Blue Remembered Earth

For Stephen Baxter and Paul McAuley: friends, colleagues and keepers of the flame.

“And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind

How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.”

— Dylan Thomas

It is necessary to speak of beginnings. Understand one thing, though, above all else. Whatever brought us to this moment, this declaration, could never have had a single cause. If we have learned anything, it’s that life is never that simple, never that schematic.

You might say it was the moment when our grandmother set her mind to her last great deed. Or that it started when Ocular found something worthy of Arethusa’s attention, a smudge of puzzling detail on a planet circling another star, and Arethusa in turn felt honour bound to share that discovery with our grandmother.

Or that it was Hector and Lucas deciding that the family’s accounts could not tolerate a single loose end, no matter how inconsequential that detail might have looked at the time. Or the moment Geoffrey was called out of the sky, torn from his work with the elephants, drawn back to the household with the news that our grandmother was dead. Or his decision to confess everything to Sunday, and her choice that, rather than spurning her brother, she should take the path of forgiveness.

You might even say that it goes back to the moment in former Tanzania, a century and a half ago, when a baby named Eunice Akinya took her first raw breath. Or the moment that followed a heartbeat later, when she bellowed her first bawling cry, heralding a life of impatience. The world never moved quickly enough for our grandmother. She was always looking back over her shoulder, screaming at it to keep up, until the day it took her at her word.

Something made Eunice, though. She may have been born angry, but it was not until her mother cradled her under the stillness of a Serengeti night, beneath the cloudless spine of the Milky Way, that she began to grasp for what was forever out of reach.

All these stars, Eunice. All these tiny diamond lights. You can have them, if you want them badly enough. But first you must be patient, and then you must be wise.

And she was. So very patient and so very wise. But if her mother made Eunice, what shaped her mother? Soya was born two centuries ago, in a refugee camp, at a time when there were still famines and wars, droughts and genocides. What made her strong enough to gift this force of nature to the world, this child who became our grandmother?

We didn’t know it then, of course. If we considered her at all, it was mostly as a cold, forbidding figure none of us had ever touched or spoken to in person. Looking down on us from her cold Lunar orbit, isolated in her self-erected prison of metal and jungle, she seemed to belong to a different century. She had done great and glorious things – changed her world, left an indelible human mark on others – but those were deeds committed by a much younger woman, one with only a distant connection to our remote, peevish and disinterested grandmother. By the time we were born her brightest and best days were behind her.

So we thought.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PART TWO

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

PART THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PROLOGUE

Late May, after the long rains. The ground had borrowed moisture from the clouds; now the sky claimed its debt in endless hot, dry days. For the children, it was a relief. After weeks of bored confinement they were at last allowed to wander from the household, beyond the gardens and the outer walls, into the wild.

It was there that they came upon the death machine.

‘I still can’t hear anyone,’ Geoffrey said.

Sunday sighed and placed a hand on her brother’s shoulder. She was two years older than Geoffrey, and tall for her age. They stood on a rectangular rock, paces from the river that still ran fast and muddy.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Surely you can hear him now?’

Geoffrey kept a firm grip on the wooden aeroplane he was carrying.

‘I can’t,’ he said. He heard the river, the sighing of leaves in acacia trees, drowsy with the endless oven-like heat.

‘He’s in trouble,’ Sunday said determinedly. ‘We should find him, then tell Memphis.’

‘Maybe we should tell Memphis first, then look for him.’

‘And what if he drowns first?’

Geoffrey considered that unlikely. The waters had gone down compared to a week ago and the rains were petering out. Bilious clouds patrolled the horizon, thunder sometimes bellowed across the plains, but the sky was clear.

Besides, they had been this way many times. There were no homes here, no villages or towns. The trails they followed were trampled by elephants rather than people. And if by some chance Maasai were nearby, one of their boys would have known better than to get into difficulty.

‘Could it be the things in your head?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘I’m used to them now.’ Sunday hopped off the stone and pointed to the trees. ‘I think it’s coming from this way.’ She started walking, then turned back to Geoffrey. ‘You don’t have to come, if you’re scared.’

‘I’m not scared.’

Watchful for hazards, they crossed drying ground and boggy marshland. They wore snake-proof boots and long snake-proof trousers, short-sleeved shirts and wide-brimmed hats. Despite the mud they’d splashed around in, and the undergrowth they’d struggled through, their clothes remained as bright and colourful as when they’d put them on back at the household. More than could be said for Geoffrey’s mud-blotched arms, now crosshatched with fine, painful cuts from sharp-thorned bushes. Remembering a time when Memphis had praised him for not crying after tripping on the household’s hard marble floor, he had made a point of not telling his cuff to make the pain go away.

Sunday pushed confidently forward into the acacia trees, Geoffrey struggling to keep up. They passed the rusted white stump of an old windmill.

‘It’s not far now,’ Sunday called back, looking over her shoulder. The hat bounced jauntily against her back, secured by a drawstring around her neck. Geoffrey reached up to jam his own tighter, crunching it down on tight curls.

‘We’ll be safe, whatever happens,’ he said, as much to convince himself as anything else. ‘The Mechanism will be keeping an eye on us.’

He didn’t know what was on the other side of the trees. They had been here before, many times, but that didn’t mean they knew every bush, every rise and hollow of the landscape.

‘Something’s happened here!’ Sunday called, just out of sight. ‘The rain’s washed this whole slope away, like an avalanche! There’s something sticking out!’

‘Be careful,’ Geoffrey cried.

‘It’s some kind of machine,’ she shouted back. ‘I think the boy must be stuck inside.’

Geoffrey steeled himself and soldiered on. Trees fretted the sky with languidly moving branches, chips of kingfisher blue spangling through the gaps. Something slithered away under dry leaves a metre or two to his left. Thickening undergrowth clawed at his trousers, inflicting a rip. He stared in jaded wonderment as the two edges of torn fabric sutured themselves back together.

‘Here,’ Sunday said. ‘Come quickly, brother!’

He could see her now. They’d emerged at the edge of a bowl-shaped depression in the ground, hemmed in by dense stands of mixed trees. An arc of the bowl’s interior had collapsed away, leaving a steep rain-washed slope.

Something poked through the tawny ground. It was metal and as big as an airpod.

Geoffrey glanced up at the sky again.

‘What is it?’ he asked, although he had a dreadful sense that he already knew. He had seen something like this in one of his books. He recognised it by its many small wheels, too many of them along the visible side for this to be a car or truck. And the tracks that the wheels fitted into, with their hinged metal plates, one after the other like the segments of a worm.

‘You mean you don’t know?’ Sunday asked.

‘It’s a tank,’ he said, suddenly remembering the word. And for all that he was frightened, for all that he wanted to be anywhere but here, there was something amazing about finding this thing, vomited up by the earth.

‘What else could it be? The little boy must have got inside, and now he can’t get out.’

‘There’s no door.’

‘It must have moved,’ Sunday said. ‘That’s why he can’t get out – the door’s covered up again.’ She was on the edge of the slope now, still on grass, but working her way around the bowl to the top of the area where the land had given way. She crouched and steadied herself, fingertips to the ground. Her hat bobbed on her shoulders.

‘How can you hear him, if he’s inside?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘We’re close now, and I still can’t hear anything! It must be in your head, to do with the machines.’

‘That’s not how it works, brother. You don’t just hear voices.’ Sunday was on the upper parts of the mud slope now, facing the slipping earth, planting her fingers into the soil for traction, beginning to work her way down to the tank.

Seeing no other option, Geoffrey began to follow.

‘We should call someone. They always say we shouldn’t touch old stuff.’

‘They say we shouldn’t do lots of things,’ Sunday said.

She continued her descent, slipping once then recovering, her boots gouging impressive furrows in the exposed earth. Her hands were dirt-caked. As she looked down, twisting her head to peer over her right shoulder, her expression was one of intense tongue-biting concentration.

‘This is not good,’ Geoffrey said, starting down from the same point, following her hand- and foot-marks as best he could.

‘We’re here!’ Sunday called suddenly, just before she planted a foot on the tank’s sloping side. ‘We’ve come to rescue you!’

‘What’s he saying?’

For the first time she appeared to take him seriously. ‘You still can’t hear him?’

‘I’m not pretending, sister.’

‘He says, “Come quickly, please. I need your help.” ’

A sensible question occurred to Geoffrey. ‘In Swahili?’

‘Yes,’ Sunday said, but almost as quickly she added, ‘I think. Why wouldn’t he say it in Swahili?’

She had both feet on the tank now. She took a step to the right, placing her feet with a tightrope-walker’s deliberation. Geoffrey aborted his descent, hardly daring to breathe in case he disturbed the slope and sent the tank, and the mud, and the two of them sliding to the bottom of the hole.

‘Is he still saying it?’

‘Yes,’ Sunday said.

‘He should have heard you by now, you’re so close.’

Sunday spread both arms and lowered to her knees. She knuckled the tank’s armour, once, twice. Geoffrey drew a steadying breath and resumed his anxious progress, still holding the wooden aeroplane in one hand, high over his head.

‘He’s not answering. Just saying the same thing.’ Sunday reached up with one hand and drew her hat onto her head. ‘I have a headache. It’s too hot.’ She tapped the tank again, harder now. ‘Hello!’

‘Look,’ Geoffrey said.

Something odd was happening to the tank, where Sunday had tapped it. Ripples of colour raced away from that one spot: pinks and greens, blues and golds. The ripples vanished from sight, scurrying into the ground. They came back in blotches of solid colour, spreading like inkblots but not mixing together. The colours flickered and pulsed, then settled down into the same muddy red tones as the tank’s surroundings.

‘We should go now,’ Geoffrey declared.

‘We can’t leave him.’ All the same, Sunday stood up. Geoffrey stopped where he was, glad that his sister had finally seen sense. He made a gallant effort to lean into the slope, ready to offer his hand when she came back within reach.

But Sunday was behaving strangely now. ‘This hurts,’ she said in a slurred tone, and made to touch her forehead.

‘Come up here,’ he said. ‘We should go home now.’

Sunday, still balanced on the tank’s sloping flanks, looked at him. Her whole body was shaking with tiny but rapid movements. She was trying to say something.

‘Sunday!’

She fell backwards, off the tank and down the slope. She hit the earth and rolled, all tangled limbs and bouncing hat. She came to rest at the bottom of the hole, where it was waterlogged, with her arms and legs spreadeagled, face-down in the mud.

For a long moment, all Geoffrey could do was stare. He wondered if she had broken any bones. Then, dimly, he realised that his sister might not be able to breathe.

He crept sideways, crossing the edge of the landslide and returning to where the ground was still firm and covered with grass and bushes. He had enough presence of mind to lift the cuff to his mouth and press the thick stud that allowed him to speak to the household.

‘Please!’

Memphis answered quickly, his voice deep, resonant and slow: ‘What is it, Geoffrey?’

Words tumbled out of him. ‘Please, Memphis. Me and Sunday were out exploring and we found this hole in the ground, and the rains had made the earth slide down, and there was a tank sticking out.’ He paused for breath. ‘Sunday tried to help the boy inside. But then she got a headache and fell off the tank and now she’s on the ground and I can’t see her face.’

‘Just a moment, Geoffrey.’ Memphis sounded impossibly calm and unsurprised, as if this development was no more or less than he had anticipated for the day. ‘Yes, I see where you are now. Go to your sister and turn her over so that she is lying on her side, not her face. But be very careful climbing down. I will be with you shortly.’

Something in Memphis’s matter-of-fact response helped Geoffrey feel less frightened. It felt like it took an age, but at last his boots were in the same waterlogged ground and he was able to squelch his way over to his sister.

She didn’t have her face in water – it was pressed into a raised patch of dry earth, with her mouth and nose unobstructed – but she was still quivering. Suds of foam bubbled between her lips.

Something buzzed in the air above them and Geoffrey tugged up the brim of his hat. It was a whirring machine no larger than the tip of his thumb.

‘I see you,’ Memphis said, speaking from Geoffrey’s cuff. ‘Now do what I said. Turn your sister over. You will need to be very strong.’

Geoffrey knelt down. He didn’t want to look at Sunday too closely, not when she was quivering and foaming.

‘Be brave, Geoffrey. Your sister is having some kind of seizure. You must help her now.’

He set the wooden aeroplane down on the ground, not minding that the mud dirtied the red paintwork. He worked his hands under Sunday’s body and tried to shift her. The violent quivering alarmed him.

‘Use all your strength, Geoffrey. I cannot help you until I arrive.’

He groaned with exertion. Perhaps she jolted in such a way as to aid his efforts, but with a lurch she finally came free of the mud and was no longer face-down.

‘Geoffrey, listen carefully. For whatever reason, there is a problem with Sunday’s head, and her cuff does not appear to be responding correctly. You must tell it what to do. Are you listening?’

‘Yes.’

‘Two red buttons, one on either side. You must press them both at the same time.’

Their cuffs were similar, but his didn’t have those two red buttons. They had only come after her tenth birthday, which meant they had something to do with the things the neuropractors had put into her head, the things he didn’t have yet.

He lifted her arm, fighting to hold it still, and tried to get his thumb and forefinger around the cuff. It was hard. His hand wasn’t big enough.

‘What will happen, Memphis?’

‘Nothing bad.’

The red buttons were much stiffer to press than the blue ones on his cuff. After a moment of panic he realised that he would need to use both hands. Even then it was hard. At first, he must not have been pushing them firmly enough because nothing happened. But he tried again, applying all his strength, and with miraculous suddenness, Sunday’s seizure stilled.

She was just lying there.

Geoffrey sat by her, waiting. She was breathing, he could see that. Her eyes were closed now, and although she was less animate than when she had been standing up on the tank and looking at him, he felt in some indefinable way that his sister had returned.

Laying a hand on her forehead, feeling the heat boiling off her skin, he turned his gaze to the sky.

Memphis arrived soon after. He hovered over the bowl, looking down from the airpod, then slid the craft sideways, back over the trees that ringed the depression. The airpod was so quiet that Geoffrey had to strain to hear the fading of its engine sound as it settled down out of view.

A minute or so later, Memphis appeared in person at the top of the slope. After no more than a moment’s hesitation he came down the slope, half-skidding and half-running, flailing his arms to maintain balance. When he reached Sunday’s side he touched a hand to her forehead, then examined the cuff.

Geoffrey studied his expression. ‘Is she going to be all right?’

‘I think so, Geoffrey. You did very well.’ Memphis looked back at the tank, as if noticing it for the first time. ‘How close did she get to it?’

‘She was standing on it.’

‘It’s a bad machine,’ Memphis explained. ‘There was a war here once, one of the last in Africa.’

‘Sunday said there was a little boy in the tank.’

Memphis lifted her from the ground, cradling her in his arms. ‘Can you climb up the slope on your own, Geoffrey?

‘I think so.’

‘We must get Sunday back to the household. She will be all right, but the sooner she is seen by a neuropractor, the better.’

Geoffrey scrambled ahead, determined to show that he could take care of himself. ‘But what about the little boy?’

‘He doesn’t exist. There is nothing in that tank but more machines, some of which are very clever.’

‘This isn’t the first tank you’ve seen?’

‘No,’ Memphis said carefully. ‘Not the first. But the last time I saw one of them moving, I was very small.’ Looking back, Geoffrey caught Memphis’s quick smile. Clearly he did not wish Geoffrey to have nightmares about killing machines stalking the Earth. ‘They are gone now, except for a few left behind, buried in the earth like this one.’

They were on the slope now, climbing. ‘How could it escape?’

Memphis paused for breath. It must have been hard, carrying Sunday and also having to keep his own balance. ‘The artilect sensed the presence of Sunday’s machines, the ones inside her head. It worked out how to talk to them, how to make Sunday think there was someone calling.’

The idea of a machine tricking his sister – tricking her well enough that she had nearly convinced Geoffrey as well – was enough to chill him even as he sweated uphill.

‘What would have happened if she hadn’t fallen?’

‘The tank might have tried to persuade her to help it. Or it might have been trying to exploit some deeper vulnerability. Whatever it did, it caused your sister to go into seizure.’

‘But the tank is very old, and Sunday’s machines are very new. How could it trick them?’

‘Very old things are sometimes cleverer than very new things. Or slyer, at least.’ They were climbing steadily now, almost near the top of the slope. ‘That is why they are forbidden, or at least very carefully controlled.’

Geoffrey looked back, feeling a weird combination of fear and pity for the half-entombed thing. ‘What will happen to the tank?’

‘It will be taken care of,’ Memphis said gently. ‘For now, it is your sister we must concern ourselves with.’

They’d attained level ground. A narrow trail wound through the trees. Geoffrey hadn’t seen it when they had come through, but it must have been clearly visible from the air. They set off along it, to the airpod that was waiting out of sight.

‘Will she be all right?’

‘I doubt any great harm has been done. It was good that you were there, to put the machines into shutdown. Ah.’ Without warning, Memphis had stopped.

Geoffrey halted at his side. ‘Is it Sunday?’

‘No,’ the thin man said, still not raising his voice. ‘It is Mephisto. He is ahead of us, on the trail. Do you see him?’

In the dusky shade of the trail, canopied by trees, a huge light-dappled form blocked their path. The elephant was scuffing its trunk back and forth in the dust. It had one tusk, the other snapped off. Something in its posture conveyed unmistakable belligerence, its forehead lowered like a battering ram.

‘Mephisto is an old bull male,’ Memphis said. ‘He is very aggressive and territorial. I saw him from the air, but he appeared to be moving away from us. I was hoping we could avoid an encounter today.’

Geoffrey was puzzled and frightened. He’d seen plenty of elephants before, but never sensed this degree of wariness from his mentor.

‘We could go around,’ he said.

‘Mephisto will not let us. He knows this area much better than we do, and he can move more quickly than us, especially with Sunday to carry.’

‘Why doesn’t he want us to pass?’

‘There is something wrong in his head.’ Memphis paused. ‘Geoffrey, would you look away, please? I must do something that I would rather not.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Look away and close your eyes.’

Geoffrey did as he was told, for there was no mistaking the severity of that command. There was silence, broken only by the rustling of leaves. And then a soft, dusty thump, accompanied by a fusillade of dry cracks as branches and tree-trunks snapped.

‘Hold on to my jacket and follow me,’ Memphis said. ‘But do not look until I have told you it is safe. Will you promise me this?’

‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said.

But he did not keep his word. As they passed into the cool of the trees, Memphis veered around an obstacle, drawing Geoffrey with him. He opened his eyes, squinting against dust still hovering in the air. Mephisto was on the ground, lying on his side. The bull’s one visible eye was open, but devoid of life. The huge grey, elaborately wrinkled form was perfectly still, perfectly dead.

‘Did you kill Mephisto?’ Geoffrey asked when they had reached the airpod.

Memphis loaded Sunday into the rear passenger compartment, placing her gently onto the padded seat. He said nothing, not even when they were in the air, on their way back to the household. Memphis knows, Geoffrey thought. Memphis knew Geoffrey had looked and nothing was ever going to be quite the same between them.

It was only later that he realised he had left the red wooden aeroplane down in the hole.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s Eunice, isn’t it?’

‘I am afraid she has passed away.’

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

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

‘And how?’

‘In her sleep, peacefully’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Eunice left specific instructions.’

‘No one told me about them.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘To bring back her body?’

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

‘I could go with you.’

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

‘I feel like a loose end.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>>open: quangled bind

>>via: Maiduguri-Nyala backbone

>>carrier: Lufthansa Telepresence

>>incept: 23/12/2161 13:44:11 UTC

>>origin: Lagos, Nigeria, WAF

>>client: Jumai Lule

>>accept/decline ching?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Because it’s dangerous.’

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

‘Anyone hurt?’

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

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

‘What about your sister?’

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

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

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

‘You can’t help the way you are.’

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

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

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

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

‘Thank you.’

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

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

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

‘I’ll let you know,’ Geoffrey said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘They’d be absolutely right.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Bad day at the office?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Right.’

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

Her fingers closed around his.

‘Creepy.’

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

‘It’s pretty good.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘So you see a big market for this?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I was thinking exactly the same thing.’

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

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

‘I think he’s only ever had the one.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Predators and scavengers, too.

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

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

Had he expected something more of them?

Perhaps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Please, spare my blushes.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ground was thrumming.

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

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

That it should be reactivated today, of all days . . .

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

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

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

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

The emerging payload was a swiftly rising glint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday set her jaw in defiance, but complied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER TWO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I bet it wasn’t as dull as mine.’

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

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

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

A night sky that was a black, swallowing ocean.

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

‘Bet that went down well.’

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

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

‘Even Hector hasn’t gone that far.’

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

‘I’m glad I’m not like them.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

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

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

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

‘Like your friends?’

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

‘Still doesn’t tell us who she is.’

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

‘Maybe everyone just assumes she was invited.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s me, Geoffrey.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is this the day?’ he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Show some backbone,’ Geoffrey whispered to himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the youngsters trumpeted.

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

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

Memphis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do they want with me?’

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

‘At the household?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That was awkward,’ Hector said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Your fault for never coming out here.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m not.’

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

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

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

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

‘What do you want?’

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

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

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

‘Why can’t you go?’

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

‘Hire an outsider, then.’

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

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

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

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

‘A loose end,’ Hector said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You’re worried about skeletons.’

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

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

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

‘Horizons. Yes.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You’re probably right,’ Lucas allowed.

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

Lucas’s nod was as grudging as possible.

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

‘Every second,’ Geoffrey said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oblivious to his reassurance, she continued her foraging.

CHAPTER THREE

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Just up from Africa.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We already have, sir.’

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

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

‘Which languages do you speak?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Thank you.’

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

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

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

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

The box contained a glove.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That there was nothing in it.’

Hector cocked his head. ‘Nothing?’

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

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

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

‘She left it there for a reason.’

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

‘You’re at the premises now, right?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I will.’

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

‘My lips are sealed.’

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

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

‘I shall.’

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

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

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

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

He chinged Sunday.

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

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

‘It would have to be.’

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

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

‘Isn’t that what I’m doing now?’

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

‘If it’s a problem—’

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

‘Sounds great.’

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

‘I’ll call.’

‘Look forward to seeing you, brother.’

He smiled, nodded and closed the ching bind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or at least until he got to Sunday’s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Just about holding it together.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What’s going on?’

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

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

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

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

‘I didn’t,’ Geoffrey assured him.

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

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

‘I see.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘If it’s free, I’m all for it.’

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

‘Thanks.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Anyone could’ve seen you do it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘They pay her well,’ Geoffrey said.

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

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

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

Geoffrey looked blank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hence the Plexus connection,’ Geoffrey said.

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

‘The construct?’

‘Later,’ Sunday said, smiling.

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

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

Geoffrey’s expression was sceptical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The cousins?’ he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

‘In their eyes.’

Sunday nodded. ‘Of course.’

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

‘For about thirty seconds.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As, indeed, could he, just as easily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You think criminality’s a good thing?’

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

‘Have fun.’

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

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

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

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

‘You’re just humouring me now.’

‘How could you tell?’

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

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

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

‘Why would it be?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things like that just didn’t happen back home.

CHAPTER FOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Apologies for the mess,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geoffrey felt at a disadvantage. ‘Evidently not.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Like I ever thought that was the case.’

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

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

‘Are you cross?’

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

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

‘Someone pressured you.’

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

‘Have a guess who.’

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

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

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

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

‘It wasn’t technically blackmail.’

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

‘I’m not sure I’ve got one.’

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

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

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

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

‘That,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes.’

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

‘I’m sure they’ll see it that way.’

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

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

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

‘From Eunice?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘There is?’ Geoffrey asked innocently.

‘Follow me.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘About what?’ Sunday asked.

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

‘But not bombs,’ Geoffrey said.

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

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

Her brother had no answer.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ he said cautiously.

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

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

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

‘I’ll take your word on that.’

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

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

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

‘How do I see her?’

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

‘Be my guest.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Good evening, Sunday,’ Eunice said.

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

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

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

He glanced at her. ‘Everything?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No.’

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

‘I have already answered that question, Sunday.’

‘I’m sorry.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘She only asked,’ Geoffrey said.

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

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

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

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

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

Eunice and her chair vanished.

‘What just happened?’

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

‘Was she always like this with adults?’

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

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

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

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

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

A swish of beaded curtains heralded Jitendra’s return.

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

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

‘Real?’ Sunday asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Perhaps,’ Jitendra said.

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

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

‘You sure about that?’ Sunday asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So she wouldn’t push him just yet.

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

CHAPTER FIVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you . . . get inside it?’

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

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

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

‘I mean, when does the fighting begin?’

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

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

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

‘Pleased to meet you, Geoffrey.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Both, I hope.’

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

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

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

‘Well, I—’

‘You have obligations back home.’

‘Yes.’

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

‘The qualia problem.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But nothing’s happening.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not much.’

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

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

‘So what happened to that one guy?’

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

‘How’s he doing now?’

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t believe you,’ Geoffrey said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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