said. ‘Anyway, it’s not just me: there are twenty of us walking around now, all chinging in from the Zone. We’re not just testing the realism of the configs. We’re seeing how well they can maintain that realism even with Earth–Lunar time lag thrown in.’

‘So you could go to the trouble of sending down a body, but you couldn’t come in person?’

She gave him a quizzical look. ‘I showed up, didn’t I? It’s not like Eunice would have cared whether any of us was physically present.’

‘I’m not sure I knew her well enough to say for sure.’

‘I doubt she’d have given a damn who’s here in the flesh and who isn’t. And she’d have hated all this fuss. But Memphis had a bee in his bonnet about us all leaving the household on time.’

‘I noticed. My guess is that Eunice stipulated something, and he’s just following the script.’

After a moment, Sunday said quietly, ‘He looks really old now.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I was thinking exactly the same thing.’

Memphis was leading the procession, walking ahead of the main party with an earthenware jar in his hands. Since leaving the house they had been walking due west towards the grove of acacia trees that marked the limit of the crumbling boundary wall.

‘Still got the old suit, though,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I think he’s only ever had the one.’

‘Either that or hundreds of exactly the same style.’

The favoured black business suit remained immaculate, but it draped off his thin frame as if tailored for some other, bulkier man. The hands that had carried Sunday out of the hole all those years ago must have been the same ones now gripping the earthenware jar, but that seemed impossible. Where once Memphis had walked with confident authority, now his gait was slow and measured, as if in every footfall lay the prospect of humiliation.

‘At least he dressed for the occasion,’ Sunday said.

‘And at least there’s a heart beating under these clothes.’

‘Even if they do reek ever so slightly of elephant dung.’

‘I thought I’d have time to get back to the research station and change, but then I lost track and—’

‘You’re here, brother. That’s all anyone would have expected.’

The party numbered around thirty, including the two of them. He’d done his best to identify the various family branches and alliances that were present, but keeping tabs on the wilder offshoots of the Akinya tree had never been his strong suit. At least elephants had the decency to drop dead after fifty or sixty years, instead of hanging around and procreating into their second century. In the Amboseli basin there were nearly a thousand individuals. Geoffrey could identify at least a hundred of them with a single glance, assessing shape and size and posture with barely any conscious application of effort, calling to mind age, lineage and kin affiliations, status within family, bond group and clan. Tracking Akinyas ought to have been trivial in comparison. There was even a matriarch, bull males and a watering hole.

Predators and scavengers, too.

What were they all doing here? Geoffrey wondered. What did they all expect to get out of it? More pertinently: what did he expect to get out of it?

A pat on the head for being a dutiful grandson? Not from his father and mother, who – like Uncle Edison – were still on Titan. Kenneth Cho and Miriam Beza-Akinya had sent golems of themselves, but the time lag was so acute that the machines were acting under full autonomy, mostly witnessing rather than interacting.

Had he expected something more of them?

Perhaps.

‘I am glad you both found time in your busy personal schedules,’ Hector said, sidling over to Geoffrey and Sunday.

‘We were always going to be here, cousin,’ Sunday said. ‘She meant as much to us as she did to you.’

‘Of course.’ Like his brother Lucas, who had also joined them, Hector wore a dark suit of conservative cut, offset with flashes of tribal colouration. The tall, muscular siblings looked uncomfortable in their formal wear. The cousins had spent so much time in space that African heat did not become them. ‘And perhaps now that we are all together again,’ Hector went on, ‘it might be an apposite time for some of us to rethink our positions within the fold.’

As if recalling some obscure biblical proverb, Lucas declared: ‘A household needs many pillars.’

‘I think the household’s doing fine without us,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Besides – aren’t we both beyond redemption as far as you’re concerned?’

‘You have an analytic mindset,’ Hector said, in his best gently patronising manner. He was only ten years older than Geoffrey but managed to make that decade seem like a century. ‘And Sunday is… adaptable.’

‘Please, spare my blushes.’

Geoffrey was about to offer a tart reply of his own when he noticed that Memphis was slowing his pace to a halt.

Conversation lulled as the party followed his lead. Sparring with the cousins had made Geoffrey tense, but now the feeling in his gut only worsened. He hated ceremony at the best of times, but especially when he had no idea exactly what was planned. He watched as Memphis turned slowly around, presenting the earthenware vase like a newborn child being held to the sky. He’d stopped in the shadow of the acacia grove, looking back towards both the low outline of the house and the mountain that rose beyond it, a scant fifty kilometres away.

Geoffrey risked a glance over his shoulder. With the sun now set, the sky beyond Kilimanjaro was a cloudless and translucent flamingo pink. It would soon be pricked by the first and brightest of the evening stars, but from the summit the sun must still have been visible. Day-lit snows glittered back at the assembled party with a blinding laser-like clarity.

Eunice had never seen those snows with her own eyes. They had melted almost completely away by the time she was born, not to begin their return until she was well into her exile.

He silenced his thoughts. The party had fallen completely silent. Memphis was speaking now.

‘She liked to come here,’ he began, pausing until he had everyone’s attention, and then repeating those opening words before continuing. ‘These trees were here when she was a little girl, and although that was long before I knew her, she never stopped coming out here to read, even during the rains.’

Memphis’s habit was to speak slowly, and his voice was at least an octave deeper than anyone else’s.

‘Even in the final months she spent on Earth, after she had returned home to prepare for her last expedition, it was still her habit to sit here, in the shade of these trees, her back against that very trunk.’ Memphis nodded, letting the party take in the particular tree with the slight hollow in its bole, a depression that could have been moulded to support a human back. ‘She would sit with her knees drawn up, an ancient, battered reader – sometimes even a printed book – balanced on them, squinting to read the words. Gulliver’s Travels was one of her favourites – her old copy’s still in the museum, a little the worse for wear. Sometimes I would call and call and she would not hear me – or pretend not to hear me – until I had walked all the way here, to this spot. As much as I tried, I could never bring myself to be angry with her. She would always smile and give the impression that she was glad to see me. And I think she was, most of the time.’ Memphis paused, and one by one – or so it seemed to Geoffrey – his attention lingered on each of the guests.

‘Thank you all for coming, especially at such short notice. To those family and friends who could not attend, or could not be here in person, I assure you that Eunice would have understood. It is enough that the family is here in spirit, to honour her and to witness this scattering.’

Memphis tipped up the urn and began to release the ashes. They breezed out in a fine grey mist.

‘She chose to return, not just to Earth but to Africa; not just to Africa but to former Tanzania; and not just here but to her household and this grove of trees, where she had always felt most at home.’

Memphis halted, and for a moment it was as if he was distracted by something only he could hear; a distant ringing alarm, an inappropriate laugh, the approach of a vehicle when none was expected.

Geoffrey glanced at Sunday, the two of them sharing a thought: was it age, momentarily betraying him?

Then Geoffrey felt something odd, something both familiar and yet completely out of place.

The ground was thrumming.

It was as if, somewhere out of sight, a multitude of animals were in stampede, and drawing nearer. Not that, though. Geoffrey knew immediately what was making the ground tremble like that, even as he refused to accept that it was happening.

The blowpipe was not – could not – be functioning. It had been out of service for at least five or six years. While there was always talk of it being brought back into operation, that was supposedly years in the future.

That it should be reactivated today, of all days…

‘It was here,’ Memphis said, the ground vibrations now quite impossible to ignore, ‘that Eunice first dreamed of her shining road to the stars. Scarcely a new idea, of course, but it took Eunice’s vision to understand that it could be made to happen, and that it could be brought into existence here and now, in her lifetime. And by sheer force of will she made it so.’

Disturbed by the drumming, a multitude of finches, cranes and storks lifted from trees in a riot of wingbeats and raucous alarm calls.

So it was the blowpipe, then, as if there had been any doubt. Nothing else had the power to shake the ground like that. A hundred or more kilometres to the west, at this very moment, a payload was racing through the bowels of the Earth, slamming along a rifle-straight vacuum tunnel that would eventually bring it right under the party. Simple physics dictated that there would be recoil from the magnetic pushers, recoil that could only be absorbed by the awesome counterweight of the Earth itself. Launching masses eastwards delayed the sun’s fall to the west. It made the day last infinitesimally longer. On the day of her scattering, the sun had slowed for its daughter.

Not everyone in attendance knew what was happening, but one by one those who had some inkling turned to face Kilimanjaro. They knew what was coming next, and their anticipation soon spread to the other members of the party. Everyone looked to the fire-bright snowcap.

The emerging payload was a swiftly rising glint.

In less than a second, the pusher lasers were activated and aligned. There were five of them in all, stationed in a wide ring around the exit iris, a few hundred metres below the summit. They were highly efficient free-electron lasers, and most of the energy they were emitting was shone straight onto the underside of the rising payload, creating an ablative cushion of superhot plasma. Their cooling systems were deep inside the mountain, so that they did not disturb the snowcap. Sufficient stray light was reaching his eyes to make the lasers visible, five platinum threads converging at the top, the angle between them slowly narrowing as the payload rose, and then appearing to widen again as it fell further and further to the east. The guests were looking along the payload’s line of flight, so they couldn’t easily tell that it was rising at forty-five degrees rather than vertically. But by now it was almost certainly out over the Indian Ocean, over the sovereign seaspace of the United Aquatic Nations.

Someone started clapping. It was, perhaps, not quite the appropriate response. But then someone else joined in, and then a third, and before long Geoffrey found himself clapping as well. Even Sunday was giving in to the mood. Memphis had by then disposed of the ashes and was looking, if not precisely pleased with himself, then not entirely dissatisfied with the way events had ensued.

‘I hope you will forgive that little piece of showmanship,’ he said, raising his voice just enough to quell the clapping. Before continuing, he looked down at the ground, almost shamefacedly. ‘A couple of days ago, after I had already returned with the ashes, I learned that an all-up test was scheduled for this afternoon. Nothing had been publicised, and the engineers were particularly keen that there be no announcement beforehand. I could not let the opportunity slip.’

‘I thought you were years away from operation.’ This was Nathan Beza, grandson of Jonathan Beza, Eunice’s late husband. Jonathan had remarried on Mars; Nathan – who had come from Ceres for the scattering – had no blood ties to Eunice.

‘So did we,’ Geoffrey muttered under his breath.

‘The damage was never as bad as we thought when this happened,’ said Hector, rubbing a finger along the sweat-line where his collar bit into his neck ‘The engineers were right to err on the side of caution, even if it hurt our shares at the time of the malfunction. But it made our competitors complacent, snug in the knowledge that we’d be out of business for a long, long time to come.’

‘What did we just put up?’ asked Geoffrey, breaking his vow of silence.

‘A test mass,’ said Lucas. ‘Offsetting of repair and redesign costs could have been achieved with a commercial payload, but the risk of a security leak was deemed unacceptably high.’ Lucas had the easy, authoritative diction of a newsfeed anchordoll. ‘Implementing watertight non-disclosure protocols within our core engineering staff has already proven challenging enough.’

‘So other than you two and Memphis, who exactly knew about this?’ Sunday asked.

‘Matters proceeded on a need-to-know basis,’ Lucas said. ‘There was no need to risk exposure beyond the family.’

‘My sister and I are still family,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Last time I checked, anyway.’

‘Yes,’ Hector said, over-emphatically. ‘Yes, you are.’

‘A number of technical and legal hurdles must be surmounted before a satisfactory transition to full commercial operations can be effected,’ Lucas said, sounding as smooth and plausible as a corporate salesbot. ‘A robust testing regime will now ensue, anticipated to last three-to-six months.’

‘The main thing,’ Hector said, ‘is that Grandmother would have found it a fitting tribute. Don’t you agree, Geoffrey?’

Geoffrey was composing a suitably tart riposte – everything he knew about Eunice told him that this was exactly the kind of self-aggrandising spectacle she’d have gone out of her way to avoid – when he realised that by wounding his cousin he would be hurting Memphis as well. So he smiled and shut up, and shot Sunday a glance warning her to do likewise.

Sunday set her jaw in defiance, but complied.

They watched until, as suddenly as they had activated, the lasers snapped off. Presuming that the launch had proceeded without incident, the lasers would by now have pushed the payload all the way to orbital velocity, doubling its speed upon emergence from the mountain. Barring any adjustments, the payload would be back over equatorial Africa in ninety minutes. By then all the stars would be out.

The party was beginning to drift back to the house. Geoffrey lingered a while, thinking about waiting until the payload returned. It was then that he noticed the child who had been there all along, mingling with the party but never attaching herself to any part of it. She was a small girl, of Chinese appearance, wearing a red dress, white stockings and black shoes. Sunday and Geoffrey both carried Chinese genes, but this girl did not look in the least African. The style and cut of her dress brought to mind a different century.

Geoffrey didn’t recognise her at all, but she was looking at him with such directness that he glanced around to see who might be standing behind. He was alone.

‘Hello?’ he said, offering a smile. ‘Can I—?’

He voked an aug layer. The girl wasn’t a girl at all, but another robot proxy. Maybe she was part of Sunday’s field test. He looked for his sister, but she was twenty paces away, talking to Montgomery, Kenneth Cho’s brother, who walked with the stiff gait of someone using a mobility exo under their clothes.

Geoffrey sharpened his aug query. He wanted to know who was chinging into this proxy body. But the aug couldn’t resolve the ching bind.

That, if anything, was even stranger than the appearance of an unknown child at his grandmother’s scattering.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Not clever, brother. It’s a long way down.’

Geoffrey steadied himself and stepped away from the roof’s edge. He’d been craning his neck, following a bright point of light as it tracked overhead. A Balinese orbital manufactory, according to the aug. For a moment, it had exerted a hypnotic draw on his gaze and he’d begun to topple.

Sunday was right: the old building lacked the safety features it was so easy to take for granted these days. No barrier around the roof, and no hidden devices waiting to spring into action to intercept his fall.

He caught his breath. ‘I didn’t hear you come up.’

‘Lost in your own little world.’ She took the wine glass out of his hand. ‘I thought you were feeling sick.’

‘Sick of playing my part, more like. Did you hear what Lucas said to me?’

‘Have a heart. I had my own conversation to handle.’

‘I bet it wasn’t as dull as mine.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Hector can give Lucas a run for his money when it comes to boring the crap out of people.’

The stars were out, the western horizon still glowing the deep shimmering pink of a plasma tube. After leaving the dinner, he had stepped over the glass skylights and made his way to the unprotected edge. Looking up, he’d studied the riverine ooze of the Near-Earth communities. The aug identified the stations and platforms by name and affiliation, painting flags and corporate symbols on the heavens. Beautiful, if you stopped to think about what it actually all meant, what it signified in terms of brute human achievement, generations of blood and sweat. Peaceful communities in orbit, cities on the Moon and Mars and further afield, and all of it theoretically within his grasp, his for the taking.

In 2030, when Eunice had been born, there’d been nothing like this. Rockets that used chemistry to get into space. A couple of mouldering space stations, bolted together from tin cans. Footprints on the Moon, undisturbed for sixty years. Some clunking, puppyish robots bumbling around on Mars, a few more further afield. Space probes the size of dustbin lids, falling into the outer darkness.

A night sky that was a black, swallowing ocean.

‘Lucas asked me what I want to do with my life,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I said I’m taking care of it myself, thank you. Then he asked me why I’m not making a name for myself. I said my name was taken care of at birth.’

‘Bet that went down well.’

‘Having the keys to the kingdom is all very well, Lucas told me, but apparently you still need to know which doors to open.’

‘Lucas is a prick. He may be blood, but I can still say it.’ Sunday knelt down, placing Geoffrey’s glass to one side. She lowered her legs over the side of the building, assuming a position that struck Geoffrey as being only slightly less precarious than standing right on the edge. ‘He’s had an empathy shunt installed. It’s legal, surprisingly enough. When he needs to become more detached and businesslike, he can turn off specific brain circuitry related to empathy. Become a sociopath for the day.’

‘Even Hector hasn’t gone that far.’

‘Give him time – if having a conscience comes between him and a profit margin, he’ll march straight down to the nearest neuropractor and have his own shunt put in.’

‘I’m glad I’m not like them.’

‘That doesn’t change the fact that you and I are always going to be a crushing disappointment to the rest of the family.’

‘If Father was here, he’d back me up.’

‘Don’t be so sure. He may not have quite as low an opinion of us as our cousins, but he still thinks you’re only pretending to have an occupation.’

Above the household, glowering down on Africa, the full Moon gave every impression of having been attacked by an exuberant child with a big box of poster paints. The Chinese, Indian and African sectors were coloured red, green and yellow. Blue swatches, squeezed between the major geopolitical subdivisions, indicated claims staked by smaller nation states and transnational entities. Arrows and text labels picked out the major settlements, as well as orbiting bodies and vehicles in cislunar space.

Geoffrey voked away the layer. The naked Moon was silver-yellow, flattened-looking. Any other time of the month, cities and industries would have spangled in lacy chains and arcs in the shadowed regions of the disc, strung out along transit lines, political demarcations and the ancient natural features of the Lunar surface. Rivers of fiery lava, seeping through a black crust. But the fully lit face, too bright for any signs of habitation to stand out, could not have looked so different to Geoffrey’s moonstruck hominid ancestors.

He still found it difficult to accept that Sunday wasn’t sitting right next to him, but was up there, on that bright nickel coin hammered into the sky.

‘Did you see that strange little girl at the scattering?’ he asked her.

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘I was going to ask if you knew who she was. I tried resolving her bind, but—’

‘It didn’t go anywhere.’ Geoffrey nodded. ‘That’s weird, isn’t it? You’re not meant to be able to do that.’

‘Doesn’t mean there aren’t some people capable of doing so.’

‘Like your friends?’

‘Ah, right. I see where this is going. You think she has something to do with the Descrutinised Zone. Well, sorry, but I don’t think she does. Plexus are monitoring Earth–Lunar traffic and they didn’t pick up anything that looked like an unresolved ching bind. Not that they’re infallible, of course, but my guess is that she wasn’t chinging in from Lunar space. Somewhere closer, maybe.’

‘Still doesn’t tell us who she is.’

‘No, but if I allowed myself to get sucked into every little mystery surrounding this family…’ Sunday left the remark unfinished. ‘Someone must know her, and that’s all that matters to me. What other possibility is there? Someone showed up at our scattering without an invitation?’

‘Maybe everyone just assumes she was invited.’

‘Good luck to her, in that case. No secrets were revealed, and if anyone wanted to eavesdrop, there were a million public eyes they could have used. Sorry, but I’ve got other things on my mind right now. Deadlines. Bills. Rent to pay. That kind of stuff.’

Sunday was right, of course – and given Geoffrey’s shaky grasp of the internal politics of his own family, it was entirely possible that the girl was some relative he’d forgotten about.

‘I can’t even point to the DZ,’ he said, grasping in a single remorseful instant how little he knew about her life.

‘It would be a bit weird if you could, brother – it’s on the other side of the Moon, so it’s never actually visible from here.’ She paused. ‘You know, the offer’s always there. You can get a tourist visa easily enough, spend a few days with us. Jitendra and I would love to show you around. There’s something else I’m dying to show you, too. That thing I did with Eunice’s face…’ Sunday hesitated. ‘There’s a bit more to it, it’s kind of a long-term project of mine. But you’d have to come and see it in person.’

Geoffrey delved into his box of delaying tactics. ‘I need to get a couple of papers out before I can take any time off. Then there’s an article I need to peer review for Mind.’

‘What you always say, brother. I’m not criticising, though. You love your work, I can see that.’

‘I’m flying out tomorrow. Want to come and see the herd?’

‘I… need to report back, about this body,’ Sunday said. ‘Sorry Like you say: maybe next time.’

Geoffrey smiled in the darkness. ‘We’re as bad each other, aren’t we?’

‘Very probably’ his sister answered, from wherever on the far side of the Moon her flesh-and-blood body presently resided. ‘Me, I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

He had hoped Sunday might change her mind – there was so much of his work he would have gladly shared with her – but when Geoffrey flew out in the morning it was on his own. The waterhole, he observed, was smaller than it had been at the start of the short dry season that accompanied the turning of the year. Patches of once-marshy ground were now hardened and barren of vegetation, forcing animals to crowd closer as they sought sustenance. Rather than the intense vivid green of the rainy season, the grass was now sun-bleached brown, sparse and lacking nourishment. Trees had been stripped of anything edible and within reach of trunks. Many decades had passed since the last prolonged drought in this part of Africa, and a real drought would never be permitted now, but it was still a testing time.

Soon he spotted a huddle of elephants near a grove of candelabra trees, and another about a kilometre further away, with a mother and calf trailing the group. Squinting as the sun flashed off what little water remained, he made out a lone bull picking its way through a stand of acacia and cabbage trees. The elephants were battleship grey, with only a few olive-green patches testifying that they had, against the odds, located some cool mud.

By the shape of his body, the relative length and curvature of his tusks and a certain sauntering quality to his gait, the lone adult male was almost certainly Odin, a generally bad-tempered bull with a range that encompassed most of the basin. Odin had his trunk curled nonchalantly over his left tusk and was making progress in the direction of the nearest grouping, the O-family into which he had been born some thirty years ago.

Geoffrey voked an aug layer, the aug dropping an arrow and data box onto the bull, confirming that it was indeed Odin.

The Cessna continued its turn. Geoffrey spotted another group of elephants, even further from the waterhole than the second. It was the M-family, his main study group. They had moved a long way since yesterday. ‘Turn north-west,’ he told the Cessna, ‘and take us down to about two hundred metres.’

The aircraft obeyed. Geoffrey counted the elephants by eye as best he could, but that was hard enough from a fixed position. He overflew the group once, had the Cessna make a loop and return, and got different numbers: eleven on the first pass, ten on the second. Giving in, he allowed the aug to label and identify the party. He was right about the M-family identification and the aug found only the expected ten elephants. He must have double-counted one of the rambunctious calves.

He had the Cessna overfly the M-family one more time, lower still, and watched elephants lift their heads to follow him, one of the older members even saluting him with her trunk. ‘Give me manual,’ he told the plane.

He selected a ribbon of land and came down three hundred metres from the M-family. The aug detected no other elephants – and certainly no bulls – within three kilometres. An adequate margin of error, and he would be alerted if the situation changed.

He told the Cessna that he would return within two hours, grabbed his shoulder bag from behind the pilot’s seat and then set off in the direction of the herd. Leaving nothing to chance, Geoffrey hefted a dead branch from the ground and used it to beat the earth as he walked, occasionally raising his voice to announce his arrival. The last thing he wanted to do was startle a dozing elephant that had somehow managed not to pick up on his approach.

‘It’s me, Geoffrey.’

He pushed through the trees, and at last the elephants were in sight. Ten, as the aug had confirmed – grazing peacefully, snuffling and rooting through dried-up grass. The matriarch, Matilda, was already aware of his presence. She was a big elephant with a broad face, missing a tusk on the right side and possessed of a distinctive Africa-shaped notch in the side of her left ear.

Geoffrey discarded the stick. ‘Hello, big girl.’

Matilda snorted and threw back her head, then returned to the business of foraging. Geoffrey surveyed the rest of the party, alert for signs of illness, injury or belligerent mood. One of the younger calves – Morgan – still had the same limp Geoffrey had noted the day before, so he voked a specific biomedical summary. Bloodstream analysis showed normal white cell and stress hormone counts, suggesting that there was no infection or skeletal injury, only a moderately debilitating muscle sprain that would clear up with time. Babies were resilient.

As for the rest of the M-family, they were relaxed and peaceable, even Marsha, the daughter who had recently mock-charged Geoffrey. She appeared sheepishly absorbed in her foraging, as if trusting that the incident was something they could both put behind them.

He paused in his approach, framed the view with his fingers like a budding auteur and blinked still frames. Sometimes he even took a small folding chair from the Cessna and sat down with a sketchbook and sharpened 2B pencil, trying to capture the ponderous majesty of these wise and solemn creatures.

‘So, old lady,’ he said quietly as he came nearer to the matriarch, ‘how are things today?’

Matilda eyed him with only mild curiosity, as if he would suffice until something more interesting came along. She continued to probe the ground with her trunk while one of the calves – Meredith’s boy, Mitchell – nosed around her hindquarters, flicking flies away with his tail.

Geoffrey voked the link with Matilda. A graphic of her brain appeared in the upper-left corner of his visual field, sliced through and colour-coded for electrical and chemical activity, all squirming blues and pinks, intricately annotated.

Geoffrey placed his bag on the ground and walked up to Matilda, all the while maintaining an unthreatening posture and letting her see that his hands were empty. She allowed him to touch her. He ran his palm along the wrinkled, leathery skin at the top of her foreleg. He felt the slow in-and-out of her breathing, like a house-sized bellows.

‘Is this the day?’ he asked.

After six months’ careful negotiation he had flown to a clinic in Luanda, on the Angolan coast, and completed the necessary paperwork. The changes to his own aug protocols were all legal and covered by watertight non-disclosure statutes. The new taps had been injected painlessly, migrating to their chosen brain regions without complication. Establishing the neural connections with his own brain tissue took several weeks, as the taps not only bonded with his mind but carried out diagnostic tests on their own functioning.

In the late summer of the previous year he’d had strange machine-like dreams, his head filled with luminous gridlike patterns and insanely complex tapestries of pulsing neon. He’d been warned. Then the taps bedded down, his dreams returned to normal and he felt exactly as he had done before.

Except now there was a bridge in his head, and on the other side of that bridge lay a fabulous, barely charted alien kingdom.

All he had to do was summon the nerve to cross into it.

Geoffrey walked around Matilda once, maintaining hand-to-skin contact so that she always knew where he was. He felt the other elephants studying him, most of them adult enough to know that if Matilda did not consider him a threat, nor should they.

Geoffrey voked his own real-time brain image into position next to Matilda’s. Mild ongoing activity showed in the visual and auditory centres, as she watched him and at the same time kept vigil over the rest of her family. He, on the other hand, was showing the classic neurological indicators of stress and anxiety.

Not that he needed the scan to tell him that: it was there in his throat, in his chest and belly.

‘Show some backbone,’ Geoffrey whispered to himself.

He voked the aug to initiate the transition. A sliding scale showed the degree of linkage, beginning at zero per cent and rising smoothly. At ten per cent there was no detectable change in his mental state. On the very first occasion, six months ago now, he’d reached fifteen and then spooked himself out of the link, convinced that his mind was being slowly infiltrated by tendrils of unaccountable dread. The second time, he’d convinced himself that the dread was entirely of his own making and nothing to do with the overlaying of Matilda’s state of mind. But at twenty per cent he had felt it coming in again, spreading like a terror-black inkblot, and he had killed the link once more. On the five subsequent occasions, he had never taken the link beyond thirty-five per cent.

He thought he could do better this time. There had been sufficient opportunity to chide himself for his earlier failures, to reflect on the family’s quiet disappointment in his endeavours.

As the scale slid past twenty per cent, he felt superhumanly attuned to his surroundings, as if his visual and auditory centres were beginning to approach Matilda’s normal state of activity. Each blade of glass, each midday shadow, appeared imbued with vast potentiality. He wondered how any creature could be that alert and still have room for anything resembling a non-essential thought.

Perhaps the relative amplification levels needed tweaking. What might feel like hyper-alertness to him might be carefree normality to Matilda.

He exceeded twenty-five per cent. His self-image was beginning to lose coherence: it was as if his nerve-endings were pushing through his skin, filling out a volume much larger than that defined by his body. He was still looking at Matilda, but now Matilda was starting to shrink. The visual cues were unchanged – he was still seeing the world through his own eyes – but the part of his brain that dealt in spatial relationships was being swamped by data from Matilda.

This was how he felt to her: like a doll, something easily broken.

Thirty per cent. The spatial adjustment was unsettling, but he could cope with the oddness of it all. It was weird, and it would leave him with the curious appreciation that his entire sense of self was a kind of crude, clunking clockwork open to sabotage and manipulation, but there was no emotional component.

Thirty-five per cent, and the terror hadn’t begun to come in yet. He was nearly four-tenths of the way to thinking like an elephant, and yet he still felt fully in command of his own mental processes. The emotions were the same as those he’d been experiencing when he initiated the link. If Matilda was sending him anything, it wasn’t enough to suppress his own brain activity.

He felt a shiver of exhilaration as the link passed forty per cent. This time, just possibly, he could go all the way. Even to reach the halfway point would be a landmark. Once he had got that far, there would be no doubt in his mind that he could take the link to its limit. Not today, though. Today he’d willingly settle for fifty-five, sixty per cent.

Something happened. His heart rate quickened, adrenalin flooding his system. Geoffrey felt panicked, but the panic was sharper and more focused than the creeping terror he had experienced on the previous occasions.

The matriarch had noticed something. The aug hadn’t detected any large predators in the area, and Odin was still much too far away to be a problem. Maasai, perhaps… but the aug should have alerted him. Matilda let out a threat rumble, but by then some of the other elephants in the family had begun to turn uneasily, the older ones shepherding the younger individuals to safety.

His sense of scale still out of kilter, Geoffrey’s eyes swept the bush for danger. Matilda rumbled again, flapping her ears and heeling the ground with her front foot.

One of the youngsters trumpeted.

Geoffrey broke the link. For a moment Matilda lingered in his head, his sense of scale still awry. Then the panic ebbed and he felt his normal body image assert itself. He was in danger, no question of it. The elephants might not mean him harm but their instinct for survival would easily override any protectiveness they felt towards him. He started to back away, at the same time wondering what exactly was approaching. He made to reach for his bag.

A dark-garbed and bony-framed man stepped out of the bush. He flicked twigs and dust from his suit trousers, apparently oblivious to the elephant family he had just scared to the brink of stampede.

Memphis.

Geoffrey blinked and frowned, his heart still racing. The elephants were calming now – they recognised Memphis from his occasional visits and understood that he was not a threat.

‘I thought we had an agreement,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Unless,’ Memphis said reasonably, ‘the circumstances were exceptional. That was also the understanding.’

‘You still didn’t have to come here in person.’

‘On the contrary, I had to do exactly that. You set your aug preferences such that you are not otherwise contactable.’

‘You could have sent a proxy,’ Geoffrey said peevishly.

‘The elephants have no liking for robots, from what I remember. The absence of smell is worse than the wrong smell. You once told me that they can differentiate Maasai from non-Maasai solely on the basis of bodily odour. Is this not the case?’

Geoffrey smiled, unable to stay angry at Memphis for long. ‘So you were paying attention after all.’

‘I wouldn’t have come if there was any alternative.Lucas and Hector were most insistent.’

‘What do they want with me?’

‘You’d best come and find out. They’re waiting.’

‘At the household?’

‘At the airpod. They were keen to walk the rest of the way, but I indicated that it might be better if they kept back.’

‘You were right,’ Geoffrey said, bristling. ‘Anything they’ve got to say to me, they had their chance last night, when we were all one big happy family.’

‘Perhaps they have decided to give you more funding.’

‘Yeah,’ Geoffrey said, stooping to collect his bag. ‘I can really see that happening.’

Lucas and Hector were standing on the ground next to the metallic-green airpod. They wore lightweight pastel business suits, with wide-brimmed hats.

‘I trust we did not disturb you,’ Lucas said.

‘Of course we disturbed him,’ Hector said, smiling. ‘What else are we to Geoffrey but an irksome interruption? He has work to do.’

‘I conveyed the urgency of your request,’ Memphis said.

‘Your cooperation is appreciated,’ Lucas said, ‘but there’s no further requirement for your presence. Return to the household with the airpod and send it back here on autopilot.’

Geoffrey folded his arms. ‘If there’s anything you need to tell me, Memphis can hear it.’

Hector beckoned the housekeeper to climb into the airpod. ‘Please, Memphis.’

The old man met Geoffrey’s eyes and nodded once. ‘There are matters I need to attend to. I shall send the airpod back directly.’

‘When you’re done,’ Hector said, ‘take the rest of the day off. You worked hard enough as it is yesterday.’

‘Thank you, Hector,’ Memphis said. ‘That is most generous.’

Memphis hauled his bony frame into the airpod and strapped in. The electric duct fans spun up to speed, whining quickly into ultrasound, and the airpod hauled itself aloft as if drawn by an invisible wire. When it had cleared the tops of the trees, it turned its blunt nose to face the household and sped away.

‘That was awkward,’ Hector said.

Lucas flicked an insect from the pale-green sleeve of his suit. ‘Under the circumstances, there was no alternative.’

Geoffrey planted his hands on his hips. ‘I suppose a lot of things look that way when you’ve had an empathy shunt put in. Have you got it turned on or off right now?’

‘Memphis understood,’ Hector said, while Lucas glowered. ‘He’s been good to the family, but he knows where his responsibilities end.’

‘You didn’t need him to bring you out here.’

Lucas shook his broad, handsome head. ‘At least the elephants know him slightly. They don’t know us at all.’

‘Your fault for never coming out here.’

‘Let’s not get off on the wrong foot here, Geoffrey.’ Hector’s suit was of similar cut to his brother’s, but a subtle flamingo pink in colour. Close enough in appearance to be easily mistaken for each other, they were actually neither twins nor clones. ‘It’s not as if we’ve come with bad news,’ Hector went on. ‘We’ve got a proposition that we think you’ll find interesting.’

‘If it’s to do with taking up my burden of family obligations, you know where you can shove it.’

‘Closer involvement in Akinya core strategic affairs would be viewed positively,’ Lucas said.

‘You make it sound like I’m shirking hard work.’

‘It’s clear to us that these animals mean an enormous amount to you,’ Hector said. ‘That’s nothing you need be ashamed of.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Nonetheless,’ Lucas said, ‘an opportunity for a reciprocal business transaction has arisen. In return for the execution of a relatively simple task, one that would involve neither personal risk nor an investment of more than a few days of your time, we would be willing to liberate additional discretionary funds—’

‘Substantial funds,’ Hector said, before Geoffrey had a chance to speak. ‘As much over the next year as the family has donated over the past three. That would make quite a difference to your work, wouldn’t it?’ He cast a brim-shadowed eye in the direction of the Cessna. ‘I’m no expert on the economics of this kind of operation, but I imagine it would make the hiring of one or two assistants perfectly feasible, with enough left over for new equipment and resources. And this wouldn’t be a one-off increase, either. Subject to the usual checks and balances, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be extended going forward, year after year.’

‘Or even increased,’ Lucas said, ‘if a suitably persuasive case were to be tabled.’

Geoffrey couldn’t dismiss an offer of increased funding out of hand, no matter what strings came attached. Pride be damned, he owed it to the herd.

‘What do you want?’

‘A matter has arisen, a matter of interest only to the family, and which necessitates a suitably tactful response,’ Lucas said. ‘You would need to go into space.’

He’d already guessed it had to be something to do with Eunice. ‘To the Winter Palace?’

‘Actually,’ Lucas said, ‘the Lunar surface.’

‘Why can’t you go?’

Hector shared a smile with his brother. ‘In a time of transition, it’s important to convey the impression of normality. Neither Lucas nor I have plausible business on the Moon.’

‘Hire an outsider, then.’

‘Third-party involvement would present unacceptable risks,’ Lucas said, pausing to tug at his shirt collar where it was sticking to his skin. Like Hector he was both muscular and comfortably taller than Geoffrey. ‘I hardly need add that you are an Akinya.’

‘What my brother means,’ Hector said, ‘is that you’re blood, and you have blood ties on the Moon, especially in the African-administered sector. If you can’t be trusted, who can?’

Geoffrey thought for a few seconds, striving to give away as little as possible. Let the two manipulators stew for a while, wondering if he was going to take the bait.

‘This matter on the Moon – what are we talking about?’

‘A loose end,’ Hector said.

‘What kind? I’m not agreeing to anything until I know what’s involved.’

‘Despite the complexity of Eunice’s estate and affairs,’ Lucas said, ‘the execution of our due-diligence audit has proceeded without complication. The sweeps have turned up nothing of concern, and certainly nothing that need raise questions beyond the immediate family.’

‘There is, however, a box,’ Hector said.

Geoffrey raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. ‘What kind?’

‘A safe-deposit box,’ Lucas said. ‘Is the concept familiar to you?’

‘You’ll have to explain it to me. Being but a lowly scientist, anything to do with money or banking is completely outside my comprehension. Yes, of course I know what a safe-deposit box is. Where is it?’

‘In a bank on the Moon,’ Hector said, ‘the name and location of which we’ll disclose once you’re under way.’

‘You’re worried about skeletons.’

The corner of Lucas’s mouth twitched. Geoffrey wondered if the empathy shunt was making him unusually prone to literal-mindedness, unable to see past a metaphor.

‘We need to know what’s in that box,’ he said.

‘It’s a simple request,’ Hector said. ‘Go to the Moon, on our expense account. Open the box. Ascertain its contents. Report back to the household. You can leave tomorrow – there’s a slot on the Libreville elevator. You’ll be on the Moon inside three days, your work done inside four. And then you’re free to do whatever you like. Play tourist. Visit Sunday. Broaden your—’

‘Horizons. Yes.’

Hector’s expression clouded over at Geoffrey’s tone. ‘Something I said?’

‘Never mind.’ Geoffrey paused. ‘I have to admire the two of you, you know. Year after year, I’ve come crawling on my hands and knees asking for more funding. I’ve begged and borrowed, pleading my case against a wall of indifference, not just from my mother and father but from the two of you. At best I’ve got a token increase, just enough to shut me up until next time. Meanwhile, the family pisses a fortune into repairing the blowpipe without me even being told about it, and when you do need a favour, you suddenly find all this money you can throw at my feet. Have you any idea how insignificant that makes me feel?’

‘If you’d rather the incentives were downscaled,’ Lucas said, ‘that can be arranged.’

‘I’m taking you for every yuan. You want this done badly enough, I doubt you’d open with your highest offer.’

‘Don’t overstep the mark,’ Hector said. ‘We could just as easily approach Sunday and make the same request of her.’

‘But you won’t, because you think Sunday’s a borderline anarchist who’s secretly plotting the downfall of the entire system-wide economy. No, I’m your last best hope, or you wouldn’t have come.’ Geoffrey steeled himself. ‘So let’s talk terms. I want a fivefold increase in research funding, inflation-linked and guaranteed for the next decade. None of that’s negotiable: we either agree to it here and now, or I walk away.’

‘To decline an offer now,’ Lucas said, ‘could prove disadvantageous when the next funding round arrives.’

‘No,’ Hector said gently. ‘He has made his point, and he is right to expect assurances. In his shoes, would we behave any differently?’

Lucas looked queasy, as if the idea of being in Geoffrey’s shoes made him faintly nauseous. It was the first human emotion that had managed to squeeze past the empathy shunt, Geoffrey thought.

‘You’re probably right,’ Lucas allowed.

‘He’s an Akinya – he still has the bargaining instinct. Are we agreed that Geoffrey’s terms are acceptable?’

Lucas’s nod was as grudging as possible.

‘We have all committed this conversation to memory?’ Hector asked.

‘Every second,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Then let it be binding.’ Hector offered his hand, which Geoffrey took after a moment’s hesitation, followed by Lucas’s. Geoffrey blinked the image of them shaking.

‘Don’t look on it as a chore,’ Hector said. ‘Look on it as a break from the routine. You’ll enjoy it, I know. And it will be good for you to look in on your sister.’

‘We would, of course, request that you refrain from any discussion of this matter with your sister,’ Lucas said.

Geoffrey said nothing, nor made any visible acknowledgement of what Lucas said. He just turned and walked off, leaving the cousins standing there.

Matilda was still keeping watch over her charges. She regarded him, emitted a low vocalisation, not precisely a threat rumble but registering mild elephantine disgruntlement, then returned to the examination of the patch of ground before her, scudding dirt and stones aside with her trunk in the desultory, half-hearted manner of someone who had forgotten quite why they had commenced a fundamentally pointless task in the first place.

‘Sorry, Matilda. I didn’t ask them to come out here.’

She didn’t understand him, of course. But he was sure she was irritated with the coming and going of the odd-smelling strangers and their annoying, high-whining machine.

He halted before her and considered activating the link again, pushing it higher than before, to see what was really going on in her head. But he was too disorientated for that, too unsure of his own feelings.

‘I think I might have made a mistake,’ Geoffrey said. ‘But if I did, I did it for the right reasons. For you, and the other elephants.’

Matilda rumbled softly and bent her trunk around to scratch under her left ear.

‘I’ll be gone for a little while,’ Geoffrey went on. ‘Probably not more than a week, all told. Ten days at most. I have to go up to the Moon, and… well, I’ll be back as quickly as I can. You’ll manage without me, won’t you?’

Matilda began poking around again. She wouldn’t just manage without him, Geoffrey thought. She’d barely notice his absence.

‘If anything comes up, I’ll send Memphis.’

Oblivious to his reassurance, she continued her foraging.

CHAPTER THREE

The woman from the bank apologised for keeping him waiting, although in fact it had been no more than minutes. Her name was Marjorie Hu, and she appeared genuinely keen to be of assistance, as if he’d caught her on a slow day where any break in routine was welcome.

‘I’m Geoffrey Akinya,’ he said, falteringly. ‘A relative of the late Eunice Akinya. Her grandson.’

‘In which case I’m very sorry for your loss, sir.’

‘Thank you,’ he said solemnly, allowing a judicious pause before proceeding with business. ‘Eunice held a safe-deposit box with this branch. I understand that as a family member I have the authority to examine the contents.’

‘Let me look into that for you, sir. There was some rebuilding work a while back, so we might have moved the box to another branch. Do you know when the box was assigned?’

‘Some time ago.’ He had no idea. The cousins hadn’t told him, assuming they even knew. ‘But it’ll still be on the Moon?’

‘Just up from Africa.’

He’d travelled like any other tourist, leaving the day after his meeting with the cousins. After clearing exit procedures in Libreville, he’d been put to sleep and packed into a coffin-sized passenger capsule. The capsule had been fed like a machine-gun round into the waiting chamber of the slug-black, blunt-hulled thread-rider, where it was automatically slotted into place and coupled to internal power and biomonitor buses, along with six hundred otherwise identical capsules, densely packed for maximum transit efficiency.

And three days later he’d woken on the Moon.

No sense of having travelled further than, say, China – until he took his first lurching step and felt in his bones that he wasn’t on Earth any more. He’d had breakfast and completed immigration procedures for the African-administered sector. As promised, there’d been a message from the cousins: details of the establishment he was supposed to visit.

Nothing about the Copernicus Branch of the CAB had surprised him, beyond the fact that it was exactly like every other bank he’d ever been in, from Mogadishu to Brazzaville. Same new-carpet smell, same wood-effect furniture, same emphatic courtesy from the staff. Everyone loped around in Lunar gravity, and the accents were different, but those were the only indicators that he wasn’t home. Even the images on the wall, cycling from view to view, were mostly of terrestrial locations. Adverts pushed travel insurance, retirement schemes, investment portfolios.

Marjorie Hu had asked him to sit in a small windowless waiting room with a potted plant and a fake view of ocean breakers while she checked the location of the safe-deposit box. He had packed lightly for the trip, jamming everything he needed into a large black zip-up sports bag with a faded logo on the side. He kept the bag between his feet, picking at the terrestrial dirt under his nails until the door opened again and Marjorie Hu came in.

‘No problem,’ she said. ‘It’s still in our vaults. Been there for thirty-five years, which is about as long as we’ve had a branch in Copernicus. If you wouldn’t mind following me?’

‘I was assuming you’d want to screen me or something.’

‘We already have, sir.’

She took him downstairs. Doors, heavy enough to contain pressure in the event of an accident, whisked open at the woman’s approach. She turned her head to look at him as they walked.

‘We’re about to pass out of aug reach, and I don’t speak Swahili.’ From a skirt pocket she pulled out a little plastic-wrapped package. ‘We have earphone translators available.’

‘Which languages do you speak?’

‘Mm, let’s see. Chinese and English, some Russian, and I’m learning Somali and Xhosa, although they’re both still bedding in. We can get a Swahili speaker to accompany you, but that might take a while to arrange.’

‘My Chinese is OK, but English will be easier for both of us, I suspect. I even know a few words of Somali, but only because my nanny spoke it. She was a nice lady from Djibouti.’

‘We’ll shift to English, then.’ Marjorie Hu put the earphones away. ‘We’ll lose aug in a few moments.’

Geoffrey barely felt the transition. It was a withdrawing of vague floating possibilities rather than a sudden curtailment of open data feeds.

‘Anyone ever come in here that you couldn’t translate for?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Not since I’ve been here. Anyone speaking a language that obscure, they’d better have backup.’ Marjorie Hu’s tone of voice had shifted microscopically now that he was hearing her actual larynx-generated speech sounds.

A final set of pressure doors brought them to the vault. The morgue-like room’s walls were lined with small silver-and-orange-fronted cabinets, stacked six high, perhaps two hundred in all. Given the virtual impossibility of committing theft in the Surveilled World, there was no longer much need for this sort of safekeeping measure. Doubtless the bank regarded the housing of these boxes as a tedious obligation to its older clients.

‘That’s yours, sir,’ she said, directing him to a specific unit three rows up from the floor, the only cabinet in the room with a green light above the handle. ‘Open it whenever you like. I’ll step outside until you’re finished. When you’re done, just push the cabinet back into the wall; it will lock on its own.’

‘Thank you.’

Marjorie Hu made a small, nervous coughing sound. ‘I’m required to inform you that you remain under surveillance. The eyes aren’t public, but we would be obliged to surrender captured imagery in the event of an investigation.’

‘That’s fine. I wouldn’t have assumed otherwise.’

She dispensed a businesslike smile. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

Geoffrey put down his bag as she left the room, the door whisking shut between them. He wasted no time. At his touch, the cabinet eased out of the wall on smooth metal runners until it reached the limit of its travel. It was open-topped, with a smaller cream-coloured box resting inside. He lifted out the box and placed it on the floor. Even allowing for Lunar gravity, it struck him as unexpectedly light. No gold ingots, then. The box, stamped with the bank’s logo, had a simple hinged lid with no lock or catch. He opened it and looked inside.

The box contained a glove.

A glove, from a spacesuit. Fabric layers interspersed with plastic or composite plating, lending flexibility and strength. The fabric was silvery or off-white – hard to judge in the vault’s sombre lighting – and the plates were beige or maybe pale yellow. At the cuff-end of the glove was an alloy connector ring, some kind of blue-tinted metal inset with complicated gold-plated contacts that would presumably lock into place when the glove was fixed to the suit sleeve. The glove had been cleaned because, despite its apparent grubbiness, his hands stayed unsoiled.

That was all there was. Nothing clutched in the fingers, nothing marked on the exterior. He couldn’t see anything lodged inside. He tried pushing his hand into it, but couldn’t get his thumb-joint past the wristband.

Geoffrey didn’t know whether he felt disappointed or relieved. A bit of both, maybe. Relieved that there was nothing here to taint Eunice’s memory – no incriminating document linking her to some long-dead tyrant or war criminal – but subtly let down that there wasn’t something more intriguing, some flourish from beyond the grave, the fitting capstone that her life demanded. It wasn’t enough just to retire to Lunar orbit, live out her remaining days in the Winter Palace and die.

He started to put the glove back in the box, preparing to stow the box back in the cabinet.

And stopped. He couldn’t say why, save the fact that the glove seemed to merit more attention than he had given it. The one constant of Eunice’s life was that she was practically minded, scathing of sentiment and pointless gesture. She wouldn’t have put that glove there unless it meant something – either to her, or to whoever was supposed to find it after her death.

Geoffrey slipped the glove into his sports bag. He put an Ashanti FC sweatshirt on top, jammed his baseball cap on top of that, resealed the bag and placed the now-empty box back into the cabinet. He pressed the cabinet back into the wall, whereupon it clicked into place and the green light changed to red.

He opened the external door and stepped out of the vault.

‘All done,’ Geoffrey told the bank woman. ‘For now, anyway. I take it there’ll be no difficulties gaining access again?’

‘None at all, sir,’ Marjorie Hu said. If she had any interest in what he had found in the box, she was doing a good job of hiding it. This is a big deal for me, Geoffrey thought: family secrets, clandestine errands to the Moon, safe-deposit boxes with mysterious contents. But she must bring a dozen people down here every week.

With the glove still in his possession, he made his way to the underground railway station. Transparent vacuum tubes punched through the terminal’s walls at different levels, threading between platforms connected by spiral walkways and sinuous escalators. Everything was glassy and semitranslucent. There were shopping plazas and dining areas, huge multi-storey sculptures and banners, waterfalls, fountains and a kind of tinkling, cascading piano music that followed him around like a lost dog.

He strolled to a quiet corner of the concourse and voked a call to Lucas. When a minute had passed without Lucas picking up, he diverted the request to Hector. Three seconds later Hector’s figment – dressed in riding boots, jodhpurs and polo shirt – was standing in front of him.

‘Good of you to check in, Geoffrey. How’s your journey been so far?’

‘Pretty uneventful. How’re things back home?’

‘You haven’t missed any excitement.’ Lunar time lag made it seem as if Hector had given the question deep consideration. ‘Now – concerning that small matter we asked you to look into? Have you by any chance—’

‘It’s done, Hector. You can pass the word to Lucas as well – I tried calling him, but he didn’t answer. Maybe his empathy shunt short-circuited.’

‘Lucas broke a leg this morning – had a bad fall during the match. What should I tell him?’

‘That there was nothing in it.’

Hector cocked his head. ‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing worth worrying about. Just an old glove.’

‘An old glove.’ Hector barked out a laugh. ‘Could you possibly be a little more specific, cousin?’

‘It’s from a spacesuit, I think – an old one. Can’t be worth much – must be millions like it still kicking around.’

‘She left it there for a reason.’

‘I suppose.’ Geoffrey gave an easy-going shrug, as if it was no longer his problem to worry about such things. ‘I’ll bring it home, if you’re interested.’

‘You’re at the premises now, right?’

‘No, I’m at the Copetown train terminal, on my way to Sunday. I couldn’t call you from the… premises – no aug reach.’

‘But the item is back where you found it?’

‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said, and for a moment the lie had emerged so effortlessly, so plausibly, that it felt as if he had spoken the truth. He swallowed hard, sudden dryness in his throat. ‘I can collect it before I come back down.’

‘Perhaps that wouldn’t be a bad idea.’ Hector’s figment was looking at him with… something. Naked, boiling contempt, perhaps, that Geoffrey had been so easily manipulated into doing the cousins’ bidding. Perhaps he should have shown more spine, talked up the offer even more. Maybe even told them to go fuck themselves. They’d have respected that.

‘I’ll bring it back. Seriously, though – it’s just an old glove.’

‘Whatever it is, it belongs in the family’s care now, not up on the Moon. How long before your train leaves?’

Geoffrey made a show of looking up at the destination board. ‘A few minutes.’

‘It’s a shame you didn’t call me from the premises.’ Hector chopped his hand dismissively, as if he had better things to do than be cross with Geoffrey. ‘No matter. Fetch it on the way down, and enjoy the rest of your trip. Be sure to pass on my best wishes to your sister, of course.’

‘I will.’

‘While remembering what we said about this matter staying between the three of us.’

‘My lips are sealed.’

‘Very good. And we’ll see you back at the household. Ching home if you need to discuss anything in depth, but otherwise consider yourself on well-deserved vacation. I’m sure Memphis will be in touch if anything requires your immediate input.’

Geoffrey smiled tightly. ‘Wish Lucas well with his leg.’

‘I shall.’

The figment vanished. Geoffrey found the next train to Verne – they ran every thirty minutes – and bought himself a business-class ticket. Damned if he was slumming it when the cousins were picking up the tab.

He was soon on his way, sitting alone in a nearly empty carriage, digging through a foil-wrapped chicken curry, lulled into drowsiness by the hypnotic rush of speeding scenery. But all the while he was thinking about the thing inside his bag, now shoved in the overhead rack. But for the fact that he had sensed its bulk and mass inside his holdall as he made his way to the station, he could easily have imagined that he’d taken nothing with him after all.

Copernicus had been sunlit when Geoffrey arrived, but ever since then he had been moving east, towards an inevitable encounter with the terminator, the moving line of division between the Moon’s illuminated and shadowed faces. They hit it just west of the Mare Tranquillitatis, as the train was winding its way down from the uplands between the Ariadaeus and Hyginus Rilles. Geoffrey happened to glance up, and for an awful, lurching moment it looked as if the train was about to hurtle off the top of a sheer cliff into an immense sucking black sea below. Just as suddenly they were speeding over that sea, the train casting a wavering, rippling pool of light across the gently undulating ground which served only to intensify the darkness beyond it. Against the unlit immensity of the great sea the train appeared to be speeding along a narrow causeway, arrowing into infinite, swallowing night.

A few minutes into the crossing the cabin lights dimmed, allowing sleep for those who needed it. Geoffrey amped-up his eyes. He made out the occasional fleeting form in the middle distance, a boulder, escarpment or some other surface feature zipping by. And there were, of course, still communities out here, some of which were among the oldest in the Moon’s short history of human habitation. To the south lay the first of the Apollo landing sites, a shrine to human ingenuity and daring that had remained undisturbed – though now safely under glass – for nearly two centuries. Back when the idea of his visiting the Moon was no more than a distant possibility, Geoffrey had always assumed that, like any good tourist, he would find time to visit the landing site. But that pilgrimage would have to wait until his next visit, however many years in the future that lay.

He chinged Sunday.

‘Geoffrey,’ she said, her figment appearing opposite him. ‘There’s got to be something screwed up with the aug, because it’s telling me your point of origin is the Moon.’

‘I’m here,’ Geoffrey said. ‘On the train out of Copernicus. It was… a spur-of-the-moment thing.’

‘It would have to be.’

‘We’ve talked about it often enough, and after the scattering I just decided, damn it, I’m doing this. Took the sleeper up from Libreville.’ He made a kind of half-grimace. ‘Um, haven’t caught you at a bad time, have I?’

‘No,’ she said, not quite masking her suspicion. ‘I’m really glad you’ve decided to come and see us at long last. It’s just… a surprise, that’s all. It wouldn’t have killed you to call ahead first, though.’

‘Isn’t that what I’m doing now?’

‘I might be on a deadline here – up to my eyes in work, with no time even to eat, sleep or indulge in basic personal hygiene.’

‘If it’s a problem—’

‘It’s not, honestly. We’d love to see you.’ He believed her, too. She was clearly pleased that he was visiting. But he didn’t blame her for having a few doubts about the suddenness of it all. ‘Look, I’m guessing it’ll be evening before you arrive in the Zone, with all the tourist crap you have to clear first. Jitendra and I were going to eat out tonight – up for joining us? There’s a place we both like – they do East African, if you’re not sick of it.’

‘Sounds great.’

‘Call me when you get near the Zone and I’ll meet you at the tram stop. We’ll go straight out to eat, if you’re not too exhausted.’

‘I’ll call.’

‘Look forward to seeing you, brother.’

He smiled, nodded and closed the ching bind.

As the train sped on across the darkness of the Sea of Tranquillity, he delved into his bag again, reaching past the Cessna baseball cap and the Ashanti FC sweatshirt.

Geoffrey angled the reading light to get a better view into the glove through its wrist opening. The wrist and hand cavity were empty, as he’d thought, all the way down as far as he could see, but the fingers were still obscured by shadow. Then he thought of his pencil and sketchpad further down in the bag, shoved in on the off chance.

He drew out the sharpened 2B. Glancing up to make sure he was still unobserved, he probed the pencil down into the glove, jabbing around with the sharp end until he found the hole where the index finger began. He continued pushing until he met resistance. Hard to tell, but he didn’t feel that he had gone beyond the first joint after the knuckle.

Something had to be wadded down there, jammed into the finger’s last two joints. Geoffrey drew out the pencil and tried the next finger along, finding that he couldn’t push the pencil down that one either. The third finger was the same, but the thumb and little finger appeared unobstructed.

He went back to the first finger, dug the pencil in again. Whatever it was yielded slightly then impeded further ingress. He tried forcing the pencil past the obstruction, so that he could somehow hook it out, but that didn’t work. He gave it a couple more goes then withdrew the pencil and returned it to his bag.

He took the glove and tried tapping it against the table, wrist end first, to loosen whatever was stuck in the fingers. That made too much noise, and in any case he could tell after the first few goes that it wasn’t going to work. He could feel nothing working loose, and if anything his poking and prodding had only rammed the obstructions further into the glove. Whatever it was would have to wait until he got home.

Or at least until he got to Sunday’s.

Certain he had exhausted its mysteries for now, Geoffrey pushed the glove back into his bag. He pulled his baseball cap out, jammed it onto his head with the brim forward, and dreamed of elephants.

‘This is your last chance,’ the Zone spokeswoman said. She was skinny, leather-clad, high-heeled, North African, with pink sparkles dusted onto her cheekbones and vivid purple hair, elaborately braided and sewn with little flickering lights. ‘From here on, the aug thins out to zilch. That bothers you, if that’s something you can’t deal with, now’s your chance to turn around.’

Stoic faces, pasted-on smiles. No one abandoned their plans, all having come too far not to go through with the rest of the trip, Geoffrey included.

‘Guess we’re set, then,’ the purple-haired woman said, as if she’d never seriously expected anyone to quit. ‘You’ve all got your visas, so hop aboard.’

The visa was a pale-green rectangle floating in his upper-right visual field, with a decrementing clock. It was the fourth of February now, and the visa allowed him to stay until the ninth. Failure to comply with the visa’s terms would result in forcible ejection from the Zone – and whether that meant literal ejection, onto the surface, with or without a spacesuit, or something fractionally more humane, was left carefully unspecified.

It was a squeeze inside the tram, Geoffrey having to strap-hang. They were rattling down some dingy concrete-clad tunnel. Sensing a change in the mood of his fellow travellers, he formulated an aug query, a simple location request, and the delay before the aug responded was palpable. He waited a moment and tried again. This time there was no response at all, followed by a cascade of error messages flooding his visual field. Simultaneously the babble of voices in the bus turned biblical.

Sensing the transition, some of the passengers reached languidly into pockets for earphone translators, or tapped jewelled ear-studs already in place. The babble quietened, lulled, resumed.

Geoffrey blinked away the few remaining error messages, leaving only the visa icon and a single symbol – a broken globe – to indicate that aug connectivity was currently impaired. The machines in his head were still functioning; they just didn’t have much to talk to beyond his skull. He sensed their restless, brooding disquiet.

The tram swerved and swooped along its shaft, dodging between the pupal carcasses of mothballed tunnelling machines. Ahead was a growing pool of light, a widening in the shaft. The tram picked its way between two rows of stacked shipping containers and came to a smooth halt next to a platform where people and robots waited. Geoffrey spotted his sister immediately. He truly felt as if it was only a few days since he’d last been in her company, even though it was years since they had been physically present with each other.

She waved. A very tall man next to her also waved, but awkwardly, his eyes shifting as if he wasn’t completely sure which passenger they were meant to be greeting. Geoffrey waved back as the tram’s doors huffed open and he stepped off. He walked over to his sister and gave her a hug.

‘Good to see you, brother,’ Sunday said, speaking Swahili. ‘Jitendra – this is Geoffrey. Geoffrey – this is Jitendra Gupta.’

Jitendra was about the same age as Sunday but easily a head taller, and very obviously a Lunar citizen: skinny, bald, boyishly handsome. Once Jitendra knew who to look at his smile warmed and he made a point of shaking Geoffrey’s hand vigorously.

‘Glad you made it!’ Jitendra declared. ‘Good trip?’

Around them robots fussed with suitcases, aiding those passengers who had arrived with non-locomotive luggage.

‘Uneventful,’ Geoffrey answered. ‘Can’t say I saw much from the train.’

‘You’ll have to come back during Lunar day. Some amazing places within easy reach of here, even if they’re not on the usual tourist maps.’

Jitendra’s Swahili was excellent, Geoffrey thought. He wondered if he’d made the effort just to impress Sunday.

‘How are you adjusting to life without the aug?’ Sunday asked.

Geoffrey took off his baseball cap and jammed it into his sweatshirt pocket.

‘Just about holding it together.’

His sister nodded approvingly. ‘A day here, you’ll forget you ever needed it.’

He gave her another hug, but this time trying to gauge the warm, breathing form under the clothes. ‘It is you, isn’t it? Not another claybot? Without the tags I’m not sure I trust anything.’

‘It’s me,’ Sunday said. ‘The claybot’s still on Earth, being driven by someone else.’ She shifted impatiently. ‘Look, let’s not stand here all day – where are the rest of your bags?’

‘This is it,’ Geoffrey said, swinging the holdall off his shoulder. ‘Travel light, that’s my motto.’

‘Don’t travel at all, that’s mine,’ Sunday said. ‘Remember what I said about eating out tonight – are you still up for that?’

‘Of course he’s up for it,’ Jitendra said cheerily. ‘Who wouldn’t be?’

Actually, Geoffrey was ready to eat – the light meal on the express hadn’t done more than dent his appetite. But he slightly resented Jitendra making that assumption for him. He eyed the other man warily, trying not to appear unfriendly but for the moment reserving judgement.

Some kind of minor commotion was going on a little further down the tram platform. Geoffrey recognised one of his fellow passengers – a big white man with chrome-tinted hair and a padded, wide-shouldered suit that made him look overmuscled. The man was being pulled aside by local officials. There was a lot of shouting and raised voices. The man was trying to break free of the officials, his face reddening.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Don’t know,’ Sunday said, as if it really wasn’t that interesting.

But Geoffrey couldn’t stop rubbernecking. He’d seldom witnessed anything resembling civil disobedience. In the Surveilled World, it hardly ever reached the point where anyone was in a position to resist authority. That man would have been on the floor by now, dropped into quivering, slack-jawed compliance by the Mech’s direct neural intervention.

Now one of the officials was holding the man’s head in a tight double-handed grip while another shone a pen-sized device into his right eye. Words were exchanged. The man appeared to give up his fight and was soon being bundled back to the tram.

‘His eyes should have stopped recording when he crossed the border,’ Jitendra said. ‘Yours will have, unless you went to great lengths to get around that limitation.’

‘I didn’t,’ Geoffrey assured him.

‘He must have had additional recording devices installed, hoping they wouldn’t get picked up by our normal scans,’ Jitendra speculated. ‘Very naughty. He’s lucky to get off with simple deportation. They’d have been well within their rights to scoop his eyes out on the spot.’

‘We’re kind of touchy about privacy here,’ Sunday said.

‘I see.’

The display of force had left Geoffrey rattled. He’d made no conscious efforts to break the Descrutinised Zone’s protocols, but what if that man had made an innocent mistake, forgetting about some function he’d had installed into his eyes years ago? The additional aug faculties that the clinic in Luanda had given Geoffrey… they couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anything in direct contravention of Zone regulations… could they? But with an effort of will he forced himself to stop worrying. He was in the Zone now. By its very nature, the amount of scrutiny he’d be subjected to from this point on would be minimal.

They left the tram station, part of a loose, straggling procession of travellers and greeters and robots. Sunday must have caught him craning his neck, looking for a view beyond these concrete and spray-sealed warrens. ‘No one bothers much with windows on the Moon,’ she told him. ‘Even above the ’lith. Too depressing at night – weeks of endless darkness – and too bright by day. You want to see Earth, or the stars, take a surface rover or suit, or ching your way to the far side. We came here for the social possibilities, not the scenery. You want scenery, stay in orbit, or go to Mars. That’s not what the Moon’s for.’

‘I didn’t know the Moon was for anything,’ Geoffrey said.

‘It’s a platform, that’s all. An event-space. A place to do interesting stuff. Think they’d tolerate the Zone anywhere else?’ Sunday was off on one of her rants now. ‘Sure, there are blind spots elsewhere in the system, but mostly that’s just because coverage gets patchy, not because people made it that way. This was on Earth, they’d have dragged some ancient clause out of the woodwork and sent in the tanks by now.’

‘I think they’d listen to reasoned persuasion first,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s not all tanks and guns down there – we do have something resembling peaceful global civilisation most of the time.’ Typical: he’d only been in Sunday’s presence for ten minutes and he was already acting like the defence counsel for the entire planet. ‘Were you born here, Jitendra?’ he asked brightly.

‘On the other side, Copernicus. That’s where you came in, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, although I didn’t see too much of it.’ They were walking along a level tunnel lined with concrete, the concrete overpainted with an impasto of oozing, flickering psycho-reactive graffiti. ‘Sunday told me you work in robotics.’

‘True-ish,’Jitendra said. ‘Although at the more experimental bleeding edge of things. Something you’re interested in?’

‘I guess. Maybe. Doing some work on elephant cognition.’

Jitendra slapped his forehead absent-mindedly. ‘Oh, I get it now. You’re the elephant man!’

Geoffrey grimaced. ‘You make it sound like I’m some bizarre medical specimen, pickled in a bottle somewhere.’

‘I don’t know how many times I’ve told Jitendra what you do,’ Sunday said, with an exasperated air. ‘I mean, it’s not like I was talking about some obscure second cousin twice removed or anything.’

Around them the graffiti reconfigured itself endlessly, except for mouse-grey patches where the paint had failed or scabbed off. Graffiti was very quaint, Geoffrey thought.

‘So, anyway: elephant cognition,’Jitendra said decisively. ‘That sounds pretty interesting. Where do you stand on Bayesian methods and the free-energy principle?’

‘If it’s free, I’m all for it.’

‘Not really a theoretician, our Geoffrey,’ Sunday said. ‘At least, theoreticians don’t usually make a point of smelling like elephant dung, or flying around in two-hundred-year-old deathtraps.’

‘Thanks.’

She wrapped an arm around his waist. ‘Wouldn’t want him any other way, of course. If it wasn’t for my brother, I’d feel like the only weird member of the family.’

She came to a stop next to a patch of wall where the muddy brown background coloration of earlier graffiti layers had been overpainted with a trembling, shimmering silvery form, like the reflection in water of some complex metallic structure or alien hieroglyph. Blocks and forms of primary colours were beginning to intrude on the silver, jabbing and harassing its margins.

Sunday pushed her finger against the wall and started reasserting the form, pushing it back out against the confining shapes. Where her finger pressed, the silver turned broad and bright and lustrous. ‘This is one of mine,’ she said. ‘Did it five months ago and it’s still hanging on. Not bad for a piece of consensus art. The paint tracks attention. Any piece that doesn’t get looked at often enough, it’s at the mercy of being encroached on and overpainted.’

She pulled back her finger, which remained spotless. ‘I can redo my own work, provided the paint deems itself to have been sufficiently observed. And I can overpaint someone else’s if it hasn’t been looked at enough. I’d hardly ever do that, though – it’s not really fair.’

‘So this is Sunday Akinya, literally making her mark,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I don’t sign this stuff,’ Sunday said. ‘And since I mostly work in sculpture and animation these days, there’s not much chance of anyone associating a piece of two-D abstraction with me.’

Geoffrey stood back to allow a luggage-laden robot to speed past.

‘Anyone could’ve seen you do it.’

‘Most wouldn’t have a clue who I am. I’m a small fish, even up here.’

‘She really is a struggling artist,’ Jitendra said.

‘And half the people who live here are artists anyway, or think they are,’ Sunday said, ushering them on again. ‘I’m not an Akinya here, just another woman trying to make a living.’

As they approached the end of the graffiti-covered corridor, Geoffrey sensed that it was about to open out into a much larger space, the acoustics shifting, the feeling of confinement ebbing. There was even a hint of a breeze.

They emerged high up on one side of a vast flat-roofed cavern. Easily two kilometres across, Geoffrey guessed. Bright lights gridded the slightly domed ceiling, drenching the entire cavern with what appeared to be a simulacrum of full planetary daylight.

Buildings crammed the space, tight as a box of skittles. Many of them reached all the way up to the ceiling and some even punched through. Towers and cupolas and spires, spiralling flutes and teetering top-heavy helices, baroque crystalline eruptions and unsettling brainlike masses, and everything shimmering with eyeball-popping colour, hues and patterns that flickered and shifted from moment to moment, as if the city was some kind of ancient computer system locked in an endless manic cycle of crash and reboot. The lower parts of the buildings, where they were accessible from street level or elevated walkways, were gaudy with layers of psycho-reactive graffiti. The upper levels carried active banners and flags or daubs of fluid, oozing neon, alongside tethered balloons with illuminated flanks.

‘Did you remember to book ahead?’ Jitendra asked.

‘It’s a Thursday,’ Sunday said. ‘It won’t be heaving.’

Down in the congested lower levels Geoffrey made out bustling traffic, electric vehicles shuffling through near gridlock like neat little injection-moulded game pieces. There were cyclists and rickshaw drivers and piggyback robots. Human and mechanical motion, everywhere.

Sunday led them across a black ironwork bridge. It carried a wooden-floored promenade with perilously low railings, interrupted here and there by booths and stands with striped canvas awnings.

‘That’s the Turret,’ she said, indicating the structure at the other end of the bridge. ‘Best views of the cavern. Hope you’ve worked up a good appetite.’

Inside the Turret it was all organic pastel-coloured forms, enlivened with glass and porcelain mosaics set into umber-coloured stucco. Sunday had led them directly to a window alcove shaped like some natural cavity worn away by subterranean water erosion. Only after several minutes of dutiful observation was Geoffrey able to confirm that the view was creeping slowly past. Sunday told him that the machinery making the restaurant revolve had been repurposed from an abandoned centrifuge. The bearings were so icily smooth it felt as if the rest of the universe was doing the turning.

He was on one side of the table, Sunday and Jitendra on the other. Sunday had ordered a big bottle of Icelandic Merlot before Geoffrey had even put his bag down, wasting no time in charging their glasses. They made small talk over the appetisers, Sunday pushing him on his current romantic entanglements, or lack thereof, asking him if he had heard from Jumai lately. He told her that Jumai had chinged in on the day of Eunice’s death.

‘Sounds very exciting, what she’s doing. And quite dangerous,’ Sunday said.

‘They pay her well,’ Geoffrey said.

Ordinarily he’d have been uneasy talking about an old girlfriend, but at least it kept them off the one topic he didn’t want to go anywhere near.

‘More wine?’ Sunday asked, when the waiter came to take away their empty appetiser plates.

Jitendra levelled a hand over his glass. ‘Need a clear head tomorrow. Robot Wars.’

Geoffrey looked blank.

‘Jitendra’s a competitor,’ Sunday said. ‘It’s a thing he does. We’ll go out and see it tomorrow, the three of us.’

‘Something to do with free energy?’ Geoffrey asked, keen to latch on to a topic that would keep them off the real reason for his visit.

‘Something else entirely.’ Jitendra lowered his voice, as if he was in dread danger of being overheard by the other diners. ‘Although June Wing will be there, I think.’

‘You work for Plexus?’ Geoffrey asked, recognising the name.

‘I do work for them,’ he said, making the distinction plain. ‘They pay me to have interesting ideas, while at the same time recognising that I could never function in an orthodox corporate environment. They also give me far more creative latitude than I’d ever get working full-time in their labs. The upside is I don’t really have deadlines or deliverables. The downside is I don’t get paid very much. But we can afford to live where we do and I have a twenty-four-hour hotline to June that some people would kill for.’

‘So this… free-energy thing – is that a Plexus research programme?’

‘Not officially, because the whole point of free energy – at least in the sense that I’m interested in it – is to create human-level artilects. And that’s obviously a fairly major no-no, even now.’ Jitendra scratched at his dark-stubbled scalp. ‘But unofficially? That’s a different kettle.’

‘We found one once,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Near our home. It tried to take over Sunday’s mind.’

‘She told me about that. What you encountered was an abomination, a military intelligence. It was designed to be insidious and spiteful and inimical to life, and it wasn’t smart enough to have a conscience. But artilects could work for us, if we make them even cleverer.’

When the waiter arrived with their main courses there was the usual minor confusion over one of the orders. Geoffrey suspected that this reassuringly human touch was now firmly embedded in the service.

‘Maybe that’s not as easy as it sounds,’ he said, ‘making machines smarter.’

‘Depends where you begin.’ Jitendra was already tucking in. ‘Seems self-evident to me that the best starting point would be the human mind. What is it, if not a thinking, conscious machine that the universe has already given us, on a plate?’

A queasy image of a brain, served up with salad and trimmings, intruded into Geoffrey’s thoughts. He shoved it aside like an undercooked entrée.

‘Animal cognition, there’s still work to be done. But the human brain? Isn’t that a done deal, research-wise?’

Jitendra pushed his food around with enthusiasm. ‘We know what goes on in a mind. We can track processes and correlate them at any resolution we care to specify. But that’s not the same as understanding.’

‘Until,’ Sunday said, ‘Jitendra comes along, with his world-shaking new ideas.’

‘I’d take credit for them if they were mine,’ Jitendra said. He inhaled a few hasty mouthfuls while holding up his knife to signal that he was not yet done talking.

Geoffrey decided that he rather liked Jitendra. And while Jitendra was talking, he didn’t have to.

‘Point is,’Jitendra continued, swallowing between words, ‘I’m not just doing this out of some deluded sense that the world gives a damn about a theory of mind. What it cares about are practical applications.’

‘Hence the Plexus connection,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You’ve seen the claybot. That’s the physical edge of things. There’s also the construct, which Sunday has been involved with at least as much as me.’

‘The construct?’

‘Later,’ Sunday said, smiling.

‘And ultimately… there’s a point to all this?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘We need better machines. Machines that are as smart and adaptable as us, so they can be us – or go places we can’t,’ Jitendra said.

Geoffrey’s expression was sceptical.

‘Look, you’re going to meet the Pans at some point,’ Jitendra went on. ‘They’re our friends, and they have one point of view, which is that only people ought to be allowed to go into space. The flesh must inherit the stars; anything else is treason against the species. On the other side of the debate, you’ve got hard-line pragmatists like Akinya Space who will always send a machine to do a human’s work if it’s cheaper. That’s why you’ve got umpteen billion robots crawling around the asteroid belt.’

‘We’re having dinner in a restaurant on the Moon,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Isn’t it a bit late to be worrying about who gets to go into space?’

‘The reckoning’s not over, it’s just postponed,’ Jitendra answered. ‘But the Pans are growing in strength and influence, and the industrialists haven’t suddenly backed off from their dollar-eyed conviction that robots make the most sense. Sooner or later, heads are going to bash. Not around Earth or the Moon, maybe, but we’re pushing into deep space now – Trans-Neptunian, the inner boundary of the Kuiper belt, and we’ve even got machines in the Oort cloud. That’s where it gets stickier. If we’re going to do anything useful out there, we’ll need smart machines and lots of them. Machines that break right through the existing cognition thresholds, into post-artilect computation. Human-level thinkers that can live with us, be our equals as well as our workers.’

‘You’re not sounding any less scary than you were five minutes ago,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Look, in a thousand years, the difference between people and machines… it’s going to seem about as relevant as the difference between Protestants and Catholics: some ludicrous relic of Dark Age thinking.’ Jitendra gave a self-conscious shrug. ‘I’m not on the side of the machines or people. I’m on the side of the convergent intelligences that will supplant both.’

Geoffrey was leaning back in his seat, blasted by the G-force of Jitendra’s conviction. ‘And this… free energy? It’s a way of making better machines?’

‘It may be,’ Jitendra conceded. ‘Don’t know yet. Too many variables, not enough data. The construct looks promising… but it’s early days and I don’t doubt we’ll take a few wrong turns along the way. All I know is that we’re unwinding two hundred years of orthodox robotics development and heading off in a completely different direction.’

‘Bet that’s what they really want to hear at the shareholder meetings,’ Sunday said.

Jitendra picked at something stuck between his teeth. ‘It’s harsh medicine. But June Wing, bless her, is at least slightly open-minded to new possibilities.’

‘Especially if there might be a dazzling commercial return at the end of it,’ Sunday said.

‘Businesswoman first, a scientist second,’ Jitendra said. ‘No sense in blaming her for that – she wouldn’t have her hands on the purse strings otherwise.’

‘Talking of purse strings,’ Sunday said, brushing crumbs from the napkin she’d tucked into her collar, ‘something I’ve been meaning to ask my brother: did the cousins cough up any more money?’

Geoffrey blinked, attempting to marshal his swirling, wine-addled thoughts into some semblance of clarity. The question had blindsided him.

‘The cousins?’ he asked.

‘As in Lucas and Hector. As in the men with the ability to end all your funding difficulties.’

Geoffrey poured some more wine and sipped before answering. ‘Why would they give me more funding?’

‘Because you showed up at the scattering, because you acted like a good little boy and didn’t get into any upsetting arguments.’

He smiled at his sister. ‘You showed up as well, and it’s not like they started showering you with benevolence, is it?’

‘I’m a lost cause; you’re not completely beyond salvation.’

‘In their eyes.’

Sunday nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘I think some more funds might be forthcoming,’ he said neutrally. ‘I obviously made a good case for the elephants. Now and then even hard-line Akinyas take a break from rabid capitalism to feel guilty about their neglected African heritage.’

‘For about thirty seconds.’

He shrugged. ‘That’s all it takes to transfer the funds.’

‘Reason I asked,’ Sunday said, stretching in her seat, ‘is that I wondered if you were up here for fund-raising purposes? It’s not like you come here very often, and the last time – if I’m remembering rightly – it was definitely cap-in-hand.’

‘I just thought it was about time I came up to see you. Are you going to throw a fit the one time I actually listen to you?’

‘All right,’ Sunday said, holding her hands up to forestall an argument. ‘I was just saying.’

Over coffee the conversation headed back into less treacherous waters: Sunday and Geoffrey trading stories about their childhood in the household, encounters with animals, encounters with Maasai, funny things that had happened between them and Memphis, Jitendra putting on a good impression of being interested and inquisitive.

When Sunday had picked up the tab and they went out onto the restaurant’s circular roof, the air had cooled and with the dimming of the ceiling lights the nocturnal effect was complete. Not that there was any sense that the city was winding down for the night, judging by the continued traffic sounds, music, shouts and laughter billowing up from below.

Sunday pointed out landmarks. Older buildings, newer ones, places she liked and didn’t like, favoured restaurants, disfavoured ones, clubs and places neither she nor Jitendra could afford. Or rather, Geoffrey thought, places that she chose not to be able to afford, which was far from the same thing. Sunday had spurned Akinya money, but that didn’t mean the floodgates couldn’t be opened at a moment’s notice, if she ever changed her mind. All she would have to do is renounce her decadent artistic ways and agree to become a profit-sharing partner in the collective enterprise.

As, indeed, could he, just as easily.

‘We’re going that way,’ Sunday said, pointing to a wide semicircular hole in the far side of the cavern wall. She was, Geoffrey realised, much less intoxicated than either of her two companions. He began to wonder, with a sense of dim foreboding, whether she had been softening him up for interrogation.

At street level they came out into some kind of all-night souk, a place of winding, labyrinthine passages roofed over with strips of tattered canvas and latticed bamboo. Food, animals, garments, consumer goods, cosmetics, surgical services and robotics parts lined the lantern-lit stalls and booths. Huge muscled snakes like coiled industrial ducting extruded from lurid green and yellow plastics. Jewel-eyed seahorses, dappled with spangling iridophores. Tiny, dollhouse-sized ponies, pink and blue and anatomically perfect. Vendors selling what Geoffrey at first took to be sheets of black, brown and pink textiles – dress fabric, curtains, perhaps – until he realised that he was looking at custom skins, vat-grown flesh sold by the metre. New skin, new eyes, new organs, new bones. Most of these commodities, being illegal elsewhere, must have been fabricated in or around the Zone itself. There was industry here, as well as artistry and anarchy. Like Dakar or Mogadishu, a hundred or more years ago: the dusty, squabblesome past that every clean, ordered, glittering African city was trying hard to put behind it.

They jostled through the souk’s crowds. Jitendra spent several minutes digging cheerfully through plastic crates of salvaged robot parts, picking up a piece then discarding it, rooting out another, holding it up to the lantern light with narrowed, critical eyes.

‘Watch your bag,’ Sunday said as they waited for Jitendra to strike a deal. ‘Thieves and pickpockets abroad.’

Geoffrey swung the sports bag around, clutching it to his chest like an overpadded comfort blanket. ‘Really? I’d have thought most of your fellow citizens went through Mandatory Enhancement screening at birth, the way you and I did.’

‘That’s true,’ Sunday conceded, while Jitendra continued his haggling, ‘but there isn’t some handy colour-coded brain module labelled “the impulse to commit crime”. What is crime, anyway? We might both agree that rape and murder are objectively bad things, but what about armed resistance to a despotic government, or stealing from the rich to feed the poor?’

‘The last time I looked, there was a distinct shortage of both despotic governments and poor people.’

‘Crime has a social context. In the Surveilled World, you’ve engineered criminality out of society using mass observation, ubiquitous tagging and targeted neural intervention. Good luck with the long-term consequences of that.’

Geoffrey shrugged. ‘Locksmiths find another line of work.’

‘I’m talking about societal timescales. Centuries, thousands of years. That’s what we’re concerned with here; it’s not all about being crypto-anarchists and throwing wild parties.’

‘You think criminality’s a good thing?’

‘Who knows? Maybe the same clusters of genes that give rise to what we loosely label “criminality” may also be lurking behind creativity, the impulse to experiment, the urge to test social boundaries. We think that’s quite probable, even likely, which is why we’ve gone to such lengths to re-engineer the public space to make crime viable again.’

‘Have fun.’

Sunday tapped a finger against her head. ‘There are Recrim clinics here where they’ll undo at least some of the work carried out by the Mandatory Enhancements. People who’ve been recrimmed can’t easily leave the Zone again, and if they do they’re treated like time bombs waiting to go off. But for some, it’s a price worth paying. I was deadly serious when I mentioned pickpockets. There are people around here who are not only fully capable of committing crimes, but who regard it as a pressing moral duty, like picking up litter or helping people when they trip over. No one’s talking about letting off nerve gas, or going on killing sprees. But a constant, low-level background of crime may help a society become more robust, more resilient.’

‘And there I was, thinking they hadn’t really got to you yet.’

‘It’s the Zone, Geoffrey. If it was exactly like everywhere else, there’d be no point having it.’

It was that same old spiralling argument, and again he didn’t have the energy to fight his corner. ‘When you put it like that, I guess it doesn’t sound too ridiculous.’

‘You’re just humouring me now.’

‘How could you tell?’

After a moment, Sunday said, ‘Didn’t mean to put you on the spot back at the restaurant.’

‘You had a point. But I’m not here with a begging bowl.’

‘Well, good. Not that I wouldn’t like you to get more money, of course. And it’s nothing to do with Eunice?’

‘Why would it be?’

‘The small fact that she just died. Very near the Moon. And all of a sudden you just happen to drop by to visit your sister, when I’ve been inviting you for ages and you’ve never come. Until now. Forgive me if I can’t help wondering whether someone in the family has put you up to something.’

Geoffrey squinted, as if she’d used some out-of-coinage phrase. ‘Put me up—’

‘Just do one thing for me, brother. Tell me there’s nothing going on that I need to know about.’

At that awkward juncture, Jitendra turned away from the stall, brandishing hard-won trophies.

‘More junk,’ Sunday said with a sigh. ‘Because we don’t have nearly enough lying around as it is.’

Geoffrey reached into his sweatshirt pocket for the Cessna baseball cap. His fingers closed on air. The hat, it began to dawn on him, had been stolen. The feeling of being a victim of crime was as novel and thrilling as being stopped in the street and kissed by a beautiful stranger.

Things like that just didn’t happen back home.

CHAPTER FOUR

They lived in a stack apartment. It had been Sunday’s originally; now they cohabited. The apartment was at the top of a tower of repurposed container modules, locked together in an alloy chassis and cut open to allow for windows and doors. Even at night Geoffrey easily discerned the faded colours and logos of the modules’ former owning companies, various Chinese and Indian shipping and logistics firms. The edifice was barnacled with air-conditioning units, spidered with pipework, ladders and fire escapes. Some kind of ivy was attempting to turn the whole stack into an olive-green monolith.

There was no elevator, not even up to the tenth-floor module where Sunday and Jitendra lived. Bounding up the skeletal staircase bolted onto the side of the stack, Geoffrey quickly understood why: reaching the tenth floor cost him no more effort than climbing a two-storey building back on Earth. He wasn’t even sweating when they arrived in Sunday’s kitchen.

‘This is amazing,’ he cried, almost happy enough that he’d put the theft of the baseball cap behind him. ‘It’s like being five again!’

‘You get used to it after a while,’ Sunday said, deflatingly. ‘Then it starts feeling like ten stories again.’ She opened a cabinet and extracted a bottle of wine, a dry white Mongolian this time. ‘Guess neither of you have any objections to another drink? Take him into the living room, Jitendra. And try not to let him break his neck on any of your toys.’

Geoffrey had never seen the apartment, had never even chinged into it with full embodiment, yet he still felt as if he had been there before. It wasn’t the layout of the rooms, the divided partitions of the cargo module, or even the furniture and textiles used to screen off the bare composite walling of the original structure. It was the knick-knacks, the little ornaments and whatnots that could only have belonged to his sister.

Glad as he was to be surrounded by things that connected him to his past, they came from a time and a place neither of them could return to. They were both grown up now, and Memphis was old, and the household felt far too small ever to have contained the limitless rooms and corridors of Geoffrey’s childhood.

He forced himself out of his funk and accepted a glass from Sunday.

‘Apologies for the mess,’ she said.

Geoffrey had seen worse. On the shelves, in between Sunday’s numerous keepsakes and objets d’art, were many toy-sized robots, or the parts of robots, all of which had been repurposed. Jitendra had butchered and spliced, creating chimeric monstrosities. In their multilegged, segmented, goggle-eyed hideousness, they reminded Geoffrey of the fossil creatures of the Burgess Shale.

He was aware, even as he planted himself on a soft chair, that he was being surveilled. Eyes – some on single stalks, others in gun-barrel clusters – swivelled and focused. Limbs and body segments twitched and flexed.

‘Are you using any of these in the Robot Wars?’ Geoffrey asked.

Geoffrey’s question appeared to confuse Jitendra. ‘In the Robot Wars?’

‘Tomorrow. You said you’re a competitor in the Robot Wars.’

‘Ah,’ Jitendra said, something clicking. ‘Yes, I am, but no, it won’t be with these robots. They’re built for cleverness, not combat. These are my test-rigs, where I try out different cognitive approaches. The ones we use in the Wars… well, they’re bigger.’ He poured himself a half-glass of wine. ‘Quite a bit bigger.’

‘You have no idea, do you?’ Sunday was sprawling on the sofa, shoes kicked off, feet resting on the mirror-bright coffee table.

Geoffrey felt at a disadvantage. ‘Evidently not.’

She looked at him, marvelling. ‘Sometimes it’s as if you’re living a century behind the rest of us.’

‘Elephants don’t care what century it is. They care what season it is.’

‘I’m going to ching June,’ Jitendra said, jumping up and wandering into another area of the apartment. ‘Need to fine-tune plans for tomorrow. Back in a moment.’

Tiredness washed over Geoffrey, bringing with it a fizzing tide of stirred-up emotions. From one moment to the next he knew he couldn’t go on with the pretence.

‘Don’t hate me for this,’ he said, unable to meet his sister’s eyes, ‘but I didn’t just come here to see you.’

‘Like I ever thought that was the case.’

Geoffrey looked up – he’d been expecting a completely different reaction. ‘You didn’t?’

‘You can’t break the habits of a lifetime just like that.’

‘Are you cross?’

Sunday cocked her head from side to side. ‘Depends what the “something else” was.’

Geoffrey sighed. ‘I didn’t want to lie to you, but I was put in a position where I really had no choice.’

‘Someone pressured you.’

Geoffrey’s sigh turned into a huge, world-weary exhalation. He hadn’t realised the burden he had been carrying around until he finally opened up to Sunday.

‘Have a guess who.’

‘Mother and Father are too far away to have got to you that thoroughly. Which leaves… Hector and Lucas?’

He nodded slowly. ‘They came to me the day after the scattering, with a proposal. Which, incidentally, I’m not supposed to discuss with another living soul.’

He told her about the safe-deposit box, about his specific instructions and how he had already violated them.

‘Scheming, manipulative vipers,’ she said, squinting as if she’d just bitten into something sour.

‘It wasn’t technically blackmail.’

‘Don’t make excuses for those stepped-on turds, brother.’ She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Look, I can understand them not wanting Eunice’s name dragged through the dirt, but why use people this way? Why not just appeal to their better natures?’

‘I’m not sure I’ve got one.’

‘You’d have done it, if they made a good enough case. But they think everyone in the world works the way they do.’

‘Well, look,’ Geoffrey said, feeling an odd, inexplicable impulse to defend Hector and Lucas in their absence. ‘What’s done is done. Sorry I wasn’t upfront with you earlier, but at least now it’s all out in the open.’

‘Yes. Apart from one small thing.’ She eyed him levelly. ‘You still haven’t told me what was in the safe-deposit box.’

Sunday Akinya did not know whether she ought to be awed or disappointed by the glove. It was certainly an unremarkable-looking item: grubby and old-fashioned, the kind of thing that, had she put her mind to it, she could easily have found in a dozen Zone flea markets. In fact, she could probably have assembled an entire spacesuit, given time.

‘That,’ she said.

‘That,’ her brother affirmed. ‘And that alone. It was the only thing in the box.’

‘Either Eunice was mad, or that glove has to mean something.’

‘That’s what I reckon – as does Hector. Do you know much about spacesuits?’

‘It’s old-looking. And that dirt is Lunar, so even if that glove was made somewhere else, it’s spent time here.’

‘You can tell it’s Lunar dust that easily?’

‘I can smell it. Gunpowdery. Or what people tell me gunpowder ought to smell like. Kind of thing you get good at, when you’ve spent enough time up here. It’s been cleaned, but you never get rid of the traces.’ With a vague feeling of apprehension, Sunday continued to examine the glove. ‘But let me get this straight. Hector told you to leave it there while you visit me, but collect it on the way down?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then so far you’re only in theoretical breach of their instructions.’

‘I’m sure they’ll see it that way.’

The glove was heavier in her hand than she had expected. The articulation was stiff, like a rusted gauntlet from a suit of armour. ‘I just mean,’ she went on, ‘we have some breathing space.’ She pushed her hand into the open cuff, as far as her fingers would go.

‘There’s something jammed into three of the fingers,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I couldn’t even get my hand past the connecting ring.’

Sunday tried for a few moments, then withdrew her hand very slowly. ‘Guess we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that it’s some kind of… well, booby trap.’

‘From Eunice?’

‘If she was mad enough to put a glove in a bank vault, she was mad enough to turn it into a bomb.’

‘I never even thought of bombs,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You’ve spent too much time in the Surveilled World. Just because you can’t assemble a lethal mechanism out there doesn’t mean you can’t do it here – or that you couldn’t have done it a hundred years ago.’ Seeing her brother’s sceptical look, Sunday added, ‘Look, it probably isn’t a bomb, but that’s still no reason not to play safe, all right?’

Even with the glove tucked into his bag, Geoffrey must have been scanned and probed a dozen times just between the bank and the railway station. Every door he went through would have been alert to the presence of harmful materials or mechanisms, and he hadn’t been stopped or questioned once. If there was something nasty – or even just suspicious-looking – in the glove, it was concealed well enough to fool routine systems.

Jitendra, who had been observing silently until then, said, ‘We’ve got our own scanner. Might be an idea to run the glove through it and be sure.’

Sunday handed it to him warily, knowing how Jitendra liked to dismantle things, often without being entirely sure how to put them back together. ‘Until we know what it’s worth, I don’t want you putting a scratch on it.’

Active doorframes were frowned upon in the Descrutinised Zone – people didn’t like walking around feeling as if their bodies were living exhibits made of various densities of coloured glass. Equally discouraged were smart textiles, the kind that could be worn or slept in, invisibly woven with superconducting sensors. Sunday had a medical cuff, which was fully capable of detecting anything seriously amiss, but on a day-to-day, even month-to-month basis, what went on inside her body was her own business. In the Descrutinised Zone, it was even possible to get pregnant without the world and his wife being in on the secret.

‘There’s a community medical scanner downtown,’ Jitendra said. ‘It’s very old – a museum piece, really. We all get our turn in it. They’ll scan anything if it’s a slow day, but if we put the glove through it everyone will want to know why, and that’ll be the end of our mysterious little secret. Fortunately, there’s a better option right here.’

‘There is?’ Geoffrey asked innocently.

‘Follow me.’

Jitendra’s den was set up in what had been the pantry and broom cupboard. Decently screened off behind beaded curtains, it was even more of a mechanical charnel house than the rest of the apartment. Generally speaking, Sunday didn’t go near it unless there was no other option.

Clamped to the edge of his workbench were adjustable arms, magnifying lenses, precision manipulators and drills. On either side of the workbench, plastic tubs brimmed with wires and connectors, homemade circuits and gel-grown nervous systems. Mounted centrally on the bench was an elderly Hitachi desktop scanner the size of a small sewing machine: a heavy chassis supporting two upright moving scanning rings on tracks. It would have been laughed at in the Surveilled World – this machine had approximately the same resolution and penetrating power as a pillowcase or T-shirt – but in the Zone one took what one could get. Secretly, as Sunday had long since realised, Jitendra derived immense delight from working around arbitrary constraints and limitations.

The scanner currently held the torso and head assembly of a doll, with two- and three-dimensional magnified images pasted up on the walls around the bench, and what looked like acupuncture needles pin-cushioning the doll’s plastic scalp. His den gave every impression of being the epicentre of some obscure Voodoo death cult.

He pulled the pincushioned doll out of the scanner, fixed the glove in place instead, then set the scanner to work. The rings whirred up to speed and jerked back and forth along their tracks while images of the glove, colour-coded in blues and pinks, graphed onto the walls.

Jitendra tapped a finger against his teeth. ‘You’re right.’

‘About what?’ Sunday asked.

‘Definitely something blocking those three fingers. Soft packing around hard contents. Like little stones, or something.’

‘But not bombs,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Nope. There’s no machinery in there, no triggering mechanisms.’

‘Think you can get them out?’ Sunday asked. ‘I mean non-destructively.’ She looked at Geoffrey. ‘Why on Earth would she put stones in a glove?’

Her brother had no answer.

‘I think I can get the packages out,’ Jitendra said, rummaging through his workbench tools. ‘Give me a few minutes here. Any loud bangs, you can revise your bomb theory.’

Sunday had decided, provisionally, that she would forgive her brother. She had not arrived at this decision lightly, being very much of the opinion that forgiveness was a non-renewable resource, like petroleum or uranium. The world should not depend on its easy dispensation, nor should hers ever be counted upon.

Yet since Geoffrey was her brother, and since he was also not a true bloodsucking Akinya, she was inclined to generosity. As much as she detested lies and concealment, she accepted that the cousins had been playing on Geoffrey’s attachment to the elephants. Her brother had faults, as did she, but greed was not among them. She could also see how troubled he had been, and how relieved he was when at last he felt able to speak about the vault and the glove. And so she decided to make no more of the matter, even though she was still hurt that he had not confided in her immediately, from the very moment the cousins tabled their proposition. But the hurt would heal, and provided Geoffrey did not lie to her again, she would forget this blemish on his character.

She led him back into the living room and drew him down next to her on the couch.

‘I think it’s time you met the construct. In for a yuan, et cetera. Remember when I showed you the face, back at the scattering?’

‘Yes,’ he said cautiously.

‘That’s only part of it. A tiny part.’ She paused, assailed by last-minute doubts, before crushing them. ‘For the last couple of years I’ve been working on something big, all of it done in my spare time. I’m building Eunice.’

‘Right…’ Geoffrey said, on a falling note.

‘A fully interactive construct, loaded with every scrap of information anyone has on her. So far, so unexceptional.’

‘I’ll take your word on that.’

‘Please do. This may be a back-room project but it’s still a level above any other construct currently in existence… or at least any I know about. The routines she’s built on aren’t proprietary. They’re highly experimental Bayesian algorithms, based on the free-energy mini-malisation paradigm. Jitendra calls her a fembot. That makes her as close to Turing-compliant as anything out there, and if the Gearheads knew they’d probably be knocking holes in the cavern about now. That’s not the main thing I want you to keep in mind, though. This is a person, brother. It’s not some made-up personality – it’s the simulation of a real but deceased individual. And sometimes that can trip you up – especially if that person happens to be someone you knew. You forget, maybe for just a second, that it isn’t her.’

‘What makes you think she knows anything at all?’

‘I’m not certain that she does, but it’s still possible that she might. I’ve been studying her life and…’ She held up her hands as if she was trying to bend a long piece of wood between them. ‘It’s like measuring a coastline. From a distance, it looks simple enough. But if I wanted to make a thorough study of her life, down to the last detail, it would cost me more than my life to do it. So that’s not an option. The best I can do – the best any one human being is capable of doing – is to plot major landmarks and survey as much of the territory between them as I can. Her birth in Africa. Marriage to Jonathan Beza. Time on Mars, and elsewhere. The construct actually knows far more than I ever will, but it won’t tell me anything unless I ask the right questions. And that’s before we even get into the voids, the areas of her life I can’t research.’ She shrugged apologetically. ‘But it’s worth a try. Anything’s worth a try.’

‘How do I see her?’

‘As a figment. Privacy-locked, so only people I allow to can see her. You’ll need access to our local version of the aug for that. It’s deliberately very basic, but it allows us to ching and interact with figments. Can I go ahead and authorise that?’

‘Be my guest.’

Sunday voked the appropriate commands, giving her brother unrestricted access to the Eunice construct. But even Geoffrey was forbidden from tampering with the construct’s deep architecture; he could tell it things, facts that it would absorb into its knowledge base, but he could not instruct it to forget or conceal something, or to alter a particular behavioural parameter.

Only Sunday could reach in and edit Eunice’s soul.

‘Invoke Eunice Akinya,’ she said under her breath.

Her grandmother assumed reality. She was as solid as day, casting a palpable aug-generated shadow.

Sunday had opted to depict Eunice as she had been upon her last return from deep space, just before the start of her Lunar exile in 2101. A small, lean woman with delicate features, she didn’t look remotely resilient enough to have done half the things credited to her. That said, her genetic toughness was manifest in the fact that she did not look quite old enough to be at the end of her seventh decade. Her hair was short and luminously white. Her eyes were wide and dark, brimming with an intelligence that could be quick and discriminating as well as cruel. She looked always on the point of laughing at something, but if she laughed, it was only ever at her own witticisms. She wore – or at least had been dressed in – clothes that were both historically accurate and also nondescript enough not to appear jarringly old-fashioned: lightweight black trousers, soft-soled running shoes with split toes and geckopad grip patches for weightlessness, a short-sleeved tunic in autumnal reds and golds. No jewellery or ornamentation of any kind, not even a watch.

She was sitting; Sunday had crafted a virtual chair, utilitarian and Quaker-plain. Eunice Akinya leaned forward slightly, hands joined in her lap, her head cocked quizzically to one side. The posture was one of attentiveness, but it also suggested someone with a hundred other plans for the day.

‘Good evening, Sunday,’ Eunice said.

‘Good evening, Eunice,’ Sunday said. ‘I’m here with Geoffrey. How are you?’

‘Very well, thank you, and I trust Geoffrey is well. Can I help you with something?’ That was Eunice to a tee: small talk was for people who had time on their hands.

‘It’s about a glove,’ Sunday said. ‘Tell her the rest, Geoffrey.’

He glanced at her. ‘Everything?’

‘Absolutely – the more she knows, the more complete she becomes.’

‘Please don’t talk about me as if I’m not in the room.’

‘My apologies, Eunice,’ Sunday answered. She did not, of course, ever refer to her as ‘grandmother’. Even if that had been Eunice’s chosen form of address, Sunday would have found it inappropriate. Eunice was a label, a name pasted onto a bundle of software reflexes that only happened to look like a living human being.

‘I found a glove,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It was in a safe-deposit box of the Central African Bank, in Copernicus City. The box was registered in your name.’

‘What kind of glove?’ Eunice asked, with the sharpness of a fierce cross-examiner.

‘From an old spacesuit. We think maybe it belonged to a Moon suit.’

‘We wondered if it might mean anything,’ Sunday said. ‘Like, was there a glove that had some particular significance to you, something connected to one of your expeditions?’

‘No.’

‘Did you lose a glove, or have something happen in which a glove played a decisive role?’

‘I have already answered that question, Sunday.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘There’s something inside the glove,’ Geoffrey said, ‘stuffed into the fingers. Jogging any memories?’

‘If I have no recollection of the glove, then I am hardly likely to be able to shed any light on its contents, am I?’

‘All right,’ Sunday said, sensing a brick wall. ‘Let’s broaden the enquiry. You used a few spacesuits in your time. Was there one that stands out above all the others? Did one save your life, or something like that?’

‘You’ll have to narrow it down for me, dear. The primary function of spacesuits is to preserve life. That is what they do.’

‘I mean,’ Sunday elaborated patiently, ‘in a significant way. Was there an accident, something like that – a dramatic situation in which a spacesuit played a pivotal, decisive role?’ As accustomed as she was to dealing with the construct – and she’d logged hundreds of hours of conversation – she still had to contain her annoyance and frustration on occasion.

‘There were many “dramatic situations”,’ Eunice said. ‘One might venture to say that my entire career was composed of “dramatic situations”. That’s what happens when you choose to place yourself in hazardous environments, far from the safety net of civilisation.’

‘She only asked,’ Geoffrey said.

‘We’re on the Moon,’ Sunday said, the model of patience ‘Did anything ever happen here?’

‘Many things happened to me on the Moon, dear child. It was no more or less forgiving an environment than anywhere else in the system. Just because Earth’s hanging up there like a big blue marble doesn’t mean it’ll save you if you do something stupid. And I was not stupid and I still got into trouble.’

‘Prickly, isn’t she?’ Geoffrey murmured.

Eunice turned to him. ‘What did you say?’

‘You can’t whisper in her presence,’ Sunday said. ‘She hears everything, even subvocalisations. I probably should have mentioned that already.’ She sighed and slipped into a momentary aug trance.

Eunice and her chair vanished.

‘What just happened?’

‘I de-voked her and scrubbed the last ten seconds of working memory. That way she won’t remember you calling her prickly, and she won’t therefore hold a permanent grudge against you for the rest of your existence.’

‘Was she always like this with adults?’

‘I don’t think she was particularly receptive to criticism. I also don’t think she was one to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.’

‘Then I suppose she’s just marked me down as one.’

‘Until I scrubbed her working memory. But don’t feel too bad about it. In the early days I must have scrubbed and re-scrubbed about a million times. To say we kept getting off on the wrong foot… that would be a major understatement. But again, it’s my fault, not hers. Right now what we have is a cartoon, a crude caricature of the real thing. I’m trying to smooth the rough edges, tone down the exaggerations. Until that’s done, we can’t make any judgements about the real Eunice Akinya.’

‘Then I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. Although she wasn’t much help, was she?’

‘If she has anything useful to tell us, we’ll need to zero in on it with some more information, fish it out of her. It’s that or sit here while she recounts every significant incident of her life – and believe me, your tourist visa won’t begin to cover that.’

A swish of beaded curtains heralded Jitendra’s return.

‘Perhaps I may now be of assistance.’ He held out his hand: the three small wadded packages resting in his palm resembled paper-wrapped candies.

Jitendra put the packages down on the coffee table. They each took one and spread the wrapping open. Coloured stones tinkled out onto the coffee table’s glass top, looking just like the hard-boiled candies the wrappers suggested.

‘Real?’ Sunday asked.

‘Afraid not,’ Jitendra said. ‘Cheap plastic fakes.’

The three of them stared dispiritedly at the imitation gems, as if willing them into semi-precious rarity. Sunday’s were a vivid, fake-looking green, Geoffrey’s blood-red, Jitendra’s a pale icy blue.

There were eight green gems, but perhaps double the number of red and blue ones. Jitendra was already doing a proper count, as if it might be significant.

‘Did you damage the glove getting them out?’ Sunday asked.

‘Not in the slightest,’ Jitendra said. ‘And I was careful to record which finger each group of gems came out of.’

‘We could boot her up again and ask about them,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I don’t think it’ll get us anywhere,’ Sunday said.

‘And I suppose we’d be wise not to deliberately antagonise her by repeating ourselves. Can she keep stuff from us?’ Geoffrey asked.

Jitendra was still moving the gems around, arranging them into patterns like a distracted child playing with his food. ‘Your sister and I,’ he said, ‘have long and involved discussions about the precise epistemological status of the Eunice construct. Sunday is convinced that the construct is incapable of malicious concealment. I am rather less certain of that.’

‘It won’t lie,’ Sunday said, hoping to forestall another long-winded debate about a topic they could never hope to resolve, ‘but the real Eunice might well have done. That’s what we have to remember.’

‘Eight, fifteen, seventeen,’ Jitendra said. ‘Green, red and blue in that order. These are the numbers of gems.’

‘You think there’s some significance to that?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘The green ones are larger,’ Sunday said. ‘She couldn’t get as many of those into the finger.’

‘Perhaps,’ Jitendra said.

‘Maybe it’s the colours that mean something, not the numbers,’ Geoffrey said.

‘It’s the numbers, not the colours,’ Jitendra replied dismissively.

‘You sure about that?’ Sunday asked.

‘Absolutely. The gems are just different colours to stop us mixing them up. Orange, pink and yellow would have sufficed for all the difference it makes.’

‘The bigger question,’ Geoffrey said, ‘is exactly when I should tell the cousins. When I sneaked the glove out of the vault, I didn’t know that there might be something inside it.’

‘Nothing to stop you stuffing the gems back into the glove and claiming you never knew about them,’ Sunday said.

‘Someone will take a good look at the glove when I go through Earthbound customs. Then I’ll have some serious explaining to do.’

Sunday shrugged. ‘Not exactly crime of the century, smuggling cheap plastic gems.’

‘And I’m a researcher crawling around on his belly begging for money. The slightest blemish on my character, the slightest hint of impropriety, and I’m screwed.’

Geoffrey was standing now, with his arms folded, striking a pose of imperturbable determination. Sunday knew her brother well enough to realise that he was not likely to budge on this point.

So she wouldn’t push him just yet.

‘Eight, fifteen, seventeen,’ Jitendra said. ‘I know these numbers. I’m sure they mean something.’ He pressed his fingers against his forehead, like a man tormented.

CHAPTER FIVE

In the morning the taxi dropped them at the base of one of the ceiling-penetrating towers, a faceted pineapple with neon snakes coiling up its flanks. In the smoke-coloured lobby a queue for the elevators had already formed. Serious-looking young people milled around, several of whom were evidently well known to Sunday and Jitendra. Hands were pumped, knuckles touched, high-fives made, whispered confidences exchanged. They were speaking Swahili, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Punjabi, English. Some were multilingual, others were making do with earphone translators, usually ornamented with lights and jewellery, or just enthusiastic gesturing. The air crackled with rivalry and the potential for swift backstabbing.

Geoffrey hadn’t sensed anything like it since his last academic conference.

‘It’s a big deal for Jitendra,’ Sunday explained. ‘Only two or three tournaments a year matter as much as this one. Reason everyone’s come out of the woodwork.’ She gave her partner a playful punch. ‘Nerves kicking in yet, Mister Gupta?’

‘If they weren’t, there’d be something badly wrong with me.’ Jitendra was working his fingers, his forearm muscles tensing and relaxing in a machinelike rhythm. He jogged frantically on the spot until their elevator arrived. ‘But I’m not afraid.’

The elevator shot them up through the core of the building, through the ceiling, through metres of compacted Lunar soil, onto the night-drenched surface. They exited in small glass-sided pimple: the embarkation lounge for bubble-canopied rovers, docked like suckling piglets around the building’s perimeter. In all directions, a hundred or so metres apart, the ground was pierced by the uppermost sections of other structures, glowing with lights and symbols, spilling reds and blues and greens across the wheel-furrowed ground. A couple of suited figures trudged between parked vehicles, carrying suitcase-sized toolkits. Other than that, there was a striking absence of visible human activity.

‘Is this where it all happens?’ he asked.

‘Way to go yet, brother,’ Sunday said.

Before very long they were aboard one of the rovers, gliding away from the embarkation structure. The rover had six huge openwork wheels, the powdery soil sifting through them in constant grey cataracts. As the rover traversed a boulder, the wheels deformed to ensure the transit was as smooth as possible. The driver – and there was a driver, not just a machine – clearly took a gleeful delight in heading directly for the worst of these obstacles. She was sitting up front, hands on joysticks, dreadlocked scalp nodding to private music.

Soon the buildings receded to a clot of coloured lights, and not long after, they fell over the horizon. Now the only illumination came from the moving glow of the rover’s canopy and the very occasional vehicle passing in the other direction.

‘I thought I’d be picking up full aug signals by now,’ Geoffrey said. With the bubble canopy packed to capacity, the three of them were strap-hanging. His aug icon still showed a broken globe.

‘You’re still in the Zone,’ Sunday said. ‘Think of this as a tongue sticking out, with a little micro-Zone at one end of it. There’s no Mech here, just our stripped-down private aug. Even if the Surveilled World could reach us here, we’d put in our own jamming systems.’

In the absence of airglow it came as a surprise to summit a slight rise and suddenly be overlooking an amphitheatre of blazing light: a kilometre-wide crater repurposed as arena, with pressurised galleries sunk back into its inner wall. Spherical, hooded viewing pods resembled so many goggling eyeballs, linked by the fatty optic nerves of umbilical connecting tunnels. The rover passed through an excavated cleft in the crater wall, then drove around the perimeter.

Geoffrey pushed to the window. Huge machines littered the ground, beached by some vast Selenean tide. Worms or maggots or centipedes: segmented, with plates of deftly interlocking body armour and ranks of powerful tractor limbs running down the lengths of their submarine-sized bodies. They had chewing mouths, drilling probosces, fierce grappling and ripping devices. The ghosts of sprayed-on emblems survived here and there, almost worn away by abrasion where the machines had rolled over on their sides or scuffed against each other. Vivid silvery scars, not yet tarnished by the chemical changes caused by cosmic ray strikes, betokened fresh injury.

The machines lying around the perimeter were being worked on, readied for combat. Service gantries and cherry pickers had been rolled up, and suited figures were repairing damage or effecting subtle design embellishments with vacuum welding gear. There must have been at least twenty machines, and that wasn’t counting those located further into the arena, lying side by side or bent around each other, mostly in pairs. Geoffrey presumed this was a lull between bouts, since nothing much appeared to be happening.

‘I’m guessing these machines weren’t originally made for your fun and games,’ he said to Jitendra.

‘Heavy-duty mining and tunnelling equipment,’ Jitendra said. ‘Too beat-up or slow for the big companies to keep using, so they sell it off to us for little more than scrap value.’

Geoffrey laughed. ‘And this is the most productive thing you could think of doing with them?’

‘It’s a damn sight better than staging real wars,’ Sunday said.

‘This is mine,’ Jitendra said as they drove past one of the waiting combatants. ‘Or rather, I have a quarter stake in it, and I get to drive it when my turn comes around.’

If anything it looked a little more battle-scarred than its neighbours, with chunks nibbled out of its side-plating exposing a vile gristle of hydraulics, control ducting and power cables. Plexus’s nerve-node emblem was faint on the machine’s side.

‘She’s taken a few hits,’ Jitendra explained, superfluously.

‘Do you… get inside it?’

‘Fuck, no.’ Jitendra stared at Geoffrey as if he’d lost his mind. ‘For a start, these things are dirty – they’re running nuclear reactors from the Stone Age. Also, there’s no room inside them. Also, it’s incredibly dangerous, being inside one robot while another robot’s trying to smash yours to pieces.’

‘I suppose it would be,’ Geoffrey said. ‘So – when does it all start?’

Jitendra looked at him askance. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I mean, when does the fighting begin?’

‘It already has, brother,’ Sunday said. ‘They’re fighting now. Out there. At this very moment.’

When the rover docked, they took him up into one of the private viewing pods. It contained a bar and a semicircle of normal seats, grouped around eight cockpits: partially enclosed chairs, big and bulky as ejector seats, their pale-green frames plastered with advertising decals and peeling warning stickers. Five people were already strapped in, with transcranial stimulation helmets lowered over their skulls.

‘Geoffrey,’ Sunday said, ‘I’d like you to meet June Wing. June – this is my brother, up from Africa.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Geoffrey.’

June Wing was a demure Chinese woman in a floor-length black skirt and maroon business jacket over a pearl blouse, with a silver clasp at the neck. Her grey-white hair was neatly combed and pinned, her expression grave. The look, Geoffrey concluded, was too disciplinarian to be unintentional. She wanted to project authoritarian firmness.

They shook hands. Her flesh was cold and rubbery. Another golem, then, although whether it was fixed form or claybot was impossible to determine.

‘We sponsor Jitendra’s team,’ June said. ‘I can’t normally find time to make it to the tournaments, but today’s an exception. I see you’re here in the flesh – how’s your trip been so far?’

‘Very enjoyable,’ Geoffrey said, which was not entirely a lie.

‘Sunday told me you’re working on elephant cognition. What are your objectives?’

Geoffrey blinked at the directness of June Wing’s interrogation. ‘Well, there are a number of different avenues.’

‘The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, or towards some practical goal?’

‘Both, I hope.’

‘I’ve just pulled up your pubs list. Considering you work alone, in what might be considered a less than fashionable area, you have a reasonable impact factor.’

Reasonable. Geoffrey thought it was a lot better than reasonable.

‘Perhaps you should come and work for Plexus,’ June Wing said.

‘Well, I—’

‘You have obligations back home.’

‘Yes.’

‘We’re very interested in minds, Geoffrey. Not just in the studying of mental processes, but in the deeper mysteries. What does another mind think? What does it feel? When I think of the colour red, does my perception tally with yours? When we claim to be feeling happy or sad, are we really experiencing the same emotions?’

‘The qualia problem.’

‘We think it’s tractable. Direct mind-to-mind process correlation. A cognitive gate. Wouldn’t that be something?’

‘It would,’ he admitted. June Wing clearly had more than a passing understanding of his work, or had deduced the thrust of it from a cursory review of his publications list. He was inclined to believe the latter, but with that came an unsettling implication.

He must be talking to one of the cleverest people he’d ever met.

How would it feel to be in the same room as her, not just a robot copy?

‘Well, you know how to reach me if you ever decide to broaden your horizons. First time at Robot Wars?’

‘Yes. Doesn’t seem to be much going on, though. Is it always like this?’ He felt even more certain of this now. Across the arena, the pairs of machines hadn’t moved to any obvious degree since he had seen them from the rover.

‘Only one of the operators is actually driving a robot right now,’ June Wing said. ‘The other four are spectating, or helping with the power-up tests on one of the backup machines. The rival operators – our competitors – are in the other viewing pods.’

‘But nothing’s happening.’

‘They’re tunnel-boring machines,’ Jitendra said. ‘They’re built to gnaw through lunar bedrock, not set land-speed records.’

Even as he spoke, Jitendra was lowering himself into one of the vacant cockpits. He reached up and tugged the transcranial stimulator down, nestling it onto his skull.

‘We can’t speed up the ’bots,’ he went on, ‘but we can slow ourselves down. Even your best civilian implants don’t mess with the brain at a level deep enough to upset the perception of time, so we need some extra assistance. Hence, direct stimulation of the basal cortex. That and some slightly naughty deep-level neurochemical intervention—’

‘As always, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ June Wing said.

Jitendra slipped his wrists into heavy medical cuffs attached to the frame of the chair. ‘They’d throw a fit in the Surveilled World. But of course, we’re not in the Surveilled World now… and that doesn’t preclude outside sponsorship, or external spectators. There’s money to be earned, reputations to be made and lost.’

‘I guess the Plexus sponsorship helps,’ Geoffrey said.

‘It’s not just advertising,’ June Wing said. ‘There is some actual R&D going on here. The robots have human drivers but they also have their own onboard battle minds, constantly trying to find a decisive strategy, a goal-winning solution they can offer to the pilot.’

‘OK, here it comes,’ Jitendra said, closing his eyes. ‘Slowdown’s beginning to take hold. Wish me…’ He stalled between words. ‘… luck.’

And then he was out, as lifelessly inert as the other drivers. Not unconscious, but decelerated into the awesomely slow sensorium of the robot, out in the arena.

‘He’s driving her now,’ Sunday said, pointing to the robot Jitendra was controlling. ‘You can just see the movement if you compare the ground shadow against the one from the support gantry.’

‘What do you do when you want some real excitement – race slugs against each other?’

‘Life moves pretty quickly if you are a slug,’ June Wing admonished. ‘It’s just a question of perceptual reference frames.’ She gestured to one of the vacant cockpits. ‘Geoffrey can spectate, if he wishes. I have a reserved slot, but I’ll pass for today.’

‘I’m carrying some fairly specialised aug hardware,’ Geoffrey said, meaning the equipment he needed to link to Matilda.

‘Nothing will be damaged, brother, I promise you,’ Sunday said.

‘And if it is, my own labs will soon put it right,’ June Wing said, with breezy indifference to his concerns. ‘So jump right in.’

Geoffrey was still wary, but another part of him wanted to get as much out of his Lunar experience as possible.

‘You need to take a leak?’ Sunday asked. ‘You’re going to be in that thing for at least six hours.’

Geoffrey consulted his bladder. ‘I’ll cope. I didn’t drink too much coffee this morning.’

Sunday helped him into the vacant cockpit. ‘The cuffs will be analysing your blood – any signs of stress, above and beyond normal competition levels, and the system will yank you out. Same for the transcranial stim. It’s read/write. There’s not much that can go wrong.’

‘Not much.’

Sunday cocked her head to one side, appearing to think for a moment. ‘Well, there was that one guy…’ She lowered the transcranial helmet, adjusting it carefully into position. ‘You were doing this at competition level, we’d cut back those curls to get the probe closer to your skin, but you’ll be fine for spectating.’

Aug status messages flashed into his visual field, informing him that an external agent was affecting his neural function. The implants offered to resist the intrusion. He voked them into acquiescence.

‘So what happened to that one guy?’

‘Nothing much,’ Sunday said breezily. ‘Just that being in the cockpit permanently reset his internal clock. Even after they withdrew the stim and the drugs, he was stuck on arena time.’

‘How’s he doing now?’

‘Thing is, he hasn’t got back to us on that one yet.’

The cuffs dropped their painless fangs into his skin. Two cold touches, neurochemicals sluicing in, and he felt himself sliding, tobogganing down an ever steepening slope. He made to grab onto the sides of the cockpit for support, but his arms, even his fingers, felt sheathed in granite.

Then the rushing sensation ebbed and he felt perfectly still, amniotically calm. Something had failed, he decided.

‘All right,’ Sunday said. ‘What you’re hearing now is me slowed down into your perceptual frame. You’ve already been in the cockpit for twenty minutes.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Make that twenty-one. June and I are off to the bar now; be back in a second or two. We’ll begin piping direct imagery into your head. Enjoy the show.’

He was almost ready not to believe her. But the digits in his tourist visa were whirring at superfast speed.

Geoffrey’s perceptions took a savage lurch and he was suddenly out there, disembodied, able to roam at will in the ching space of the arena. Jitendra’s robot wasn’t crawling now; it was propelling itself in convulsive jerks, tractor claws threshing, body sections pistoning back and forth like some heavy industrial mechanism that had escaped its shackles. Lunar soil, disturbed by the robot’s passage, collapsed back into itself as if composed of molten lead, under Jupiter’s immense gravity.

Around the arena’s perimeter, a frenzy of blurred motion attended the waiting machines. Elsewhere, dual combatants were locked in titanic wrestling matches, writhing and thrashing to the death.

Jitendra’s opponent crossed the graded soil like a demented iron maggot. It differed from Jitendra’s robot in its details but was of a comparable size, equipped with a broadly similar range of offensive devices. On its flanks, in luminous red, shone the Escher triangle logo of MetaPresence, Plexus’s main competitor in ching facilitation and proxy robotics. The nerve-node emblem on Jitendra’s machine was now similarly bright and unfaded, painted over the image by the aug. Accompanying these overlays were a host of statistics and technical readouts, speculating at the likely efficacies of armour, weapons and combat tactics.

The two robots halted at the laser-scribed circle of combat. Articulating two-thirds of the way down their bodies – they had been designed to steer during tunnel-boring operations – the robots reared up and bowed to each other. Agonising minutes must have passed in real-time as this martial ritual was observed.

The engagement was as sudden and brutal as a pair of sumo wrestlers charging into each other. At first, Jitendra’s machine appeared to have the upper hand. It flexed itself around the enemy, using rows of tractor limbs to gain purchase, sinking their sharpened tips into gaps in armour plating. Articulating its head end, it brought the whirring nightmare of its circular cutting teeth into play. As they contacted its opponent’s alloy head, molten metal fountained away on neon-bright parabolas. Reflecting Jitendra’s initial success – and the changing spread-patterns of bets – the statistics shifted violently in his favour.

It didn’t last. Even as Jitendra’s robot was chewing into it, the other robot had retaliatory ambitions. Halfway down its body, armoured panels hinged open like pupal wings, allowing complex cutting machinery to scissor out. Servo-driven vacuum cutters began to burn into the belly of Jitendra’s robot, clamped into place with traction claws. A kind of peristaltic wave surged up the body of the assaulted machine, as if it was experiencing actual pain. It relinquished its hold, bending its body away, disengaging the whirling vortex of its cutting teeth. The stats updated. Pink vapour jetted at arterial speed from the wound that had been cut into the side of Jitendra’s robot: some kind of nuclear coolant or hydraulic fluid, bleeding into space.

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.

Geoffrey closed his eyes, blocking what little extraneous input was now reaching them. He concentrated on a particular mental puzzle: holding an Escher figure in his mind, the Meta Presence triangle, and then rotating it, all the while trying to keep the details in sharp focus. It required an intense conscious effort, and because the exercise drew on his mind’s visual machinery, it elicited a response in the neural map of his own brain, still hanging there in the upper-left corner of his visual field. His visual cortex was glowing, as bloodflow and neurochemical markers signalled a concentration of resources.

It required an even greater effort to hold the Escher figure in mind and also track the neural changes in the side-by-side scans, but he had trained for that, over and over, until he was capable of making the rapid attentional shifts that allowed him to both perform the concentration exercises and monitor their effects.

Now it was paying off: Matilda’s visual cortex was beginning to light up as well, in response to his own. He had no idea what that felt like to her, but she couldn’t be experiencing that level of stimulus without feeling something. For a moment, he too felt the rising potential as the visual response he was generating in her began to spill back into his head. It died down just as quickly, though: he had installed dampening protocols to guard against that kind of positive feedback.

He stopped holding the Escher figure in his head and opened his eyelids again. Their minds had returned to quiescence, with no exceptional activity in either visual cortex.

Geoffrey didn’t doubt that the link had worked as intended, and that the observed response would be repeatable. He’d done nothing that broke the laws of physics, just wired two minds together in a particular way. It would have been strange if it hadn’t worked.

Time to try something else.

Geoffrey did not care for scorpions. He had trodden on one as a child – it had found its way into his shoe one night – and the memory of that lancing, electric pain as the venom touched his nervous system was no less sharp the better part of thirty years later. He had learned to overcome his fear – it would have been difficult to function otherwise, when there were so many other things that could sting and injure – but that childhood incident had imprinted a deep-seated phobia that would be with him for the rest of his life. He’d had occasion to curse that fear, but at last it was going to do something for him instead.

Merely thinking about the scorpion was enough to bring on unpleasant feelings, but now he forced himself not just to return to the incident, but to imagine it in as much fetishistic detail as he could. He’d been old enough to understand that he ought to check for scorpions, old enough to grasp that it would be very bad to be stung, but at the age of five, he hadn’t acquired the tedious adult discipline of checking every time. Still, when his foot contacted the scorpion, and the sting sank in, there had been a moment of delicious clarity, a calm hiatus in which he understood precisely what had happened, precisely what was about to happen, and that there was nothing in the universe that could stop it. It had come like a wind-whipped fire, spreading up his leg, through the branching intricacy of his nervous system – his first real understanding that he even had a nervous system.

But there it was, traced out in writhing, luminous glory, like a ship’s rigging wreathed in St Elmo’s fire. In that moment he could have drawn an anatomical map of himself.

It was a memory he had tried his best not to return to, but perhaps because of that it remained raw, the edges still sharp, the colours and sensations bright. He felt his chest tighten, his heart rate increase, sweat prickle his back. In the neural scan of his brain, he saw the fear response light up.

Matilda was feeling it now as well. In response she issued a threat rumble, and Geoffrey took a step back as he sensed her growing agitation. His eyes were wide open now. He let go of the memory, forced it back into the mental box where he had kept it all these years. Enough for now; he’d gone sufficiently far to prove his point. It was unfortunate that the first demonstration of that had involved fear, but he’d needed something capable of producing an unambiguous signal. Matilda’s neural pattern was settling down now; he hoped that she would not be troubled by what had happened.

He was about to suspend the link when, without warning, Eunice appeared. She was standing to his right, watching proceedings with her hands behind her back.

Geoffrey was about to admonish the figment – she had as good as promised not to appear without his direct invocation – when it occurred to him that, since Matilda was sharing his sensorium, she should also be aware of Eunice.

He voked to suspend the link, but the damage had been done. Matilda had seen something there, something entirely novel, something she had never encountered before in her life. The figment would have been disturbing enough in its own right, popping into existence like that – elephants moved through a world of solid persistence, of dusty ground, rocks and weather-shaped trees – but the figment would also have been made visible, ghostly and translucent, by virtue of the five-per-cent threshold. Elephants didn’t have to believe in ghosts to find an apparition profoundly upsetting.

Matilda certainly didn’t like it. He had primed her by stimulating the fear response, but he doubted she would have taken the figment well under any circumstances. She alternated trumpeting with threat rumbles and began backing away from the spot where the figment had appeared. Geoffrey might have broken the link, but Matilda wasn’t going to let it slip that easily.

‘You stupid fool!’ he shouted. ‘I told you not to show up like that.’

‘What’s wrong with them? Why are they behaving like that?’

‘Because she was in my head when you appeared. She saw you, Eunice. And she doesn’t know how to deal with it.’

‘How could she have seen me, Geoffrey?’

‘Get out of here,’ he snapped. ‘Leave. Now. Before I rip you out of my head with a rock.’

‘I came to tell you something important. I’ve just learned the news from my counterpart up on the Moon. Your sister’s on her way to Mars.’

‘What?’

‘Mars,’ the construct repeated. ‘There’s a Maersk Intersolar swiftship leaving tomorrow and the Pans have bought her a slot aboard it. That’s all.’

The figment vanished, leaving him alone with the elephants.

Matilda might have been the only elephant neurally linked to Geoffrey, but it hadn’t taken more than a couple of seconds for her agitation to communicate itself to the others. They had seen nothing, but when the matriarch alerted them that there was a problem, they took her at her word. Geoffrey couldn’t see their eyes, but their postures told him that they were directing their attention to the same patch of ground where Eunice had appeared. There was no guessing what they thought Matilda might have seen or sensed there, but they were very clearly not taking any chances.

He thought of opening the link again, and doing his best to project calming reassurance… but with his mind in its present state, that was about the worst thing he could have tried.

Mars. What was Sunday playing at, after what she’d promised him?

No rash decisions.

He held up his hands. ‘I’m sorry, Matilda. There’s nothing wrong, but I don’t expect you to understand that now. And it was my fault.’ He began to back up, barely giving a thought to what might be behind him in the darkness. ‘I think it’s best if I leave you alone now, let you sort this out on your own. I’m truly sorry.’

She trumpeted at him then, an answering blast that he could not help but interpret as fury. He did not doubt that it was directed at him. He, after all, was the only alien presence in this environment. And if she grasped that the figment was in some sense unreal, then it was also the case that she had been made to look foolish, jumping at something that wasn’t there, in the presence of the rest of the herd. She was matriarch, but only until the next female rose to challenge her.

He left the elephants to their grumbling, still feeling Matilda’s disgruntlement even as he risked turning his back on her. He found his way to the Cessna, letting the aug light his path, and it was only when he was aloft that his hands stopped shaking. He had, he realised, left his bag down by the waterhole, along with the drawings: he’d forgotten it when the figment appeared.

Under other circumstances he might have circled down and retrieved it. Not tonight, though.

He’d done enough damage as it was.

CHAPTER TEN

Sunday was just wondering what the time was in Africa – or, to be precise, at the household – when her brother placed a ching request. A coincidence like that should have left her reeling, but she’d long since learned to take such things in her stride.

She went to a leafy corner of the departure lounge, while Jitendra wandered over to poke at one of the maintenance bots, which was locked in some kind of pathological behaviour loop.

‘Just thinking of calling you,’ she told her brother as his figment popped into reality.

After the usual two-and-a-bit seconds of time lag he answered, ‘Good, I’m very glad to hear it.’

She studied his reaction. ‘You don’t sound overjoyed, Geoffrey. Have I done something wrong?’

‘I’m not sure where to begin. You’re on your way to Mars without telling me, despite everything we talked about, and all of a sudden I’ve got my grandmother inside my head.’

‘You two have already made your acquaintance, then.’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘Look, I should probably have warned you, but… well, what are surprises if you can’t spring them on people now and again? Besides, I thought it would be useful for the construct. She needs to see a bit more of the world, and I’m obviously not going to be much help in that regard. So I took the liberty.’

‘You certainly did.’

‘I thought you’d appreciate the gesture. She’s a… very useful resource.’

‘Good. Now you can tell me what you think you’re doing. According to your tag you’re already at the departure station.’

‘We are. Jitendra and I are just about to board the swiftship.’ They’d come up by surface-to-orbit liner, spent a couple of hours in the freefall and spun sections of the station, eaten a meal, drunk too much coffee and passed the final medical tests prior to cryosleep. ‘They’ll put us under soon,’ she went on. ‘Lights out until Phobos.’

‘And where the hell did the money for this come from?’

‘Plexus funds,’ Sunday answered. ‘June Wing’s paying for Jitendra to go and do field work for the R&D division.’

‘I hear the Pans are paying your fare.’

‘Yeah. They want an artist in the loop, someone who can communicate their big ideas to the wider public. Because I know the zookeepers, I sort of got the job. Or at least a try-out, to see how it goes. There are Pans on Mars – they’ve got some start-up venture going on there.’

‘And none of this comes with strings.’

‘Oh, a few. But I don’t have to buy into the ideology; I just have to wear it for a while.’

‘And how long are you going to be away?’

‘Not less than ten weeks, even if I get right back on the ship as soon as we reach Mars. Which, obviously, isn’t the idea. It’ll probably be more like four months, realistically – the return trip will take longer, too. I’m not going all that way just to spend a few days down there, and if the Pans are footing the bill…’ She halted. ‘You’re all right with this, aren’t you?’

‘Like I have any choice.’

‘It’s only Mars. It’s not like I’m going Trans-Neptunian.’

‘There’s a difference between you being on the Moon and… whatever it is, twenty light-minutes away.’

‘I have to do this, Geoffrey. I’m thirty-five, and apart from a small coterie of admirers in the Zone, I’m virtually unknown. In two years I’ll be older than Van Gogh was when he died! I can’t live with that any longer: it’s now or never. This opportunity’s come up, and I have to take it. You understand, don’t you? If it was something about elephants, and it meant that much to you—’

‘Think I might have told you about it. Just in passing.’

It was a strange conversational dance they were engaged in. Geoffrey was rightly cross about her decision to go to Mars, but he was well aware of her real motivation, which had nothing to do with the Panspermian Initiative. On the faint chance that their conversation was being intercepted, though, he had to pretend that the whole thing was a massive shock, in no way related to the events in Pythagoras. And his questions about funding were perfectly sincere. Her own finances couldn’t possibly stretch to this.

But they hadn’t needed to. The right word to Chama and Gleb, and it hadn’t been long before Truro put in another appearance. That took care of her ticket, even if it put her deeper into hock with the Pans. Jitendra, similarly, had ramped up his debt to June Wing.

‘If I’d told you,’ she said, ‘we’d have ended up having exactly this conversation, only with the possibility of you talking me out of it.’

‘I’m not trying to be overprotective.’ He paused. ‘Well, maybe just a little. But Mars is a long way away. Stuff happens there.’

‘I’m not travelling alone, and I won’t be getting up to any mischief.’

Apart, she thought, from the kind of mischief she and her brother already knew about.

‘I know you meant well with the construct,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but she got me into a world of trouble.’

‘How so?’

‘Managed to screw up one of my exchanges with Matilda. Spooked the whole clan, and now I’m going to have to go back and start rebuilding trust.’

‘How…’ Sunday started asking, because she could not imagine how the construct could possibly have played any role in Geoffrey’s elephant studies. But her instincts told her to abort that line of enquiry. ‘If that’s the case, then I’m sorry. Genuinely. It’s my fault – I gave her enough volition to auto-invoke, based on your perceptual stimuli. Basically, if she sensed sufficient attentional focus, she was cued to appear.’

‘Even when I’d told her not to?’

‘She can be contrary like that. But you don’t have to put up with her – I’ll deactivate your copy. I can do it from here.’

‘Wait,’ Geoffrey said, letting out a sigh. ‘It’s not that I mind having Eunice on tap. I just don’t want her springing up like a jack-in-the-box and scaring me half to death. Can you just dial down that… volition, or whatever it was?’

Sunday smiled. ‘I’ll assign the necessary changes before they put me under.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re doing me a big favour with this, although I’m sure you know that.’

‘Just as long as we’re clear on one thing,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I’ll keep her until she drives me mad, or you get back from Mars. Whichever comes first.’

‘I’ll call you when I wake up. But be prepared for the time lag – we won’t be able to ching, so that’s going to feel… weird. Be like the days of steamships and telegrams.’

‘All else fails, send a postcard.’

‘I will. Meantime, give my regards to Memphis?’

‘We’re going out to the elephants tomorrow. We’ll be able to have a good old chat.’

‘Wish I could be there with you.’

Geoffrey smiled tightly. ‘Some other time.’

‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘Some other time. Take care, brother.’

His response took longer than time lag could explain. ‘Take care, sister.’

Geoffrey closed the ching, saving her from having to do it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He dropped into what was obviously a departure lounge, bright and tree-lined, shops and restaurants hewn out of something resembling white stone, all irregular windows, semicircular doorways and rounded roofs, the floor and ceiling curving away out of sight, people walking around with the bouncy-heeled gait that he immediately recognised as signifying something close to Lunar gravity.

He had no physical embodiment. All local proxies and golems were assigned, and would remain so for at least the next hour. Still, the figment body he’d been allocated would suffice for his needs. When he made to walk, there was a lag of three seconds before anything happened, and then his point of view was gliding forwards, ghost arms swinging purposefully as ghost feet slid frictionlessly against the floor. The body was slightly transparent, but that was merely a mnemonic aid, to remind him that he wasn’t fully embodied and couldn’t (for instance) intervene in a medical emergency, or prevent an accident or crime by force. The other people in the lounge would either see him as a fully realised figment, a spectral presence, a hovering, sprite-like nimbus – simply a point of view – or, depending on how they had configured their aug settings, not at all.

Walking with time lag was hard, but stopping was even worse. No harm could possibly come to Geoffrey or his environment, of course, and the ching was considerate enough to slow him down or adjust his trajectory before he appeared to run into obstacles, and therefore risked looking clumsy.

Other than that, it was disarmingly easy to forget there was any time lag at all. He could turn his head instantly, but that was because his ‘eyes’ were only ever intercepting a tiny slice of the available visual field.

He wandered the lounge, completing a full circle of the centrifuge without seeing anything of the ship. Eventually he found his way out of the centrifuge, into a part of the station that wasn’t rotating. The ching protocols permitted a form of air swimming, which was in fact far more efficient than would have been the case had he been embodied. He paddled his way to a window, incurving so that it faced the station’s core, and there was his sister’s swiftship, skewering the hollow cylinder from end to end.

Geoffrey looked at it for several minutes before it occurred to him to invoke Eunice.

‘You should see this,’ he said quietly, when she had appeared next to him. ‘That’s Sunday’s ship, the one that’s going to take her to Mars. She’s aboard now. Probably unconscious.’

‘You’re speaking to me again?’ Eunice asked. ‘After that unpleasantness with the elephants?’

‘Sunday says you need more stimulation.’ He waved at the view. ‘So here’s some stimuli. Make the most of it.’

Eunice’s ghost hands were resting on the curving handrail. No one was paying her the slightest attention. Geoffrey’s figment might be visible to anyone who chose to see it, but Eunice was an entirely private hallucination.

‘They’re nearly ready to go,’ Eunice said. ‘Docking connections, power umbilicals, all decoupled and retracted.’ She was silent for a few moments, looking at the liner.

The Maersk Intersolar vehicle was essentially a single skeletal chassis a thousand metres long, with the engines at one end, various cargo storage, navigation and manoeuvring systems in the middle, and the passenger and crew accommodation at the front, tucked behind the blunt black cone of the ship’s aerobrake. The engines were a long way down the cylinder, difficult to make out beyond an impression of three city-block-sized rectangular structures, flanged with cooling vanes. The swiftship was ugly and asymmetric because there wasn’t a single kilogram of mass aboard that wasn’t mission-critical. In Darwinian terms, it was as sleek and ruthlessly efficient as a swordfish.

‘That business with the Pans hiring her as an artist,’ Eunice remarked, ‘obviously a cover, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I don’t have an opinion on the matter.’

‘Don’t be obtuse, Geoffrey. We can be as hurtful or helpful as we please, and today I’ve come to help. I know why Sunday has to go to Mars – it’s because of what we found in Pythagoras.’

‘We,’ he scoffed. ‘Like you’re part of this now.’

‘Look at that ship, though,’ Eunice said, with renewed passion. ‘What we would have given for something like those magnetoplasma rockets when I was young. Even our VASIMR engines couldn’t touch what she can do. Exhaust velocities in the range of two hundred kilometres per second, specific impulse off the scale – we’d have murdered our own mothers for that. Our best fusion plants back then were the size of battleships, even with Mpemba cooling – not exactly built for lugging around the solar system. Mars in four weeks now, and you don’t even have to be awake for the trip! That’s the trouble with you young people – you barely know you’re born. We were just out of the chemical rocket era, and we still did more in fifty years than you’ll do in a century.’

‘You lived to see all this develop,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but instead of enjoying it you chose to rot away in seclusion.’

‘I’d had my hour in the sun.’

‘Then don’t blame the rest of us for getting on with our lives. You pushed back the boundaries of outer space. There are plenty of us doing the same with inner space, the mind. It might not have quite the grandeur or romance of exploring the solar system, but that doesn’t make it any less vital.’

‘I’m not arguing. Still want to be on that ship, though.’

After a moment he said, ‘I know when you were last on Phobos – 2099, just before your final expedition. A year later, maybe less, you donated the book to the museum. And if we could pin down when you returned to Pythagoras, it would have been around the same time, wouldn’t it? You were rushing about, hiding these clues. What’s Sunday going to find on Phobos?’

‘I don’t know.’ Seeing Geoffrey’s frustrated expression, she added, ‘You still don’t understand. I’m not here to lie, or keep things from you. If I think I know something useful to you, you’ll know about it.’

‘But you don’t even know what you did on Phobos.’

‘I went back to Mars for Jonathan’s funeral. I don’t know what I got up to, or where. But it’s a small moon, and there aren’t many possibilities.’

‘Sunday should still have told me her plans.’

‘And risk being found out by the cousins? We can have this conversation safely enough now, but a routine ching bind between Earth and the Moon, with minimal quangle? Sunday didn’t dare take that chance, Geoffrey.’

‘Hector and Lucas couldn’t have stopped her.’

‘You’re still not getting it. It’s not them pressuring her that Sunday was concerned about. It’s them pressuring you. She was thinking of you, your elephants, your whole self-centred existence back in Africa. Being a good sister to her little brother.’

‘I’ll be glad when she’s home,’ Geoffrey said after a while, when he’d had time to mull Eunice’s words and decide that she was probably right. ‘Glad when I know she’s only as far away as the Moon.’

‘I’m looking after her. She’ll be fine.’

For all that it was a commonplace event, the departure had drawn a small crowd of watchers, including proxies and golems. Two orange tugs pushed the liner slowly out of the way station until the engine assembly had cleared the end opening. Then the swiftship fired its own steering motors – a strobe-flicker of blue-hot pinpricks running the length of the vehicle – and began to turn, flipping end-over-end as it aimed itself at Mars, or rather the point on the ecliptic where Mars would be in four weeks.

The liner drifted slowly out of sight, the tugs still clamped on. Eunice’s ghost hand tugged at Geoffrey’s ghost sleeve. ‘Let’s go to the other window. I don’t want to miss this.’

The other watchers had drifted to an external port for a better view. Geoffrey and Eunice followed them unhurriedly. For an hour the liner just sat there, backdropped by the slowly turning Moon. Now and then a steering jet would fire, performing some micro-adjustment or last-minute systems check. Some of the spectators drifted away, their patience strained. Geoffrey waited, fully intent on seeing this through to the end. He’d almost begun to forget that his body was still back in Africa, still waiting on a warm rooftop, when some kindly insect opted to sink its mouthparts into his neck.

Presently the swiftship’s engines were activated. Three stilettos of neon-pink plasma spiked out of the drive assembly, and then brightened to a lance-like intensity. The tugs had unclamped, using steering rockets to boost quickly away from the sides of the larger ship before any part of it stood a chance of colliding with them. Geoffrey concentrated his attention on the background stars. It took nearly a minute for the swiftship to traverse its own length. And then it was clearly moving, accelerating, every second putting another metre-per-second of speed on its clock. It was like watching a house slide down a mountainside, gathering momentum with awful inevitability.

She would keep those motors burning for another day of steady acceleration, by which point the ship would be moving at a hundred kilometres per second… faster than anything he could easily grasp, but still – he did the sums in his head – a blistering one-thirtieth of one per cent of the speed of light. That was wrong, surely? He must have dropped a decimal point, maybe two. But no, his calculations were correct. Two hundred years of spaceflight, two hundred years of steady, methodical progress combined with bold, intuitive leaps… and this was still the very best the human species could do: attain a speed so slow that, in cosmic terms, it barely counted as movement at all.

‘I thought one day we’d do better than this,’ Eunice said, as if she’d been reading his thoughts. ‘They had most of my lifetime to do it in, after all.’

‘Sorry we let you down.’

‘We?’

‘The rest of the human species,’ Geoffrey said. ‘For not living up to your exacting standards.’

‘You tried,’ Eunice said. ‘I’ll give you that much.’

In the morning he returned to the elephants. Memphis came with him in the Cessna, and they landed at the semi-permanent airstrip adjacent to Geoffrey’s research station. It was a trio of modular huts set around three sides of a square compound, where an ancient zebra-striped truck and an even more ancient zebra-striped jeep stood dormant. Wheat-coloured grass fingered mudguards and armoured bumpers.

He helped the old man out of the aircraft. If he’d had any doubts about his own muscular readjustment to Earth gravity, they were silenced when he took Memphis’s weight, supporting him under the elbow as he climbed out of the cockpit. Memphis felt as light and dry as a bag of sticks.

‘Sorry,’ Geoffrey said as Memphis’s polished black lace-ups touched the ground. ‘I shouldn’t have put you through this. No reason we couldn’t have taken one of the pods.’

The three stilt-mounted huts, soap-like plastic structures with rounded corners, were respectively an accommodation module, research area and storage building. In practice Geoffrey only needed the research hut, since that was where he usually ended up sleeping and cooking for himself. All his equipment, samples, veterinary medicines and documentation only filled a third of the storage unit, with the rest set aside for utilisation by the graduate or postgraduate assistants Geoffrey’s research budget had not yet made possible. He supposed that was all going to change now. The new funds would certainly pay for one helper, probably two, as well as a mountain of gleaming new study tools. He’d have to move his domestic arrangements back into the accommodation shack, to free up room and lend a semblance of order to the research space. The place could use some sprucing up, that was true. But it was only now that he realised that the days of solitude, the peace and quiet, might be numbered.

For now they were just passing through. Geoffrey made chai for Memphis and sat him down in the research hut while he sorted out equipment, packing gear into boxes which he then secured in the Cessna. He walked out to one of the perimeter towers and swapped a module in the solar collector, then replaced a cable leading from another. All the while his mind was turning over, wondering how he was going to raise the subject of Eunice with Memphis.

In the end Memphis made it easy. They were up in the air again, buzzing west a hundred metres above the treetops.

‘I might be mistaken,’ he said, ‘but something tells me this trip isn’t entirely about visiting the elephants.’

Geoffrey tried to smile the remark away, glancing at his passenger before snapping his attention back to the controls. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘You have been thinking of tasks you need to do, but which could easily be put off for a week or a month. As if you feel you need an excuse for this whole day.’

‘I can only put things off so long,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You know how it is.’

‘Nonetheless,’ Memphis said. He looked out of the window, spotting some giraffe in the distance and following them with his gaze. They were loping, crossing the ground in great scissoring strides, like pairs of draughtsmen’s compasses being walked across a map. They’d been seeing flying machines for two hundred and fifty years and still acted as if each time was the first. Panicked bundles of instinct and fear, forever startled by their own shadows.

‘Actually, there is something.’

‘Of course,’ Memphis said. ‘And one must presume it relates to your recent journey. And that it is also something you didn’t wish to talk about in the household, for fear of being overheard.’

‘You know me too well, I’m afraid. Look, I’m sorry for the subterfuge, but I couldn’t think of any other way to have this conversation.’

‘You need not apologise, Geoffrey. I think we both understand each other perfectly well.’

Geoffrey cast around for his next landing site and put the Cessna down with barely a bump, paying extra attention because of his passenger. They got out, Memphis helping himself down unassisted this time. They were nowhere near any of the herds but that was intentional. Geoffrey did not want the elephants to associate him with the work that was about to be done.

One of the equipment boxes disclosed a delicate, translucent thing like a giant prehistoric dragonfly. Geoffrey held it carefully between his fingers, gripping it under the black keel of its carbon-fibre thorax. He tipped the dragonfly upside down, flipped open a cover and loaded six target-seeking darts from another box. The darts resembled miniature avatars of the same creature, down to the complex origami of their switchblade-folded wings.

‘Do you know why the cousins sent me to the Moon?’

‘A family matter.’ Memphis propped his left foot up on the undercarriage fairing and began to redo one of his laces. ‘That was as much as Hector and Lucas wished me to know, Geoffrey. For your sake, it might not be wise to tell me any more than that.’

‘Because you think they’d have a way of finding out?’

‘Because there is at least the chance of that. One also assumes that there was an incentive behind this errand?’

‘Yes, and there’s no harm in me telling you about that, at least. You know what kind of budget I work under, so you’d be the first to notice when more cash started flowing in.’

‘You may find this rather difficult to credit,’ Memphis said, swapping to the other shoe, ‘but your cousins mean well.’

‘That’s what I usually end up convincing myself.’ Geoffrey sealed the belly-door and turned the dragonfly the right way up. ‘They’re venal and manipulative, and their only real interest is profit margins, but they’re not actually evil. And I don’t think even they knew what they were getting me into.’ He gave the dragonfly a vigorous flick, causing its wings to deploy to their fullest extent. Save for a fine veining of whiskerlike supports, they were almost invisible. ‘If they’d known, they’d never have involved me.’

‘Perhaps it would be better if you said no more on the matter,’ Memphis replied.

Geoffrey touched a contact node on the dragonfly’s head and the wings began to beat the air, a leisurely pulse that gradually quickened to a steady clockwork whirr. ‘Memphis, did something happen to Eunice before she went into exile?’

‘Rather a lot of things,’ Memphis said.

‘I mean, apart from the stuff we already know about.’

Geoffrey let the dragonfly go, allowing it to hover away from his hand. A metre or so higher than his head, it halted and awaited further instructions. Squinting against the brightness of the sky, he could only just see it. The wings were a butterfly-shaped nimbus of flickering, and the elongated body – with its cargo of darts – just a smudgelike blemish on his vision.

‘I’m not talking about all the adventures and exploits already in the public record,’ Geoffrey went on.

‘I am not sure that I can help you.’

‘Eunice did something,’ Geoffrey said. ‘No need to go into details, but it’s as if she set something up, a series of clues that weren’t meant to come to light until after her death.’

‘Sunday’s trip to Mars,’ Memphis said thoughtfully. ‘Would that be related to this matter?’

‘Draw your own conclusions.’

‘I shall.’

‘The cousins sent me to the Moon to look into something, a detail they weren’t expecting to lead to anything significant.’

‘I take it you confided in your sister?’

‘What I found up there was… not what the cousins were expecting. I couldn’t keep it a secret from Sunday.’

‘Are you going to tell me what it was?’

‘I don’t want any of this to come back and hurt you, and if I tell you too much it might.’ Geoffrey paused to send the dragonfly on its way, in the direction where the herd had last been sighted. An aug window had already opened in his upper-centre visual field, showing the dragonfly’s view of things as it scudded over the terrain. ‘All I want to know, Memphis, is one thing. Before she came back from deep space in 2101 – days, months or years, I don’t know which – she must have gone around putting these clues in place. Either she did it all on her own, or she had help. Right now I’m not sure which. But if ever there was one person she’d have turned to for assistance, I’m talking to him now.’

‘You refer to these things as clues. Can you be certain that this is what they are?’

‘If they’re not, then we’re all imagining connections where none exist. Here’s what I think, though. The loose end, the thing the cousins sent me to investigate, didn’t come to light by accident. Eunice must have planned it this way. She’d have known there’d be a thorough audit of her assets after her death, conducted from inside the family.’

‘If she wished to convey a message beyond the grave… why not just convey that message directly?’

Geoffrey had sighted the herd, about a kilometre from the dragonfly. ‘Maybe things will be clearer when Sunday gets back from Mars.’

‘Until then, though, you are wondering whether I might be able to shed light on the matter.’

‘I’m sorry to do this to you, Memphis.’

‘And I wish I could be of more assistance.’

Geoffrey’s spirits dipped. Perhaps it had been unrealistic, but he’d been hoping for something more than that. Yet after all the years of service, how likely had it ever been that Memphis was just going to cave in at the first gentle interrogation?

Assuming he knew anything at all.

‘If there’s something she said or did… anything at all that might be relevant… you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’

‘It would help if I had the slightest idea what form these clues might have taken.’ Memphis looked stern, then offered a consoling smile. ‘But I understand your reticence. Merely raising the subject has placed a considerable strain on you.’

‘Last thing I want to do is damage our friendship.’

‘It would take more than this, Geoffrey.’ Memphis gave him a bony hand-pat on his shoulder. ‘There is no danger of that.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Nonetheless, you are disappointed.’

‘I was hoping you’d know more. Then you might be able to tell me where I stand, what I should do next.’

‘It sounds as if Sunday has made her own mind up.’

‘I’d have gone with her, if it wasn’t for the elephants. Not that I didn’t think you’d be able to a good job looking after them, but—’

‘There is a difference between being away for a week and several months. It’s all right, Geoffrey – you don’t have to explain yourself to me. These elephants need you.’

‘They need us,’ Geoffrey corrected gently. ‘Human stewards. We don’t own them, and we don’t have any claims on moral superiority. But after all we’ve done to them in the past we do have an obligation to shepherd them through to better times.’ He smiled, catching himself. ‘Damn, I almost sound like a Panspermian. That’s what spending time with Sunday’s friends does to you.’

‘I’m sure it did you no harm.’ Memphis coughed lightly. ‘Now, may I be of some practical assistance? That was the intended purpose of this trip, after all.’

‘I’m nearly over the herd,’ Geoffrey said. ‘The aug will show you the infants that still need implanting. Designate them with the dragonfly, then let the darts find their own way. It’s the same protocol as last time.’

‘I shall endeavour to remember.’ Memphis halted his progress and assumed a posture of upright concentration, his hands laced behind his back, his face lifted slightly to the sky. ‘Are you certain you trust me with this?’

‘No one else I’d let anywhere near it. Assigning the dragonfly to you… now.’

Memphis allowed his eyelids to drop nearly shut. ‘I have it. I’m circling over the herd now. The view is marvellous. Will they see me?’

‘Some of them, but they won’t connect the dragonfly or the darts with either of us. They don’t feel much when the machines go in, but it’s always best to play safe and avoid any negative associations.’

‘I have the first of the infants designated now. That is Melissa, I think.’

‘Two closely spaced notches on the right ear, that’s her.’

Memphis released the first of the darts, which deployed its wings and locked on to the target infant. The aug dropped a clarifying tag, a box with accompanying sub-icons denoting the presence of potentially harmful nanomachinery, along with the serial numbers and codes that established the legal status of that nanomachinery under various USN conventions and intergovernmental veterinary-medical protocols.

Memphis waited until Melissa was at least a body length from any other elephants and then brought the dart in. It landed on top of her neck, just below the base of her skull, and clamped into position like some tiny replica of an asteroid-mining robot, sinking barbed landing legs into the yielding crust of living tissue. The next step was for the dart to push a blood-sampling surface penetrator into the tissue, a quick-burrowing telescopic drill that, having collected and rapid-assayed a DNA sample, was able to verify that this really was an elephant it had landed on, and not some other organism it had selected in error. This took another three hundred milliseconds, by which point nearly half a second had elapsed since the dart’s touchdown. Somewhere else in the world, having been notified of the results of the DNA assay, a USN biomedical watchdog system gave final authorisation for nanoculation to proceed.

Although the delivery probe was releasing anaesthetic as it tunnelled down, Melissa still felt it happening. Two seconds into the process, she trumpeted and began to curl her trunk back, seeking to remove the offending object.

By then the quicksilver rush of nanomachinery had commenced, a liquid army of submicroscopic medical engines invading foreign territory. The machines knew their way around a brain, even an elephant brain. They began to replicate, spinning a web of glistening connectivity.

All this took time. Although the seed population had been established within seconds, it would be weeks before complete neural integration had been achieved. Even then, only a thousandth part of Melissa’s brain volume would have been co-opted into the new network. That was all it took to give Geoffrey a window – and a door – into her mind.

Less than five seconds after its arrival, the dart’s work was done. It withdrew its self-cauterizing probes, unmoored itself from the elephant’s skin and returned to the sky. Melissa stopped trumpeting and lowered her trunk in a distracted manner, as if not quite sure what had been bothering her. The other elephants, momentarily troubled, returned to their own concerns. Melissa wandered back to her mother, one of the high-ranking females. Memphis sent a command authorising the dart to dismantle itself.

There were four more elephants to inject, but Geoffrey had no doubt that Memphis was up to the task. He was relieved that his old friend and mentor hadn’t taken obvious offence at the questions posed to him. At least, he didn’t think he had.

Memphis had told the truth, too. Geoffrey had never been more certain of anything in his life.

When the last of the elephants had been nanoculated and the aug had confirmed that the seed populations were establishing satisfactorily, Geoffrey and Memphis took the Cessna north and overflew some of the other Amboseli herds, making slow turns so that Geoffrey could see the elephants from all angles.

‘I know a few hundred of these animals by sight,’ he told Memphis. ‘Maybe two hundred I can recognise instantly, without having to think about it. I can identify maybe five hundred from the ear charts.’

‘I doubt that anyone else has your facility,’ Memphis said.

‘It’s nothing. Compared to some of the old researchers, the people who were out here a hundred or two hundred years ago, I’m barely starting.’

‘I am not sure that I could identify five hundred people, let alone elephants.’

‘I’m sure you’d do just as well as me, if you spent all day working out here.’

‘Perhaps when I was a young man. Now I am much too old to learn such things.’

‘You’re not old, Memphis. You’re just overworked and taken for granted. There’s no reason you couldn’t live as long as Eunice, and then some. A hundred and fifty years, no problem. You just have to take better care of yourself, and not let the family dominate your life.’

‘The family is my life, Geoffrey. It is all I have.’

‘But you don’t owe it anything, not now. The cousins don’t need you, Memphis. They treat the proxies better than they treat you.’

‘I gave my word to Eunice that I would be there for the Akinyas when she could not. Come what may.’

After a moment, Geoffrey said, ‘When did you give your word, Memphis? And why did she ask it of you? She may not have been here physically, but she was always there for us, looking down from the Winter Palace.’

‘I gave my word,’ Memphis said. ‘That is all.’

Geoffrey was visited by his father the next day. Kenneth Cho’s golem was running autonomously, as well it needed to given the fact that the organic aspect of Kenneth was presently on Titan, supervising Akinya Space hydrocarbon operations on the shore of Kraken Lake. It was a very good golem, too – not a claybot, but the best money could buy, and even with the ching tag reminding Geoffrey that the proxy was being driven from halfway across the solar system, across hours of time lag, it was difficult to shake the sense that his father was here in all his living, breathing, bludgeoning actuality.

‘Your mother and I,’ Kenneth declared as they walked together through the household, ‘are gravely concerned by this turn of events, Geoffrey. You and your sister have always been wayward, but we have come to accept this, as one accepts any regrettable situation that one cannot influence. But at the same time we have always trusted that you would act as a moderating factor, guiding Sunday against her wilder impulses.’

‘I’m not Sunday’s—’ Geoffrey started to protest.

‘She turned her back on responsibility years ago,’ Kenneth steamrollered on. He was a thin, elegant-looking man with precise symmetrical features and the hushed, disapproving manner of a senior librarian. ‘Preferring a life of self-indulgence and hedonism instead of bearing her familial obligations. You have been little better, but at least in you we still see glimmerings of decency. You waste time with elephants when you could be applying that useful mind to better purpose. But at least you put the animals before your own welfare, as the rest of us have put the family ahead of our own.’

‘You live in luxury, Father, and you gallivant around the solar system at the drop of a hat. In what sense are you putting anything before your own welfare?’ Geoffrey was listless and in the mood for an argument. He’d just been contacted by another research team, complaining about his near-exclusive access to the M-group. The last thing he needed was someone else poking around inside Matilda’s head, or for that matter any of her herd members. He could hold them off if necessary but the fact that he had to defend his research corner at all made him prickly.

The golem processed his answer. ‘You were with her on the Moon recently – this much we know from Hector and Lucas. Something you did or said must have prompted this bizarre action of hers.’

‘I can’t imagine what.’ He shrugged. ‘If you doubt me, play back that last ching conversation between me and Sunday, the one you were undoubtedly listening in on. Did I sound like I approved of or even knew about her trip to Mars in advance?’

In the same hushed, unperturbed tone that characterised most of his statements, Kenneth replied, ‘I am entirely unaware of this conversation.’

‘Right. And there are pigs circling Kilimanjaro even as we speak. Look, take it up with my sister. She wouldn’t listen to me even if I gave enough of a shit about what you think to try arguing her out of it.’

‘Sunday is frozen now, as you are well aware. Her ship is on its way. Nothing can stop her arrival at Mars.’

‘So you may as well start dealing with it.’

‘This troubles us, Geoffrey. Quite aside from the “why”, how has Sunday found the wherewithal to suddenly fund a trip to Mars?’

He thought of his parents, of Kenneth and Miriam, and wondered what exactly was going through their heads now, at this exact moment, on faraway Titan. He very much doubted that the outcome of this conversation was uppermost in Kenneth’s concerns. Kenneth projected versions of himself wherever they were required, sometimes more than one at a time. The fact that this version gave the impression of being bothered about Sunday didn’t mean that she was more than a passing concern to the real Kenneth.

‘As difficult as it is for you to grasp, maybe she made some money out of her art,’ Geoffrey said.

Kenneth looked sympathetic, as if he had unwelcome, even dire news to impart. ‘In the last two years, Sunday has made exactly two large sales, both to anonymous off-world buyers. The rest has been demeaning piecework. A job here, a job there. Barely enough to keep a roof over her head. Do you want the honest truth of it?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Sunday is a competent artist, nothing more. She has her moments, her flashes. But that won’t buy her fame and fortune, and it certainly won’t buy her posterity.’

‘You don’t know anything about her,’ Geoffrey told the golem. ‘There’s not a single piece of my sister’s life that you’re even capable of understanding.’ But the idea that Kenneth had knowledge of Sunday’s finances struck him as entirely too plausible.

‘Listen to me very carefully, Geoffrey. When Sunday arrives at her destination, the onus will be on you to reason with her. Whatever hole she is intent on digging for herself, you must talk her out of it. She may think she’s a free agent, able to do as she wishes, but that’s an unfortunate misconception. I won’t stand back and watch her drag our name through mud.’

‘She’s your daughter. Why not try treating her like a human being instead of a company asset that isn’t returning on its investment?’

‘She is my daughter, yes,’ the golem affirmed. ‘But above all else she is an Akinya, and that name carries expectations.’

‘Give my regards to Mother,’ Geoffrey said, turning away from the golem.

Later that afternoon he was lying back in his hammock at the study station, browsing a paper for peer review – it was long-winded and broke no obvious new ground – when the perimeter defence alarm sounded. Geoffrey rolled out of the hammock and slipped on his shoes. Sometimes Maasai came and talked, trading chai and gossip, but not usually at this time of the day. Nor had the aug picked up any human presences within walking distance during his approach overflight.

He walked to the door and unclipped the pistol from its alloy storage cabinet to the right of the doorframe, situated just below the first-aid kit. Around the weapon’s lightweight frame were bolted a variety of stun/disorientation devices, ranging from laser/acoustic projectors to electrical and rapid-effect anaesthetic darts.

Geoffrey flicked the arming stud and opened the door, cupping the other hand over his eyes against the afternoon glare. He scanned his surroundings, looking for something – anything – that might have tripped the alarm.

He saw what it was. The cousins were walking towards him, approaching along the side of the zebra-striped truck. Off in the distance, where it had come down far enough away not to have disturbed him, was an airpod, glinting chrome-green amid dry brush.

‘… the fuck,’ Geoffrey started saying.

‘Put that thing away,’ Hector said. ‘Wouldn’t want it going off by accident, would we?’

Still holding the pistol, Geoffrey came down the stairs from the research shack. ‘You’ve got no business coming here, Hector.’ He turned his gaze on the other cousin. ‘Same goes for you, Lucas. This is my work, nothing to do with you.’

‘As welcomes go,’ Lucas said, ‘it must be said that there is more than a little scope for improvement.’

Both cousins were dressed in lightweight slacks, business shoes and patterned shirts. Hector wore sunglasses, a form-fitting type that made it look, disturbingly enough, as if an oblong of black plastic had been inserted into a slot cut into his face. Lucas was holding a blue and yellow parasol; there was a bulge in his slacks where the centipede was still clamped to his leg. He also wore sunglasses; his were mirrored, although oddly the view they were reflecting wasn’t what Lucas was actually looking at.

‘The pistol, please,’ Hector said. ‘Put it down, Geoffrey.’

Geoffrey was on the verge of complying when he changed his mind and held the pistol by the barrel instead, his fingers around the multiply clustered cylinders of the various pacification devices. ‘You don’t come here,’ he said. ‘Not without my agreement.’

‘Hostility and defensiveness have their place in the modern business environment,’ Lucas said, folding the parasol, ‘but if family can’t drop by on a whim, who can?’

‘Don’t pretend you’ve ever given a shit about my work, Lucas.’

‘That’s a significant investment sitting in your account,’ Hector said. ‘You didn’t honestly think we were going to wash our hands of further involvement?’

‘We want oversight,’ Lucas said. ‘Checks and balances. Due diligence with regard to allocated funds.’

Geoffrey aimed the gun’s stock at Hector. ‘You never said anything about becoming more involved.’

‘In such circumstances,’ Lucas said, employing the parasol as a kind of walking stick, ‘it’s always prudent to consult the fine print.’

‘We had an arrangement,’ Geoffrey said. Hector and Lucas were nearly at his doorstep now. ‘I did your stupid errand, you gave me the money. There were no strings.’

‘Explain to me why your sister is aboard a Maersk Intersolar spacecraft, headed for Mars,’ Hector said.

‘She’s my sister, not my subordinate. What she does is her own business.’

‘If only it were that simple,’ Lucas said, his sunglasses disclosing a night-lit scene, some ritzy neon-washed club or function full of beautiful, glamorous people. ‘As a rule, your sister doesn’t just go to Mars at the drop of a…’ He faltered.

‘Hat,’ Hector said. ‘And we’re wondering what might have prompted this decision of hers.’

‘Ask her yourselves,’ said Geoffrey.

‘She’s frozen,’ Lucas said. ‘That does somewhat hamper the free and efficient exchange of information.’

‘In any case, Sunday being Sunday,’ Hector said, ‘she wouldn’t give us the time of day even if we managed to get through to her. You, on the other hand… well, you’ll talk to us whether you want to or not. Especially now those funds are in your account. They can be rescinded, you know.’

‘Fiscal reimbursement procedures are in place,’ Lucas said.

‘Fuck your procedures, Lucas.’

Slowly, his eyes on Geoffrey, Hector began to reach for the pistol. ‘Let’s not go down that route, cousin. We were all friends the night you came back from the Moon. There’s no need for this antagonism between us.’

Geoffrey yanked the pistol out of Hector’s reach. ‘We’ve never been friends. Let’s be absolutely clear on that. And what Sunday does is up to her.’

‘Geoffrey,’ Hector said, ‘please try to see things from our point of view. You must have said or done something that has put her on this course. What we would like to know is exactly what that was.’ He smiled, but there was no warmth in it, only a cryogenic chill. ‘So. Shall we discuss this like adults, or are you going to continue insulting our intelligence?’

‘I couldn’t if I tried,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Well, it’s good to establish a basis for further negotiations,’ Lucas said. He was still two metres from Geoffrey, standing further away than his brother, but in a single swift motion he brought up the shaft of the parasol and whipped the end of it hard against the stock of the pistol, the impact knocking the weapon out of Geoffrey’s hand, sending it careening into the dirt. Geoffrey jerked back his hand in shock, half-expecting to find his fingers broken by the jolt.

Hector knelt down and picked up the fallen pistol. ‘My brother has very fast reflexes,’ he explained. ‘Squid axon nerve shunts – it’s the latest thing. Long-fibre muscle augmentation, too – he could wrestle a chimp and win. It’s all really rather unsporting of him.’

‘My surgeon offers very favourable terms to family,’ Lucas said, adjusting his shirtsleeve. ‘I should put you in touch, Hector. No point being at such a miserable disadvantage in life.’

Hector was still holding the pistol. He looked at it distastefully, worked the mode selector and fired one of the tranquilliser darts into the ground. Then he passed it back to Geoffrey as if it was a toy he’d been deemed big enough to play with.

‘Best put it away, I think,’ Hector said confidingly.

Geoffrey was still shaking. He had witnessed very few violent acts in his life, much less been on the wrong end of one.

‘Have a think,’ Lucas said, ‘about what you said to Sunday, and how much this work really means to you. You’ll schedule some time for that, won’t you?’

‘Of course he will,’ Hector said. ‘Geoffrey’s close to his sister, and we can’t fault him for that. But ultimately he knows what’s best for him, and for his elephants. Don’t you, old fellow?’

‘Pass on our best regards to the herd,’ Lucas said.

The two cousins turned away and walked back towards their airpod. Geoffrey stood at the door, pistol quivering in his hand, heart racing, lungs heaving with each breath. He could still feel the sweat on his back as the airpod lifted into the sky, tumbled like a thrown egg and aimed itself at the household.