Blue Remembered Earth

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sunday’s state of mind as she returned to consciousness was one of supreme ease and contentment. With all worldly concerns on hold, she nonetheless retained sufficient detachment to appreciate that the cause of this euphoria was rooted in profound biochemical and transcranial intervention. That understanding, however, in no way undermined the bliss. Something joyous lay in that very realisation, too, for the machines would not be waking her unless the journey had been successful; she would not be waking unless the swiftship had crossed space to its destination. Mars.

She had reached Mars – or was at least close enough that it made no difference now. And that in itself was astonishing. It bordered on the miraculous that she had gone to sleep around the Moon and was now… here, around that baleful pinprick of golden light she had sometimes seen in the sky. In a flash she understood herself for what she was: an exceedingly smart monkey. She was a smart monkey who had travelled across interplanetary space in a thing made by other smart monkeys. And the fact of this was enough to make her laugh out loud, as if she had suddenly, belatedly, grasped the punchline to a very involved joke.

I’m the punchline, Sunday thought. I’m the period, the full stop at the end of an immensely long and convoluted argument, a rambling chain of happenstance and contingency stretching from the discovery of fire down in the Olduvai Gorge, through the inventions of language and paper and the wheel, through all the unremembered centuries to… this. This condition. Being brought out of hibernation aboard a spaceship orbiting another planet. Being alive in the twenty-second century. Being a thing with a central nervous system complex enough to understand the concept of being a thing with a central nervous system. Simply being.

Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to be a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the whole damned universe.

She had threaded the needle of creation and stabbed the cosmic bullseye.

That, she thought, was some fucking achievement.

‘Good morning, Sunday Akinya,’ said an automated but soothing voice. ‘I am pleased to inform you that your hibernation phase has proceeded without incident. You have reached Mars administrative airspace and are now under observation in the Maersk Intersolar postrevival facility in Phobos. For your comfort and convenience, voluntary muscular control is currently suspended while final medical checkout is completed. This is a necessary step in the revival process and is no cause for distress. Please also be aware that you may experience altered emotional states while your neurochemistry is stabilising. Some of these states may manifest as religious or spiritual insights, including feelings of exaggerated significance. Again, this is no cause for distress.’

She couldn’t move any part of her body, including her eyes, but the aug was active and able to supply a fully coherent visual stream in whatever direction she intended to look. She was resting on a couch, held there by a pull heavier than Lunar gravity but not nearly as strong as Earth’s.

The couch was also a medical scanner; she knew this because a hoop was gliding up and down its length, and there was a more elaborate hemispherical device enclosing her head. The couch lay in a narrow room, furnished in white, with a curving glass wall along one side, merging seamlessly into a transparent ceiling. Beyond the glass, a meadow, a pond, some dense-leaved, deciduous-looking trees. Cloudless blue skies. Birdsong and the sound of wind in branches pushed through the glass. None of it looked like Africa but she could not deny that it was therapeutic, in a calculated, manipulative sort of way.

In fact, it was hard to think of anything that wouldn’t have been therapeutic, given the deep and intrusive stimulation currently being worked on her brain. She decided to lie there and accept it. With nothing better to do, she skimmed systemwide newsfeeds, mildly disappointed that no events of epochal consequence had happened while she was under. No famous person had died; no one had gone to war with anyone else; there had been a dismaying lack of natural disasters. The Yuan had faltered against the Euro, but not so calamitously that anyone was jumping off skyscrapers. An adult tiger, captured in Uttar Pradesh and found not to be instrumented, led to a panic that other apex predators might yet roam beyond Mechanism control. In the Caspian Sea, a tourist boat had capsized with the loss of two lives. In Riga, the living heirs of a proud artistic lineage claimed that the Mandatory Enhancements had robbed them of the creative skillset that should have been their birthright. A ceremony attended the bulldozing of the world’s last place of incarceration, a former maximum-security prison near Guadalajara. A “golden period” Stradivarius had been destroyed in a freak shipping accident, while a lost Vermeer had turned up in someone’s attic in Naples. On the Moon, a match-fixing scandal surrounding the latest cricket tournament. An outbreak of the common cold, quickly isolated and controlled, in the Synchronous Communities. A pop star was pregnant. Another had broken up with his clone.

By turns she felt little prickles and tingles of returning sensation in different parts of her body, and at last the system informed her that she was now at liberty to make cautious movements.

Sunday got out of bed.

She had to force sluggish muscles to work for her, bullying them like an indolent workforce. She was wearing the same skimpy silvery gown stitched with the Maersk Intersolar logo they’d given her to put on before going under. She hoped her clothes had made it to Mars as well, because this wasn’t going to do.

She tried voking Jitendra. No response.

Presently a door opened in the glade. A Chinese medic came in with a wheeled trolley and performed a few last-minute tests, some of which involved no more sophisticated a procedure than him tapping her knees with a small metal hammer and nodding encouragingly.

‘You’re good to go,’ Sunday was told. ‘Anything feels out of the ordinary, be sure to contact a Maersk representative. But you should have no problems completing the journey to Mars.’

‘I travelled with a friend,’ Sunday said, answering in Swahili. ‘I couldn’t get through to him just now.’

‘Not everyone’s out yet. We don’t have the capacity to revive all the passengers in one go, not since they launched the thousand-berth liners. They’re building a bigger facility on the other side of Fobe, but it won’t be online for a year or so.’

‘Everything’s all right, though?’

The medic was packing away his gear. ‘Everything’s fine. We haven’t lost a passenger in the last ten trips.’

Somehow that wasn’t quite the blanket reassurance she had been hoping for. Sunday decided it had been meant sincerely enough, though, and that she should take it on those terms.

A little later she was shown to another room where her belongings had been unshipped, and she gladly shrugged off the gown and put on her own clothes, opting for an ankle-length skirt and sleeveless top. She selected a lime-green pattern for the skirt, left the top in its default black, tied her hair back with a white scarf and went to find Jitendra.

But Jitendra was indeed still frozen. It turned out that he had been loaded into a different part of the ship – no explanation was offered, beyond that kind of thing being routine – and was only now being offloaded and processed. It would be another six hours before he was conscious and mobile.

She called Geoffrey, without even stopping to check local time in Africa. This wasn’t going to be a real-time ching, so if Geoffrey didn’t want to take the call, he could always play her message later.

‘It’s me, Sunday,’ she said. ‘I’ve arrived safe and sound on Phobos; just waiting for Jitendra to be woken, then we’ll be on our way. Haven’t seen Mars yet, but I’m going outside shortly – I’ll blink you a few snaps from the surface of Phobos. It’s all pretty unreal, brother. I don’t feel like I’ve been asleep for a month. Us being on the Moon, me talking to you the day we departed… that all feels like a couple of days ago. I’m a month older, a month closer to my next birthday, and I don’t feel it at all.’

She halted, realised she had spoken only about herself. ‘Hope all’s well back home – I guess the cousins know I’ve taken this little trip by now. I hope they haven’t been making life too hard for you, and that you’ve been able to spend some time with the elephants. And I hope Eunice has been… behaving herself. Right now I think she can be useful to us. There’s a copy of her with me, and a copy with you… and it’s the same Eunice, give or take a few differences due to time lag. Even when we’re not in contact she can keep synchronising herself, updating her internal memory, learning all the while. And it may help us, brother. She’s the best window we have into Eunice’s actual life, and as I told you on the Moon, the construct will always know more about Eunice’s documented past than I could ever hope to hold in my head. And that could make a difference, for both of us.’

She paused for breath. ‘OK, I’m shutting up now. Reply when you’re able, but don’t sweat it if you’re in the middle of something. We’ll speak again when I’m on Mars.

‘On Mars,’ she repeated to herself softly, when the ching bind had collapsed.

On Mars. And shoot me if there’s ever a time when that doesn’t sound amazing.

Sunday was already experiencing Martian gravity. She was in one of several concentric centrifuge wheels, packed like watch gears into Stickney, the eight-kilometre-wide crater at one end of the little potato-shaped moon. The shops, boutiques and restaurants were set into facades of rough-hewn reddish stone. Decorated with black and white mosaics, the pavements and thoroughfares wound their way around fountains and signs and items of abstract public art, neon-pink installations mostly themed around dust-devils and sand dunes.

Unadventurous kitsch, but then Sunday wasn’t one to judge: she’d committed her fair share of that.

Travellers were everywhere, some walking confidently, some in exos, some with exos on standby, never straying more than a few paces from their owners. There were also some who were too frail even for exos, or had perhaps forgotten the art of walking entirely. They were supported in reclining dodgem-shaped travel couches, gliding around like deathbed patients on a terminal shopping spree. They’d come to Martian space from Ceres, the other Belt communities, the Galilean satellites, or from the moons of Saturn, or even further out. In their low-gravity worlds, Sunday would be the bumbling oaf, the object of deserved pity.

Panspermian funds allowed Sunday the rental of a Phobos surface suit. A tunnel brought her to the edge of Stickney, into an underground enclosure where rental employees surveyed proceedings with bored, seen-it-all expressions.

Risk had been engineered out of the Phobos suits. They came wobbling in via a ceiling track, like cable cars. Each consisted of an ovoid life-support capsule with a perfectly transparent upper hemisphere, ringed by a thick mechanical girdle. Four infinitely flexible segmented legs were anchored to the girdle, with one of the legs hooked onto the ceiling rail and the other three curled up around the ovoid like the arms of a chandelier. There was no means of picking up or prodding anything.

Sunday was helped into the next available suit, inside which she found a seat and basic directional controls. The dome clamped down and went pressure-tight, and then she was carried through a series of dilating pressure locks, finally exiting via a bunker-like entrance ringed by pulsing green bars. The suit’s curled-up legs flexed down and dug traction pitons into the light-sucking asphalt-black surface of the moon. The fourth leg uncoupled from the ceiling rail, and she was free. She could move the rover-suit in any direction she wanted just by tapping arrows or pushing a simple joystick. The suit took care of locomotion, maintaining a tarantula death grip against the moon’s feeble gravity.

Wherever Sunday looked there was another primary-coloured spider clambering with fluid agility over the soot-black undulating ground. No matter what contortions the legs had to perform as they navigated craters and grooves at all scales, the pressure capsules followed graceful trajectories. The more distant the spiders, the more acute the angle of view. She watched them tilt around the curvature of the world.

‘Phobos feels like a long way from Earth,’ Eunice said, her suited figure walking alongside Sunday’s rover. ‘But that’s not how it works, when you factor in the orbital-transfer mechanics.’

‘Right. I was wondering when you’d pop up.’

‘Not like I was going to miss an opportunity to revisit the old place, given the time I spent here.’ Eunice’s purposeful, bouncing stride belied the feeble gravity.

‘I don’t see how this place can be anything other than a long way from home,’ Sunday said.

‘Energetics, dear girl. Delta-vee. If you start from Earth, it costs you more fuel to land on the Moon than it does to reach Phobos. Counterintuitive, I suppose – although not if you have a thorough grasp of the principles.’

‘That’s me ruled out, then.’

‘Nature gave us this stepping stone for free. It’s just been sitting around Mars, waiting to be exploited. So we came and we saw and we conquered.’ Eunice swivelled her helmet to track Sunday. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Your old base camp. Where else are you likely to have buried a clue?’

‘Let’s look at Mars first,’ Eunice declared. ‘Then we’ll go to the base camp. You owe me that much.’

Sunday felt that she owed the construct nothing, but she caught her tongue before answering. Any utterance that was not the sort of thing she might have said to her living grandmother was at best noise, at worse a potentially damaging input.

‘You’ll get your wish.’

The rover-suit’s whirling, whisking limbs made brisk work of the necessary kilometres, processing the terrain with furious scuttling precision. Soon Mars began to rise over the horizon’s sharp black ridge.

Sunday did not stop until the clock was reading two hours, halfway into her rental agreement. Then it was time to take in the glory of this new world.

Mars ruled the sky. It was half-illuminated, the shadowed hemisphere serving only to emphasise that this was a three-dimensional thing, a sphere bulging out towards her. With no air between her and the atmosphere of Mars – and very little air in the atmosphere to begin with – the ground features appeared preternaturally sharp, defined with a mapmaker’s fastidiousness. The lit hemisphere was a warm salmon hue, tinged here and there with dusty swathes of ochre and burnt sienna. White snow frosted the visible pole. Cutting across the face, the claw-marks of some staggering canyon system gouged deep into the flesh of the world. Valles Marineris, Sunday thought: she knew that much, at least. And that fracture zone, where the canyons dissolved into a quilt of shattered intricacy, was the Noctis Labyrinthus, the Maze of Night. The three volcanoes beyond the maze: Ascreaus Mons, Pavonis Mons, Arsia Mons.

She was about to voke the aug to request a detailed topographic overlay when she realised that she was already travelling with the best possible guide.

‘Fond memories?’ Sunday asked.

‘It wasn’t like this when Jonathan and I landed on Phobos,’ Eunice said. ‘A planetwide dust storm had brewed up while we were on our way, so when we got here we couldn’t see much at all. We had no choice but to sit it out before we could head down to Mars.’

‘There were already people down there, though.’

Eunice used one gloved hand to screen glare from her helmet. ‘They had enough provisions and supplies to see out the storm, provided it didn’t last for months. But they couldn’t move around much, and it was far too dangerous to send anything up or down. This was before the elevator, of course.’

‘That much I figured.’

‘It wasn’t like Earth. Miss your landing point on Earth and you’re never far from rescue. Didn’t work that way on Mars, especially not in those days.’

Eunice had been thirty-one when she came with her husband to Phobos in 2062; not much younger than Sunday was now. She had been the ninety-eighth human being to set foot on that rusted soil, just before the influx became an inundation.

‘Can we look at the camp now?’ she said. ‘Clock’s ticking on my rental agreement.’

‘Follow me,’ Eunice said, sighing. ‘It’s not too far. Nothing’s far on Phobos.’

The dust storm wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. Nevertheless, none of the early explorers had been pleased to have their journeys to Mars interrupted by surface weather. Phobos had benefited, though. Long a convenient staging point for Martian exploration, by 2062 an entire transnational shanty town had spontaneously self-organised on the little moon, consisting of a ramshackle, barely planned assortment of domes, surface shacks and dugout habitats, and home to a semi-permanent population already numbering dozens.

Even in those early days, some had already decided that they actually preferred life in orbit, rather than down in the Martian gravity well or back on the Moon or Earth. They got all the scenery they could take just by looking out of the window or venturing onto the moon’s surface, and the steady succession of arriving and departing ships made for endless variety. Their technical services were also highly valued, in a variety of enterprises ranging from vehicle maintenance to the supply of narcotics and paid sex.

Most of that original shanty town was gone now, swallowed into the Stickney developments. But there had been a few outposts scattered elsewhere on Phobos, including the one where Eunice had spent most of her time.

When something began to push over the horizon, Sunday assumed they were coming up on the camp. But the object reared too high for that.

It was as dark, if not darker, than the rest of Phobos, and it rose a good ninety metres from the surface. They crept up to the shattered terrain around its base, where it had daggered into Phobos countless ages ago. A couple of other suits were wandering around the scene, shining spotlights onto the object’s upper reaches. Where the lights fell, they picked out intricate carved detail: flanges, pipes, repetitive iterations of the same elements, like spinal vertebrae or ribs. Bony outgrowths fused with ancient fossilised machine parts. Rocket exhausts like eye sockets, docking ports like gaping jawbones or reproductive organs. Hull armour spidered with fontanelle cracks.

‘They called it the Monolith,’ Eunice said. ‘Found it in photographs of Phobos, way back at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Couldn’t resolve the thing itself, just its shadow, but the shadow told them it had to be big. Needless to say, it was a prime target for close-up examination by the first landers.’

Sunday’s eyes tracked the mesmerising, morbid detail. The object was lumpy and asymmetrical, but it was clearly a vehicle of some kind, nose-down in the crust. ‘Somehow, I think I’d have heard about a crashed alien spaceship by now.’

‘Some of the early explorers got bored, cooped up here with a lot of time on their hands and not enough to do. One of them was a woman called Chakrabarty. Indian, I think. Or maybe Pakistani. One day, for kicks, she draws up a plan, very detailed and meticulous, and starts carving stuff into the Monolith. Her team had cutting gear, explosives, everything she needed. She started at the bottom and worked her way up. It was pretty easy. You can climb all the way up without any kind of safety line, and even if you fall off the top, it’s no worse than jumping off a garden wall back on Earth.’

‘This was all done by… this one woman?’

‘Chakrabarty started it. Then she went down to Mars and a while later word came back that she’d been killed – suit malfunction, I think. Her plans were still on file at the camp, though. After that, it became a sort of tradition. Anyone who was stuck here for more than a few days… they’d suit-up and head out to the Monolith to add a contribution to Chakra’s Folly. It was a way of honouring her memory – and of saying, We were here, we did this. Millions of years from now, the Monolith’s still going to be here. Until Phobos falls into Mars.’

‘Is it finished now?’

‘They reached the top decades ago. They’ve even sprayed the whole thing with plastic, to stop vandals and micrometeorite damage.’

Sunday made out fist-sized craters where tiny particles had hit Chakra’s Folly after it had been carved and decorated, chipping away at the details. She presumed the damage had been done before the protective layer was added.

‘Did you add to it?’ she asked.

‘I suppose I must have.’

‘You suppose?’

‘I don’t remember whether I did or not. Is that good enough for you?’

Sunday tempered her frustration. She couldn’t blame the construct for not knowing things that it had never been told. ‘There must be a record of who did what somewhere.’

‘Don’t count on it. And maybe I didn’t add anything. At this point, there may be no way of ever telling.’ Eunice stooped to pick something up from the ground, some chunk of material lying loose on the surface – blasted from the Monolith, perhaps – but her fingers slipped right through it. ‘You didn’t need to come all this way to examine the Folly,’ she said, standing up with a grunt of irritation. ‘You could have called up a figment of it and examined it in detail back on the Moon. Anyway, I don’t think this can be the reason I wanted you here. Everything about the Folly is public. I couldn’t have hidden a message in it if I’d tried.’

‘Something worked into the pattern, perhaps?’

‘Difficult. They didn’t like it when you deviated from Chakrabarty’s plan. It was supposed to bring bad luck.’

‘Like you ever believed in that.’

‘I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to court trouble.’ Eunice craned her head back, holding one hand above her visor. ‘It’s magnificent, though. No, really: isn’t it?’

‘It’s a shame Chakra never got to see it finished.’

‘We ’re seeing it for her,’ Eunice said.

Sunday wanted to dispute that – there was no ‘we’ as far as she was concerned, just her own pair of eyes, her own mind and her own feelings. As absurd as it made her feel, though, she did not have the heart to contradict Eunice. Let her believe she was capable of honouring a dead woman’s memories, if that was what she wished.

It did not take long to reach the Indian encampment, once they’d set off from the Monolith. It surmounted the horizon like an approaching galleon, masts and sails the towers and reflector arrays of a long-abandoned communications node. Smaller buildings surrounded the main huddle. It was a ghost town, long derelict.

‘Bad blood between the Indians and the Chinese back in the mid-fifties,’ Eunice explained, Sunday reminding herself that this was the mid-twenty-fifties she was talking about, not the twenty-one-fifties. ‘Never blew up into anything involving tanks and bombs, but there was sufficient animosity for the Indians not to want to have anything to do with the Chinese encampment. So they came all the way to Phobos and built this place, practically walking distance from the original shanty town.’

‘Couldn’t they have done us all a favour and left the Old-World politics behind?’

‘We were young, the world was young.’

Sunday couldn’t tell if anyone had been near the outpost lately. There were no footprints on Phobos, and the indentations left by the surface suits were indistinguishable from the pitting and gouging already worked into the terrain over billions of years. Still, why would anyone bother giving the settlement more than a glance?

Maybe in a hundred years historians would look back on this neglected site and find its dereliction unforgivable. But here, now, it was just more human litter, roadside junk left behind when people had moved elsewhere.

Off to one side, Eunice walked by a curious, rack-like structure that had been planted into the Phobos topsoil. It had a makeshift, lopsided look, as if knocked together in a burst of misguided enthusiasm after a lengthy drinking session. Eunice brushed her hand against the wheels that had been fixed into the frame, mounted on vertical spindles so that their rims could be easily turned. ‘Tibetans and Mongolians,’ she explained. ‘They were on the original Indian mission, or ended up here later – I can’t remember which.’

‘What the hell are those things?’

‘Prayer wheels. What the Tibetans used to call ’khor. Ceramic gyroscopes and reaction-control discs from spacecraft stabilisation systems. The things painted on the rim are Buddhist incantations, mainly – the eight auspicious symbols of the Ashtamangala. Supposed to notch up good karma by turning the wheels whenever you were coming and going from the camp.’

Eunice’s ghost-hand brushed through the prayer wheels without turning them.

‘Don’t tell me you believed that stuff.’

‘You don’t have to believe something to keep on good terms with your neighbours. Their cooking was great, and it cost me nothing to turn their silly old wheels. I even suggested we should rig them up to dynamos, make some extra energy.’ She made a tooth-sucking noise. ‘Didn’t go down well.’

‘So why touch the wheels now?’

‘Old habits.’ Eunice hesitated. ‘Respect for the people who once lived here. There was one… there was this young Tibetan. I think space had already got to him by the time he reached Phobos. Cooped up here, the poor kid went completely off the rails. Just sat there rocking and chanting, mostly. Then he latched on to me. My fault, really. Had this helmet… I’d painted a lion’s face around the visor. We’d all customised our suits, so it was no big deal to me.’

‘And?’

‘This poor young man… there’s this figure, they call her the Dakini. Khandroma in Tibetan – “she who traverses the sky”. One of her manifestations is Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one. She’s on some of those wheels. When I showed up with my helmet… let’s just say he had a few adjustment issues.’

Sunday had no recollection of ever having heard this story before. Yet it was out there, somewhere in Eunice’s documented life – either in the public record, or captured in some private recording snared by the family’s posterity engines. The construct could not have known it otherwise.

How marvellous a life was, how effortlessly complex, how full of astonishments.

‘You pushed him over the edge,’ Sunday said. ‘Into madness.’

‘Wasn’t my fault that he was already primed to believe that claptrap,’ Eunice said. ‘This was before the Mandatory Enhancements, remember. But he was a sweet little boy. I tried to downplay my karmic stature as best as I could, but I didn’t want to undermine his entire belief system.’

‘How considerate of you.’

‘I thought so.’

At the base of the comms tower was a low rock-clad dome – inflated and pressurised and then layered over with a scree of insulating rubble, fused to a lustrous ebony. Radiating out from this central dome were three semicircular-profiled tunnels connected to three hummocks, each of which had an igloo-like airlock and a thick-paned cartwheel-shaped window set into its apex.

The entire Indian complex was smaller than one wing of the household, but this was where Eunice had spent months of her existence, holed up with a dozen or so fellow travellers while they waited for the storm to blow over.

‘How did you… pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’

‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.’

‘I know about books,’ Sunday said. ‘It’s one of your stupid books that’s brought me here.’’

‘Well, we read a lot. And watched movies and listened to music and indulged in this strange behaviour called “making our own entertainment”.’ She paused. ‘We weren’t just sitting around watching the days go by. We had work to do, keeping the base operational, drilling into Phobos, even, very occasionally meeting the Chinese and other settlers in Stickney. Just because the governments made us build separate bases didn’t mean we couldn’t hang out.’

Sunday had walked the suit all the way around the main dome and its three satellites.

‘I can’t see a way in. There are airlocks on each of the smaller domes, but they’re all sealed over. Even if they weren’t sealed, I’m not sure this suit would fit through the doorway.’

‘The camp was abandoned by the end of the century, which is when I’d have had to come back here. But that sprayed-on sealant must be newer than that.’

‘Did it occur to you sixty years ago, while you were busy thinking of ingenious ways to waste my time, that I might not even be able to get in there now?’

Eunice bent to peer through the viewport in the nearest airlock, wiping the glass with her ghost-hands. ‘You’re making an unwarranted assumption. There may be no need for physical entry into the domes. There’s aug here, self-evidently. If it reaches into the domes, then we can ching inside.’

‘I already tried that. There’s no way into the domes, active or passive.’

Eunice stalked around to the next airlock. ‘Let me make absolutely sure of that.’

Sunday had equipped the construct with a suite of routines to maximise the effectiveness of the simulation, even when the aug was thin or local data traffic highly congested. Those same routines made Eunice’s conversations all but secure, even with only modest levels of quanglement. Perhaps Eunice would be able to sniff a way into the dome using the same box of tricks.

Sunday wasn’t optimistic about that. Unless there was something inside capable of surveilling – a security camera, a robot, a distributed sensor web – they were back to square one. And why would there be anything like that in an abandoned encampment?

‘OK, I’ve found a way in. Impressed, granddaughter? Damn well should be. I’ve lost none of my edge.’

‘Yes, I’m…’ But Sunday trailed off. Was it right to be impressed that software had done the job it was designed to do? Wasn’t that exactly the point of it? ‘Just tell me what we’ve got.’

‘Active ching, my dear. There’s a… robot. Someone left it in there, and it’s still motile.’

‘Someone just left a robot in there?’

‘Do you want the ching or not? You don’t need to know the coords – I can put you through from my side.’

‘Where will I end up?’

Eunice gestured vaguely. ‘The dome to the left of us, I believe. It doesn’t really matter, because I’ll be right with you and I know the layout of the place. Once inside, we can make our way to my quarters.’

‘Give me the bind,’ Sunday said.

It was, by some distance, the crudest ching she had ever experienced – cruder even than the proxy she’d used on the Moon, during Chama’s expedition through the Ghost Wall. She had a point of view, but no sense of being elsewhere – her body, as far as her mind was concerned, was still in the rover-suit. When she tried to look around, her viewpoint juddered like a camera with a sticky bearing.

‘Are you here?’ Eunice asked. She was standing next to Sunday, cradling her helmet under one arm. The helmet, Sunday was astonished to see, had gained a custom paint job in the seconds since she had last seen Eunice.

A lion’s roaring face, coloured gold and ochre, with startling blue eyes and a toothsome, red-lined jaw gaping around the visor.

‘Very nice,’ Sunday said.

‘There’s no air, according to your sensors, but it feels odd to wear a suit in here.’

A circular window crowned the apex of the dome, but it didn’t admit much light. Sunday’s robot had a torch built into its head, which must have activated as soon as the ching bind went through. She steered its dim yellow beam around the airless room, picking out a miserable assortment of junk and detritus. The room looked as if it had suffered an earthquake, or been looted. There were bunks, equipment lockers, ancient and broken computer systems. Printouts, photographs of loved ones, children’s drawings were still fixed to the in-curving walls.

Her robot was slumped, knees drawn up to its chest, back to the wall. She tried standing up. The robot hesitated, then jerked into shambling motion. It had a limp and its fine motor control was shot. It was obviously very damaged, which might have been the reason it had been left to moulder in the camp. There was something attached to its chest, a kind of mechanical spider with jointed white limbs and a flattened crablike body. Sunday presumed it was a repair bot that had broken down in the process of trying to fix the larger unit.

She dislodged it with a stiff flick from her forearm and gauntlet. The fingers were seized into uselessness, like a frostbitten hand.

‘This way,’ Eunice said, picking a path between piles of junk.

They navigated the connecting corridor between the domes, Eunice looking back impatiently as Sunday struggled to keep apace. Decompression, when it happened, must have been sudden. There were flashfrozen plants, their vines still curling around the corridor walls. When Sunday touched them, they snapped into green shards like brittle sugary confections.

‘I don’t like this place. Hope no one was here when the pressure went.’

‘Do you see bodies?’

‘No.’

‘It was abandoned long before it fell into decay, I’m sure of that. No one’s been inside these walls for a very long time.’

‘Why would they? It’s the dead past. Anyone sensible has got better things to do with their time.’

Eunice flashed her a cocky smile. ‘Then what does that make you?’

‘Find your room, then let’s get out of here.’

The main dome had interior partitions with pressure-tight doors between them. The doors were all open now, the air long since fled. There was a lounge/commons area with a round table, its black top engraved with a zodiacal design, and brightly coloured chairs that were normal enough save for the fact that they had seat belts and foot stirrups. There was a mug still on the table, with a snap-on plastic lid and a drinking nipple. Sunday moved to examine it, but the robot’s seized-up grip wasn’t wide enough to grasp it and she knocked it off the table. The mug drifted to the floor without breaking. On its side were the words Reykjavik 2088, above the five rings of the Olympics symbol.

‘This way,’ Eunice said. She stepped through one of the partition doors, Sunday following into the room beyond.

Sunday waggled the torch beam around. ‘Sure this is it?’

‘Yes, quite definitely.’ Eunice didn’t need to explain herself. If she was certain, it meant that the records placed her in this part of the Indian base. There would be images, movies that had been gorged by the construct’s ravenous curiosity. ‘But I may not have been the last occupant, and there’s no reason they’d have kept this place as a shrine to my greatness.’

‘Then we’re wasting our time, aren’t we?’

‘My older self obviously thought otherwise, or she wouldn’t have buried those papers in Pythagoras.’

‘Well, that worked well, didn’t it? If your older self didn’t anticipate that part of the Moon being swallowed by China, maybe she got her plans wrong here as well.’

‘Do have a little faith, child.’

In one angle of the segment-shaped room was a combination bunk/hammock, optimised for sleep in microgravity conditions. Next to that was a fold-out desk, with a screen and mirror above it. Elsewhere there were equipment lockers and shelves, furnished with boxes, cartons, medical supplies and general spacefaring kipple.

Sunday scuffed her hand along one of the shelves, bulldozing dust. After depressurisation the dust had had decades to resettle, forming a cloying grey sediment on every surface.

Sunday saw something on the bunk. She limped over and tried to pick it up, but her hands were useless.

‘It’s your glove,’ she said. ‘The other half of the pair. It’s just like the one Geoffrey found in Copetown. But I can’t grab hold of it.’ Then a thought occurred to her. ‘Even if I could grab onto it, how the hell am I going to get it out of here?’

‘Break the window in the ceiling and throw the glove out – just make sure you don’t put it into orbit.’

‘Then what? By the time it makes it back down to the surface, it could be anywhere on Phobos!’

Eunice had her helmet under her arm and was scratching the back of her head with her other hand. ‘It’s not the glove,’ she said quietly. ‘The glove’s a gift, reassurance that you’re close. But it’s not the glove. That’s not how I think.’

Sunday moved to another part of the room. She had noticed the mirror before, but it was only now that she happened to stand in front of it and glimpse herself. For an instant, the realisation of what she was looking at, what was being reflected back at her, did not quite click. She was chinging an androform robot, as she had expected: hard-armoured and articulated like a human being. The light in the crown of the robot’s head dazzled her as it bounced back from the mirror.

But it wasn’t an androform robot. It was a spacesuit, with a helmet on.

And there was something behind the visor.

Sunday looked at the face of death, looking back at her. There was a skull inside the helmet. A skull with skin pasted on, skin like rice paper.

‘Eunice… this isn’t a robot.’ Horror made her own voice sound unfamiliar.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It’s a spacesuit with a dead body and I’m walking around in it. Please tell me you didn’t know this.’

Eunice looked at her. There was no change of expression on her face, no dawning comprehension. ‘How could I possibly have known, Sunday?’

‘You knew. You looked for something to ching, and you found… this. You found a way in. You couldn’t have done that without realising that the ching coordinates pointed to a suit, not a robot.’

‘I… improvised, dear. It’s a suit with servo-assist and a camera built into the helmet. It moves, it sees. How, in practical terms, does that differ from a robot?’

‘Because it’s got a corpse in it.’ She was too angry to swear, too angry even to sound angry.

‘Fate presented us with this opening; I took it.’

‘How can you be so callous? This is… was a person, and you’re using

them like…’ Sunday flustered, ‘like some cheap tool, like some piece of disposable equipment. And I’m locked in with them, in a… a coffin.’

‘Get over it. Do you think this person gives a shit, Sunday? Whoever they are, whoever they were, no one cared enough to come and look for them. They sealed this place up, not even realising there was a dead body inside. That’s how missed this person was.’

‘You’re not making this any easier.’

‘We’ve found them now, haven’t we? When we get back to Stickney we’ll alert the authorities, and they can come and open up the camp. They’ll probably be able run a trace on the suit and find its owner. But in the meantime? Am I going to refuse to make use of this suit just because someone died in it once upon a time? This is serious, Sunday.’

She swallowed her revulsion. ‘Let’s get this over with. And if you ever do something like this to me again—’

‘You’ll do what? Erase me, because I had the temerity to make a decision? I thought you were smarter than that, granddaughter. By the way – while we’ve been talking, I happened to notice that that locker isn’t where it ought to be.’

‘What?’ Sunday asked, wary of a diversion.

‘Check the dust tracks on the floor. It’s been moved. Those may even be my own footprints.’

Sunday could no more grip the locker than she could the mug or the glove, but in Phobos’s gravity it wasn’t hard to shove it sideways until it toppled in slow motion. Sunday directed the helmet torch at the portion of the wall that had been hidden by the locker until then.

Eunice’s intuition had been correct. It was a painting, more properly a mural: brushed directly onto the dome’s curving wall.

Sunday stared at it in wonderment. For a moment, she forgot all about the corpse suit.

‘I know this.’

‘Of course you know it. It’s a copy of the one in my room, back in the household. I take no responsibility for the original, but I’m certain I made this copy.’

‘You painted this?’

‘Projected the original onto the wall, copied it. It doesn’t make me an artist.’

She wished that the construct had permitted the tingle of recognition to endure for at least a few moments before shattering the spell. Eunice was quite right, of course. Sunday had visited her grandmother’s abandoned bedroom on a handful of solemn occasions – it had always felt like the room of someone dead, not merely absent – and she recognised the mural from those visits.

‘Who’d have thought it?’

The construct looked at her sharply. ‘Who’d have thought what, child?’

‘That you, the great and fierce Eunice Akinya, could ever have been homesick. Why else would you have brought this piece of your past with you?’

Executed with childlike boldness, the mural was a vivid, colour-drenched painting of Kilimanjaro. The mountain’s steepness was exaggerated, its snow-cap diamond-faceted against deep-blue sky. Cutting across the middle of the painting was a horizontal swathe of trees, depicted with naive exactness and symmetry. Ornamenting the trees, perched on the branches like jewels and lanterns, were many colourful birds with long tails and horned beaks. In the foreground were ochre grasses and emerald shrubs. Woven into the grasses, striped and counter-striped like partial ciphers, were many different kinds of animal, from lions to zebra to giraffe and rhino, snakes and scorpions. There were even Maasai, their tall black and red spear-clutching forms the only recurrent vertical elements in the composition.

‘I wasn’t homesick,’ Eunice said, after a great while. ‘Home-proud. That’s not the same thing.’

Sunday blinked the mural. ‘I’ve captured an image. But I’m not sure this is the thing we were meant to find.’

‘And I’m sure it is. When I came back here, I must have changed the picture. It was well done, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps I redid the whole thing, to make sure the joins wouldn’t show.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘It doesn’t match. I have a memory of the original, and… something’s different.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Let’s be sure of ourselves, shall we? I can’t be certain that my memory of the mural is accurate. But your brother’s still in Africa. Have him visit my room and blink the image up to us. Then we can talk.’

Jitendra was on the drowsy cusp of consciousness, in the same kind of room where she had been revived earlier in the day. Sunday sat down in the chair next to the bed and was smiling when he surfaced, squinting against the light and licking sleep-parched lips. ‘Welcome back, lover. We’re on Mars. Almost.’

Jitendra had already been reassigned voluntary muscle function, so he was able to tilt his head and smile back. His face was slack, but the tone would return soon enough.

‘We made it,’ he said, slurring and pausing. ‘Not that I ever had doubts… but still.’

‘It’s still a miracle.’ The technician had given her a box holding six little cuboid sponges, stuck on the end of sticks like lollipops. They were soaked with something sweet, chemically tailored to Jitendra’s palate. She leaned over and dabbed his lips with one.

‘Thank you,’ Jitendra said.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Like I’ve been dead for a month.’

‘You have, Mister Gupta. It’s called space travel.’

He struggled into a sitting-up position, propping himself with an elbow. He was wearing silver pyjamas. They had even shaved him, so that when Sunday kissed his cheek his skin was peach soft and perfumed, smelling of violets. Jitendra took in his surroundings, studying the white room and the false window with its ever-breaking waves. ‘Everything went OK, didn’t it?’

Sunday dabbed at his lips again. ‘Not a hitch. They brought me out sooner, but apparently that’s what happens sometimes. Just time to take a little stroll outside, see the scenery.’

‘Please don’t tell me you’ve seen Mars ahead of me.’

‘No,’ she said, just a bit too quickly. ‘Not yet. It was on the other side. We’ll see it together.’

‘I’d like that.’ Jitendra rubbed his slightly stubbled scalp. ‘I need a haircut.’

‘We found something,’ she blurted.

‘We?’

‘Eunice and I. I need to talk to my brother, but… I think I already know where we’re going next.’

Jitendra sat in silence, waiting for her to elaborate. ‘Are you going to let me in on the big secret?’ he asked eventually.

‘It’s Mars,’ Sunday said. ‘Which is where we were going anyway, of course. But there’s a complication.’

Jitendra managed a smile. ‘Why am I not surprised?’

When Mars lifted into view its aspect was different, but she made no mention of that. In a way it helped, because this was a different face of the world, not the one she had already seen, and she could study it afresh without having to pretend. Sunday regretted her lie, but it had been a small one.

They were standing next to each other, far enough away from the other tourists that they could imagine themselves alone on this airless ridge, the only living people on Phobos. Soon this would be the memory she chose to hold on to, letting the earlier one wither. And in time she might even come to believe that this was, indeed, the first time she had seen Mars rising, in all its ancient, time-scarred immensity.

‘It’s wonderful,’ Jitendra said.

‘It’s a world. Worlds are wonderful.’

They stood in silence, transfixed, until a soft chime from the console told them it would soon be time to return their rented suits, and make ready for the rest of their journey.

‘Before we go inside,’ Sunday said, ‘you should see Chakra’s Folly. Reckon we’ve still got time. On the way, you can tell me all about the Evolvarium.’

‘Why are you interested in that all of a sudden? I thought that was more my area.’

‘Because that’s where we’re going.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The ching was passive, but the resolution more than adequate for his purposes. He exited his standing body, rose into the air and drifted over the treetops, gaining speed and altitude. Sometimes it was good not to take the Cessna, or one of the other machines; just to become a disembodied witness, with a viewpoint assembled from distributed public eyes. The scene was rendered with exacting thoroughness down to the last leaf, the last hoofprint or elephant footprint in the dust. Any uncertainty in the image flow was seamlessly interpolated long before his brain had to fill in any gaps.

He found the herd soon enough. Whatever status Matilda might have lost among the other females when she was startled by Eunice’s figment had been regained over the ensuing weeks. Her position and body posture were as authoritative as ever. She was leading her family along a narrow trail bordered by acacia and cabbage trees.

Revelling in the freedom – as much as he loved flying the Cessna, there was something delicious about lacking body and inertia, the ability to traverse the sky like a demon, at the merest whim – Geoffrey scouted the other herds, taking the opportunity to refresh his memories of their structures and hierarchies. He also pinpointed the roving bulls, solitary or in small, quarrelsome gangs. The minds of bull elephants, soaked with testosterone, preoccupied with status and mating, felt infinitely more alien to him than those of the matriarchs and their herds. And yet he’d known many of these bulls when they were juvenile males, as boisterous and carefree as the rest.

Minds were deeply strange things. When these elephants were young, it had required no great effort to see the sparks of human awareness in their curiosity and playfulness. It was even possible to think that their minds were in fact more human before adulthood clamped down and locked those attributes away, secure behind iron walls of dominance and aggression.

Elephant society was a product of necessity, shaped by environmental factors over countless millions of years. But what did that mean, here and now? Things were changing for the elephants; had been changing for centuries. Humans had come, and the humans had done things to the climate that had made the world convulse. Steamships to space elevators: all that in a Darwinian eye-blink, a strobe-flash of massively compressed change. Elephants were still dealing with the fact that monkeys had fire and spears; they hadn’t even begun to process the industrial revolution, let alone the space age or the Anthropocene.

Bolder changes still were coming down the line, changes that even humans would struggle to accommodate. Panspermian Initiatives, the Green Efflorescence.

Observing elephants, monitoring them – even creeping into their skulls – that was acceptable to Geoffrey. But making them into something else, rewiring their society as if it was no more than a defective mechanism, transforming it into something better equipped to survive…? He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. People had done enough harm, even with the best of intentions.

When he chinged back into his body, someone was waiting for permission to manifest. The tag was unfamiliar, so for a moment he presumed it was Sunday, coming in via an unorthodox, highly quangled routing.

He took the call in the research shack. He had made coffee before chinging and now, as the figment assumed reality, he drained the bitter dregs into his cup.

‘I hope I haven’t caught you at an inopportune moment, Mister Akinya. I did say I’d be back in touch, didn’t I?’

Geoffrey studied the blank-eyed man, with his sea-green suit and toothless gash of a mouth, his skin so pale that it might have been grafted from a reptile’s belly.

‘Kind of hoping you might have forgotten, Truro.’

‘Well, I can’t fault your honesty. But no, we don’t forget our debts. Especially when they’ve been extended. Remortgaged.’

‘If Sunday cut a deal with you, that’s between you and her.’

‘Ah, but it doesn’t work like that. If it ever did. We’ve done you two favours now, Mister Akinya. I’d very much like us at least to begin to discuss something by way of reciprocity.’

‘You can start by telling me where you’re chinging from.’

‘Oh, not so very far from you. Your sister correctly deduced that I was based on or near Earth. As it happens, I’m practically within spitting distance. I’m calling from Tiamaat, not too far from your Somalian coast. You’ll have heard of it, of course.’

‘I’m not an idiot. Why have you waited until now to contact me?’

‘You needed time to reflect, to assess your obligations to family. Sunday has arrived at her destination: we facilitated her visit, and the quangled bind from Phobos. She is awake. History has begun again. It felt like an appropriate time to resume negotiations.’

Geoffrey knew that Sunday was safe. He had received her message and made a point of blinking her a view of Kilimanjaro by way of reply.

‘I’m not sure anything needs negotiating.’

‘Chama Akbulut… found something, didn’t he? On the Moon, in the Chinese sector?’

Geoffrey picked a fly out of the coffee’s cold meniscus. ‘If you say so.’

‘I’ll confess, there are two reasons why we ought to meet in person, and with some urgency. One is the business with Chama, Gleb and the phyletic dwarves. It’s a marvellous little project and it has my absolute support. There’s something else, though. You’ve come to the attention of… well, I shan’t say for the moment. But a colleague of mine has requested an audience.’

‘Thing is, my calendar’s a little full.’

‘And this is science, Mister Akinya. Whatever your plans, I doubt there’s anything so pressing that it can’t wait a few days.’

Geoffrey opened his mouth to argue, but beyond the usual vague notions of getting ahead on paperwork, he had no detailed intentions. ‘You’re not going away, are you?’

‘As you’ll find, I’m a remarkably persistent soul.’

‘You’re going to keep bothering me, I suppose I might as well get it over with.’

‘Splendid,’ Truro said, as if he had been expecting no other response. ‘You shall come to Tiamaat, and the pleasure will be all mine! I have your ching coordinates. Shall we say… this location, tomorrow morning? Ten a.m.? Very good.’

The knob clicked, the door emitting a mouselike squeak of protestation as it opened. Eunice’s room was cool, the windows permanently shuttered. A ceiling fan stirred the air to no detectable benefit. Geoffrey had peered into this room at various points during his childhood and adolescence, but not often since his late teens. Eunice’s figment had sometimes manifested here, but as often as not it had appeared somewhere else in the household or its grounds. Whatever the case, Geoffrey had usually done his best to be elsewhere.

The room was a time capsule, a piece of the twenty-first century lodged in the present. The rose-printed wallpaper was paper, not active material: it was pasted onto the walls and couldn’t be altered at a moment’s whim. Rectangular fade marks hinted at the locations of old pictures, join lines where the sheets didn’t quite match, and little white lesions where the paper had been scuffed. The rug on the floor was a kind of textile rather than a self-cleansing frond-carpet. When he stood on it, it didn’t ooze over his shoes and try to pick them clean of nourishment. The furniture was wooden: not the kind of wood that grew purposefully into furniture shapes, but the kind that started off as trees, before being hacked and rolled and sawed and steamed into shape. There were things in this room older than the Cessna.

One wall wasn’t papered, or had been papered and then painted over. The mural didn’t fill the entire area; it was bordered in white and smaller than Geoffrey remembered. The wall faced east, towards the real Kilimanjaro.

‘I was right,’ Eunice said. ‘You can blink it for Sunday’s sake, but I’ve seen it through your eyes now and that’s much the same thing.’

‘I haven’t seen the other one. What’s different?’

‘Directly below the mountain, here.’ She was pointing at a long-legged bird, maybe a crane or ibis. ‘The etymology of Kilimanjaro isn’t very clear, but it may mean “white mountain” or “white hill”. This bird is white, do you see?’

‘I do.’

‘In the version on Phobos, it’s a different bird. I saw it immediately, but I had to be sure. Sunday would never have realised, but—’

‘Get to it, Eunice.’ His nerves were addled after the visitation from Truro. ‘Some of us have lives to be getting on with.’

‘It’s a peacock,’ she said, ‘painted in exactly the same position. That’s the only point of difference between the two murals. We have stills of the Indian camp taken around 2062, and some of them show the mural. There was no difference between this one and that one at that point, so I must have made the change when I returned to Phobos in 2099.’

‘Fine. And this is supposed to mean something to me?’

‘From white mountain to peacock mountain, Geoffrey. Must I labour the point? The original mural refers to Kilimanjaro; the one on Phobos can only refer to Pavonis Mons.’

‘Pavonis Mons,’ he repeated.

‘On Mars. It’s the—’

‘Highest mountain. Or volcano. Or something.’

‘That’s Olympus Mons, but you’re on the right lines. Pavonis Mons is still pretty impressive. Main thing is, I was there. If there was no documented link to my past, then you’d be forgiven for dismissing the mural. But I was there. I walked on that mountain. It was 2081; I was fifty-one years old, pregnant with Miriam. We know the exact coordinates.’

‘Then all Sunday has to do is…’ Geoffrey trailed off. ‘She mentioned complications, Eunice.’

The figment swallowed audibly. ‘There are… difficulties.’

‘Such as?’

‘That part of Mars… the Tharsis Bulge… it’s changed a little since my time.’

Memphis motioned Geoffrey to take a seat until his call was done. Geoffrey poured himself some water from the jug set on a low table near Memphis’s desk.

‘What can I do for you, Geoffrey?’ Memphis asked pleasantly, when he had come out of ching.

‘I have to go away, just for a couple of days, leaving tomorrow morning. Could you check on things while I’m gone?’

‘It is rather short notice.’

‘I know, but I’d feel a lot happier if you could do that for me.’

Memphis shook his head, a gesture of good-natured exasperation that Geoffrey remembered well from his earliest days. What are we going to do with you, young man?

‘Couple of days, you said?’

‘That’s all. And you don’t need to spend hours out there.’

‘Could you not ching, from wherever you’ll be?’

‘That may not be possible. Anyway, I’d rather someone went there in person. You know how it is.’

‘Yes,’ Memphis said, in long-suffering tones. ‘One does. Well, you would not ask this lightly, I think. I will inspect Matilda’s herd from an airpod. Will that suffice?’

‘If you could also land and inspect the perimeter monitors, and then check on the camp, that would be even better.’

‘Will one inspection per day suffice?’

Geoffrey shifted on his seat. ‘If that’s all you can give me—’

‘Which is your way of saying you would rather I made at least two.’

Geoffrey smiled softly. ‘Thank you, Memphis.’

‘This mysterious trip of yours… you’ll be sure to tell me what it’s all about, when you get back?’

‘I will, I promise. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us.’

‘Nor I.’

There was a lull. Memphis looked ready to return to his work, so Geoffrey made to stand up. But his old mentor was not quite done.

‘Now that Eunice is never coming back, we should give some thought to what happens to her room. She would not have wanted it kept as some miserable, dusty shrine.’

‘There are plenty of rooms in the household going spare.’

‘When we have many guests – as we did during the scattering – we are considerably stretched. If the subject upsets you, I won’t raise it again. But I know your cousins will be anxious to move on.’

‘Bury the past, you mean.’

‘We must all do that, if we are to keep living,’ Memphis said.

In the morning, Geoffrey saw a glint of moving silver, an aircraft with an upright tail fin, sharking low over the trees. Gradually he heard the drone of… He shook his head, ready to laugh at the patent absurdity of it. The only thing in his experience that made a sound anything like that was the Cessna, and the Cessna was sitting in plain view.

‘Eunice,’ he said quietly, ‘I could use some help here.’

She was with him in an instant, as if she had never been more than a few paces away. ‘What is it, Geoffrey?’

‘Need a reality check. Tell me I’m not looking at an aeroplane even older than my own.’

Geoffrey was shielding his eyes from the sun. Eunice echoed his gesture, but at the same time – from where, he hadn’t noticed – produced a pair of slim grasshopper-green binoculars, which she held to her eyes single-handed, as daintily as if they were opera glasses. She tracked the moving form of the aircraft, now almost nose-on.

‘If I’m not very much mistaken, that is a DC-3. Is there any particular reason why a DC-3 would be coming down to land, miles from anywhere, in the middle of equatorial East Africa?’

‘It’s my ride,’ Geoffrey said.

Eunice lowered the binoculars. ‘To where?’

‘Somewhere interesting, I hope.’

The DC-3 dropped under the treeline, its engines throttling back. They walked over to meet it.

‘They were extraordinarily numerous and long-lived,’ Eunice said as they picked their way through dry brush. ‘Sixteen thousand, and that’s not including all the copies and knock-offs. Even when they were old, you could strip out the avionics, put in new engines and begin again with a zero fatigue rating. Dakotas were still flying when I was a child.’

‘Did you like planes?’

‘Adored them.’ Eunice was stomping her merry way through thigh-high grass as if it wasn’t there at all. ‘Look at it this way. You’ve been born in a time when it’s possible to fly through the air in machines. Who wouldn’t fall in love with the idea of that?’

The DC-3 sat tail-down at the end of the airstrip. It was quite astonishingly beautiful: a gorgeous sleek thing, as curvaceous and purposeful as a dolphin.

But, incongruously, there was no sign of a welcoming committee. A door had been opened and a set of steps lowered, but no one was standing at the top of those steps, beckoning him aboard.

‘Are you sure this is for you?’

‘I thought so,’ he said, but with ebbing confidence.

Yet what else could it be but the transport Truro had promised? Then he saw a neat little logo on the tail fin, a spiral galaxy painted green, the only marking anywhere on the highly reflective silver fuselage.

If that didn’t clinch it, nothing would.

They climbed aboard. It was cool inside, with seats and settees laid out lounge-fashion and a bar situated at the rear of the fuselage. The compartment ran all the way to the nose: there was no cockpit, no flight controls or instrument panel, merely a couple of additional lounge seats for those who wanted to take advantage of the forward view.

Behind them, the steps folded back into the plane and the door sealed itself. The engines revved up again and Geoffrey felt the aircraft turning on the airstrip.

‘And you’ve no idea what this is about?’

‘You, ultimately,’ Geoffrey said.

Soon they were bouncing along the airstrip, and then aloft, climbing shallowly, skimming the treetops by no more than hand-widths.

‘Well, this is grand fun,’ Eunice said, striding imperiously from window to window. ‘I’m still here, too. Whoever’s sent this thing is allowing you full access to the aug. That’s reassuring, isn’t it? You’re not being kidnapped.’

‘I never thought I was.’

Eunice soon tired of the view and sat herself down in one of the seats. ‘So who sent this aircraft?’

‘The Panspermian Initiative. You know about them – you used to hang out with Lin Wei.’

‘I don’t know anyone called Lin Wei.’

‘You should do, but there’s a part of your life missing. Sunday established the connection with Lin, but she doesn’t have enough information to fill in the rest of the void.’

‘Have to take your word for it, then. So we’re going to see this Lin Wei?’

‘I doubt it, seeing as she’s dead. My point of contact is someone called Truro.’

‘Whom you trust enough to get aboard this plane?’

‘I’m in his debt. Actually, we’re all in his debt, but I’m the one who seems to be expected to do the paying back.’

‘The Panspermian Initiative,’ Eunice said languidly, drawing out the words as if she was reading them, signwritten across the sky. She was tapping the aug, glugging gallons of data. ‘You need to watch people like that. All that species-imperative stuff? Self-aggrandising horse-piss.’

‘They think we might be in a critical period, a window of opportunity. If we don’t seize the moment now, we might never get beyond the system, into the wider galaxy.’

‘Which would automatically be a good thing, would it?’

‘You weren’t exactly short of grand visions in your day.’

She scoffed. ‘I didn’t have any noble intentions for the rest of humanity. I was in it for myself, and anyone else smart enough to go along with me.’

‘No,’ Geoffrey said, shaking his head. ‘You were a pioneer and a risk-taker, sure, but you also had ambitions. You didn’t go to Mars just to stamp your footprint into that soil and come home again. You wanted to live there, to prove it was something we could do.’

‘Me and a thousand others.’

‘Doesn’t matter – you got there as soon as you could. But your problem was that you couldn’t stand still. You had to keep moving, pushing outwards. You liked the idea of living on one planet more than the actuality. That’s why you left your husband behind.’

‘Jonathan and I grew apart. What has that got to do with anything?’

‘If you were alive now, with enough influence to be part of this, you’d be one of the main drivers.’

‘Spoken with the assurance of youth. Well, I’m sorry to prick your bubble, but did you ever wonder why I came back to the Winter Palace? Everything Eunice Akinya used to stand for started to bore me senseless.’

‘So you decided to become a witchy old recluse, counting her money and tut-tutting at her offspring.’

‘Since you put it so charmingly, yes.’

They had been travelling for two hours straight before they left Africa behind, crossing the buttressed white margin of the self-renewing sea wall and into the airspace above the Indian Ocean.

There were boats at sea, fishing and leisure craft, even some of the elegant multi-masted cyberclippers: benign Marie Celestes, holds abrim with bulky, non-perishable cargoes. To the south, the edge of one of the floating platelets, an artificial island capped by its own fevered little weather system. Another island, smaller this time, bore a dense thicket of skyscrapers, as if Singapore had become unmoored and drifted halfway around the world. As the DC-3 approached, the city revealed itself to be a congregation of stack farms, rising two kilometres from sea level. The stacks were mossy with vegetation, green-carpeted up their sheer flanks. Robot dirigibles harvested the tops of the stacks, crowding around them like fattened bumblebees as they waited their turn. Aside from a skeleton staff of technicians, no one would live on that island.

The DC-3 kept flying. Geoffrey checked his watch. It was two in the afternoon; they’d been in the air for four hours. He hadn’t expected the journey to take this long.

Just when he was starting to worry that the plane was going to carry him all the way to India – however many hours that might entail – something loomed from the ocean haze. Whatever it was rose straight from the sea, a solid-looking mass with a rounded, symmetrical summit. It was a structure, a very large one, with the open maw of a snorkel facing him. The DC-3 was headed straight for it.

Geoffrey knew better than to be alarmed; if the Pans were going to kill him, there were simpler ways of going about it than a plane crash. The engine note changed, the floor tilting as the aircraft lost altitude.

‘Do you know what that is?’

‘An aqualogy transit duct,’ Eunice said. ‘They’re built up from the seabed, raised on stilts of artificial coral, grown and replenished like the self-renewing sea walls.’

He’d moved to the forward seats for the best view. A pale, batlike craft emerged from the snorkel and sped south. One of the harvester dirigibles loitered near the entrance, awaiting clearance to proceed. Rafts of green biomass drooled from its collector baskets.

The DC-3 had approach priority. The descent steepened, and then they were inside the snorkel, flying down a completely enclosed air-corridor. Geoffrey tried to judge the angle of descent, but without a visible horizon it was hard to estimate. It felt much steeper than his usual landing pattern in the Cessna, but at the same time there was a sense of calm routine, the ride elevator-smooth. He hadn’t even been told to sit down or buckle-up.

The corridor darkened as the sunlit mouth receded. Red lights slipped by on either side, marking their progress. Once, another batwing craft sped by in the opposite direction: silver-bodied with the Initiative’s green whorl painted on its skin.

‘We’ve descended a long way,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We must be underwater by now.’

‘They’re blocking me.’

‘What?’

‘Aug degradation. The duct must be interfering with the signal. I imagine that’s not accidental.’

‘Can’t you do anything about it?’

‘Dear me – that almost sounds like concern for my welfare.’

‘It’s not. I just value a second pair of eyes.’ He paused. ‘Eunice?’

His visual field clotted with error messages. She was gone.

His ears popped. The ride levelled out for a stretch. Then, softly enough that he almost thought it might be his imagination, the DC-3 was down. It rolled for a short while, as smoothly as if sliding on ice, and then came to a halt. The tunnel had widened out into a larger space, lit by banks of blue lights.

The door whirred open, the stairs lowering simultaneously. Geoffrey grabbed his overnight bag and climbed out of the now silent transport. He stepped onto hard black ground, sheened like wet asphalt. The chamber was large enough to hold half a dozen other aircraft, though none were as old as the DC-3. Nearby a harvester was having its collector baskets raked clean.

Without Eunice, and without the aug, Geoffrey felt more vulnerable than he’d been expecting. He didn’t want to think about all the megatonnes of seawater somewhere over his head, especially as some of it appeared to be dripping through the ceiling.

‘Well, thanks for the welcome,’ he said quietly.

A merwoman strode out of the darkness. Her mobility prosthesis encased her body from the ribcage down, gripping corset-tight. Mechanical legs emerged from the exo’s pelvic girdle, spaced wide on complex joints. They were articulated backwards, giving the merwoman the look of some giant strutting bird. The exo whirred and clanked, as if it wasn’t in the best repair. The framework was bottle-green, traced with luminous kelp-like patterns.

In impeccable Swahili she said, ‘Good afternoon, Mister Akinya. I hope your journey was a pleasant one.’

‘Whose idea was the Dakota?’

‘Truro thought you’d appreciate the antique touch. Rest assured, though, that you’ll be going home by conventional means. I am Mira Gilbert – UAN Office of Scientific and Technological Liaison. It’s a pleasure to welcome you to Tiamaat. I trust the absence of aug isn’t too distressing?’

‘I’m coping.’

‘We have our own local aug here, and something very like the Mechanism. You’ll be given access to the baseline functions, but before that, I’m afraid we’ll need to neutralise any recording devices you might be carrying.’

‘I’m not.’

‘That also includes your eyes, Mister Akinya. Their capture-and-record function must be disabled.’ Her tone was apologetic but insistent. ‘I trust this isn’t too great an inconvenience? Any information already on the eyes should be safe.’

Geoffrey bristled, but he’d come too far to throw a tantrum now. ‘If that’s what it takes.’

‘Please follow me.’

She whirred around in the exo and clanked away, leading Geoffrey through a door in the side of the cavern and along a dank, wet-floored corridor.

‘You speak Swahili very well,’ he told her.

‘Helps, in this region. I understand you’ve been in space recently?’

‘The Moon and back, assuming that counts. Do you leave Tiamaat very often?’

‘I don’t leave water very often, let alone the city. Frankly, I can’t wait to get out of this clanking contraption. It’s not that I minded meeting you, though.’ After a few paces she added, ‘I have been to space, though. I was a pilot, before I was seconded to Tiamaat.’

‘How long have you been…?’ He felt tongue-tied.

‘Aquatic? Thirteen years now. Takes a little while to get used to the alterations – the brain has to learn a whole new way of moving, a whole new hydrodynamics. The first six months were difficult. After that, I never looked back.’

‘And could you be… reversed? If you wanted to?’

‘Perhaps,’ Gilbert said, managing to sound as if the notion had never really occurred to her. ‘Some have defected back to lubber. But they must have been ’formed for the wrong reasons.’ She turned to look back over her shoulder. ‘People think becoming like this is the magic spell that’ll sort out their lives, put an end to all their worldly woes. Nowadays the psych screening’s much more rigorous. There’s also a huge waiting list for new surgery. You can’t just wake up one morning and decide to become aquatic.’

‘You’re not worried about overcrowding, surely?’

‘Not really. There’s more surface area down here than on all the dry land masses combined. Earth coexists with a planet as large as Mars, and all you have to do to cross from one to the other is swim. But there are bottlenecks. Our clinics can only cope with so many transformations, and with the germline programmes making ever more headway, there’ll soon be second-generation aquatics who never came through the clinics – merchildren born of merpeople. Then we’ll have to impose much stricter quotas. Needless to say, our offspring will have priority. It’s not too late to join us, though.’

‘Become a citizen? Thanks, but I’ve got other plans for the rest of my life.’

They rode an elevator upshaft and emerged into a clean white-tiled room. With the tiled floor eventually giving way to a shimmering rectangle of turquoise water, accessed at various points by stairs and ramps, it resembled a large indoor swimming pool. Dim greenish light filtered through heavily strutted ceiling windows. That must be ocean above his head, he thought: enough of it that the full glare of sunlight was reduced to this soupy, olive-stained radiance.

‘You can locomote the rest of the way if you want to,’ Gilbert said, ‘but it would really make a lot more sense if you travelled by water instead. Do you swim?’

Geoffrey couldn’t recall the last time he’d set foot in water. ‘A bit.’

The merwoman gestured to a white door in the tiled wall to Geoffrey’s right. ‘Wetsuit in there. Leave your clothes and belongings there – they’ll be forwarded to your quarters later.’

With some diffidence, Geoffrey locked himself in the changing room and removed his clothes. He bundled them up in a wireframe basket, then examined the waiting wetsuit. It was fixed against the wall by some hidden means, legs and arms spread wide. It was a vivid yellow-green colour, with a texture like fine-grained sandpaper. He was just starting to work out the best way to get into it when the suit peeled open along hidden seams, exactly as if a kindly poltergeist were offering assistance.

Geoffrey turned and shuffled backwards, arms and legs mirroring the suit’s posture, and waited for the fabric to seal itself around his body. At first it tightened alarmingly, sucking onto his skin as if vacuum-formed. Rather to his surprise, he found that he could still breathe without difficulty. He felt, in fact, completely unclothed, and when he brushed his bare fingertips across his fabric-clad chest, it felt as if he was touching his own skin. High-res tactile-transmission system, he supposed, the kind they had in spacesuits these days. He walked out of the room, feeling more self-conscious than he would have liked. The suit enclosed him from ankle to neck, but its tight-fitting contours were barely sufficient to preserve his modesty.

‘Good,’ Gilbert said, giving him no more than a momentary glance. ‘Now for the aqua-mobility harness.’

She walked him over to the far wall, where a dozen or so sleek white devices were racked in a line. They resembled the partial skeletons of marine mammals, each with a segmented spine, a fluke, articulated side-flippers, a lacy suggestion of a skull. There was also a kind of cracked-open ribcage.

‘I’m meant to get into that?’

‘You want to keep up with me,’ Gilbert said, ‘you’d better. Back into the harness, it’ll do the rest.’

Geoffrey did as he was told, selecting the first of the harnesses. The ribcage pincered slowly around him, clutching his chest firmly, the padded insides of the ‘ribs’ reshaping to provide maximum surface-area contact. The skull enclosed his head, forming an openwork cage equipped with a breathing apparatus and suction goggles. He felt the harness detach from the wall mounting, so that he was bearing what little weight it possessed. It felt as flimsy as a cheaply made carnival costume.

‘What do I do with it?’ Geoffrey asked, feeling awkward. He could speak and see freely: the breathing apparatus was still hinged away from his mouth and nose, and the goggles had yet to clamp down onto his eye sockets.

‘Step into the water. The harness will sense your intentions and operate accordingly.’ With this, Gilbert divested herself of the exo. She slipped out of it and slid into the water, sleek as an otter. Released from the exo she was effectively naked, but her form was so thoroughly alien that Geoffrey might as well have been watching a wildlife documentary.

He took one of the sloping ramps and walked into the blood-warm water. When he was up to his waist, the harness latched on to his legs and coaxed them gently together. Without any apparent conscious volition on his part, the harness then pushed him into a horizontal swimming posture. Before he had a chance to gag on the water the mask and goggles had covered his face. The view through the goggles was as bright and clear as day, lacking any optical distortion or cloudiness.

‘Follow me,’ Gilbert said, and he heard her clearly through the water. She flexed her body and torpedoed past him, executing an exuberant barrel-roll.

He kicked his legs and paddled his arms. Miraculously, he surged forwards, the harness flexing all the way along its spine, taking his legs with it. The feeble paddling of his arms was amplified a dozen- or hundredfold by the elegant wide-spread flippers, which extended a good two metres either side of him.

Gilbert was still ahead, swimming underwater at least as fast as someone might jog on dry land, but Geoffrey was only a body length or so behind her. For all the power she put into her swimming, it was evidently a very efficient process, judging by the lack of turbulence in her wake.

‘Not claustrophobic, are you?’ she asked.

‘If I was, now would be a bit late to find out.’

‘We’ll take the express tube. You’ll like this.’

Around the pool’s submerged walls were several tunnel mouths, each ringed by a hoop of glowing primary colour. ‘Red are the exit tubes, we don’t take those,’ Gilbert said. ‘Wouldn’t be able to swim against the up-current anyway, even with power-assist.’

She aimed for the tunnel mouth ringed in glowing purple, appearing to accelerate into the maw at the last moment. Geoffrey followed, muscularly signalling his intention to steer and feeling the harness respond almost instantly. Indeed, it appeared to be adapting to him as quickly as he was adapting to it. He was swimming underwater as effortlessly as a dolphin.

He grinned. It would be madness not to enjoy this.

He felt the surge as the tunnel’s current seized him, and then he was racing along it, glassy walls speeding by, Gilbert not far ahead. As the tube twisted and turned, the water inside it flowing up and down, he wondered what drove that flow: he couldn’t see any visible fans or pumps, unless they retracted out of the way as the swimmers passed. Perhaps it was peristalsis, a gentle but continuous impulsion, driven by the walls themselves.

He had no sooner formulated that idea than they were, startlingly, outside – crossing between one part of Tiamaat and another, with only the tube’s glass between them and the crush of the surrounding water. They were crossing through a forest of night-lit towers, turreted and flanged and cupolaed, submarine skyscrapers pushing up from black depths, garlanded with myriad coloured lights. The buildings were cross-linked and buttressed by huge windowed arches, many stories high, and the whole city-district, as far as he could see, lay entwined in a bird’s-nest tangle of water-filled tubes. He could, in fact, make out one or two tiny moving forms, far above and far below – swimmers carrying their own illumination, so that they became glowing corpuscles in some godlike arterial system. Elsewhere there were ocean-swimming aquatics, moving outside of the tubes, and all manner of submersible vehicles, ranging from person-sized miniature submarines to servicing craft at least as large as one of the cyberclippers he had seen from the air.

Geoffrey reeled. He knew about Tiamaat; he knew about the United Aquatic Nations and had some idea of what they were getting up to under the waves. But the scale of the thing was startling.

He realised that he’d been operating under a gross misapprehension. Living on dry land, it was easy to think that the aquatics constituted no more than a faltering experiment in undersea living, like an early moonbase.

But this was a kingdom. For a moment, dizzied, he began to wonder if it was his existence that was the failed experiment.

As quickly as it had been disclosed, the view of Tiamaat was snatched away and he was back inside, the tube hairpinning again, ducking and diving with joyous abandon through a series of vertical S-bends until it deposited the two of them in another swimming pool – or rather what he now appreciated to be a kind of interchange between the various tube systems, with its own colour-coded portals. It was a bigger junction, and they were not alone this time. Other aquatics loitered in the pool, not too close to the entrance/exit points with their strong currents. There were even some visitors or newcomers, wearing harnesses like his own. They were gathered into groups, talking and laughing.

Some were fully aqua-formed, like Gilbert, but there were others who still retained basic lubber anatomy, with a normal complement of limbs. Some of these borderline cases appeared happy with prolonged submersion, while others wore lightweight breathing devices of various kinds. From what Geoffrey had gathered, the process of full aqua-transformation wasn’t an overnight thing; there were many way stations along the route, and not everyone opted to proceed with further surgery once they’d received the basic modifications.

Gilbert swam to an orange portal, and then they were rushing down another tube – not as far, this time – until they came out into another junction, this one not much larger than the first. This pool had its share of portals, but there were also colour-coded exits that were not yet open to the water. Gilbert swam to one of these exits and pressed a webbed hand into the panel to its right; the circular door rolled aside, revealing an illuminated, water-filled corridor.

After a short distance they emerged into a pool that was scarcely larger than a private jacuzzi. It occupied a curving, green-walled room with windows set into one side. Geoffrey made to stand up, pushing his head into open air, the mask and goggles unclasping automatically with a soft pop of released suction. Water stampeded off him in a thousand beetle-sized droplets.

Through the windows in one half of the room he saw another aspect of Tiamaat’s abundant underwater sprawl: towers, a fungal growth of geodesic domes, glowing from within with floodlit greenery. Tiamaat went on for kilometres.

A kind of channel or ditch ran away from the jacuzzi, through an arch, into an adjoining room. Gilbert swam ahead, but with her face and upper body mostly out of the water. Geoffrey, now upright, shuffled behind. The harness retracted its flippers, tucking them away like folded angel’s wings. He’d only been aquatic for a few minutes, and already walking felt like an absurd evolutionary dead end.

The water-filled ditch led them into Truro’s presence.

‘So very glad you accepted my invitation,’ he said grandly. ‘You were, of course, never under any binding obligation to deal with us again.’

‘That’s not how it felt,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Well, let’s look on the positive side. You’re here now, and we have every likelihood of finding common ground.’

Truro had changed. He wasn’t the man in the sea-green suit any more.

Now he floated in a green-tiled, kidney-shaped pool, bubbling with scented froth. His head merged seamlessly with the smooth ovoid of his torso, all details of his underlying skeleton and musculature rendered cryptic beneath layers of insulating blubber. His grey skin, which was completely hairless, shone with waxy pearlescence. He had no external ears and scarcely any nose. His nostrils were two muscle-activated slits that opened and closed with each breath. He had large, almost round eyes, very dark and penetrating. They blinked a complicated double-membrane blink.

‘Why didn’t your figment look like this?’

‘It would only have complicated the issue further, I think. Besides, when I manifest I tend to revert to my former anatomy. Call it a nostalgic attachment.’ Truro touched a web-fingered hand against the area where, prior to his surgery, his nose must have been. ‘Not that I have any regrets. But sometimes, you know, for old time’s sake.’

Consoles and data displays with chunky waterproof keypads bobbed in the water like brightly coloured bath toys. Geoffrey couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen actual, solid data-visualisation and interface systems outside of a museum. Books were more common than screens and keypads.

Truro barged the yoke of a keypad aside, clearing room in front of him. ‘Come in. Join me,’ he said, ushering them forward. ‘We’ve much to talk about.’

‘May I leave you now, sir?’ asked Gilbert.

‘Of course. Thank you, Mira.’

When they were alone, Geoffrey divested himself of the mobility harness, leaving it propped against a wall while he returned to the pool. He eased into the turbulent, fizzing waters, sitting cross-legged opposite the merman.

‘So what do you think of the old place?’ Truro asked, leaning back with his muscular arms resting along the pool’s tiled edge, webbed fingers trailing in the water.

‘The tiny part of it I’ve seen is impressive enough.’

‘It’s a wonderful life, down here. We’re aquatic apes, at heart. Returning to the seas is only the expression of something deep within us. A calling, if you will. And each year, more people respond to that call.’

‘I thought you Pans wanted a migration outwards, not back into the oceans.’

‘Many paths to the one goal. We can return to the seas and take the seas with us to the stars.’ Truro smiled quickly, as if his own words had betrayed him. ‘Sometimes rhetoric gets the better of me. Please don’t take anything I say too seriously. That wouldn’t do at all.’

‘I’m happy on dry land, thanks.’ Geoffrey paused, sensing that the quickest way to get this over and done with was to go straight to the point. ‘Can we talk about the phyletic dwarves, since that’s obviously why I’m here?’

Truro’s unusual countenance evinced pain at this abrupt curtailment of preliminaries. ‘That’s part of it, certainly. Matter of fact, I’ve Chama on hold right now. Said I’d let him know when you got in.’

‘I didn’t think Chama was meant to have any contact with the world beyond the Descrutinised Zone.’

‘And what are private quangle paths for, if not for circumventing such tedious legal constraints?’ Truro reached for the floating keypad and depressed one of the spongy controls. ‘Chama, you can manifest now. Geoffrey Akinya is here.’ Turning to Geoffrey he added: ‘I’m giving you local aug access. Excuse me while I make my own arrangements.’

The merman fumbled in the water for a pair of lurid yellow goggles, which he slipped over his dark, seal-like eyes with elastic straps.

‘You don’t have retinal implants,’ Geoffrey said, startled.

‘Removed at the time of my aqua-forming. Does that appal you?’ Truro looked to his left, towards an area of tiled flooring where Chama’s figment was now standing. ‘Ah,’ he said, beaming magnanimously. ‘Good to see you.’

Chama looked at Geoffrey. ‘How are the elephants?’

‘They’re doing fine. They barely noticed I was gone.’

Time lag slowed Chama’s response. ‘Gleb and I’ve had a lot of time to talk things over, and we’re even more convinced that this is the way forward.’

‘Chama’s already filled me in on the background,’ said Truro. ‘From our standpoint, there are no insurmountable technical challenges. We would need to extend neural intervention to all the elephants in your study group, with the exception of perhaps the very youngest calves, and limit the interaction with non-augmented herd members wherever possible. But from what I gather, as things stand we can proceed immediately, on a trial basis.’

‘Quangle paths are allocated?’ Chama asked, as if they were merely fussing over details.

‘Already in place,’ the merman said. ‘The anticipated load isn’t exorbitant, and we should be able to manage things without drawing undue attention.’

‘There’s a lot more to it than that,’ Geoffrey said, alarmed by how readily his consent was being assumed. ‘The ethical considerations, for a start.’

The merman scratched under one of his blubbery, hairless armpits. ‘My dear fellow, there could hardly be anything more ethical than actively furthering the welfare of a species, surely.’

Geoffrey smiled, suddenly grasping his place in things. ‘This is how you operate, isn’t it? Always going a bit too far, always counting on people falling for your arguments that what’s done is done, that the best thing they can do is cooperate.’

‘Look at it this way,’ Chama said. ‘When it comes to long-term funding, who’d you rather do business with – us or your family? We’re in it for the seriously long game. And we’ve every incentive to protect you and the Amboseli herds from outside interference.’

‘You’re good at this,’ Geoffrey said.

‘We have to be,’ Truro said. ‘It’s how things get done.’

‘We can begin almost immediately,’ Chama said briskly, ‘starting with some simple test figments: dropping ghost images of other elephants into their visual fields, distant enough that olfactory and auditory hallucinations won’t be required. We’ll run exactly the same assessment protocols on the Lunar dwarves.’

‘You just have to give us the ching codes,’ Truro said. ‘Then we can really start to make things happen.’

‘Collaborate with us,’ Chama said pleadingly. ‘Do something bigger than your family. Something that’ll still have meaning centuries from now.’

‘Join the Pans,’ Geoffrey said, his own voice sounding hollow and drained of fight.

‘Become a fellow traveller, that’s all. No one’s asking you to swallow the ideology in its entirety.’ Truro was speaking now. ‘Still, I won’t insult you by reminding you that there’s a debt to be paid, for what Chama did for you on the Moon. It was all to do with your grandmother, wasn’t it?’

Geoffrey saw no purpose in lies or evasion. ‘I’m sure Chama’s told you enough.’

‘The basics. Just when we thought we had Eunice Akinya pinned down… she surprises us all. She was close to us once, did you know?’

‘I’ve heard about her Pan involvement.’

‘That business on Mercury… such a tragedy it ended the way it did. There’s so much we could have done together, but Eunice had to go and betray Lin.’

Geoffrey saw his moment. ‘Did you know Lin Wei? My sister was hoping to find out what really went on there.’

‘No, I never had the pleasure of meeting the first Prime Pan… Lin Wei drowned, of course. They told you that.’

‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Arethusa knew her very well indeed. When the current Prime Pan learned of your… interest, you became of… shall we say reciprocal interest to Arethusa.’ Truro appeared to be having difficulty finding the appropriate words. ‘No disrespect to Chama or the elephants, but that’s really why you’re here. Arethusa demands an audience.’

‘Since I’ve already been dragged here,’ Geoffrey said, ‘I may as well speak to anyone who wants a conversation. Will the Prime Pan be coming here?’

Truro’s minimalist features nonetheless evinced apology. ‘The mountain must go to Mohammed, I’m afraid. Are you up for a bit more swimming?’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

According to the aug they were somewhere over the equatorial highlands of Syrtis Major, on the other side of Mars from Pavonis Mons.

They had gone down in the cheapest kind of cut-price shuttle. Sunday had no regrets about taking the fast way: she was too excited for that. Jitendra shared her anticipation, his grin only intensifying as re-entry commenced. They’d gone from Stickney’s centrifugal gravity to the free fall of the shuttle, and now weight was returning as the shuttle hit atmosphere and enveloped itself in a blistering cocoon of neon-pink plasma. As the deceleration peaked, the seats adjusted to provide fullbody support. It was more gravity than Sunday had experienced in years. She loved watching the plasma snap and ripple around the hull, like a flag in a stiff breeze.

And then it eased, and they were flying as much as falling. The shuttle’s hull was reshaping itself all the while, optimising to the changing conditions, resisting gravity to the last instant. Gullies and craters slid underneath, sharp-shadowed, Sunday certain that she could stretch out her hand and feel the leathery texture of the surface, scraping beneath her palm like the cover of an old book. So far, at least, there was nothing down there to suggest that they were anything other than the very first people to reach this world. No settlements, no roads, not even the glint of some long-abandoned mechanical envoy, dust-bound for centuries. It was staggering, all that emptiness.

Jitendra saw something, pointing excitedly at a dark worming trail, the furiously gyring knot at its head etching a meandering track across the surface. ‘It’s a vehicle, I think. A Mars rover, or maybe some kind of low-altitude aircraft.’

Sunday had already voked the mag to maximum. ‘Kicking up a lot of dust. Moving pretty quickly, too.’

‘It’s a dust-devil,’ Eunice said, cutting into Sunday’s thoughts. ‘Just a whirlwind.’

She turned to Jitendra, and repeated Eunice’s words.

‘Oh,’ he said, on a falling note.

‘Raised on the Moon,’ Eunice said disapprovingly. ‘Doesn’t have the first foggiest notion of terrestrial planet weather systems.’

Sunday voked, ‘Didn’t think you’d show up until we were down, Eunice.’

‘There’s local aug, enough of a network for me to utilise. I’m synching with my Earthside self as we speak. That’s going to take some time. Have you heard from your brother?’

‘We talked just before I got on the shuttle. He knows I’m OK.’ Sunday still had one eye on the scrolling view. ‘Have you been in contact with him?’

‘Not since he went off-grid.’

Sunday tensed. ‘What do you mean, “off-grid”?’

‘Your brother’s currently a guest of the United Aquatic Nations, in Tiamaat. Truro sent a plane to pick him up.’

‘I wasn’t expecting him to forget the favours we owe him for. The only reason I’m here is because the Pans took care of my ticket.’

‘They’re more interested in us than I expected, though. This isn’t just about reciprocity. I worry that it’s me they’re really after.’

‘You don’t exist. And at the risk of wounding your ego, not everyone in the known universe is obsessed with you and your secret history.’

‘Let’s be honest, though, a fair few are.’

‘But only because you spent half your life turning yourself into a puzzle. Geoffrey blinked me a copy of the mural in your bedroom – seems you were right about the alterations in Phobos.’

‘Good to have my suspicions confirmed. I’m not infallible, and I can’t vouch for the absolute reliability of my memories.’

‘Trust me, I never once thought you were infallible. What do you know about Truro?’

‘He’s not top dog, although he’s not far off it either. He answers to the Prime Pan, whoever that is. Here’s the catch, though. Sift through my logged conversations – as I myself have done – and you’ll find ample evidence of occasional traffic between myself and Tiamaat. Highly quangled, so you can’t get into deep content, but someone there was clearly of interest to me. For years, decades. Going all the way back to Mercury.’

‘You have a theory.’

‘My… death has stirred up ghosts, Sunday. I can’t be certain of anything. But there aren’t many people I’d have been capable of sustaining a lifelong association with, without one or both of us going mad with boredom. What I’m getting at is this: did the Prime Pan know me? Did I know the Prime Pan?’

‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’

‘Not yet. I’ll wait for more data, until I’m not only fully synched but back in touch with Geoffrey.’

Sunday seethed. ‘I’m ordering you to tell me.’

‘And I’m refusing. This is a deep-level epistemological conflict, granddaughter. You can’t force me to be more like myself and then throw a tantrum when I decide to act entirely in character. Live with your handiwork, my dear. You made me the high-minded bitch that I am.’

It wasn’t long before human presence asserted itself in the form of what might have been a pipeline or power-conduction conduit lancing across the surface in bold tangents. A little later, as the line zagged to match their course, they passed over a frogspawn clump of silvery domes, an outpost or some kind of maintenance complex. Even at full magnification, Sunday couldn’t see a living soul. Then, five or six minutes later, the line met another trunk branching in from the north, and there was something like a village or hamlet at the junction: multiple domes, square buildings, a geometric quilt of copper-green hexagons spreading to the south – solar collectors, or perhaps cropbeds – and a pale finger-scratch arrowing west that was too purposefully Euclidean to be a dust-devil track.

She followed it – they were moving west as well – until she picked out the bumbling, bouncing form of what was unmistakably a surface vehicle. It was a silver beetle with six huge wheels, plodding its way home.

After that, signs of civilisation only increased. More villages, and then a town, domes laid out in curling galactic spirals from a central core. She couldn’t see anyone moving around, even at full magnification, and when she tried to ching down to street level her request was politely rebuffed.

The town had a railway line, also punching west, slicing through some craters, angling around others, occasionally diving underground for no particular reason. Then she saw a train, speeding along the track in the opposite direction from their motion – six silver cylinders with surprisingly blunt test-tube-shaped ends.

They followed the railway line until it passed through another big town, and then a city twinkled on the western horizon. Crommelin Edge, said the aug, and Sunday remembered that this was where they were going to be processed for final Martian immigration. The elevator’s anchorpoint was halfway around Mars, so Crommelin Edge – located close to the equator, close to the zero meridian, in the cratered plateau of Arabia Terra – was one of the two main entry points for arriving travellers.

The shuttle made a pass over the city, sloughing altitude and speed. The settlement took the form of a crescent, partly tracing the outer wall of its namesake crater. Scant evidence of planning here, just a bubbling froth of variegated domes and other structures, cubes and rhomboids and cylinders, pylons and vanes, looking less like an organised settlement than a bag of marbles and toy building blocks spilt out onto the floor and gathered into rough formation. The artist in Sunday appreciated the ordered form of the spiral she had seen earlier, but there was something haphazardly human about this arrangement that also appealed to her. She liked her cities best when they contained gnarly, counter-intuitive geometries.

The shuttle came down on a landing strip surrounded by domes and soggy-looking amoeboid terminal buildings. The hull flicked to perfect transparency and their seatbelts slithered away. Service vehicles were already surrounding the shuttle, while a docking tube extended itself into position, flexing and probing like the trunk of an inquisitive elephant. The sky over the spaceport was a darkening mauve, fretted by wisps of high-altitude clouds.

‘Welcome to Mars,’ said a piped voice. ‘The Mars Sol Date is one hundred and two thousand, four hundred and forty-seven sols. Local Mean Solar Time is eighteen hours and thirty-one minutes. For the benefit of passengers arriving from Earth, it is sixteen thirty-five Coordinated Universal Time on March thirteen.’

Cavernous and bright, the terminal could have been any shopping mall from Mombasa to the Moon. Exos loitered to assist those struggling with the gravity, but no one was having any obvious difficulties. Adverts jostled for attention, pushing services and products that were for the most part uniquely Martian.

Sunday wasn’t at all surprised when she was taken aside for additional interviewing and background examination. They had reported the dead body on Phobos before boarding the shuttle and had been detained while bureaucratic procedure was observed. No crime had been committed: she’d been perfectly within her rights to trample all over the moon, and she’d broken no rules by chinging into the abandoned camp. Of necessity, they had to wait while the Stickney authorities sent their own investigators into the sealed-up dome, verifying Sunday’s side of the story, but once that was done, they were allowed to be on their way.

Flags had been raised, though. It was difficult enough travelling incognito as an Akinya, but now there was the matter of the corpse and her Panspermian affiliation.

They were in the holding area when word came down from Phobos: the investigators had run a trace on the suit and crossmatched the DNA of the body inside with their records. The corpse belonged to Nicolas Escoffery, a Martian citizen who’d gone missing on Phobos nearly fifty years earlier. Escoffery was a broker in second-hand equipment, a wheeler and dealer who made frequent trips between the moon and the surface, and whose operations often skirted the edge of legality. At the time of his disappearance, Escoffery was under investigation for customs irregularities and appeared to have made efforts to conceal his true whereabouts. An area of Mars had been searched, but no one had guessed that he was actually on Phobos.

‘Wouldn’t happen now,’ it was explained to Sunday. ‘You just can’t get away with that kind of crap these days.’

How Escoffery had died was a different matter. He hadn’t been imprisoned in the camp, and the doors hadn’t been sealed over until after his death. The best guess was that his suit had malfunctioned, its servo-systems jamming into immobility, turning itself into a man-shaped coffin. Sunday remembered the white spider she had dislodged from Escoffery’s suit, though, and wasn’t so sure… but she thought it advisable to say no more on the subject.

They were eventually allowed on their way. As distasteful as the authorities found Sunday’s Panspermian association, it wasn’t a sufficient pretext for denying her entry. All the same, she could sense the resentment that they hadn’t found something to pin on either her or Jitendra.

They collected their luggage, which was already waiting by the time they cleared immigration. Sunday made a conscious effort to put recent events behind her. She wasn’t looking forward to what was ahead, and she could still see that paper-skinned skull, grinning through her own visor… But that was over, and if she dwelt on it, it was going to ruin this delicious experience: her first few steps on another world. She could return to this place a thousand times and it would never be this new.

‘We’re here,’ she said, hugging Jitendra. ‘I can’t believe it. Under my feet… it’s Mars.’

Literally so. In the arrivals plaza, a strip of flooring had been cut back to raw Martian soil, like a lumpy red carpet. It must have been sprayed over with some atom-thin polymer to eliminate dust, but she could not have told that from the feel of the ground under her feet or the palm of her hand. For a ridiculous moment she had to fight the urge to kneel down and kiss it.

Jitendra finished rearranging the contents of the suitcases, to make them easier to carry. ‘We need to celebrate. Get a drink, now. Before the moment passes.’

‘So there’s this amazing, precious experience, this once-in-a-lifetime thing, and before it has a chance to form deep neural connections you want to batter it into submission with toxic chemicals?’

Jitendra gave the matter due consideration. ‘Basically, if you must put it that way, that’s exactly what I had in mind.’

‘Fine,’ Sunday said, deciding that it was much easier to go along with him than otherwise. ‘I’m up for that as well.’

But first there was some business to attend to. The Pans had given Sunday a ching address to call upon her arrival. As tempting as it was to put the matter off, it would only be delaying the inevitable. She found a quiet corner of the arrivals lounge and voked the request.

The bind went through with a high level of quangle, and she found herself in a room which – judging by the high aspect of the sun – lay some distance west of Crommelin. Under her feet was glass, and under the glass was empty air, plunging all the way down to the scoured red ground, so far below that she might as well have still been in orbit. To either side, ancient weathered cliffs receded into mist-hazed obscurity. A handful of sleek discus-shaped buildings were cut into the cliffsides, or buttressed out from them.

‘Welcome, Sunday,’ she heard. ‘How was your journey?’

‘No complaints, apart from the friendly welcome at Crommelin.’

‘You’ll have to excuse our customs and immigration staff: they preach courtesy and respect while demonstrating exactly the opposite.’

Sunday took a nervous step sideways, distrusting the flooring. Even in ching it was hard to suppress vertigo, or the instinctive urge for self-preservation. This was especially the case when the proxy was a living, breathing human organism.

The warmblood belonged to a woman of about her age and build, although the skin was paler than her own. She wore a business outfit: colour-coordinated skirt and blouse, dark green offset with silver piping, black stockings and sensible low-heeled black shoes.

Sunday certainly wouldn’t have trusted heels on that floor.

She flexed the warmblood’s fingers. She’d only chinged this way a couple of times before but had already cultivated an intense loathing for the arrangement.

‘Where am I?’

‘The Pan outpost at Valles Marineris,’ the voice said. ‘We’re on the very edge of the deepest canyon, the greatest rift valley anywhere in the solar system. I thought you would appreciate seeing the view through human eyes. My transform-surgeon, Magdalena, consented to be driven.’

‘It’s very thoughtful.’

‘Entirely appropriate, too. You’re both sculptresses. You work with stone and clay, Magdalena with the living flesh. Now you are as one.’

Sunday turned from the view of Valles Marineris. Her speaker faced her from a kind of bed, resting on an oblong of white self-sterilising frond-carpet. The bed was as heavy and complicated-looking as some ghastly iron lung or CAT scanner from the medical Dark Ages. It was plumbed into the wall behind it, and it hummed and gurgled like an espresso machine. It was actually more like a bath than a bed, for the occupant was mostly immersed in fluid, contained by high-walled, slosh-proof sides. The treacle-thick fluid had a bluish chemical tint.

‘Come closer,’ the patient said. ‘I won’t bite. Biting is one of the very many things not presently an option for me.’

Two green-uniformed female nurses stood by the bedside: one with a surgical trolley, the other with a kind of Pan-compliant clipboard and stylus computer. Without a word they took their leave, striding like catwalk models, one of them pushing the trolley before her. A door in the rear of the room snicked open and shut like an iris.

Sunday came closer. She couldn’t smell anything through the ching bind, but wondered if the fluid – or indeed the patient – had a strong odour.

‘I am Holroyd,’ the voice said. ‘You mustn’t be alarmed. I’m actually in no great distress, and despite appearances I do not believe success to be completely ruled out, at least not yet.’

There was a man in the fluid, but only just. Her first thought had been: cactus. His form, what she could see of it, was covered with jagged dark growths, erupting from every inch of his skin. They were glossy and leaflike, sharp-edged, studded with barbs and thorns. His upper torso, his submerged limbs, his head and face… there was no part of him where the growths were not rampant. His eyes peered through tunnels of pruned-back growth. She wondered how much of the world he could see.

‘What happened to you, Mister Holroyd?’

He did not sound in the least bit upset by the directness of her question. ‘Hubris, I suppose. Or impatience. Or some combination of the two.’ She couldn’t see a mouth making the words. ‘I was a genetic volunteer. A Pan, of course – an old friend of Truro’s, too, though I doubt we’ll ever meet again. Our paths have taken us in very different directions. His to the oceans. Mine to… well, this.’

‘Did Magdalena do this to you?’

‘Magdalena was part of the team that, with my consent, proceeded with the genetic intervention… now she is part of the team attempting to undo the effects of that intervention.’ A hand, spined and spiked to the point of uselessness, like a cross between a mace and a gauntlet, emerged from the cloying fluid. There were wounds in the armour, pale healed-over scars and white-seeping gashes. ‘The intention was to change my body, to armour it to the point where, with only the minimum of additional life-support measures, I could survive outside without a surface suit. Thermal insulation, pressure and moisture containment… they were within our grasp. I’d still need an air supply, of course, and there’d always be parts of Mars that would be unendurable, even for me, but it was worth attempting. A gesture of intent, if nothing else. A sign that we are here for good. That we’ll do whatever we can to make this work. Even change our basic humanity.’

‘How did it go wrong?’

‘There are no catastrophes in science, Sunday, only lessons. I’d far rather live in a universe capable of producing monsters like me than one where we understood all the rules, down to the last tedious footnote. I’m evidence that reality is still capable of tripping us up. As I said, I am not in pain. And recently we have made… I won’t call it “progress”, that’s too big a word. But there have been intimations, hints of the possibility of a modest therapeutic breakthrough. The game is not yet lost!’

‘I hope things work out for you, Mister Holroyd.’

‘I try to look on the bright side. That’s vital, don’t you think?’ The hand and arm sank beneath the surface of the fluid. The bed made a decisive clicking noise and the fluid began to bubble vigorously. ‘Well, to business, I suppose – and you’ll excuse the abrupt shift in tone, I hope. I’m delighted you’ve made it to Mars, and you have my assurance that the Initiative will do all in its power to facilitate your… enquiries. You will spend the next two nights in Crommelin Edge, and I hope you’ll take the time to see something of the city and the crater, get your Mars legs. After that, we’ve arranged transportation to Pavonis Mons, or as close as we can reasonably take you. We will of course assist with any further logistical requirements that might arise, within the limits of funds and resources, of course. I hardly need add that there must be some reciprocity, however crass that sounds.’

‘I understand, Mister Holroyd. I wouldn’t have been able to get to Mars without Pan sponsorship. I agreed to take on some commissions, and I’m ready and willing to fulfil that commitment.’

‘Very good, Sunday. I’ve been looking at some of your work, did you know?’

‘I didn’t, sir.’

‘I’m no expert, but I like what I see. There are visible and public ways that you can help the Initiative, and we’ll come to those in due course. But to begin with, I wonder if we might consider a more personal study, as a kind of warm-up exercise?’

‘I’m open to ideas.’

‘I never doubted it. But you may not…’ Holroyd faltered. ‘I appreciate that this may not be easy for you, but I wonder if you’d consider a piece that drew its inspiration… from me?’

‘As you were, sir, or as you’re meant to be?’

‘No,’ Holroyd corrected gently. ‘As I am, here and now. In all my splendid ugliness. A monument to ignorance and possibility. Hubris and hope. There: I’ve already given you a title. How can you possibly say no?’

Sunday had never felt less enthusiastic about a commission, or less bothered about the title. ‘I don’t suppose I can, sir.’

The door opened and one of the green-uniformed nurses came back in with a trolley. Gleaming chrome instruments rested on it, including something that looked very much like a pair of pruning shears.

‘I really need that drink now,’ Sunday said, when she’d come out of ching.

‘Difficult client?’

‘A prickly customer.’

They found a bar called the Red Menace, on the edge of a glassed-over mall filled with high-end boutiques and expensive souvenir shops. The Red Menace’s stock-in-trade was bad-taste Martian-invasion kitsch, from the slime-green cocktails to the skull-masked bartenders and clanking steam-actuated Wellsian tripods that brought the drinks, clutching glasses in their tentacles and carrying bar-snacks in baskets tucked under their bodies. Heat-rays pulsed through puffs of dry ice, while portentous military music throbbed from underfloor bass speakers.

Sunday should have been appalled, but in fact the bar suited her mood exactly. She was just wiping the salt off the rim of her second Silver Locust – Jitendra was on his third – when she became aware that someone was looking at them from the entrance, standing very still and peering through the scudding gouts of dry ice clouding the bar.

Studying the tall black-skinned man, a sense of profound wrongness washed over her in a clammy wave, as if her every waking assumption had just been annihilated. The shock stole her breath. The universe appeared to stall, stretching a moment into a lifetime.

The shape of his face, the light on the cheekbones, the wide imperial brow. It was one of the cousins.

She touched Jitendra’s hand, and although the effort was almost unbearable, forced herself to breathe and then to speak. ‘Look.’

Jitendra looked at the man and put down his drink. With a calm that felt far out of place, he said, ‘It’s not a person.’

She turned up her own aug threshold, letting the tag inform her that the figure was a golem.

‘Hello,’ it said, arriving at their table. ‘I’m glad you made it here safely. Do you mind if I take a seat?’ The golem tilted its face towards the third chair, the one nobody was sitting in.

‘What do you want with us?’ Sunday asked.

The golem lowered itself into the seat. ‘I am Lucas Akinya’s designated legal presence on Mars.’

‘It’s autonomous,’ Jitendra whispered. ‘Do you think it was here all along, or came with us on the same ship?’

‘Who knows? Lucas and Hector probably have thousands of the fucking things, all over the system, ready to pop up like a slice of toast whenever they need a legal presence.’ She glared at it. ‘I’ll ask you again: what do you want with us?’

‘This visit of yours,’ the golem said, ‘has raised a number of flags. We’ve spoken to Geoffrey. Keeping secrets is not one of his core skills.’

She could see the trap she was being steered into, of disclosing more than she needed to. ‘And what secrets would those be?’

The golem was keeping its voice very low, smiling all the while. ‘You claim to be here on Panspermian business.’

‘I don’t “claim” anything.’

‘How would you characterise your ongoing business relationship with these people?’

‘I’m an artist. The Pans need art to get their ideas across. Doesn’t mean I’ve bought the T-shirt’

The golem paused. Its cleverness was paper-thin. It could emit statements and responses that sounded plausible, but the swerves and hairpins of normal human conversation left it befuddled. ‘This visit to Mars comes hard on the heels of your brother’s visit to the Moon. Even the most casual observer might reasonably posit a causative link between the two developments.’

‘Conclude what you like. Not my problem.’

‘Geoffrey was tasked to investigate a matter on behalf of the family. Whatever he may have told you, visiting you was not the sole purpose of his trip.’

‘In which case you’ve just made a big fucking mistake in mentioning it now, haven’t you?’

The golem’s face became a death mask pulled too tight. ‘There is something else,’ it continued, after a pause. ‘An incident on the Chinese Lunar border, and a demonstrable Panspermian connection. Your associate Chama was arrested and then released, under terms of restraint.’

‘It was nothing to do with me.’

‘The incident took place near Eunice’s crash site.’ The golem leaned forwards and spoke with particular intensity. ‘What did Geoffrey find in the Central African Bank? Apart from the glove, which we know about.’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘It behoves you to show responsibility, Sunday. In these times of economic uncertainty, the continued good standing of the Akinya name must be paramount in our concerns.’

‘Good standing?’ She was thinking back to her treatment at immigration. ‘They hate our name, even here. You think I give a damn about preserving that?’

Again the golem appeared unsure how to respond. ‘Akinya Space is a building block,’ it declared. ‘Thousands depend on us directly for employment and welfare. Millions indirectly, through secondary contracts and business transactions. Billions more, by dint of our mere existence. Our machines bring valuable raw materials from across the system, from the main belt to the Trans-Neptunian iceteroids. Without that dependable flow, the entire infrastructure of human settlement and colonisation would falter.’

‘I’m not trying to bring down human civilisation, Lucas. That would imply that I give a shit about it.’

‘Our concern is that Eunice may have had self-destructive impulses. We worry that whatever was in that box was a metaphorical time bomb, planted under the family by a bitter, resentful old woman.’

‘You don’t believe that.’

‘Please do not doubt the seriousness of my concerns, or the lengths Hector and I will go to to protect this family.’

Sunday sat in silence, as if she was giving the golem’s words due consideration. Only when a suitable interval had passed did she allow herself to start speaking. ‘Cousin, we’re not in Africa any more. This is not the household. We’re on Mars now, a long way from home. I owe you nothing. This is my life and I do what I want with it. I do not want to speak to you again while I’m here. I do not even want to see you again. So please leave us alone, before I make exactly the kind of scene you’d really like to avoid.’

‘This may not be Africa,’ the golem said, ‘but nor is it the Descrutinised Zone. You’re in the Surveilled World now, Sunday.’ He moved to stand, rising from the stool with the oiled precision of a periscope. ‘And it runs on our rules, not yours.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

She worked quickly, but not because she considered the commission beneath her. It was simply the way she always approached her art. Preparation, forethought, hours of meditation, then an explosion of swift and decisive action, like the quick and merciful descent of a sword. Execution, in every sense of the word.

The morning after her arrival in Crommelin, she had chinged back to the Pan lodge on the edge of Valles Marineris, into a proxy this time rather than the warmblood body of Holroyd’s nurse. She had made her preferences known, and the Pans had abided by them. Now Magdalena was free to do her chores, and Sunday was wearing a wasp-waisted black mechanical mannequin. It was a recent model, ornamented with pastel-glowing vines and limb-entwining daisy chains.

‘I meant to say that I’ve arranged a guide for you,’ Holroyd announced. ‘He has experience in the Evolvarium, which you’ll definitely need. Not many people go anywhere near that place without good reason, usually involving a commercial interest. You’re still certain you don’t want to subcontract this operation to… specialists?’

‘I came to Mars for a reason, Mister Holroyd.’

‘That was before you found out where your grandmother had buried the next item.’ Holroyd waited for Magdalena to snip away a thumbsized growth from one of his chest-spines, leaving a weeping milky wound. If there was pain, he was careful not to show it. ‘That development is… unfortunate,’ he went on, ‘but I suppose we can’t blame her for not seeing this far ahead.’

‘She could have saved us all a lot of bother and just put the first and last clue in the same place,’ Sunday said.

‘That obviously wasn’t her intention.’

The sculpture was nearing, if not completion, than at least the point where the probability of success or failure could rightly be judged. Sunday had begun with an upright cylinder of lustrous silver-grey material, mounted on a plinth. The material, which stood nearly as tall as Sunday herself, was active clay: an inert medium saturated with nanomachines at a density of five per cent by both weight and volume. The machines were programmed to respond to gestural and proximal cues from Sunday’s proxy-driven hands, moving not just their own bodies but the inert matrix in which they were embedded.

Sunday couldn’t see the machines themselves, but their effect on the material was obvious enough. She only had to skim her fingers near the working surface and the clay would repel, flinching back in channels or grooves or wide, scalloped curves depending on the precise orientation of her hand and fingers. As it deformed, the clay turned reflective. It obeyed pseudo fluid dynamics, knotted with eddies and turbulence, forming rippling, surflike sheets or bubbling globular mirrored extrusions, like mercury slowed down a thousand times. Once her hand was withdrawn, the active clay froze into its last configuration. By bringing in the other hand, creating opposing vectors of repulsion, Sunday could coax the matter into solid geometries of surprising complexity.

‘I don’t know what she had in mind for us. All I know is it can’t be personal. She didn’t know it was going to be my brother who looked into that bank vault.’

‘She knew it would be one of you, though. Definitely an Akinya. Whatever she’s doing, she seems very determined to keep it in the family, doesn’t she?’

Sunday flicked her wrist through part of the sculpture, cleaving matter the way prophets parted waters. The sculpture didn’t really look like a man, she had to admit. More like a lung, or a tree dipped in molten lead. But the prickliness of it, the densely packed spines and thorns, was suggestive of her host.

‘If she’s testing us, I suppose there has to be a reason.’

‘Gold at the end of the rainbow? Or just a dead woman playing malicious games with her descendants?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever Eunice planned, though, it was put in place before her last mission. She may have gone a little mad up in the Winter Palace – who wouldn’t? – but she was sane when she took Winter Queen out for its last expedition.’

‘Plenty of imagery and footage from then, in that case.’

Sunday nodded, cajoling an arc of clay out on its own lazy Martian parabola, freezing into the crooked curve of a gull’s wing. She didn’t get to work with active clay very often; it was too expensive for her usual commissions and there were strict conditions on the importing of nanotechnology into the Zone. ‘That’s what unsettles me. Ever since she came back, the whole time she’s been up there, orbiting the Moon… she’s known about this… plot of hers.’

‘You speak as if she’s still alive.’

‘I don’t mean to, but when you dig into a person’s past, and you have—’

‘I know about the construct, Sunday. A data entity like that, distributed cloudware – we could hardly fail to detect its presence in the Martian aug.’

She hid her shock. If the Pans were going to rip into her secrets, she was damned if she’d give them the pleasure of looking surprised about it.

‘Of course. It’s just that sometimes, if only for a moment, I forget that it isn’t my grandmother.’

‘An understandable error. But not, I’d imagine, one that you make all that often.’

‘I try not to.’

After a moment, Holroyd said, ‘Your grandmother was born in a different world, Sunday. A different century. She lived through difficult times; saw the best and the worst of what we are capable of. So did billions of others… But she was in a privileged, possibly even unique position. She may not have experienced wars first hand, but she would have met many people who were touched by them, and touched badly. There were no Mandatory Enhancements in Eunice’s day, either. She would have understood that there are times, many times, when we can’t always be trusted to do the right and proper thing. Even with the Mechanism guiding our actions, even when the neuropractors have knifed villainy out our heads.’

‘I’m not sure where this is leading, sir.’

‘All I mean to say is… no one would have been better placed than your grandmother to see the truth about humanity. And given everything that happened to her, no one would have been better placed to stumble on dangerous knowledge.’

Sunday paused in her sculpting. ‘Dangerous knowledge?’

‘I speculate, that’s all. But if your grandmother did learn something, by whatever means… something that she didn’t think the rest of us were ready for… do you really think she’d be so selfish as to take that knowledge to her grave, for all of time?’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Geoffrey went deep. At length the transit flume opened out into a submarine chamber the size of which he could only guess at. It was large, definitely: probably big enough to have swallowed both wings of the household and a fair part of the grounds as well. It was spherical and the walls were black, but the equator of this sphere was dotted with entry and exit flumes at regular intervals, and these luminous red and green circles offered some sense of scale and perspective.

Opposite him – the water was as clear as optical glass – hovered a glowing image, projected onto the curvature of the sphere’s far side. For a moment he took it to be Earth, seen from space: it didn’t look all that different from the view he’d had coming down the Libreville elevator. A moment’s further scrutiny told him that this was not Earth, nor any world in the solar system. It had surface oceans and continents and weather systems, but they were fundamentally unrecognisable.

Like an eclipsing moon, a partner world to this alien planet, a dark form interposed itself between Geoffrey and the image.

Through the harness’s headset he heard, ‘You can leave him with me, thank you. I’ll show him out when we’re done.’

And at the same time as he heard those words, spoken in almost accentless Swahili by a woman’s voice, he felt a subsonic component, deep as an elephant’s musth rumble, conveyed through the water, into his belly, into his nervous system.

As if the Earth itself had made an utterance, shaping words through the tectonic grind of crustal plates.

He glanced around. His guides had departed.

‘Welcome, Geoffrey Akinya,’ the female voice said, with the same accompanying rumble. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me. Your meeting with Truro – it was suitably productive?’

Geoffrey was staring into the water, still trying to map the shape and extent of the dark form and hoping it was not as far away – and therefore as large – as his eyes were insisting.

‘Arethusa?’ he asked.

‘My apologies. One tends to assume that my visitors need no introduction, but that’s an inexcusable rudeness on my part. Yes, I am Arethusa.’

Geoffrey decided that it might be prudent to answer her question. ‘Truro had some… interesting proposals.’

‘And your response?’

‘I suspect I’m not really in a position to say no, after what happened on the Moon.’

‘You feel indebted.’

‘Made to feel indebted. Amounts to the same thing, I guess.’

‘I was informed about Chama and Gleb’s endeavours with the phyletic dwarves. It’s a small aspect of our work, but an important one nonetheless. They deserve success. I’m sure you could play a vital role in making that happen.’

‘And risk ruining my entire career.’

‘Or creating a shiny new one. Why be a prisoner of your past?’

He took that as an invitation to steer the conversation in the vague direction of Eunice. ‘I was told you knew Lin Wei.’

‘We were close. She spoke often of your grandmother.’

‘You never met Eunice yourself, though?’

‘Lin painted a vivid picture. Warts and all, as the expression goes. Did you know your grandmother well?’

‘Not particularly. She was already in the Winter Palace by the time I was born, and she didn’t ching down to Africa very often. To be honest, I don’t think she was interested in us any more.’

‘But she’s of interest to you, now.’

Obviously Arethusa knew about the glove, the burial in Pythagoras, the Martian angle. ‘I’ve become tangled up in something I’d rather not have had anything to do with. But my sister’s been digging into Eunice’s past a lot longer than I have. There’s this project of hers—’

‘The construct, yes. I know of it. A valiant effort.’

‘I’m surprised you approve. It’s a thinking machine, for a start. And Sunday told me that my grandmother broke her side of the bargain with Lin Wei.’

‘Water under the bridge. Lin Wei bore her no ill will, in later years. I see no reason why Sunday’s project shouldn’t be celebrated.’

‘There are gaps in the construct’s knowledge. It doesn’t even remember Lin Wei.’

‘No?’

His eyes had acclimatised to the darkness by small degrees. Arethusa was an elongated form, hovering in the water at an angle, her head closest to him, her tail further away and lower. He was fairly sure that she was a whale. The size and shape, the flippers on either side of her streamlined body, the subsonic communication. The only remaining question was whether she’d been born a whale, or had attained this form by post-natal genetic and surgical intervention.

He knew of nothing like her, anywhere in creation. A whale with a human-level intellect, or a person turned cetacean. He wasn’t sure which would be the more miraculous.

‘You know what really happened on Mercury?’

‘I know that there was deceit,’ Arethusa replied, with evident caution. ‘More recently I’ve found myself wondering how far down that deceit extended.’ She paused, and with a languid wave of her flippers began to gyre her massive form.

Across metres of water Geoffrey felt the awesome backwash. ‘When was the last time you two spoke?’

‘Just before she died. I chinged up to the Winter Palace, spoke to her in that mad jungle of hers. I may have been one of the last people to speak to her.’

‘I’m surprised you had much to talk about.’

‘I felt obliged. Your grandmother played a pivotal role in Ocular.’

He recalled what Sunday had told him. ‘That was some kind of telescope, right?’

‘A machine for mapping exoplanets,’ Arethusa corrected in scholarly tones. ‘The Oort Cloud Ultra-Large Array: a swarm of eyes, cast into the outer darkness, linked together laser-interferometrically so they could function as a single vast lens wider than the solar system. Even half-finished, it was an astounding technical feat. But it broke Lin Wei’s heart, to see what became of her beautiful child.’

‘I know a little about Eunice’s connection.’

‘Your family was brought in to help with the heavy lifting. In return, we gave them the Mercury leasehold. Akinya Space built their polar facility, saying it was for physics research.’

‘Which was a lie.’ Geoffrey presumed there was now no harm in recounting what he had been told. ‘They were doing illegal work on artilects.’

‘That was what we thought at the time. But Eunice was much too clever to allow herself to be nearly caught out that way. If she really, badly wanted to conduct illicit artilect studies, she’d have found somewhere else to do it, somewhere just as far away from the Cognition Police as Mercury. There’s a whole system out there, after all. No shortage of dark corners.’

‘What are you saying – that there was something else going on, apart from the artilects?’

‘The facility drew power from the Ocular launch grid. It was doing something.’

‘Eunice put up a smokescreen to conceal a smokescreen?’

‘You’ve heard of hiding in plain sight? Even Lin Wei didn’t guess at the time. She was so fixated on the idea that illegal artilect research was going on, under the camouflage of physics research, that it never occurred to her to look closely at the camouflage itself, at the very thing that Eunice was making no effort to conceal.’

‘Then… it was physics all along?’ But Geoffrey couldn’t see where else to take that thought.

‘Physics all along,’ Arethusa said.

‘This is just supposition,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Eunice is gone. Lin Wei is gone. If the Gearheads didn’t find anything intact on Mercury back then, there won’t be anything there now, all these years later.’

‘So look somewhere else. Doubtless you’ve noticed the planet projected onto my sphere.’

‘I was wondering when you’d get to that. Is it a real world, or a simulation?’

‘Real enough. It’s an Ocular composite image of Sixty-One Virginis f, a planet we call Crucible. It’s just under twenty-eight light-years away – hardly any distance at all in cosmic terms. A hop and a skip. I showed Crucible to Eunice because there was something about it, something remarkable that Lin Wei would have wished her to see.’

‘And you’d know all about Lin Wei’s intentions, wouldn’t you?’

‘There’s an odd undercurrent to that question,’ the vast form retorted, with unmistakable menace.

‘Suit yourself,’ Geoffrey said. He was thinking of the girl at the scattering again, the figment that bore a striking resemblance to the younger Lin Wei. ‘This discovery,’ he went on. ‘Shouldn’t it be public knowledge?’

‘Soon it will be. The discovery was made late last year, less than four months ago. We’re still in the embargo phase, meaning that… at this point in time… there are probably fewer than a dozen people in the solar system currently privy to this data. All but one of them has an intimate connection with Ocular. You’re the exception.’

Geoffrey wondered where all this was leading. ‘So what did you find?’

‘I can’t take any credit for the discovery. It was made by Ocular itself, or rather by Arachne, the controlling intelligence at the heart of the instrument. Arachne is an artilect – a very smart one, forged from the fruits of Eunice’s lab. The Cognition Police know about Arachne, and technically she – it – is within their threshold of concern. But they’ve given the project a special dispensation. Arachne is a harmless orphan, floating in deep space, blind to the world except for what she sees through Ocular’s own eyes. What she found was stupendous and world-shattering. That was why she brought it to my attention.’

The image had changed while Geoffrey’s attention was distracted. It was still the same blue planet, but now the cloud cover had been scoured away, the blue-green marble polished back to oceans and ice and land masses.

‘I’m not—’ Geoffrey began.

‘Let’s zoom in,’ Arethusa said, ‘down to an effective resolution of about three hundred metres. That’s not enough to image fine-scale structure like roads or houses, but it’s more than adequate to pick up geo-engineering, cities, deforestation, agricultural utilisation, even the wakes of large seagoing vessels. The area you’re seeing now is about one thousand kilometres across, centred very precisely on the equator.’

Geoffrey stared at the thing Arethusa was showing him. It was obvious to his eyes that it had no business being there.

‘Arachne called it Maximum Entropy Anomaly 563/912261. Obviously it needed a better name than that. That’s why I decided to call it Mandala.’

‘Man-da-la,’ he repeated, stressing the syllables slowly. ‘It’s a good name.’

‘Yes.’

And he marvelled. If the malleable skin of Crucible – the very planetary crust – had been warm wax, and into the wax had been embossed the hard imprint of an imperial seal, a seal of great intricacy, the result might have been something like this Maximum Entropy Anomaly, this Mandala.

At its heart was a system of concentric circles, ripples frozen in the act of spreading, but that basic organisation was obscured within layers of additional geometric complexity. There were squares, triangles, smaller circles – some positioned at the middle of the main formation, others at some distance from the centre. There were spirals and sinusoids. There were ellipses and horsetails and comma-like formations. It was, as near as Geoffrey could judge, marvellously, hypnotically symmetrical, in both the vertical and horizontal planes.

‘And this… thing – it couldn’t be a mistake, something… I don’t know, imprinted on the data by… what did you call her?’

‘By Arachne? No. She’s infallible. I’ve injected enough test patterns into the Ocular data stream to be certain that she’s absolutely dependable. Of course, we ran even more exhaustive tests, and we’ll have run many more by the time we go public with this. But there’s no doubt – Mandala is real.’

‘OK,’ he said slowly, sensing that Arethusa’s assessment of his intellectual worth might depend acutely on his next utterance. ‘It’s real. And I see that it isn’t natural. Nothing natural produced that, not in ten billion years. But do you know what it is?’

‘To the best of my knowledge… a system of mirrored channels, cut into the planet’s surface. Lined with something highly reflective, which is sometimes exposed and sometimes covered by water.’

‘Sometimes?’

‘Crucible has two large moons. Their tidal effects produce an ocean swell, or rather a pattern of ocean swells, which sometimes lead to the channels being inundated. Water isn’t a good reflector, so the effect is very pronounced. Water races into the channels and fills them in a complicated fashion. In a similarly complicated fashion, the water drains or evaporates from the channels again, leaving the mirrors exposed once more. The pattern doesn’t appear to be quite the same from cycle to cycle. Whether that is down to chance, or whether the system is running through iterations… computational state-changes… we can’t know. Not until we have a much closer look.’

‘Are there moving parts?’

‘That’s a good question, and the answer again is we don’t know – our resolution isn’t sufficient to discern that. But here’s the thing: whether or not any part of Mandala moves, the entire thing must be self-renewing, or under constant repair. Whether it’s ten thousand or ten million years old, it must repair itself. If we dug channels like that on our own Earth, even with the best materials currently at our disposal, do you imagine they’d last more than a few millennia without upkeep?’

‘Maybe it’s not even that old.’

‘I very much doubt that it was built within the span of human history. Given the age of the galaxy, the ages of the other stars and planets… that would be an almighty coincidence, wouldn’t it? That someone made this thing, and we just happened to evolve a civilisation and the means to detect it a cosmic eye-blink later?’

‘You think it’s a lot older.’

‘Yes, but not hundreds of millions of years, either. Crucible has plate tectonics, like our own Earth. Land masses move around on her surface. We trace their interlocking coastlines and deduce where they once fitted together, like Africa and the Americas. No structure that large could endure plate movement without being deformed or destroyed. Mandala’s geometric symmetry is as perfect as we can measure with our current methods. It can’t be much older than tens of millions of years. Which, I admit, is still a cosmic eye-blink.’

Geoffrey felt as if he’d stepped off a mental cliff and was still falling. Wisely or not, he rejected any notion that Arethusa might be lying. This was real – or at least she believed it to be so. Ocular had found something of epochal significance, one of the two or three most important discoveries in the history of the human species, and he was in on it from almost the outset. Stupendous and world-shattering, Arethusa had called it. That, he was forced to admit, was no exaggeration.

This knowledge changed everything. Sooner or later the world would know, and from that moment on… every thought, every action, every desire and ambition would be indelibly coloured by this discovery. How could it be otherwise? There was another intelligence out there, close enough to touch. And even if they were now gone, then the mere existence of their handiwork was wonder enough to fundamentally change humanity’s view of the universe.

Well, perhaps. The world had absorbed the dizzying lessons of modern science easily enough, hadn’t it? Reality was a trick of cognition, an illusion woven by the brain. Beneath the apparently solid skin of the world lay a fizzing unreality of quantum mechanics, playing out on a warped and surreal Salvador Dali landscape. Ghost worlds peeled away from the present with every decision. The universe itself would one day simmer down to absolute entropic stasis, the absolute and literal end of time itself. No action, no memory of an action, no trace of a memory, could endure for ever. Every human deed, from the smallest kindness to the grandest artistic achievement, was ultimately pointless.

But it wasn’t as if people went around thinking about that when they had lovers to meet, menus to choose from, birthdays to remember. The humdrum concerns of normal life trumped the miraculous every time. Eunice’s death had been a seven-day wonder, and the same would be true of the Ocular discovery when it went public. Maybe a seven-month or seven-year wonder, Geoffrey thought charitably. But sooner or later it would be business as usual. Economies would rise and fall. Celebrities would come and go. There would be political scandals, even the occasional murder. And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks.

But still… That didn’t mean it wasn’t momentous, that it wasn’t an awesome privilege to be one of the first to know.

Quite why Arethusa felt he deserved that privilege, or what he was expected to do for her in return, were entirely separate mysteries.

‘Forgive my scepticism, but…’ he ventured. ‘Are you absolutely certain that it can’t be a naturally occurring phenomenon? I mean, think of anthills… beehives. They have structure, organisation, that might imply conscious intent. Even geological or chemical processes can create the illusion of design.’

‘It’s good that you have doubts, but I don’t think you’ve considered all the options yet. This is an order of magnitude – no, make that two or three orders of magnitude more complex than anything nature is capable of. That’s a planet like Earth, Geoffrey. Its weather and surface chemistry obey predictable rules. There’s only one conclusion, which is that Mandala was made. It’s artificial, and it was designed to be seen. The people… the beings… that did this – they’d have known exactly how visible they were. They’d have known that instruments like Ocular would be capable of viewing them from dozens of light-years away. And still they did this, knowing full well that another civilisation would be able to detect their handiwork. It was deliberate. It was made to be seen.’

‘Like a calling card,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Or, perhaps, an invitation to keep away. A territorial marker. Maybe a helpful warning sign, like a radiation or biohazard symbol. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about this image for months and I still haven’t got any further with it. Ocular will continue monitoring Crucible, and the signal-to-noise will improve… but there’s a limit to what we can find out from here. We’ll have to get closer.’

‘You mean go there?’

‘If it takes a thousand years, that’s within our scope. Don’t look so surprised, Geoffrey – I credited you with more imagination than that.’

He shivered, for it was uncomfortably like being spoken to by his grandmother.

‘It takes months just to get to Jupiter.’

‘But the Green Efflorescence already demands of us that we achieve the means to cross interstellar space. We are already on that path. If Crucible is the spur that brings that goal closer, so be it.’

‘You said this discovery was made late last year.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘That’s also around the time my grandmother died.’

‘And you’re wondering if the… shock of it was what pushed her over the edge?’

Geoffrey doubted there was much in the universe capable of shocking his grandmother. ‘Or something,’ he allowed.

‘She was surprised, as you’d expect. Brim-full of questions. Probing, insightful questions. Sharp until the end, your grandmother. But once she’d absorbed the news, once she’d asked me enough to satisfy her curiosity, it was almost as if she decided to put the whole business out of her mind, as if it really wasn’t that important, just something we’d been talking about to pass the time. As if the discovery of intelligence elsewhere in the universe was no more consequential than, say, the news that a mutual acquaintance of ours was dying of some very rare illness. I’d told her the most astonishing news imaginable, given her this secret known only to myself at that point, and she was amazed, and then merely interested, and ultimately nonplussed.’ Arethusa paused. ‘That was when I started to wonder whether something had gone wrong in her head, after all those years of seclusion. Had she lost the capacity to be truly astounded, because nothing astounding had happened to her for so long? But how could anyone become that jaded?’

‘Based on what I knew of her, everything you’ve just told me makes perfect sense. She was emotionally detached, cut off from the things that used to matter to her. I’m not sure she cared about anything by the end.’

‘There’s still the fact of her death happening so soon after my visit.’

‘It could be a coincidence.’

‘I’d agree if there’d been a single sign that she was in any way ailing, losing her grip on life.’

‘You chinged up there. That means you were seeing whatever the proxy made you see. Maybe she was more unwell than she let on.’

‘That’s possible,’ Arethusa allowed. ‘But even if she was ill, the timing still troubles me. I show her the images of Crucible, and a few weeks later she dies? After one hundred and thirty years of not dying?’ A pause. Then: ‘You’ve been there, since she died? To the Winter Palace?’

‘Not me. Just Memphis – I suppose you’d call him our retainer. Been with the family for years, and the only one of us who was still dealing with Eunice on a face-to-face basis, even though he’s not an Akinya.’

‘I should very much like to speak with Memphis. It sounds as if he knew her better than the rest of you.’

‘Good luck getting much out of him. Memphis isn’t exactly one to go blurting out secrets.’

‘Because he has something to hide?’

Geoffrey laughed. ‘I doubt it. But Memphis was loyal to her when she was alive, and he’s not going to suddenly change now that she’s dead.’

‘And you’ve already spoken to him about Eunice?’

‘I’ve asked him this and that, but he’s not one to betray a confidence. Whatever passed between them, I’m afraid it’ll go to the grave with Memphis.’

‘Unless you make your own independent enquiries.’

‘I do have a life I’d quite like to be getting on with. I’m a scientist, not an expert in digging into private family affairs.’

‘Surely you grasp that this is about more than just your family now, Geoffrey. You are right to point out that I only chinged to the Winter Palace. Given my circumstances, that was unavoidable. But you could visit in person, couldn’t you?’

‘It’s a bit late for that.’

‘I’m thinking of the things she may have left behind. Records, testimonies. An explanation for her death. You should go, while there’s still a chance of doing so.’

‘The Winter Palace has been up there for decades. It’s not going anywhere soon.’

‘On that matter, your family may have other ideas.’

Text appeared to the right of Crucible. For a moment the words hung there in Chinese, before his eyes supplied the visual translation layer.

It was a request for ‘disposal of abandoned asset’. The asset in question was an axially stabilised free-flying habitable structure, better known as the Winter Palace. The request came from Akinya Space, to the United Orbital Nations Circumlunar Space Traffic Administration.

It had been submitted on February 12.

The day he got back from the Moon. The day he handed the glove to the cousins.

‘If I were you,’ Arethusa said, ‘I wouldn’t wait too long before taking a look up there. Of course, if you need any help with that, you know who to call.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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

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

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

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

‘Aren’t you enjoying this?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

The impactor, whatever it had been, had made stark and visible the sedimentary deposits, exposing them as a grand series of horizontal steps, dozens upon dozens in height. Awesome and patient weathering processes had toiled on this scene to produce a landscape of alien strangeness. Flat-topped mesas, pyramids and sphinxlike formations rose from a dark floor, tiered sides contoured in neat horizontal steps as if they’d been laser-cut from mile-thick plywood. Some of the formations were bony, making Sunday imagine the calcified vertebrae of colossal dead monsters, half-swallowed into the Martian crust.

Others had the random, swirling complexity of partly stirred coffee, or caramel syrup in vanilla or pecan ice cream. It was gorgeous, moving, seductive. But like everywhere else on Mars, it was also both deadly and dead.

The cable car dipped again – Sunday felt the descent this time as its suspending line spooled out a little more – and they sailed over the edge of a tawny cliff as high as any building in the Zone. Her stomach did a little butterfly flutter. Tiny bright-green and yellow multilimbed robots clung to the cliff’s side, glued like geckos. She voked a scale-grid. Actually, they weren’t tiny at all, but as large as bulldozers. Not rock climbers, or even ching proxies, she was given to understand, but scientific machines, still conducting sampling operations.

The cable car rose and dipped again, clearing a long stepped ridge. Another line came in from the north-east, intersecting theirs at an angle. Sunday watched as a car on the other line lowered down to a railinged platform buttressed off the side of one of the rock formations. A handful of suited figures were waiting on the platform to board; others got off the cable car and began to follow a meandering metal path bolted to the cliffside. The cable car climbed away, reeling in its line to gain height, and soon it was lost in the butterscotch dust.

A sharp voice asked, ‘Sunday Akinya?’

The voice belonged to a proxy, a brass-coloured robot chassis with many gears and ratchets ticking and whirring in the open cage of its skull. Its eyes were like museum-piece telescopes, goggling out of its dialled face.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Since you’re obviously not Holroyd, I’m guessing you’re our guide?’

Sunday was alone. Jitendra had wandered off to use one of the swivel-mounted binoculars situated around the promenade deck.

‘Gribelin will meet you in Vishniac. He knows the Evolvarium. He’s already been very well paid, so don’t let him talk you into any extra fees. Here are your train tickets.’

The proxy offered her its hand to shake and Sunday slipped her hand into its brass grip. The ruby-nailed fingers tightened. An icon appeared in her left visual field, signifying that she was now in possession of the relevant documents. Two seats, a private compartment on the overnight bullet from Crommelin to Vishniac, leaving tomorrow.

‘This Gribelin doesn’t sound very trustworthy.’

‘Gribelin’s mercenary, but he’s also dependable. There’s a coffee bar in the public concourse at Vishniac – he will be waiting for you.’

Sunday studied the bind tag. The proxy was being chinged from Shalbatana, but with the Pans’ expertise in manipulating quangle paths that meant little.

‘Did Holroyd mention the golem?’

‘We know about that and we’ll do what we can to slow it down, but beyond that there are no guarantees.’

‘Can’t you just… stop it? Have someone break its legs?’

‘It wouldn’t achieve anything, other than drawing the wrong sort of attention. Your cousin could easily obtain another body, even if it didn’t look like him. We can stop him chinging ahead to Vishniac by renting all available proxies at that end, but we can’t be seen to act in open opposition to Akinya interests.’ The proxy looked around, its telescope-eyes clicking and rotating. ‘We’ve block-booked half the train, so the golem won’t be able to buy a ticket at the last minute. All the same, you mustn’t give it the chance. The station isn’t far from your hotel, so don’t arrive any earlier than you need to.’

‘We won’t,’ Sunday said.

‘Holroyd will be in touch when you return. I was told to let you know that he’s very satisfied with the work so far.’

‘I’m… glad to hear it,’ Sunday said.

The brass proxy nodded and walked away, melting into the milling tourists.

‘Give them credit,’ Eunice said. ‘They’ve covered all the bases, or as many as they’re able to. Block-booking the train, renting the proxies in Vishniac… that’s only the half of it, too. I’ve been having difficulties synching with my Earthside counterpart ever since we arrived. It’s not just that your brother’s in Tiamaat, either. Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to tie up Earth–Mars comms by all legal means available.’

‘Then they’re on our side, even if it inconveniences you.’

‘My suspicion,’ the construct said, ‘is that they’re on whichever side works best for them from one moment to the next.’

Sunday felt a touch on her arm. She turned, expecting it to be Jitendra, or just possibly the proxy, back to tell her something it had forgotten to mention before. But the young man looking at her in a crisp maroon and silver-trimmed uniform was one of the cable car’s staff. ‘The suit you reserved, Miss Akinya,’ he said, smiling from beneath a pillbox hat. ‘We were expecting you about ten minutes ago.’

Sunday narrowed her eyes. ‘I didn’t book any suit.’

‘There’s definitely one reserved, Miss Akinya. I can cancel it, of course, but if you’d care to take up the reservation, we’ll be making our next stop in about ten minutes?’ His smile was starting to crumble around the edges. ‘You’ll have about an hour on the ground before the last pickup of the day.’

‘Did Jitendra book this?’

‘I don’t know, sorry.’

‘No, he didn’t,’ Eunice said, answering her question. ‘Not unless he managed to do so without me knowing about it, and as clever as Jitendra undoubtedly is, he’s not that clever. So someone else has booked this suit for you, and if the Pans knew about it, the proxy would presumably have mentioned it.’

‘If you’d care to come this way,’ the young man said.

‘I wouldn’t,’ Eunice said.

‘It can’t be Lucas. If Lucas wants to talk to me, he can just stroll straight on up, the way he did when we landed.’

‘So you don’t know who’s behind this. All the more reason to be suspicious of it, you ask me.’

‘Which I didn’t.’ Sunday looked through the windows, wondering what was the worst that could happen.

The suit would be the property of the cable-car company, so she could presume it would be in good repair, and it wasn’t as if she’d be going off into the wilderness. The metal walkways down in the crater were fenced off, there were safety lines, the Mech would be as thick as anywhere else in Crommelin and there were sightseers coming and going all the time.

No possible harm could come to her: this was, if anything, an even safer place than the Descrutinised Zone.

‘On your head be it,’ Eunice said.

‘Just do one thing for me. Tell Jitendra where I’ve gone. You can do that, can’t you?’

‘It won’t overtax my capabilities, no.’

‘Tell him to hang around at the cable-car terminal where we got on. I’ll be back as soon as I’m able.’

‘Why not tell him yourself?’

‘Because he won’t like it.’

‘Indeed. That’s because it’s a mistake.’

‘Then allow me the luxury of making it on my own, Grandmother.’ She caught herself. ‘I didn’t mean to say that.’

‘But you did,’ Eunice answered, looking back at Sunday with a smile of quiet delight. ‘You forgot, just for a moment. You forgot that I’m not really me.’

Sunday turned away, before the construct could see the shame on her face.

There were three other tourists on the landing platform: the last drop-off of the day. The suit was a little stiff, its locomotor functions lagging intent by just enough milliseconds for her brain to register the resistance. In all other respects it appeared to be in perfect working order, with a clean visor and all life-support indices in the green. The railing’s cold came through her glove. She could feel the scabby roughness where the paint had flaked off the metal.

One of the cable-car employees latched a gate behind the surface party and the car pulled away, receding and rising into the air at the same time. She watched it fade into the dust, hoping Jitendra wouldn’t be too alarmed by this sudden course of action.

Three metal-fenced paths led away from the landing platform, soon winding their way out of sight around rocks and cliffs. There was no guided tour, not even a suggested direction of progress, so Sunday waited until the other tourists had drifted off before choosing her own route, the one that struck her as the least popular.

The paths were bolted to the sheer sides of the rock formations, suspended dozens and sometimes hundreds of metres above solid ground. The floor was coated with some grippy anti-slip compound. A continuous rail along the cliffside allowed her to clip on a sliding safety line, with the other end tethered to her waist. There was no real possibility of falling, but she clipped on anyway.

Sunday walked as quickly as the suit allowed, conscious that she would need to be back at the platform for the final cable car of the day. The suit had more than enough reserves for an overnight stay, if it came to that, but it wasn’t a prospect she viewed with any particular enthusiasm. For Jitendra’s sake she vowed not to be late for the pickup.

But – and this was the thing – the scenery in Crommelin was literally awesome. There really was no other word for it. The Moon had its magnificent desolation, airless and silent as the space between thoughts, but it had taken rain and wind, insane aeons of it, to sculpt these astonishing and purposeful shapes.

Nature shouldn’t be able to do this, Sunday thought. It shouldn’t be able to produce something that resembled the work of directed intelligence, something artful, when the only factors involved were unthinking physics and obscene, spendthrift quantities of time. Time to lay down the sediments, in deluge after deluge, entire epochs in the impossibly distant past when Mars had been both warm and wet, a world deluded into thinking it had a future. Time for cosmic happenstance to hurl a fist from the sky, punching down through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling through geological chapters like a bullet through a book. And then yet more time – countless millions of years – for wind and dust to work their callous handiwork, scouring and abrading, wearing the exposed layers back at subtly different rates depending on hardness and chemistry, until these deliberate-looking right-angled steps and contours began to assume grand and imperial solidity, rising from the depths like the stairways of the gods.

Awe-inspiring, yes. Sometimes it was entirely right and proper to be awed. And recognising the physics in these formations, the hand of time and matter and the nuclear forces underpinning all things, did not lessen that feeling. What was she, ultimately, but the end product of physics and matter? And what was her art but the product of physics and matter working on itself?

She rounded a bend. There was a figure, another spacesuited sightseer, leaning over the outer railing, arms folded on the top of the fence. Sensing her approach – her footsteps reverberated along the path – the figure looked at her for a few seconds, then returned its gaze to the canyon below. She continued her progress, never doubting that this was the person who had arranged for her suit.

The figure’s gold and chrome suit differed from hers. It was older-looking – not antique-old, but certainly not made in the last twenty or thirty years. The suit appeared well looked after, though, and she didn’t doubt that it was still in perfectly serviceable condition.

Sunday joined the figure, hooking her own arms over the railing and looking down. As the day cooled, winds stirred dust eddies in the nooks and chicanes of the crater formations. Panther-black shadows stole up from the depths.

The figure touched a hand to Sunday’s sleeve, establishing a suit-to-suit link. ‘I know who you are,’ she heard, the voice female, the words Swahili but with a distinct Martian lilt. No translation layer was in effect, at least not on her side.

‘That’s easy to say,’ Sunday answered.

‘Sunday Akinya.’ The woman said her name slowly, so there could be no mistaking it. ‘You’ve come to Mars to find out about your grandmother.’

‘Knowing my name’s no great trick. Despite my best efforts, it’s not like I’m travelling incognito, is it? You could easily have run an aug query on me before I left the cable car, or at any time since I landed.’

‘And the other part?’

‘Doesn’t take a genius to draw that conclusion, does it? My grandmother died recently. Within a few days of her scattering I’m on my way to Mars. How likely is it that the two events aren’t related?’

‘Maybe you had to get away from things for a while. But that’s not really the case, is it? You’re searching for something.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ Sunday turned to look at the woman but her visor was mirrored, throwing back Sunday’s own reflection and a fish-eye distortion of the landscape. ‘You know my name. How about telling me yours?’

‘Soya,’ the woman answered, easily, as if the information cost her nothing.

‘That’s an African name, I think. And you appear to speak Swahili very well.’

‘My ancestors were Nigerian, but I was born here.’ Soya deliberated. ‘Your intentions are to travel west, I think. We needn’t go into specifics, but you have in mind somewhere quite dangerous.’

‘Say it, if you’re so damned sure.’

‘I’d rather not. We’re quite safe from eavesdroppers here, which is why I went to the trouble of renting that suit for you, and making sure aug reach was disabled – did you even notice that? But it’s not wholly safe. Nowhere is.’

‘Fine, talk in riddles, then.’ Sunday admitted to herself that she hadn’t noticed the absence of the aug. Unlike some people, and especially those who lived beyond the Zone, she didn’t swim in it every waking moment of her existence. It was there, on tap when she needed it. And right now she would have been very glad of it. ‘Are you working for the same people as Holroyd?’ she ventured.

‘I’m not “working” for anyone at all. I’m just here to warn you to be careful.’

‘Is that a threat?’

‘What could I threaten you with? Violence? Don’t be silly. No: the people you need to be careful of are those who’ve bankrolled this expedition. Holroyd’s people, in other words. They’ve been very helpful so far, haven’t they?’

Sunday saw no point in denying it. ‘We currently have a mutually beneficial relationship.’

Soya laughed at that. ‘I don’t doubt it. But let’s not pretend that they’re in this out of the goodness of their hearts.’

‘Never said they were. They’re helping me, and my brother’s helping them. Everyone’s a winner.’

‘You may see it that way. I’m not sure they do.’

Sunday was wearying of this. ‘Get to the point, whatever it is.’

‘Let’s be clear. I’m not saying the Pans are evil. They’re zealous, certainly, and a little scary when they talk about their long-term goals, and how the rest of us are going to get sucked along for the ride whether we like it or not… but that doesn’t make them villains. But in it for themselves, when push comes to shove? Most definitely.’

‘We’re all in it for ourselves on some level.’

‘Indeed. Why are you here, if not driven by intellectual curiosity? Isn’t that a fundamentally selfish motivation, when you get down to it? You want those answers so you can feel better yourself, not because you think they’ll necessarily do the rest of us any good.’

‘Until I get the answers, I’m not going to know, am I?’

‘If you get the answers,’ Soya corrected. ‘That’s the point. The Pans have been watching you every step of your journey, haven’t they? Always there, always willing to be helpful. Who were you meeting on the cable car if it wasn’t the Pans?’

‘I can’t do this without them. I’m not the spoilt rich kid you might have heard about.’

‘I don’t doubt that. But be clear about one thing: whatever you find here, your powerful new allies are likely to be at least as interested in learning about it as you are – and they may well decide to cut you out of the loop at the last minute.’

‘This is nothing to do with them. Or you, for that matter.’ Sunday stepped back from the edge, but took care not to break contact with the other woman. ‘OK, you’ve told me your name. But that means nothing. Who are you, Soya? What’s your agenda?’

‘Consider me a friend,’ Soya said. ‘That’s all you need to know for the moment.’ Using her other hand, the one that wasn’t resting on Sunday’s sleeve, she reached up and touched a stud in the side of her helmet. The visor de-mirrored instantaneously. Soya looked around, letting Sunday see her face behind the glass, and for a moment it was all she could do to keep her balance.

The face was her own.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

They flew Geoffrey back to Africa early the next day. The sickle-shaped craft was supersonic, a gauche indulgence when even the fastest airpods didn’t break the sound barrier. Geoffrey was the flier’s only occupant, and for most of the journey he stood at the extravagant curve of the forward window, hand on the railing, Caesar surveying his Rome.

Once they were over open water, back into aug reach and outpacing every other flying thing for kilometres around, Eunice returned.

‘I’ve been worried about you. I hope no mischief occurred while I was absent.’

‘I’m capable of taking care of myself, Grandmother.’

‘Well, that’s a development, you calling me “grandmother”.’

‘It just slipped out.’

‘Evidently.’ She fell silent, Geoffrey hoping that was the last she had to say, but after a suitable interval she continued, ‘So what happened down there? Or are you not going to tell me?’

‘We talked about Lin Wei, the friend you duped.’

‘I don’t even know of any… oh, wait – you mentioned her already, didn’t you?’

‘What did you actually do on Mercury, Eunice?’

‘Whatever anyone does: collected a few souvenirs, soaked up the local colour.’

He abandoned that line of enquiry, guessing how far it would get him. ‘Lin Wei came to you just before you died.’

‘How would you know?’

‘Because I think I might have met her. She didn’t “drown” at all. Or if she did, it was only a metaphorical drowning. Becoming one with the sea. Changing name and form. She’s a whale now, did you know? Calls herself Arethusa.’

‘Try to make at least some sense.’

‘Ocular found something. You remember Ocular, don’t you? Or perhaps that’s another part of your past you’ve conveniently buried.’ He gave an uninterested shrug. ‘What does it matter? I’ll tell you anyway. Lin found evidence of alien intelligence, the Mandala structure, and she thought you ought to know about it. Obviously still felt she owed you that, despite whatever it was you did to her.’

Eunice was standing next to him at the window, with the African coast racing towards them. The off-white wall of the coastal barrage was like a sheer chalk cliff rising from the sea. Fishing boats and pleasure craft slammed by underneath. They were flying at scarcely more than sail height, but even at supersonic speed the Pan aircraft would have been all but silent.

‘My involvement with Ocular was no more than peripheral,’ Eunice’s figment said.

‘Maybe that’s what the public record says. But Lin must have known there was more to it than that. Reason she made a point of keeping her side of the bargain, by giving you this news. And then a little while later you go and die.’

‘And that sequence of events troubles you?’

‘Starting to feel like a bit too much of a coincidence. Lin must have felt the same way or she wouldn’t have told me. She came to your funeral, you realise. That little girl in a red dress, the one none of us knew? It was a ching proxy of Lin Wei, manifesting as a child. The way she’d have been when the two of you were friends.’ After a moment he added, ‘I’m going up to the Winter Palace. If there’s anything I need to know about it, now’s the time to tell me.’

‘What would I know?’

‘You lived there, Eunice. You created it.’

‘I wish I could help you, Geoffrey. I would if I could.’ She turned to face him. ‘I’ll say one thing: be very careful up there.’

He knew something was not quite right as soon as the Pan flier dropped subsonic and began circling over the study station, selecting its landing site. The Cessna was where he’d left it, pinned like a crucifix to the tawny earth. Parked a little distance from it – not too far from the station’s triad of stilt-mounted huts – stood a pair of clean, gleaming airpods. One was amber, the other a vivid, too-bright yellow. He could see figures on the ground, coming and going from the huts. People, robots and golems. Something on the ground like a foil-wrapped mummy, with a robot or golem bent over it.

‘Put me down,’ he snapped. ‘Anywhere.’

The flier VTOL’d onto the nearest patch of open ground. Geoffrey dropped out of the belly hatch before the landing manoeuvre was complete, flinging his bag ahead of him. He thumped to the hard-packed earth, pushed himself to his feet, grabbed the bag and started sprinting the remaining distance to the huts. A shadow passed over him as the Pan flier returned to the sky. Geoffrey barely registered it.

‘Geoffrey,’ Hector said, noticing his approach. ‘We tried calling you… tried chinging. You weren’t reachable. Where the hell have you been?’

‘I told you to keep away from here,’ Geoffrey said. He coughed as dust, stirred up by the flier, infiltrated his lungs.

‘It’s Memphis,’ Lucas said. He was standing next to the mummy-like form lying on the ground.

‘What?’ Geoffrey asked, stupefied.

‘Memphis was late back at the household,’ Hector explained. ‘This morning.’ He was flustered, sweat prickling his forehead. ‘He was expected at a particular time – we were supposed to be meeting him, to talk about the household accounts.’

‘No ching bind could be established,’ Lucas said, repeating himself a moment later. ‘No ching bind could be established.’ As if this very fact implied the opening up of an entire chasm of existential wrongness, a baleful perversion against the natural order of things.

‘We came out here straight away,’ Hector said. ‘His airpod… we could see where he’d landed.’

Geoffrey pushed Hector back until he was standing next to Lucas, who was staring blankly at the ground. He coughed some more dust from his windpipe. The ocean, the turquoise realm of Tiamaat, the night dance of the merpeople, felt like a lovely dream from which he’d just been abruptly woken. No medical diagnosis was needed to tell Geoffrey that Memphis was dead. His body was visible through the protective chrysalis that had been sprayed around him. Through its emerald tint, Memphis’s bloodied and crushed form looked like a toy that had been given to a boisterous, vengeful child. He would have been unrecognisable were it not for his signature suit, caked with dirt and blood but insufficiently so to conceal the familiar pinstriping. One of Memphis’s black leather shoes had come off his foot, exposing a dusty sock. The shoe was on the ground, outside the chrysalis.

‘What happened?’ Eunice whispered, appearing next to him.

‘Not now. Of all times, not now.’

She kept looking at the body, saying nothing. The robotic form that had been stooped over the chrysalis rose to its full bipedal height. It was one of the household’s usual proxies, Geoffrey saw – Giacometti-thin, with holes and gaps in its limbs, torso and head-assembly.

‘There’s nothing you could have done,’ the proxy stated, with a smooth Senegalese accent. ‘Judging by these injuries, he was killed very quickly. There will have to be a full medical examination, of course, given the accidental nature of his death, but I doubt there will be any surprises. You say his body was found near elephants?’

‘He was working with them,’ Lucas said, glancing at Geoffrey.

‘Elephants didn’t do this,’ Geoffrey said.

Hector placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘I know it will be hard for you to accept…’

Geoffrey nearly wrenched his cousin’s hand off. ‘It wasn’t the elephants.’

‘These are crush injuries,’ the proxy said hesitantly, as if it didn’t want to get dragged into a family dispute. ‘And this wound in his abdomen… it is consistent with a tusk injury.’

‘Seen a lot of those, have you?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘I thought accidents were supposed to be rare these days.’

‘I’ve seen wounds like this in the textbooks,’ the proxy replied.

‘The doctor’s only trying to assist us,’ Hector said placatingly.

‘He’s right,’ Eunice said, in little more than a murmur. ‘It’s not the proxy’s fault, or the fault of the physician on the other end.’

But Geoffrey still couldn’t accept the evidence of his senses, or the honest testimony of the medical expert.

‘Elephants didn’t do this,’ he said again, only softer this time, as if it was himself he was trying to convince.

‘He should not have come out here alone, at his age,’ Hector said.

‘He was only a hundred,’ Lucas pointed out.

‘He’s not been looking strong to me lately. This was a risk he should never have taken. What was he doing out here, Geoffrey?’ Hector had his hands on his hips. ‘This was your work, not his.’

In a monotone, Geoffrey said, ‘Memphis always helped me.’

‘You should not have asked it of him,’ Lucas said. ‘He had enough to be doing at the household. You imposed on his good nature.’

Geoffrey took a swing at him, but missed. His own momentum sent him spinning off balance. He would have fallen had Hector not reached out to steady him.

‘This isn’t the time for recriminations,’ Hector said, directing the comment at his brother. ‘This is upsetting for all of us.’

‘Get a grip on yourself,’ Eunice admonished, her arms folded disapprovingly. ‘If the Mech was any thicker, it would have dropped you like a stone just for thinking violence.’

Geoffrey gave a last cough. There was dust in his lungs, up his nose, in his watering eyes. ‘He was just doing routine work for me,’ he said in a wheeze as Hector relinquished his grip. ‘While I was away.’

‘You still haven’t told us where you were,’ Lucas said.

‘Because it’s none of your fucking business, cousin.’

The proxy swivelled its head, reminding them that it was still present, still being chinged.

‘I’ve called for a scrambulance. The body will be taken to the hospital in Mombasa. They’ll do what they can, but I should tell you now there’s little prospect for revival.’

Hector nodded gravely. ‘Thank you for your honesty, Doctor.’

‘If I’d been able to get to him sooner…’ The proxy shook its head. ‘I do not understand why he allowed this to happen.’

‘Allowed?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘In a place this dangerous,’ Lucas said, looking around, ‘he should not have been on his own. The Mechanism can’t be all places at all times – it’s not god. A watchdog should have come out with him, in case he got into difficulties.’ He pointed at the encased form. ‘Look, he’s not even wearing a bracelet. What was he supposed to do if a snake bit him, or he sprained his ankle and couldn’t walk back to the airpod?’

‘He knew what he was doing,’ Geoffrey said.

‘He must have been startled,’ Hector said. ‘That’s the only explanation. The elephant was on him before he had a chance to do anything about it.’

‘I doubt very much that he suffered,’ the doctor said. ‘As you say, if he’d had any inkling that he was in peril—’

‘We would have found a dead elephant near his body,’ Lucas said. ‘Or dead elephants.’

Eunice looked Geoffrey in the eye, then absented herself.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Sunday and Jitendra were on the overland bullet train, speeding west through the plains of Chryse in the middle of the Martian day, when Geoffrey chinged in.

Sunday knew at once that something was wrong.

‘If you can,’ his figment said, ‘take this call somewhere private. I don’t mean from Jitendra. It would be good if Jitendra could be with you. But you shouldn’t be in public.’ Geoffrey’s face told her everything she needed to know, except the worst part of it. ‘I don’t have good news.’

The Pans had paid for a private compartment in the train so there was no need for Sunday to take the call anywhere else. She allowed the figment to continue speaking, cursing the distance that prevented her from responding to him in real-time. Cursing physics, the basic organising framework of reality.

‘It’s just after noon here. This morning I came back from Tiamaat. I was due to land at the study station, but as I came in I saw that something was happening on the ground. The cousins were there, and they’d found Memphis.’ Geoffrey swallowed, moved his jaw. ‘He was dead, Sunday. Something had happened out there and… he was dead, on the ground, just lying there.’ Geoffrey stopped and looked down at his feet. ‘There was already a doctor on-scene when I arrived, but too much time had passed. They’ve taken Memphis to Mombasa, but it’s not looking good… I don’t think there’s going to be much they can do.’

Jitendra had already closed his hand around hers, though she barely felt his presence, the train compartment, the pressure-tight glass, the rushing red scenery beyond, everything receding into galactic distance.

‘I don’t know what happened,’ Geoffrey went on. ‘He’d agreed to help me with the elephants while I was away. The doctor says he was crushed… as if he got into trouble with the elephants. But that can’t have happened. Memphis knew the herd almost as well as I did – I wouldn’t have asked for his help otherwise, and there’s no one else I’d have trusted to do the job properly.’ He closed his eyes. ‘That’s all I have right now. I’ll call you as soon as there’s more news, but I think you should be prepared for the worst.’ He opened his eyes, started to say something before abandoning the attempt. ‘I feel I ought to say that I wish I could be with you, but that’s a lie. I wish you were here, back with me, in Africa. Right now Mars feels like a very long way away.’ He nodded, his eyes meeting hers with uncanny directness. ‘Take care, sister. I love you.’

Geoffrey was gone. The train sped on its way, oblivious to her news. It should be slowing, she reckoned, allowing her thoughts time to catch up. That would be the decent thing.

She did not know what to do or say, so when Jitendra tightened his hold on her and said that he was sorry, she was as glad as it was possible to be in that moment.

‘I have to get back to Earth.’

‘Wait for what the doctors have to say. Neuropractors can do wonders nowadays.’

‘You heard what my brother said – it had been too long.’

Jitendra had no answer for that. He had meant to be kind, she knew, but there was reasonable hope and there was false hope, and she would not cling to the latter.

‘I have to get back,’ she repeated.

‘It… won’t make any difference.’ Jitendra was speaking very carefully. ‘It’s taken you a month to travel here, and even if we got back into orbit and miraculously found a slot on the next swiftship out… it’d be five weeks, at least, before we’ll be anywhere near Earth.’

‘Every week I spend here, Earth is further away.’

‘If there’s going to be a funeral, then you’ll have either already missed it, even if you leave now, or they’ll have to wait until you get back. Who was closest to Memphis? You and your brother. And your brother’s back in Africa. He’s not going to let anything happen until you get home, is he?’

‘Please don’t talk about funerals,’ Sunday said. ‘Not yet. Not before we’ve heard from Mombasa.’

But he was right. She had already been thinking of funerals.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Chinging in from Mombasa, where Memphis’s body had been examined in detail, the neuropractor delivered her verdict to the family members gathered in the household.

They could bring him back to life, the figment said, that was always an option, albeit an expensive one. But so much of his brain would need to be rebuilt from scratch that the end result wouldn’t be the man they had known. The basic structural organisation of his personality had been blasted to shards. ‘There is no gentle way of putting this, but what you would be getting back would be a baby in an old man’s body,’ the figment informed them, Geoffrey unable to shake the sense that this was all fractionally too rehearsed, a speech that the neuropractor kept up her sleeve to deliver on occasions such as this, while trying to make it sound suitably impromptu and sincere. He wanted to resent her for that, but couldn’t. She was just being kind.

‘A confused, frightened baby with just enough recollection to know what it was missing,’ the specialist went on. ‘Memory. Language. All traces of family and friendship. The hard-earned skills and knowledge of a lifetime. And with not enough life ahead of it ever to recover what was lost. We will of course abide by your wishes, but I urge you to give deep consideration before taking this course.’

No discussion was required. For once, the Akinyas were all in agreement. The decision was entirely in their hands, as Memphis had no family but the one that employed him.

‘We wouldn’t want that,’ Hector said softly, Geoffrey nodding his assent, and knowing as he did so that he was answering for Sunday as well.

‘I think you’re doing the right thing,’ the specialist said. ‘And I am so sorry that this has happened.’

Geoffrey was still trying to come to terms with what the day had delivered. Everything felt unreal, off-kilter. Memphis had been part of his life in a way that Eunice never had. She was a reclusive figure who sometimes beamed herself down from the Winter Palace, but who never walked the household in person. Having her removed from his life was the same as having a part of his own past dismantled, boxed away for posterity. He was sad about it, but it didn’t rip him apart.

It was different with Memphis. He’d always been there, a living, breathing, human presence. The smell of him, the prickly texture of his suit fabric, the squeak of his shoes on waxed flooring as he patrolled the household’s corridors at night, more vigilant than any watchdog. Kind when he needed to be, stern when the moment called for it. Always willing to forgive, if not necessarily forget. The most decent human being Geoffrey had ever known.

He remembered Lucas’s words: You imposed on his good nature.

The implication wounded, but he had done exactly that. Always had done.

‘Thank you for letting me know,’ Sunday said, when she chinged back in response to his earlier transmission. ‘Right now, I don’t really have a clue what to say. I’m still processing it. I’m so sorry that you had to see him… the way he was. But whatever you might think, this wasn’t your fault, OK? You asked Memphis to do something for you, but that doesn’t mean you have to take responsibility for what happened to him. Memphis was old enough to make his own decisions: if he’d felt your request endangered him, he’d have told you so. So don’t go making this any harder on yourself than it already is. Please, brother? For me?’ Sunday collected herself; from the figment, it was hard to tell if she’d been crying or not. ‘I’m on my way to Pavonis Mons right now. Keep me informed, and I’ll be in touch as soon as I’m able.’ She touched a finger to her lips. ‘Love you, brother. Be strong, for both of us.’ He nodded.

He would try, although he did not expect it to be easy.

Geoffrey had to get out of the house, so he went for a walk in the gardens, forcing his mind from its rut as best as he was able. Everywhere he went, though, he found evidence of Memphis’s handiwork. Choices about the redevelopment of the grounds, the refurbishment of ornamental fountains, the arabesque detailwork in the enclosing wall, the selection of flowers and shrubs in the beds – all these things had ultimately fallen to Memphis. Even when the family had been presented with a series of options, Memphis would already have whittled down a much larger set of possibilities, to the point where any one of the final choices would have been acceptable to him. One of his greatest, subtlest gifts to the Akinyas had been granting them the illusion of free will.

Later that afternoon, when Geoffrey had returned indoors, Jumai chinged to say she was on the train from Lagos. Geoffrey was momentarily befuddled, until he remembered that he had in fact called and left a message with her, shortly after the body was taken away. Everything had been a blur. Jumai had been working, so couldn’t take the call there and then. He was still startled that she was on her way.

‘Get off the train in Kigali,’ he told her. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

‘All right,’ she said, doubtfully, as if that wasn’t the kind of reception she’d been expecting.

‘It will be good to see Jumai again,’ Eunice said, announcing her presence.

‘You never knew her,’ Geoffrey snapped. ‘You never knew anyone at all.’

It was only later that he realised she’d had the good grace to keep out of his skull while he’d been wandering the grounds.

It was a two-hour flight, and mid-evening by the time he landed in Kigali. Rain was descending, soft and warm, honey-scented, dyed scarlet and cobalt and gold by the station’s old-fashioned neon signage. He’d just missed Jumai’s arrival: she was sheltering under the concourse’s overhanging roof, while taxis and airpods fussed about and vendors packed up for the night. Two black bags, sagging on the damp concrete either side of her feet like exhausted lapdogs, were her only luggage.

‘You didn’t have to do this,’ Geoffrey said when they were in the air, wheeling over night-time Kigali on their way back to the household.

‘I knew Memphis pretty well,’ Jumai said, as if he might not remember. They’d both got wet between the station and the airpod, but were drying off quickly with the cabin heater turned up. ‘I was part of your life long enough, don’t forget.’

‘I’m not likely to.’ But while he’d remembered to call Jumai – she’d have been hurt if he hadn’t – it was only now that he was beginning to remember how closely braided their lives had really been. Weeks, months, in Amboseli. Memphis had often come out to the research station while Jumai was fashioning the architecture for the human– elephant neurolink. They’d often ended up eating together, late at night, under a single swaying lamp around which mosquitoes orbited like frantic little planets, caught in the death-grip of a supermassive star.

Long stories, silly laughter, too much wine. Yes, Jumai knew Memphis. Had known, he corrected himself. All past tense from now on.

He started crying. It was ridiculous – there’d been no particular spur to it, save the helter-skelter progression of his own thoughts, but once he started he could not stop himself. How foolish he had been to think he could keep it together, at least until he was out of anyone’s sight.

‘I’m sorry, Geoffrey.’ Jumai squeezed his hand. ‘This must be really hard on you. I know how much he meant to you.’

‘It’s hard on Sunday as well,’ he said, when he was able to speak.

‘Is she flying in?’

‘Not really an option – Sunday’s on Mars, on her way to Pavonis Mons.’

They were crossing the southern tip of Lake Victoria. The clouds had parted overhead, the waters as still and clear as if they were cut from black marble.

‘What’s going on, Geoffrey? Eunice dies. Memphis dies… Your sister decides to go to Mars.’

‘Something. I don’t know what.’ After a moment he added, ‘I might need to go back into space myself. There’s a job…’ He closed his eyes. ‘It’s related, but I can’t say much more than that. I might have to break into family property.’

‘Is that why I’m here? Because I can be useful to you?’

‘You know me better than that.’

‘Perhaps.’ She was silent for a few seconds. ‘Well, as it happens, I just quit in Lagos. Bad day at the office.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. Nearly got spiked. Figured it was time to bail out, before we hit something really nasty. And for what? A dickhead of a boss? Bank accounts from a hundred years ago, the tawdry blackmail secrets of the rich and famous?’ She looked cross-eyed and appalled, as if she’d just picked something repulsive out of her nose. ‘Frankly, if I’m going to die on the job, I’d rather it was for something more interesting than century-old scandal fodder.’

Geoffrey considered the Winter Palace.

‘I’m afraid century-old scandal fodder may be the best I can offer instead.’

There was a silence. The airpod made a tiny course adjustment. Once in a while another one zipped by in the other direction, but aside from that they had the night sky all to themselves.

‘You want to talk about what happened,’ Jumai said after a while, in not much more than a whisper, ‘it’s all right with me.’ When Geoffrey was not immediately forthcoming, she added, ‘You said they found him near the elephants, that there’d been an accident.’

‘Something out there got him. But it wasn’t elephants.’

‘What, then?’

‘I don’t know. Something else. Memphis knew his way around the herd. Elephants didn’t do this.’

After a while she said, ‘It must have been quick.’

‘That’s what the doctor thought. He couldn’t have had any warning, or he’d have… protected himself.’

‘I’ve never seen anyone do that.’

‘I have,’ Geoffrey said, thinking back to the day they had found the death machine, and Sunday had nearly died. ‘Once, when I was little.’

It was during breakfast with Jumai the following morning that the thought struck him, the one that, in retrospect – and given his ideas about the cousins – he might reasonably already have entertained. Perhaps, on some unspoken level, he had indeed done that. But he had not come close to voicing it to himself at the level of conscious assessment. And now that he had, now that the thought had pushed itself into his awareness like a rhino charging into daylight, it was all he could do to sit in stunned wonderment, awed at what his mind had dared to conjure.

‘What are you thinking?’ Eunice asked.

‘I’m thinking it would be a good idea if you fucked off.’

‘Geoffrey?’ Jumai asked.

He was staring past her, through the window, out to the trees beyond the border wall. Eunice was gone.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said distractedly. ‘It’s just—’

‘It was a bad idea me coming here, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s not it,’ he said.

But in truth it was disconcerting, having Jumai back at the household, but them not sleeping together. Doubly so in that Memphis was not around. Time and again his thoughts kept plummeting through the same mental trapdoors. Memphis should hear this. Memphis will know. What will Memphis have to say? And each time he caught himself and swore that that would be the last time, and each time he was mistaken.

They’d slept in separate rooms, and met in the east wing for breakfast. The household staff vacillated between subdued discretion and the putting on of brave faces, acting as if nothing had happened. This grated on Geoffrey until he realised he was doing exactly the same thing, smiling too emphatically, cracking nervous little half-jokes. They were all simply trying to do what Memphis would have wanted, which was to keep on with business as usual exactly as if nothing had happened. They were all overdoing it, though.

‘You don’t have to apologise,’ Jumai said. ‘You’re bound to be upset by what’s happened. But if this is making you feel awkward, me being here, I can leave at any time.’ She dropped her voice to a stage whisper. ‘It doesn’t prevent me working on that, um, commission.’

‘Honestly, it’s not you,’ Geoffrey assured her. ‘I’m glad to have some company. It’s just… there’s a lot going on in my head.’

Like the ghost of his dead grandmother, bothering him from beyond the grave. Like the possibility that one or both of the cousins had killed Memphis.

There it was, stated as unambiguously as possible. No pussyfooting around that one.

The cousins killed Memphis.

He’d hoped, upon erecting this suspicion, to be able to knock it down immediately. Bulldoze the rubble away and forget about it. Until that point he hadn’t hated the cousins, after all. Or at least if there were degrees of hate, his was on the mildly antipathetic end of the spectrum, repelled by their manipulative gamesmanship, sickened by their avarice, disgusted by their attachment to family above all else. But not actually despising them. Not actually wishing pain upon them. Most of the time.

But the idea that they might have killed Memphis, or made his death probable… well, when framed so plainly, why exactly not? The cousins bitterly regretted bringing Geoffrey in to help them, that was clear. Since his return from the Moon, they’d been well aware that he was keeping information from them, and that this deceit extended to Sunday. It was all to do with Eunice, so what better way to limit any further damage than by removing the one man who’d had more access to the old woman than any of them? Killing Memphis blocked Geoffrey’s investigations in that particular direction. It also meant that anything damaging that Memphis might have had cause to disclose was not now likely to come to light.

And yes, murder… a difficult thing, that, in the Surveilled World. Easier to steal the Great Wall of China. The very word had the dark alchemical glamour of crimes now banished to history, like regicide or blasphemy.

But still. Murder wasn’t impossible, even in 2162. Even beyond the Descrutinised Zone, in the loving panoptic gaze of the Mechanism. Because the Mechanism wasn’t infallible, and even this tireless engineered god couldn’t be all places at once. The Mandatory Enhancements were supposed to weed out the worst criminal tendencies from developing minds before people reached adolescence… but those very tendencies were imprecise, and it was inevitable that someone, now and then, would slip through the mesh. Someone with the mental wiring necessary to premeditate. Someone capable of malintent.

And if you wanted to commit a crime like that, the Amboseli Basin was far from the worst place you could think of.

When had Memphis died? When Geoffrey was away, not keeping his eye on the old man.

Where had he died? Out in the sticks, where the aug was stretched thin, the Mechanism ineffectual. Memphis wasn’t even wearing his biomedical bracelet – although that could easily have been removed after his death.

Who’d found him? Hector and Lucas. The cousins.

Geoffrey closed his eyes, trying to derail his thoughts, to get them off this tramline. It didn’t work.

The cousins killed Memphis.

‘I’m sorry I dragged you into this,’ he said.

‘Dragged me into what? We’ve barely begun.’

‘Family,’ he said. ‘Memphis. Everything.’

‘You’ve given me an out from Lagos, Geoffrey. I’m hardly going to resent you for that.’

‘Even if there’s an element of self-interest?’

‘Like we said, it’s business. So long as we’re clear about that, all’s well.’ She picked at her food like a bird rooting through roadside scraps. Geoffrey didn’t have much of an appetite either. Even the coffee sat heavily inside him, sloshing around like some toxic by-product. ‘Has there been any talk…’ she began, then faltered.

‘Of what?’

Jumai set her face in an expression he remembered well, drawing in breath and squaring her jaw. ‘I’m assuming there are funeral arrangements. I couldn’t make it back for your grandmother’s scattering, but now that I’m here—’

‘There’s nothing in hand. Memphis never talked to me about what he wanted to happen in the event of his death, and I can’t imagine he was any more frank with the rest of the family. Even Sunday wasn’t as close to him as I am. Was.’ He dragged up a smile. ‘Still adjusting. But I’m glad you mentioned the funeral, because I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought.’

‘Really?’

‘I’ve been so fixated on what happened, and what it means… but you’re right. There will be a funeral, of course, and I want my sister to be part of it.’

Jumai looked doubtful. ‘Even though she’s on Mars?’

‘She’ll be back sooner or later. Memphis doesn’t have to be cremated and scattered in a hurry, the way my grandmother was. There wasn’t time for everyone to get back home then, especially not when some of us were as far out as Titan. It won’t be the same with Memphis.’

Jumai nodded coolly. ‘And you’ll make damned sure of that.’

‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Because I owe it to my sister. And it’s what Memphis would have wanted.’

‘That’s one thing I never understood about your grandmother,’ Jumai said. ‘I can understand why no one wanted to move the scattering to suit my needs. But why did the rest of you have to get here so quickly?’

‘Because that’s what Eunice wanted,’ Geoffrey said. ‘A quick cremation, and a quick scattering. She didn’t want to wait a year, or however long it would take for the whole family to get back to Africa.’

‘She told you that?’

‘No,’ he answered carefully. ‘But Memphis did.’ And then he thought about that, and what exactly it meant.

After breakfast Jumai went to swim. Geoffrey returned to his room and sat on the made bed. He slid open the lower drawer of the bedside cabinet and took out the shoe he’d brought with him from the study station. He held it in his hands, chalky ochre dust soiling his fingers. The laces were still tied: the shoe had slipped off the old man’s foot without them coming loose. Geoffrey touched the knot, wondering if Memphis had been the habit of tying his left shoe first or his right. He had a picture in his mind of Memphis resting one foot on the Cessna’s undercarriage, doing up his laces, but he couldn’t remember which shoe Memphis had started with. Details, ordinary quotidian details, beginning to slip out of focus. And no more than a day had passed.

He put the shoe back in the drawer, slid it shut. No idea why he had been moved to pick it up, as Memphis’s chrysalis-bound body was being loaded into the medical transport. Hector and Lucas might even have seen him do it, he wasn’t sure.

He moved to his desk, settled into the chair and voked a request to the United Orbital Nations for information relating to the status of asset GGFX13419/785G, aka the Winter Palace. The data was open and public, but even if it hadn’t been, his request was coming through Akinya channels.

Text floated before him:

‘What’s troubling you?’ Eunice asked.

He thought about not answering her for a moment, before giving in. ‘They’re going to tear down the Winter Palace.’

‘Let them,’ she said, shrugging with blunt indifference. ‘I don’t live there any more, Geoffrey. Last thing anyone needs is more junk cluttering up Lunar orbit.’

‘It’s not junk. It’s history, part of us. Part of what’s made us the way we are. The cousins can’t just trash it.’

‘Evidently they can.’ She was looking at the text, accessing the same data.

‘Unless someone stops them,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You wouldn’t be planning anything foolhardy, would you?’

‘I’ll get back to you on that one.’

Geoffrey voked the text away and went outside to find the cousins. He encountered Hector first. He was coming back from the tennis court, sweat-damp towel padded around his neck. A proxy strode alongside him, swinging a racquet. Geoffrey blocked the path of the two opponents.

‘Whoever you are,’ he told the proxy, ‘you can ching right back home.’

‘This is unfortunate, Geoffrey,’ Hector said, staring him down. ‘I’m used to your rudeness, but there’s absolutely no need to inflict it on my guests.’

‘I was going anyway,’ the proxy said. ‘Nice game, Hector. Let’s do it again sometime.’ The proxy became slump-shouldered and loll-headed as soon as the ching was broken, the racquet dangling from one limp hand.

Hector took the racquet, clacking it against his own, then told the proxy to store itself.

‘There was no need for that, cousin.’

‘You’ll get over it.’

The proxy scooted away, walking like a person in a speeded-up movie. Hector dredged up a pained smile. ‘And there was me, thinking we were all getting on so well yesterday.’

‘That was then,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Anything in particular I can help you with?’

‘You can start by telling me what really happened out there.’

‘Out where, cousin?’ Hector unwrapped the towel and began rubbing his hair with it.

‘Memphis dying. That was so convenient, wasn’t it? Solved all your problems in one stroke. No wonder you’re in the mood for a game of tennis.’

‘Go back inside, take a deep breath and start again. We’ll both pretend this conversation didn’t happen.’

‘I’m not saying you killed him,’ Geoffrey blurted. He’d gone too far, he realised immediately, let his temper get the better of him. Off in the distance, Eunice was shaking her head.

Hector gave him an appraising nod. ‘Good. Because if you were—’

‘But it works for you, doesn’t it? You can’t wait to bury Eunice and everything she did. You just want to get on with running things, and not have any nasty surprises jump out at you from the past.’

Hector flung his towel onto the path, knowing a household robot would be along to tidy it away. ‘I think you and I need to have a little chat. You’ve been acting very strange since you came back from the Moon. Stranger, I should say. What were you doing in Tiamaat?’

Geoffrey stared at him blankly.

‘What, you think an aircraft can’t be tracked?’ Hector pushed. ‘We knew where you were. Cosying up to the Pans now, are you? Well, they’ve got money, I’ll give you that. Comes at a price, though. I wouldn’t trust them any further than I’d trust us, if I wasn’t already an Akinya.’

‘Man has a point,’ Eunice commented.

‘I’ll choose my own loyalties, thanks,’ Geoffrey said.

‘No one’s stopping you,’ Hector said. ‘Big mistake, though, thinking you can make the Pans work for you. What have you got that they want, exactly? Because it isn’t money, and if it’s charm and diplomacy they’re after…’ Hector tapped the doubled racquets against his forehead. ‘Oh, wait. It’s one of two things, isn’t it? Elephants or elephant dung.’ He lowered the racquets. ‘You think you’re ahead of them, Geoffrey? Able to make them work for you, not the other way around? You’re more naive than I thought, and that’s saying something.’ He paused, his voice turning earnest. ‘Lucas and I didn’t give a fuck about Memphis either way, I’ll be honest with you. He was old and past his best. But whatever happened out there, you had better get it into your head that we had nothing to do with it. Whereas you sent an old man to do your dirty work, when you had better things to do. It’s not me who needs to take a good hard look at his conscience.’

‘I won’t let you take down the Winter Palace.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘I don’t need to spell it out. Eunice is gone, Memphis is gone. Now the only link to the past is… that thing up there. And you can’t let it stand.’

‘Lucas was right – he did warn me it was a mistake to ask you to do anything useful. I should have listened.’ He pinched sweat from the corners of his eyes. ‘You enjoy certain benefits, cousin. You think yourself to be above the rest of us, but you’re always willing to scuttle back to the household when the need suits you. A room you don’t pay for? Free meals and transportation? Dropping the family name when it helps open doors?’

Geoffrey glared. ‘I’ve never done that.’

‘You need a dose of reality, I think. I won’t throw you out of the household, not when you have a guest here, but consider all other privileges rescinded. Forthwith. I’ll arrange a train ticket for Jumai and an airpod back to the railway station, but it’ll be at my discretion, not yours. You’ve shamed yourself, Geoffrey. Stop before you do any more harm.’

He moved to punch Hector.

It was a stupid, unpremeditated impulse, not something he’d been planning. If he’d thought about it for more than the instant it took the fury to overcome him, he’d have known how utterly pointless the gesture was going to prove.

Hector didn’t even flinch; barely raised the racquets in involuntary self-defence. He simply took a step backwards while the Mechanism assessed Geoffrey’s intent and intervened to prevent the completion of a violent act. It had been different out at the study station, when Geoffrey had clashed with the cousins: there, the aug had been thin, the Mechanism’s omniscience imperfect.

No so here, in the well-ordered environs of the household. A million viewpoints tracked him from instant to instant, an audience of unblinking sensors wired to the tireless peacekeeping web of the Surveilled World. In the dirt under his feet, in the granite glint of a wall, in the air itself, were more public eyes than he could imagine. His movements had been modelled and forward-projected. Algorithms had triggered, escalating in severity. From that nodal point in equatorial East Africa, a seismic ripple had troubled the Mechanism. At its epicentre, one calamitous truth: A human being was attempting to perpetrate harm against another.

The algorithms debated. Expert systems polled each other. Decision-branches cascaded. Prior case histories were sifted for best intervention practice. There was no time to consult human specialists; they’d only be alerted when the Mechanism had acted.

Geoffrey had barely begun to initiate the punch when something axed his head in two.

It was ‘just’ a headache, but so sudden, so agonising, that the effect was as instant and debilitating as if he’d been struck by lightning. He froze into paralysis, not even able to scream his pain. Eunice broke up like a jammed signal. Unbalanced by the momentum he’d already put into his swing, Geoffrey toppled past Hector and hit the ground hard, stiff as a statue.

The paralysis ebbed. He lay helpless, quivering in the aftershock of the intervention, dust and gravel in his mouth, his palms stinging, his trousers wet where he had lost bladder control.

The intervention was over as suddenly as it had arrived. The headache was gone, leaving only an endless migraine afterchime.

‘That was… silly,’ Hector said, stepping over him, stooping to tap him on the thigh with the racquets. ‘Very, very silly. Now there’ll have to be an inquiry, and you know what that will mean. Psychologists will be involved. Neuropractors. Our name dragged through more dirt. All because you couldn’t act like a responsible adult.’

Geoffrey pushed himself to his feet. Through the shock of what had happened, the fury remained. Absurd as it was, he still wanted to hit Hector. Still wanted to punch that smile away.

Eunice hadn’t reappeared.

‘This isn’t over,’ he said.

Hector averted his gaze from the sorry spectacle before him. ‘Go and make yourself presentable.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Geoffrey was still shaking, still doing his best not to think through the consequences of what had just transpired, as he tossed his soiled garments into the wash and changed into fresh clothes. His instinct was to blame Hector.

But even if Hector was responsible for him committing the violent act, he could not be held accountable for the intervention. That was the point of the Mechanism: it was oblivious to persuasion, supremely immune to influence. Nor was it done with him. It might take hours, it might take days, but he would be called to account, by shrinks and ’practors, subjected to exhaustive profiling: not just to make sure he was suitably repentant, but to satisfy the Mechanism’s human consultants that the impulse had been an aberration, not the manifestation of some deeper psychological malaise that required further surgical intervention.

So he was in trouble, unquestionably. But he still had every reason to distrust the cousins, every reason to think that they would not waste a moment in erasing Eunice’s legacy.

Still in his room, with the door ajar, he used Truro’s secure quangle path to ching Tiamaat.

‘There’s been a development,’ Geoffrey said, when the smooth-faced merman had assumed form.

‘You’re referring to the disposal plans?’ Truro, who was half-submerged in pastel-blue lather, gave a vigorous blubbery nod. ‘I assumed that would have come to your attention as well. There’s no timescale for the operation, but we can safely assume it will be sooner rather than later, now that permission has been granted.’

‘There’s something else. I’ve just done something… impetuous. Or stupid.’ Geoffrey lowered his gaze, unable to look at the Pan directly. ‘I confronted the cousins.’

‘Perfectly understandable, given the circumstances.’

‘And I tried hitting one of them.’

‘Ah,’ Truro said, after a moment’s reflection. ‘I see. And this… act – was it—’

‘The Mechanism intervened.’

‘Oof.’ He blinked his large dark seal eyes in sympathy. ‘Painful, I’ll warrant. And doubtless fairly humiliating as well.’

‘I’ve had better mornings.’

‘Any, um, history of this kind of thing?’

‘I don’t routinely go around trying to hit people, no.’ But he had to think carefully. ‘Got into a fight when I was a teenager, over a card game. Or a girl. Both, maybe. That was the last time. Before that, it was just the usual stuff we do in childhood, so that we understand how things work.’

‘Then I doubt there’ll be any lasting complications. We’re animals, at the core, even after the Enhancements: the Mechanism doesn’t expect sainthood. All the same… it does complicate things now.’

‘That’s what I was thinking.’

‘Usual protocol in this situation would be a period of… probationary restraint, I think they call it – denial of aug and ching rights, restricted freedom of movement, and so forth – until a team of experts decides you aren’t a permanent menace to society and can be allowed to get on with your life without further enhancement… with a caution flag appended to your behavioural file, of course. The next time you’re involved in anything similar, the Mechanism won’t hesitate to assume you’re the initiating party… and it may dial up its response accordingly.’

No bones: the Mechanism would kill, if killing prevented the taking of an innocent life. Just because it didn’t happen very often didn’t mean that the threat was absent. Geoffrey’s crime put him a long way down the spectrum from the sort of offender likely to merit that kind of intervention. But still… just being on the same spectrum: he wasn’t too thrilled about that.

‘What do I do?’

‘We need to get you to Tiamaat before probationary restraint kicks in. A human has to be involved in that process, probably someone with a dozen or so pending cases already in their workfile. That means we may have an hour or two.’

‘Once I’m in Tiamaat, how does that help?’

‘We have… ways and means. But you need to get to us, Geoffrey. We can’t come to you now.’

He looked around the little room, underfurnished and impersonal, like a hotel he’d just checked into. He realised he wouldn’t miss it if he never saw it again. Other than a few knick-knacks, there was nothing of him here.

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Make haste,’ Truro said. ‘And speed. Haste and speed, very good things right now.’

Jumai was swimming lengths, cutting through the water like a swordfish, all glossy sleekness and speed. She made this basically inhuman activity appear not only workable but the one viable solution to the problem of moving.

‘I thought we might take a flight, around the area,’ he said vaguely when she paused for breath at one end of the pool, elbows on the side.

‘Is there stuff you need to deal with, to do with Memphis?’

‘Nothing that can’t wait.’

‘You all right, Geoffrey?’ She was looking at his trousers and shirt. ‘Why’ve you changed?’

He offered a shrug. ‘Felt like it.’

She shrugged in return, appearing to accept his explanation. ‘Mind if I do a few more lengths?’

He nodded at the clear blue horizon. It was untrammelled by even the wispiest promise of clouds, the merest hint of the weather system they’d flown through around Kigali. ‘There’s a front coming in. I thought we’d try and duck around it.’

‘A front? Really?’

‘Revised weather schedule,’ he offered lamely.

‘And this can’t wait?’

‘No,’ he said, trusting that she’d understand him, read the message in his eyes that he couldn’t say aloud. ‘No, it can’t.’

‘OK. Then I guess it’s time to get out of the water.’

She changed quickly, hair still frizzy from being towel-dried when she rejoined him. Geoffrey was anxious, wondering when the iron clamp of probationary restraint was going to slam down on him.

‘What’s up?’ she asked him, sotto voce, as they headed towards the parked airpods.

‘Something.’

‘To do with me being here?’

‘It’s not you.’ He was answering in the same undertone. ‘But I need you with me.’

‘Is this about the job?’

‘Might be.’

He beckoned the closest airpod to open itself. Jumai climbed in confidently, Geoffrey right behind her. It was only as he entered the cool of the passenger compartment that he realised how much he’d been sweating. It was drying on him, cold-prickling his forehead.

‘Manual,’ he voked, and waited for the controls to slide out of their hidden ports, unfolding and assembling with cunning speed into his waiting grasp. A moment passed, then another. His hands were still clutching air.

‘Manual,’ Geoffrey repeated.

‘I’m afraid that manual flight authority is not available,’ the airpod said, with maddening pleasantness. ‘Please give a destination or vector.’

Jumai glanced at Geoffrey. ‘You’re locked out?’

‘Take me to Tiamaat Aqualogy,’ he said.

‘That destination is not recognised,’ the airpod replied. ‘Please restate.’

‘Take me to the sea, over the Somali Basin.’

‘Please be more specific.’

‘Head due east.’

‘I’m afraid that vector is not acceptable.’

‘You’re not allowed to take me east?’

‘I am not permitted to accept any destinations or vectors that would involve flight over open water.’

Geoffrey shook his head, confounded. ‘Who put this restriction on you?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not permitted—’

‘Never mind.’ Geoffrey clenched his fists, giving up on the airpod. He cracked the canopy, letting out the bubble of cool, scented air, letting the African heat back in. ‘Fucking Lucas and Hector.’

Jumai pushed herself out. ‘They’ll have locked them all down, won’t they?’

‘All the airpods,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Not the Cessna.’

It was parked at the end of the row of flying machines, already turned around ready for taxi. ‘Engine start,’ Geoffrey voked before they’d even got there. The prop began to turn, the hydrogen-electric engine almost silent save for a rising locust hum that quickly passed into ultrasound. That was good, at least: he didn’t think that the cousins had the means to block his control of the Cessna, but there was little he’d put past them now.

‘If you knew they couldn’t stop the Cessna,’ Jumai said, ‘why didn’t we—’

The hydrogen feed line was unplugged, lying on the ground next to the plane. Geoffrey had connected the line when he’d arrived, still focused enough to do that, but he had no idea when the cousins had come along to remove it.

‘Watch the prop-wash.’ Geoffrey opened the door and allowed Jumai to climb under the shade of the wing into the co-pilot’s position. He removed the chocks and joined her in the cockpit. Skipping the flight-readiness checks, he released the brakes and revved the engine to taxi power. The Cessna began to roll, bumping over dirt and wheel ruts on its way to the take-off strip. Only now did Geoffrey check the fuel gauge. Lower than he’d have wished, but not empty. He thought there was enough to make it to Tiamaat.

‘We’re running away, aren’t we?’ Jumai said, fiddling with her seat buckle. ‘That’s basically the deal here, right?’

Geoffrey lined up the plane for take-off. ‘I screwed up. I hit Hector.’

She said it back to him as if she might have misheard.

‘You “hit” Hector.’

‘Tried. Before the Mech intervened and dropped a boulder on my skull.’

‘Ho boy.’ She was grinning, caught somewhere between delight and horror. ‘Way to go with the conflict resolution, Geoffrey.’

‘I’m at war with my family. Escalation was the logical next step.’

‘Yeah. You know, I think that’s what they call pretaliation.’ She was shaking her head. ‘And now what?’

He pushed the throttle to take-off power. The Cessna surged forward, the ride bumpy at first until sheer speed smoothed out the undulations in the ground. ‘We’re on our way to Tiamaat.’

‘Too cheap to send their own plane?’

‘They can’t now I’ve got myself into trouble with the Mechanism. They won’t be rushing into a direct stand-off with the family, either.’

They were at take-off speed. He rotated and took them into the air.

‘Something about you has changed,’ Jumai said. ‘I’m not sure it’s good, but something’s definitely changed. You used to be boring.’

‘And now?’ Geoffrey made a steep left turn, bringing them back over the white and blue ‘A’ of the household.

‘Less so.’ Jumai loosened her seat buckle. ‘So – how far to the coast?’

‘About five hundred kilometres.’ He eyed the fuel gauge again, wondering if he was being optimistic. ‘Call it two hours of flight time. And then we still have to get out to Tiamaat.’ He patted the console. ‘But we’re good.’

‘We’d be better off walking.’

‘She’s an old machine, but that’s good – cousins can’t touch old machines.’

‘Maybe it isn’t the cousins we should be worrying about,’ Jumai said. ‘Especially if you’ve just pissed off the Mechanism.’

Geoffrey smiled. The household wheeled below. Two figures were standing by one of the walls, looking up at him with hands visoring their eyes. He waggled the wings and aimed for the ocean.

Not that it was ever going to be that simple, of course. They had not been in the air for more than ten minutes when two airpods closed in, one on each side, pincering the Cessna with only a wing’s width to spare. Geoffrey took his eyes off the horizon just long enough to confirm that it was the cousins. They were flying in the same two machines that had been parked on the ground near Memphis’s body: Hector to starboard, Lucas to port.

‘I think they want to talk,’ Jumai said. ‘Someone keeps trying to push a figment through.’

‘They can fuck off. We’re long past the point of reasoned discussion.’ He had been rebuffing figment requests since he had taunted the cousins from the air. There was nothing he wanted to hear from them now.

‘They’re getting pretty close. I know airpods can’t collide with each other, but…’ She left the sentence hanging.

‘Don’t worry,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If they do anything that even looks as if it’s an attempt to force us down, suddenly I’m not going to be the main thing on the Mechanism’s mind.’

‘That’ll be a great consolation as they’re scooping me off the ground.’

‘We’re not going to crash. Anyway, this should be a walk in the park for you, the queen of high-risk data recovery. You laugh in the face of explosives and nerve gas.’

‘Geoffrey,’ a voice said, cutting through his thoughts like an icebreaker. ‘I’m sorry to use this channel, but you’ve left me with no option.’

‘Get out of my skull, Lucas.’

Jumai looked at him in dismay, not hearing the cousin.

‘I would,’ Lucas said, ‘if I thought you’d accede to communication through a more orthodox channel.’

‘What’s happening?’ Jumai asked.

‘Lucas has found a way into my head,’ Geoffrey said, having to shout to drown out the voice that was still droning on between his ears. ‘Don’t know how.’

He didn’t. Even Memphis couldn’t reach him when he didn’t want to be reached, and there was no reason to suppose that the cousins had any secret voodoo that offered them a back door into Geoffrey’s mind. They’d have used it already if that was the case, when they were trying to contact him about Memphis being killed.

‘It’s simple enough,’ Lucas was saying. ‘You’ve fled the scene of a high-level intervention before a risk-assessment team had the chance to interview you. The Mechanism takes a fairly dim view of that. They’d shut you down again if there wasn’t a risk of endangering both you and your hostage.’

‘She’s not my hostage,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Tell that to the authorities, cousin. The Mech’s given me direct-access privilege because I’m kin and I might be able to talk you out of making this worse for yourself.’

‘Well, you can tell them you tried. Now fuck off.’

‘Geoffrey, listen to me. We understand that this has been a difficult and emotional time for you, but don’t compound matters by behaving rashly.’

‘Don’t blame me, Lucas. You started this, by sending me to the Moon.’

‘There are things best left in the past,’ Lucas said. ‘If you cared about this family, and its obligations, you’d understand that. There are millions of people who depend on us, who depend on stability.’

‘Our stocks barely faltered, Lucas. Other than us, no one gives a shit about Eunice.’

‘Which is exactly why none of this is worth what you’re doing. She’s history, Geoffrey. A ghost.’

‘Leave it to the Mechanism. This isn’t your problem any more.’

He hadn’t expected Lucas to take him at his word, but after a few moments the cousins’ airpods peeled away, leaving the Cessna alone in the sky. Geoffrey was surprised at how shaken that left him feeling. He twisted around in his seat to watch the two vehicles dwindling aft.

‘Lucas is gone,’ he said softly.

‘There was nothing they could do,’ Jumai said. ‘You said it yourself – knocking us out of the sky was never an option.’

But eventually the Mechanism came, as he had always known it would. They were over the ocean by then, and the fuel warning had sounded three times. Two Civil Administration vehicles approached, official blue-and-whites garbed in aug-generated EAF and AU insignia, vectoring out to sea from Nairobi or maybe Mombasa, bigger and faster than the cousins’ airpods, blunt-hulled, stub-winged, barnacled with duct-fans, rhino-ugly with angular chiselled hull plates and the hornlike black protuberances of weapons systems. Quite something, in this day and age, to be confronted with such an overt display of peacekeeping authority. Geoffrey couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything like it, on Earth at least. All this, for little old me? he felt like asking. Really, you shouldn’t have.

‘Maybe quitting the day job was a mistake,’ Jumai said.

‘They think you’re my hostage,’ Geoffrey said. ‘At least, that’s the stance they’ve decided to take, so I wouldn’t worry if I were you – they’re not going to say or do anything that might put you in danger.’

‘Until they dig around in my background and decide, hey, maybe his Nigerian ex-girlfriend might be an accomplice after all.’

‘They’re still not going to do anything stupid. I haven’t committed any crime. I just fled the scene of one I didn’t succeed in committing.’

‘Tell that to the judge.’ She was looking through the windows, jerkily alternating between starboard and port like someone following a vigorous tennis match. ‘I’ve seen some mean machinery in my time, Geoffrey, even driven some of it—’

‘They’re designed to intimidate. Which is why we won’t be intimidated.’

The enforcement vehicles, insignia hovering around them like bright neon banners caught in their slipstreams, were much bigger than the Cessna. But that worked to Geoffrey’s advantage, too. The pilots would look at his little white toy of an aeroplane and see something preposterously old and fragile, not realising that the ancient airframe was in fact much tougher than it looked.

‘Geoffrey Akinya,’ a voice said, cutting through everything just as Lucas’s had done. ‘This is the Civil Administration. Please return to your place of origin.’

‘Sorry, no can do,’ Geoffrey said.

‘An intervention was necessary to prevent the completion of a violent act, Geoffrey.’ He was being spoken to like a child, with great forbearance. ‘Under such circumstances, a process of review must always take place. Submit yourself to probationary restraint and you have nothing to fear. I urge you now to turn around.’ The voice was deep, male, unmistakably Tanzanian.

‘You can’t stop me, can you? There’s nothing in the world you can do to make me alter my course.’

The vehicles came closer. They were as big as houses, armoured like bunkers. This kind of military-spec enforcement technology was like a coelacanth: it had no business still existing in the present. Yet, Geoffrey now realised, it had been there all along, a covert part of his world, tucked decently out of sight until he transgressed against the Mechanism.

‘This is your last warning,’ the voice said. ‘Turn around now.’

That was when the fuel ran out. Geoffrey had never ditched an aircraft before, never even considered that he might one day face the possibility of ditching. Ditching was what happened when things went wrong, when things were miscalculated.

Yet here he was, ditching the Cessna. He came in at just above stall speed, full flaps, and flared steeply at the last moment. The wheels bit water. The aircraft slowed quickly, nose pitching into the sea, and then leaned slowly to starboard until the wingtip was submerged. The engine had stopped. The Cessna rocked in the green swell of the Indian Ocean, silent save for an occasional creak from the airframe, as if it had always been waiting for its time as a boat.

‘Life jacket under your seat,’ Geoffrey said. The sea air tickled his nose. ‘We have to get out. She’s not built for floating.’

Jumai extracted her life jacket. ‘Meaning we swim for it?’

‘Not much choice, I’m afraid.’

‘There are sharks in these waters.’

He nodded. ‘We should be all right. The Mechanism’s probably already clearing any large predators from the area, or euthanising those that don’t take the hint.’

‘You hope.’

‘Right now, being eaten is the least of our worries.’

The Administration vehicles loitered overhead. That was good, in one sense, because it meant they wouldn’t have to wait long for rescue – Mechanism or not, Geoffrey didn’t relish the prospect of spending hours in the ocean. Bad in another sense, though, because once Geoffrey and Jumai were floating, it wouldn’t take the authorities long to work out a way of scooping them into custody.

But the Cessna was definitely sinking. Water had been lapping in from the moment they ditched, splashing through the door seals and engine openings. With their life jackets on, Geoffrey and Jumai climbed onto the sloping surface of one wing, but that would buy them minutes, no more. Jumai was sitting on the inclined wing, her feet dangling over the edge. Geoffrey stood, hands on hips, knees bent for balance, anxiously surveying the horizon. He’d been able to see land from the air, but not now they were down.

‘Whatever happens,’ Jumai said, ‘I’m sorry about your plane.’

‘Me too.’

There was a clunk from under the fuselage: softened by suspension, as if the submerged undercarriage had just touched dry land. With a lurch, the Cessna righted itself, the wing becoming horizontal once more. Geoffrey staggered, nearly losing his footing. Jumai reached out and grabbed his ankle, and nearly lost her own purchase in the process. Water sluiced away in rivulets.

With the smoothness of a rising elevator, the Cessna emerged from the sea.

‘The fuck?’ Jumai said.

Geoffrey offered her a shrug of incomprehension.

There was a black road under the wheels. The black road was rising, forcing itself into daylight: ocean was sluicing off the road as well, down its broad curving flanks. Geoffrey turned slowly around, half-knowing what he’d see. In the opposite direction, the road ran into a sheer-sided black tower, its rounded, tapering form rising to a hammerhead lookout deck.

‘We’re on a submarine,’ Geoffrey said. He had to say it twice just to convince himself. ‘We’re on a submarine.’

Jumai dropped from the wing onto the slick rubber-treaded deck. ‘And is this good, or bad?’

‘I think it’s good. For now.’

The submersible was from Tiamaat; he knew this even before a door opened in the base of the tower and an exo’d merperson came striding out. He squinted against a sudden salty lash of sea-spray.

It was Mira Gilbert. Behind her were three other exo-clad merpeople.

‘Hello, lubbers!’ she said, beckoning. ‘Come inside. We’ll secure the plane, then get under way.’

Geoffrey climbed off the wing, touched a hand to the side of the engine cowling, reassuring it that he would be back. In truth, he had little idea what was going to happen next. His ordered plans, such as they had been, were in tatters. He had done a shameful thing, then fled the scene of the crime. He had refused to submit to Mech authority, and now he was surrendering himself to people he barely knew, let alone trusted.

It wasn’t too late. The Administration vehicles were still loitering. He could still take his chances with the ocean, let them swoop him into their custody. For a moment, caught between branching possibilities, two versions of his life peeling away from each other like aircraft contrails, he was paralysed.

‘We’re waiting, Mister Akinya,’ Mira Gilbert said.

‘You don’t need to be a part of this,’ he told Jumai. ‘You could still—’

‘Fuck that,’ she said, shooting a dismissive glance at the hovering machines. ‘Sooner take my chances with the aquatics, if that’s all right with you. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same.’

She was right, of course. He’d committed to this path from the moment he tried flying the airpod. No point in second-guessing himself now.

So they went inside, and the Administration vehicles were still loitering when the submarine filled its tanks and slipped under the waves. The craft turned out to be the Alexander Nevsky, one of Tiamaat’s small fleet of subsurface freighters. The Nevsky’s function was to carry or haul cargoes that were too heavy, bulky or hazardous for the elegant, hyper-efficient wind-driven cyberclippers that now moved nine-tenths of the world’s global freight.

The Nevsky was a good hundred and fifty years old, rehabilitated from some dark former career as a nuclear-deterrent vessel. Now the only atomic technology aboard was its engine. Missile bays had been gutted of their terrible secrets and turned into storage holds. Behind it came a ponderous string of cargo drogues, hulled with sharkskin polymer to minimise drag, each as large as the submarine itself.

The Nevsky demanded little in the way of a crew, judging by the exceedingly sparse onboard provisions for cabin space. In fact, it probably ran most of its duties entirely unmanned, save for any passengers who might be along for the ride.

‘How did you get here so quickly?’ Geoffrey asked Mira Gilbert when they were under way again, and after he had asked for the twentieth reassurance that the Cessna was being taken care of.

‘The Nevsky was already operating in the area,’ the merwoman said. ‘Routine cargo run. I podded aboard when it looked likely we’d be able to make a rendezvous.’

Geoffrey and Jumai had been given dry clothes, towels and brimful mugs of salty sea-green chai. They were underwater now, travelling at maximum subsurface cruise speed, but there was no way to tell that from inside the Nevsky. No aug reach, no means of opening a window through the iron dermis of its hull.

‘I don’t know how much Truro told you,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but I’m in a lot of trouble with the Mechanism. I don’t think they’re going to let me get away with it this easily.’

‘We can hold them off for the time being,’ Gilbert said. ‘Technically, you trespassed on Initiative property, you see.’

‘By ditching my plane?’

Gilbert nodded enthusiastically. ‘Over our submarine.’

‘I didn’t know it was there,’ Geoffrey said in benign exasperation. ‘How can that possibly count as trespass?’

‘It’s all for the best. You’re in our immediate jurisdiction now, which means we can activate various quasi-legal stalling measures.’

Geoffrey shivered. It was cold inside the Nevsky, even with the warm clothes they’d been given. ‘Won’t that get you into a stand-off with the Mechanism?’

‘You came to us, not the other way around,’ Gilbert said. ‘That changes the landscape. There are now… procedures which can be brought into play.’

‘Such as?’ Jumai asked.

‘If Geoffrey applies for Tiamaat citizenship, the Mech has to wait until we’ve completed our own battery of psych assessments… which, within reason, could take just about as long as we like.’

‘And then what – you hand me back anyway?’

‘We’ll cross that bridge later. For now, let’s get started on the citizenship application.’ She smiled at his hesitation. ‘It’s just a formality. You’re not signing over your immortal soul to Neptune and his watery minions.’

‘What do I have to do?’

She voked text into the air. ‘Just read these words, and we’re good to go.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

During the night they had crossed and recrossed the complex fault-and-rift system of the Valles Marineris many times. As they swooped over impossibly high and narrow bridges – barely wide enough for the train’s single gleaming monorail, which gave the disconcerting illusion that they were flying over these immense gaps – Sunday had looked out for evidence of the buildings she had seen from Holroyd’s room, set into the canyon’s walls. A window, a nurse, a green-thorned man in a surgical bath. But she’d seen no sign of human habitation at all, not a single light or pipeline or road in all the empty hours. Valles Marineris was wide enough to span Africa from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian: you could lose entire countries in that kind of area, let alone buildings and windows.

She reminded herself of that over and over, but her brain simply wasn’t wired to grasp scenery on Martian scales.

She hadn’t been able to sleep, not after the news from Earth. Geoffrey had called back and the update was no better than she’d been expecting, which was that Memphis had been dead for so long that there was no hope of recovery. She had no reason to doubt the truth of that. The one thing the family wouldn’t skimp on was medical expertise, and the doctors in Mombasa were as good as anywhere.

So Memphis was gone: an entire thread ripped out of her life without warning, a golden strand unravelling right back to her childhood. She couldn’t deal with that, not right now. She did not need consolation because she did not yet feel anything that she recognised as grief. Instead there was a peculiar vacuum-like absence of other emotions. It was as if her mind had begun to make mental houseroom, clearing itself of furniture it no longer needed. Something else was going to be moving in, for months or years. Sunday wondered how grief would feel, when it arrived.

Jitendra returned to the compartment looking brighter and better rested than she felt he had any right to. He’d gone to get himself some breakfast, Sunday apologising for not having an appetite, and hoping he didn’t mind eating on his own. He was finishing off a paper-wrapped croissant.

‘We’re nearly in Vishniac,’ he said, rubbing a hand over a freshly shaven chin to dislodge crumbs. He looked different, and it took her a moment to identify the change. Normally he kept his scalp shaved so that the transcranial stimulator could work effectively, but now his hair was beginning to grow back. ‘I’m guessing our ride will be waiting for us,’ he went on, between mouthfuls. ‘Sure you want to go through with this? It’s not too late to call it all off.’

‘It’ll take my mind off things,’ she said.

‘This happening, maybe it’ll knock some sense into those cousins of yours.’ He offered her the remaining half of the croissant. She shook her head. ‘You sure? Got to eat.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

But she didn’t feel fine. She felt sick and light-headed, not quite in her own body, as if she was elsewhere and a ching bind was collapsing. It was not simply the news of Memphis’s death, though that was a significant part of it. She had been feeling disorientated ever since Soya had contacted her in Crommelin.

Soya of the mirrored visor and the face that echoed her own.

That’s all it had been – an echo. Later Sunday had played back the retinal capture, and while Soya’s face was very similar to Sunday’s, it was not an exact likeness – although in the moment, with the distortion of the intervening layers of glass, she could forgive herself for thinking otherwise. But a family resemblance? Unquestionably.

Which threw up more questions than it answered.

She did not think she recognised the name, but in fact that had been her own memory at fault. Eunice’s mother, of all people, had been named Soya. But that particular Soya had been dead more than a hundred years, and at least as crucially she had never left Earth. Born in the second half of the twentieth century, she had, by the standards of her age, lived a long and blessedly happy life. But she had not lived long enough to see more than the first flowering of her daughter’s accomplishments. In any case, the images of Soya Akinya did not match the face Sunday had seen, even those few grainy still frames that existed of Soya as a young woman. The Akinya genes were present in both women, but they had expressed themselves quite differently.

How easy it would have been to run an aug trace, if she hadn’t been stuck in that tourist suit. But that had evidently been the point: not just to shield their conversation, but to disclose as little as possible about Soya’s true identity.

All of that was suitably destabilising, but what had unsettled Sunday just as much as seeing her own face was the warning Soya had given. Not that Sunday had ever assumed the Pans could be trusted unquestioningly – she would be naive not to think otherwise – but given the fact that she had no alternative but to trust them, what precisely was she meant to do with that information?

And how did Soya know about the Pans, and Sunday, and Eunice’s trail of breadcrumbs anyway?

It was not good to feel like a cog in a machine, even a willing and submissive cog. Who could she turn to now? Sunday wondered. Jitendra for love and affection, all she could wish for in a partner. But Jitendra couldn’t help her make the decisions now being forced upon her. Her brother? In a heartbeat. But Geoffrey was on another planet and all her communications to him went through the Pans…

That left Eunice, an art project she herself had assembled and breathed life into. A patchwork thing, a collage, a wind-up doll. Eunice might serve as a handy, easily queryable repository of all-world-knowledge relating to her late namesake, and she might have a few data-sniffing tricks up her sleeve, but the idea that Sunday might turn to the construct for counsel, for wisdom, for succour in a time of crisis…

That was ridiculous.

I’m Sunday Akinya, she thought. I’m thirty-five years old. I’m fit and well. I am not the ugliest woman ever born. Barring accidents I’ll probably see out another hundred and twenty years, at the very minimum. I’m a talented if obscure artist, I live on the Moon and I’m currently walking around on Mars, with my boyfriend, with an expense account some people would kill for, if killing were still possible.

So why am I not having fun?

The Vishniac railway station was much smaller than the one in Crommelin, and smaller than those at many of the intermediate stops they had made on the way. It was pressurised – the train had passed through an airtight collar as it dived underground – but the air was cool and it felt thinner in her lungs, somehow. That was undoubtedly an illusion, owing as much to her mental state as her knowledge that they had gained considerable altitude. A few dozen passengers had alighted, and it did not take long to verify that the golem was not among them. Sunday waited, apprehensively, until the train slid out of the station, picking up speed so quickly that she felt the air being sucked in its wake. Then it was gone, and there was still no golem.

There were no customs or immigration formalities for travel between Martian administrative sectors, so they were quickly through the station and into the shabby glitz of the Vishniac public concourse. It had the look of a place that had been fresh and modern about thirty years ago, but had since been allowed to fade. Sunday located the café where they had been told to meet Gribelin; it was tucked between a florist and a closed-for-business nail salon.

Their guide was already there, sitting by himself at an outlying table with one leg hooked over the other, sipping from a white coffee cup not much larger than a thimble. His bug-eyed goggles appeared to have been surgically grafted to his face. He was bald and cadaverous.

‘Mister Gribelin?’ Sunday ventured.

He set the coffee down on the glass-topped table with a precise and delicate chink and stood up, retrieving a knee-length leather overcoat from the back of his chair. He was tall even by Lunar standards, towering over both Sunday and Jitendra.

‘Can’t hang around,’ he said, without a word of welcome. ‘Your friend caught the next train out of Crom. He’s been right behind you all the way.’

‘How long does that give us?’ Sunday asked.

‘Two hours, maybe less. Means we’ve already pissed away most of our head start.’ He shrugged on the murky brown coat. It had wide shoulder patches and a collar that went halfway up the sides of his skull. Now that she had a good look at him, Sunday saw fine tattoos covering every visible piece of skin, from his face to his scalp and the back of his head. The tattoos were of weird little dancing stick figures, executed in primitivist lines and squiggles.

She had nothing against weirdness – hell, she lived in the Descrutinised Zone – but she’d been hoping for a driver who exuded quiet authority and confidence, not someone who looked borderline psychotic.

‘So much for your cousins seeing sense,’ Jitendra said gloomily.

‘Maybe the golem’s on autopilot. Either way, I’m not in the mood to talk to it.’

‘You all right?’ Gribelin asked her, casually, as if he had only marginal interest in the answer.

Her face was reflected back at her from his bug-eyes. ‘Had better weeks. Can we just get going?’

‘Sure thing, sweet cheeks.’

They took an elevator. In the enclosed space, Gribelin gave off a hard-to-place mustiness, like the contents of an old cupboard. A garage lay three or four levels under the concourse. It was pressurised and floodlit, but even colder than the public spaces above. Sunday coveted Gribelin’s coat and boots. The floor was covered with a tan-coloured tar of compacted oily dust that stuck to her shoes. They walked past rows of bulky machines, some of them as large as houses: cargo haulers, excavators, tourist buses, all mounted on multiple sets of springy openwork wheels.

‘Here’s your ride,’ Gribelin said, stopping at one of the trucks. ‘Don’t scuff the paint job.’

He cranked down a ladder and made his limber way up into the cab airlock. Halfway up he paused, looked down and reached for Sunday’s luggage. She passed him her bag, then Jitendra’s, and then followed him up into the vehicle, trying to kick as much of the muck off her soles as she was able. The paint, what remained of it, could fuck itself.

It was a six-wheeled truck with a crudely airbrushed dragon on the side. Up front was a rounded accommodation and command bubble, with engine and cargo space at the rear, comms blisters and deployable solar vanes on the roof, now tucked back like retracted switchblades. Clamped to the front like a trophy, under the chin of the command bubble, was an androform maintenance robot.

There was more room inside than Sunday had been expecting. Two small sleeping cabins – one for Gribelin, another for his passengers – and a mini-galley with four fold-down seats. They took seats either side of their guide in the command bubble. The truck smelled as musty as its owner, dirt and mould in the corners, cigarette burns in some of the upholstery.

Gribelin had one hand on a steering yoke, the other on a bank of power-selector levers. They hit the steep upgrade of the garage’s exit spiral; the truck laboured, then found its stride. Gribelin floored it, there was a lurch of wheelspin and then the curving walls were speeding by only a hand’s width from the wheel rims. They climbed and climbed, barely slowing when the ramp flattened and the truck barged through a trio of self-sealing pressure curtains.

Then they were outside. For a few minutes they rumbled along surfaced roads, between low banks of bunkerlike buildings with narrow slitted windows and faded, weatherworn plastic logos on their roofs. The roads were perforated sheets, raised up on stilts. Signs on masts advertised the businesses along the route, with enormous neon-lit arrows pointing off to airlocks and parking ramps. Power lines ran overhead, sagging low above the road and its intersections. It was sprawl, the outskirts of a one-horse town on a planet where even the biggest city was small by Earth or Lunar standards. Sunday saw a repair crew working with welding torches on part of the road, but no pedestrians at all.

The buildings thinned out and soon they passed through a gate in a concrete dust-wall, flanked by flashing beacons, beyond which the road abandoned its lofty ambitions and settled for being a two-lane dirt track. Boulders and large stones, bulldozed out of the way and left along the sides, formed a crude demarcation. Every few hundred metres they passed a transponder or beacon on a flimsy pole, and that was the extent of the road markings.

Not that it appeared to matter to Gribelin, who was only pushing the truck harder. Sunday watched the speedometer climb up to one hundred and sixty kilometres per hour. Dust billowed out of the wheels, and wind-sculpted undulations in the road caused the truck to nose up and down like a small boat in high seas.

‘How long until we reach the Evolvarium?’ she asked.

Gribelin made a show of opening a hatch in the dashboard and rolling himself a cigarette before answering, stuffing it with some dark-red weed.

‘Eight, nine hours,’ he said eventually. ‘Can’t be more precise than that.’

‘I wish we had more time on Lucas.’

He drew on the cigarette, examined it carefully before answering. ‘That your buddy in the train, the golem?’

‘He’s not my friend,’ Sunday said.

‘Figure of speech, sweet cheeks. Kind of obvious you’re not on kissing terms.’ The truck reached the summit of a hill; Gribelin upshifted one of the power-selector levers. They passed the wreck of another vehicle, turned turtle in the dust. ‘The golem’ll need to hitch itself a ride out of town, unless it’s planning on walking. Maybe you’ll get lucky and there aren’t any rides until morning. Who’s on the other end of the proxy?’

‘My cousin, back on Earth.’

He nodded slowly. ‘Same place you’re from, right?’

‘The Moon,’ Sunday said. ‘There’s a difference.’

‘Earth, Moon, just tiny pissholes in the sky here. What is this, some kind of family feud?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Next time, maybe give some thought to settling your scores back home.’ He scratched at the skin around the edge of his goggles. ‘Had enough Earthside politics exported up here to last six fucking lifetimes.’

‘Thanks for sharing. You’re being paid handsomely for this little job, aren’t you?’

He shrugged at Sunday’s question. ‘No complaints, sweet cheeks.’

‘Then please shut the fuck up until I ask you a direct question. I’ve just lost someone very precious to me and the last thing I need is a dose of small-minded Martian nationalism.’ She took a breath. ‘And if you call me “sweet cheeks” one more time, I’ll personally rip those goggles off and ram them down your windpipe.’

Gribelin grinned, took another draw on his cigarette and leaned over to say in Jitendra’s ear: ‘I’m liking her more by the minute. She always this way?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Whatever the Nevsky had just docked with – there’d been a dull metallic clunk as it engaged with something – Geoffrey knew it could not be the aqualogy. They hadn’t come far enough. Yet communicated in that clunk had been an impression of immense, dull solidity. A station, perhaps, rooted to the seabed, or a much larger ocean-going vessel.

Merpeople led them down damp black corridors of armoured metal with flume tubes stapled to the ceiling and water-filled channels sunk into the floor. Through doorways Geoffrey saw more merpeople, lubber technicians and robots toiling under bright lights, surrounded by pallets stacked with elaborately decaled cargo pods. A striding exo-clad merwoman was actually checking something off on a clipboard using a glowing-tipped stylus.

Shortly after he grasped that they’d arrived in the launching facility for one of Tiamaat’s surface-to-orbit lifters, they showed him the rocket itself.

Blunt-nosed and pale green, it sat in its silo like a cartridge in a chamber. Loading belts poked through the walls, thrusting across open air to reach into the lifter’s cargo bays. The lower part of the three-hundred-metre-tall rocket was already submerged. Even as Geoffrey watched, the tide rose perceptibly, lapping over the aerodynamic bulge of its engine fairings. They were flooding the chamber in readiness for launch.

‘Basically just a big bottle of fizzy water,’ Mira Gilbert said as they viewed the rocket from one of the silo’s observation windows. ‘Given a good shake, waiting for someone to pop the cork.’

The rocket’s fuel was metallic hydrogen. Geoffrey knew just enough about MH to be suitably unnerved being this close to so much of the stuff. Nothing exotic or rare about MH: it was out there in bulk quantities, found naturally in the solar system, absolutely free for the taking. The snag was that it only existed at the bottom of the atmospheres of gas-giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, where it had been formed by the brutal crush of all that overlaying gas. Under barely comprehensible pressures of many dozens of gigapascals, normal hydrogen underwent a phase transition to an ultradense electrically conductive state. The key to MH was its metastability: after the pressure was withdrawn, it didn’t immediately revert to normal hydrogen. That didn’t mean it was safe, by any definition, just that it was stable enough to be transported and utilised as an energy-dense rocket propellant with a potential specific impulse far beyond anything achievable through purely chemical reactions.

They weren’t mining it yet. Akinya Space had a share in the programme established to develop MH extraction technology, literally lowering a piezoelectrically stabilised bucket into Jupiter’s atmosphere on a spiderfibre cable and ladling out the stuff, and there’d been some promising feasibility demonstrations, but doing that on a cost-effective, repeatable scale made space-elevator technology look like the work of Neanderthals. It was decades, maybe even centuries down the line, and a dicey investment given that MH had no clear economic application for deep-space propulsion, only the short-haul business of escaping planetary gravity wells. So for now they manufactured it, at ludicrous expense, in mammoth orbital production platforms, tapping the kinetic energy of incoming spacecraft to drive diamond-anvil pistons that were themselves as large and complex as rocket engines.

‘The tanks aren’t completely full of MH,’ Gilbert said. ‘That would be really terrifying. The MH tank is tiny, just a little bubble right down at the base of the vehicle. Problem with MH is that it burns hotter than the surface of the sun, and we still can’t make pumps or nozzles that can tolerate that kind of heat without melting. So we have to dilute it, to lower the burn temperature to the point where we can just handle the reaction, and for that we use liquid hydrogen.’

‘In other words,’ Jumai said, ‘MH is so scary that it makes normal hydrogen, this horrible flammable substance, this stuff that explodes and kills people, seem like the safe, cuddly option.’

‘It gets better,’ Gilbert said, cheerfully indifferent to the dangers. ‘You’re going up in it, both of you. Lifters are normally cargo-only shots but they are fully human-rated. It’s bumpy, but you don’t need to worry about that: you’ll be sedated for the ride.’

‘All that, just to get us to the Winter Palace?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘The launch was scheduled anyway,’ Gilbert said, deflating him slightly. ‘Besides, you’re not the only living, breathing passengers.’ And she nodded down towards one of the conveyor belts, at the torpedo-shaped cargo pod that was being fed into the lifter’s side. It was much larger than any of the other containers they had seen, and it was accompanied by six or seven technicians, mer and lubber, riding alongside like pall-bearers, giving every impression of attending to the pod with particular diligence.

‘What’s inside that?’ Jumai asked.

‘Not what,’ Gilbert corrected gently. ‘Who.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The ground refused to stop rising. Ever since leaving Vishniac they had been driving into the cold afternoon of an early spring day on Mars, ascending, always ascending. They were high up on the Tharsis plateau now, nine kilometres above the mean surface level of the rest of the planet, traversing a vast continent-sized lava bulge higher than Kilimanjaro, higher than Everest, higher than any spot on the surface of the Earth. Even now the terrain forged up towards the cone of Pavonis Mons.

Peacock Mountain. They couldn’t see it yet – the summit was mist-shrouded, and the volcano wouldn’t appear as much more than a gentle bump even in clear visibility.

And this wasn’t even the tallest volcano on Mars.

They’d passed nothing in the way of functioning civilisation. A handful of abandoned vehicles, the descent-stage of a long-abandoned or forgotten rocket, the shrivelled, wind-ripped carcass of a transport dirigible that must have come down decades ago. Once they’d passed near a tiny hamlet, a cluster of pewter-coloured domes with fantails of dust on their leeward sides. Lights were on in the comms towers above the domes, but there was no other indication that anyone lived there. None of these dismal landmarks merited even the briefest of glances from Gribelin. Sunday supposed that he drove this way often enough that the scenery offered little in the way of interest. That had been two hours into the trip. They’d gone a long way since then.

‘Here’s your fence, kids,’ Gribelin said eventually, slowing to guide the truck between a line of transponder masts, most of them leaning away from the prevailing wind direction. ‘Don’t mean a whole lot, truth to tell. Machines sense it, and they know they’ll be punished if they cross over. But that doesn’t mean they don’t try it on for size now and then. Also doesn’t mean we’re going to run into machines as soon as we cross it.’ He tapped a finger against a fold-down map, a physical display of the area east of Pavonis Mons. The display flickered and bled colour under his fingernail. Contour lines showed terrain elevation. Cryptic symbols, horse heads and castles and knights and pawns – like chess notation, except that there were also scorpions and snakes and skulls – were dotted in clumps and ones and twos throughout the roughly circular demarcation of the Evolvarium. There were hundreds of pawns, not so many scorpions, snakes and horse heads, only a few knights and skulls and castles. ‘It’s a big area, and there’s a fuck of a lot of room to get lost in,’ he said.

‘Are those symbols telling you where the machines are?’ Sunday asked.

‘Telling me where the best guess for their location might be, based on the last hard sighting, which could be hours or days ago. Bit of a head-trip for you, the concept of not knowing where something is?’

‘I’m from the Descrutinised Zone,’ Sunday said. ‘There’s no aug, no Mech, in the Zone – at least, not as most people would understand those terms.’

‘But that’s intentional,’ Jitendra said. ‘In the Zone, they’ve chosen to go that way. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to know where these machines are.’

‘There are public eyes in orbit,’ Gribelin said, ‘but when the dust’s up they can’t see shit. Machines are sly – they’ll exploit the dust whenever they can, and if there’s no dust many of them are able to kick some up or tunnel underground or use camouflage. Your next question’s going to be: why don’t they just carpet-bomb the whole fucking landscape with eyes?’

Sunday bristled. That had indeed been her next question. ‘And?’

‘Machines ate ’em. You’re basically throwing down foodstuff, nourishment, in a desert. Yum, yum.’

‘Fix trackers to the machines, then,’ Jitendra said.

‘Same problem. Any kind of parasite like that, anything not directly beneficial to the host, gets picked off and eaten like a grub.’ He tapped the map again. ‘Lame as it is, this is the best we’ve got. Based on intel compiled and shared by the Overfloaters, when they’re feeling in a compiling and sharing mood.’

‘Overfloaters?’ Sunday asked.

Jitendra cut in before Gribelin had a chance to reply: maybe he wanted to show that he wasn’t completely ignorant of the situation here; that he had done at least some homework. ‘The brokers who run the Evolvarium. Think of them like… cockfighters, trying to create the ideal fighting animal. They’re always dreaming up new ways to stress the population, to force the machines to keep evolving. And whenever the machines throw up something useful, some innovation or wrinkle on an existing idea, the brokers race each other to skim it off and make some money on the technologies exchange. That’s why this place is on June Wing’s radar.’

‘June Wing?’ Gribelin asked.

Jitendra smiled quickly. ‘A… friend of mine. With an interest in fringe robotics. How much do you know about us?’

‘Just that there’s a job, that the fish-faces are behind it, and beyond that I’m not to ask questions.’

‘You knew about the golem,’ Sunday said.

‘The Pans said not to hang around once you were off the train. I was also told to watch out for a claybot, in case your follower got the march on you. As to why the golem’s on your tail, sweet cheeks, I didn’t ask and they didn’t tell.’ He grinned a mouthful of weirdly carved and metal-capped teeth at her. ‘Shit, I called you it again, didn’t I?’

‘We’re not tourists,’ Sunday said levelly, deciding to let her earlier threat slide. ‘The Pans will have told you to take me as near as possible to a set of coordinates in the Evolvarium. There’s a reason for that.’

‘Which is?’

Sunday and Jitendra exchanged glances before she spoke. ‘There’s something buried in the area, something that belongs to me.’

‘Belongs?’

‘Family property,’ she said. ‘But not property that I’d want the golem to get hold of ahead of me.’

‘And you know it’s buried?’ Gribelin asked.

‘If it isn’t, what are the odds of it still being here?’

‘Pretty fucking slim.’

‘I still have to be sure,’ Sunday said.

Gribelin’s skull bobbed up and down as he shrugged. ‘Your call.’

After a moment she asked, ‘What are those things on your skull?’

‘Ears.’

‘I mean the tattoos. Do they signify something? They look like rock art or something.’

‘Rock art.’ He grinned again. ‘Yeah, that’d be about right.’

They passed their first carcass an hour into the Evolvarium.

Dust-scouring wind and the graft of enthusiastic scavengers, both human and mechanical, had stripped the war machine back to a rust-coloured skeleton, a hundred metres from tip to tail. Formed from dozens of articulated modular segments, the ruined robot resembled the vulture-picked spine of some much larger creature. The dust was thin on the Tharsis Bulge, a layer only a centimetre deep covering laval rock, so the war machine’s metal bones were exposed almost entirely to the sky. Gribelin slowed to skirt around the corpse, eyeing it warily.

‘Been here longer than most,’ he said in a low murmur. ‘Deadsville, completely harmless and pecked clean of pretty much anything usable. But sometimes active units use it as a place of concealment. Ambush predators. I think we’re good today, but—’

‘Would they attack us?’ Sunday asked.

‘Mostly, the machines are smart enough to leave us alone.’ He shot her a glance, Sunday’s face bulbous in his goggles. ‘Basic self-preservation: fight each other, use whatever they can, evolve, but don’t piss off the Overfloaters.’

‘You said “mostly”,’ Jitendra said.

‘Darwinism in action, my friend. Every now and then something comes along and tears up the rule book.’

‘You’re risking a lot, bringing us here,’ Jitendra said.

‘I know the terrain.’ He eyed the map again. ‘And I know who to keep away from. You think I’d be here if I didn’t believe the odds were in my favour? Your friends are paying well, but nothing’s worth suicide.’

At four in the afternoon, a quill of orange-red dust feathered up from the horizon. It scribed its way across the landscape, propelled by an invisible hand. Sunday’s first thought was that they were watching a dust-devil, but Gribelin’s map showed a pawn symbol close to their present location.

‘Sifter,’ he said. ‘Your basic low-down grazing caste. Chew through the dust and the top layer of rock, looking for anything recyclable. What they can use to repair or fuel themselves, they use. What’s left over, they barter between themselves or trade on up the food chain.’

‘What’s that?’ Sunday asked, pointing dead ahead, up the gently rising lie of the land. A grey-black smudge floated in the sky, like a dead fly on the windshield, just above the horizon. It dangled entrails, as if it had been swatted. She had tried zooming, but the aug was all but absent.

Gribelin tugged down a pair of binoculars fixed to the ceiling on a scissoring mount and settled his goggled eyes into the rubber-shielded cups. ‘Lady Disdain,’ he said quietly. ‘Not usually this far east. Might be following the sifter, looking for anything thrown up behind it.’

‘Can we avoid her?’ Jitendra said.

‘Only if Dorcas is feeling nice.’ Gribelin steered left, the Overfloater craft veering slowly to the right in the window. He slid the binoculars towards Sunday. ‘Be my guest.’

The rubber eye-cups were greasy with sweat and tiny skin flakes. It took a moment for the binoculars to sense her intended point of interest. The view leapt, stabilised, snapped to sharpness, overlaid with cross hairs and distance/alt-azimuth numerics.

The Overfloater machine was a fat-bellied airship, approximately arrowhead-shaped. Slung under it, blended into the deltoid profile of its gas envelope, was an angular gondola. The ‘entrails’ were sinuous, whiplike mechanical tentacles, a dozen of them, emerging from the base of the gondola. The airship skimmed the surface at a sufficiently low altitude that the arms were able to pluck things from the ground. That was what Lady Disdain was doing right now: loitering, examining.

It brought to Sunday’s mind one of Geoffrey’s elephants, nosing the dirt with its trunk. Or a family of them, bunched into a single foraging organism.

‘Is Dorcas a friend of yours?’ Sunday asked.

‘Friend,’ Gribelin said, chewing over the word as if it was a new one on him. ‘That’s a tricky concept out here. Pretty much dog eat dog all the way down. Machines fuck each other over, Overfloaters fuck the machines over, Overfloaters fuck each other for a profit margin. I fight for the scraps. Me and Dorcas? We go back some. Don’t exactly hate each other. Doesn’t mean we’re kissing cousins either.’

‘Wouldn’t you rather be at the top of the rat heap?’ Sunday asked. She had some idea of how it worked: how the machines, in their endless evolutionary struggle, occasionally splintered off some novelty or gadget or industrial process that the rest of the system could use. Like the technology behind the prototype claybot, the one she’d chinged to the scattering. That rapidly morphing material had been a spin-off from the Evolvarium, and now it stood to make trillions for Plexus. ‘Floating up there like a god, being worshipped. Because that’s what’s going on here, isn’t it? Gods hovering over mortals, taking amusement in their endless warfare and misery.’

‘Wouldn’t go that far,’ Jitendra said. ‘These machines might be super-adaptive, but there’s no actual cognition going on down here. The machines don’t understand that they’re machines. All they know how to do is survive, and try not to fall behind in the arms race. They’re no more capable of religion than lobsters.’

‘Nice if it was that clear-cut,’ Gribelin said. ‘Me, I ain’t so sure. Spend as much time out here as I have, you’ll see some things that make you question your certainties.’

‘Really?’ Jitendra asked sceptically.

‘You think these machines don’t grasp what they are, that they don’t get the difference between existence and non-existence?’ He paused to take a sip from his liquor bottle, flicking the cap off with his thumb while steering one-handed. ‘Once, out by the western flanks, I saw a sifter begging for its life, begging not to be destroyed by a rogue collector.’

‘An evolved response, like a whimpering dog,’ Jitendra said dismissively. ‘Doesn’t prove there’s anything going on inside its head.’

‘You’d seen what I saw, you’d feel differently.’

‘Show me the imagery, I’ll make up my own mind.’

‘Not enough public eyes to catch it,’ Gribelin answered. ‘My own eyes were surrendered to the Overfloaters. They wiped the evidence.’

‘I can see why they might want to,’ Sunday said.

Lady Disdain was powering downslope, three or four tentacles dragging the ground. Sunday had a better impression of the manta-like vehicle now. It was enormous – as it had to be, given the tenuousness of the Martian atmosphere. Ducted engines as large as ocean turbines were bracketed to the drab green gondola.

She felt that it ought to make a sound, a terrible droning approach, but there was nothing.

‘Can you outrun it?’ Jitendra asked.

Gribelin gave a brief shake of his head. ‘Not a hope in hell, and even if we did, we’d only run into more Overfloaters further into the Evolvarium. But don’t worry – I’m sure I’ll find a way to sweet talk Dorcas.’

‘Using your natural charm and diplomacy,’ Sunday said.

‘You’d be surprised how far it gets me.’

The airship circled the moving truck then headed slightly south, dropping its triangular shadow over them like a cloak. Gribelin was still driving, but he was making no effort to push the truck to its limits. Sunday looked up, watching as the underside of the airship, hundreds of metres across and speckled with patch repairs, began to eclipse the sky. The gondola was as large as the Crommelin cable car, aglow with tiny yellow windows.

Figures stole around up there, backlit and mysterious.

Something clanged against them. Sunday jumped. Jitendra grabbed for the nearest handhold. Gribelin swore, but appeared otherwise resigned. The truck pitched as if it had just run into a sand-trap. The ground pulled away, dust cataracting from the wheels. Lady Disdain was lifting them into the sky, hauling them up with one or more of her tentacles.

Fifty metres, then maybe a hundred. The horizon began to rotate, the deltoid canopy gyring slowly overhead. The tentacles held them level with the front of the gondola so that they were looking back at the deep, slanted windows of what was evidently the airship’s bridge. The bridge was wide, and there were at least six visible crew, none of whom were obviously proxies.

One figure drew Sunday’s attention. A woman garbed in a long black coat that went all the way to her boots strode from one side of the bridge to the other, pointing and jabbing at her underlings. She came to rest at a console or podium, then angled some cumbersome speaking device to her lips.

A head and shoulders appeared in the truck, hovering above the dashboard and rendered with slight translucence.

‘Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something here, Gribelin?’ She was ghost-pale, slender-faced, with a sharp chin and long ash-grey hair brushed in a side-parting so that a curtain of it covered half her features. Her nose was pierced and many rings hung from the lobe of her one visible ear.

‘We’re kind of in the middle of something, too, Dorcas,’ Gribelin said. ‘As you’ve probably worked out. You mind letting us go, while there’s still some daylight?’

‘You cross the ’varium on our terms, when we feel like letting you. Why do I have to keep reminding you of that?’

‘Look, it would be nice to chat, but…’

The woman combed fingers through her hair, allowing it to fall back into place. ‘You’re not usually in this much of a hurry. Anything to do with the vehicle following you from Vishniac?’

Sunday glanced at her driver. ‘Ask her how far behind it is.’

‘No need, I heard you anyway,’ Dorcas said. ‘You weren’t aware of it until now?’

‘You know how tenuous things get out here,’ Gribelin said.

‘Especially after someone went to a lot of trouble to tie up all the proxies and swamp the public eyes with dumb queries. You usually operate alone, Grib. Why do I have the feeling someone’s pulling strings behind your back this time?’

‘Tell me about the vehicle,’ Sunday said. ‘Please.’

Something in Dorcas appeared to relent, albeit only for the moment. ‘A rented surface rover, a little smaller than your truck. About two and a half hours behind you, maybe a little less.’

‘Lucas,’ Sunday said, as if there could be any doubt. ‘Quick off the mark, too. He must have arranged the vehicle rental before the train got in.’

‘Not a friend of yours?’ Dorcas asked.

‘I’m on an errand for a couple of clients,’ Gribelin explained. ‘A golem’s been following them since they left Crommelin.’

‘This errand… it wouldn’t be anything that will get in the way of my business, would it?’

‘You know what the Evolvarium is to me, Dorcas – just a place I like to get in and out of as quickly as possible.’

‘And your clients?’

Sunday leaned forward. ‘We’ll be in and out of here as swiftly as we can, and nothing we do will have any impact on your line of work.’

‘And I’m supposed to just take that on trust?’

Sunday closed her eyes while she organised her thoughts. ‘I’m going to tell you the truth. Whether you believe me or not is entirely up to you. My name is Sunday Akinya.’

‘As in—’

‘Sixty-odd years ago, my grandmother buried something here, smack in the middle of the Evolvarium. Of course, it wasn’t the Evolvarium then. It was just an area of Mars that meant something to her. Now I’m here to find out what she considered important enough to bury, and that means I have to locate the burial spot and dig.’

‘I’ve already told her she’s crazycakes if she thinks there’ll be anything to dig up,’ Gribelin said, ‘but she’s fixed on seeing this through.’

‘You have coordinates?’

Sunday nodded. ‘There’s some uncertainty, but I think I can get close. My grandmother spent time at an abandoned Russian weather station near here, before she came back to bury whatever it was. The station’s location is known, and there haven’t been any geological changes since she last visited.’

‘We’re about two hundred kays out,’ Gribelin said. ‘We can be there in two hours, maybe three if we have to run around any big players.’

‘By which time it’ll be dark,’ Dorcas said. ‘Not much you’ll be able to do then.’

‘At least we’ll be there first.’

Dorcas considered this at length before responding, taking whispered asides from her crew while she contemplated her answer. ‘We’ve always had a good working arrangement, haven’t we, Grib?’

‘It’s had its ups and downs,’ Gribelin said.

‘Neither of us is a philanthropist. But over the years we’ve mostly managed not to tread on each other’s tails.’

‘Fair assessment.’

‘Even, some might say, helped each other when the situation demands it.’

‘Which it does now.’

‘Indeed. In that spirit, I’m going to make you an offer. I’ll get you closer to the landing site in much less than three hours. We’ll use the full resources of Lady Disdain to search for your object, and I’ll hand it to you intact when – if – we locate it. In return, you’ll give me twenty-five per cent of whatever you’re being paid. Whether or not we find anything.’

‘I’m not made of money,’ Gribelin said.

‘But someone else is. One way or the other, I’ll find out who’s involved and what they’re paying you.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of fobbing you off, Dorcas.’ For a moment, Gribelin looked paralysed with indecision, before deciding that honesty was the only viable option. ‘It’s the Pans,’ he said, letting out a small audible sigh. ‘You’d have figured that out sooner or later, based on the comms trickery.’

Dorcas sneered. ‘Why are you letting the Pans yank your chain?’

‘They pay well. Amazingly well. And my clients—’

‘We’re not Pans,’ Sunday said emphatically. ‘We’ve just got mixed up with them. What I want, and what they want… they coincide, up to a point. That’s why they’ve paid for me to be here, and why they’re helping slow down the golem. But we’re not Pans.’

‘Yes.’ Dorcas allowed herself the thinnest of smiles. ‘Think I got that the first time.’

It was teatime on the Lady Disdain. They knelt around a table while one of Dorcas’s underlings attended to their white porcelain Marsware cups. Tactical status maps, vastly more complicated than Gribelin’s simple readout, jostled for attention on the table’s slablike surface. These real-time summaries of the Evolvarium were accompanied by a constant low murmur of field analysis from the crew. Around the walls, systemwide stock exchange summaries tracked technologies commodities from Mercury to the Kuiper belt. Histograms danced to hidden music. Market analysis curves rose and fell in regular sinus rhythms like the Fourier components of some awesome alien heartbeat. Newsfeeds dribbled updates. Outside, the sun was beetling towards the horizon as if it had work to be getting on with.

The chai was watery but sweet – infused with jasmine, Sunday decided. She and Jitendra were kneeling on one side of the table, Gribelin and Dorcas on the other. Kneeling was very nearly as comfortable in Martian gravity as it was on the Moon, which was to say a lot easier on the knees than on Earth.

The conversation was flowing in at least two directions, maybe three. Jitendra relished the chance to learn as much as he could about the history and organisation of the Evolvarium, and his questions were divided equally between Dorcas and Gribelin. Dorcas, for her part, appeared willing to humour him… but she had her own interrogative agenda, too, with her probing directed mostly at Sunday. She wanted to know more about this buried secret, and why it might be of interest to more than one party.

‘I can’t tell you what she buried there,’ Sunday said. ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t have had to come all this way. I can’t even be sure this is where she meant me to go.’

‘And the Pans?’ Dorcas asked. ‘What’s their angle?’

Remembering Soya’s warning, Sunday wondered how much she was at liberty to discuss. ‘They have an interest in my grandmother,’ she said, circumspectly. ‘She knew Lin Wei, who’s as close to being the Pans’ founder as anyone.’

‘And that’s all it is – mere historical interest?’

‘I suppose they can’t help being curious now,’ Sunday said.

One of Dorcas’s staff approached, leaned down and whispered something in her ear. She nodded, danced her fingers above the table. The positions of some of the Evolvarium players shifted around. ‘Revised intel,’ she explained. ‘Increased sifter activity in sector eight, and two new hunter-killer subspecies out in three. Meanwhile, the Aggregate’s been unusually active these last few days.’

‘The Aggregate?’ Jitendra asked, beaming like a kid who was getting all his presents at once. ‘Have you encountered it?’

‘Grib’s had his share of run-ins with it, haven’t you?’ Dorcas said.

‘I keep out of its way, best as I’m able.’

Dorcas gave a knowing nod. ‘Sensible man.’

‘What is it?’ Sunday asked.

‘What happens when a bunch of machines get together and decide to act in unison, rather than fighting for scraps,’ Jitendra said. ‘A kind of emergent proto-civilisation. A quasi-autonomous motile city-state made up of hundreds of cooperating machine elements.’

‘A nuisance to some,’ Dorcas said. ‘An incipient Martian god to others. Isn’t that right, Grib? Or is that something you don’t like to talk about these days?’

‘All in the past, as you well know.’

Dorcas smiled once. ‘Did he tell you about the tattoos? I’m guessing not.’

‘If I was bothered about the tattoos, I’d have had them removed.’

‘Which would cost money, which you’d sooner spend on whores, narcotics or truck parts.’ Dorcas gave a little throat-clearing cough, now that she had their attention. ‘Thirty, forty years back, Gribelin ran into a little group of mental cases just outside the Evolvarium. Something about the scenery, the emptiness, the mind-wrenching desolation reaches in and presses the “god” button some of us still have inside us. What were these people called, Grib?’

‘Aggregationists,’ he said tersely. ‘Can we move on now?’

‘They’re all gone now. Word is their leader, the crackpot behind the whole thing, woke up one morning and realised he was surrounded by lunatics. Not only that, but fawning lunatics he’d helped along with their craziness. The Apostate, they call him. He cleared out and left them to get on with it. You met him, didn’t you, Grib?’

‘Our paths crossed.’

Dorcas poured some more chai for her guests. ‘Whatever became of the Apostate, the Aggregate’s doing pretty well for itself. It’s entirely self-sufficient, as far as we can tell, so it doesn’t have to deal with sifters. It’s also strong enough to be able to deter most mid-level threats, and agile enough to keep out of the way of anything large enough to intimidate it. If the original construct was a nation state, this is a walled city.’

‘I guess the next question is… is there any way to make money from it?’ Jitendra asked.

‘If there is, no one’s thought of it yet,’ Dorcas said, not appearing to mind the directness of his question. ‘The Aggregate doesn’t shed bits of itself, and until it dies, we can’t very well pick it apart and look inside. But someone will get there eventually. Our… rivals won’t stop trying, and nor will we. So far, it’s rebuffed our efforts at negotiated trade. But everything has a price, doesn’t it?’

‘Be careful you don’t end up evolving anything too clever,’ Sunday said. ‘We all know where that leads.’

Dorcas smiled tightly. ‘We have sufficient demolition charges on just this one ship to turn the entire Evolvarium into a radioactive pit, if we so wished. No one takes this lightly.’ She directed a sharp look at Sunday. ‘Of course, you’d rather we didn’t do that any time soon, wouldn’t you? Not while this secret of yours is still to be unearthed.’

‘I don’t even know if there is a secret,’ Sunday said.

‘You’ve come this far, you can’t have too many doubts. Nor the Pans, given their level of interest. What do you imagine she might have left behind?’

‘For all I know, it’s just another cryptic clue leading to somewhere else.’

Dorcas raised a finely plucked eyebrow. ‘On Mars?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘And if at the end of this there’s nothing, no bucket of gold, what then?’

‘We all go home and get back to our lives,’ Sunday said.

Another aide came to whisper something to Dorcas. She listened, nodded once.

‘The other vehicle has crossed the perimeter,’ she said. ‘Its point of entry was very close to your own, and it’s following roughly the same course you were on before we picked you up. You say there’s a golem in that thing?’

Sunday nodded. ‘It’s pretty likely.’

‘Then it must be acting near-autonomously by now. Does it know exactly where the burial might have taken place?’

‘The people behind the golem,’ Sunday said circumspectly, not wanting to give away more information about her family than she needed to, ‘they’re smart enough to have joined the same dots I did.’

‘Not much we can do about that,’ Dorcas said. She put down her teacup and rose from a kneeling position, smoothing the wrinkles out of her long black coat as she did so. ‘No matter: we have a good two hours on the rover, and we’re very nearly at the location.’

‘You don’t expect to find anything, do you?’ Sunday said.

‘The machines are thorough, but if something was buried sufficiently far down… well, there’s a possibility it’s still there, albeit a remote one.’

‘Except Eunice wouldn’t have seen any reason to bury something so deeply,’ Jitendra said.

‘Let’s err on the side of optimism,’ Dorcas said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Of the Russian weather station, of the evidence of Eunice’s return decades later, nothing now remained. All traces had been erased by wind and time; all artefacts and trash long since absorbed and recycled by the Evolvarium’s machines. But the location was known to within a handful of metres, and as Lady Disdain adjusted her engines to maintain a hovering posture, there could be no doubt that they were sitting over exactly the right patch of ground.

‘If there was anything large and magnetic sitting right below the dust, we’d already know about it,’ Dorcas said. ‘I’m afraid that’s not looking good right now. Same for gravitational anomalies. If there’s something buried right under us, within a couple of metres of the surface, it must have the same density as the rock, to within the limits of our mass sensors.’ She was standing at a pulpit-like console, arms spread either side of an angled display. ‘There are a few more things to try, though, before we think about looking deeper.’

‘Ground-penetrating radar?’ Gribelin asked.

‘Already down to a depth of three metres, over a surface area of fifty-by-fifty. We can expand the search grid, of course – but that’ll take time.’

Gribelin had his arms folded across his chest. ‘What about seismic?’

‘On the case – again, the data will take a little while to build up.’

From the gondola’s downward-looking windows, Sunday watched as the tentacles picked up loose-lying boulders, lofted them high into the air and then flung them back down at the ground. Other tentacles, spread out as far from the airship as was possible, brushed their tips against the surface to catch the vibrations transmitted through the underlying geography. The arrival times of the impulses would enable Dorcas to build up a seismographic profile of the local terrain, penetrating much deeper than was possible with radar. It was slow and haphazard, though – the airship obviously didn’t come equipped with specialised seismic probes or the routines to crunch the data swiftly – and Sunday wondered what effect all that crashing and banging was having on the Evolvarium’s native inhabitants. If they wanted to approach this search in a discreet manner, without drawing attention to their activities, this struck her as exactly the wrong way to go about it.

‘Eunice, Eunice, Eunice,’ she said under her breath. ‘Why couldn’t you make this simple for us?’

Now that the construct was denied her, she missed having it around. Eunice might be an illusion, a parlour trick that only looked and spoke like a thinking human being. But her eyes were not Sunday’s eyes. And she had seen things Sunday never would.

‘This wasn’t exactly how I was hoping things would pan out,’ Gribelin said, his musty aroma announcing his arrival by her side a moment before he spoke, ‘but I think we can trust Dorcas.’

Sunday was effectively alone now, the other Overfloaters busy with their instruments and technical systems, while Jitendra dug into firsthand summaries of the Evolvarium’s history. ‘You think or you know?’ she asked.

‘Nothing watertight where Dorcas is involved, kid.’ His voice was a low confiding rasp. ‘We’ll just have to take things as they come and… be flexible. She can be slippery, that’s a fact. But then so can we.’ He shifted something around in his throat, some loose phlegmy package that obviously felt at home. ‘My manner back there… when I first picked you up…’ He trailed off, as if he needed some invitation to continue.

‘Go on,’ Sunday obliged.

‘This line of work, you get to meet all sorts. Rich kids, especially. Thrill-seekers. I knew there was money behind you, but… you’re not really here for the thrills, are you?’

‘I had a good life on the Moon. I didn’t want any of this. It came after me, not the other way round.’ Sunday fell silent for a moment. ‘You wouldn’t be apologising, would you, Gribelin?’

‘For giving you a hard time?’ He shrugged, as if that was all that needed to be said on the subject. ‘From here on, though… whatever happens, when I take a job on, I don’t let my clients down.’

‘And if our host has other ideas?’

‘We’ll play things by ear. And if things get… intense, you and the beanpole do exactly what I tell you, all right? No second-guessing old Gribelin. Because if the shit comes down, there won’t be time for a nice chinwag about our options.’

‘We’ll listen,’ Sunday said. ‘Not as if we’re spoilt for choice with guides out here.’ Softly she added, ‘Thank you, Gribelin.’

He made to turn away – she thought he was done with her – but something compelled him to halt. After a silence he said, ‘You asked about the marks on my skull, back when we were driving. Dorcas mentioned my run-in with the Apostate. I figured you’d be even more curious after that.’

‘The way I see it, it’s none of my business.’

‘Way I see it, too. But not everyone would agree.’ Gribelin looked down before continuing, ‘I went a little mad out there. They put ideas in my head. Little dancing men, figures scratched in rock. The Apostate had gone mad himself, once, but I think he got better. It took me longer, and maybe some of it’s still lodged inside me. But that’s between me and the god I don’t believe in.’

The shadows had lengthened and evening winds had begun to howl in from the northern lowlands when Dorcas lifted her gaze from a hooded viewer. ‘I don’t know quite what to make of this,’ she said, fingering the fine-adjustment controls set into the viewer’s side.

‘Not sure how to break it to me that there’s nothing here?’ Sunday asked.

‘No.’ Dorcas pushed her hair back over one ear, to hook it out of her eyes. ‘How to break it to you that we’ve found something. There’s an object down there. It’s metal, and it’s not too far from the surface. Which, frankly, isn’t possible.’

But the digging would have to wait until daybreak. It got cold at night, and cold made everything harder, but that was not the reason for their delay. At night, as the cold and darkness clamped down, the bottom-feeding castes became much less active, generally opting both to conserve energy and cool their external shells as close to the ambient surroundings as possible, so that they were harder to detect. The predators, conversely, became more active. Kills remained difficult, but the likelihood of success, once a pursuit or strike had been initiated, was now much higher. There was never a good time to be down on the surface, Dorcas explained, but night was worse than day, even for Overfloaters, and they would not risk drilling until sunrise.

‘And the golem? We’ve gained this lead on it – what’s the point of throwing it all away now?’

‘Your golem is on land,’ Dorcas said. ‘That means it won’t be going anywhere until sun-up, either. Not if it knows the first thing about the Evolvarium, and wants to make it through to dawn in one piece. So get some sleep. Be our guests.’

But Sunday couldn’t sleep much, not while that thing was down in the rock, calling to her. So that night, while the Overfloater held station and a skeleton crew manned the graveyard shift, she stood in darkness aboard the gondola and watched. Radar and infrared sensors swept the parched, dust-tormented plateau. Very occasionally, halfway to the horizon or further, something would break cover. Fleeting and swift, it would slink across the land’s contours. The ambush predators were experts at concealment, from jack-in-the-box variants that dug themselves into rock holes and natural fissures, compressed like springs, to shapeshifting forms that were able to pancake their bodies into the very top layer of the dust, to lurk unseen. There were things like flatfish and things like snakes. There were also stalking, prowling horrors that quartered the night on endless deterrent patrols, searching for the weak, the maimed or the dead. She saw one of these loping jackal-like things traverse the horizon line: it had so many jointed legs that it appeared to move in spite of itself, riding a bickering tumble of independent limbs. There was also something like a convoy of scorpions, one after another, that might (horrifyingly) have been a single entity, and a flat-topped creature like a house-sized hairbrush, supported on countless bristling centipede legs, that could have been a grazer or a killer.

It was wonderful in a way, she supposed. There was astonishing variation in the Evolvarium, a staggering panoply of evolutionary strategies, bodyplans, survival mechanisms. Life on Earth had taken three and a half billion years to achieve the radiative diversity that these swift, endlessly mutable machines had produced in a matter of decades. Artificially imposed selection pressures had turned life’s clock into a screaming flywheel. The arms race of survival had been harnessed for the purposes of product development, feeding an endless supply of new technologies, new materials and concepts, into the systemwide marketplace. In that sense, it was almost miraculous: something for nothing, over and over again.

But it wasn’t free, was it? The Evolvarium was death and fear, terror and hunger, on endless repeat. The machines might not have enough cognitive potential to trouble the Gearheads, but that didn’t make them mindless, no matter what Jitendra might care to think. She thought of the sifter Gribelin had told them about, the machine that had begged. Maybe he’d been exaggerating. Maybe he’d been imposing human values on an exchange that was fundamentally alien, beyond a gulf of conceptualisation that could never be crossed.

She wondered. She wondered and knew that she would be very, very glad when they were out of this place.

Jitendra slipped his arm around her waist. ‘I’m sorry about Memphis,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sorry that we aren’t back home, with your brother. But I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this for the world.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s marvellous,’ he said.

Beyond the horizon, red and green radiance underlit the night’s dust clouds. Something was dying in fire and light. Sunday shivered.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

By the time he came to groggy consciousness, Geoffrey was already halfway to the Moon, and a minor diplomatic squall was busy playing itself out back on Earth. Mechanism apparatchiks were not at all happy about Geoffrey having absconded before submitting to a pysch assessment, and they were taking an increasingly sceptical stance regarding Jumai’s supposed innocence in the whole affair. The Nigerian had committed no direct wrongdoing, but the message – in no uncertain terms – was that it would be in her absolute best interests if she were to submit to Mech jurisdiction at her earliest convenience. In other words, she was a whim away from being declared a fugitive herself. Tiamaat, meanwhile – and by extension the Panspermian Initiative – was using every stalling measure in its arsenal, arguing that because Geoffrey had requested aqualogy citizenship, it had no option but to discharge its own procedural obligations in this regard, and that if it did not do so, it would be in grave dereliction of its charter.

Smoke and mirrors, bluff versus bluff, two geopolitical superpowers playing an old, old game. As long as it bought Geoffrey time, he didn’t really care. Worse, as far as he was concerned, was the reaction of the cousins.

Lucas and Hector had been trying to ching from the moment he was picked up by the Nevsky. Their requests had been systematically rebuffed – and Geoffrey had been unconscious for much of the ensuing time – but the cousins hadn’t been daunted. They’d had no trouble tracking the Nevsky – the movements of any seagoing vessel, let alone one as large and ponderous as a former Soviet nuclear submarine, were publically visible – and they’d had no trouble making the obvious connection between the Nevsky’s destination and the lifter’s ascent into orbit. Geoffrey had dropped off the Mechanism’s radar, so they couldn’t be sure that he was in space. But he wasn’t anywhere else under Mechanism jurisdiction either, which did rather argue for him being aboard the rocket. It would not have taken limitless resources to track the rocket’s rendezvous with the deep-space vehicle Quaynor, and to presume that Geoffrey and Jumai were now aboard that ship.

When they had eventually given up on trying to speak to him directly, Hector had recorded a statement, one that Geoffrey had finally felt obliged to listen to.

‘We know what you intend to do, cousin. We know what your new friends think they will help you to achieve. But you are wrong. This will not work. And you are making a very, very serious mistake. You have no business in the Winter Palace, and you have no right to trespass where you are not welcome.’

‘I have as much right to it as you do,’ Geoffrey mouthed.

‘If you have ever thought of yourself as an Akinya,’ Hector went on, ‘do the right thing now. Turn around. Abandon this folly. Before you damage the family name beyond repair.’

‘Fuck the family name,’ Geoffrey said. Then, softly: ‘Fuck the family while you’re at it. I’m out.’

There was a dull propellant roar from somewhere in the ship, a ghost of gravity as the ship trimmed its course, and from that moment on the Quaynor was aimed like an arrow for the orbiting prison where his grandmother had ended her days.

‘Not much to look at,’ Jumai said, six hours later, when they had their first good view of the Winter Palace. ‘I don’t know what I was expecting. Bit more than this, though.’ She paused to tap her medical cuff, instructing it to up her anti-vertigo dosage. Geoffrey had caught her vomiting into a sick bag a few hours into the flight, curled into a foetal ball in the module that had been assigned as her temporary quarters, making dry retching sounds. He’d asked her why she hadn’t managed the nausea, and she’d said that the cuff’s chemicals took the edge off her concentration, and for Jumai that was less acceptable than the occasional heave.

‘We need you sharp at the station,’ he’d argued. ‘That means not being worn out from puking your guts up before we get there.’ And he took her wrist, gently, and tapped up her discretionary dosage to match his own.

‘Yes, Doctor,’ she’d said, half-sullenly, but the message – he was relieved to see now – had got through.

‘She had it built around her old ship, the Winter Queen,’ he said, when the grey cylinder hung before them, massively magnified. They were still fifty thousand kilometres out, so the imagery was synthesised from distributed public eyes in cislunar space rather than the Quaynor’s own low-res cameras. ‘I never went inside it, of course – never even chinged up there. But I know what it’s like. Saw images often enough, whenever she deigned to address us from her throne. It’s a jungle, humid and sticky as a hothouse. Ship’s a rust-bucket; it was just about capable of keeping her alive, supplying power to the station, but no more than that. That’s why the cousins can make a good case for decommissioning it – the reactor’s almost as old as the one in that submarine.’

The cylinder had the proportions of two or three beer cans stuck together top to bottom, bristling with docking/service equipment at either end. It was rotating slowly, spinning on its long axis, bringing most of the surface into view. Between the endcaps, the station’s outer skin was smooth, uninterrupted by machinery, sensory gear or anything that might indicate scale. Eunice had wrapped her own iron microcosm around herself, and she’d never felt the slightest inclination to see what was outside.

‘She never left this?’ Jumai asked, the horror seeping through her voice. ‘I mean, not even to step outside, in a suit? In all that time?’

‘We’d have known. There was never a point when someone, somewhere, wasn’t watching the Winter Palace. Ships came and went occasionally – automated supply vehicles, Memphis on one of his errands – but no one else ever came out. Her star may have faded, but even in her last years she was still enough of a celebrity for that to have made the news, if it had happened.’

‘But to live inside that thing – after all she’d done, all she’d seen. How could she do that to herself?’

‘By going a little mad,’ Geoffrey said.

‘She could ching, I suppose. But that wouldn’t have been enough consolation for me.’

‘You’re not my grandmother. Whatever she needed, it was in there.’

‘That’s not living.’

‘Never said it was,’ Geoffrey replied.

After a silence Jumai went on, ‘Well, we dock first. That’s clear. Then we see how easy it is to break inside. Figure you expect some complications, or you wouldn’t have brought me along.’

‘If you don’t have to lift a finger, you’ll still get paid,’ he reassured her.

‘You still think I’m a mercenary to the core.’

‘I think you like risk. Not quite the same thing.’

‘In your book.’ Jumai gave an unconcerned shrug, her nausea blasted away for the time being. ‘So: let’s see what our docking options are.’ And she reached out and tumbled the image of the Winter Palace like a toy suspended over a cot until she’d brought one of the endcaps into view. She plucked her fingers to zoom in, frowning at the details. ‘See anything out of the ordinary? You’re the seasoned space traveller, not me.’

‘Can’t say I’m any kind of expert on docking systems.’

‘You don’t need to be,’ said a voice behind them. It was Mira Gilbert, weightless now, fully divested of her mobility harness but equally at home in zero gravity as she was under water. She wore a skintight zip-up orange and grey outfit fitted with pockets and grab-patches. ‘We’ve assessed the situation. Perfectly standard interfaces and capture clamps: the Quaynor will be able to hard-dock without difficulty.’

‘You came just to tell us that?’ Geoffrey asked. He’d barely seen Gilbert since his revival.

‘Actually, I came to tell you that there’s been a development back in the East African Federation. Public eyes detected the activation of the Kilimanjaro ballistic launcher.’

‘Fuck,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Not sure what came up: could be a test package, a cargo pod, or something else. Right now we’re leaning towards “something else”. Whatever it was got pushed all the way to orbit, where it was met by another vehicle.’

‘What kind?’ Jumai asked.

‘The Kinyeti, an asteroid miner registered to Akinya Space,’ Gilbert answered slowly, so the words had time to hit home. ‘Something with at least the range and capabilities of the Quaynor, if not greater.’

She pulled up an image: either a long-range real-time grab or an archival picture of the same ship. As far as Geoffrey was concerned, he could have been looking at another view of the ship he was travelling in. The Kinyeti had the same skeletal outline, built for operations in vacuum with no requirement to withstand atmosphere or hard acceleration/deceleration. It had engines and fuel tanks at one end, docking and mining equipment at the other, and a pair of contra-rotating centrifuge arms mounted at the midsection bulge of her main crew quarters, with habitat modules on the end of each arm.

He’d seen the Quaynor’s arms from inside the ship. They were static, welded into immobility, their only remaining function to serve as outriggers for comms gear and precision manoeuvring systems.

‘Been on high-burn ever since it met the blowpipe package,’ Gilbert went on. ‘Keeps that up, it’ll reach the Winter Palace about ninety minutes ahead of us.’

‘Has to be one or both of the cousins,’ Geoffrey said.

‘This caught us with our flippers off,’ Gilbert said. ‘We didn’t think the blowpipe was working yet.’

‘It wasn’t,’ Geoffrey told her. ‘Not properly. They tested it when my grandmother was scattered, but it wasn’t ready for people… not by a long margin. Only Lucas or Hector would be fucking mad enough to risk their necks riding the blowpipe.’

‘They want to catch up with us, they wouldn’t have had much choice,’ Gilbert said. ‘Libreville would have taken too long to get to, and they didn’t have access to their own rocket. Would’ve been blowpipe or nothing.’

‘Someone means business,’ Jumai said. ‘But we knew that already. OK, what does this change?’

‘Nothing,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘We’re not turning around. Can we squeeze some more speed out of this thing, Mira? Now that we no longer need to hide our intentions?’

‘Depends how fast you want to go,’ the merwoman said. ‘And how many space-traffic violations you want to stack up.’

‘Enough to make sure the cousins don’t get there ahead of us. All we need to do is shut them out – shouldn’t be too hard, should it? We get in, find out what, if anything, Eunice left behind up there, and leave. And then, if at all possible, we can all get on with our lives.’

‘This is your life now,’ Gilbert reminded him gently. ‘Citizen Akinya.’

Geoffrey touched the damp, warm glass of Arethusa’s container, trying to make out the form it held. With the way the hold’s lights were arranged, he could discern little more than a dark hovering shadow in the green-stained murkiness of the water tank.

‘It’s an extravagance, of course,’ Arethusa confided. Her voice came straight into his head via the ship’s onboard aug. ‘Moving me around. I’m not just meat and bone, like you. I weigh fifty tonnes to begin with, and I also need thousands of litres of water to float in. But they can owe me this one. We have fuel to spare – or at least we did, before your family decided to race us to the prize – and in an emergency my suspension fluid can always be used for coolant or reaction mass or radiation shielding.’

‘What would happen to you?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘I’d die, very probably. But I wouldn’t object to the basic unfairness of it. Doesn’t mean I’m tired of life, or ready to end it – not at all. But I’ve long since reached the point where I accept that I’m living on borrowed time. Every waking instant.’

‘I still don’t understand. Why now?’

‘Why what now?’ She sounded unreasonably prickled by the question.

‘Don’t tell me you just decided to leave the planet at the drop of a hat, Arethusa. Something’s prompted this. Where are you going, anyway? You can’t stay in the Winter Palace.’

‘I don’t plan to. But it’s been time to move on for a while now. I bore easily, Geoffrey. Life in the aqualogy stopped offering me challenges decades ago, and for that reason alone I need new horizons. Ocular’s finally given me the spur to make the transition.’

‘To leave Earth.’

‘I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time. But this news – the Crucible data, the Mandala and the death of my old friend Eunice – it really feels as if the time is right. Carpe diem, and all that. If I don’t do this now, what else will it take? We Pans preach outward migration, exploration and colonisation as a species imperative. The least I can do is offer deeds instead of words.’

‘You mean to stay in space, then?’

‘I’m not going back,’ she affirmed. ‘And most certainly not after all the fuel expenditure it took to haul me up here. Do I want to look profligate?’ She fell silent, ruminating in darkness. The tank chugged and whirred. ‘There’s a whole system to explore, Geoffrey,’ she said eventually. ‘Worlds and moons, cities and vistas. Wonder and terror. More than Lin Wei could ever have imagined, bless her. And that’s just this little huddle of rock and dust around this one little yellow star.’

‘You are Lin Wei,’ he said quietly. ‘You never drowned. You just became a whale.’

She sounded more disappointed than angered. ‘Can we at least maintain the pretence, for the sake of civility?’

‘Why did this happen to you?’

‘I made it happen. Why else?’ She sounded genuinely perplexed that the question needed answering. ‘It was a phase.’

‘Being a whale?’

‘Being human.’ Then, after a moment: ‘We both became strange, Eunice and I, both turned our backs on what we’d once been. Me in here. Eunice in her prison. We both lived and loved, and after all that, it wasn’t enough.’

The impulse to defend his grandmother was overwhelming, but he knew it would have been a mistake. ‘At least you haven’t turned into a recluse. You’re still in the world, on some level. You still have plans.’

‘Yes,’ Arethusa acknowledged. ‘I do. Even if, now and then, I scare myself with them.’

‘Do you know why she hid herself away?’

‘She was never the same after Mercury. But then again, who was?’ Arethusa paused. She was still Arethusa to him: try as he might, he couldn’t relate this floating apparition to his notion of Lin Wei, the little Chinese girl who had befriended his grandmother, back when the world was a simpler place. ‘My doctors – the people who helped shape me – tell me I could live a very long time, Geoffrey. One way to cheat death is to just keep growing, you see. I’m still forming new neural connections. My brain astonishes itself.’

‘How long?’

‘Decades, maybe even a century: who knows? No different for you, really. You’re a young man. A hundred years from now, do you honestly expect medicine not to have made even more progress?’

‘I don’t think that far ahead.’

‘It’s time we got into the habit. Every living, breathing human being. Because we’re all in this together, aren’t we? We endured the turmoil of climate change, the Resource and Relocation wars, the metaphorical and literal floods and storms, didn’t we? Or if we didn’t, we at least had the marvellous good fortune to have ancestors who did, to allow us to be born into this time of miracles and wonder, when possibilities are opening rather than closing. We’re all Poseidon’s children, Geoffrey: whether we like it or not.’

‘Poseidon’s children,’ he repeated. ‘Is that supposed to mean something?’

‘We came through. That’s all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it’s time to start doing something useful with our lives.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Sunday’s boots crunched into Tharsis dust. This, she was startled to realise, was the first time that she had actually set foot on Martian soil. The strip of plasticised ground in the arrivals terminal hadn’t counted, nor the spidering walkway in Crommelin. She was outside now, hundreds of kilometres from anything that might even loosely be termed civilisation. Between her body and the dust and rock of this vastly ancient planet lay only the thinnest membrane of air and alloy and plastic. She was a cosy little fiefdom of warmth and life, enclaved by dominions of cold and death.

She was accustomed to wearing a suit, accustomed to being outside in the Moon’s vacuum and extremes of temperature. Mars was different, though. It lulled with its very familiarity. It didn’t look airless, or even particularly antipathetic to life. She had spent enough time on Earth to recognise the handiwork of rain and weathering. The sky wasn’t black, it was the pale pink of a summer’s twilight. There were clouds and corkscrewing dust-devils. The ground, its temperature and texture transmitted through the soles of her boots, did not feel unwelcoming. She felt as if she could slip the boots off and pad barefoot through the dust, as if on a beach.

This was how Mars murdered, with an assassin’s stealth and cunning. People came from Earth or elsewhere with the best of intentions. They knew that the environment was lethal, that only suits and walls would protect them. Yet time and again, men and women were found outside, dead, half-out of their suits. They weren’t mad, exactly, and most of them had not been suicidal. But something in the landscape’s familiarity had worked its fatal way into their brains, whispering reassurance, even friendliness. Trust me. I look welcoming, because I am. Take off that silly armour. You don’t need it here.

This was not the Mars that Eunice had first set foot on a hundred years earlier, Sunday reminded herself. She might be a long way from Vishniac, and Vishniac might be a long way from the nearest city, but, crucially, there were cities. There’d been none in Eunice’s time. No trains, no space elevator, no infrastructure.

If Sunday’s suit failed now, which was about as mathematically probable as her being hit by a falling meteorite, Dorcas and her crew were close at hand. And if Dorcas and her crew ran into trouble, help would arrive from other Overfloaters soon enough. Vishniac could send an airship or plane, and by bullet train nowhere on Mars was more than a day from Vishniac. She was plugged into a planetary life-support system no less capable than the one clamped onto her back.

Sunday’s courage wasn’t lacking; she did not need anyone to tell her that. But it was a different order of courage that had brought Eunice to this world, one that had no currency on this prosperous and confident new Mars, with its casinos and hotels and rental firms. Even here, in the Evolvarium, the risk to which Sunday exposed herself was measured, quantifiable – and if she didn’t like it, she could leave easily enough. And in the worst of scenarios, it would not be Mars that killed her. It would be the things people had brought to Mars, and set amok.

‘We start here,’ Gribelin said, nudging the drill into place. ‘If we’re off, it’s not by more than a couple of centimetres, and we should be able to refine our bore once we get closer.’

‘How long?’ Sunday asked.

‘To chew down?’ He shrugged through the tight-fitting armour of his surface suit. ‘Two, three hours, if it was solid Tharsis lava. But it’s not. It’s been shattered and poured back into the shaft, so progress’ll be a lot easier. Shouldn’t take us much more than an hour.’

The Overfloaters had lowered his truck back down from their ship, depositing it gently a few metres from the drill site. The truck had deployed bracing legs, and then Gribelin had swung a vertical drill out from the rear of the cargo bed, directing the heavy equipment into place with gestures, voked commands and the occasional shove from his shoulder. The drill was greasy with low-temperature lubricant and anti-dust caulk. He guided the bit into position, allowed it to rotate slowly as it chewed through the top layer of dust and reached rock. Then it began to spin faster, a tawny plume of digested rock arcing out from the top of it. Sunday could feel its grinding labours through the soles of her boots.

‘See now why we held off until sun-up?’ Dorcas said, angling her head back to track the plume’s trajectory, making sure it went nowhere near her precious airship. ‘Machines hunt with vibrations. Would’ve been a very bad idea to be sat here at night, practically inviting them to come and take a closer look.’

Sunday nodded: she could see the prudence in that, but she could also see the sense in being done with this as quickly as possible. The drill was already making tangible progress, its cutting head a hand’s depth into the solidified lava.

There were five of them in suits: Gribelin, Jitendra and Sunday, Dorcas and one of her senior crew, another Martian woman who Sunday had gathered was called Sibyl. The Overfloaters had their own suits, very sleek and modern, with Neolithic and Australian aboriginal animal designs embossed on them in luminous holographic inks. Jitendra and Sunday made do with the units Gribelin carried on his truck for emergency use. They were clunkier, with stiffer articulation and no fancy ornamentation, but they worked well enough, and there was sufficient comms functionality to facilitate a sparse local aug. Tags identified the other suited figures, and a simplified version of the tactical map hovered in Sunday’s upper visual field, ready to swell and assume centrality when she needed it. There had been no significant alterations to the map during the night, but in the morning the Overfloaters had acquired intelligence from their fellow brokers, and the positions of the Evolvarium’s chief protagonists had been updated.

There were shifting networks of rivalry and cooperation, favour and obligation. It wasn’t transparently clear that all this intelligence was reliable, but Dorcas was used to applying her own confidence filters. Her high-value allies had reported that the golem was on the move again, heading their way after spending the night immobile. ‘But it’s taking a big chance,’ Dorcas had explained, while they were suiting up.

‘Aren’t we all?’ Sunday asked.

Dorcas tapped a version of the map. ‘Two C-class collectors moved into this sector since we passed through. A pair of hammerheads. Not the worst, but bad enough. If your golem carries on, it’ll pass within two or three kays of their present positions.’

It’s not my golem, Sunday thought sourly. ‘Is that going to be a problem for him… I mean, it?’

Dorcas nodded sagely. ‘He won’t automatically be ambushed, not in daylight. But then again one or both of the hammerheads may decide to have a go at him, if it thinks the likelihood of reprisal is small. Which it would be – the golem’s not even a warmblood – but the hammerheads probably don’t know that.’

‘Probably?’

‘Don’t put anything past these things. Sniffing comms traffic, distinguishing between a human pilot and a chinged proxy – that’s within their cognitive bound, just as it’s within ours.’

Sunday brushed a gauntleted finger against the largest icon on the map. ‘The Aggregate?’

‘Yes,’ Dorcas said.

‘Maybe it’s me, but it looks closer than it did yesterday.’

‘It’s covered some ground overnight. It probably doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Probably,’ Sunday echoed once more.

‘It can’t know what we’re doing here,’ Dorcas said. ‘It can’t know, and even if it did, it wouldn’t be interested. I told you, it’s like a city-state. We’re nothing to it.’

Sunday watched the drill bite deeper, its progress plain to the naked eye – it had reached at least a metre into the ground, perhaps more. That there was something down there was now beyond doubt. The radar and seismic profiles had improved since Dorcas’s first detection, and now revealed what appeared to be a purposefully buried box, not so very different in size and proportions from the container Chama had uncovered on the Moon. A rectangular shaft must have been excavated, the box lowered into it lengthwise and the waste material dropped back over it, before being tamped down. With better equipment, they might even have been able to peer inside the box without bringing it to the surface. Not that it mattered: they’d have the thing in their hands before very long. Gribelin was digging a circular shaft slightly wider than the original bore, and he would stop short of the item itself, for fear of damaging it or triggering some destruct mechanism or booby trap. To be sure, they would send in the proxy Gribelin carried attached to the front of his vehicle.

‘When do we hit it?’ she asked.

Gribelin stared at the drill for a long while before answering. ‘Sixty, seventy minutes.’

‘When I asked you before, you said it wouldn’t take more than an hour.’

‘I said it wouldn’t take much more,’ he snapped back at her.

‘Golem’s fifty kays out,’ Dorcas said levelly. ‘If the hammerheads are going to do anything, we’ll know about it soon enough. Maybe luck’s on your golem’s side.’

‘If we didn’t have to drill here, maybe we could drive out and meet the golem halfway,’ Jitendra said, stamping his feet nervously, as if the cold was starting to reach him through the insulation of his suit.

‘And then what?’ Dorcas asked. ‘Use reasoned persuasion?’

‘I was thinking more along the lines of a reasoned kick in the teeth.’

‘There’s no Mech to stop you, but you’d still be in a world of trouble once news got back to the Surveilled World. And we don’t know that the golem doesn’t have a human or warmblood guide with it.’ Dorcas nodded at the whirring drill. ‘We’ll see this through to the bitter end. It’s not as if it’s likely to be anything worth fighting over.’

‘You still don’t believe we’ll find anything,’ Sunday said.

‘If that box has been down there for a hundred years,’ Dorcas said, ‘then everything I know about the Evolvarium is wrong. And I’m afraid that’s just not the way my world works.’

‘Much as it pains me to agree with the good captain,’ Gribelin said, ‘she does have a point.’

There had been days that seemed to pass more rapidly than that hour. Watching the drill was like watching a kettle. Eventually Sunday gave up and walked away from the site, as far as she dared. Even when she was two hundred metres from the truck, she could still feel the vibrations from Gribelin’s equipment. Other than the rock plume, the sky was clear and cloudless, darkening almost to a subtle purple-black at the zenith. Pavonis Mons was a gentle bulge on the horizon – underwhelming, or would have been were she naive enough to have expected anything more spectacular. She was already on its footslopes. The mountains of Mars were simply too big to see in one go, unless one was in space.

Give her Kilimanjaro any day. At least that was a mountain you could point to.

The vibration stopped. She looked back just in time to see the plume attenuate, the last part of it bannering through the sky like a kite’s tail. She watched Gribelin push the drill back out of the way, nothing in his unhurried movements suggesting that there’d been a fault with the machinery.

She walked back to the drill site. By the time she got there, Jitendra and Dorcas were leaning at the edge of the fresh hole, hands on knees as they peered into its depths.

‘The good news,’ Dorcas said, ‘is that one of the hammerheads took the bait.’

‘And?’

‘It wasn’t a clean kill. The vehicle is still approaching, although not as quickly as before. But it’s damaged, and the other hammerhead may be taking an interest.’

‘Will there be repercussions?’

‘Reprisals? Probably not. Your golem resumed movement before sun-up, which is asking for trouble in anyone’s book.’

‘I hope no one else was hurt.’

‘Their fault if they were,’ Dorcas said.

Sunday took care as she neared the freshly dug hole. It was only about sixty centimetres across, but easily wide enough to become wedged in if she lost her footing.

‘About this much to go,’ Gribelin said, spreading his hands the width of a football. ‘We’ll back off and let the proxy dig out the rest.’

‘Sifters,’ Sibyl said, pointing to two pink plumes on the horizon, sailing slowly from left to right like the smoke from an Old-World ocean liner. ‘We’d best not hang around.’

The truck and the airship backed off a couple of hundred metres. Gribelin’s robot had detached itself from the prow of his vehicle and was now striding across the open terrain. Gribelin had gone into ching bind, otherwise immobile as he drove the proxy to the edge of the hole. It was the same kind of skeletal, minimalist unit that Sunday had chinged on the Moon, constructed from numerous tubes and pistons. It squeezed into the hole effortlessly, folding itself into a tight little knot like a dried-up spider, and vanished down the shaft. A few moments later, gobbets of rubble began to pop out of the opening. If there’s a booby trap, Sunday thought, we’d best all pray it isn’t nuclear.

But after a few minutes’ further excavation, the proxy had unearthed the box. Deeming it to be safe, at least for the moment, Sunday returned to the shaft and looked down. The proxy had extricated itself, allowing her a clear view of the object. About two-thirds of the upright container had been exposed, revealing it to be of dull, anonymous-looking construction. The size of a picnic hamper, the grey alloy casing was scratched and slightly dented. Sunday made out the seam of a lid, and what appeared to be a pair of simple catches in the long side.

She nodded at Gribelin. ‘Bring it all the way out.’

They retreated again and waited for the proxy to haul the box from the shaft and deposit it on the ground lengthwise, with the lid facing the sky. In all the red emptiness of Mars, it looked like something painted by Salvador Dali: a tombstone in a desert, maybe.

Sunday was the first to reach it. She sent the proxy away, not willing to let anyone else open the lid now that she had come this far. Different on the Moon, when Chama had been the one who had that privilege. Then, she’d barely known what she was getting involved with. Now it was as personal as anything in her universe.

Sunday knelt next to the box. Jitendra was behind her, but the others were still keeping their distance. Let them, she thought as she worked her gloved fingers under the catches and applied pressure. They flipped open obligingly, and Sunday had her first real inkling of disquiet. She’d never been entirely persuaded by Dorcas’s argument that a box could not have been under the surface all this time and not be found by the machines. But catches that had been snapped shut sixty or more years ago and then exposed to six decades of Martian cold ought to feel tighter than these.

The lid swung open just as easily. It was only then that Sunday realised she should have considered the possibility that the box had been packed and sealed under normal pressure conditions rather than in the thin air on the face of Mars.

Too late… But no: it either hadn’t been pressure-sealed, or the air had leaked away over the decades.

She looked inside. The box contained another box: a lacquered black receptacle with a flower pattern worked into its lid. There was just enough room around the outside of the smaller box to get her fingers in. She reached for it.

And felt something touch the back of her head.

‘It’s not a weapon,’ Dorcas said. ‘We need to be clear about that. I am not holding a weapon against your helmet. I would never do that. What I am doing is holding a non-weapon, a tool, a normal part of our equipment, in such a way that harm could conceivably come to you if I were careless. Which I won’t be, provided you do nothing that might… distract me.’

Sunday was surprised by how calm her own voice sounded. ‘What would you like me to do, Dorcas?’

‘I’d like you to let go of that box, the smaller one, and step away from the big box. I’m right behind you, and I’m going to stay right behind you.’

Sunday removed her fingers from the gap between the boxes. She’d budged the small box just enough to feel that it was light, if not empty.

‘I don’t understand what’s going on,’ she said, standing and moving away from the box as she’d been told to. ‘Other than the fact that it feels criminal.’

‘Not at all,’ Dorcas said. ‘Quite the opposite, really. I’m intervening to prevent the execution of a criminal act. In the absence of an effective Mechanism, I’m obliged to do so. Now kneel again.’

‘If there was a Mechanism,’ Sunday answered, lowering down as she’d been ordered, ‘I doubt very much whether you’d be holding something against the back of my helmet.’

‘That’s as may be. But as I said, what we’re trying to do here is stop a crime, not create one.’

‘The crime being…?’

‘The removal of artefacts from the Evolvarium without the necessary authorisation. I’m afraid everything here that isn’t geology belongs to the Overfloater Consortium. You should have realised that before you came blundering in.’

From her kneeling position Sunday looked around slowly, careful not make any sudden movements. She had walked perhaps twenty paces from the big box when Dorcas ordered her to kneel again. The woman was still behind her. Sibyl, the other Overfloater, was holding a kind of pneumatic drill, double-gripped like a gangster-era machine gun. It was heavy and green and wrapped in a gristle of cabling. Gribelin and Jitendra were kneeling on the ground before her, their hands raised as high as their suit articulation allowed.

‘Piton-drivers,’ Dorcas said. ‘We use them to fire anchors into the ground when we need to moor-up during a storm. They use compressed air to drive self-locking cleats fifty centimetres into solid rock. Just think what that would do to common-or-garden suit armour.’

‘I didn’t come to steal from the Overfloaters. You know why I’m here. Whatever’s in that box is family property, that’s all, and it was buried here before the Evolvarium was created. It’s got nothing to do with you or your machines. If I take it, nothing changes. No one gets richer or poorer.’

‘If that’s the case,’ Dorcas said, ‘then you won’t mind if I have it instead, will you?’

‘I said it belongs to me, to my family.’

‘Can you prove this?’

‘Of course. I didn’t end up here by accident. I followed clues, all the way from the Moon.’

‘Then you can submit a claim for return of confiscated property through the usual channels.’ Dorcas seemed to think for a moment. ‘Of course, to prove that you followed those clues, you’ll have to mention that incident with the Chinese, to which your name hasn’t hitherto been linked.’

‘Who’s behind this?’ Jitendra asked.

‘There’s no one “behind” anything,’ Dorcas said. ‘I’m merely asserting the rule of law.’

‘It’s just that you’d only know about what happened on the Moon if the Pans had told you,’ Jitendra said.

‘I’m not surprised,’ Sunday said. ‘If anything, I’m amazed it’s taken them this long.’

‘To do what?’ Gribelin asked.

‘To steal the box from under my nose. It’s been too easy, hasn’t it? They’ve been falling over themselves to help us get this far. Now they’ve decided: enough is enough. We don’t need Sunday to follow the rest of the clues. We can do that on our own, thanks very much, or just not bother.’ She shook her head, disgusted at her own unwillingness to see things clearly until this lacerating moment. ‘Soya warned me,’ she said.

‘Soya?’ Dorcas asked. ‘Who the hell is Soya?’

‘Someone I should have listened to when I had the chance. Not that it would have made much difference. How far could I have got, without the Pans’ assistance?’

‘Maybe I’m missing something,’ Gribelin said, ‘but if the Pans are paying me, why is this shit happening?’

‘Let’s not allow this to come between us, Grib,’ Dorcas said soothingly. ‘We’re both too old for that. You’ve done an honest job and you’ve been paid for it. You had no right to assist in the extraction of materials from the Evolvarium, so you could say that you’re getting off very lightly by being interdicted before the crime could be fully actualised.’

‘I told you what we had in mind. You said nothing about stealing the fucking box from me at the last minute.’

‘Yes, well, that was before I was fully cognisant of the possibilities.’

‘When did they contact you?’ Sunday asked. ‘Was it yesterday, after we’d been brought aboard? Was that why you delayed the dig, when we still had daylight to spare? So you could haggle terms with the Pans?’

‘She’s not going to admit to them being behind this,’ Jitendra said.

‘No,’ Sunday said. ‘You’re right. But I thought they could be trusted – to a point, at least. I trusted Chama and Gleb. I even trusted Holroyd. And if they’re screwing me over, what are they doing to my brother?’

‘I very much doubt that Chama and Gleb had anything to do with this,’ Jitendra said.

On an open channel, obviously not caring that her words would be heard by everyone present, Dorcas said, ‘The box is secure. Send down two more crew to pick us up and start prepping for departure. I want to be out of here before the golem leads the hammerheads to us.’

‘May be a bit late for that,’ Gribelin said, angling his helmet to nod eastwards. Still kneeling, Sunday twisted to look as well, keeping her movements smooth and slow. She made out a plume of dust, a bumbling silver glint at the point where it met the ground.

Dorcas cursed, some Martian oath that the translation layer couldn’t parse. ‘I was meant to be alerted!’

‘Nine kays and closing,’ Sibyl said. ‘There’s still time, if we hurry.’

Dorcas prodded Sunday. ‘Get up.’

‘Make your mind up. You just told me to kneel down.’

This time the prod was harder, enough to rattle Sunday’s head against the inside of her helmet. ‘I won’t ask again. Remember, bad things happen out here. No one’s going to bat so much as an eyelid if you don’t show up in Vishniac again. They went into the Evolvarium without an official escort – what were they expecting?’

Sunday rose. ‘Whatever you think you’re doing, understand this. You’re not just stealing this box from me. You’re stealing the corporate property of Akinya Space. Are you really sure you want to make an enemy of us?’

‘Tell that to Lin Wei. I seem to remember Akinya Space stuck the knife in her business, all those years ago.’ A prod, less violent this time. ‘Now walk. All of you. Go as far as that ridge, and keep close to each other.’

Sunday pushed any thoughts of grand heroics out of her mind. She wasn’t going to take a chance against the piton-driver, not when Dorcas was only a few paces behind her. The three of them did as they were instructed, leaving Sibyl free to retrieve the smaller box. Turning to look back while she walked, Sunday watched the other woman extract the lacquered box from the larger container without incident. She held it up to her visor and with one gloved hand eased up the patterned lid.

Sibyl examined the contents for a few seconds, poking a finger into whatever was inside, then closed the lid carefully. There was no way of telling what she’d seen.

‘Keep walking,’ Dorcas said.

Despite the order, Gribelin stopped and pointed. ‘Hammerhead!’ he bellowed, like a whaler sighting a spout.

‘Move!’ Dorcas snarled.

The hammerhead was some distance beyond the golem’s rover, but it was rearing up now, assuming full and dreadful aspect. Sunday’s visor graphed up a high-mag zoom, sensing her focus. A down-angled claw hammer, big as the rover itself, pivoted on the head-end of a mechanical spine as long as a train. The machine cut through the terrain in an S-wave, each of its house-sized spinal modules equipped with out-jutting legs, sinuous and in constant whipping motion. The golem was travelling quickly, kicking dust back at its pursuer, but the hammerhead looked to be gaining. They watched it scoop up boulders and fling them through the air, raining down on the golem with ballistic precision.

Sunday had been running from the golem from the moment it had announced itself in Crommelin, but now she welcomed its arrival. Given the alternative, she would far rather deal with Lucas than Dorcas and the Pans. Watching the hammerhead close the distance on the rover, she willed the golem forward.

It wasn’t enough. A car-sized boulder spun through the air, barely missing the rover and landing slightly ahead of it. The rover bludgeoned into the obstacle, its nose digging down as its tail flipped up. Wheels spun in the air. The rover, its front end crumpled, fell onto its side. The hammerhead continued throwing rocks as it approached.

Sunday tore her gaze away from the spectacle long enough to see the airship reaching down its arms to scoop up Dorcas and Sibyl. It hauled them into the sky, along with their improvised weapons and the black box.

‘Good luck!’ Dorcas said over the suit-to-suit channel. ‘We’ll do what we can to push that hammerhead away, but I wouldn’t stick around if I were you.’ She let her piton-gun fall to the dust. ‘I’ll buy you a drink next time we’re both in Vishniac, Grib.’

The gondola’s airlock was open: another crewperson was waiting to receive Dorcas and Sibyl. The airship’s engines swivelled on their mountings, the deltoid gasbag turning with the ponderousness of a cloud. Gribelin looked dumbstruck. He was hurrying back to the truck, kicking dust with his heels. He paused to scoop up the piton-gun, shaking the dirt from its workings. Sunday and Jitendra started after him.

But she couldn’t not look at the golem. The hammerhead was on it now, rearing above the crashed rover. It swung back its head, angling it as far as the hinge allowed, then swung the hammer down, putting its entire body into the movement so that it looked, for an instant, as if the robot were no more than a whip being cracked. The hammer drove down onto the rover. The head angled back, swung again. The rover was being crushed and pulverised. Sunday thought of the golem inside, what must now be left of it. She hoped it had come alone.

They had reached the truck. The hammerhead had smashed the other vehicle six or seven times now. Bits of it had broken off, and now the Evolvarium machine was employing its cilia-like legs to pick through the debris. There was something obscene and avaricious about the haste with which it went about the task of recycling the broken machine, shovelling the prime cuts into a ring-shaped aperture just under its hinge-point. A horror of counterrotating teeth spun at high speed inside the maw, grinding and slicing.

Gribelin hauled himself onto the side of his truck. He looked back, still holding the piton-gun, and then switched his attention to the hammerhead. Sunday looked at it as well. It was still next to the wreck, but it had interrupted its feeding. The ‘head’ was swivelling slowly around, like a battleship turret moving onto its next target.

‘It knows we’re here,’ Gribelin said.

‘Then we’d better do what Dorcas just said,’ Sunday answered. ‘Get the fuck out of here.’

‘Lucas couldn’t outrun it, could he?’ Jitendra asked, fear breaking his voice. ‘What hope have we got?’

‘Maybe Dorcas can scare it away,’ Sunday said. Instead of heading towards the hammerhead, however, the airship was moving in the opposite direction.

‘And maybe I trust Dorcas about as far as I can piss, right now,’ Gribelin said. Through his visor, the set of his face was grim and calculating. He glanced at the hammerhead again, then his truck, then Sunday and Jitendra.

‘Run,’ he said.

Sunday frowned. ‘What do you mean—’

‘Run,’ he repeated, lowering the muzzle of the piton-gun in her direction to dispel any remaining doubt. ‘Run, sweet cheeks, and keep running. Hammerheads lock on to the biggest target they can find, and they’re smart enough to go after a machine rather than a person in a suit. Until the machine escapes, or they catch it. Whichever happens first.’

Sunday wasn’t processing. All she was seeing was a man pointing a non-weapon at her, blocking her access to the one thing that stood even a remote chance of outrunning the Evolvarium creature. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Let us in.’

From his position on the truck’s side, Gribelin kicked hard. His boot caught her in the middle of her chest. She crashed back, falling against Jitendra, who stumbled and flailed before finding his balance. ‘Gribelin!’ he called. ‘You can’t do this!’

‘Run,’ Gribelin said again. He was in the truck now, venting its cabin air in a single explosive gasp so that he didn’t have to go through the airlock cycle. Still on her back, Sunday watched him settle into the control position and work the levers. The stabilising legs spidered away. The wheels churned, found their grip.

‘He’s abandoning us,’ Jitendra said.

‘I’m not so sure,’ Sunday replied as the truck backed away and turned. She rolled onto her side and forced herself up. She remembered what Gribelin had told her, that they should do exactly what he said if the shit came down. This predicament, she decided, adequately satisfied the requirements. ‘But I do think we should run.’

So they ran, as fast as the suits allowed, which was nowhere near as fast as she would have liked, and maybe a fifth of the speed of Gribelin’s rover, now scudding away from them with a huge peacock’s tail of dust behind it.

‘It’s taking the bait,’ Jitendra said, between ragged breaths. Sunday barely had breath herself. They were pushing the suits to their limit, their own lungs and muscles doing at least as much work as the suits’ servos.

‘Keep moving,’ she said.

But she couldn’t resist a look back. The hammerhead had abandoned its first kill. Now it was going after Gribelin, but not with any sense of urgency. Conserving its energy, knowing that it could catch him up in patient increments, over kilometres. She forced herself to keep running, or to maintain what was now little more than an exhausted shambling jog. She was starting to feel light-headed, with stars spangling the edges of her vision. The faceplate readouts were all in the red, warning her that she was pushing the suit beyond its recommended performance envelope.

Never mind the suit, she thought. This is pretty far outside my own performance envelope.

There’d been no stated intention, no agreement between them that they should run in a certain direction, other than away from the truck. But that had been sufficient shared volition, Sunday realised now, to send them towards the golem’s wreck. It had looked awfully far away, but distances on Mars were deceptive. She crested a shallow ridge, and with a dreamlike lurch of contracting perspectives it was suddenly much closer.

It looked bad, too. She’d never had any real expectation that the attack had been survivable, but any hopes she might have entertained were now obliterated. The rover was in pieces. It had been ripped apart and pounded into mangled and flattened shapes, now barely recognisable as the vehicle parts they had once been. She thought of Dali again: of sagging watches draped over leafless branches. The Evolvarium creature had turned the rover into art.

The suit’s warning alerts were now more than she could endure, and her own heart felt like a piece of machinery about to burst from her chest. Her lungs felt as if the sun had been poured into them. She could not keep running.

Lucas’s proxy lay on the ground.

The golem had no need of a surface suit, and was dressed as it had been in the Red Menace. For an instant her eyes tricked her, telling her that half of it must be buried under dust, until she realised that half of it was missing. The golem consisted of a head, an upper torso, one left arm. Lucas’s proxy body had been severed in a diagonal line from the upper-right shoulder to the left hip. Sunday could not see the rest of it. Perhaps the other parts were in the remains of the rover, or scattered, or had already been digested by the Evolvarium creature.

It was the first time she’d seen the inner workings of a golem. There were glutinous layers, sheaths of active polymer, a skeletal structure of translucent white plastic, fibrous bundles of nerves and power-transmission circuits. A blue-grey blubber of artificial muscles, precisely veined with fluid ducting. Not much metal, and very little in the way of hard mechanisms. Purple ichor, some kind of lubrication or coolant medium, had spilt out of it and was already freezing on the Tharsis ground. The right side of its face was mashed in, the ear and scalp missing. An eyeball lolled out of its socket, trailing a rope of greasy fibre optics. The golem’s intelligence, in so far as it had any, was distributed throughout its entire anatomy. But the eyes were still its primary visual acquisition system.

She stood next to it, hands on knees, waiting for the fog of exhaustion to clear from her vision.

The golem looked at her. The good eyeball tracked her in its socket, the other one twitching like a fish on land. The mouth moved, clicking open and shut in the manner of a ventriloquist’s dummy, as if operated by a crude mechanism. For the moment, there was no animation in the face. It was like a limp rubber mask with no person wearing it, sagging in the wrong places. Then Lucas seemed to push through, his personality inhabiting the golem. The face tautened, filled out, and the mouth formed a smile.

‘I’m in trouble,’ Sunday said over the suit’s general comm channel. ‘I can’t reach the aug, and aside from my brother and some people I don’t trust any more, no one knows I’m here. That leaves you, Lucas. And I don’t even know if you’re hearing this, or if you still have a ching bind back to Earth.’

The golem spoke. She heard it in her head. ‘I think we’re both in trouble, Sunday.’

‘When was the last time you received an update from Lucas?’

‘I’ve been autonomous for hours now. I’m afraid it’s highly unlikely that there’ll be any re-establishment of contact, at least not before I become inoperable.’

‘Is Lucas aware of my whereabouts?’

‘Lucas knows that I followed you into the Evolvarium, and that your probable target was Eunice’s landing site. However, he didn’t know that for a fact.’

Sunday looked around. Gribelin and the hammerhead were a long way off now: from this distance, she couldn’t see much more than the rover’s dust plume. She hoped Gribelin was still maintaining his lead.

Jitendra staggered to a halt, bracing his hands on his hips. He saw the golem, shuddered instinctively. It was a natural reaction. It looked so plausible, so lifelike.

‘It should never have come to this, cousin,’ Sunday said, with genuine sorrow.

The golem’s one good eye twinkled with bitter-sweet amusement. ‘I was always prepared to put the family before my personal advancement. It’s just a shame you didn’t feel the same way. What have you gained, though? They took the item. You came all this way for nothing.’ The face smiled. Purple ichor drooled from its lips. ‘You wasted everything, Sunday.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’ She planted a foot on the golem’s skull. ‘There are always compensations.’

She felt the plastic crack wetly under her weight, like some large, brittle, yolk-filled egg. The pettiness of the gesture sickened her to the marrow. There was spite in her that she had never once suspected.

But at the same time she did not regret it at all.

Jitendra had been digging through the wreckage of the rover, the parts that hadn’t been completely pancaked, for many hours now. He was looking for something, anything, that might enable them to send a distress signal. Sunday had helped, at first, but then the futility of the exercise had burst over her in a wave of bleak despair. He would not find anything of use, nor would they succeed in contacting anyone who could help. If they tried to walk, they’d still be inside the Evolvarium when night returned, and their suits would certainly not keep them alive for more than a couple of days. It was already long past noon and the sun was hurtling back down towards the horizon with indecent haste.

‘I don’t think we should stay here,’ she said, for the third or fourth time. ‘If the hammerhead comes back to take another look at the wreck…’

On the other hand, by remaining close to the wreckage of the rover they might be less conspicuous than two figures out in the landscape, far from any other manufactured thing. Did the machines hunt by heat or sound, primarily? And was there sense in staying close to the drill site, in the faint hope that the golem had managed to report home? She might have spurned the family, but they wouldn’t let her die out here. Not knowingly, she hoped.

Gribelin was dead. She was certain of this now. Almost at the point when the dust plume faded into the pink haze of distance above the horizon, there had been a bright and soundless explosion. She had felt the report of it seconds later, rumbling through the ground like elephant talk. She imagined him allowing the hammerhead to come as close to the rover as he dared, before triggering something aboard the vehicle: a cache of explosives, some illegal weapon. Whether it had been enough to destroy the hammerhead, or merely to exclude the possibility of its catching Gribelin alive, there was no way of telling. A bonsai mushroom cloud had curled up, a brain rising swollen and cerebral from its own spinal cord, and there had been no sign of the hammerhead after that.

But the hammerhead was not even an apex predator.

‘I want Eunice,’ Sunday said. ‘She’d know what to do. She always knew what to do.’

Jitendra kicked aside a buckled metal plate. ‘There’s nothing here we can use. And I’m not even sure it’s a good idea to keep communicating like this. Maybe we should go into radio silence from now on.’ He paused, his breath ragged from the exertion of searching the wreck. That was Jitendra’s way of coping, Sunday thought: keep busy, until even he had no option but to admit the futility of it. ‘So, which direction do we walk? The winds haven’t been too bad since we came in. If our air recyclers hold out we can probably follow the vehicle tracks all the way back to Vishniac, even if we lose suit nav.’

If they lost suit nav, Sunday thought, getting lost would be the least of their worries. It would mean the suits were dying on them, and that life support would be among the failing systems. ‘Maybe another Overfloater will take pity on us.’

‘Yes. They do appear to be the kind and considerate sort, based on Dorcas’s example.’

‘I’m just saying. When you’re out of options, you cling to the unrealistic.’ But Sunday had been searching the sky for hours. There were no other airships up there. ‘I could kill her. Better than that. I will kill her, if I ever get the chance.’

Which I won’t, a quiet voice added.

‘I don’t think she meant us to die. On the other hand, I don’t think she thought things through particularly well.’

‘Do me a favour,’ Sunday said. ‘Can you – just for once – stop trying to look on the bright side all the fucking time? And stop trying to always see the good in everyone, because sometimes it just isn’t there. Sometimes people are just arseholes. Evil fucking arseholes.’

Jitendra dragged a piece of rover panelling next to Sunday and jammed it into the ground like a windbreak. ‘We’re going to be the hottest things for miles around. The more thermal screening we can arrange, the better our chances.’

‘Our chances are zero, Jitendra. But if it makes you feel better…’ She blinked hard. Her eyes stung with tears, but there was nothing she could do about that now.

‘It would make me feel better if you helped a bit,’ he said. ‘Some of these pieces are too big for me to manage on my own.’

Anything to please Jitendra. And he was right. Better to be doing something. Better to be doing something, no matter how stupid and pointless, than nothing at all.

While the universe surveyed their ramshackle plans and laughed.

They made a crude shelter, open to the skies but offering some cover from anything approaching on or near the ground. Sunday doubted that it would make much difference – their heat was going to bleed out whatever they did – but if it made them slightly less visible then she supposed the effort was not entirely wasted. They had depleted some more of their suits’ power and oxygen, but they had not surrendered. And when the work was done, the shelter fashioned to the best of their abilities and the sun lower still, they sat next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, maintaining tactile contact so they could talk.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sunday said finally.

‘Sorry for being tricked and cheated?’

‘Sorry for what I got you into. Sorry for what I got Gribelin into.’

‘I’m sorry for him as well. But he was an old man, in a dangerous line of work. You didn’t kill him; his job did.’

‘Maybe we’d have been better staying together.’

‘We’re still alive,’ Jitendra said. He tightened his hand around hers in emphasis. ‘He isn’t. That has to be the better outcome, doesn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sunday said, and the words surprised her because they seemed to come unbidden.

‘I do,’ Jitendra said. ‘And while there’s a second more of living to be had, I’ll always choose life over death. Because anything at all could happen in that second.’

‘Since when did you start believing in miracles?’ Sunday asked.

‘I don’t,’ he answered. ‘But I do believe in…’ Jitendra fell silent, long enough that she began to wonder if the tactile link had stopped working. She followed his line of sight, out through the narrow vertical gap where two of the wreck’s pieces didn’t quite meet.

‘Jitendra?’

‘I haven’t moved since we sat down,’ he said. ‘My line of sight’s still the same. And I definitely couldn’t see that hill an hour ago.’

Sunday adjusted her position and saw what he meant. She’d have seen it herself, had she been sitting a little to her left. It was no hill, she knew. The topography here was clear: other than the volcanoes and some ancient craters, there were no sharp protrusions in the terrain.

More than that, Jitendra was right. The hill hadn’t been there while they made the shelter.

‘The Aggregate,’ Sunday said, and when Jitendra didn’t answer, she knew it was because he had nothing better to offer.

And the Aggregate was coming closer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Geoffrey checked his restraints. The Quaynor was burning fuel again, continuing with orbital insertion and approach/rendezvous with the Winter Palace. Up in the forward command blister – the nearest thing the ship had to a bridge – Jumai and Mira Gilbert were tethered either side of him, secured within a messy cat’s cradle of bungee cords and buckle-on harnesses. The command blister was a metal-framed cupola set with impact-resistant glass and furnished with quaintly old-fashioned controls and readouts.

‘Your family are still ahead of us,’ Gilbert said, confirming the news that Geoffrey had been half-expecting. ‘We had some delta-vee in reserve. Unfortunately, so did the Kinyeti.’ She tapped at a fold-down instrument panel, muttering some dark aquatic oath. Reaction motors popped and stuttered, finessing the Quaynor’s course. ‘Going to be a nail-biter, I’m afraid. We’ll meet them on the same orbit. Unfortunately it looks like they’ll make dock before we do.’

‘How many docking slots?’ Jumai asked.

‘Close-ups show one at either pole. Anyone’s guess as to whether both are serviceable.’

‘Been a long while since there was any need for two ships to be docked at the same time,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If ever.’

The Quaynor wasn’t new – Geoffrey could tell that much just from the rank mustiness of his living quarters – but he doubted that it dated from much before the turn of the century. Rather it had been tailored to Pan ideological specifications, which dictated a strict minimum of aug-generated contrivances. Glass windows, so that the universe might be apprehended photon by photon, on its own blazing terms, rather than through layers of distorting mediation. Control and navigation systems that required physical interaction, so that a person had to be present, in body as well as mind. Decision-making abdicated to fallible, slow-witted human pilots, rather than suites of swift and tireless expert systems.

‘What are Hector and Lucas hoping to gain here?’ Jumai asked.

Geoffrey scratched a nugget of crystal-hard dust from his eye. The period of unconsciousness in the rocket hadn’t done anything to take the edge off his exhaustion.

‘The cousins couldn’t give two shits about what’s inside the Winter Palace. Not for themselves, anyway. They just don’t want me finding anything that might hurt Eunice’s reputation or endanger the business.’ He adjusted one of the restraints where it was starting to chafe. ‘They’ll be planning to scuttle it, one way or another. They already have the paperwork in place.’

Jumai asked, ‘Reckon they brought bombs with them?’

‘Plenty of stuff in a ship that can be used to make a bang,’ Gilbert said. ‘That’s before we even get to the fact that there’s a whole other ship stuck inside the Winter Palace.’

Geoffrey tensed at the arrival of a ching request. It was Hector, and the ching coordinates placed him near the Moon.

‘I don’t think we have much to say to each other,’ he said, opting to keep the conversation strictly voice-only.

‘You took the call,’ Hector said, his reply bouncing back from the Kinyeti almost immediately, ‘which suggests you think there’s something worth discussing.’

‘Is it just you, or did Lucas come along for the ride?’

‘Only room for one of us, Geoffrey – I came up in a cargo shot, not the crewed capsule. Stress wouldn’t have been good for Lucas, not after what he did to his leg.’ He emitted a brief, humourless laugh. ‘It was quite a trip. You should try it sometime.’

‘I did it once,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Not this way, with no cushioning and the safety margins dialled to zero. The kick when I hit the bend at the base of the mountain… that was something. The view, though… once the pusher lasers had me and I was sailing into orbit. Glorious.’

‘Glad it was worthwhile. You’re brave or stupid, one of the two.’

Hector let slip another laugh. ‘It’s still not too late to make this good, Geoffrey. Whatever you think you’re going to achieve in the Winter Palace, you don’t have to go through with it.’

‘So I should just leave you to destroy it?’

‘We have a good life here, cousin, everything we need. Why are you so anxious to ruin things?’

‘If Eunice wanted to screw the family, she had her whole life to do it.’

‘You have a touching faith in human nature. I’d say she’s perfectly capable of screwing us from the afterlife, if that’s what she wanted.’

‘Hector, trust my sister on this. Sunday knew Eunice inside out. Eunice didn’t do pointless, spiteful gestures. And why the hell would she have something against us, anyway?’

‘She lost her mind, cousin. Out there, on the edge of the system. From that point on, she wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘I don’t think she lost her mind. I think she saw something out there, had some kind of experience… something that made her look back on everything she’d achieved up to that point and realise it wasn’t necessarily worth all the blood and toil she’d put into it. But that’s not going mad. It’s called getting a sense of perspective.’

After an interval Hector said, ‘Love to think you were right, but we can’t take any chances here. Too much depends on us.’

‘At least let me see what’s inside the Winter Palace.’

‘And if it’s something that hurts us? Something we can’t recover from?’

‘I’m not going to destroy the business,’ Geoffrey said, exhaustedly. ‘I don’t give enough of a damn about it.’

‘And if we’d done something bad? Some crime only she knew about? If you found out that your own flesh and blood had done something unspeakable? Could your conscience allow you to keep the secret then, cousin?’ He imagined Hector shaking his head, tutting beneath his breath. ‘You wouldn’t be able to live with that kind of secret.’

Softly Geoffrey asked, ‘What kind of crime?’

‘How the fuck should I know? Artilects, genetics, weapons: who knows what she got up to a hundred years ago? Who knows what anyone got up to back then?’

‘This doesn’t make any sense, Hector. We’re almost talking like equals now. Why couldn’t we have had this conversation weeks ago?’

Hector sighed, as if it bored him to have to explain something that should have been obvious. ‘Weeks ago you were still family, Geoffrey. Now you’re not. You’ve defected, turned traitor. Now you’re a business adversary. Now you’re an equal. That changes everything. I feel I can almost respect you.’

‘Please turn around.’

‘Kinyeti’s locked on, cousin. I’d maintain a safe distance, I were you.’

‘What are you planning?’

‘What I came here to do,’ Hector said. ‘Demolition.’

Rather than completing its approach, the Kinyeti came to a station-keeping halt fifty kilometres out, following almost the same orbit as the Winter Palace. Geoffrey wondered, optimistically, if Hector had had second thoughts. Perhaps, after all, he had begun to get through to his cousin, making him see sense.

But no. After ten minutes, a much smaller vehicle detached from the head of the mining ship and resumed the original approach vector. They studied the tiny ball-shaped craft at high-mag via the Quaynor’s own cameras. It was the kind of short-range ship-to-ship ferry that could also serve as an escape capsule or single-use re-entry vehicle.

‘Should have seen this coming,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Hector doesn’t want the Kinyeti’s crew getting any closer to the Winter Palace than necessary. Still playing family secrets close to his chest.’

‘Kinyeti is withdrawing,’ Arethusa said as the bigger ship fired a string of steering motors along its spine. ‘Guess they’ll be returning to collect Hector, but for the moment he’s told them to keep the hell away.’

‘They’ll be paid well enough not to ask awkward questions,’ Geoffrey said.

Once he was on his way, it only took Hector twenty minutes to complete the crossing to the Winter Palace. Using the capsule’s micro-thrusters, he executed one inspection pass, spiralling around the station’s cylinder from end to end before closing in for final docking. If the Winter Palace had queried the little ship’s approach authorisation – and then given clearance to commence final docking manoeuvres – there was no practical way to intercept that tight-beamed comms traffic from the Quaynor. Geoffrey could only presume that they would be challenged on their own approach.

‘Synching for dock,’ Gilbert said as Hector’s ship went into a slow roll, matching the station’s centrifugal spin rate. ‘Contact and capture in five… four… three…’

The capsule docked. Clamp arms folded down to secure it. Two or three minutes passed and then there was an exhalation of silvery glitter from the airlock collar. A gasp of escaping pressure, held there since the last time the lock was activated, and then the seals locked tight. The tiny capsule was almost lost in the details of the station’s endcap docking and service structures.

‘Lining us up for the other pole,’ Gilbert said, tapping commands into one of the fold-down keypads. ‘Think we can pass through the entire structure?’

‘It’s just a big hollow tube, with Winter Queen running down the middle,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We shouldn’t have any problems, especially as Arethusa already chinged aboard not so long ago.’

‘I only saw what she let me see,’ Arethusa warned.

Hector’s transfer into the smaller ship had eaten into his lead over the Quaynor, but they were still thirty minutes from docking. Geoffrey drummed his fingertips, the seconds crawling by with agonising slowness. He couldn’t see Hector taking his time inside, no matter the novelty value of being able to roam at will through Eunice’s private kingdom.

They were fifty kilometres out when the first challenge came: shrill and automated, fully in keeping with Eunice’s general policy of not extending a magnanimous welcome to visitors. ‘Unidentified vehicle on approach heading one-one-nine, three-one-seven: you do not have docking or fly-by authorisation. Please adjust your vector to comply with our mandatory exclusion volume.’ The voice, which was speaking Swahili, could easily have passed for his grandmother’s. ‘If you do not adjust your vector, we cannot be held responsible for any damage caused by our anti-collision systems.’

‘Hold the course,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Let her – it – know we mean business. Eunice: are you listening to me?’

‘I’m here,’ the construct said, deigning not to project a figment into what was already a cramped space.

‘Make yourself heard by everyone present, including Arethusa. No reason for them not to listen in on our conversation.’

‘Sunday wouldn’t like that.’

‘Do it anyway. I’m ordering you.’

There was a barely measurable pause. ‘It’s done. They can hear me now.’

‘Good.’ Geoffrey looked around at his companions, trusting that they’d settle for asking questions later. ‘I’m afraid there’s no time to bring you up to speed right now, Eunice, but we need docking permission for the Winter Palace.’

‘Tell it you’re on Akinya business.’

There was little point seeking the construct’s guidance if he was not willing to give her suggestions the benefit of the doubt. ‘Mira – am I patched through?’

‘Say your piece,’ Gilbert said.

‘This is Geoffrey Akinya, grandson of Eunice. I am aboard the deep-space vehicle Quaynor, requesting approach and docking authorisation.’ He waited a moment, then, for all that it sounded pompous, added, ‘I am on important family business.’

‘Approach approval has already been assigned to Hector Akinya. No further docking slots are available.’

Geoffrey ground his teeth. ‘Hector is docked at one pole; we can come in at the other.’

‘No further docking slots are available,’ the voice repeated, but this time with an edge of menace.

‘I have the right to come in,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Disarm your anti-collision systems and give me clearance for the unoccupied dock. You have no choice but to comply with a family instruction.’

‘Your identity is not verified. Desist approach and adjust your vector.’

‘It doesn’t believe you’re you,’ Eunice said.

Geoffrey bit off a sarcastic response before it left his mouth. ‘Why did it accept Hector, and not me?’

‘Hector came in on an Akinya vehicle, showing Akinya registration – the same way Memphis would have done. The Winter Palace had no reason not to let him through.’

He grimaced. ‘Mira – can we fake a civil registration?’

‘Not infallibly, not legally and most certainly not now, given that the habitat already has us pegged as being under different ownership.’ Gilbert shot him an apologetic glance. ‘You’re just going to have to talk your way through this one, Geoffrey. Even Jumai can’t help us until we’re docked.’

‘Need some ideas here, Eunice,’ he said.

‘If the habitat recognises the notion of family visiting rights, if it grasps that Hector is an Akinya and it therefore has an obligation to let him dock – then it may be running something a little bit like me. Much less sophisticated, of course – but a model of Eunice, all the same, and with an attempt at an embedded knowledge base.’

‘All well and good, but I’m not sure that gets us anywhere,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Talk to it. Explain that you are Geoffrey Akinya, and that you’re prepared to submit to questioning to prove it.’

‘Think that’s going to work?’ Jumai asked him.

‘Don’t know. Any other bright ideas, short of fighting our way past anti-collision systems? Those are basically guns, in case you missed the briefing.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied. ‘I do get the fact that there are real risks here.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Geoffrey said. And he meant it, too: of all the people he knew, it was hard to think of anyone less risk-averse than Jumai.

‘Look,’ she said, giving him a conciliatory look, ‘if the construct says this is our best shot—’

‘Are we still on air?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Say your piece,’ Gilbert confirmed.

He cleared his throat. ‘This is Geoffrey Akinya speaking again. I have no formal means of establishing my identity, not at this range. But I’m willing to talk. Eunice knew me. Maybe not well, but as well as she knew anyone in our family. If there’s something, anything, that I can say to prove myself… please ask. I will do my best to answer.’

There was silence. Jumai opened her mouth to speak, but she had not even begun to draw breath when the habitat answered again.

‘Disengage all external comms except for this tight-beam link. Any attempt to query the aug will be detected.’

‘It’s done,’ Arethusa said.

After a moment the Winter Palace said, ‘Wooden elephants, a birthday present. How many were there, and how old would Geoffrey Akinya have been when he received them?’

He looked around at his fellow travellers. ‘I would have been five, six,’ he mouthed, keeping his words low enough not to be picked up on the ship-to-station channel. ‘I don’t remember!’

‘I saw those elephants,’ Jumai said, in the same hushed voice. ‘You told me you didn’t even think they’d come from Eunice.’

‘There was a nanny from Djibouti looking after Sunday and at the time… I thought maybe she’d got them, or maybe Memphis.’

‘Ask the construct,’ Gilbert said.

‘Can’t. There’s a copy of her assigned to me, like a cloud hovering around me in data-space, but she’s not inside my skull. Without the aug she can’t tell me anything.’

‘I must have an answer,’ the habitat said. ‘How old was Geoffrey Akinya?’

‘Six,’ he said. ‘Six elephants, and… I was six at the time. My sixth birthday.’

Silence again, and then, ‘Approach authorisation granted. Proceed for docking at the trailing pole.’

Geoffrey let out a gasp of bottled-up tension. ‘We’re in. Or at least allowed a little closer.’

‘How’d you figure it out, five or six?’ Jumai asked.

‘I didn’t! It was a guess.’

‘Lucky fucking guess.’

‘She knew about the elephants,’ Geoffrey said, as much to himself as anyone present. ‘She may not have bought them… but I didn’t even think she cared enough to know—’

‘Enough to make it the billion-yuan question,’ Jumai said.

‘We’re lined up,’ Mira Gilbert said. ‘Still off-aug, and we’ll stay that way for the time being.’ Then her tone changed. ‘Wait. Something’s happening with the Kinyeti. Thruster activity.’

‘Where’s she headed?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Give me a few seconds to nail the vector.’ Gilbert watched and waited, tapping commands into her fold-out keyboard and studying the complex multicoloured readouts as they squirmed through various scenarios. ‘Resumed her approach for the Winter Palace,’ she said, sounding doubtful of her own analysis. ‘That can’t be right, can it? He’s only been in there, what, twenty minutes?’

‘Maybe that’s all he needs,’ Jumai said.

‘He still wouldn’t want to call in the Kinyeti,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Not when he has his own means of getting back. So maybe there’s a problem with the ferry, or he’s told the Kinyeti to block our approach to the other dock.’

‘We have approach authorisation,’ Arethusa said. ‘If he blocks us, this becomes an interjurisdictional incident.’

‘I think it already became one the moment I signed up for citizenship,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I’m slowing our own approach,’ Gilbert said. ‘Want to see what the Kinyeti’s aiming for, before we get in any closer.’

Geoffrey reminded himself that he wasn’t chinging here, his flesh and blood body safely back in Africa. He was physically present, aboard a huge, ponderous, fragile-as-gossamer machine, something that could no more tolerate a collision with another of its kind than it could execute dogfight course changes. And with two delicate ships being drawn to the candleflame of the Winter Palace, the chances of an accident, let alone a deliberate obstructional act, could only increase.

‘Kinyeti is ten kays out,’ Gilbert said, a few minutes later. ‘Looks as if they’re lining up for… the docking node where Hector’s already clamped on. That make sense to anyone?’

‘Might be the only entry point they trust,’ Jumai said.

Geoffrey nodded. ‘Let’s wait and see what their intentions are.’

A second or so later, Arethusa said, ‘Pirates.’

She had seen it an instant before the rest of them: an eruption of pinprick light from either end of the habitat’s cylinder, the bright spillage of magnetic and optical collision-avoidance devices as they directed mass and energy against whatever the Winter Palace’s autonomous defence systems had identified as an incoming threat. Not an enemy, because the notion of ‘enemy’ required the supposition of intent, of directed sentience, but rather something dumb and non-negotiable, space debris or a marauding chunk of primeval rock and ice, sailing too close for comfort.

It took Geoffrey a moment to interpret Arethusa’s statement. There were no pirates. But there were proximal impact ranging and target eradication systems, and in English the acronym was precisely the word Arethusa had uttered. Guns, basically, but rigorously fail-safed, incapable of being directed at anything other than a real, imminent collision hazard.

Non-weapons.

They had stood down upon Hector’s approach, but they had not shown the Kinyeti the same courtesy. A moment after he grasped what was happening, Geoffrey saw the flowering of multiple impact points along the Kinyeti’s hull, attended by puffs of sudden silver brightness as metal and ceramics underwent instantaneous vaporisation. The best the pirates could do was subject her to a continuous disruptive assault, aiming to break up her mass into smaller parts that could be individually bulldozed out of harm’s way using further kinetic-energy volleys.

Most of the ship remained. One of her centrifuge arms had been ripped loose, cartwheeling away on its own new orbit, and all up and down her hull lay a peppering of craters and voids where she had been struck. One of her fuel tanks had been punctured and was now venting furiously, while there was evidence of systemic pressure loss from three or four rupture points in the forward module. The view was clouded by the debris and gases expanding away from the ship itself, cloaking her injuries.

But she wasn’t dead. They knew this when a second stutter of heat and light signalled the Kinyeti deploying her own anti-collision systems, this time in a coordinated strike against the habitat. Quite what the legality of that action was, Geoffrey couldn’t begin to guess: the number of instances of ships being attacked by other ships, or stations by ships, or vice versa, was surely so small that there could be little or no precedent for it in modern law. That the Kinyeti was protecting herself was beyond dispute, but equally, her crew must have realised that the habitat would not permit a closer approach, and that their actions were provocative.

From the Quaynor, all they could do was watch, transfixed, as the conflict ran its course. The Kinyeti’s assault had taken out the visible pirate emplacements ringed around either end of the Winter Palace. But the Winter Palace was rotating, and her slow spin brought undamaged emplacements into view. The Palace fired again, blasting another fuel tank, nearly severing the main axis and doing further harm to the command module at the ship’s front. The gas cloud thickened to grey-white smog. The Kinyeti retaliated, less convincingly this time, as if portions of her own defence systems had been damaged or rendered inoperable. Blast sites pockmarked the Winter Palace – some landing far from the endcaps, cratering the unmarked skin of the cylinder, punching so far into insulation that they might have touched the bedrock of Eunice’s private hothouse. The Winter Palace kept spinning, as heavy and oblivious as a grindstone. More pirates revolved into view and rained hell on the Akinya craft. There was a sputter of retaliation, then nothing.

The Winter Palace, largely undamaged even now, maintained its spin as the debris/gas cloud slowly dispersed away from the wreck of the Kinyeti. The tattered, broken-backed mining ship was still moving, still on an approach vector for the habitat.

No further attacks were forthcoming.

‘OK, would someone be so good as to clue me in on what the fuck just happened?’ Jumai asked, doubtless rhetorically.

‘Hector must have called for help, or he was late checking in,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Somewhere between his arrival and the point where it fired on the Kinyeti, the Winter Palace must have changed its mind about him being welcome.’ He sounded awed and appalled even to himself, not quite able to process what he had just witnessed.

‘There could still be survivors,’ Gilbert said. ‘I’m trying to establish direct comms. Resuming aug reach: we don’t have much to lose now, and it may be our only way of establishing a path to the Kinyeti.’ The merwoman paused, rapt with concentration. ‘Oh, wait – here’s something. General distress signal, point of origin Kinyeti. She’s calling for assistance.’

‘Can you patch me through?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘No idea if they can still hear, but you can try. Speak when ready.’

He coughed to clear his throat. ‘This is Geoffrey Akinya, calling the Kinyeti. We saw what just happened to you. What is your status, and how may we assist?’

The reply came through on voice-only comms, sounding as if it had been broken up, scrambled and only partially reassembled. ‘This is Captain Dos Santos… Akinya Space mining vehicle Kinyeti. We have sustained damage to critical systems… life support… inoperable.’ It was a man’s voice, speaking Swahili at source. ‘We can’t steer and we have no delta-vee capability. Our emergency escape vehicle is detached.’

‘They’re screwed,’ Eunice said.

‘We saw the departure,’ Geoffrey said, trying to tune out the construct but not wishing to de-voke her completely. ‘I presume Hector took the vehicle?’

‘I…’ Captain Dos Santos hesitated. Geoffrey could imagine him wondering how much he was at licence to disclose. ‘Yes. Of course.’

‘I’m Hector’s cousin, if you didn’t already know.’ Geoffrey glanced at one of Gilbert’s readouts, trusting that he was interpreting it correctly. ‘It doesn’t look as if you’re going to smash into the Winter Palace now – your vector puts you passing close to the docking hub but avoiding an actual collision. That’s lucky.’

‘They must have vented enough gas to push them off course,’ Eunice said. ‘But they’re still at risk from my guns.’

‘They’re your guns, you turn them off,’ Jumai said.

‘I can’t, dear.’

‘We don’t know how many of the Winter Palace’s guns are still operable,’ Geoffrey said, cutting over the construct, ‘and I doubt your information is any better than ours.’

‘No, probably not.’ The captain allowed himself a quiet, resigned laugh. ‘What do you suggest, Mister Akinya?’

‘We can’t risk endangering this ship until you’re out of immediate range of the Winter Palace,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Once we’re satisfied that those guns won’t be turned on us, we’ll close in for docking. You’ll have to ride things out until then. How many of you are there?’

‘Eight,’ Dos Santos answered. Comms had stabilised now: his voice was coming through much more clearly, and without dropouts. ‘That’s the regular crew, myself included.’

‘We can easily take eight survivors,’ Gilbert said. ‘It won’t overburden our life support, and at most we’ll only need to hold them for a few hours before UON or Lunar authorities arrive.’

‘There’s also Hector,’ the captain added.

‘I was about to ask,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Hector was supposed to return on his own – we were never meant to get that close. Then he signalled for help.’

‘He needed technical assistance?’

‘Rescuing. Beyond that, I can’t tell you anything. We think he may have been hurt, but that’s just guesswork – we were on voice-only, no ching, and no biomed feed from his suit.’ Dos Santos grunted: either effort or pain, it was impossible to tell which. ‘But he wouldn’t have called us unless there was a problem.’

‘OK.’ Geoffrey drew a breath, giving himself the space to collect his thoughts. ‘Are you in suits, Captain?’

‘Getting into them as we speak. Afterwards, we’ll crawl into our storm cellar. That’s the best armoured part of the Kinyeti. Should be able to ride out the worst of it in there, even full depressurisation.’

‘Whatever happens, help is on its way. I’m sorry you were dragged into this.’

‘We did what we were asked to do,’ Dos Santos replied. ‘That’s all.’

‘Good luck, Captain.’

‘Same to you, Mister Akinya.’

Dos Santos signed off. Geoffrey remained silent for a few moments, wishing it did not fall on him to say what was surely on all their minds. ‘We can’t leave him there,’ he said quietly. ‘But at the same time, we can’t endanger the Quaynor. We also have a duty of care to the Kinyeti’s survivors.’

‘If they make it through the close approach, they’ll have nothing to fear,’ Arethusa said. ‘Mira said it herself: the authorities will already have been alerted to the attack, and they’ll be on their way very shortly indeed. In a few hours, maybe less, this volume of space will be crawling with enforcement and rescue services.’

‘I’m just as concerned for your safety,’ Geoffrey said.

‘If I’d wanted to be cocooned, I’d never have left Tiamaat,’ the old aquatic answered. ‘We have an advantage over the Kinyeti, anyway – we still have power and steering. Mira, I want you to take us all the way in, to the airlock we originally agreed to use, but in such a way that you minimise our exposure to those pirate emplacements which we suspect may still be operational. Can you do that?’

‘I…’ Gilbert’s hands danced on the keypads. ‘I think so. Possibly. Whether the ship’ll take it, I don’t know. We’ll be stress-loading her to the max, to match the habitat’s spin.’

‘They build safety margins into these things,’ Arethusa answered.

‘And I’ve allowed for the margins,’ Gilbert said.

‘Let me look at this,’ Eunice said. ‘I may be able to help.’

‘Are you serious?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Totally. Voke me active ching privilege. I need to drive your body.’

‘No,’ he said, even before he’d begun to consider the implications of her request.

‘You think nothing of chinging into a golem when the mood suits you. Nor would you object if another person wished to drive your body as a warmblood proxy. Why does my request offend you so very deeply?’

He was about to say: Because you’re dead, and you were my grandmother, but he stopped himself in time. The construct was a pattern of self-evolving data, nothing more. It embodied knowledge and certain useful skill-sets. That it just happened to manifest with the body and voice of his late relative was totally immaterial.

So he told himself.

‘I don’t know if Eunice can do a better job than any of us at flying this thing,’ he told the others. ‘What she thinks she can do and what she can really do are not the same things.’

‘I flew ships like this before you were a glint in your mother’s eye,’ Eunice said. ‘The avionics, the interfaces… they’re as ancient and old-fashioned as me.’

‘If she can do this—’ Jumai said.

‘We should use all available assets,’ Arethusa concurred. ‘Mira, if you don’t like what’s happening, you can revoke Geoffrey’s command privilege at any time, can’t you?’

Gilbert gave the merwoman equivalent of a shrug. ‘More or less.’

‘I’ll accept the consequences. Geoffrey – I can’t force you to do this, but you have my consent to fly the Quaynor. If Eunice is able to help with that, so much the better.’

‘You must do this,’ Eunice said. Her tone turned needling. ‘You let elephants into your head, grandson. Surely you can make an exception for me.’

‘Give me the controls,’ he said, popping his knuckles, spreading his fingers, loosening his shoulder muscles, just as if he was readying himself for an hour in the Cessna. ‘Eunice – I’m letting you in. You know I can kick you out at any time, so don’t overstay your welcome.’

‘As if I’d ever do that.’

He voked the rarely given command, the one that assigned full voluntary control of his own body to another intelligence. There was nothing magical about it; it was merely an inversion of the usual ching protocols: nerve impulses running one way rather than the other, sensory flow leaving his head rather than entering it.

Still it was strange for him. People did this sort of thing all the time, hiring out their bodies as warmblood proxies. He’d never had cause to ching into a warmblood himself – but if the situation had demanded it, and there’d been no other choice, he supposed he’d have accepted the arrangement without complaint. But the other way round: to be the warmblood? Never in a million years.

And here he was being driven by his grandmother.

She stole his eyes first. Between one moment and the next, they weren’t looking where he wanted, but where she needed to see – and her intake of visual information was so efficient that it felt as if he had gone into a kind of quivering optic seizure, his eyeballs jerking this way and that in the manner of REM sleep. Then she took his hands. They started moving on the fold-out keypads, rap-tapping commands into the Quaynor’s avionics. It felt, for an instant, as if his hands were stuffed into enchanted gloves that forced his fingers to dance.

Then she stole his voice. It still sounded like him: she could make him speak, but she couldn’t alter the basic properties of his larynx.

‘I have an approach solution. It’s imperfect, and it will still expose us to the Winter Palace’s countermeasures. If we were to attempt to match her spin precisely, we’d break up inside sixty seconds. This is a compromise that gets us to the dock and minimises our likelihood of suffering catastrophic damage. I will assume control all the way in, and make any necessary adjustments as we go. Do I have authorisation?’

‘Do you need it?’ Gilbert asked.

‘I thought it best to ask first, child.’

‘Do it,’ Arethusa said.

The acceleration came without warning, without a cushioning transition from zero-gee. To his horror and wonderment, Geoffrey realised that he could hear the engines, even in vacuum. They had been cranked up so high that something of their output, some phantom of undamped vibration, was propagating through the chassis of the ship, despite all the intervening layers of insulation and shockproofing. It sounded like a landslide or a stampede and it made him very, very nervous. Red lights started flashing, master caution alarms sounding. The Quaynor was registering indignant objection to the punishment it was now enduring.

It had served its human masters well. Why were they putting it through this?

‘She’s holding,’ Eunice announced, through Geoffrey’s throat. ‘But that was the easy bit.’

The Quaynor had to execute a curving trajectory to match, or even come close to matching, the Winter Palace’s spin. In the Cessna, it would have needed nothing more than a modest application of stick and rudder. But curvature was acceleration, and in vacuum that could only be achieved by thrust, directed at an angle to the ship’s momentary vector. The magnetoplasma engines could not be gimballed, and therefore the Quaynor was forced to use auxiliary steering and manoeuvring rockets, pushed to their limits. Under such a load, the possibility of buckling was a very real risk. Geoffrey needed no sensors or master-caution alarms to tell him that. He could feel it in the push of his bones against his restraints, the creaks and groans from his surroundings.

When something clanged against the hull he assumed it was the resumption of the Winter Palace’s attack, but no: it was just a speck of debris from the wreckage of the Kinyeti. More came, in drumming volleys, and then they were through the thickest part of it. The acceleration and steering thrust intensified and abated in savage jerks as Eunice finessed her approach solution. They were very close now, fewer than a dozen kilometres from the station, and the extent of its damage – or lack of it – was becoming much clearer. A fraction, maybe one in five, of the pirate devices appeared unharmed. They wheeled slowly into view and then slowly out of view again, like cabins in a Ferris wheel.

‘Maybe we still have approach authorisation,’ Jumai said.

Something hit them. There’d been no warning, and they were so close to the Winter Palace that even a kinetic-energy slug arrived almost instantaneously. The Quaynor shook, and kept shaking, as the energy of the impact whiplashed up and down her chassis. Two or three seconds later, the habitat scored another strike. In the neurotic jitter of his vision, Geoffrey caught Mira Gilbert studying a schematic: an outline of the ship with the damaged areas pulsing an angry red. He wanted to speak, wanted to ask how serious the injuries were, but Eunice still had him in her thrall.

Then it quietened – there were no more impacts – and just as miraculously the acceleration eased, smoothed, reduced to zero. They had transited the volume of maximum hazard.

The Quaynor gave one more creak, and then all was silent. Even the master-caution alarm had stopped blaring.

‘We’re clear,’ Eunice said. ‘My guns can’t touch us now – there’s a zone of avoidance around either docking pole, and we’re well inside it. Normal approach and docking will be completed in…’ She made a show of hesitation, although the answer was surely known to her in advance. ‘Thirty seconds. Please fold away your tray-tables and place your seats in the upright position. Thank you for flying with Akinya Space.’

‘Why did you shoot at us?’ Gilbert asked.

‘That wasn’t shooting. That was a reminder not to take anything for granted.’ She made him let out a small, prideful sigh. ‘Well, grandson – now that my work here is done, would you like your body back?’

His eyes stopped their jerky dance. He could speak again, and move his hands normally.

‘You did well,’ he said.

‘You feel the need to compliment me?’

‘It’s what Sunday would do,’ he said, addressing the now disembodied voice. ‘That’s all.’

Soon came a gentle clunk, followed by a quick sequenced drumroll of capture clamps, primed like the petals of some carnivorous plant to lock on to any vehicle that made it this far.

Geoffrey began to undo his restraints. It had been difficult, but they had docked with the Winter Palace.

Now all they had to do was go inside and see what had become of Hector.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

There was darkness, an absence of experience, then dawning amber light, the primal stirrings of consciousness. Then there was a room, warm and golden and as bedecked with finery as the inside of any wealthy merchant’s tent, in any desert caravan from the Arabian Nights.

And Sunday was awake, looking at herself.

A memory stirred: an error she would not make twice. It was not her own face looking down at her, but there were sufficient similarities that a blood relationship could not be denied. A woman’s face, close enough to her own that they might have been sisters or cousins. And she had seen this woman before, behind layers of glass, in a landscape older than Africa.

Her mouth was dry, her lips gummed together. Nonetheless she managed a word.

‘Soya.’

‘Glad you remember me. You were both pretty cold by the time we reached you. Your suits only had a few hours of effective life support left in them.’ Soya was dressed in a white blouse, draped with about a dozen necklaces, some hung with jewelled pendants, some with wooden charms. She was all skin and bones, lean and angular where Sunday (as she would readily admit) was padded and ample. They had genes in common, but they’d been raised on very different worlds. Soya’s legs, in leather trousers with calf-length boots, were stupidly long and slender. She was taller than Sunday, and towered over her even more so now that Sunday was lying on her back, on a couch or bed in one corner of the room. It had curtains rather than walls. Incense smoked in candleholders. The air smelled of honey, cinnamon, baking bread.

‘Jitendra?’ she asked, forming his name in three distinct syllables, each of which cost her effort.

‘He’s well, don’t worry.’ Soya was pouring something into a glass. Bangles clashed against each other on her wrist, making a constant metallic hiss whenever she moved. ‘You don’t remember much about being rescued?’

‘No,’ Sunday said.

‘But you know my name.’

‘We’ve met before.’

‘Yes, we did.’ There was a note of reproach in that. ‘And still you got into trouble with those people. Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned.’ Soya leaned down and offered the glass to Sunday’s lips. ‘Drink this.’

The liquid was sugary and welcome. It rinsed some of the dryness from her mouth and throat; notched her one step closer to the living.

‘I don’t know who you are, Soya.’ Sunday dredged a hard-won memory from the recent past. ‘You told me you were born here, on Mars. You said something about Nigeria. We’re still on Mars, aren’t we?’

‘You’ve only been out about thirteen hours. It’s tomorrow.’ Soya smiled at that, and the smile cut through Sunday. She’d seen it a million times, in her own reflection. Just not as much lately as she might have wished.

‘And that’s all I get? We’re related, Soya. I’ve known that from the moment I first saw your face. And why would you make contact with me if it wasn’t connected with my family?’

Soya smiled, but with less assurance than before. ‘I know you want answers, but you’ve had a difficult couple of days and you should probably rest first.’

‘You just told me I’ve been asleep since yesterday.’

‘After nearly dying.’

Sunday took a leap into the void. The question was absurd on a number of levels, but she had to ask it. ‘Are you… related to Eunice? Are you some granddaughter or grand-niece I never knew about?’

‘No, I’m not related to her. I’d offer you a cell scraping, if you had a means of testing it.’ Soya looked down, fiddling absently with the necklaces. ‘But you and me, that’s a different story. We do have a common ancestor. But it’s not Eunice.’

Sunday pushed herself up from the couch. Heavy blankets slid away from her. She was wearing lime-green football shorts and a cheap yellow tourist T-shirt with an animated space elevator printed on the front. The logo said Pontaniak.

‘Who, Soya?’ The other woman had half a head on her, but she still took a step away, as if she hadn’t anticipated a show of determination quite this valiant.

‘Jonathan,’ Soya said. And as if that was not enough – there was only one Jonathan in Sunday’s firmament – Soya added, ‘Beza. Eunice’s husband. The man she came to Mars with.’

Sunday shook her head reflexively. ‘Jonathan Beza died more than sixty years ago. Eunice and he had divorced by then. There was an accident, here on Mars. Some kind of pressure blow-out.’

‘And that precludes me from being related to him?’

‘He remarried before his death. He had more children, and some of them had children themselves. Nathan even came to the funeral, and I know about all the others. There’s no Soya anywhere in that family tree.’

‘In which case you’re looking at the wrong tree.’

It had not been Soya who said that. This voice was deep and sonorous, varnished and craquelured. It spoke Swahili, but with an old-fashioned diction that called to mind nothing in Sunday’s experience but Memphis Chibesa.

She turned to follow the voice to its origin. There, standing in a gash of the curtain – like an actor hesitating to join the stage – was the oldest man she had ever seen.

‘I am Jonathan Beza,’ the man said. ‘I am your grandfather, Sunday Akinya. I was married to Eunice. And yes, I am very much alive.’

Jitendra was looking to her for guidance. She signalled with the slightest nod that yes, she believed this man to be exactly who he said he was. As absurd as that was to take in, after everything she had accepted in her life.

‘It was easier to die then,’ Jonathan Beza said. ‘You must remember that this was a different Mars, a different time. Even now, as you’ve experienced, there are places on this world where a person can disappear very effectively. Or be made to disappear.’ He stopped to pour chai for his daughter and their two guests.

‘You mean there was never an accident?’ Sunday asked.

‘There was. The same sort of accident that still happens very occasionally nowadays. It was real, and I didn’t engineer it in any way. I should hope not: good people died in it, after all.’

‘But you saw your chance to vanish,’ Jitendra said.

‘The thought had been at the back of my mind for some time. The Mech was so primitive back then we didn’t even call it the Mech. The few implants I carried were easily disabled, or fooled into giving false reports. When the opportunity to fall off the edge of the world presented itself, I took it.’ He fixed his gaze on Sunday. ‘Your grandmother didn’t know. She wasn’t complicit in this. She even came to my funeral.’

‘That was when she returned to Phobos,’ Sunday said.

‘Yes.’

They were sitting in a different curtained room. Sunday still had no idea where they were, beyond Jonathan’s assurance that it was still Mars. There was no aug reach, no Eunice. In their place was a noise like distant engines and the occasional bump or sway that led her to think she was in a vehicle.

A possibility had presented itself, but she’d dismissed it instantly.

‘You found us in the Evolvarium,’ Jitendra said. ‘Have you any idea what we were doing there?’

Jonathan said, ‘Dying?’

‘Other than that,’ Sunday said.

‘Yes, I have a shrewd idea what you were doing. Better than a shrewd idea, actually.’ He paused, apparently to collect himself, marshalling energies before proceeding. Jonathan was small, wiry, obviously immensely old but nowhere near as frail as Sunday might have expected for one of his age. He was even older than Eunice: she’d have queried the construct for his date of birth, if the construct had been reachable. Born 2020 or thereabouts, if not earlier. A man now in his hundred-and-forties. That made him old, but not impossibly so. He wore the inner layer of a spacesuit, a tight black garment sewn with coolant lines and studded with the gold-plated discs of biomonitor sockets. His arms were scrawny but there was still muscle tone there, and no trace of arthritis or neurodegenerative tremor in his fingers. Sunday had watched as he poured the chai; he hadn’t spilt a drop. His head was mostly hairless, save for a corona of fine white fuzz around his scalp, his face abundantly wrinkled, the already dark skin mottled by pure black lesions, yet remaining startlingly expressive. His eyes were clear and focused, his smile alarmingly youthful.

‘Then you’ll know it was a waste of time,’ Jitendra said.

‘I know Dorcas cheated you. That may not amount to quite the same thing.’

‘How much do you know?’ Sunday asked, directing her question at Soya. ‘You were in Crommelin. You must be registered as a citizen or tourist to be anywhere on Mars, so you can’t have dropped off the map the way your father has.’

Jonathan answered for her. ‘Soya has been my lifeline, Sunday. She has been able to move in the Surveilled World, be my eyes and ears. She has arranged medicine for me, on the few occasions when I have needed it.’

‘I have a false history,’ Soya said, looking at Sunday and Jitendra in turn. ‘My connection to my father… and by extension your grandmother… isn’t part of that history.’

‘You could never do such a thing on Earth, or any place where the Surveilled World is fully developed. On Mars, now, it would be difficult. It was easier when Soya was born.’

‘How old are you?’ Sunday asked.

‘Fifty,’ Soya said. ‘Does that surprise you?’

‘I don’t suppose it should.’

‘Eunice wasn’t her mother,’ Jonathan said, confirming what Soya had already told Sunday. ‘There was a woman, an investigator. Her name was Lizbet. She had her doubts about my death, and she followed them to me.’

‘I never heard about any investigation,’ Sunday said.

‘Lizbet decided not to go public with her story once she’d heard my side of things. She became my companion, and we had a daughter. We were happy. Lizbet died twenty years ago.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Sunday and Jitendra said in unison. Then, on her own, Sunday continued, ‘And what was your side of the story, Jonathan? Why this secrecy? What persuaded Lizbet to keep it to herself?’

‘I know why your grandmother came back to Mars. My funeral was a useful pretext, but she’d have found a way to do it whatever happened. She spent time on Phobos, more than she needed to. I don’t know what she got up to there, but I presume whatever it was led you here?’

Sunday eyed Jitendra before proceeding. ‘We’ve been following something ever since she died. It began with an anomaly in her private banking files. That led us from Africa to the Moon. On the Moon my brother found something in a safe-deposit box. That led us to Pythagoras. What we found in Pythagoras led me to Phobos. Phobos led me to the Evolvarium.’

‘And now to me,’ Jonathan said.

‘Except I didn’t find you,’ Sunday said. ‘You found me. Soya knew I was on the planet: that’s why she contacted me in Crommelin.’

‘It was easy to track your arrival,’ Soya said. ‘Given the timing, there couldn’t be any other reason why you’d come to Mars, other than to find out what your grandmother had buried here.’

‘I failed,’ Sunday said.

Jonathan braced his hands on his knees and rose from his chair. ‘Do you have any idea where you are?’

‘Somewhere out in the sticks, I’m guessing. A camp or station everyone assumes to be unoccupied. Probably quite near the Evolvarium, since I doubt we travelled very far overnight.’ She was careful not to voice her suspicion that they were moving.

‘Not near,’ Jonathan corrected, with a smile. ‘In. We’ve never left it.’

It came back to her in disconnected glimpses, as of a dream forgotten until some chance association called it to mind, much later in the day. Jitendra had seen it first: that hill, a feature in the terrain that ought not to have been there, glimpsed from within their makeshift shelter as they waited for night and whatever it might bring. A hill that was approaching.

The Aggregate.

Not a hill, but a machine as large as a skyscraper, crunching slowly across the Evolvarium. Sunday remembered what she had learned regarding the Aggregate, aboard the Overfloater airship. It was not one machine, but a society of them. From the level of sifters to apex predators, they had organised in the interests of mutual reliance and interdependence. It was a stinging affront to the basic function of the Evolvarium. Whereas the other machines toiled and clashed and evolved, sparking off industrial novelties as a by-product of their struggle for survival, the Aggregate gave nothing back. Whatever it innovated, it kept to itself.

It had sent out an envoy to meet them. With that memory came the aftertaste of the fear they had both felt as they crouched in their makeshift shelter. The Aggregate’s envoy was a quick-scuttling thing like an iron ant, black-armoured and as large as the rover whose wreckage they had repurposed. Even if their suits had been working at full capacity, they could never have outrun it. It had ripped away the petals of their shelter, flinging them to the winds, and loomed over them in all its eyeless belligerence. Its head was a blank metal sphere, its torso a pinch-waisted cylinder. In addition to its pistoning black legs it had whipping cilia. It had plucked them from the ground, not without a certain carelessness, and a red-lit aperture had opened in its belly.

After that, Sunday didn’t remember very much.

Yet here they were, in the Aggregate. There was no need to take Jonathan Beza’s word for that. From a high vantage point, the queen of her own castle, Sunday was looking down on the very machine she had assumed meant to have her crushed and recycled for useful materials.

It was motley. Hundreds of basic organisms had fused or locked together to form the structural outline of the Aggregate, and that didn’t begin to touch the implied complexity of its interior. Not a skyscraper, then, for that conveyed entirely too much symmetry and orderliness. The Aggregate was more like a city block, a dense-packed huddle of buildings constructed at different times and according to varying objectives and governing aesthetics. It was approximately pyramidal in shape, wide and flat at the base, rising in steps and pinnacles and buttresses to a sort of summit, but there was nothing geometric or harmonious about it. Sunday saw where some of the machines had fused into the main mass, like gargoyles on a cathedral. Others must have changed beyond all recognition, so that it was not easy to tell where one began and another ended, or what their original forms and locomotive principles must have been like. From here, looking down, she couldn’t see how the Aggregate moved its colossal bulk. She presumed countless legs and feet were deployed under the flat base of the city, working in concert so that the ride was mostly smooth. Dust welled up constantly from the Aggregate’s margins, stirred by whatever mechanisms toiled underneath it.

‘No one ever mentioned anything about this thing being inhabited,’ Sunday said. They were in a many-windowed cupola, a hundred or more metres above the ground.

‘They don’t know,’ Jonathan said. ‘No one does, except Soya and me. Maybe some of the Overfloaters suspect, but that’s not the same thing as knowing and it’s certainly not something they’ll talk about in polite company. They can’t tell for sure, from the outside. The glass is one-way, and with all the waste heat and chemistry a machine like the Aggregate radiates, there’s no way of picking out the signatures of a couple of human occupants. Especially when the Aggregate doesn’t want anyone to know about us.’

‘So you’re its prisoners?’ she asked. But that didn’t work: Soya clearly had free roam of Mars, and must have come back here of her own volition.

‘No,’ Jonathan said. ‘I’m its client. The Aggregate benefits from a human consultant. That’s really all I am to it: just another modular component it can depend on when the need arrives. It makes me comfortable – more than comfortable, actually – and it tolerates my absence when I’m not here.’

‘It lets you come and go as you please?’

‘We agreed terms. It would rather put up with that than have me kill myself. Needless to say, I can’t go very far – that’s one of the drawbacks of being dead. But I’m not a prisoner.’

‘I’m finding all this a little difficult to take in. I’ve spent my whole life thinking you were dead.’

‘I’m afraid there was no other way. The best that Soya could do was warn you to be on your guard against the Pans. It was obvious to us that they couldn’t be trusted simply to let you walk away with the prize.’

‘You knew they were planning to steal it?’ Jitendra asked.

‘No, but there was a strong possibility of that happening. Had this all taken place in the Surveilled World, there wouldn’t have been much scope for treachery. But the Evolvarium gave them the perfect opportunity to commit an unwitnessed crime.’

‘I witnessed it,’ Sunday said.

Jonathan allowed a thin smile to play across his lips. ‘You don’t count.’

‘We’ll see about that, when I get back to Earth. They’re going to find out that I’m still an Akinya, and bad things happen when you cross us.’

‘Yes…’ Jonathan stretched the word, managing to sound less than entirely convinced by Sunday’s statement. ‘Funny how you’re so keen to slip back into the fold the moment you’re wronged. You’ve been running away from your family all these years, but the moment life throws something at you that you don’t like… you’re straight back into the arms of the household, a good little Akinya with the family behind her.’

Sunday bristled, but said nothing.

‘I don’t blame you for that,’ Jonathan continued, conveying entirely the opposite impression, ‘but it would be unwise in the extreme to underestimate the Pans. They’re not just a movement with a few ships and people. Behind the Initiative is the entire geopolitical armoury of the United Aquatic Nations. Take them on, you’re taking on half the planet.’

‘You’ve kept up with Earthside politics, then,’ Sunday said, her tone sour.

‘I may be dead, but I’m not a hermit.’

‘Well, it’s all for nothing anyway,’ Jitendra said. ‘We don’t have a clue what was in that box, and we can’t even prove they stole it. Without corroboration, the evidence of our eyes won’t be admissible in any court. Whatever’s in the box may mean nothing to them without Sunday’s background knowledge of Eunice. That’s assuming they ever gave a shit. Maybe all they wanted was for us not to get our hands on it. Well, they succeeded. We’re all losers now.’

‘The Overfloaters must have been surprised,’ Jonathan said.

‘Surprised by what?’ Sunday asked, irritated and fatigued.

‘That the object was still underground after so many years. Did they not express scepticism that it would still be there?’

‘Dorcas said it was strange that the machines hadn’t found it,’ Jitendra said. ‘But there it was.’

‘Or rather, there it wasn’t,’ Jonathan said. ‘Come, let’s go back downstairs. I have something you might be interested in.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

‘And there was I,’ Jumai said, ‘thinking maybe I’d get paid for nothing. Silly me. As if anything’s ever that easy.’

‘I didn’t mean to raise any unrealistic expectations,’ Geoffrey said.

They were moving side by side down the docking tube, brushing themselves along with fingertip pressure against the rough-textured walling.

‘Look at it this way, though,’ he went on. ‘You’re hoping this is going to do wonders for your reputation. Wouldn’t work if it turned out to be too easy, would it?’

‘Fuck my reputation. Right now I’ll settle for easy.’

They had matched the habitat’s spin in the moments before docking, but as they traversed the connecting tube Geoffrey still felt weightless, albeit with the sensation that the world was tumbling slowly around him. The docking tube was aligned with the Winter Palace’s axis of rotation, and he would therefore need to travel a lot further out before he felt anything resembling a normal gravitational pull. But even in the absence of visual cues that spin was impossible to ignore.

They were wearing spacesuits, of course: lightweight, hypermodern, form-fitting models from the Quaynor’s own equipment stores. Like the submarine harness in Tiamaat, Geoffrey’s suit had put itself on around him, splitting open, encasing him from head to toe and reassembling along a dozen improbable seams that were now completely invisible and airtight. Technology had come a long way since Eunice’s ancient gauntlet-like moonglove was state of the art.

Mira Gilbert’s mobility harness was not optimised for weightlessness, and since the station was presently denying aug reach, there was no way for Arethusa to ching a proxy. Given that someone had to physically enter the Palace to locate Hector, Geoffrey was glad it was just the two of them. Arethusa would want to know what they found, and she would ching aboard as soon as that became feasible, but for now the Pans would have to be patient. Even Eunice couldn’t stick her oar in.

They had passed without incident through the connected airlocks of the Quaynor and the Winter Palace, but now they came to the first obstruction: an internal door, armoured against pressure loss, blocked their progress. It was circular, cartwheeled with heavy bee-striped reinforcing struts. The manual control had no effect, and the door was certainly too large to force.

‘I keep having to remind myself, Hector didn’t come this way,’ Geoffrey said. ‘For all we know, this door hasn’t been opened in years.’

‘Give me a minute,’ Jumai answered. ‘I’ve cracked data vaults that haven’t been opened in a century. This is just warm-up stuff.’

Jumai had spent her time on the Quaynor profitably, packing a holdall full of anything she deemed useful. Now she rummaged through the bag’s weightless guts, pushing aside intestinal spools of data cables and stick-on sensor pads. She came out with a chunky rectangle of black plastic, geckoed it to the side of the door, over the operating panel, and connected a grey cable into her suit’s forearm.

She tapped a panel on the forearm, which sprang open to form a surprisingly large keypad and screen. The suits might be modern, but they’d been customised according to Pan specifications, which meant physical readouts and data-entry options.

‘What’s the story?’ Geoffrey ventured, when she’d been tapping keys and pursing her lips at scrolling numbers for several minutes.

‘The story is… we’re in.’

She tapped one last key, ripped the stick-on pad away from the panel. The door wheeled aside, recessing into a slot in the sidewall. The door’s bare metal edges were toothed like a cogwheel.

‘It was that easy?’

‘Easier than it looked. Wanted to make absolutely sure there was nothing nasty beyond the door, like fire or vacuum or sarin nerve gas.’

‘We’re in suits.’

‘I like additional guarantees.’ Jumai packed her equipment away and sealed the holdall. ‘No second chances in this line of work. Learned that in Lagos.’

They called back to the Quaynor, told them that they were passing through the door. There was still no aug reach, but for the moment simple comms were getting through.

‘We’ve reached a right-angled bend,’ Jumai reported. ‘It’s the only way forward. Looks like it runs all the way back out to the skin.’

‘That makes sense,’ Geoffrey said. ‘The Winter Queen fills the middle of the habitat, and her engines and aerobrake would block our progress if we tried to pass along the axis of rotation. We have to go up to move forward. Hector would have hit the same dead end coming in from his side.’

‘Assuming he got this far,’ Jumai said.

‘He was inside this thing for a while before calling for help.’

They started moving along the radial shaft. It was wide and set with multiple hand- and footholds, and to begin with there was no sense that they were climbing either up or down. But every metre took them further from the axis, thereby increasing the tug of centrifugal gravity, tending to push them still further from the axis. For a while, it was easy and pleasant to drift, but there came a point when it took more effort than anticipated to arrest his motion. In that moment Geoffrey’s inner ear decided, forcefully, that his local universe now contained a very definite up and down, and that he was suspended the wrong way up in what appeared to be an infinitely deep, plunging lift shaft.

Vertigo gripped him. He caught his breath and closed his eyes.

‘Easy,’ Jumai said.

He forced his eyes open. ‘Has to be a better way.’

‘Probably is, if we’d come in through the other lock. Can’t see many people putting up with this shit. Then again, did your grandmother get many visitors?’

‘No,’ he answered, as with great care he inverted himself so that the force of gravity was acting in the direction of his feet, not his head. ‘Just Memphis, and even then not very often.’

‘Take it one rung at a time, and don’t look down any more than you have to.’

‘We’ll never get Hector back up this shaft if he’s hurt.’

‘Comes to that, we’ll call for help from the Quaynor. They can lower us a rope, or use the ship’s thrusters to take some of the spin off the habitat.’

‘Anyone would think you’d done this a million times.’

‘It’s all just breaking and entering.’ He could imagine Jumai grinning. ‘Used to delude myself that there was something in my brain, some developmental flaw which might mean I was predisposed to criminality. Wouldn’t that be glamorous? But I was wrong. The scans came back and I’m… almost tediously normal. Not a single brain module out of place or underdeveloped. I just happen to be more than averagely competent at breaking into things.’

Geoffrey forced a smile of his own. He might not have dragged Jumai out of Lagos – she’d quit of her own accord – but he couldn’t deny that there had been a large measure of self-interest. However it had worked out, it was good to have her back in his life.

By turns, and his vertigo notwithstanding, he found a steady descending rhythm, always ensuring that he had three points of contact with the wall. The suit might well protect him in the event of a fall, but he had no desire to put that to the test.

When at last they reached the ‘floor’, they’d come – by the suit’s estimation – a total of seventy-five vertical metres. Ambient gravity was now one gee, or as close as made no difference, and since the Winter Palace was only a little wider than one hundred and fifty metres across, they must be very close to the interior surface of its insulating skin. In the restricted space at the base of the shaft, Geoffrey could do little more than walk a few paces in either direction before he reached an obstructing wall or door. The gravity felt convincing enough in terms of the effort required and the load on his joints, but his inner ear insisted that something wasn’t quite right.

Jumai was already tackling the door that was their only point of ingress into the rest of the habitat. It looked similar to the one they’d already come through, but when more than a few minutes had elapsed without her managing to open it, Geoffrey guessed that this door presented additional challenges.

‘You think there’s something bad on the other side?’ he asked, hardly daring to break her concentration but not able to stop himself.

‘There’s pressure,’ she said quietly. ‘And unless these telltales are lying, it’s not nerve gas or a wall of fire. That’s not the problem, I’m afraid.’

‘So what is?’

‘Door’s interlocked with the one back up the shaft. Give me a day, and more equipment than we came with, and I might be able to bypass that interlocking mechanism. But right now, and with this equipment, I won’t be able to get us through this one without closing the other.’

‘And thereby cutting off contact with the Quaynor.’

‘Give the man a cigar.’

Geoffrey thought about this before answering. He didn’t like it, and he doubted Jumai liked it either, but they had come a long way to turn back now. ‘Have you ever been in a situation similar to this, in Lagos, or anywhere else you did contract work?’

‘Crazy question if you were asking anyone else, but… yes. Once or twice. Some of those server farms were designed by seriously paranoid arseholes.’

‘And you still went through.’

‘Had a job to do.’

‘So your judgement was correct, in the moment. You made a decision… and it paid off.’

‘Wouldn’t be having this conversation otherwise. I mean, I’m not saying I’d be dead, exactly, but sure as hell I wouldn’t still be in this line of work.’

‘In which case… I think you should open that door.’

Jumai’s hand was poised over the flip-out keypad on her sleeve forearm. ‘Let’s be clear about one thing, rich boy. No guarantees about what we’ll find on the other side, or how the door mechanism will look to me then. Might not be as easy to retrace as it was to come this far.’

‘Whatever it takes.’

After they had spoken to the Quaynor, Jumai said, ‘You grown balls of steel all of a sudden?’

‘Guess it’s just dawning on me – I’ve burnt too many bridges to start having second thoughts now.’ He knuckled his fist against the chest plate of the suit. ‘Fuck it all. I’m Geoffrey Akinya. This is my grandmother’s house. And I have every damned right to see what’s inside it.’

‘Hell, yeah,’ Jumai said.

And tapped the keypad.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Jonathan Beza whipped the blanket free with a magicianly flourish, beaming at Sunday as if this was a moment he had been planning for years.

The blanket had concealed a box. It was, superficially, much like the box that Gribelin’s proxy had unearthed the day before: the same dimensions, the same grey alloy casing. It looked older, though. Sunday couldn’t put her finger on exactly why that should be so, but she knew she was looking at something that had been locked and buried a long time ago. The dents and scratches had provenance.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Eunice came back for my funeral,’ Jonathan said. ‘This we know. But she didn’t just come back for that. I… followed her.’ He hesitated, looking aside as if there was shame in what he had done. ‘At a distance, obviously, and I don’t think she ever suspected anything. It wasn’t difficult to track her movements, and there was no Evolvarium then. I traced her return to her old landing site, near Pavonis Mons – the burial spot.’

‘You saw her bury the box?’ Sunday asked.

He shook his head firmly. ‘No – I couldn’t get that close, not without making my presence known. But when she’d gone, there was nothing to stop me returning to the landing site. I gave it a year or two, just to let the dust settle. Part of me worried that the whole thing was a trap to flush me out.’

‘But it wasn’t.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘As much as it pains me, I think I was the last thing on her mind by then. Even my funeral… it suited her to come back to attend it, but maybe she already had other plans…’ He trailed off. ‘Perhaps you’d better open the box.’

‘Do you know what’s in it?’ Jitendra asked.

‘Yes, and it’s perfectly safe. But it won’t talk to me.’

As Sunday worked the catches at the side of the box, she said, ‘I still don’t get it. The box Dorcas stole – where did that one come from?’

‘Oh, that,’ Jonathan said, as if this was a detail he had nearly allowed to slip his mind. ‘I put that there, obviously. I knew that the real box was meant for someone to find, someone connected to the family. For sixty years, no one came. Then Eunice’s death was announced, and less than four months later her granddaughter shows up on Mars.’ He touched his fingers to his chin, as if mulling a difficult problem. ‘Hm. I wonder if those two things might possibly be connected?’

‘I was keeping an eye on things for him,’ Soya said. ‘When it became clear that you intended to enter the Evolvarium, there was no doubt that you’d come for the box.’

‘While Soya was meeting you in Crommelin,’ Jonathan said, ‘I was out there burying the decoy box. No one saw me do it. With the machines sniffing around, it wouldn’t stand a chance of going undetected for more than a few weeks. But we didn’t need that long, just the few days it would take you to cross Mars and reach the burial site.’

‘It was good that I warned you that the Pans couldn’t necessarily be trusted,’ Soya said. ‘It meant that you understood the situation the moment Dorcas turned on you. From what we can gather, you played your parts very well indeed. Dorcas never had the slightest idea that she’d been duped.’

‘She got the wrong box,’ Jitendra said, marvellingly.

‘And left you to the mercy of the Evolvarium,’ Soya added. ‘She cut a lot of deals to make that snatch. Frankly, no one will be shedding any tears if the other Overfloaters rip the Lady Disdain to shreds.’

Sunday had finally succeeded in opening the catches. She eased back the lid, the hinges stiff but manageable. She wasn’t sure what to expect this time. There had been a smaller box inside the decoy, but perhaps the point of that had just been to delay the Overfloaters. Inside this box she found a dense matrix of foam packing, and a rounded object poking through the top of the packing.

‘Take it out,’ Jonathan said. ‘It won’t bite.’

She understood the significance of his comment as she withdrew the ancient space helmet from the box. Even in Martian gravity it was heavy in her hands: like something forged from iron or cut from solid marble. She had never handled a helmet quite so antiquated.

But she had seen it before.

Vivid paintwork covered the helmet: slashes of yellow, gold and black, daubs of white and red around the visor’s rim. The paintwork had chipped to reveal bare metal in places, was scuffed and dirty elsewhere, but the design was still clear. It was a fierce blue-eyed lioness, her mouth gaping wide around the faceplate.

‘Senge Dongma,’ Sunday said, in reverence and awe. ‘The lion-faced one. This is Eunice’s actual helmet.’

‘Knew you’d recognise it,’ Jonathan said.

Sunday bit back the admission that she would have recognised nothing were it not for the construct. ‘I… saw an image of it on Phobos,’ she said. ‘Very recently. Was this really hers?’

‘This is what she buried. It’s been in my care ever since.’

She turned the helmet around in her hands, wheeling it like a globe, cradling history between her fingertips. In forced exile from her own family, Sunday had handled remarkably few artefacts with a direct link to her grandmother. This helmet, had it been back in the household museum, would have been one of the most hallowed relics.

‘This is all there was?’ she asked. ‘Nothing else with it?’

‘Were you expecting more?’ Jonathan responded.

‘It is just a helmet. The other things we’ve found pointed to something – another burial. This doesn’t.’

‘You’re sure of that?’ he asked.

‘It doesn’t take me any further than Mars. I know she had this helmet when she was on Phobos, so she would have brought it down to Mars when the dust storm cleared. But we’re on Mars already. It’s a dead end.’

‘Unless you’re missing something,’ Jonathan said.

‘It’s not just a helmet,’ Jitendra said, ‘is it? I mean, it is a helmet, but that doesn’t mean it’s just a lump of metal and plastic. There’s computing power inside it. It will have seen and recorded things, while she was using it.’

She looked at Jonathan. ‘Have you investigated that?’

‘The helmet is old,’ Jonathan said, ‘but from a mechanical standpoint there’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t have an internal power supply of its own, though. It will only work when it’s connected to a suit, via a compatible neck ring.’

‘Tell her,’ Soya said.

Jonathan shot his daughter a tolerant smile. ‘The suit could be anywhere, if it still exists. Eunice only left the helmet here, at this particular burial site. But it doesn’t have to be the same suit to make the helmet work. It just has to fit.’

‘You’d still have to find an old suit,’ Jitendra said.

‘That’s what antiques markets are for,’ Soya said, with a glimmer of pride. ‘It took me a long, long time, but I found one in the end, not far from Lowell. Not as old as the helmet, only about seventy years, but with the same coupling.’ She whisked aside one of the room’s curtains, revealing an old-fashioned composite shell spacesuit, olive drab and grey, with evidence of damage and repair all over it. The suit was complete from the neck ring down, hanging from a rack that had been bolted to the metal innards of the Aggregate. ‘It’s a piece of shit,’ Soya explained. ‘You’d trust your life to this thing only if it was the absolute last resort. But it can still juice the helmet.’

Sunday asked the obvious question. ‘Have either of you tried it on?’

‘Both of us,’ Jonathan answered. ‘Some kind of low-level sphinxware running inside it. Beyond a few gatekeeper questions, it won’t talk to either of us. But it might work for you.’

There was no part of getting into that musty old suit that Sunday could be said to have enjoyed. The suit was a poor fit in all the critical places (it felt as if it had been tailored for a portly child, not a woman) and being seventy years old, it did nothing to assist in the process of being worn. Without the complicity of Jitendra, Jonathan and Soya, she doubted she would have been able to put the hideous old thing on at all. Conversely, without them there, she probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to keep trying. Each component of the suit, as it clicked into place, added to her sense of imprisonment and paralysis.

The suit was not functioning, in any accepted sense of the word. Its motive power-assist was dead, so it required all of Sunday’s strength and determination to move it even slightly. The best she could manage was a ghoulish, mummylike shuffle, and the effort of that would soon tax her to exhaustion. Not that she could go very far anyway. Its cooling and air-recirculation systems were only barely operative, so it was as hot and stuffy as the inside of a sleeping bag. It had no independent internal power supply, but needed to be connected to the Aggregate by an energy umbilical. Only then could the suit feed power to the helmet, which had to be locked into place before it would boot-up and function. Sunday felt ready to be buried. The air circulator huffed and wheezed like an asthmatic dog. Caution indicators, blocked in red, were already illuminating the faceplate head-up display. Even before it had fully booted, the helmet knew that it was plugged into a piece of barely safe garbage, and it wasn’t too happy about it.

‘The current user is not recognised,’ the helmet said, its waspish buzzing into her ears in Swahili. ‘Please identify yourself.’

With an assertiveness that rather surprised herself, she declared, ‘I am Sunday Akinya.’

The helmet went quiet for a few seconds, as if it was thinking things over. ‘Please state your relationship to Eunice Akinya.’

‘I’m her granddaughter. I’ve come to Mars for this helmet. Please recognise my authority to wear it.’

‘What brought you to Mars?’

She had to think about that, sensing that the suit might be looking for a very specific answer. ‘Something I found in Phobos,’ she said, cautiously.

‘What did you find in Phobos?’

‘A painting.’ She took a breath, feeling sweat prickle her forehead. ‘A mural. There was a mistake… an alteration. The peacock should have been a different bird. A crane, maybe an ibis.’

‘What brought you to Phobos?’

Had she passed the first test, or merely skipped to the next question having failed the first one? The suit gave no clue. ‘Pages from a book,’ Sunday said, swallowing hard. ‘Gulliver’s Travels. It was a clear reference to the moons of Mars, and Eunice had only ever spent time on Phobos, so that had to be the right moon.’ Through the helmet glass, which was beginning to mist up, Jitendra and the others were watching her with avid interest. They were ready to spring to her aid should something go wrong with the life-support system, but knowing that didn’t alleviate Sunday’s sense of confinement. ‘I found the pages on the Moon – Earth’s Moon,’ she added. ‘In the crater Pythagoras.’

‘What led you to Pythagoras?’

‘A glove, which we found in a safe-deposit box, also on the Moon. The glove used to belong to Eunice Akinya. There were… gems in the glove. Plastic gems, three different colours. The numbers corresponded to a Pythagorean triple. Knowing Eunice’s history, we were able to pinpoint a crash site in the crater.’ She felt as if she was going to faint. ‘That’s all I’ve got. The existence of the safe-deposit box came from an audit of Eunice’s affairs, after her death.’

‘What was the significance of the coloured gems?’

‘The colours had… no significance.’ But why would the helmet have asked her that if the answer was so simple? ‘Except they had to be different colours so that we could count them.’

That was what Jitendra had said, at least – and she’d been more than ready to accept that explanation. But the gems had been stuffed into different fingers. Given the care they’d taken with the examination, they’d have been unlikely to muddle them up.

‘You have failed to pass all security questions,’ the helmet said. ‘Nonetheless, you are recognised as having the necessary authority. Please wait.’

‘Please wait for what?’

‘Please wait.’

Even through the fogging glass, Jitendra must have seen the doubt in her eyes. He pushed his face close to the visor. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked, voice muffled as if many rooms away.

‘It asked me a bunch of questions!’ she shouted back, making herself feel lighter-headed in the process. ‘I failed at least one of them, but it’s accepting me anyway. Can you crank up the cooling on this thing? It’s like a Turkish bath in here.’

Jitendra and Jonathan exchanged words. Soya nodded and went to one side, out of Sunday’s field of view. A moment later she felt knocking and tapping as Soya fiddled with the suit’s backpack.

The faceplate continued to fog over, even as the air grew fractionally cooler than it had been before. Sunday wondered whether it was better to close her eyes than confront that misted-over glass only centimetres from her nose and mouth.

Then the mist began to clear. But just when the condensation had shrunk back almost completely around the faceplate’s borders, it greyed over again. Sunday was about to call out to Jitendra when she realised the greyness wasn’t more condensation; rather it had been caused by the head-up display obstructing her entire forward view. The head-up view was changing now, but the image that resolved wasn’t the room inside the Aggregate.

What she could see was a broken aeroplane.

It lay upside down, snapped wings scissored across its fuselage. Dust had gathered in its lee. The plane slumped on the crest of a gently sloping ridge, bone-white against a horizon of darkening butterscotch. More dust spilt from the ruptured eye of its bubble canopy. Sunday thought of her brother, that this was some dire vision of the Cessna, crashed and upended. But this was not Geoffrey’s aircraft.

To the right of the wreck, a hundred paces further up the shallow incline, sat a squat compound of pressure-tight huts. The huts’ rib-sided shells had been scoured to a grey metal sheen by dust storms. Dust had also built up in their wind-shadows. Faded almost to illegibility was a hammer-and-sickle flag. A wind gauge, its cups as large as washbasins, whirred atop the roof of the largest hut.

Sunday found her point of view moving towards the aircraft. Acting independently of her volition, her line of sight dipped as if she was kneeling to peer into the inverted bulge of the shattered canopy. The seat was upside down, the buckled harness dangling open where it had been released. The cockpit was empty.

Her point of view turned from the aircraft, again without her direction, and approached the cluster of huts. The significance of the weather station and the smashed aeroplane was unavoidable. It was here, on the slopes of Pavonis Mons, that Eunice had landed and then sought shelter during a particularly ferocious storm. The plane had been intact when she brought it down, but had subsequently been plucked from its moorings by the winds, upended and crushed like a paper toy.

The station and the plane were gone now, but the documented fact of this episode had been the only thing pointing to a specific part of the terrain around the Martian volcano. Sunday already knew this. She could not have found the helmet without already making this connection.

So what did Eunice want with her now?

Metal steps, the lower treads buried in dust, led to the airlock in the largest of the Russian huts. The outer door and its interior counterpart were both open. Sunday’s point of view ascended the steps.

Inside, it was brightly lit and wrong: physics and common sense were in dreamlike abeyance. It was not the interior of a Russian weather station on Mars but an annexe of the household. The light blazed in through square, thick-walled windows at a steep slant. It fell on recognisable furniture: chairs and tables, rugs and hangings, white-plastered walls. There were ornaments on the tables, dust-glints trembling in the air. In place of one wall, silk curtains billowed. Sunday would have been drawn to the curtains even if she’d had control of the suit’s point of view.

A gloved hand reached out and parted the curtains. She pushed on through.

Outside it was Africa.

It was somewhere near dusk, some season when the skies held an abundance of clouds, gaudy with underlit colours: salmon-pink, vermilion, rare shades of rose and tangerine. Between the clouds, improbably, the slashes of clear sky were luminous cobalt. The trees, darkly silhouetted, reminded her of toy-theatre cut-outs.

The view tracked around. Kilimanjaro slid into sight, snowless. The household, blue-tiled and white-plastered, the walls reflecting sky in a hundred pastel combinations. A flight of cranes, like birds in a Chinese watercolour.

A stand of trees, more solid and real-looking than the silhouettes. Her point of view commenced towards that place of shelter. And the woman who had been leaning with her back against one of the trees, sitting down as she read in the last light of some long-gone day, made to stand up, neither hurriedly, as if she had been disturbed, nor languidly, as if she had all the time in the world. As if this was simply the ordained moment.

The figure rested one hand on her hip. The other grasped the book she had been reading, resting against her thigh. She wore riding pants and boots, and a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up to bony elbows. The blouse looked very much like the one Soya had been wearing.

‘Good evening, Sunday,’ the woman said.

‘How do you know my name?’ Sunday asked, wondering what she was dealing with.

‘You told me, just now, when you answered the helmet’s questions. Do you understand what I am?’

‘Not really.’

‘When I buried this helmet on Mars, it was already forty years old. I had its systems upgraded as best I could, but there were still limitations to what could be achieved. You are not interacting with Eunice Akinya, rather with a very simple model of her, with a limited range of responses and a very restricted internal knowledge base. Don’t go mistaking it for me.’

‘So… this is you speaking now?’

‘This is… an interactive recording, a message to you, whoever you may be. The sphinxware wouldn’t have admitted you unless you’d uncovered the trail that led to this point, so the chances are excellent that you’re a member of the family, or at least someone with close ties to it.’

‘As you just said, I’ve told you who I am.’

‘You have, and we shall proceed on that basis.’ Eunice – the recording of Eunice – glanced down at the book she’d been reading. ‘Firstly, you’ve done well to come this far. That took resourcefulness. I trust there were no particular unpleasantnesses along the way?’

‘You could have picked a better burial site on Mars.’

Eunice’s eyes sharpened. ‘There were local difficulties?’

‘This is the middle of the fucking Evolvarium, Grandmother.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. Evol-what? Succinctly, please.’

‘Other than burying your helmet in a minefield, you couldn’t have picked a worse spot on Mars. This whole area, for a thousand kilometres in any direction, is a no-go zone. It’s a place where self-replicating machines are allowed to run riot. They evolve through generations, fighting for survival. Every now and then that evolutionary process throws up some gimmick, some idea or gadget that someone can make money from outside the ’varium. The machines are dangerous, and the people who run the place don’t take kindly to outsiders poking around. Our guide was killed out there, and Jitendra and I came close to dying as well.’

‘I’m… sorry.’ The contrition sounded genuine. ‘I meant you to be challenged, but not put in real peril. Still, I can’t be held accountable for what happened to Mars after the burial.’ Again there was that sharpening of her gaze. ‘It’s an odd thing to happen, though. This is the only place like it on Mars?’

‘I told you, you couldn’t have picked a worse location.’

‘Then that’s strange. I’m not one for coincidences, Sunday. Not this kind, anyway. There must be an explanation.’

‘You tell me.’

‘I only know what I know. But how could my little adventure on Pavonis Mons have led to this?’ She gave every impression of thinking about that, reopening the book and leafing through it, scratching her fingernail against the fine Bible-thin paper, even though her eyes were not on the close-printed text. ‘After I lost the aeroplane… but no.’ A quick dismissive head-shake. ‘That can’t be it.’

‘What can’t be what?’

‘I had to take shelter while the storm raged. The Russian station was still airtight, and it had power and the basic amenities. But I couldn’t stay there for ever. The wind had damaged the aircraft, but I still needed a way out.’

Sunday issued a terse, ‘Continue.’

As if Eunice needed permission.

‘The Russians had left a lot of equipment in their station, some of it still semi-functional. Before landing, I’d scouted a number of abandoned facilities and assets in the area. If I could salvage some of that junk, I’d be able to keep myself alive longer. Batteries, air-scrubbers, that kind of thing. Maybe even rig up some kind of repair to the aircraft. But I couldn’t go out there. My suit wasn’t stormproof, and in any case it only had limited range. I couldn’t have walked far enough to do any good.’

‘So you were in deep shit.’

‘Until I found the robots.’ Eunice snapped the book shut again. ‘The Russians had left them behind, in one of the storage sheds. I’m not surprised: they were old, slow, their programming screwed. Still, I didn’t need them to do much for me.’ She smiled quickly, as if abashed at her own resourcefulness. ‘I… patched them together, fixed their programming as best I could. Took me eight days, but it kept my mind off the worst. Then I sent them out in different directions, running on maximum autonomy. I’d told them to locate anything that looked potentially useful and drag it back to me.’

‘I guess it worked.’

‘No – rescue came sooner than I anticipated. The storm cleared, and my people were able to get me out. As for the robots… I forgot about them. But they were still out there, running with my lashed-up programming. They were supposed to take care of themselves, and to act competitively if the need arose. Do you think…?’

‘Do I think you inadvertently created the Evolvarium? I’d say yes, if I wasn’t worried that your ego might already be on the point of stellar collapse.’

Eunice dislodged a fly from her brow. ‘I’ve achieved enough by intent, without dwelling on the things I made happen by accident. Regardless, I’m truly sorry if circumstances were more complicated than I envisaged, but it appears you weathered the adversity. Congratulations, Sunday. You’ve come through very well.’

‘My brother and I have been sharing the burden.’

‘And does that mean you have the full authority of the family behind you?’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, no.’

‘I never counted on it. The important thing is that you’ve demonstrated the necessary insight and determination to make it this far.’ Eunice lifted her head to study the sun. ‘My internal clock tells me that more than sixty years have passed since the burial. Is that really the case?’

‘Yes,’ Sunday said. ‘And you’ve only just died. The reason I’m here is because of an audit the household ran just after your death.’

‘A long time in anyone’s book. How have things been, while I was gone?’

‘With the family?’

‘Everything. The world, the flesh and the devil. Us. Have we managed not to screw things up completely?’

‘I’m here,’ Sunday said. ‘That should tell you something, shouldn’t it?’

‘I was born in 2030,’ Eunice said. ‘People told me it was the best and worst of times. To me it just seemed like the way of the world. Whether you’re born with famine in your belly or a silver spoon in your mouth – it’s always just the way things are, isn’t it? You know no different. Later, I realised I was fortunate, extraordinarily so. Fortunate to have been born African, for one thing, in the right place at the right time. My mother and father always said we should make the best of things, so that’s what we did. The world still had some catching up to do, mind. I grew up with the last wars ever fought on Earth. They never touched me directly, but no one could entirely escape their influence. Please tell me they were the last wars. I couldn’t bear to think we’d slipped back to our bad old ways.’

‘There haven’t been any more wars, which is not to say things are perfect back on Earth. I tease my brother about it often enough. They still have police, armies and peacekeeping forces, the occasional border incident. But it’s not like it used to be.’

‘The Resource and Relocation crisis taught us to grow up,’ Eunice said. ‘We were like a house full of squabbling children for most of our history. And then the house started burning down. We had to grow up fast or burn with it.’

‘We did.’

‘What is it like out there now? Have you seen much of the system?’

‘Not much. I was born on Earth, but I’ve spent most of my adult life on the Moon. This is the first time I’ve ever been anywhere else.’

‘You never had the means?’

‘It’s… complicated.’ Sunday nodded at the book her interlocutor was holding. ‘Is that Gulliver’s Travels?’

Eunice glanced absent-mindedly at the title. ‘Finnegans Wake,’ she said. ‘I liked Swift when I was little. Maybe Gulliver turned me into an explorer. But this is… denser. I still haven’t got the bottom of it. So many questions. You could spend a lifetime on it and still not understand it.’ She flicked open a random page, frowned at something written there. ‘Who was Muster Mark? What do you suppose he wanted with three quarks?’

‘I don’t know.’ Sunday was ready to leave the suit now. ‘What’s this all about, Eunice? Why did you bury the helmet? Why are you asking me these things?’

‘You disappoint me, Sunday. To have so much of the world ready for the taking, and to have seen so little of it. I thought wanderlust ran in our blood. I thought it was the fire that made us Akinyas.’

‘You saw it all, and then you came back, a sad old woman with no interest in anything except money and power and lording it over the rest of us. Doesn’t that suggest all that exploring was really just a waste of time?’

‘It would, if it hadn’t changed me.’ The book’s leather binding offered a creak of complaint as she shut it. ‘I’ve seen marvellous things, Sunday. I’ve looked back from the edge of the system and seen this planet, this Earth, reduced to a tiny dot of pale blue. I know what that feels like. To think that dot is where we came from, where we evolved out of the chaos and the dirt… to think that Africa is only a part of that dot, that the dot contains not just Africa, but all the other continents, the oceans and ice caps… under a kiss of atmosphere, like morning dew, soon to be boiled off in the day’s heat. And I know what it feels like to imagine going further. To hold that incredible, dangerous thought in my mind, if only for an instant. To think: what if I don’t go home? What if I just keep on travelling? Watching that pale-blue dot fall ever further away, until the darkness swallowed it and there was no turning back. Until Earth was just a blue memory.’

Sunday’s scorn was overwhelming. ‘You never had the nerve.’

‘Maybe not. But at least,’ Eunice answered mildly, ‘I’ve stood on the edge of that cliff and thought about jumping.’

‘I came to Mars. Isn’t that adventurous enough for you?’

‘You’ve only taken baby steps, child. But I can’t fault your determination. After all, you found me.’

‘Yes. And where has that got me?’

‘To this point. And I’m not done with you yet. Not by a long mark. There’s a choice that needs to be made, a difficult one, and in all conscience I just don’t have the mental capacity to make it.’

‘That’s uncharacteristically modest of you.’

‘Oh, I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about this thing I’ve become: this bundle of clanking routines stuffed into a hundred-year-old space helmet. That won’t suffice, not when so much is at stake. That’s why I’m going to leave matters in your hands. Return to Lunar space. Go to the Winter Palace, if it’s still there.’

‘It is.’

‘If you’ve managed to find the helmet, then you’ll get past the sphinxware guarding the Palace. And if you are, as you say, Akinya… then the rest will follow.’ She paused. ‘At some point, you will be challenged by more sphinxware. The answer you give will be critical. But I can’t tell you what that answer should be. I’ve been buried under Mars for sixty years.’

‘And that’s meant to be helpful… how, exactly?’

Her eyes twinkled. ‘Forewarned is forearmed.’

‘Thank you,’ Sunday said, drenching her answer with as much sarcasm as she could muster.

‘I wish I could tell you more, but the simple fact is that I only know the things I need to know, here and now. Yet wisely or otherwise I have faith in you, Sunday Akinya.’

‘You just told me you’re a bunch of routines stuffed into a helmet. How could you possibly know whether I’m up to the task?’

‘Because you remind me of me,’ Eunice said.

‘You mean, up my arse with my own divine self-importance?’

‘It’s a step in the right direction.’

Sunday took deep and grateful gulps of air. Her clothes were soaked with sweat, sticking to her as she was extricated from the suit.

‘I hope that wasn’t too traumatic,’ Jonathan said, pushing a glass into Sunday’s clammy hand.

‘You’ve had the helmet all this time, yet in sixty years you never figured out a way to break through the sphinxware?’ She drank the glass down in one go. ‘Even if you couldn’t do it, surely someone else would have been able to?’

‘There might have been a way,’ Jonathan said, ‘but would the risk have been worth it? If the helmet sensed it was being hacked, it might have erased its contents. Besides, it didn’t really interest me.’

‘I can’t believe that.’

‘You have to remember that I was the one who bored your grandmother. When she’d grown restless of Mars, I was happy to put down roots. The helmet was from that other part of her life, the part I had nothing to do with.’

Soya dabbed Sunday’s forehead with a cloth.

‘Then why dig it up?’ Sunday asked.

‘I still wanted to make sure it reached the right hands. If that meant acting as a curator, so be it. If I hadn’t, the machines would have recycled it decades ago.’

‘You can’t argue with that,’ Soya said.

‘No, but I’m not sure what either of us has achieved. Yes, there was a message from Eunice in the helmet, and it told me some stuff. But answers? All she gave me was some cryptic horsepiss about something being a blessing or a curse. She wouldn’t say which. Other than that I need to get to the Winter Palace, which is back where I started.’

‘She dragged you all the way to Mars… to tell you the answer is on your doorstep?’ Jitendra asked.

‘I don’t know what she was telling me.’ Sunday accepted another glass of water from Jonathan. She was beginning to feel human again, save for the lingering aches and pains where the suit had been squeezing her. ‘There was some stuff about looking back at Earth, seeing it from all the way out.’ She paused and said doubtfully, ‘Maybe there’s more it can tell me.’

‘You want to get back in that thing?’ Jitendra asked, with what struck her as a particularly touching concern for her well-being.

‘Maybe, when we’re back in aug reach, the construct can find a way in without tripping the sphinxware to self-erase. But we have to leave the Evolvarium for that. She thinks she might have created this place, by the way. By accident!’

‘She was here,’ Jitendra admitted. ‘No one can argue with that. And when all this is over, someone really needs to dig around and find out how the Evolvarium got started. Maybe I’ll do it.’

‘You’ll ruffle a few feathers,’ Soya said.

‘Good. It’s about time.’

‘That’ll have to wait, I’m afraid,’ Sunday said. ‘I need to get a message to Geoffrey, very urgently. Even if I left Mars right now, I’m still more than a month from home. That’s too long. One of us needs to look inside the Winter Palace before Hector or Lucas gets the same idea.’

‘We can reach Vishniac by tomorrow morning,’ Soya said.

‘Cross the Evolvarium at night?’

‘It’s safer when you have friends in the right places,’ Jonathan said. There was a gleam in his eyes that didn’t belong in a man that old. ‘Trust Soya – she’ll get you back in one piece. But promise me something – this won’t be the last time we speak, will it?’

‘We’ve barely begun,’ Sunday said.

‘Count on it,’ Jitendra said. ‘Even if she doesn’t come back, I will. I’m serious about ruffling those feathers. And I have a feeling there’s a lot you and I could talk about.’

‘I think so too,’ Jonathan said. Then he frowned slightly, turning back to Sunday. ‘What you said just now, about it all being horsepiss?’

‘What?’ Sunday asked.

‘Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you sounded just like your grandmother.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Geoffrey heard his own footsteps through the suit’s auditory-acoustic pickup and the timbre was different now, each footfall accompanied by a distinct steel-edged echo. The open door had shown only darkness, and it was no lighter now that they were on the other side of it, cut off from the Quaynor. He felt as if he’d climbed into the hold of a ship: some huge metal-walled void with no windows.

‘There’s an image-intensifier mode on these things,’ Jumai said, quietly, as if there were things astir that she did not wish to alert. ‘Voke amplification, see what you make of it.’

Jumai was never more than arm’s reach away, her form outlined on the helmet’s display. Geoffrey did as she had suggested, voking the suit to apply a light-enhanced overlay. Grey-green perspectives raced away from him, curving in one direction, arrow-straight in the other. He pivoted around, Jumai manifesting as a blazing white smudge. The floor angled up behind her, commencing its great steepening arc, the arc that would eventually bring it soaring overhead and back down behind him. At right angles to the direction of curvature, the floor stretched all the way to the far endcap. He couldn’t see anything of the endcap. There wasn’t enough ambient light for that.

‘This isn’t right,’ he said, shaking his head inside the helmet. ‘It shouldn’t be like this.’

‘You want to let me in on what you were expecting?’

‘I’ve never been here before,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but I’m very familiar with this space – from whenever she talked to us, whenever she delivered one of her sermons.’ The words were a struggle. ‘This wasn’t just an empty shell. It was full of trees, full of greenery and light. Like a jungle. There were plants, borders, paths and stairs. It rained. There should be a whole closed-cycle ecology running in here.’

‘Looks more like a big room full of nothing to me,’ Jumai said.

‘Arethusa was here. She chinged aboard, not long before Eunice died. She’d have noticed anything strange. She’d have said something to me.’

Jumai had her hands on her hips. She was looking up, towards the central axis of the empty chamber. ‘Least there’s a ship. That is a ship, isn’t it?’

‘I think so.’ But he could hardly tell. It was nearly seventy-five metres away. All he could make out was a spine of organised darkness running from one end of the chamber to the other. ‘We need more light,’ Geoffrey said decisively. ‘Is there a flashlight mode somewhere? I’m surprised it hasn’t cut in automatically.’

‘Maybe there are situations where you wouldn’t want that to happen. Wait a second.’ Jumai reached up and started fiddling with the crown of her helmet. ‘Thought I saw something while we were suiting up. Got some flares in my toolkit, all else fails.’

Light blazed from her helmet. She doused the blue-white beam against the central axis, picking out details of the Winter Queen. Geoffrey felt his world lurch slightly back into sanity, if only for a few lucid moments. He was still reeling from the absence of the jungle. Even if the air in the chamber had been swapped for pure oxygen and allowed to consume itself, there’d still be ashes… scorching. Yet there was nothing. The flooring under his feet had the improbable antiseptic gleam of an airpod showroom.

But the ship was real. He’d activated his own helmet lamp and was sweeping the beam along the nearest part of the Winter Queen. The deep-space explorer was a kilometre long, and even though part of that length was now absorbed into the endcaps, he still couldn’t see more than a fifth of it. Yet the anatomy was unmistakable, from the cluster of fuel tanks above him to the delicate filigreed spine with its branching black complexity of fractally folded radiator vanes.

He’d seen this ship a thousand times, in countless family histories. Everything about it looked correct. But this wasn’t the rotting, rusted, tree-encased carcass he’d been expecting. Winter Queen wasn’t garlanded with humid green overgrowth and she wasn’t laced with solar lights and an irrigation system. There were no spiral staircases rising from the floor to puncture her hull. She did not look as if she’d been stuck in here for decades.

She looked ravishingly, sparklingly new.

‘Enough of this shit,’ Jumai said. Her glowing form reached down and scooped something out of the holdall she’d dropped at her feet. She did something to the object in her hand and it quickened into impossible brilliance.

She tossed the little ball of light along the floor, where it bounced and rolled and then began to propel itself with a curious willingness, until it came to a rolling stop two or three hundred metres away.

Jumai did the same thing with a second flare.

They lit the entire chamber. Geoffrey squinted against the brightness until his eyes amped down their response. His suspicions were confirmed now: the ship looked as pristine as its surroundings. The two opposed centrifuge arms, one hundred and eighty metres from tip to tip, were still turning, whooshing around like the blades of a wind turbine. The capsule-shaped living pods at either end of the arms skimmed the ground with only a metre or so to spare.

‘Why are they still turning?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘There’s already gravity in this place.’

Jumai looked at the swinging arms. ‘How fast are we spinning?’

Geoffrey recalled what he’d learned on the approach. ‘About three times a minute, give or take.’

‘Then they’re not spinning fast enough to counteract the habitat’s rotation, either. I thought maybe someone had gone to a lot of trouble to recreate weightlessness, for whatever reason. But that’s not it. Those arms can’t be swinging around faster than once every couple of minutes, relative to us.’

‘Must be a systems glitch, then,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Something inside blew a fuse and the arms started up again. Or maybe it’s just to keep the air circulating, like a god’s own ceiling fan.’

Jumai scratched the back of her helmet, as if she had an itch. ‘Air’s breathable, you realise. Someone went to that much trouble. But I’m beginning to wonder if anyone ever actually put that to the test.’

‘Memphis would have breathed it.’

‘If he ever came this far. And if he did… well, he lied to you, didn’t he? Big time.’

Geoffrey wasn’t keen to follow that thought to its conclusion. ‘I see something,’ he said. ‘High above us, under the path of the centrifuge arms.’ He pointed, and Jumai followed his gaze to the indistinct form he’d sighted, pinned to the ceiling like a squashed fly.

‘Got to be Hector.’

‘He’s not moving.’ Somewhere in the suit there had to be a mode for zooming in the faceplate view, but Geoffrey couldn’t be bothered searching for it now. ‘I wonder if he even knows we’re here. There’s no aug reach, but suit-to-suit comms are still good…’ He didn’t want to voice the possibility that Hector might be dead, however plausible that now looked.

Jumai grabbed the holdall and broke into a surprisingly loose-limbed run, the suit easily accommodating her intentions. Geoffrey followed, keen to reach his cousin but anxious about what they might find. Whatever had hurt Hector might still be present. But where could anything or anyone hide, in this vast empty space? Unless Hector’s attacker had retreated back into the far endcap wall, the only possible hiding place was the ship itself.

He didn’t like that idea at all.

Even running against the spin of the habitat, Geoffrey didn’t feel his own weight varying to any perceptible degree. They cut diagonally, Jumai tossing out another flare along the way, and slowed to a walk when they were about a hundred metres from the suited figure. The centrifuge booms were still turning, and now that they were closer there was a clear whoosh each time one of the capsules swept by them. The arms were not moving particularly quickly – scarcely more than running pace, compared to the floor – but Geoffrey nonetheless had an impression of enormous, dangerous momentum.

Hector – who else could it possibly be? – was on his back, spreadeagled and motionless, staring straight up towards the central axis and the Winter Queen. Next to him, resting on the ground, was a white rectangular box like a big first-aid kit. Traceries of luminous arterial red ran down the suit’s matte-black limbs and defined the form of the chestplate and helmet. The Akinya Space logo glowed on the upper shoulder joint of the nearest arm.

Geoffrey approached the form, always keeping the centrifuge arms in view. As one of the capsules sped past him, he grasped what must have happened to his cousin. There was a door in the capsule: a dark circular aperture in the leading hemisphere.

‘Hector was trying to get inside.’

‘Figures,’ Jumai said slowly. ‘I mean, he would, wouldn’t he? Comes this way, finds things aren’t the way they’re meant to be… what else is he going to do but try to get aboard the ship?’ She took a step back as the other capsule whooshed by. ‘Think this was a surprise to him?’

Geoffrey had no adequate answer for that, only intuition. ‘I don’t like Hector,’ he said. ‘Don’t trust him, either. But I don’t think he was expecting to find this place empty.’ He got up close to Hector’s visor, trying to make out the face behind the glass.

There wasn’t one.

‘The suit’s empty.’

Jumai knelt down and double-checked, as if he could possibly have been mistaken. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘He must have removed the suit, then told it to wait here for him. That’s what it’s doing – just lying there, waiting.’

‘I know there’s air in here, but why would anyone be lunatic enough to get out of a perfectly good spacesuit?’

Geoffrey looked at the next centrifuge pod to swing past them, at the tiny door in its side. A suited figure could squeeze through that aperture – there’d have been little point in having it otherwise – but it would have been all but impossible to time the transition from floor to moving component. Unencumbered by a suit, though… and for a man who was fit and agile enough to play both tennis and polo and excel at both… Geoffrey wondered.

‘I think he wanted to get aboard the ship. He couldn’t do it with the suit on: too sluggish, too clumsy. So he got out of it. Told it to wait here, until he was ready to leave.’

‘We haven’t seen him,’ Jumai said. ‘There’s another way out of the Winter Palace, of course.’

‘But he wouldn’t have left without putting the suit back on. I think he’s still inside the ship.’

Cautiously, as if he might be working a jack-in-the-box, Geoffrey eased open the cover on the white container and saw four small cylindrical devices, packed like stubby beer bottles. There were four empty spaces next to them. He tugged one of the plump cylinders out of its cushioned support matrix.

It was heavy and cold, with a sturdy flip-up arming mechanism built into the cap. The label was in Swahili, with other languages printed underneath in smaller type. ‘“Caution: metastable metallic hydrogen,”’ he read. ‘“This is a variable-yield explosive device. Do not tamper with, shock or expose to temperatures in excess of four hundred kelvin, magnetic fields in excess of one tesla, or ambient pressures in excess of one hundred atmospheres. If found, immediately notify Akinya Space, Deep-System Resources.”’

‘You don’t think he came with just the four, do you?’ Jumai said.

‘Perhaps. On the other hand, maybe he took the other four into the ship.’

‘And set the fuses. And then issued a distress call, because something happened to him in there.’ Jumai was speaking very slowly, as if she did not much care for the direction her thoughts were taking her. ‘Something that meant he couldn’t get back out again on his own.’

‘We might be in trouble,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You think those charges would be enough to blow up the whole habitat?’

‘Don’t need to be. There’s a nuclear drive inside the ship.’ He turned the demolition charge around, studying the fine settings around the flip-up arming device. There was a twist dial and a locking fail-safe. Tiny numerals were engraved into the twist dial. ‘Must be a way to trigger these remotely. But there’s also a timer mode. It goes ten, twenty, thirty, sixty, ninety.’

‘Seconds or minutes?’

‘Minutes, I hope.’ Geoffrey slid the charge back into the box, treating it as gingerly as he would a Ming vase. ‘We don’t know that he set the timers, but it’s a possibility we can’t ignore.’

‘He called in the Kinyeti more than an hour ago,’ Jumai said. ‘If he armed those fuses and then ran into trouble… it can’t be the sixty-minute fuse. But that still doesn’t give us a lot of time to get out of here. We should start back now, and tell the Quaynor to pull away as soon as we’re in the lock.’

‘That’s an excellent idea.’ Geoffrey voked through visor menus until he found the option for suit removal. Typically, there were eight or nine hurdles to jump before the suit accepted that he really, honestly meant to get out of it. ‘But one of us has to go up there and get Hector. I’ll disarm the fuses if I’m able; otherwise I’ll find him and get the two of us out of there as quickly as possible. And if I can’t save Hector, I’ll save myself.’

‘No,’ Jumai said. ‘That’s not how it’s going to happen. And we don’t have time to argue about it.’

Geoffrey’s suit had begun to detach itself, opening like a crafty puzzle to reveal the human prize at its heart. The air in the chamber hit his lungs: he’d seen no point in holding his breath, so he gulped it down eagerly. Beyond a brief coughing fit triggered by the air’s coldness, there were no ill-effects.

‘Listen carefully,’ he told Jumai. ‘If Hector’s hurt in any way, he won’t be much use in that suit. I can carry him back the way he came in, if it comes to that, and he can get me through any doors we meet on the way – he passed through them on his way here, after all. But there’s no way I’d be able to get him up that shaft we already came down.’

‘So how the hell do you get out?’

‘Hector’s ferry. There’ll be room aboard for both of us.’

He put a hand on the armoured swell of her shoulder joint, before she could voice an objection. ‘I’m not suicidal, Jumai. But I can’t just leave him to die aboard that ship. As soon as you’re back in aug reach, tell Mira and Arethusa to decouple and get away as quickly as possible. The Pans’ll wait for you, or leave one of the Quaynor’s own escape pods docked at the hub for you to use. If all else fails, vent the airlock and use the explosive decompression to push you away from the station. It’ll only take you a few minutes to reach safe distance: I may not know much about spaceflight, but I know there are no shockwaves in vacuum, and the debris cloud will attenuate very quickly.’

‘And you?’

‘This is the only way.’

‘It sucks.’

‘Yes, it does. But the more time we spend discussing this, the less time we have for making it work.’ Geoffrey raised his voice. ‘Go. Now. We’ll both be fine.’

Jumai hesitated, then started to retrace their steps. She turned back once or twice, but Geoffrey was waiting until she was gone before he chanced his luck with the centrifuge. If it went wrong, he didn’t want Jumai risking her own neck to save his.

He waited for the next pod to come around, studying it more closely than he had before. The aperture was in the front, as the pod travelled, but if he simply stood his ground and waited for it to arrive he’d be swatted aside like a fly. Better to run alongside it, as fast as he could, and spring aboard. He couldn’t match its speed, but he could reduce the relative motion to the point where he ought to be able to grab hold of the pod without being injured or flung aside. There were handholds around the pod’s circumference: they’d been put there for weightless operations but they would serve his purpose equally well.

When he was certain that Jumai was either out of the chamber or far enough away that she couldn’t see him, he stationed himself as close to the path of the pods as he dared. Divested of his suit, he felt the breeze as they passed. He gulped in deep cold breaths and began to jog. The next pod whisked past his right shoulder – it was moving faster than he’d anticipated. He increased his pace, transitioning from a jog to a run. He kept his eyes on the ground, tracking a fine seam in the floor, making sure he didn’t deviate more than a few centimetres either side of it. The next pod arrived: it was still fast, but he’d cut down the relative motion to the point where jumping aboard no longer appeared insanely impossible. His feet hammered the metal plates. He was not yet running at his limit, but he might have to sustain this pace for several minutes. When the next pod passed, he upped his speed again. His lungs began to hurt. Now the relative speed couldn’t be more than two metres a second, but this was not a pace he could sustain indefinitely. The pods had taken about two minutes to complete their revolutions before, but now they had to catch up with a moving reference point and the interval was closer to three minutes. He thought again of the timer fuses on the demolition charges. Was this madness, even attempting to get aboard the Winter Queen?

When the next pod came, he made his move. One chance only, he figured. If he was knocked to the ground, if his ankle twisted under him, he’d never have the strength to make a second attempt. Part of him hoped it would happen that way. Make a gesture, an effort to reach Hector… that would be sufficient, wouldn’t it? He could go home with a clear conscience, knowing he’d tried.

He grasped for the handhold with his right hand, and an instant later had his left in place as well. For a second or so he was able to keep pace with the pod, but then his legs buckled under him and he was being dragged. Putting as much strength into his arms as he was able, he levered himself further from the ground. He was facing back the way he’d come now, like a rider about to mount a horse, his heels skimming the floor. With a grunt of supreme effort he managed to hook his right leg onto one of the handholds, like a foot into a stirrup, and then his left leg followed. He was aboard the pod.

But not inside it. He was facing the wrong way, gripping the outside, one slip away from tumbling off. He twisted around, keeping his hands and feet where they were. The only thing in his favour was that he was now slightly lighter than when he’d been standing: the centrifuge’s own rotation was working against the overall spin of the Winter Palace.

Geoffrey adjusted his position. He moved his right hand onto the same handhold as the left, and then moved the left as far back over his shoulder as he was able without throwing himself dangerously off-balance. He caught his breath, knowing he could only hold the posture for a few seconds. He could not adjust the position of his legs unless he swung himself out into space again, holding on with just his hands. Taking another breath, calculating the movement he would have to make, rehearsing exactly where he would plant his feet when momentum brought him back into contact with the pod, he committed.

Something twisted in his wrist. The pain was intense, a dagger into a nerve, but it was also momentary. He forced himself not to let go, grunting away the discomfort. His left foot recontacted the pod, then his right. He scrambled for a more secure hold, his right heel sliding against the pod’s curving side.

Then he was safe.

Geoffrey allowed himself a minute to gather his energies before continuing. It was not difficult to reach the entrance hole, although it required care. Under other circumstances, knowing that something had already happened to Hector, he would have entered it with immense caution. Scarcely an option now. He swung himself inside, and as he hit the padded floor all he felt was the relief of no longer having to clutch on to the handholds. His wrist ached, his shoulder muscles were protesting, his legs were burning from the exertion.

But he was aboard the Winter Queen.

The pod’s interior was bathroom-sized. There were fold-down stools and a table, a couple of screens. Sufficient for a game of cards, but even without suits on, it would be very cramped in here with more than two people. The pods weren’t meant for extended habitation, though. The idea would be to spend a few hours per day under normal or even slightly higher than normal gravitation, to offset the calcium depletion and muscle wasting of prolonged weightlessness. Given that Eunice had been alone on her final deep-space voyage, elbow room had hardly been an issue.

He looked up, along the spoke that connected the pod to the spacecraft’s central axis. Ninety metres: more or less the same distance they’d already traversed after entering the habitat. There was a ladder, and just enough room for one person to climb it. Before cramp set in, he made a start on the ascent. His limbs protested, the ache in his wrist sharpening, but as he ascended, so his effective weight gradually decreased and the effort became endurable. Every ten metres or so the ladder reached a platform and swapped sides, so that there was no risk of falling all the way down. He wondered why they hadn’t arranged an elevator, but a moment’s consideration made it plain enough: the whole point of the centrifuge arm was to work bone and muscle. Climbing up and down was part of the exercise.

The air in the ship was free to mix with that in the chamber, but there was a metallic quality to it that he didn’t remember from before. It smelled antiseptic, like a hospital corridor that had been vigorously scrubbed and polished. Nor was it as cold as the air outside. In addition to the warmth, ship sounds were now reaching his ears. He heard the electric hum of what he presumed to be the centrifuge mechanism, and beyond that the muted chug of onboard life support and air circulation, like a showroom full of refrigerators.

Three minutes after commencing his ascent, Geoffrey was weightless again. He had reached the transition collar where the rotary movement of the centrifuge met the fixed reference frame of the main hull. An oval hole slid slowly by, rimmed with cushioning. Hector had come at least this far.

Geoffrey pushed himself through the hole the next time it appeared. There was ample time to complete the manoeuvre, and he didn’t doubt that there were safety mechanisms waiting to cut off the centrifuge’s rotation should he somehow imperil himself.

He floated into the lit core of the Winter Queen and assessed his surroundings.

He was amidships: aft lay the engine assembly and the nuclear power plant; fore lay the command deck. He was hanging in a corridor, hexagonal in cross section, with panels and lockers arranged in longitudinal strips. Between the strips were recessed ladders, grip-pads and handholds. The main lights were on, and everything looked very clean and tidy.

Not at all like a ship that had been to the edge of the solar system and back – much less one that had been lived in for sixty-odd years. Geoffrey picked at the edge of a striped warning decal, bordering what the glass pane identified as an emergency bulkhead control. Not even a hint of dirt around the edge of the decal. His own fingernails were grubbier.

Nothing stayed that new, not with human beings in the loop.

‘Hector!’ Geoffrey called. ‘Can you hear me?’

No answer. Not that that necessarily meant anything, since the ship was big and there were undoubtedly soundproof doors between its various internal sections. But which way had his cousin gone?

Tossing a mental coin, Geoffrey decided to check out the command deck first. Trusting his orientation, he set off down the corridor, using the handholds and straps for traction. He was glad he’d had time to adjust to weightlessness on the Quaynor.

The corridor jinked right, then left – squeezing past some fuel tank or external equipment module, he guessed – and then there was a door, blocking his path. A small window was set into the door, but all he could see through that was a short space and another door beyond it. Bracing himself, conscious that he wasn’t wearing a suit and that he had no reason to assume the entire ship was pressurised, he reached out and palmed what was obviously the door’s operating control. An amber light flicked to green and the door gapped apart in two interlocking halves.

He pushed through into the space beyond, the door closing almost before he’d cleared the gap. He arrested his drift and palmed open the second door. There was air beyond. He continued his exploration.

By his reckoning, Geoffrey thought he must be halfway to the front of the ship by now. The corridor he was moving along was wider than the others, and there were rooms – or more properly compartments – leading off from it. He spared them the briefest of glances as he passed. Most were large enough to serve as private chambers for individual crewmembers, and indeed one or two came equipped with bunks and other fold-out amenities. But again there was no sign that anything had ever been used. He passed a couple of larger chambers, a dining area, a commons room, a sickbay – all the chrome and pea-green equipment gleaming and shrink-wrapped, as if it had just been ordered out of the catalogue and installed yesterday. A zero-gee gym, a kind of cinema or lecture theatre. More storage lockers and equipment bays. Lots of equipment: spacesuits, vacuum repair gear, medical and food supplies, even a couple of stowed proxies, waiting to be called into service. The proxies were surprisingly modern-looking for a ship that hadn’t gone anywhere since 2101.

Did they even have proxies back then? Geoffrey wondered.

He moved on. Around him the ship chugged and whirred and clicked. It was much warmer now, almost uncomfortably so, and Geoffrey was beginning to sweat under the spacesuit inner layer. He passed a pair of large eggshell-white rooms furnished with hibernation cabinets: streamlined sarcophagi. They were Hitachi units, plastered with medical logos, instructions and graphic warning decals. There were six cabinets.

Which made no sense at all.

Winter Queen had made many journeys with a normal operating staff, but for her final mission Eunice had taken the ship out alone. There had been good reasons for that: automation and reliability had improved to the point where the vehicle could easily manage its own subsystems and damage repair, and beyond that Eunice had not wanted to involve anyone else in what was unarguably a risky enterprise, taking her much further out, and for longer, than any previous deep-space expedition.

That, of course, and her natural unwillingness to share the limelight.

But mass was fuel, and fuel was speed, and speed was time. Eunice would never have hauled the deadweight of five extra hibernation units and their associated mechanisms – many tonnes, Geoffrey guessed – if she only needed one for herself. Winter Queen had been outfitted and modified for each of its journeys. There was no reason for all that mass to have been left aboard.

Pushing questions from his mind for the moment, Geoffrey continued along the spine of the ship. He passed through another set of pressure doors, and before him lay the command deck. It was windowless: more like the tactical room of a warship than an aircraft’s cockpit. Windows had little utility on a deep-space vehicle like this; it could steer and dock itself autonomously, and relay any external view to its crew via screens or aug-generated figments.

The ship was dreaming of itself. Screens and readouts wrapped the space like the facets of a wasp’s eye, seen from inside. Lines of housekeeping data scrolled in green and blue text, updating too quickly to read. Schematic diagrams fluttered from screen to screen in a constant nervous dance, reactor cross sections, fuel-management flow cycles. Other displays showed zoom-ins of the solar system at different scales: planets and moons, their paths around the sun, various trajectories and intercepts available to the ship at that moment, depending on fuel and time/energy trade-offs. Simulations and projections, executing in neurotic loops, with only tiny, trifling variations from run to run, everything changing and shuffling at a feverish pace. Geoffrey could take in the totality of it, but no single display held still long enough for him to grasp more than the sketchiest of details. One thing was clear, though: the ship still thought it was a ship.

There were three chairs in the command deck – bulky acceleration couches, heavy and high-backed – and for all that the displays snared his attention, it could not have taken Geoffrey more than five or ten seconds to notice that he was not alone.

In the middle chair was Hector.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Where’s Dos Santos?’

‘Dos Santos ran into trouble answering your distress call. I’m your next best hope.’

‘Leave now,’ Hector told him.

Geoffrey propelled himself through the space. Between the displays were margins of padded walling set with handles and elastic hoops. His foot brushed one of the displays. It flexed, absorbing the pressure before gently repelling him.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked, facing Hector directly. ‘Why are you still aboard?’

‘Because I had to know,’ Hector said. ‘Because I had to fucking know. Why else? What happened to Dos Santos? Why are you here, cousin?’

Geoffrey’s eyes amped up to compensate for the low ambient lighting on the command deck. Hector wasn’t just sitting in the central command seat. He was strapped there, with a heavy X-shaped webbing across his chest and tough-looking restraints around his wrists and ankles. Like Geoffrey he was wearing only the inner layer of a spacesuit.

‘I’m here because I thought you might be in trouble,’ Geoffrey said, still trying to get his bearings. ‘The station attacked the Kinyeti – the crew’s still alive, but the ship’s a wreck. Jumai and I came aboard afterwards, using the other docking hub. We found the four demolition charges you left behind and assumed you’d come aboard with the others. Is that the case? Did you arm them?’

‘Not an issue now. There’s still eleven minutes on the fuses, if my timing’s right.’

Geoffrey shook his head. ‘How can that not be an issue? Tell me where the charges are – I’ll disarm them.’

‘Just leave. You still have a few minutes.’

‘You just said eleven minutes.’

‘Different countdown.’ Hector nodded, which was all he could do given the degree to which his movements were impaired. ‘The screen ahead of me. It’s the only one that hasn’t changed.’

Geoffrey followed his gaze with a peculiar kind of dread. He saw what Hector meant. Three sets of double digits: hours, minutes, seconds. The hours had reached zero. There were four minutes left, and a handful of churning seconds.

‘What the hell?’

‘It initiated as soon as I hit a certain level of the ship’s file system. Some kind of self-destruct, obviously.’ Hector sounded insanely calm and resigned, as if he’d had years to accept his fate. ‘I can’t get out of this chair – it’s locked me in. But you’ve still got time. You don’t need a suit, and the elevator’s still working to take you all the way back to the hub. Use my ferry – I assume it’s still docked.’

Geoffrey was too stunned to answer immediately. ‘The charges,’ he said, when he could push a clear thought into his head. ‘Tell me where they are.’

‘You’re not listening. It doesn’t matter now. You need to leave.’

‘Until we know what that countdown means, I’m not going to assume anything. Where are the charges?’

Hector groaned, as if all this was an insuperable nuisance. ‘To the rear, next to the last bulkhead before the engine section. That’s as close as I could get. I assumed it would be sufficient.’

‘Maybe I should work on getting you out of that seat first.’

Hector rolled his eyes. ‘With the heavy cutting equipment you happened to bring with you?’

‘There’s got to be something I can use somewhere on the ship.’

‘Good luck finding it in… less than four minutes.’

Geoffrey pushed himself away. He left the command deck, working his way back down the ship as quickly as his limbs allowed. The doors opened for him, all the way back to the point where’d he’d come in. Through a small porthole he saw the centrifuge arms, still wheeling around. Hector was being optimistic, he thought. Even with four minutes, it would have been a stretch to reach space and safe distance before Winter Queen’s countdown touched zero. He doubted that he even had time to escape the demolition charges.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

He pushed deeper into the ship, back towards the propulsion section, and at last found the devices. There were four of them, hooked into restraining straps on the wall just before the bulkhead. He slid one of the demolition charges out of its strap and studied the arming mechanism. It was set to the ninety-minute delay, but there was no means of determining how much time was left on the clock.

Geoffrey twisted the dial back to its safety setting, felt a click, and lowered the flip-up arming toggle. He repeated the procedure on the other three devices, then unzipped the top of his spacesuit inner-layer and stuffed the charges against his chest, metal to skin. Then he zipped up again, as well as he could. Hector must have had to do something similar to get the bombs aboard the ship in the first place.

Geoffrey made his way back to the command deck. He was still sweating, still struggling to catch his breath.

‘How much time left?’

‘I told you to leave!’ Hector shouted. ‘We’re down to less than a minute!’

The clock confirmed forty seconds remaining, thirty-nine, thirty-eight…

‘I disarmed the fuses.’

‘What do you want, a gold star?’

‘I thought you might like to know.’

‘You should have left, cousin.’ The fight had slumped out of Hector. ‘It’s too late now.’

Geoffrey tugged the charges out of his suit and stuffed them into a nylon tie-bag fixed to the wall near the entrance. He re-zipped his suit then eased into the command seat to Hector’s left.

‘What are you doing?’ Hector asked.

‘The ship wanted you in that seat for a reason. If Eunice meant to just kill you and blow up the ship, there are less melodramatic ways she could have made that happen.’ Geoffrey buckled in, adjusted the chest webbing, then positioned his hands on the seat rests. Cuffs whirred out and locked him in place, as they’d done with Hector. He felt a momentary pinprick in both wrists. Something was sampling him, tasting his blood.

Fifteen seconds on the clock. Ten. He watched the last digit whirr down to zero.

‘You didn’t have to come back for me,’ Hector said.

‘What would you have done were the situation reversed?’

‘I’m not really sure.’

Geoffrey heard a sound like distant drums beating a military tattoo. He glanced at his cousin. ‘Those sound like explosions.’

‘But we’re still here. If the power plant was going to blow… I think we’d already know it.’ Hector looked to Geoffrey for confirmation. ‘Wouldn’t we?’

‘I’m a biologist, not a ship designer.’ He paused. ‘But I think you’re right.’

The detonations were continuing. He heard the sound, and through his seat he felt something of the shockwave of each explosion as it transmitted through the ship. But it didn’t feel as if it was the ship itself that was breaking up.

Geoffrey looked around. The dance of readouts had calmed down. Before him floated a schematic of the entire ship, cut through like a blueprint, with flashing colour blocks and oozing flow lines showing fuel and coolant circulation. Most of the activity appeared to be going on around the propulsion assembly. On other screens, the trajectory simulations were stabilising around one possibility. He saw their future path arc away from Lunar orbit, away from the Earth–Moon system, slingshotting far across the ecliptic.

‘We’re getting ready to leave,’ Geoffrey said, unsure whether to be awed or terrified by this prospect. ‘Winter Queen is powering up. Those explosions… I think it’s the station, dismantling itself around us. Freeing the ship.’

‘I’ve got some news for you,’ Hector said. ‘This isn’t Winter Queen.’

The explosions had doubled in intensity and frequency, now resembling cannon fire. Eight massive explosions shook the ship violently, followed a few moments later by eight more. One fusillade came from the front, the other from the rear. On one of the schematics, Geoffrey observed that the aerobrake and drive shield were decoupling from their anchorpoints in the habitat’s leading and trailing ends. The ship was now floating free, cocooned in the remains of the Winter Palace.

He felt weight. His seat was pushing into his back. Half a gee at least, he guessed – maybe more. The ship clattered and banged. Moving forward, beginning to accelerate, the armoured piston of the aerobrake would be bearing the brunt of any impacts she suffered against the ruins of the habitat.

‘If this isn’t the Winter Queen…’ he said, leaving the statement unfinished.

‘By the time I planted the charges,’ Hector said, grimacing as the acceleration notched even higher, ‘I’d already seen the state of this ship and the rest of the habitat. You think I didn’t have questions by that point?’ He clenched his fists, his wrists jutting from the restraining cuffs. ‘I had to know, Geoffrey. There was still time to look into the system files. Maybe I’d stumble on a destruct option as well, save myself the worry of those charges not doing their job. So I came in here and sat in this seat, only expecting to be here a few minutes.’

‘That’s when the seat imprisoned you?’

‘No… I consented to this.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I had immediate access to the top-layer files. It’s an old system, but easy enough to navigate. At first, it was more than willing to let me have access.’

‘And then?’

‘I hit a point where it wouldn’t let me go any further. Detailed construction history, navigation logs… all that was blocked. No time to look for workarounds. But the ship said I could have access to everything I wished, provided I proved that I was Akinya. I didn’t question it. Why wouldn’t the ship want to know that I was family before giving me its deepest secrets?’

‘So you let the cuffs close around you.’

‘I had to buckle in first: the blood-sampling system wouldn’t activate until I was secured. That was foolish… but I didn’t have time to sit and weigh the options. I wanted to know, very badly. And I assumed the ship would take a drop and release me again.’

The acceleration had been rising steadily ever since their departure, and it was a long time since Geoffrey had felt the ship crash into anything. Whatever remained of the Winter Palace, they must have left it far behind by now. He hoped that Jumai had got to safety, and that the Pans had managed to undock their ship in time.

‘How did you call for help?’

‘Still had a comm-link to my suit, and my suit could still get a signal to the Kinyeti.’

‘You didn’t tell Dos Santos much.’

‘I told him I needed help. I knew he’d come as quickly as possible. There was still time to get me out.’

‘After the ship had taken the blood sample… did it keep its word?’

‘Yes,’ Hector said. ‘That’s how I found out that this isn’t Winter Queen. It’s… something else. I found the construction history. This ship is sixty-two years old. It was built in 2100, when Eunice was off on her final mission. Winter Queen was a good twenty years older than that.’

Geoffrey nodded to himself, thinking that he understood Hector’s error. ‘Something happened out there, that’s all. Her previous flight logs got wiped somehow, and everything was reset to zero.’

Hector sighed. ‘All the files cross-matched. Nothing had been erased or lost. This ship only ever made one trip. It was built in deep space, and it came back to Lunar orbit, where it’s been ever since. Box-fresh.’

‘What do you mean, built in deep space?’

‘Unless the files are lying… this ship was manufactured on one of our Kuiper belt assets. A dormant comet, orbiting beyond Neptune.’

‘You make igloos out of ice, Hector, not ships. I know that much.’

‘I realise this is painful for you, Geoffrey, getting up to speed with what your own family has been doing for the last hundred years. Of course you can’t make anything out of ice and dirt: that’s not why we went to the Kuiper belt, nor why we spent a fortune planting flags all over anything bigger than a potato. We mine those iceteroids for what they can give us: water, volatiles, hydrocarbons. We send robots and raw materials out there and they build mining and on-site refining facilities, and then they package the processed material and catapult it back to us on energy-efficient trajectories. The robots and raw materials come from our facilities on the main belt M-class asteroids, where the metals are. It’s a supply chain. Can you grasp that?’

‘You still haven’t told me how a ship could originate on a comet.’

‘There are metals and assembly facilities in the Kuiper belt. We put them there, to mine the volatiles. Thousands of tonnes of complex self-repairing machinery, serviced by Plexus machines – even more tonnage. And that infrastructure was already in place by 2100, already earning back our investment.’

‘You’re saying it could have been reassigned to make a ship?’

‘Saying it’s possible, that’s all. Maybe illegal – there’d have been any number of patent violations, unless our subcontractors were somehow in the know – but it could have been done. If Eunice wanted to build a copy of her ship, she had the means. All she would have needed were raw materials and time.’

Geoffrey closed his eyes. It wasn’t just the steadily mounting gee-load, although that was a part of it. He needed to think. If they were on VASIMR propulsion now, the power plant was surely being pushed to its limit. He remembered how leisurely the departure of Sunday’s swiftship had appeared.

‘And secrecy,’ he said.

‘She had it. The Kuiper belt’s a long way out, and it’s not like anyone else was living anywhere near that asset.’

‘Want to hazard a guess as to where we’re headed?’

Hector looked at the trajectory display, but it was clear that he’d already digested the salient details. ‘If that’s to be believed, then we’re going a long way out.’

‘Maybe back to the ship’s point of origin?’

‘If I could get out of these restraints, maybe I could query the ship.’

Geoffrey struggled against his own cuffs, but they were still holding him tight. ‘We’re safe now, though,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘The ship clearly wanted to make sure one or both of us was family, so it had to test our blood. It may also have wanted to cushion us during the escape phase. But that’s over – so why would it insist on holding us here now?’

‘Is that a rhetorical question, cousin?’

‘Release me,’ Geoffrey said.

The cuffs relinquished their hold, as did the ankle restraints. He was still buckled into the seat, and while the ship was under acceleration it might make sense to stay that way, but he was no longer a prisoner of the chair.

‘You just had to ask nicely.’

Hector clenched his fists again, made one final attempt to break the restraints by force, then said, ‘Release me.’

The ship let him go. Hector stretched his arms, holding them out from his body against the acceleration. Geoffrey remembered that his cousin had been confined to the chair for a lot longer than he had, and had spent much of that interval expecting to die. For the first time in a very long while he felt a dim flicker of empathy.

They were blood, after all.

‘I guess the next thing is to tell it to stop and let us off.’

Hector strained forward. ‘This is Hector Akinya. Acknowledge command authority.’

‘Welcome, Hector Akinya,’ the ship said, speaking in what Geoffrey recognised as the voice of Memphis, or one very close to it. ‘Welcome, Geoffrey Akinya.’

‘Stop engines,’ Hector said, in the tones of one who was used to getting his way. ‘Immediately. Return us to Lunar orbit.’

‘Propulsion and navigation control are currently suspended, Hector.’

Geoffrey issued the same command, was met by the same polite but firm rebuttal. It was irksome to have Memphis speaking back, as if the ship failed to grasp that mimicking the voice of a recently dead man was an act of grave tactlessness.

‘How long?’ he asked. Then, sensing that the ship might need clarification: ‘For how long are propulsion and navigation control suspended?’

‘For the duration of the trip, Geoffrey.’

Hector looked at him, evidently sharing his profound unease at that answer. ‘State our destination, and the duration of the trip,’ he said.

‘Our destination is KBO 2071 NK subscript 789,’ the ship said. ‘Akinya Space Trans-Neptunian asset 116 stroke 133, codename Lionheart. Trip time will be fifty-two days.’

Hector listened to that and shook his head.

‘What?’ Geoffrey asked, growing impatient. ‘Is that the same place or not?’

‘It’s the same iceteroid where the ship was built. I remember the name, Lionheart. But that’s Trans-Neptunian, for pity’s sake. I’ve been as far out as Saturn, cousin. I know how long it takes, and fifty-two days won’t begin to cut it.’

Geoffrey could only nod. He knew how long it had taken the swiftship to get Sunday to Mars, and Mars was a hop and a skip away compared to Neptune’s orbit. ‘Eunice’s mission to the edge of the system took a lot longer than a hundred days, even allowing for the return time.’

‘More than a year. So either the ship is bullshitting us, for no reason at all, or…’ Hector didn’t seem to know where to go with that.

‘Or we’re on a very fast ship.’

‘Nothing’s that fast.’

‘Until now,’ Geoffrey said.

Behind them, the command deck doors opened. Geoffrey twisted around in his harness, straining to see past the bulk of his seat. His heart skipped at the sight of a proxy, looming in the doorway. It was one of the shipboard units he’d seen earlier – a man-shaped chassis constructed from tubes and joints.

It was cradling a body, and he recognised it.

‘This female has suffered minor concussion, but is otherwise uninjured.’ The proxy spoke with the voice of the ship. ‘Shall I convey her to the medical suite?’

Geoffrey unbuckled his harness. They were still accelerating, but the thrust appeared to have levelled out at around one gee. He could move around in that without difficulty, provided he took care. ‘Do so,’ he said.

‘I thought you said you were alone.’

‘I thought I was.’

Hector was in the process of undoing his own restraints when a ching request arrived. Geoffrey voked acknowledgement and placed Mira Gilbert’s head and upper torso in the middle of the command deck. He voked Hector in on the conversation.

‘Unless someone’s spoofing the return signal, you’re alive,’ Gilbert’s figment said. ‘We’ve been trying to establish contact since… well, whatever it was that happened. We’ll get to that in a moment. Are you all right?’

Geoffrey took a moment to decide how to answer that question truthfully. ‘I’m fine… for the time being. Beyond that, things become a little murky. I’m with Hector – he’s OK as well. Since you seem to be alive, I presume Jumai got word through?’

‘Jumai reached the point where she was able to signal us. She told us to undock immediately and execute a safe-distancing manoeuvre. I told her I’d wait until she was in the lock, but she insisted on going back inside.’

‘I know. We just found her.’

‘How is she?’

‘I’m guessing she made it onto the ship just before we departed. She must have been knocked around a bit, but the proxy tells me there isn’t anything seriously wrong with her.’

Gilbert’s figment nodded. ‘OK – next question. The habitat’s gone. Presumably you worked that much out for yourselves. How much control do you have over Winter Queen?’

‘None whatsoever, and by the way, this isn’t Winter Queen. It’s some other ship Eunice sent back in its place. Similar, but not the same. And there’s no sign that Eunice was ever here, either aboard this ship or anywhere in the Winter Palace.’

Hector shot him a warning look. ‘Any other family business you want to reveal, cousin?’

‘They already know more than you’d approve of – a little more won’t hurt.’

‘How can she not have been in the habitat?’ Gilbert asked. ‘Jumai said something similar, but we didn’t have time to get the full story out of her before she went off-air again.’

‘I don’t know,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘Obviously none of us ever dealt with Eunice except via ching… other than our housekeeper Memphis.’

‘All right. As important as that is, there are actually more pressing matters right now. You say you can’t control the ship – what have you tried?’

‘Everything,’ Hector said. ‘Flight plan’s locked in, and it won’t let us change anything.’

‘We’re tracking you, but we don’t have a handle on your trajectory yet. Where are you headed?’

‘If the ship’s to be believed,’ Geoffrey said, ‘an iceteroid in the Kuiper belt.’

Gilbert looked apologetic. ‘You won’t make it out of Earth–Moon space at this rate. You’re running way outside the safe operating envelope for that type of propulsion system.’

Hector looked sceptical. ‘You’ve figured that much out in just a few minutes?’

‘You’re lighting up near-Lunar space like a Roman candle. You need to find a way to throttle back, and urgently. At the very least, you’re going to burn so much fuel you won’t have a snowball’s hope of slowing down this side of the Oort cloud.’

‘The ship has its own ideas,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You’ll have to do something. You’ve already reached the point where no local traffic has enough delta-vee to catch up with you – and that includes Quaynor, I’m afraid.’

Geoffrey nodded, although a fuller understanding of the situation did not make it any easier to accept. ‘I need to check on Jumai. Maybe she can help us.’

‘We’ll keep reviewing the situation,’ the merwoman said. ‘In the meantime, good luck. I was about to wish you “godspeed”, but under the circumstances… maybe not.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Getting to the medical suite had been more difficult than Geoffrey had anticipated. The central corridor had become a plunging vertical shaft, one that could only be ascended or descended using the recessed ladders Geoffrey had noticed on his arrival. He’d wanted to go down alone – he’d tried to persuade Hector to stay on the bridge, monitoring the situation – but his cousin had been determined to accompany him. They had been able to secure themselves to handholds and grabs as they worked their way down, but the process had been time-consuming and fraught with hazard.

There was something troubling about the provision of the ladders, though. Whoever had decided they were necessary must have known that the ship would be accelerating hard. That, and the ship’s confident assessment of their trip time to Lionheart, made it all the more difficult to accept that the engine was malfunctioning.

Geoffrey should have been encouraged by that, but he wasn’t. He didn’t like the idea of being trapped aboard a ship that was already travelling too fast to be intercepted.

‘I don’t remember what happened,’ Jumai said, when the proxy had brought her round to consciousness and the ship had confirmed that her injuries were minor, the concussion having no long-term consequences. ‘I was outside… and now I’m not.’

‘You remember Winter Queen?’ he asked.

She considered his question for a moment before answering. ‘In the habitat, yes.’

‘You’re aboard it,’ Geoffrey said, before adding, ‘sort of.’

‘We’re prisoners,’ Hector stated gravely. ‘The ship has locked us out of its controls and we’ve been accelerating since we broke out of the Winter Palace. But it isn’t Eunice’s old ship, and we don’t really know where it’s taking us.’

‘We found your suit,’ Jumai said.

Hector nodded. ‘Geoffrey told me you both came aboard to find me. You were supposed to leave the station and get to safety before the charges blew. You remember the charges?’

She answered his question with one of her own: ‘What happened to them?’

‘I defused them,’ Geoffrey said. ‘But they were the least of our problems, as it turns out. The station was already counting down to its own demolition. It must have been designed this way, all those years ago – made to come apart, so that the ship could break out without damaging itself.’

‘Did you say this isn’t the Winter Queen?’ There was a notch in her brow – a frown, or the crease of a headache, or both.

‘It looks the same,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but it’s younger, and it was built on the edge of the solar system. It’s also… doing things. Stuff that ships don’t usually do, in my limited experience.’

‘Your grandmother was a piece of work, do you know that?’

Geoffrey managed a graveyard smile. ‘I’m coming round to that conclusion myself.’

‘The ship is accelerating too strongly,’ Hector said. ‘That’s what the people outside think, anyway. But clearly we’re still alive, and the ship looks as if it’s been designed to cope with this kind of thing.’

‘You think Eunice gave it some tweaks?’

‘If she did, it was a hell of a tune-up,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If the ship isn’t lying, it’s headed for an iceteroid in the Kuiper belt. It’s an Akinya asset, a long way out. Ship says we’ll be there in fifty-two days, which is nothing.’

‘Doesn’t sound like nothing to me. That’s – what – nearly two months?’

‘It should take a lot longer,’ Hector told her. ‘Our best swiftships – the best that anyone can buy, including me – have an upper limit of about two hundred kilometres per second, and most don’t get anywhere near that. We’ll need to be moving about five times faster.’

‘That’s impossible,’ Geoffrey said.

‘One thousand kilometres per second,’ Hector said. ‘Or one-third of one per cent of the speed of light. It may not sound very fast when you put in those terms, and frankly, in the grand scheme, it isn’t. But if the ship keeps this up, the three of us will shortly be moving faster than anyone has ever travelled in the entire history of human civilisation.’

‘Well,’ Jumai said, ‘this sure as fuck wasn’t in my plans when I woke up this morning.’

‘I suspect that goes for the three of us,’ Hector said.

‘You shouldn’t have come after us,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You had a chance to get out.’

‘So did you,’ Hector said. ‘Why criticise Jumai for doing exactly the same thing you did?’

‘I wanted to save the station,’ Geoffrey said. ‘There was never much chance of me getting out in time.’

‘Part of you must have still wanted to give it a try. That’s basic human survival instinct kicking in, cousin. Yet you came back, and stayed with me until the ship’s countdown reached zero.’ Hector glanced away, then forced himself to meet Geoffrey’s eyes. He held the stare, his chin working while he sought the right words. ‘After everything that has happened between us, after what you thought Lucas and I had done to Memphis, I did not expect that.’

‘I had to know what this ship is for,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Maybe you did,’ Jumai said. ‘But you couldn’t leave him, either.’

Softly, Hector said, ‘If Lucas and I have wronged you, it is only because we wanted the best for the family. Would we have involved you if that was not the case?’

‘You opened something you weren’t expecting,’ Geoffrey said.

‘That is true.’

‘Maybe there was a point where we had the option of letting all this stay hidden. But after what we’ve seen now – the Winter Palace, this ship – I don’t think we can go back. Not even if we wanted to.’

‘The destruction of the habitat will have been visible to countless public eyes,’ Hector said. ‘The world will soon know what was inside it – if it doesn’t already.’

‘So you accept that the cat is out of the bag?’

Hector emitted a mirthless half-laugh. ‘What choice do any of us have now?’

Geoffrey turned to Jumai. ‘I can’t say I’m happy that you chose to come back aboard the ship. But at the same time, I’m glad to have you here. Does that make any sense?’

‘Maybe it will when my head clears,’ she said.

When Jumai was strong enough to be moved, they had the proxy convey her back up to the command deck while Geoffrey and Hector took the ladders. They had been under way for more than three hours by this point, and the relentless acceleration had already taken them as far from the Moon as its own orbit around the Earth. In one of the viewing ports, it already looked smaller than it did from Africa. More than anything, it was this that touched Geoffrey on a visceral level.

It wasn’t numbers any more; it was something he could look at with his own eyes and feel, deep in his guts. He didn’t need to take anyone’s word that they were going a long way out.

For most of the last hour Jumai had been sitting in the right-most command chair, attempting to find a way to unlock the ship’s controls. She had been doing none of the command inputting herself since the seat would not recognise her as being of Akinya blood. But that didn’t stop her directing Hector and Geoffrey.

It was to no avail. The control lockout was watertight, and all the usual circumventions proved futile.

‘Not saying it can’t be broken,’ Jumai said, when her last attempt was rebuffed, ‘but it’s going to take someone a lot smarter than me to do it. Plus, they’d need to be on this ship already.’

‘Maybe it can’t be done,’ Hector said. ‘This has been orchestrated with exceptional thoroughness. Our grandmother was not one for leaving loose ends.’

‘Except the ones she meant us to find,’ Geoffrey said.

‘This ship has been prepared for us,’ Hector went on. ‘It was waiting for an Akinya to enter it, and it has a destination in mind. I do not think it is any accident that those hibernation units were provided.’

‘Why six?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Eunice was taking no chances. The ship only needed one of us to trigger its countdown, but there was always the possibility that there might be other people aboard when that happened. As it transpired, it’s just the three of us. But you’ve seen the provisions. Even if there were more than six, I think the ship could easily keep a few more people alive for fifty-two days.’

‘And the return trip,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Let’s not forget about that.’

‘Let’s hope sending us back was in her plans,’ Hector said.

When Mira Gilbert next chinged in, it was with imagery of their own ship, captured by public eyes as it fled Lunar space. Geoffrey could appreciate her concern over the engine now. There’d been nothing that bright since the age of chemical rockets. The difference was that the ship was able to sustain its thrust for hours, not minutes. There was no sign of the drive flame guttering out, and even sceptical witnesses were beginning to speculate that the engine might not be as prone to imminent destruction as they’d first supposed. If anything, some of its initial instabilities were beginning to settle down.

The ship had emerged from the Winter Palace almost unscathed. The aerobrake had acted like a battering ram, shoving most of the debris out of harm’s way. The centrifuge arms had decelerated and folded into their stowed positions, tucked along the sides of the hull like grasshopper legs.

‘It may not be much consolation,’ Gilbert said, ‘but you’re breaking news all over the inner system. You’ll be systemwide when light’s had time to bounce back from Saturn.’

‘How does that help us?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘It doesn’t. I warned you that you were already out of range of local traffic. Things are no better when we factor in faster ships. There are a couple of swiftships on Earth approach that might be able to match your instantaneous speed now, if they diverted immediately, but by the time they reached you they’d be out of fuel. That wouldn’t help you at all.’

‘No one is to risk anything on our behalf,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I agree,’ Hector put in. ‘And I speak for Akinya Space in this regard.’

‘Once we have confirmation of your destination,’ Gilbert said, ‘we can talk about sending out a rescue party. But you’re going to be looking at a long wait before anyone shows up.’

‘The ship appears to have everything it needs to keep us alive,’ Hector answered. ‘We’ll find out about the iceteroid when we get there. It’s a mining facility, so there should be life-support equipment for visiting technicians.’ Hector didn’t sound sure of that, though. At this point Geoffrey didn’t blame him for having doubts.

‘We’re just going to have to trust the ship,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We’ll be entering hibernation soon – there’s no point staying awake if our hands are tied. We all have friends and family elsewhere in the system. I think we’d all like time to make statements to them before we go under. We still don’t have full aug reach, and we may never get it. We’ll need your assistance to relay our messages.’

‘I’ll make sure they get where they’re meant to,’ Gilbert said. ‘You have my word on that.’

There wasn’t much to say, when it came down to it. They recorded their statements privately, committing them to the care of the Pans, and then returned to the command deck. Jumai made one last attempt to break the lockout, but she got no further than before.

‘Whoever designed this,’ she said, gesturing vaguely at the suite of readouts and controls, ‘didn’t throw it together in five minutes. This ship was designed from the ground up not to accept external inputs unless it wants to. Honestly, if it wasn’t my life on the line here, I’d be impressed. As it is, I could cheerfully strangle whoever put this architecture together.’

‘It’s a little late for that,’ Hector said.

Geoffrey was still thinking about what he had said to Sunday, and whether it needed amending. The last thing he wanted to do was add to her troubles, but he had still asked her to find someone who could take care of the elephants – at least watch over them – until he was back. He did not go so far as to voice his own fear, which was that he might never return. Geoffrey just hoped she was faring well on Mars. It would have been good to know that she was safe, before he went under.

‘I suspect I know what you are thinking,’ Hector said a little while later.

‘What?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘You would have liked to have spoken to Memphis again before he died. You may find this difficult to accept, but I feel the same way. I did not kill him, Geoffrey. Nor did Lucas.’

Geoffrey looked away for a moment. ‘I know. It was what you always said it was: just a stupid accident.’

Hector’s face showed that he had been expecting any answer but that one. ‘You were so certain we had done it. What made you change your mind? Did you play back our movements, examine data from the public eyes?’

‘I didn’t need to. I had a choice, when I came aboard the Winter Palace and found your suit. At that point, part of me was still willing to accept that you and Lucas might have been behind it.’

‘No one could blame you for feeling angry. You were always close to him.’

‘Another part of me knew it wasn’t possible. We’re family, after all. We may have different opinions about the way we live our lives, but that doesn’t make us implacable enemies. Or it shouldn’t. We’ve all had the enhancements, too. Why should you and Lucas be capable of premeditated murder if I’m not?’

‘Some fish always slip through the net. It was not an outlandish possibility. When you tried to punch me… it’s not as if you didn’t want to draw blood, is it?’

The memory of that moment, the red rage, the numbing clampdown as the Mech retaliated, remained raw.

‘I’m ashamed of what I did.’

‘None of us has acted as well as we might have in this,’ Hector said. ‘Lucas and I… we should not have approached you the way we did. It would have been better if we’d just asked you for help, rather than offering money. Rather than bribing you. Then at least there would have been the implication that we trusted each other. But I am afraid business runs rather thick in our veins.’

‘What’s done is done.’

‘I am still glad that you came back for me,’ Hector said. ‘Perhaps I would have done the same for you. The point is, the moment tested you, and you rose to the challenge. I have not yet been tested.’ He paused, smiling slightly. ‘I am not sure if we will ever be friends, in the accepted sense, but if we can somehow find a way not to despise each other, I think that will be an improvement. For the old man’s sake, if nothing else. Memphis always did wish we could all get on like a happy family.’

‘I still can’t accept that he’s gone,’ Geoffrey said.

‘It will take us all a long while to adjust. When this is over, we must find a way to honour his memory. All of us, as best we can.’

‘I agree,’ Geoffrey said.

Hector offered his hand. Geoffrey looked at it, allowing the moment to stretch. He did not want to give the impression that this was an easy or casual reconciliation, or that there was not still a vast gulf of trust to be bridged. But Hector was right. They had to start somewhere, and now was as good a time as ever. They might not, after all, get another chance.

He shook.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

It was the morning of the nineteenth of March, another spring day dawning in the northern hemisphere of Mars, the sky as clean and pink as bottled plasma. Soya had driven Sunday and Jitendra back to Vishniac, traversing the Evolvarium at night in a tiny four-wheeled buggy with a bubble-top pressure cabin. They had come out of the Aggregate’s belly down a steel ramp which had folded back into the machine as soon as their wheels touched dirt. Jonathan had said that the journey was safe, that the other machines would keep their distance – none of them wished to provoke the Aggregate – but Sunday nonetheless sensed a constant low-level tension in Soya as they bounced and yawed across the endless high plains of the Tharsis Bulge. Now and then she’d bite her lower lip, clench her knuckles on the controls, glance nervously at the radar and sonar devices, or scan the horizon for the auroral flashes which signalled the death struggles of lesser machines. They had crossed the transponder boundary and put many kilometres between themselves and the technical limit of the Evolvarium before Soya allowed herself to relax. Even then, it was a twitching, high-strung sort of relaxation. She might be free of the machines, but Soya still wished to keep a low profile.

They had only been away from Vishniac for two full days, yet it felt like weeks to Sunday. And the little settlement, skewered by its railway line, so dismal and unprepossessing upon her arrival, now looked magnificent.

Soya parked the buggy in the same underground garage where Gribelin had kept his truck. ‘I should be going,’ she said, while Jitendra and Sunday grabbed their things. ‘Got jobs to do for my father.’

‘At least let us buy you a coffee,’ Sunday said.

Soya resisted, but Sunday pushed, and at last they were riding the elevator back up to the public levels. In the elevator’s unforgiving light, Soya looked older than before. Sunday began to appreciate the toll that her shadowy existence had enacted upon this woman. Then she caught her own reflection, and it was scarcely an improvement. Their genes were not so very different, she supposed. Both of them looked like they could use a few days off.

They found the same cafeteria where Gribelin had been waiting for them. While Jitendra was ordering drinks at the bar, Sunday held Soya’s hand. ‘I’m glad we got this chance to meet. Nothing’s going to be the same now. I’ll always know that you’re out here.’

‘I suppose we’re cousins,’ Soya said.

‘Something like that. Whatever we are, I’m happy there’s someone out here I didn’t know about. Not just because you’re a direct connection to my grandfather, although that’s part of it, but just because…’ Sunday faltered. ‘I think we could both use more friends, couldn’t we? And I meant what I said about coming back here. I will.’ Although that might be easier said than done, she thought. It wasn’t as if she could count on Pans for her expenses any more, was it?

‘I would like to travel. There are problems with that, though. My past is a fiction. It’s good enough to let me move around Mars, but I could never leave this planet.’

‘What’s the worst that could happen? They’d find out who you really are? I can’t see that you’ve done anything wrong, Soya, other than maintain a falsehood to protect Jonathan. And who wouldn’t do that? He seems like a good man.’

‘If the world finds out who I am, then it will discover what happened to him,’ Soya said.

‘Maybe it’s time. There’s no rule that says he has to hide away for the rest of his days, is there?’

‘I think he likes it better this way. Dropping out of history, like a deleted chapter.’

‘Fair enough, that’s his choice. But you don’t have to sacrifice your whole life to serve him, do you? You’ve already done more than enough.’

‘I’m not that old,’ Soya said. ‘There’s still a lot of time ahead.’ And she clearly meant a lot of time without her father, which was equally true, though Sunday had been careful not to voice that fact herself.

‘Like I said, I’m glad we met.’

Soya appeared to come to some private decision. She reached around her neck, undid a hidden fastening and lifted away one of the wooden charms. ‘This is yours now, Sunday. My father gave it to me. It used to belong to Eunice. It was a gift from her mother, Soya. Soya told her it was old, even then. I think it goes back a long way.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You will.’ Soya peeled apart Sunday’s fingers and forced the charm into her palm. ‘You have no say in this. No one ever does.’

Sunday stared down at the gift. Fastened onto a simple leather strand was a circular talisman, enclosing a more complex form that had been engraved and stained with fine geometric patterning. She allowed her fingers to curl around it, imagining her grandmother echoing the gesture, and Eunice’s mother before her, a lineage of closing hands, bound in this moment as if time itself was membrane-thin, easily breached.

‘Thank you,’ she said softly.

Jitendra was coming back with a tray and three steaming mugs of coffee. Sunday was debating whether or not to show him the gift – wondering if it ought to remain a secret, between her and Soya – when without warning a proxy arrived and took his seat.

It was not a golem; this was a purely mechanical-looking thing, shaped like an improbably skinny suit of armour, all silvers and chromes and burnished blues. It had a minimalist face: a slit of a mouth, two round eyes like double craters.

‘We need to talk,’ the proxy said.

Sunday slipped the talisman into her pocket for safekeeping. She recognised the voice, but requested an aug tag to be on the safe side. ‘Lucas,’ she said, with icy politeness. ‘Fancy seeing you here. The last thing I remember is my boot crushing your face. Didn’t you get the message?’

‘Shut up.’

Sunday had had enough of this crap. She braced herself and kicked out at the proxy, landing her heel in the middle of its abdomen. She pushed hard, toppling the proxy back. It went crashing, taking the table with it as its own foot flicked up. The spent drink containers left on the table by the previous customers went flying. From across the concourse faces swivelled towards the commotion like a bank of radar dishes.

Jitendra had frozen, the tray still in his hand.

‘We’re long past the point of reasoned debate, Lucas. Don’t you get it yet? It’s over, finished. The Pans screwed me. I came all this way for noth—’

‘Shut up.’ The proxy was getting back up, disentangling itself from the chair. ‘Just shut up. Everything’s changed now.’

There was something too calm about the way it was telling her to shut up. More in resignation than anger.

‘How?’ she asked.

The proxy placed the seat back upright, leaving the table tipped over. ‘It’s about your brother. I think you should listen.’

She wasn’t talking to Lucas, she reminded herself. Lucas was another world away; this was just an emulation – cleverer and quicker than the simulation of Eunice running in the helmet, but no closer to true sentience. Yet for all that, the illusion was compelling. The urgency in its voice was all too real.

‘Why do you care about Geoffrey?’

Jitendra had put the drinks down on the next clear table and was busy righting the tipped-over one, picking up the self-healing glassware and setting it down out of harm’s way. The coffee dregs were being sucked into the floor before they had a chance to stick to anyone’s shoes.

‘As a rule, not much. But I do care about my brother. Hector got into trouble. Geoffrey…’ The proxy tilted its head downwards. ‘Geoffrey tried to help him. Now they are both in difficulty.’

Sunday could have sworn she had exhausted her capacity to feel anxious after everything that had happened in the Evolvarium. But the proxy’s words still managed to touch something raw. ‘What do you mean?’

There was that not-quite-human pause while the proxy formulated its response. ‘Hector tried to gain entry into the Winter Palace. Geoffrey went in after him, only a few minutes later. Something happened shortly afterwards. The Winter Palace is gone.’

Sunday wasn’t sure if she’d understood correctly. ‘Gone?’

‘It destroyed itself. But Hector and Geoffrey are alive, for the moment. They’re on a ship, together with Jumai Lule.’

‘I don’t believe it. My brother wouldn’t work with Hector. This is some kind of trick to lull me into trusting you.’

‘You don’t have to take my word for it – consult the aug. The news has gone systemwide.’

Sunday doubted that the proxy would call her bluff that readily, so perhaps it was true after all. ‘I need to talk to my brother.’

‘You can’t. They’re asleep, and the ship is on its way to Trans-Neptunian space. It’s moving very quickly, which in itself is noteworthy. We are concerned that the ship may damage itself, perhaps fatally. If it doesn’t, it will reach its destination in a little over seven weeks. In truth, we don’t really understand what’s going on. But the landscape has certainly changed.’

‘Not from where I’m sitting.’

‘Sunday,’ the proxy said, leaning forwards to emphasise its point, ‘let us not pretend that you and I retain any great affection for each other. But my brother is on that ship, and your brother tried to help him. Shortly before he went under, Hector told me that we must reassess our position with regard to Eunice’s legacy.’

‘Are you saying you made a mistake?’

‘We’ve both made mistakes.’ The proxy folded its skinny mesh-muscled arms. She could see all the way through them, to metal bones and actuators, and out the other side. ‘You said it yourself. The Pans screwed you.’

She’d been wondering if the proxy had the smarts to pick up on that. Evidently it did.

‘How else was I supposed to get to Mars? Flap my wings?’

‘The question should be: how are you going to get back to Earth, now that your friends have deserted you?’ Quicker than she could blink, the proxy’s hand whipped out and touched her wrist. Contact was made for only a fraction of a second – she felt the implication of a touch, not the touch itself – and then broken.

Then the icon popped into her visual field. ‘I doubt the Pans will honour their obligation to return you home,’ the proxy explained. ‘In any case, the next swiftship with an available slot isn’t due to break orbit for another week. But who needs commercial liners when you have Akinya Space at your disposal?’

She felt violated. Had the proxy asked her permission to establish a body-to-body link, she would have refused it.

Perhaps that was the point.

‘What did you just give me?’

‘Authorisation to sequester an Akinya deep-system vehicle currently in Martian orbit. It’s a freighter, so don’t expect the height of luxury, but it can get you home in five weeks, if you leave for the elevator today. You’ll be back around Earth before Geoffrey and Hector reach their destination.’

‘Maybe I don’t want to go home. Maybe I want to follow my brother.’

‘He’s headed beyond the orbit of Neptune, Sunday. From that far out, the difference between being on Earth or Mars is nothing. Besides – even our fastest ship would take more than eight months to get there.’ The proxy let that sink in before continuing. ‘You can’t do anything for Geoffrey here, and nor can I for Hector. That’s why I’m still in Africa. And we all have to come home eventually.’

‘I’ve only just got to Mars.’

‘Mars isn’t going anywhere,’ the proxy said. ‘It’ll still be here waiting for you.’

So she went home. Vishniac to Herschel, Herschel to the elevator. As the thread-rider took her higher she watched Mars fall away under her feet, receding and paling like some memory of a dream that began to perish at the touch of daylight. Considered in those terms it had been a strange one, a restless fever stalked by scuttling iron monsters and grinning, bad-smelling madmen. She had nearly died in it, too, but now she was sad because there seemed to be something final in this ascent, some unaccountable certainty that there would be no return. Goodbye, Mars, she thought: Goodbye, cold little world of broken promises. The planet might not be going anywhere, but there was no reason to assume that the trajectory of her life was ever going to intersect with Mars again.

In orbit, she snatched only glimpses of the requisitioned freighter. Ugly as sin, all fuel tanks and radiators, with a random plaque of airtight shipping containers fixed around its skeletal chassis, thousands of them, like blocky 3-D pixels implying a fatter shape she couldn’t quite visualise. The nameless vehicle had no permanent crew and only a tiny life-rated habitat module. They put Sunday and Jitendra asleep before loading them, and then there was nothing, five weeks of oblivion and then the grog and haze of revival. She’d felt like a god, like the centre of her own personal universe, when they brought her back to consciousness on Phobos. Now some switch had flipped in her skull and she felt like a piece of grit that the universe was trying very hard to expel.

But that passed, gradually. And from orbit Earth was marvellous, impossibly blue, lit up like an indigo lantern with its own interior glow. She longed to touch it, to stroke her fingers through that atmosphere, cleaving white billowing clouds and glittering salty seas, until she felt the hard scabbed crust beneath them. She wanted to walk on Earth, breathe its ancient airs, feel the tectonic murmur of its still-beating heart. To be somewhere where she didn’t need to rely on machines and glass and pressure seals to keep her alive. Which was absurd, given the amount of her life that she’d happily spent in a roofed-over cave on the Moon. But Mars had done something to her.

‘I can’t go back to the Zone,’ she told Jitendra. ‘I mean, not right now. Not this moment.’

‘One of us has to.’

He was right, too: their affairs couldn’t just be left to moulder. So two days after revival, they separated: Jitendra returning to the Moon, and the Descrutinised Zone, where he would attempt to resolve any minor emergencies that had arisen since their departure; and Sunday to the elevator, and to Libreville, and to Africa. It was bad, saying goodbye to Jitendra. It might be many weeks, even months, before they were properly reunited – and Sunday doubted that ching was going to offer much in the way of consolation while they were apart. But she had to do this, and Jitendra understood.

She had not walked under terrestrial gravity for years, and the transition was far harder than she had anticipated. Medicine helped, and so did an exo – she did not feel in the least bit conspicuous wearing it, since her predicament was hardly a rare one – but what she had not counted on was the near-permanent ache in her bones and muscles, or the constant fear of tripping, of damaging herself. The ever-vigilant exo would not permit injury, and the ache was only a consequence of her body reconfiguring itself for locomotion on Earth. But neither of these realisations helped in the slightest. She still felt awkward, top-heavy, fragile as porcelain.

But that passed, too – or at least became no more than a tolerable background nuisance. She did not return to the household directly, for she was not yet ready to deal with Lucas. Instead she travelled, tapping funds that were effectively inexhaustible. Libreville to the Brazzaville – Kinshasa sprawl, where there were friends and fellow artists she’d once collaborated with. B – K to Luanda, where she spent long hours losing herself in the surge and retreat of the ocean, its mindless assault on the mighty Cho sea walls. She never had much trouble finding somewhere to stay, company to pass the evenings. Her friends wanted to know what had happened on Mars, why she had been all that way only to come home again. As politely as she could, she rebuffed their questions. Most of her friends were wise enough not to push.

But they wanted to know about Geoffrey, and she could hardly blame them for that. Unlike the death of her grandmother, this wasn’t some seven-day wonder. Winter Queen, or whatever name that ship merited, had defied expectations by not destroying itself. It was still out there, further from the sun than it had any right to be given the mere weeks that it had been under way. It had long since stopped accelerating, but it would need to decelerate if it was to rendezvous with its presumed destination. The ship’s exhaust would be directed away from Earth when that happened, much harder to detect from the inner system. But countless eyes would be straining for a glimpse of those improbable energies, trying to tease out a hint at the unexpected physics underpinning them. Some of the minds behind those eyes, undoubtedly, would be half-hoping for the ship to wipe itself out in a single information-rich flash, all the better for unravelling.

In fact, she wasn’t worried about that herself. By now she had some faith in Eunice. If the ship was capable of getting Geoffrey, Hector and Jumai most of the way to Lionheart, it wasn’t going to screw up the last part of that journey. But she was much more concerned about what would happen to the three of them when they arrived. What awaited them out there? If the ship used up all its fuel getting to the iceteroid, could they get back home again – or survive long enough to await rescue? But again she fell back on that faith. This was engineered, part of a plan concocted by Eunice more than sixty years earlier. There had to be a point to it, beyond an elaborate form of punishment aimed at her descendants. So she hoped, anyway.

Meanwhile, Geoffrey was not in Africa. When he left Earth it had not been under ideal circumstances, and he could not have known how long it would take to break into the Winter Palace and ferret out its secrets. But he had surely not counted on being away for months. Since he had been involved with the Amboseli elephants, Sunday knew, Geoffrey had very rarely been away from them for more than a couple of weeks at a time. A month would have been exceptional. He’d often told her how much effort he had invested in establishing a rapport with the study group, and how easily that rapport could be undermined.

That, fundamentally, was what had brought her back to Africa, although she had not been quite ready to admit it to herself at first. The elephants had never meant much to her, even though she had shared very similar childhood experiences with Geoffrey. But if she had been pulled away from the Moon unexpectedly, and if something she had nurtured was in danger of suffering through neglect, she had no doubt that Geoffrey would have been there for her.

In Luanda her funds provided an airpod. Still awkward in the exo, she folded herself into its interior and told it to fly to the Amboseli basin. She would be within a stone’s throw of the household, but the household could wait.

In the air, east of the Great Rift Valley, the airpod on autopilot, she chinged Gleb Ozerov. She hadn’t bothered working out what time it was in the Descrutinised Zone. The zookeepers kept weird hours anyway, and after what she’d been through on Mars she was of the distinct opinion that they could damn well take her call.

Sunday had requested outbound ching, and after a moment of hiatus the bind inserted her bodyless presence into the menagerie. Gleb, who must have accepted the inbound call, stood next to a table-sized trolley, collecting leaf samples from the vivariums.

‘It’s good to hear from you,’ he said, doubtfully, as if there had to be a catch somewhere. ‘I was hoping you’d get in touch…’ He put down his tools, dusted his fingers on his laboratory smock. ‘I tried reaching you, but you were still on the ship. Are you all right?’

Sunday was already answering before Gleb had finished his piece. ‘How much do you know about what happened on Mars?’

It wasn’t just time lag that delayed his answer. ‘I was hoping to hear your side of the story before making my mind up. Chama’s been trying to find out what he can, but he’s still under lockdown, which complicates things.’

‘You screwed us. Your people, Gleb. The ones I thought I could trust.’

‘My people.’ He sounded stung by this, as if what she’d said was somehow beneath her. As if she had failed to live up to his hitherto unblemished image of her.

‘Truro, Holroyd, whoever. I don’t give a fuck. I was lied to. Told I’d be helped, when all they wanted was to get to the box before me. Jitendra and I nearly died out there, Gleb. The Evolvarium nearly ate us alive, and that wouldn’t have happened if we’d got in and out without being betrayed. Gribelin died out there.’

Gleb selected another tool and nipped a leaf sample. He held the wispy green sliver up to his eyes for inspection, frowning slightly.

‘Nobody comes out of this looking good, Sunday. But if it’s any consolation, Chama and I had nothing to do with what happened on Mars. When Chama put his neck on the line in Pythagoras, he was doing you a favour.’

‘To buy a favour back from my brother.’

‘Perhaps. But beyond that, he had no ulterior motives.’ Gleb placed the nipped-off leaf sample into one of his specimen boxes, clipping shut the airtight lid. ‘Arethusa contacted us, it might interest you to hear – not long after that unpleasantness on Mars.’

‘I’ve no reason to trust her either.’

‘Trust who you like, Sunday – I’m not here to make your mind up for you. She spoke about Truro, though. Said things were possibly going to become difficult for Chama and me, since our sponsorship was so closely tied to Truro and his allies.’ He paused to drag a stylus from behind his ear, using it to scribe a note on the specimen box. ‘Arethusa said things were going to become difficult for her, too – it seems this whole sorry business has precipitated a bit of a rift.’

‘I thought Arethusa was in charge.’

‘So did she. So did we. But it appears there are elements who feel she’s not been promoting the Panspermian ideology with sufficient vigour, at least in recent years.’

‘My brother and I had our theories about Arethusa. If we’re right, then there wouldn’t be a Panspermian ideology without her.’ Sunday hesitated on the threshold of what she hardly dared say, because it felt almost blasphemous to voice such speculation in Gleb’s presence. But the time for tact, she decided, was long past. ‘I think I met Lin Wei, your founder. I think she’s still alive. I think all of you owe Arethusa more than you realise.’

Gleb nodded slowly. ‘I won’t say the possibility had never occurred to us. Given your family’s connection to Lin Wei—’

‘She was at Eunice’s scattering. Arethusa was behind the proxy, of course. And she could only have chosen the form she did because she half-wanted one of us to make the connection.’

Gleb wheeled the trolley to the next vivarium. ‘She still has influence, still has allies. For the time being, I’m fairly hopeful that she can still protect Chama and me. Even ensure a continuation of basic funds and amenities. But that isn’t guaranteed, and right now we need all the friends we can find. Actually, screw us. We don’t matter at all. But the dwarves do. This collaboration is vital, Sunday. We can’t let it fall apart just because of a squabble between Arethusa and her rivals.’

‘Funnily enough, it’s elephants I’m calling about.’

For the first time since she had chinged in Gleb smiled. ‘Yours or mine? I should say, the dwarves, or the Amboseli herd?’

‘Both, ultimately. Right now I need help with the big ones. You know about my brother’s situation, I take it?’

‘Difficult not to. I… hope things work out, Sunday. Our thoughts are with Geoffrey.’ Hastily he added, ‘And the other two… your cousin, and the woman.’

‘Hector and Jumai. Yes, we’re concerned about them all. But there’s nothing we can do for them and there is something we can do for the elephants. Geoffrey wasn’t expecting to be away this long, and I’m worried about the herd. That’s why I’m back in Africa. I feel I should be doing something.’

‘They are, fundamentally, elephants,’ Gleb said thoughtfully. ‘They’ve been managing on their own for millions of years. It would be presumptuous to assume they can’t do without us for a little longer.’

‘But they’re elephants with machines in their heads, elephants my brother has been interacting with for most of his adult life. They’re used to him coming and going, studying them. He speaks to them, for pity’s sake. I don’t know what his not being there is going to do to them. And that’s before I start worrying about medical issues or pregnancies or anything else going on with the herd. My brother would have known what to do. I don’t.’

‘Did he leave specific instructions?’

She thought back to the message Geoffrey had recorded, before entering cryosleep. ‘Nothing too detailed. I don’t think he wanted to burden me, and anyway, he had enough on his mind back then.’

‘If there was anything vital, he’d have told you.’ She nodded, wanting to believe it, but Gleb sounded much surer than Sunday would have been. ‘All the same, our hands aren’t completely tied. Your ching tag places you… very near the herd.’

‘On my way to it right now.’

‘Chama and I know our way around the M-group – remember that we’ve been taking an interest in Geoffrey’s work for years. We know the hierarchies, the bloodlines, and I can probably identify two dozen individuals by sight alone even though I’ve never been to Africa. You’ve never had much contact with them, have you?’

It felt like an admission of weakness, a duty she had shirked. ‘Virtually none.’

‘In which case we won’t risk direct contact. Leave that to your brother, for when he gets home. But we can at least monitor the M-group, and any other parties that take our interest. And – not inconsequentially – maintain enough of a presence to deter any researchers who feel like claim-jumping. Although I hope no one would be that irresponsible, given the very public reasons for your brother’s absence.’

‘I hope not.’

‘But human nature being what it is, we’d best take no chances. Will you be maintaining a physical presence in the area?’

‘For the time being.’ Which meant: until she had news from Geoffrey, good or bad. However long that took.

‘Chama had best not risk involvement, at least until his hundred-day lockdown expires, and there’s no reason for me to be there in person. But I can give you as much support as you need, for as long as you want it. That’s my promise, Sunday. If you feel we’ve wronged you, then I aim to do my small part in rectifying that. I may not succeed, but I’m prepared to give it a damned good try.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. And it was a heartfelt thanks, although it was only in this moment that she realised how much she had been counting on his help.

The airpod’s console chimed, pulling her back into its sensorium. She was nearing home.