Blue Remembered Earth

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

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

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

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

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

Time to try something else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How could she have seen me, Geoffrey?’

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

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

‘What?’

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

The figment vanished, leaving him alone with the elephants.

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

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

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

No rash decisions.

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

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

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

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

He’d done enough damage as it was.

CHAPTER TEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

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

‘You certainly did.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I hear the Pans are paying your fare.’

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

‘And none of this comes with strings.’

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

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

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

‘Like I have any choice.’

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

‘There’s a difference between you being on the Moon and . . . whatever it is, twenty light-minutes away.’

‘I have to do this, Geoffrey. I’m thirty-five, and apart from a small coterie of admirers in the Zone, I’m virtually unknown. In two years I’ll be older than Van Gogh was when he died! I can’t live with that any longer: it’s now or never. This opportunity’s come up, and I have to take it. You understand, don’t you? If it was something about elephants, and it meant that much to you—’

‘Think I might have told you about it. Just in passing.’

It was a strange conversational dance they were engaged in. Geoffrey was rightly cross about her decision to go to Mars, but he was well aware of her real motivation, which had nothing to do with the Panspermian Initiative. On the faint chance that their conversation was being intercepted, though, he had to pretend that the whole thing was a massive shock, in no way related to the events in Pythagoras. And his questions about funding were perfectly sincere. Her own finances couldn’t possibly stretch to this.

But they hadn’t needed to. The right word to Chama and Gleb, and it hadn’t been long before Truro put in another appearance. That took care of her ticket, even if it put her deeper into hock with the Pans. Jitendra, similarly, had ramped up his debt to June Wing.

‘If I’d told you,’ she said, ‘we’d have ended up having exactly this conversation, only with the possibility of you talking me out of it.’

‘I’m not trying to be overprotective.’ He paused. ‘Well, maybe just a little. But Mars is a long way away. Stuff happens there.’

‘I’m not travelling alone, and I won’t be getting up to any mischief.’

Apart, she thought, from the kind of mischief she and her brother already knew about.

‘I know you meant well with the construct,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but she got me into a world of trouble.’

‘How so?’

‘Managed to screw up one of my exchanges with Matilda. Spooked the whole clan, and now I’m going to have to go back and start rebuilding trust.’

‘How . . .’ Sunday started asking, because she could not imagine how the construct could possibly have played any role in Geoffrey’s elephant studies. But her instincts told her to abort that line of enquiry. ‘If that’s the case, then I’m sorry. Genuinely. It’s my fault – I gave her enough volition to auto-invoke, based on your perceptual stimuli. Basically, if she sensed sufficient attentional focus, she was cued to appear.’

‘Even when I’d told her not to?’

‘She can be contrary like that. But you don’t have to put up with her – I’ll deactivate your copy. I can do it from here.’

‘Wait,’ Geoffrey said, letting out a sigh. ‘It’s not that I mind having Eunice on tap. I just don’t want her springing up like a jack-in-the-box and scaring me half to death. Can you just dial down that . . . volition, or whatever it was?’

Sunday smiled. ‘I’ll assign the necessary changes before they put me under.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re doing me a big favour with this, although I’m sure you know that.’

‘Just as long as we’re clear on one thing,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I’ll keep her until she drives me mad, or you get back from Mars. Whichever comes first.’

‘I’ll call you when I wake up. But be prepared for the time lag – we won’t be able to ching, so that’s going to feel . . . weird. Be like the days of steamships and telegrams.’

‘All else fails, send a postcard.’

‘I will. Meantime, give my regards to Memphis?’

‘We’re going out to the elephants tomorrow. We’ll be able to have a good old chat.’

‘Wish I could be there with you.’

Geoffrey smiled tightly. ‘Some other time.’

‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘Some other time. Take care, brother.’

His response took longer than time lag could explain. ‘Take care, sister.’

Geoffrey closed the ching, saving her from having to do it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He dropped into what was obviously a departure lounge, bright and tree-lined, shops and restaurants hewn out of something resembling white stone, all irregular windows, semicircular doorways and rounded roofs, the floor and ceiling curving away out of sight, people walking around with the bouncy-heeled gait that he immediately recognised as signifying something close to Lunar gravity.

He had no physical embodiment. All local proxies and golems were assigned, and would remain so for at least the next hour. Still, the figment body he’d been allocated would suffice for his needs. When he made to walk, there was a lag of three seconds before anything happened, and then his point of view was gliding forwards, ghost arms swinging purposefully as ghost feet slid frictionlessly against the floor. The body was slightly transparent, but that was merely a mnemonic aid, to remind him that he wasn’t fully embodied and couldn’t (for instance) intervene in a medical emergency, or prevent an accident or crime by force. The other people in the lounge would either see him as a fully realised figment, a spectral presence, a hovering, sprite-like nimbus – simply a point of view – or, depending on how they had configured their aug settings, not at all.

Walking with time lag was hard, but stopping was even worse. No harm could possibly come to Geoffrey or his environment, of course, and the ching was considerate enough to slow him down or adjust his trajectory before he appeared to run into obstacles, and therefore risked looking clumsy.

Other than that, it was disarmingly easy to forget there was any time lag at all. He could turn his head instantly, but that was because his ‘eyes’ were only ever intercepting a tiny slice of the available visual field.

He wandered the lounge, completing a full circle of the centrifuge without seeing anything of the ship. Eventually he found his way out of the centrifuge, into a part of the station that wasn’t rotating. The ching protocols permitted a form of air swimming, which was in fact far more efficient than would have been the case had he been embodied. He paddled his way to a window, incurving so that it faced the station’s core, and there was his sister’s swiftship, skewering the hollow cylinder from end to end.

Geoffrey looked at it for several minutes before it occurred to him to invoke Eunice.

‘You should see this,’ he said quietly, when she had appeared next to him. ‘That’s Sunday’s ship, the one that’s going to take her to Mars. She’s aboard now. Probably unconscious.’

‘You’re speaking to me again?’ Eunice asked. ‘After that unpleasantness with the elephants?’

‘Sunday says you need more stimulation.’ He waved at the view. ‘So here’s some stimuli. Make the most of it.’

Eunice’s ghost hands were resting on the curving handrail. No one was paying her the slightest attention. Geoffrey’s figment might be visible to anyone who chose to see it, but Eunice was an entirely private hallucination.

‘They’re nearly ready to go,’ Eunice said. ‘Docking connections, power umbilicals, all decoupled and retracted.’ She was silent for a few moments, looking at the liner.

The Maersk Intersolar vehicle was essentially a single skeletal chassis a thousand metres long, with the engines at one end, various cargo storage, navigation and manoeuvring systems in the middle, and the passenger and crew accommodation at the front, tucked behind the blunt black cone of the ship’s aerobrake. The engines were a long way down the cylinder, difficult to make out beyond an impression of three city-block-sized rectangular structures, flanged with cooling vanes. The swiftship was ugly and asymmetric because there wasn’t a single kilogram of mass aboard that wasn’t mission-critical. In Darwinian terms, it was as sleek and ruthlessly efficient as a swordfish.

‘That business with the Pans hiring her as an artist,’ Eunice remarked, ‘obviously a cover, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I don’t have an opinion on the matter.’

‘Don’t be obtuse, Geoffrey. We can be as hurtful or helpful as we please, and today I’ve come to help. I know why Sunday has to go to Mars – it’s because of what we found in Pythagoras.’

‘We,’ he scoffed. ‘Like you’re part of this now.’

‘Look at that ship, though,’ Eunice said, with renewed passion. ‘What we would have given for something like those magnetoplasma rockets when I was young. Even our VASIMR engines couldn’t touch what she can do. Exhaust velocities in the range of two hundred kilometres per second, specific impulse off the scale – we’d have murdered our own mothers for that. Our best fusion plants back then were the size of battleships, even with Mpemba cooling – not exactly built for lugging around the solar system. Mars in four weeks now, and you don’t even have to be awake for the trip! That’s the trouble with you young people – you barely know you’re born. We were just out of the chemical rocket era, and we still did more in fifty years than you’ll do in a century.’

‘You lived to see all this develop,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but instead of enjoying it you chose to rot away in seclusion.’

‘I’d had my hour in the sun.’

‘Then don’t blame the rest of us for getting on with our lives. You pushed back the boundaries of outer space. There are plenty of us doing the same with inner space, the mind. It might not have quite the grandeur or romance of exploring the solar system, but that doesn’t make it any less vital.’

‘I’m not arguing. Still want to be on that ship, though.’

After a moment he said, ‘I know when you were last on Phobos – 2099, just before your final expedition. A year later, maybe less, you donated the book to the museum. And if we could pin down when you returned to Pythagoras, it would have been around the same time, wouldn’t it? You were rushing about, hiding these clues. What’s Sunday going to find on Phobos?’

‘I don’t know.’ Seeing Geoffrey’s frustrated expression, she added, ‘You still don’t understand. I’m not here to lie, or keep things from you. If I think I know something useful to you, you’ll know about it.’

‘But you don’t even know what you did on Phobos.’

‘I went back to Mars for Jonathan’s funeral. I don’t know what I got up to, or where. But it’s a small moon, and there aren’t many possibilities.’

‘Sunday should still have told me her plans.’

‘And risk being found out by the cousins? We can have this conversation safely enough now, but a routine ching bind between Earth and the Moon, with minimal quangle? Sunday didn’t dare take that chance, Geoffrey.’

‘Hector and Lucas couldn’t have stopped her.’

‘You’re still not getting it. It’s not them pressuring her that Sunday was concerned about. It’s them pressuring you. She was thinking of you, your elephants, your whole self-centred existence back in Africa. Being a good sister to her little brother.’

‘I’ll be glad when she’s home,’ Geoffrey said after a while, when he’d had time to mull Eunice’s words and decide that she was probably right. ‘Glad when I know she’s only as far away as the Moon.’

‘I’m looking after her. She’ll be fine.’

For all that it was a commonplace event, the departure had drawn a small crowd of watchers, including proxies and golems. Two orange tugs pushed the liner slowly out of the way station until the engine assembly had cleared the end opening. Then the swiftship fired its own steering motors – a strobe-flicker of blue-hot pinpricks running the length of the vehicle – and began to turn, flipping end-over-end as it aimed itself at Mars, or rather the point on the ecliptic where Mars would be in four weeks.

The liner drifted slowly out of sight, the tugs still clamped on. Eunice’s ghost hand tugged at Geoffrey’s ghost sleeve. ‘Let’s go to the other window. I don’t want to miss this.’

The other watchers had drifted to an external port for a better view. Geoffrey and Eunice followed them unhurriedly. For an hour the liner just sat there, backdropped by the slowly turning Moon. Now and then a steering jet would fire, performing some micro-adjustment or last-minute systems check. Some of the spectators drifted away, their patience strained. Geoffrey waited, fully intent on seeing this through to the end. He’d almost begun to forget that his body was still back in Africa, still waiting on a warm rooftop, when some kindly insect opted to sink its mouthparts into his neck.

Presently the swiftship’s engines were activated. Three stilettos of neon-pink plasma spiked out of the drive assembly, and then brightened to a lance-like intensity. The tugs had unclamped, using steering rockets to boost quickly away from the sides of the larger ship before any part of it stood a chance of colliding with them. Geoffrey concentrated his attention on the background stars. It took nearly a minute for the swiftship to traverse its own length. And then it was clearly moving, accelerating, every second putting another metre-per-second of speed on its clock. It was like watching a house slide down a mountainside, gathering momentum with awful inevitability.

She would keep those motors burning for another day of steady acceleration, by which point the ship would be moving at a hundred kilometres per second . . . faster than anything he could easily grasp, but still – he did the sums in his head – a blistering one-thirtieth of one per cent of the speed of light. That was wrong, surely? He must have dropped a decimal point, maybe two. But no, his calculations were correct. Two hundred years of spaceflight, two hundred years of steady, methodical progress combined with bold, intuitive leaps . . . and this was still the very best the human species could do: attain a speed so slow that, in cosmic terms, it barely counted as movement at all.

‘I thought one day we’d do better than this,’ Eunice said, as if she’d been reading his thoughts. ‘They had most of my lifetime to do it in, after all.’

‘Sorry we let you down.’

‘We?’

‘The rest of the human species,’ Geoffrey said. ‘For not living up to your exacting standards.’

‘You tried,’ Eunice said. ‘I’ll give you that much.’

In the morning he returned to the elephants. Memphis came with him in the Cessna, and they landed at the semi-permanent airstrip adjacent to Geoffrey’s research station. It was a trio of modular huts set around three sides of a square compound, where an ancient zebra-striped truck and an even more ancient zebra-striped jeep stood dormant. Wheat-coloured grass fingered mudguards and armoured bumpers.

He helped the old man out of the aircraft. If he’d had any doubts about his own muscular readjustment to Earth gravity, they were silenced when he took Memphis’s weight, supporting him under the elbow as he climbed out of the cockpit. Memphis felt as light and dry as a bag of sticks.

‘Sorry,’ Geoffrey said as Memphis’s polished black lace-ups touched the ground. ‘I shouldn’t have put you through this. No reason we couldn’t have taken one of the pods.’

The three stilt-mounted huts, soap-like plastic structures with rounded corners, were respectively an accommodation module, research area and storage building. In practice Geoffrey only needed the research hut, since that was where he usually ended up sleeping and cooking for himself. All his equipment, samples, veterinary medicines and documentation only filled a third of the storage unit, with the rest set aside for utilisation by the graduate or postgraduate assistants Geoffrey’s research budget had not yet made possible. He supposed that was all going to change now. The new funds would certainly pay for one helper, probably two, as well as a mountain of gleaming new study tools. He’d have to move his domestic arrangements back into the accommodation shack, to free up room and lend a semblance of order to the research space. The place could use some sprucing up, that was true. But it was only now that he realised that the days of solitude, the peace and quiet, might be numbered.

For now they were just passing through. Geoffrey made chai for Memphis and sat him down in the research hut while he sorted out equipment, packing gear into boxes which he then secured in the Cessna. He walked out to one of the perimeter towers and swapped a module in the solar collector, then replaced a cable leading from another. All the while his mind was turning over, wondering how he was going to raise the subject of Eunice with Memphis.

In the end Memphis made it easy. They were up in the air again, buzzing west a hundred metres above the treetops.

‘I might be mistaken,’ he said, ‘but something tells me this trip isn’t entirely about visiting the elephants.’

Geoffrey tried to smile the remark away, glancing at his passenger before snapping his attention back to the controls. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘You have been thinking of tasks you need to do, but which could easily be put off for a week or a month. As if you feel you need an excuse for this whole day.’

‘I can only put things off so long,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You know how it is.’

‘Nonetheless,’ Memphis said. He looked out of the window, spotting some giraffe in the distance and following them with his gaze. They were loping, crossing the ground in great scissoring strides, like pairs of draughtsmen’s compasses being walked across a map. They’d been seeing flying machines for two hundred and fifty years and still acted as if each time was the first. Panicked bundles of instinct and fear, forever startled by their own shadows.

‘Actually, there is something.’

‘Of course,’ Memphis said. ‘And one must presume it relates to your recent journey. And that it is also something you didn’t wish to talk about in the household, for fear of being overheard.’

‘You know me too well, I’m afraid. Look, I’m sorry for the subterfuge, but I couldn’t think of any other way to have this conversation.’

‘You need not apologise, Geoffrey. I think we both understand each other perfectly well.’

Geoffrey cast around for his next landing site and put the Cessna down with barely a bump, paying extra attention because of his passenger. They got out, Memphis helping himself down unassisted this time. They were nowhere near any of the herds but that was intentional. Geoffrey did not want the elephants to associate him with the work that was about to be done.

One of the equipment boxes disclosed a delicate, translucent thing like a giant prehistoric dragonfly. Geoffrey held it carefully between his fingers, gripping it under the black keel of its carbon-fibre thorax. He tipped the dragonfly upside down, flipped open a cover and loaded six target-seeking darts from another box. The darts resembled miniature avatars of the same creature, down to the complex origami of their switchblade-folded wings.

‘Do you know why the cousins sent me to the Moon?’

‘A family matter.’ Memphis propped his left foot up on the undercarriage fairing and began to redo one of his laces. ‘That was as much as Hector and Lucas wished me to know, Geoffrey. For your sake, it might not be wise to tell me any more than that.’

‘Because you think they’d have a way of finding out?’

‘Because there is at least the chance of that. One also assumes that there was an incentive behind this errand?’

‘Yes, and there’s no harm in me telling you about that, at least. You know what kind of budget I work under, so you’d be the first to notice when more cash started flowing in.’

‘You may find this rather difficult to credit,’ Memphis said, swapping to the other shoe, ‘but your cousins mean well.’

‘That’s what I usually end up convincing myself.’ Geoffrey sealed the belly-door and turned the dragonfly the right way up. ‘They’re venal and manipulative, and their only real interest is profit margins, but they’re not actually evil. And I don’t think even they knew what they were getting me into.’ He gave the dragonfly a vigorous flick, causing its wings to deploy to their fullest extent. Save for a fine veining of whiskerlike supports, they were almost invisible. ‘If they’d known, they’d never have involved me.’

‘Perhaps it would be better if you said no more on the matter,’ Memphis replied.

Geoffrey touched a contact node on the dragonfly’s head and the wings began to beat the air, a leisurely pulse that gradually quickened to a steady clockwork whirr. ‘Memphis, did something happen to Eunice before she went into exile?’

‘Rather a lot of things,’ Memphis said.

‘I mean, apart from the stuff we already know about.’

Geoffrey let the dragonfly go, allowing it to hover away from his hand. A metre or so higher than his head, it halted and awaited further instructions. Squinting against the brightness of the sky, he could only just see it. The wings were a butterfly-shaped nimbus of flickering, and the elongated body – with its cargo of darts – just a smudgelike blemish on his vision.

‘I’m not talking about all the adventures and exploits already in the public record,’ Geoffrey went on.

‘I am not sure that I can help you.’

‘Eunice did something,’ Geoffrey said. ‘No need to go into details, but it’s as if she set something up, a series of clues that weren’t meant to come to light until after her death.’

‘Sunday’s trip to Mars,’ Memphis said thoughtfully. ‘Would that be related to this matter?’

‘Draw your own conclusions.’

‘I shall.’

‘The cousins sent me to the Moon to look into something, a detail they weren’t expecting to lead to anything significant.’

‘I take it you confided in your sister?’

‘What I found up there was . . . not what the cousins were expecting. I couldn’t keep it a secret from Sunday.’

‘Are you going to tell me what it was?’

‘I don’t want any of this to come back and hurt you, and if I tell you too much it might.’ Geoffrey paused to send the dragonfly on its way, in the direction where the herd had last been sighted. An aug window had already opened in his upper-centre visual field, showing the dragonfly’s view of things as it scudded over the terrain. ‘All I want to know, Memphis, is one thing. Before she came back from deep space in 2101 – days, months or years, I don’t know which – she must have gone around putting these clues in place. Either she did it all on her own, or she had help. Right now I’m not sure which. But if ever there was one person she’d have turned to for assistance, I’m talking to him now.’

‘You refer to these things as clues. Can you be certain that this is what they are?’

‘If they’re not, then we’re all imagining connections where none exist. Here’s what I think, though. The loose end, the thing the cousins sent me to investigate, didn’t come to light by accident. Eunice must have planned it this way. She’d have known there’d be a thorough audit of her assets after her death, conducted from inside the family.’

‘If she wished to convey a message beyond the grave . . . why not just convey that message directly?’

Geoffrey had sighted the herd, about a kilometre from the dragonfly. ‘Maybe things will be clearer when Sunday gets back from Mars.’

‘Until then, though, you are wondering whether I might be able to shed light on the matter.’

‘I’m sorry to do this to you, Memphis.’

‘And I wish I could be of more assistance.’

Geoffrey’s spirits dipped. Perhaps it had been unrealistic, but he’d been hoping for something more than that. Yet after all the years of service, how likely had it ever been that Memphis was just going to cave in at the first gentle interrogation?

Assuming he knew anything at all.

‘If there’s something she said or did . . . anything at all that might be relevant . . . you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’

‘It would help if I had the slightest idea what form these clues might have taken.’ Memphis looked stern, then offered a consoling smile. ‘But I understand your reticence. Merely raising the subject has placed a considerable strain on you.’

‘Last thing I want to do is damage our friendship.’

‘It would take more than this, Geoffrey.’ Memphis gave him a bony hand-pat on his shoulder. ‘There is no danger of that.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Nonetheless, you are disappointed.’

‘I was hoping you’d know more. Then you might be able to tell me where I stand, what I should do next.’

‘It sounds as if Sunday has made her own mind up.’

‘I’d have gone with her, if it wasn’t for the elephants. Not that I didn’t think you’d be able to a good job looking after them, but—’

‘There is a difference between being away for a week and several months. It’s all right, Geoffrey – you don’t have to explain yourself to me. These elephants need you.’

‘They need us,’ Geoffrey corrected gently. ‘Human stewards. We don’t own them, and we don’t have any claims on moral superiority. But after all we’ve done to them in the past we do have an obligation to shepherd them through to better times.’ He smiled, catching himself. ‘Damn, I almost sound like a Panspermian. That’s what spending time with Sunday’s friends does to you.’

‘I’m sure it did you no harm.’ Memphis coughed lightly. ‘Now, may I be of some practical assistance? That was the intended purpose of this trip, after all.’

‘I’m nearly over the herd,’ Geoffrey said. ‘The aug will show you the infants that still need implanting. Designate them with the dragonfly, then let the darts find their own way. It’s the same protocol as last time.’

‘I shall endeavour to remember.’ Memphis halted his progress and assumed a posture of upright concentration, his hands laced behind his back, his face lifted slightly to the sky. ‘Are you certain you trust me with this?’

‘No one else I’d let anywhere near it. Assigning the dragonfly to you . . . now.’

Memphis allowed his eyelids to drop nearly shut. ‘I have it. I’m circling over the herd now. The view is marvellous. Will they see me?’

‘Some of them, but they won’t connect the dragonfly or the darts with either of us. They don’t feel much when the machines go in, but it’s always best to play safe and avoid any negative associations.’

‘I have the first of the infants designated now. That is Melissa, I think.’

‘Two closely spaced notches on the right ear, that’s her.’

Memphis released the first of the darts, which deployed its wings and locked on to the target infant. The aug dropped a clarifying tag, a box with accompanying sub-icons denoting the presence of potentially harmful nanomachinery, along with the serial numbers and codes that established the legal status of that nanomachinery under various USN conventions and intergovernmental veterinary-medical protocols.

Memphis waited until Melissa was at least a body length from any other elephants and then brought the dart in. It landed on top of her neck, just below the base of her skull, and clamped into position like some tiny replica of an asteroid-mining robot, sinking barbed landing legs into the yielding crust of living tissue. The next step was for the dart to push a blood-sampling surface penetrator into the tissue, a quick-burrowing telescopic drill that, having collected and rapid-assayed a DNA sample, was able to verify that this really was an elephant it had landed on, and not some other organism it had selected in error. This took another three hundred milliseconds, by which point nearly half a second had elapsed since the dart’s touchdown. Somewhere else in the world, having been notified of the results of the DNA assay, a USN biomedical watchdog system gave final authorisation for nanoculation to proceed.

Although the delivery probe was releasing anaesthetic as it tunnelled down, Melissa still felt it happening. Two seconds into the process, she trumpeted and began to curl her trunk back, seeking to remove the offending object.

By then the quicksilver rush of nanomachinery had commenced, a liquid army of submicroscopic medical engines invading foreign territory. The machines knew their way around a brain, even an elephant brain. They began to replicate, spinning a web of glistening connectivity.

All this took time. Although the seed population had been established within seconds, it would be weeks before complete neural integration had been achieved. Even then, only a thousandth part of Melissa’s brain volume would have been co-opted into the new network. That was all it took to give Geoffrey a window – and a door – into her mind.

Less than five seconds after its arrival, the dart’s work was done. It withdrew its self-cauterizing probes, unmoored itself from the elephant’s skin and returned to the sky. Melissa stopped trumpeting and lowered her trunk in a distracted manner, as if not quite sure what had been bothering her. The other elephants, momentarily troubled, returned to their own concerns. Melissa wandered back to her mother, one of the high-ranking females. Memphis sent a command authorising the dart to dismantle itself.

There were four more elephants to inject, but Geoffrey had no doubt that Memphis was up to the task. He was relieved that his old friend and mentor hadn’t taken obvious offence at the questions posed to him. At least, he didn’t think he had.

Memphis had told the truth, too. Geoffrey had never been more certain of anything in his life.

When the last of the elephants had been nanoculated and the aug had confirmed that the seed populations were establishing satisfactorily, Geoffrey and Memphis took the Cessna north and overflew some of the other Amboseli herds, making slow turns so that Geoffrey could see the elephants from all angles.

‘I know a few hundred of these animals by sight,’ he told Memphis. ‘Maybe two hundred I can recognise instantly, without having to think about it. I can identify maybe five hundred from the ear charts.’

‘I doubt that anyone else has your facility,’ Memphis said.

‘It’s nothing. Compared to some of the old researchers, the people who were out here a hundred or two hundred years ago, I’m barely starting.’

‘I am not sure that I could identify five hundred people, let alone elephants.’

‘I’m sure you’d do just as well as me, if you spent all day working out here.’

‘Perhaps when I was a young man. Now I am much too old to learn such things.’

‘You’re not old, Memphis. You’re just overworked and taken for granted. There’s no reason you couldn’t live as long as Eunice, and then some. A hundred and fifty years, no problem. You just have to take better care of yourself, and not let the family dominate your life.’

‘The family is my life, Geoffrey. It is all I have.’

‘But you don’t owe it anything, not now. The cousins don’t need you, Memphis. They treat the proxies better than they treat you.’

‘I gave my word to Eunice that I would be there for the Akinyas when she could not. Come what may.’

After a moment, Geoffrey said, ‘When did you give your word, Memphis? And why did she ask it of you? She may not have been here physically, but she was always there for us, looking down from the Winter Palace.’

‘I gave my word,’ Memphis said. ‘That is all.’

Geoffrey was visited by his father the next day. Kenneth Cho’s golem was running autonomously, as well it needed to given the fact that the organic aspect of Kenneth was presently on Titan, supervising Akinya Space hydrocarbon operations on the shore of Kraken Lake. It was a very good golem, too – not a claybot, but the best money could buy, and even with the ching tag reminding Geoffrey that the proxy was being driven from halfway across the solar system, across hours of time lag, it was difficult to shake the sense that his father was here in all his living, breathing, bludgeoning actuality.

‘Your mother and I,’ Kenneth declared as they walked together through the household, ‘are gravely concerned by this turn of events, Geoffrey. You and your sister have always been wayward, but we have come to accept this, as one accepts any regrettable situation that one cannot influence. But at the same time we have always trusted that you would act as a moderating factor, guiding Sunday against her wilder impulses.’

‘I’m not Sunday’s—’ Geoffrey started to protest.

‘She turned her back on responsibility years ago,’ Kenneth steamrollered on. He was a thin, elegant-looking man with precise symmetrical features and the hushed, disapproving manner of a senior librarian. ‘Preferring a life of self-indulgence and hedonism instead of bearing her familial obligations. You have been little better, but at least in you we still see glimmerings of decency. You waste time with elephants when you could be applying that useful mind to better purpose. But at least you put the animals before your own welfare, as the rest of us have put the family ahead of our own.’

‘You live in luxury, Father, and you gallivant around the solar system at the drop of a hat. In what sense are you putting anything before your own welfare?’ Geoffrey was listless and in the mood for an argument. He’d just been contacted by another research team, complaining about his near-exclusive access to the M-group. The last thing he needed was someone else poking around inside Matilda’s head, or for that matter any of her herd members. He could hold them off if necessary but the fact that he had to defend his research corner at all made him prickly.

The golem processed his answer. ‘You were with her on the Moon recently – this much we know from Hector and Lucas. Something you did or said must have prompted this bizarre action of hers.’

‘I can’t imagine what.’ He shrugged. ‘If you doubt me, play back that last ching conversation between me and Sunday, the one you were undoubtedly listening in on. Did I sound like I approved of or even knew about her trip to Mars in advance?’

In the same hushed, unperturbed tone that characterised most of his statements, Kenneth replied, ‘I am entirely unaware of this conversation.’

‘Right. And there are pigs circling Kilimanjaro even as we speak. Look, take it up with my sister. She wouldn’t listen to me even if I gave enough of a shit about what you think to try arguing her out of it.’

‘Sunday is frozen now, as you are well aware. Her ship is on its way. Nothing can stop her arrival at Mars.’

‘So you may as well start dealing with it.’

‘This troubles us, Geoffrey. Quite aside from the “why”, how has Sunday found the wherewithal to suddenly fund a trip to Mars?’

He thought of his parents, of Kenneth and Miriam, and wondered what exactly was going through their heads now, at this exact moment, on faraway Titan. He very much doubted that the outcome of this conversation was uppermost in Kenneth’s concerns. Kenneth projected versions of himself wherever they were required, sometimes more than one at a time. The fact that this version gave the impression of being bothered about Sunday didn’t mean that she was more than a passing concern to the real Kenneth.

‘As difficult as it is for you to grasp, maybe she made some money out of her art,’ Geoffrey said.

Kenneth looked sympathetic, as if he had unwelcome, even dire news to impart. ‘In the last two years, Sunday has made exactly two large sales, both to anonymous off-world buyers. The rest has been demeaning piecework. A job here, a job there. Barely enough to keep a roof over her head. Do you want the honest truth of it?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Sunday is a competent artist, nothing more. She has her moments, her flashes. But that won’t buy her fame and fortune, and it certainly won’t buy her posterity.’

‘You don’t know anything about her,’ Geoffrey told the golem. ‘There’s not a single piece of my sister’s life that you’re even capable of understanding.’ But the idea that Kenneth had knowledge of Sunday’s finances struck him as entirely too plausible.

‘Listen to me very carefully, Geoffrey. When Sunday arrives at her destination, the onus will be on you to reason with her. Whatever hole she is intent on digging for herself, you must talk her out of it. She may think she’s a free agent, able to do as she wishes, but that’s an unfortunate misconception. I won’t stand back and watch her drag our name through mud.’

‘She’s your daughter. Why not try treating her like a human being instead of a company asset that isn’t returning on its investment?’

‘She is my daughter, yes,’ the golem affirmed. ‘But above all else she is an Akinya, and that name carries expectations.’

‘Give my regards to Mother,’ Geoffrey said, turning away from the golem.

Later that afternoon he was lying back in his hammock at the study station, browsing a paper for peer review – it was long-winded and broke no obvious new ground – when the perimeter defence alarm sounded. Geoffrey rolled out of the hammock and slipped on his shoes. Sometimes Maasai came and talked, trading chai and gossip, but not usually at this time of the day. Nor had the aug picked up any human presences within walking distance during his approach overflight.

He walked to the door and unclipped the pistol from its alloy storage cabinet to the right of the doorframe, situated just below the first-aid kit. Around the weapon’s lightweight frame were bolted a variety of stun/disorientation devices, ranging from laser/acoustic projectors to electrical and rapid-effect anaesthetic darts.

Geoffrey flicked the arming stud and opened the door, cupping the other hand over his eyes against the afternoon glare. He scanned his surroundings, looking for something – anything – that might have tripped the alarm.

He saw what it was. The cousins were walking towards him, approaching along the side of the zebra-striped truck. Off in the distance, where it had come down far enough away not to have disturbed him, was an airpod, glinting chrome-green amid dry brush.

‘. . . the fuck,’ Geoffrey started saying.

‘Put that thing away,’ Hector said. ‘Wouldn’t want it going off by accident, would we?’

Still holding the pistol, Geoffrey came down the stairs from the research shack. ‘You’ve got no business coming here, Hector.’ He turned his gaze on the other cousin. ‘Same goes for you, Lucas. This is my work, nothing to do with you.’

‘As welcomes go,’ Lucas said, ‘it must be said that there is more than a little scope for improvement.’

Both cousins were dressed in lightweight slacks, business shoes and patterned shirts. Hector wore sunglasses, a form-fitting type that made it look, disturbingly enough, as if an oblong of black plastic had been inserted into a slot cut into his face. Lucas was holding a blue and yellow parasol; there was a bulge in his slacks where the centipede was still clamped to his leg. He also wore sunglasses; his were mirrored, although oddly the view they were reflecting wasn’t what Lucas was actually looking at.

‘The pistol, please,’ Hector said. ‘Put it down, Geoffrey.’

Geoffrey was on the verge of complying when he changed his mind and held the pistol by the barrel instead, his fingers around the multiply clustered cylinders of the various pacification devices. ‘You don’t come here,’ he said. ‘Not without my agreement.’

‘Hostility and defensiveness have their place in the modern business environment,’ Lucas said, folding the parasol, ‘but if family can’t drop by on a whim, who can?’

‘Don’t pretend you’ve ever given a shit about my work, Lucas.’

‘That’s a significant investment sitting in your account,’ Hector said. ‘You didn’t honestly think we were going to wash our hands of further involvement?’

‘We want oversight,’ Lucas said. ‘Checks and balances. Due diligence with regard to allocated funds.’

Geoffrey aimed the gun’s stock at Hector. ‘You never said anything about becoming more involved.’

‘In such circumstances,’ Lucas said, employing the parasol as a kind of walking stick, ‘it’s always prudent to consult the fine print.’

‘We had an arrangement,’ Geoffrey said. Hector and Lucas were nearly at his doorstep now. ‘I did your stupid errand, you gave me the money. There were no strings.’

‘Explain to me why your sister is aboard a Maersk Intersolar spacecraft, headed for Mars,’ Hector said.

‘She’s my sister, not my subordinate. What she does is her own business.’

‘If only it were that simple,’ Lucas said, his sunglasses disclosing a night-lit scene, some ritzy neon-washed club or function full of beautiful, glamorous people. ‘As a rule, your sister doesn’t just go to Mars at the drop of a . . .’ He faltered.

‘Hat,’ Hector said. ‘And we’re wondering what might have prompted this decision of hers.’

‘Ask her yourselves,’ said Geoffrey.

‘She’s frozen,’ Lucas said. ‘That does somewhat hamper the free and efficient exchange of information.’

‘In any case, Sunday being Sunday,’ Hector said, ‘she wouldn’t give us the time of day even if we managed to get through to her. You, on the other hand . . . well, you’ll talk to us whether you want to or not. Especially now those funds are in your account. They can be rescinded, you know.’

‘Fiscal reimbursement procedures are in place,’ Lucas said.

‘Fuck your procedures, Lucas.’

Slowly, his eyes on Geoffrey, Hector began to reach for the pistol. ‘Let’s not go down that route, cousin. We were all friends the night you came back from the Moon. There’s no need for this antagonism between us.’

Geoffrey yanked the pistol out of Hector’s reach. ‘We’ve never been friends. Let’s be absolutely clear on that. And what Sunday does is up to her.’

‘Geoffrey,’ Hector said, ‘please try to see things from our point of view. You must have said or done something that has put her on this course. What we would like to know is exactly what that was.’ He smiled, but there was no warmth in it, only a cryogenic chill. ‘So. Shall we discuss this like adults, or are you going to continue insulting our intelligence?’

‘I couldn’t if I tried,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Well, it’s good to establish a basis for further negotiations,’ Lucas said. He was still two metres from Geoffrey, standing further away than his brother, but in a single swift motion he brought up the shaft of the parasol and whipped the end of it hard against the stock of the pistol, the impact knocking the weapon out of Geoffrey’s hand, sending it careening into the dirt. Geoffrey jerked back his hand in shock, half-expecting to find his fingers broken by the jolt.

Hector knelt down and picked up the fallen pistol. ‘My brother has very fast reflexes,’ he explained. ‘Squid axon nerve shunts – it’s the latest thing. Long-fibre muscle augmentation, too – he could wrestle a chimp and win. It’s all really rather unsporting of him.’

‘My surgeon offers very favourable terms to family,’ Lucas said, adjusting his shirtsleeve. ‘I should put you in touch, Hector. No point being at such a miserable disadvantage in life.’

Hector was still holding the pistol. He looked at it distastefully, worked the mode selector and fired one of the tranquilliser darts into the ground. Then he passed it back to Geoffrey as if it was a toy he’d been deemed big enough to play with.

‘Best put it away, I think,’ Hector said confidingly.

Geoffrey was still shaking. He had witnessed very few violent acts in his life, much less been on the wrong end of one.

‘Have a think,’ Lucas said, ‘about what you said to Sunday, and how much this work really means to you. You’ll schedule some time for that, won’t you?’

‘Of course he will,’ Hector said. ‘Geoffrey’s close to his sister, and we can’t fault him for that. But ultimately he knows what’s best for him, and for his elephants. Don’t you, old fellow?’

‘Pass on our best regards to the herd,’ Lucas said.

The two cousins turned away and walked back towards their airpod. Geoffrey stood at the door, pistol quivering in his hand, heart racing, lungs heaving with each breath. He could still feel the sweat on his back as the airpod lifted into the sky, tumbled like a thrown egg and aimed itself at the household.

PART TWO

CHAPTER TWELVE

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

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

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

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

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

That, she thought, was some fucking achievement.

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday got out of bed.

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

She tried voking Jitendra. No response.

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

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

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

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

‘Everything’s all right, though?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That’s me ruled out, then.’

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

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

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

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

‘You’ll get your wish.’

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

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

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

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

‘Fond memories?’ Sunday asked.

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

‘There were already people down there, though.’

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

‘That much I figured.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is it finished now?’

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

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

‘Did you add to it?’ she asked.

‘I suppose I must have.’

‘You suppose?’

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

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

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

‘Something worked into the pattern, perhaps?’

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

‘Like you ever believed in that.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We were young, the world was young.’

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

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

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

‘What the hell are those things?’

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

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

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

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

‘So why touch the wheels now?’

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

‘And?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘How considerate of you.’

‘I thought so.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Someone just left a robot in there?’

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

‘Where will I end up?’

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

‘Give me the bind,’ Sunday said.

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

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

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

‘Very nice,’ Sunday said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you see bodies?’

‘No.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do have a little faith, child.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there was something behind the visor.

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

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

‘I’m sorry?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You’re not making this any easier.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I know this.’

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

‘You painted this?’

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

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

‘Who’d have thought it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What are you on about?’

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

‘Tell me.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Thank you,’ Jitendra said.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Like I’ve been dead for a month.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We found something,’ she blurted.

‘We?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s wonderful,’ Jitendra said.

‘It’s a world. Worlds are wonderful.’

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

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

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

‘Because that’s where we’re going.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m not sure anything needs negotiating.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I do.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Pavonis Mons,’ he repeated.

‘On Mars. It’s the—’

‘Highest mountain. Or volcano. Or something.’

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

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

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

‘Such as?’

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

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

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

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

‘It is rather short notice.’

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

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

‘Couple of days, you said?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Will one inspection per day suffice?’

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

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

Geoffrey smiled softly. ‘Thank you, Memphis.’

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

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

‘Nor I.’

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

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

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

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

‘Bury the past, you mean.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s my ride,’ Geoffrey said.

Eunice lowered the binoculars. ‘To where?’

‘Somewhere interesting, I hope.’

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

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

‘Did you like planes?’

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

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

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

‘Are you sure this is for you?’

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

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

If that didn’t clinch it, nothing would.

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

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

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

‘You, ultimately,’ Geoffrey said.

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

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

‘I never thought I was.’

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

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

‘I don’t know anyone called Lin Wei.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Me and a thousand others.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Since you put it so charmingly, yes.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you know what that is?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘They’re blocking me.’

‘What?’

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

‘Can’t you do anything about it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Whose idea was the Dakota?’

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

‘I’m coping.’

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

‘I’m not.’

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

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

‘Please follow me.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m meant to get into that?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not claustrophobic, are you?’ she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Of course. Thank you, Mira.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You’re good at this,’ Geoffrey said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’ve heard about her Pan involvement.’

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said.

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

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

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

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh,’ he said, on a falling note.

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

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

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

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

‘Not since he went off-grid.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You have a theory.’

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

‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where am I?’

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

‘It’s very thoughtful.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What happened to you, Mister Holroyd?’

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

‘Did Magdalena do this to you?’

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

‘How did it go wrong?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I didn’t, sir.’

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

‘I’m open to ideas.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Difficult client?’

‘A prickly customer.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t “claim” anything.’

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

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

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

‘Conclude what you like. Not my problem.’

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

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

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

‘It was nothing to do with me.’

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

‘I’ve no idea.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘You don’t believe that.’

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

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

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

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That obviously wasn’t her intention.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You speak as if she’s still alive.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I try not to.’

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

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

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

Sunday paused in her sculpting. ‘Dangerous knowledge?’

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

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

He glanced around. His guides had departed.

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

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

‘Arethusa?’ he asked.

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

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

‘And your response?’

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

‘You feel indebted.’

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

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

‘And risk ruining my entire career.’

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

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

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

‘You never met Eunice yourself, though?’

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

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

‘But she’s of interest to you, now.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘No?’

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

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

‘You know what really happened on Mercury?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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