Blue Remembered Earth

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

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

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

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

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

‘Physics all along,’ Arethusa said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m not—’ Geoffrey began.

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

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

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

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

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sometimes?’

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

‘Are there moving parts?’

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

‘Maybe it’s not even that old.’

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

‘You think it’s a lot older.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Like a calling card,’ Geoffrey said.

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

‘You mean go there?’

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

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

‘It takes months just to get to Jupiter.’

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

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

‘That’s correct.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It could be a coincidence.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Because he has something to hide?’

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

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

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

‘Unless you make your own independent enquiries.’

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

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

‘It’s a bit late for that.’

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

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

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

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

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

It had been submitted on February 12.

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

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

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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

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

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

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

‘Aren’t you enjoying this?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sharp voice asked, ‘Sunday Akinya?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘This Gribelin doesn’t sound very trustworthy.’

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

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

‘Did Holroyd mention the golem?’

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

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

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

‘We won’t,’ Sunday said.

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

‘I’m . . . glad to hear it,’ Sunday said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Did Jitendra book this?’

‘I don’t know, sorry.’

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

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

‘I wouldn’t,’ Eunice said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘On your head be it,’ Eunice said.

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

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

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

‘Why not tell him yourself?’

‘Because he won’t like it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And the other part?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Say it, if you’re so damned sure.’

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

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

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

‘Is that a threat?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The face was her own.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

‘It just slipped out.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How would you know?’

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

‘Try to make at least some sense.’

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

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

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

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

‘And that sequence of events troubles you?’

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

‘What would I know?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What?’ Geoffrey asked, stupefied.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not now. Of all times, not now.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Allowed?’ Geoffrey asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Eunice looked Geoffrey in the eye, then absented herself.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

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

Sunday knew at once that something was wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I have to get back to Earth.’

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

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

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

‘I have to get back,’ she repeated.

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

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

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

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

But he was right. She had already been thinking of funerals.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Chinging in from Mombasa, where Memphis’s body had been examined in detail, the neuropractor delivered her verdict to the family members gathered in the household.

They could bring him back to life, the figment said, that was always an option, albeit an expensive one. But so much of his brain would need to be rebuilt from scratch that the end result wouldn’t be the man they had known. The basic structural organisation of his personality had been blasted to shards. ‘There is no gentle way of putting this, but what you would be getting back would be a baby in an old man’s body,’ the figment informed them, Geoffrey unable to shake the sense that this was all fractionally too rehearsed, a speech that the neuropractor kept up her sleeve to deliver on occasions such as this, while trying to make it sound suitably impromptu and sincere. He wanted to resent her for that, but couldn’t. She was just being kind.

‘A confused, frightened baby with just enough recollection to know what it was missing,’ the specialist went on. ‘Memory. Language. All traces of family and friendship. The hard-earned skills and knowledge of a lifetime. And with not enough life ahead of it ever to recover what was lost. We will of course abide by your wishes, but I urge you to give deep consideration before taking this course.’

No discussion was required. For once, the Akinyas were all in agreement. The decision was entirely in their hands, as Memphis had no family but the one that employed him.

‘We wouldn’t want that,’ Hector said softly, Geoffrey nodding his assent, and knowing as he did so that he was answering for Sunday as well.

‘I think you’re doing the right thing,’ the specialist said. ‘And I am so sorry that this has happened.’

Geoffrey was still trying to come to terms with what the day had delivered. Everything felt unreal, off-kilter. Memphis had been part of his life in a way that Eunice never had. She was a reclusive figure who sometimes beamed herself down from the Winter Palace, but who never walked the household in person. Having her removed from his life was the same as having a part of his own past dismantled, boxed away for posterity. He was sad about it, but it didn’t rip him apart.

It was different with Memphis. He’d always been there, a living, breathing, human presence. The smell of him, the prickly texture of his suit fabric, the squeak of his shoes on waxed flooring as he patrolled the household’s corridors at night, more vigilant than any watchdog. Kind when he needed to be, stern when the moment called for it. Always willing to forgive, if not necessarily forget. The most decent human being Geoffrey had ever known.

He remembered Lucas’s words: You imposed on his good nature.

The implication wounded, but he had done exactly that. Always had done.

‘Thank you for letting me know,’ Sunday said, when she chinged back in response to his earlier transmission. ‘Right now, I don’t really have a clue what to say. I’m still processing it. I’m so sorry that you had to see him . . . the way he was. But whatever you might think, this wasn’t your fault, OK? You asked Memphis to do something for you, but that doesn’t mean you have to take responsibility for what happened to him. Memphis was old enough to make his own decisions: if he’d felt your request endangered him, he’d have told you so. So don’t go making this any harder on yourself than it already is. Please, brother? For me?’ Sunday collected herself; from the figment, it was hard to tell if she’d been crying or not. ‘I’m on my way to Pavonis Mons right now. Keep me informed, and I’ll be in touch as soon as I’m able.’ She touched a finger to her lips. ‘Love you, brother. Be strong, for both of us.’ He nodded.

He would try, although he did not expect it to be easy.

Geoffrey had to get out of the house, so he went for a walk in the gardens, forcing his mind from its rut as best as he was able. Everywhere he went, though, he found evidence of Memphis’s handiwork. Choices about the redevelopment of the grounds, the refurbishment of ornamental fountains, the arabesque detailwork in the enclosing wall, the selection of flowers and shrubs in the beds – all these things had ultimately fallen to Memphis. Even when the family had been presented with a series of options, Memphis would already have whittled down a much larger set of possibilities, to the point where any one of the final choices would have been acceptable to him. One of his greatest, subtlest gifts to the Akinyas had been granting them the illusion of free will.

Later that afternoon, when Geoffrey had returned indoors, Jumai chinged to say she was on the train from Lagos. Geoffrey was momentarily befuddled, until he remembered that he had in fact called and left a message with her, shortly after the body was taken away. Everything had been a blur. Jumai had been working, so couldn’t take the call there and then. He was still startled that she was on her way.

‘Get off the train in Kigali,’ he told her. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

‘All right,’ she said, doubtfully, as if that wasn’t the kind of reception she’d been expecting.

‘It will be good to see Jumai again,’ Eunice said, announcing her presence.

‘You never knew her,’ Geoffrey snapped. ‘You never knew anyone at all.’

It was only later that he realised she’d had the good grace to keep out of his skull while he’d been wandering the grounds.

It was a two-hour flight, and mid-evening by the time he landed in Kigali. Rain was descending, soft and warm, honey-scented, dyed scarlet and cobalt and gold by the station’s old-fashioned neon signage. He’d just missed Jumai’s arrival: she was sheltering under the concourse’s overhanging roof, while taxis and airpods fussed about and vendors packed up for the night. Two black bags, sagging on the damp concrete either side of her feet like exhausted lapdogs, were her only luggage.

‘You didn’t have to do this,’ Geoffrey said when they were in the air, wheeling over night-time Kigali on their way back to the household.

‘I knew Memphis pretty well,’ Jumai said, as if he might not remember. They’d both got wet between the station and the airpod, but were drying off quickly with the cabin heater turned up. ‘I was part of your life long enough, don’t forget.’

‘I’m not likely to.’ But while he’d remembered to call Jumai – she’d have been hurt if he hadn’t – it was only now that he was beginning to remember how closely braided their lives had really been. Weeks, months, in Amboseli. Memphis had often come out to the research station while Jumai was fashioning the architecture for the human– elephant neurolink. They’d often ended up eating together, late at night, under a single swaying lamp around which mosquitoes orbited like frantic little planets, caught in the death-grip of a supermassive star.

Long stories, silly laughter, too much wine. Yes, Jumai knew Memphis. Had known, he corrected himself. All past tense from now on.

He started crying. It was ridiculous – there’d been no particular spur to it, save the helter-skelter progression of his own thoughts, but once he started he could not stop himself. How foolish he had been to think he could keep it together, at least until he was out of anyone’s sight.

‘I’m sorry, Geoffrey.’ Jumai squeezed his hand. ‘This must be really hard on you. I know how much he meant to you.’

‘It’s hard on Sunday as well,’ he said, when he was able to speak.

‘Is she flying in?’

‘Not really an option – Sunday’s on Mars, on her way to Pavonis Mons.’

They were crossing the southern tip of Lake Victoria. The clouds had parted overhead, the waters as still and clear as if they were cut from black marble.

‘What’s going on, Geoffrey? Eunice dies. Memphis dies . . . Your sister decides to go to Mars.’

‘Something. I don’t know what.’ After a moment he added, ‘I might need to go back into space myself. There’s a job . . .’ He closed his eyes. ‘It’s related, but I can’t say much more than that. I might have to break into family property.’

‘Is that why I’m here? Because I can be useful to you?’

‘You know me better than that.’

‘Perhaps.’ She was silent for a few seconds. ‘Well, as it happens, I just quit in Lagos. Bad day at the office.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. Nearly got spiked. Figured it was time to bail out, before we hit something really nasty. And for what? A dickhead of a boss? Bank accounts from a hundred years ago, the tawdry blackmail secrets of the rich and famous?’ She looked cross-eyed and appalled, as if she’d just picked something repulsive out of her nose. ‘Frankly, if I’m going to die on the job, I’d rather it was for something more interesting than century-old scandal fodder.’

Geoffrey considered the Winter Palace.

‘I’m afraid century-old scandal fodder may be the best I can offer instead.’

There was a silence. The airpod made a tiny course adjustment. Once in a while another one zipped by in the other direction, but aside from that they had the night sky all to themselves.

‘You want to talk about what happened,’ Jumai said after a while, in not much more than a whisper, ‘it’s all right with me.’ When Geoffrey was not immediately forthcoming, she added, ‘You said they found him near the elephants, that there’d been an accident.’

‘Something out there got him. But it wasn’t elephants.’

‘What, then?’

‘I don’t know. Something else. Memphis knew his way around the herd. Elephants didn’t do this.’

After a while she said, ‘It must have been quick.’

‘That’s what the doctor thought. He couldn’t have had any warning, or he’d have . . . protected himself.’

‘I’ve never seen anyone do that.’

‘I have,’ Geoffrey said, thinking back to the day they had found the death machine, and Sunday had nearly died. ‘Once, when I was little.’

It was during breakfast with Jumai the following morning that the thought struck him, the one that, in retrospect – and given his ideas about the cousins – he might reasonably already have entertained. Perhaps, on some unspoken level, he had indeed done that. But he had not come close to voicing it to himself at the level of conscious assessment. And now that he had, now that the thought had pushed itself into his awareness like a rhino charging into daylight, it was all he could do to sit in stunned wonderment, awed at what his mind had dared to conjure.

‘What are you thinking?’ Eunice asked.

‘I’m thinking it would be a good idea if you fucked off.’

‘Geoffrey?’ Jumai asked.

He was staring past her, through the window, out to the trees beyond the border wall. Eunice was gone.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said distractedly. ‘It’s just—’

‘It was a bad idea me coming here, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s not it,’ he said.

But in truth it was disconcerting, having Jumai back at the household, but them not sleeping together. Doubly so in that Memphis was not around. Time and again his thoughts kept plummeting through the same mental trapdoors. Memphis should hear this. Memphis will know. What will Memphis have to say? And each time he caught himself and swore that that would be the last time, and each time he was mistaken.

They’d slept in separate rooms, and met in the east wing for breakfast. The household staff vacillated between subdued discretion and the putting on of brave faces, acting as if nothing had happened. This grated on Geoffrey until he realised he was doing exactly the same thing, smiling too emphatically, cracking nervous little half-jokes. They were all simply trying to do what Memphis would have wanted, which was to keep on with business as usual exactly as if nothing had happened. They were all overdoing it, though.

‘You don’t have to apologise,’ Jumai said. ‘You’re bound to be upset by what’s happened. But if this is making you feel awkward, me being here, I can leave at any time.’ She dropped her voice to a stage whisper. ‘It doesn’t prevent me working on that, um, commission.’

‘Honestly, it’s not you,’ Geoffrey assured her. ‘I’m glad to have some company. It’s just . . . there’s a lot going on in my head.’

Like the ghost of his dead grandmother, bothering him from beyond the grave. Like the possibility that one or both of the cousins had killed Memphis.

There it was, stated as unambiguously as possible. No pussyfooting around that one.

The cousins killed Memphis.

He’d hoped, upon erecting this suspicion, to be able to knock it down immediately. Bulldoze the rubble away and forget about it. Until that point he hadn’t hated the cousins, after all. Or at least if there were degrees of hate, his was on the mildly antipathetic end of the spectrum, repelled by their manipulative gamesmanship, sickened by their avarice, disgusted by their attachment to family above all else. But not actually despising them. Not actually wishing pain upon them. Most of the time.

But the idea that they might have killed Memphis, or made his death probable . . . well, when framed so plainly, why exactly not? The cousins bitterly regretted bringing Geoffrey in to help them, that was clear. Since his return from the Moon, they’d been well aware that he was keeping information from them, and that this deceit extended to Sunday. It was all to do with Eunice, so what better way to limit any further damage than by removing the one man who’d had more access to the old woman than any of them? Killing Memphis blocked Geoffrey’s investigations in that particular direction. It also meant that anything damaging that Memphis might have had cause to disclose was not now likely to come to light.

And yes, murder . . . a difficult thing, that, in the Surveilled World. Easier to steal the Great Wall of China. The very word had the dark alchemical glamour of crimes now banished to history, like regicide or blasphemy.

But still. Murder wasn’t impossible, even in 2162. Even beyond the Descrutinised Zone, in the loving panoptic gaze of the Mechanism. Because the Mechanism wasn’t infallible, and even this tireless engineered god couldn’t be all places at once. The Mandatory Enhancements were supposed to weed out the worst criminal tendencies from developing minds before people reached adolescence . . . but those very tendencies were imprecise, and it was inevitable that someone, now and then, would slip through the mesh. Someone with the mental wiring necessary to premeditate. Someone capable of malintent.

And if you wanted to commit a crime like that, the Amboseli Basin was far from the worst place you could think of.

When had Memphis died? When Geoffrey was away, not keeping his eye on the old man.

Where had he died? Out in the sticks, where the aug was stretched thin, the Mechanism ineffectual. Memphis wasn’t even wearing his biomedical bracelet – although that could easily have been removed after his death.

Who’d found him? Hector and Lucas. The cousins.

Geoffrey closed his eyes, trying to derail his thoughts, to get them off this tramline. It didn’t work.

The cousins killed Memphis.

‘I’m sorry I dragged you into this,’ he said.

‘Dragged me into what? We’ve barely begun.’

‘Family,’ he said. ‘Memphis. Everything.’

‘You’ve given me an out from Lagos, Geoffrey. I’m hardly going to resent you for that.’

‘Even if there’s an element of self-interest?’

‘Like we said, it’s business. So long as we’re clear about that, all’s well.’ She picked at her food like a bird rooting through roadside scraps. Geoffrey didn’t have much of an appetite either. Even the coffee sat heavily inside him, sloshing around like some toxic by-product. ‘Has there been any talk . . .’ she began, then faltered.

‘Of what?’

Jumai set her face in an expression he remembered well, drawing in breath and squaring her jaw. ‘I’m assuming there are funeral arrangements. I couldn’t make it back for your grandmother’s scattering, but now that I’m here—’

‘There’s nothing in hand. Memphis never talked to me about what he wanted to happen in the event of his death, and I can’t imagine he was any more frank with the rest of the family. Even Sunday wasn’t as close to him as I am. Was.’ He dragged up a smile. ‘Still adjusting. But I’m glad you mentioned the funeral, because I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought.’

‘Really?’

‘I’ve been so fixated on what happened, and what it means . . . but you’re right. There will be a funeral, of course, and I want my sister to be part of it.’

Jumai looked doubtful. ‘Even though she’s on Mars?’

‘She’ll be back sooner or later. Memphis doesn’t have to be cremated and scattered in a hurry, the way my grandmother was. There wasn’t time for everyone to get back home then, especially not when some of us were as far out as Titan. It won’t be the same with Memphis.’

Jumai nodded coolly. ‘And you’ll make damned sure of that.’

‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Because I owe it to my sister. And it’s what Memphis would have wanted.’

‘That’s one thing I never understood about your grandmother,’ Jumai said. ‘I can understand why no one wanted to move the scattering to suit my needs. But why did the rest of you have to get here so quickly?’

‘Because that’s what Eunice wanted,’ Geoffrey said. ‘A quick cremation, and a quick scattering. She didn’t want to wait a year, or however long it would take for the whole family to get back to Africa.’

‘She told you that?’

‘No,’ he answered carefully. ‘But Memphis did.’ And then he thought about that, and what exactly it meant.

After breakfast Jumai went to swim. Geoffrey returned to his room and sat on the made bed. He slid open the lower drawer of the bedside cabinet and took out the shoe he’d brought with him from the study station. He held it in his hands, chalky ochre dust soiling his fingers. The laces were still tied: the shoe had slipped off the old man’s foot without them coming loose. Geoffrey touched the knot, wondering if Memphis had been the habit of tying his left shoe first or his right. He had a picture in his mind of Memphis resting one foot on the Cessna’s undercarriage, doing up his laces, but he couldn’t remember which shoe Memphis had started with. Details, ordinary quotidian details, beginning to slip out of focus. And no more than a day had passed.

He put the shoe back in the drawer, slid it shut. No idea why he had been moved to pick it up, as Memphis’s chrysalis-bound body was being loaded into the medical transport. Hector and Lucas might even have seen him do it, he wasn’t sure.

He moved to his desk, settled into the chair and voked a request to the United Orbital Nations for information relating to the status of asset GGFX13419/785G, aka the Winter Palace. The data was open and public, but even if it hadn’t been, his request was coming through Akinya channels.

Text floated before him:

On: 20/2/62 07:14:03:11 CUT

Subject: Request for disposal of abandoned asset

Asset code: GGFX13419/785G

Asset type: Axially stabilised free-flying habitable structure

Status: Disposal authority granted

Disposal mode: Discretionary

‘What’s troubling you?’ Eunice asked.

He thought about not answering her for a moment, before giving in. ‘They’re going to tear down the Winter Palace.’

‘Let them,’ she said, shrugging with blunt indifference. ‘I don’t live there any more, Geoffrey. Last thing anyone needs is more junk cluttering up Lunar orbit.’

‘It’s not junk. It’s history, part of us. Part of what’s made us the way we are. The cousins can’t just trash it.’

‘Evidently they can.’ She was looking at the text, accessing the same data.

‘Unless someone stops them,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You wouldn’t be planning anything foolhardy, would you?’

‘I’ll get back to you on that one.’

Geoffrey voked the text away and went outside to find the cousins. He encountered Hector first. He was coming back from the tennis court, sweat-damp towel padded around his neck. A proxy strode alongside him, swinging a racquet. Geoffrey blocked the path of the two opponents.

‘Whoever you are,’ he told the proxy, ‘you can ching right back home.’

‘This is unfortunate, Geoffrey,’ Hector said, staring him down. ‘I’m used to your rudeness, but there’s absolutely no need to inflict it on my guests.’

‘I was going anyway,’ the proxy said. ‘Nice game, Hector. Let’s do it again sometime.’ The proxy became slump-shouldered and loll-headed as soon as the ching was broken, the racquet dangling from one limp hand.

Hector took the racquet, clacking it against his own, then told the proxy to store itself.

‘There was no need for that, cousin.’

‘You’ll get over it.’

The proxy scooted away, walking like a person in a speeded-up movie. Hector dredged up a pained smile. ‘And there was me, thinking we were all getting on so well yesterday.’

‘That was then,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Anything in particular I can help you with?’

‘You can start by telling me what really happened out there.’

‘Out where, cousin?’ Hector unwrapped the towel and began rubbing his hair with it.

‘Memphis dying. That was so convenient, wasn’t it? Solved all your problems in one stroke. No wonder you’re in the mood for a game of tennis.’

‘Go back inside, take a deep breath and start again. We’ll both pretend this conversation didn’t happen.’

‘I’m not saying you killed him,’ Geoffrey blurted. He’d gone too far, he realised immediately, let his temper get the better of him. Off in the distance, Eunice was shaking her head.

Hector gave him an appraising nod. ‘Good. Because if you were—’

‘But it works for you, doesn’t it? You can’t wait to bury Eunice and everything she did. You just want to get on with running things, and not have any nasty surprises jump out at you from the past.’

Hector flung his towel onto the path, knowing a household robot would be along to tidy it away. ‘I think you and I need to have a little chat. You’ve been acting very strange since you came back from the Moon. Stranger, I should say. What were you doing in Tiamaat?’

Geoffrey stared at him blankly.

‘What, you think an aircraft can’t be tracked?’ Hector pushed. ‘We knew where you were. Cosying up to the Pans now, are you? Well, they’ve got money, I’ll give you that. Comes at a price, though. I wouldn’t trust them any further than I’d trust us, if I wasn’t already an Akinya.’

‘Man has a point,’ Eunice commented.

‘I’ll choose my own loyalties, thanks,’ Geoffrey said.

‘No one’s stopping you,’ Hector said. ‘Big mistake, though, thinking you can make the Pans work for you. What have you got that they want, exactly? Because it isn’t money, and if it’s charm and diplomacy they’re after . . .’ Hector tapped the doubled racquets against his forehead. ‘Oh, wait. It’s one of two things, isn’t it? Elephants or elephant dung.’ He lowered the racquets. ‘You think you’re ahead of them, Geoffrey? Able to make them work for you, not the other way around? You’re more naive than I thought, and that’s saying something.’ He paused, his voice turning earnest. ‘Lucas and I didn’t give a fuck about Memphis either way, I’ll be honest with you. He was old and past his best. But whatever happened out there, you had better get it into your head that we had nothing to do with it. Whereas you sent an old man to do your dirty work, when you had better things to do. It’s not me who needs to take a good hard look at his conscience.’

‘I won’t let you take down the Winter Palace.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘I don’t need to spell it out. Eunice is gone, Memphis is gone. Now the only link to the past is . . . that thing up there. And you can’t let it stand.’

‘Lucas was right – he did warn me it was a mistake to ask you to do anything useful. I should have listened.’ He pinched sweat from the corners of his eyes. ‘You enjoy certain benefits, cousin. You think yourself to be above the rest of us, but you’re always willing to scuttle back to the household when the need suits you. A room you don’t pay for? Free meals and transportation? Dropping the family name when it helps open doors?’

Geoffrey glared. ‘I’ve never done that.’

‘You need a dose of reality, I think. I won’t throw you out of the household, not when you have a guest here, but consider all other privileges rescinded. Forthwith. I’ll arrange a train ticket for Jumai and an airpod back to the railway station, but it’ll be at my discretion, not yours. You’ve shamed yourself, Geoffrey. Stop before you do any more harm.’

He moved to punch Hector.

It was a stupid, unpremeditated impulse, not something he’d been planning. If he’d thought about it for more than the instant it took the fury to overcome him, he’d have known how utterly pointless the gesture was going to prove.

Hector didn’t even flinch; barely raised the racquets in involuntary self-defence. He simply took a step backwards while the Mechanism assessed Geoffrey’s intent and intervened to prevent the completion of a violent act. It had been different out at the study station, when Geoffrey had clashed with the cousins: there, the aug had been thin, the Mechanism’s omniscience imperfect.

No so here, in the well-ordered environs of the household. A million viewpoints tracked him from instant to instant, an audience of unblinking sensors wired to the tireless peacekeeping web of the Surveilled World. In the dirt under his feet, in the granite glint of a wall, in the air itself, were more public eyes than he could imagine. His movements had been modelled and forward-projected. Algorithms had triggered, escalating in severity. From that nodal point in equatorial East Africa, a seismic ripple had troubled the Mechanism. At its epicentre, one calamitous truth: A human being was attempting to perpetrate harm against another.

The algorithms debated. Expert systems polled each other. Decision-branches cascaded. Prior case histories were sifted for best intervention practice. There was no time to consult human specialists; they’d only be alerted when the Mechanism had acted.

Geoffrey had barely begun to initiate the punch when something axed his head in two.

It was ‘just’ a headache, but so sudden, so agonising, that the effect was as instant and debilitating as if he’d been struck by lightning. He froze into paralysis, not even able to scream his pain. Eunice broke up like a jammed signal. Unbalanced by the momentum he’d already put into his swing, Geoffrey toppled past Hector and hit the ground hard, stiff as a statue.

The paralysis ebbed. He lay helpless, quivering in the aftershock of the intervention, dust and gravel in his mouth, his palms stinging, his trousers wet where he had lost bladder control.

The intervention was over as suddenly as it had arrived. The headache was gone, leaving only an endless migraine afterchime.

‘That was . . . silly,’ Hector said, stepping over him, stooping to tap him on the thigh with the racquets. ‘Very, very silly. Now there’ll have to be an inquiry, and you know what that will mean. Psychologists will be involved. Neuropractors. Our name dragged through more dirt. All because you couldn’t act like a responsible adult.’

Geoffrey pushed himself to his feet. Through the shock of what had happened, the fury remained. Absurd as it was, he still wanted to hit Hector. Still wanted to punch that smile away.

Eunice hadn’t reappeared.

‘This isn’t over,’ he said.

Hector averted his gaze from the sorry spectacle before him. ‘Go and make yourself presentable.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Geoffrey was still shaking, still doing his best not to think through the consequences of what had just transpired, as he tossed his soiled garments into the wash and changed into fresh clothes. His instinct was to blame Hector.

But even if Hector was responsible for him committing the violent act, he could not be held accountable for the intervention. That was the point of the Mechanism: it was oblivious to persuasion, supremely immune to influence. Nor was it done with him. It might take hours, it might take days, but he would be called to account, by shrinks and ’practors, subjected to exhaustive profiling: not just to make sure he was suitably repentant, but to satisfy the Mechanism’s human consultants that the impulse had been an aberration, not the manifestation of some deeper psychological malaise that required further surgical intervention.

So he was in trouble, unquestionably. But he still had every reason to distrust the cousins, every reason to think that they would not waste a moment in erasing Eunice’s legacy.

Still in his room, with the door ajar, he used Truro’s secure quangle path to ching Tiamaat.

‘There’s been a development,’ Geoffrey said, when the smooth-faced merman had assumed form.

‘You’re referring to the disposal plans?’ Truro, who was half-submerged in pastel-blue lather, gave a vigorous blubbery nod. ‘I assumed that would have come to your attention as well. There’s no timescale for the operation, but we can safely assume it will be sooner rather than later, now that permission has been granted.’

‘There’s something else. I’ve just done something . . . impetuous. Or stupid.’ Geoffrey lowered his gaze, unable to look at the Pan directly. ‘I confronted the cousins.’

‘Perfectly understandable, given the circumstances.’

‘And I tried hitting one of them.’

‘Ah,’ Truro said, after a moment’s reflection. ‘I see. And this . . . act – was it—’

‘The Mechanism intervened.’

‘Oof.’ He blinked his large dark seal eyes in sympathy. ‘Painful, I’ll warrant. And doubtless fairly humiliating as well.’

‘I’ve had better mornings.’

‘Any, um, history of this kind of thing?’

‘I don’t routinely go around trying to hit people, no.’ But he had to think carefully. ‘Got into a fight when I was a teenager, over a card game. Or a girl. Both, maybe. That was the last time. Before that, it was just the usual stuff we do in childhood, so that we understand how things work.’

‘Then I doubt there’ll be any lasting complications. We’re animals, at the core, even after the Enhancements: the Mechanism doesn’t expect sainthood. All the same . . . it does complicate things now.’

‘That’s what I was thinking.’

‘Usual protocol in this situation would be a period of . . . probationary restraint, I think they call it – denial of aug and ching rights, restricted freedom of movement, and so forth – until a team of experts decides you aren’t a permanent menace to society and can be allowed to get on with your life without further enhancement . . . with a caution flag appended to your behavioural file, of course. The next time you’re involved in anything similar, the Mechanism won’t hesitate to assume you’re the initiating party . . . and it may dial up its response accordingly.’

No bones: the Mechanism would kill, if killing prevented the taking of an innocent life. Just because it didn’t happen very often didn’t mean that the threat was absent. Geoffrey’s crime put him a long way down the spectrum from the sort of offender likely to merit that kind of intervention. But still . . . just being on the same spectrum: he wasn’t too thrilled about that.

‘What do I do?’

‘We need to get you to Tiamaat before probationary restraint kicks in. A human has to be involved in that process, probably someone with a dozen or so pending cases already in their workfile. That means we may have an hour or two.’

‘Once I’m in Tiamaat, how does that help?’

‘We have . . . ways and means. But you need to get to us, Geoffrey. We can’t come to you now.’

He looked around the little room, underfurnished and impersonal, like a hotel he’d just checked into. He realised he wouldn’t miss it if he never saw it again. Other than a few knick-knacks, there was nothing of him here.

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Make haste,’ Truro said. ‘And speed. Haste and speed, very good things right now.’

Jumai was swimming lengths, cutting through the water like a swordfish, all glossy sleekness and speed. She made this basically inhuman activity appear not only workable but the one viable solution to the problem of moving.

‘I thought we might take a flight, around the area,’ he said vaguely when she paused for breath at one end of the pool, elbows on the side.

‘Is there stuff you need to deal with, to do with Memphis?’

‘Nothing that can’t wait.’

‘You all right, Geoffrey?’ She was looking at his trousers and shirt. ‘Why’ve you changed?’

He offered a shrug. ‘Felt like it.’

She shrugged in return, appearing to accept his explanation. ‘Mind if I do a few more lengths?’

He nodded at the clear blue horizon. It was untrammelled by even the wispiest promise of clouds, the merest hint of the weather system they’d flown through around Kigali. ‘There’s a front coming in. I thought we’d try and duck around it.’

‘A front? Really?’

‘Revised weather schedule,’ he offered lamely.

‘And this can’t wait?’

‘No,’ he said, trusting that she’d understand him, read the message in his eyes that he couldn’t say aloud. ‘No, it can’t.’

‘OK. Then I guess it’s time to get out of the water.’

She changed quickly, hair still frizzy from being towel-dried when she rejoined him. Geoffrey was anxious, wondering when the iron clamp of probationary restraint was going to slam down on him.

‘What’s up?’ she asked him, sotto voce, as they headed towards the parked airpods.

‘Something.’

‘To do with me being here?’

‘It’s not you.’ He was answering in the same undertone. ‘But I need you with me.’

‘Is this about the job?’

‘Might be.’

He beckoned the closest airpod to open itself. Jumai climbed in confidently, Geoffrey right behind her. It was only as he entered the cool of the passenger compartment that he realised how much he’d been sweating. It was drying on him, cold-prickling his forehead.

‘Manual,’ he voked, and waited for the controls to slide out of their hidden ports, unfolding and assembling with cunning speed into his waiting grasp. A moment passed, then another. His hands were still clutching air.

‘Manual,’ Geoffrey repeated.

‘I’m afraid that manual flight authority is not available,’ the airpod said, with maddening pleasantness. ‘Please give a destination or vector.’

Jumai glanced at Geoffrey. ‘You’re locked out?’

‘Take me to Tiamaat Aqualogy,’ he said.

‘That destination is not recognised,’ the airpod replied. ‘Please restate.’

‘Take me to the sea, over the Somali Basin.’

‘Please be more specific.’

‘Head due east.’

‘I’m afraid that vector is not acceptable.’

‘You’re not allowed to take me east?’

‘I am not permitted to accept any destinations or vectors that would involve flight over open water.’

Geoffrey shook his head, confounded. ‘Who put this restriction on you?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not permitted—’

‘Never mind.’ Geoffrey clenched his fists, giving up on the airpod. He cracked the canopy, letting out the bubble of cool, scented air, letting the African heat back in. ‘Fucking Lucas and Hector.’

Jumai pushed herself out. ‘They’ll have locked them all down, won’t they?’

‘All the airpods,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Not the Cessna.’

It was parked at the end of the row of flying machines, already turned around ready for taxi. ‘Engine start,’ Geoffrey voked before they’d even got there. The prop began to turn, the hydrogen-electric engine almost silent save for a rising locust hum that quickly passed into ultrasound. That was good, at least: he didn’t think that the cousins had the means to block his control of the Cessna, but there was little he’d put past them now.

‘If you knew they couldn’t stop the Cessna,’ Jumai said, ‘why didn’t we—’

The hydrogen feed line was unplugged, lying on the ground next to the plane. Geoffrey had connected the line when he’d arrived, still focused enough to do that, but he had no idea when the cousins had come along to remove it.

‘Watch the prop-wash.’ Geoffrey opened the door and allowed Jumai to climb under the shade of the wing into the co-pilot’s position. He removed the chocks and joined her in the cockpit. Skipping the flight-readiness checks, he released the brakes and revved the engine to taxi power. The Cessna began to roll, bumping over dirt and wheel ruts on its way to the take-off strip. Only now did Geoffrey check the fuel gauge. Lower than he’d have wished, but not empty. He thought there was enough to make it to Tiamaat.

‘We’re running away, aren’t we?’ Jumai said, fiddling with her seat buckle. ‘That’s basically the deal here, right?’

Geoffrey lined up the plane for take-off. ‘I screwed up. I hit Hector.’

She said it back to him as if she might have misheard.

‘You “hit” Hector.’

‘Tried. Before the Mech intervened and dropped a boulder on my skull.’

‘Ho boy.’ She was grinning, caught somewhere between delight and horror. ‘Way to go with the conflict resolution, Geoffrey.’

‘I’m at war with my family. Escalation was the logical next step.’

‘Yeah. You know, I think that’s what they call pretaliation.’ She was shaking her head. ‘And now what?’

He pushed the throttle to take-off power. The Cessna surged forward, the ride bumpy at first until sheer speed smoothed out the undulations in the ground. ‘We’re on our way to Tiamaat.’

‘Too cheap to send their own plane?’

‘They can’t now I’ve got myself into trouble with the Mechanism. They won’t be rushing into a direct stand-off with the family, either.’

They were at take-off speed. He rotated and took them into the air.

‘Something about you has changed,’ Jumai said. ‘I’m not sure it’s good, but something’s definitely changed. You used to be boring.’

‘And now?’ Geoffrey made a steep left turn, bringing them back over the white and blue ‘A’ of the household.

‘Less so.’ Jumai loosened her seat buckle. ‘So – how far to the coast?’

‘About five hundred kilometres.’ He eyed the fuel gauge again, wondering if he was being optimistic. ‘Call it two hours of flight time. And then we still have to get out to Tiamaat.’ He patted the console. ‘But we’re good.’

‘We’d be better off walking.’

‘She’s an old machine, but that’s good – cousins can’t touch old machines.’

‘Maybe it isn’t the cousins we should be worrying about,’ Jumai said. ‘Especially if you’ve just pissed off the Mechanism.’

Geoffrey smiled. The household wheeled below. Two figures were standing by one of the walls, looking up at him with hands visoring their eyes. He waggled the wings and aimed for the ocean.

Not that it was ever going to be that simple, of course. They had not been in the air for more than ten minutes when two airpods closed in, one on each side, pincering the Cessna with only a wing’s width to spare. Geoffrey took his eyes off the horizon just long enough to confirm that it was the cousins. They were flying in the same two machines that had been parked on the ground near Memphis’s body: Hector to starboard, Lucas to port.

‘I think they want to talk,’ Jumai said. ‘Someone keeps trying to push a figment through.’

‘They can fuck off. We’re long past the point of reasoned discussion.’ He had been rebuffing figment requests since he had taunted the cousins from the air. There was nothing he wanted to hear from them now.

‘They’re getting pretty close. I know airpods can’t collide with each other, but . . .’ She left the sentence hanging.

‘Don’t worry,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If they do anything that even looks as if it’s an attempt to force us down, suddenly I’m not going to be the main thing on the Mechanism’s mind.’

‘That’ll be a great consolation as they’re scooping me off the ground.’

‘We’re not going to crash. Anyway, this should be a walk in the park for you, the queen of high-risk data recovery. You laugh in the face of explosives and nerve gas.’

‘Geoffrey,’ a voice said, cutting through his thoughts like an icebreaker. ‘I’m sorry to use this channel, but you’ve left me with no option.’

‘Get out of my skull, Lucas.’

Jumai looked at him in dismay, not hearing the cousin.

‘I would,’ Lucas said, ‘if I thought you’d accede to communication through a more orthodox channel.’

‘What’s happening?’ Jumai asked.

‘Lucas has found a way into my head,’ Geoffrey said, having to shout to drown out the voice that was still droning on between his ears. ‘Don’t know how.’

He didn’t. Even Memphis couldn’t reach him when he didn’t want to be reached, and there was no reason to suppose that the cousins had any secret voodoo that offered them a back door into Geoffrey’s mind. They’d have used it already if that was the case, when they were trying to contact him about Memphis being killed.

‘It’s simple enough,’ Lucas was saying. ‘You’ve fled the scene of a high-level intervention before a risk-assessment team had the chance to interview you. The Mechanism takes a fairly dim view of that. They’d shut you down again if there wasn’t a risk of endangering both you and your hostage.’

‘She’s not my hostage,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Tell that to the authorities, cousin. The Mech’s given me direct-access privilege because I’m kin and I might be able to talk you out of making this worse for yourself.’

‘Well, you can tell them you tried. Now fuck off.’

‘Geoffrey, listen to me. We understand that this has been a difficult and emotional time for you, but don’t compound matters by behaving rashly.’

‘Don’t blame me, Lucas. You started this, by sending me to the Moon.’

‘There are things best left in the past,’ Lucas said. ‘If you cared about this family, and its obligations, you’d understand that. There are millions of people who depend on us, who depend on stability.’

‘Our stocks barely faltered, Lucas. Other than us, no one gives a shit about Eunice.’

‘Which is exactly why none of this is worth what you’re doing. She’s history, Geoffrey. A ghost.’

‘Leave it to the Mechanism. This isn’t your problem any more.’

He hadn’t expected Lucas to take him at his word, but after a few moments the cousins’ airpods peeled away, leaving the Cessna alone in the sky. Geoffrey was surprised at how shaken that left him feeling. He twisted around in his seat to watch the two vehicles dwindling aft.

‘Lucas is gone,’ he said softly.

‘There was nothing they could do,’ Jumai said. ‘You said it yourself – knocking us out of the sky was never an option.’

But eventually the Mechanism came, as he had always known it would. They were over the ocean by then, and the fuel warning had sounded three times. Two Civil Administration vehicles approached, official blue-and-whites garbed in aug-generated EAF and AU insignia, vectoring out to sea from Nairobi or maybe Mombasa, bigger and faster than the cousins’ airpods, blunt-hulled, stub-winged, barnacled with duct-fans, rhino-ugly with angular chiselled hull plates and the hornlike black protuberances of weapons systems. Quite something, in this day and age, to be confronted with such an overt display of peacekeeping authority. Geoffrey couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything like it, on Earth at least. All this, for little old me? he felt like asking. Really, you shouldn’t have.

‘Maybe quitting the day job was a mistake,’ Jumai said.

‘They think you’re my hostage,’ Geoffrey said. ‘At least, that’s the stance they’ve decided to take, so I wouldn’t worry if I were you – they’re not going to say or do anything that might put you in danger.’

‘Until they dig around in my background and decide, hey, maybe his Nigerian ex-girlfriend might be an accomplice after all.’

‘They’re still not going to do anything stupid. I haven’t committed any crime. I just fled the scene of one I didn’t succeed in committing.’

‘Tell that to the judge.’ She was looking through the windows, jerkily alternating between starboard and port like someone following a vigorous tennis match. ‘I’ve seen some mean machinery in my time, Geoffrey, even driven some of it—’

‘They’re designed to intimidate. Which is why we won’t be intimidated.’

The enforcement vehicles, insignia hovering around them like bright neon banners caught in their slipstreams, were much bigger than the Cessna. But that worked to Geoffrey’s advantage, too. The pilots would look at his little white toy of an aeroplane and see something preposterously old and fragile, not realising that the ancient airframe was in fact much tougher than it looked.

‘Geoffrey Akinya,’ a voice said, cutting through everything just as Lucas’s had done. ‘This is the Civil Administration. Please return to your place of origin.’

‘Sorry, no can do,’ Geoffrey said.

‘An intervention was necessary to prevent the completion of a violent act, Geoffrey.’ He was being spoken to like a child, with great forbearance. ‘Under such circumstances, a process of review must always take place. Submit yourself to probationary restraint and you have nothing to fear. I urge you now to turn around.’ The voice was deep, male, unmistakably Tanzanian.

‘You can’t stop me, can you? There’s nothing in the world you can do to make me alter my course.’

The vehicles came closer. They were as big as houses, armoured like bunkers. This kind of military-spec enforcement technology was like a coelacanth: it had no business still existing in the present. Yet, Geoffrey now realised, it had been there all along, a covert part of his world, tucked decently out of sight until he transgressed against the Mechanism.

‘This is your last warning,’ the voice said. ‘Turn around now.’

That was when the fuel ran out. Geoffrey had never ditched an aircraft before, never even considered that he might one day face the possibility of ditching. Ditching was what happened when things went wrong, when things were miscalculated.

Yet here he was, ditching the Cessna. He came in at just above stall speed, full flaps, and flared steeply at the last moment. The wheels bit water. The aircraft slowed quickly, nose pitching into the sea, and then leaned slowly to starboard until the wingtip was submerged. The engine had stopped. The Cessna rocked in the green swell of the Indian Ocean, silent save for an occasional creak from the airframe, as if it had always been waiting for its time as a boat.

‘Life jacket under your seat,’ Geoffrey said. The sea air tickled his nose. ‘We have to get out. She’s not built for floating.’

Jumai extracted her life jacket. ‘Meaning we swim for it?’

‘Not much choice, I’m afraid.’

‘There are sharks in these waters.’

He nodded. ‘We should be all right. The Mechanism’s probably already clearing any large predators from the area, or euthanising those that don’t take the hint.’

‘You hope.’

‘Right now, being eaten is the least of our worries.’

The Administration vehicles loitered overhead. That was good, in one sense, because it meant they wouldn’t have to wait long for rescue – Mechanism or not, Geoffrey didn’t relish the prospect of spending hours in the ocean. Bad in another sense, though, because once Geoffrey and Jumai were floating, it wouldn’t take the authorities long to work out a way of scooping them into custody.

But the Cessna was definitely sinking. Water had been lapping in from the moment they ditched, splashing through the door seals and engine openings. With their life jackets on, Geoffrey and Jumai climbed onto the sloping surface of one wing, but that would buy them minutes, no more. Jumai was sitting on the inclined wing, her feet dangling over the edge. Geoffrey stood, hands on hips, knees bent for balance, anxiously surveying the horizon. He’d been able to see land from the air, but not now they were down.

‘Whatever happens,’ Jumai said, ‘I’m sorry about your plane.’

‘Me too.’

There was a clunk from under the fuselage: softened by suspension, as if the submerged undercarriage had just touched dry land. With a lurch, the Cessna righted itself, the wing becoming horizontal once more. Geoffrey staggered, nearly losing his footing. Jumai reached out and grabbed his ankle, and nearly lost her own purchase in the process. Water sluiced away in rivulets.

With the smoothness of a rising elevator, the Cessna emerged from the sea.

‘The fuck?’ Jumai said.

Geoffrey offered her a shrug of incomprehension.

There was a black road under the wheels. The black road was rising, forcing itself into daylight: ocean was sluicing off the road as well, down its broad curving flanks. Geoffrey turned slowly around, half-knowing what he’d see. In the opposite direction, the road ran into a sheer-sided black tower, its rounded, tapering form rising to a hammerhead lookout deck.

‘We’re on a submarine,’ Geoffrey said. He had to say it twice just to convince himself. ‘We’re on a submarine.’

Jumai dropped from the wing onto the slick rubber-treaded deck. ‘And is this good, or bad?’

‘I think it’s good. For now.’

The submersible was from Tiamaat; he knew this even before a door opened in the base of the tower and an exo’d merperson came striding out. He squinted against a sudden salty lash of sea-spray.

It was Mira Gilbert. Behind her were three other exo-clad merpeople.

‘Hello, lubbers!’ she said, beckoning. ‘Come inside. We’ll secure the plane, then get under way.’

Geoffrey climbed off the wing, touched a hand to the side of the engine cowling, reassuring it that he would be back. In truth, he had little idea what was going to happen next. His ordered plans, such as they had been, were in tatters. He had done a shameful thing, then fled the scene of the crime. He had refused to submit to Mech authority, and now he was surrendering himself to people he barely knew, let alone trusted.

It wasn’t too late. The Administration vehicles were still loitering. He could still take his chances with the ocean, let them swoop him into their custody. For a moment, caught between branching possibilities, two versions of his life peeling away from each other like aircraft contrails, he was paralysed.

‘We’re waiting, Mister Akinya,’ Mira Gilbert said.

‘You don’t need to be a part of this,’ he told Jumai. ‘You could still—’

‘Fuck that,’ she said, shooting a dismissive glance at the hovering machines. ‘Sooner take my chances with the aquatics, if that’s all right with you. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same.’

She was right, of course. He’d committed to this path from the moment he tried flying the airpod. No point in second-guessing himself now.

So they went inside, and the Administration vehicles were still loitering when the submarine filled its tanks and slipped under the waves. The craft turned out to be the Alexander Nevsky, one of Tiamaat’s small fleet of subsurface freighters. The Nevsky’s function was to carry or haul cargoes that were too heavy, bulky or hazardous for the elegant, hyper-efficient wind-driven cyberclippers that now moved nine-tenths of the world’s global freight.

The Nevsky was a good hundred and fifty years old, rehabilitated from some dark former career as a nuclear-deterrent vessel. Now the only atomic technology aboard was its engine. Missile bays had been gutted of their terrible secrets and turned into storage holds. Behind it came a ponderous string of cargo drogues, hulled with sharkskin polymer to minimise drag, each as large as the submarine itself.

The Nevsky demanded little in the way of a crew, judging by the exceedingly sparse onboard provisions for cabin space. In fact, it probably ran most of its duties entirely unmanned, save for any passengers who might be along for the ride.

‘How did you get here so quickly?’ Geoffrey asked Mira Gilbert when they were under way again, and after he had asked for the twentieth reassurance that the Cessna was being taken care of.

‘The Nevsky was already operating in the area,’ the merwoman said. ‘Routine cargo run. I podded aboard when it looked likely we’d be able to make a rendezvous.’

Geoffrey and Jumai had been given dry clothes, towels and brimful mugs of salty sea-green chai. They were underwater now, travelling at maximum subsurface cruise speed, but there was no way to tell that from inside the Nevsky. No aug reach, no means of opening a window through the iron dermis of its hull.

‘I don’t know how much Truro told you,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but I’m in a lot of trouble with the Mechanism. I don’t think they’re going to let me get away with it this easily.’

‘We can hold them off for the time being,’ Gilbert said. ‘Technically, you trespassed on Initiative property, you see.’

‘By ditching my plane?’

Gilbert nodded enthusiastically. ‘Over our submarine.’

‘I didn’t know it was there,’ Geoffrey said in benign exasperation. ‘How can that possibly count as trespass?’

‘It’s all for the best. You’re in our immediate jurisdiction now, which means we can activate various quasi-legal stalling measures.’

Geoffrey shivered. It was cold inside the Nevsky, even with the warm clothes they’d been given. ‘Won’t that get you into a stand-off with the Mechanism?’

‘You came to us, not the other way around,’ Gilbert said. ‘That changes the landscape. There are now . . . procedures which can be brought into play.’

‘Such as?’ Jumai asked.

‘If Geoffrey applies for Tiamaat citizenship, the Mech has to wait until we’ve completed our own battery of psych assessments . . . which, within reason, could take just about as long as we like.’

‘And then what – you hand me back anyway?’

‘We’ll cross that bridge later. For now, let’s get started on the citizenship application.’ She smiled at his hesitation. ‘It’s just a formality. You’re not signing over your immortal soul to Neptune and his watery minions.’

‘What do I have to do?’

She voked text into the air. ‘Just read these words, and we’re good to go.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

During the night they had crossed and recrossed the complex fault-and-rift system of the Valles Marineris many times. As they swooped over impossibly high and narrow bridges – barely wide enough for the train’s single gleaming monorail, which gave the disconcerting illusion that they were flying over these immense gaps – Sunday had looked out for evidence of the buildings she had seen from Holroyd’s room, set into the canyon’s walls. A window, a nurse, a green-thorned man in a surgical bath. But she’d seen no sign of human habitation at all, not a single light or pipeline or road in all the empty hours. Valles Marineris was wide enough to span Africa from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian: you could lose entire countries in that kind of area, let alone buildings and windows.

She reminded herself of that over and over, but her brain simply wasn’t wired to grasp scenery on Martian scales.

She hadn’t been able to sleep, not after the news from Earth. Geoffrey had called back and the update was no better than she’d been expecting, which was that Memphis had been dead for so long that there was no hope of recovery. She had no reason to doubt the truth of that. The one thing the family wouldn’t skimp on was medical expertise, and the doctors in Mombasa were as good as anywhere.

So Memphis was gone: an entire thread ripped out of her life without warning, a golden strand unravelling right back to her childhood. She couldn’t deal with that, not right now. She did not need consolation because she did not yet feel anything that she recognised as grief. Instead there was a peculiar vacuum-like absence of other emotions. It was as if her mind had begun to make mental houseroom, clearing itself of furniture it no longer needed. Something else was going to be moving in, for months or years. Sunday wondered how grief would feel, when it arrived.

Jitendra returned to the compartment looking brighter and better rested than she felt he had any right to. He’d gone to get himself some breakfast, Sunday apologising for not having an appetite, and hoping he didn’t mind eating on his own. He was finishing off a paper-wrapped croissant.

‘We’re nearly in Vishniac,’ he said, rubbing a hand over a freshly shaven chin to dislodge crumbs. He looked different, and it took her a moment to identify the change. Normally he kept his scalp shaved so that the transcranial stimulator could work effectively, but now his hair was beginning to grow back. ‘I’m guessing our ride will be waiting for us,’ he went on, between mouthfuls. ‘Sure you want to go through with this? It’s not too late to call it all off.’

‘It’ll take my mind off things,’ she said.

‘This happening, maybe it’ll knock some sense into those cousins of yours.’ He offered her the remaining half of the croissant. She shook her head. ‘You sure? Got to eat.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

But she didn’t feel fine. She felt sick and light-headed, not quite in her own body, as if she was elsewhere and a ching bind was collapsing. It was not simply the news of Memphis’s death, though that was a significant part of it. She had been feeling disorientated ever since Soya had contacted her in Crommelin.

Soya of the mirrored visor and the face that echoed her own.

That’s all it had been – an echo. Later Sunday had played back the retinal capture, and while Soya’s face was very similar to Sunday’s, it was not an exact likeness – although in the moment, with the distortion of the intervening layers of glass, she could forgive herself for thinking otherwise. But a family resemblance? Unquestionably.

Which threw up more questions than it answered.

She did not think she recognised the name, but in fact that had been her own memory at fault. Eunice’s mother, of all people, had been named Soya. But that particular Soya had been dead more than a hundred years, and at least as crucially she had never left Earth. Born in the second half of the twentieth century, she had, by the standards of her age, lived a long and blessedly happy life. But she had not lived long enough to see more than the first flowering of her daughter’s accomplishments. In any case, the images of Soya Akinya did not match the face Sunday had seen, even those few grainy still frames that existed of Soya as a young woman. The Akinya genes were present in both women, but they had expressed themselves quite differently.

How easy it would have been to run an aug trace, if she hadn’t been stuck in that tourist suit. But that had evidently been the point: not just to shield their conversation, but to disclose as little as possible about Soya’s true identity.

All of that was suitably destabilising, but what had unsettled Sunday just as much as seeing her own face was the warning Soya had given. Not that Sunday had ever assumed the Pans could be trusted unquestioningly – she would be naive not to think otherwise – but given the fact that she had no alternative but to trust them, what precisely was she meant to do with that information?

And how did Soya know about the Pans, and Sunday, and Eunice’s trail of breadcrumbs anyway?

It was not good to feel like a cog in a machine, even a willing and submissive cog. Who could she turn to now? Sunday wondered. Jitendra for love and affection, all she could wish for in a partner. But Jitendra couldn’t help her make the decisions now being forced upon her. Her brother? In a heartbeat. But Geoffrey was on another planet and all her communications to him went through the Pans . . .

That left Eunice, an art project she herself had assembled and breathed life into. A patchwork thing, a collage, a wind-up doll. Eunice might serve as a handy, easily queryable repository of all-world-knowledge relating to her late namesake, and she might have a few data-sniffing tricks up her sleeve, but the idea that Sunday might turn to the construct for counsel, for wisdom, for succour in a time of crisis . . .

That was ridiculous.

I’m Sunday Akinya, she thought. I’m thirty-five years old. I’m fit and well. I am not the ugliest woman ever born. Barring accidents I’ll probably see out another hundred and twenty years, at the very minimum. I’m a talented if obscure artist, I live on the Moon and I’m currently walking around on Mars, with my boyfriend, with an expense account some people would kill for, if killing were still possible.

So why am I not having fun?

The Vishniac railway station was much smaller than the one in Crommelin, and smaller than those at many of the intermediate stops they had made on the way. It was pressurised – the train had passed through an airtight collar as it dived underground – but the air was cool and it felt thinner in her lungs, somehow. That was undoubtedly an illusion, owing as much to her mental state as her knowledge that they had gained considerable altitude. A few dozen passengers had alighted, and it did not take long to verify that the golem was not among them. Sunday waited, apprehensively, until the train slid out of the station, picking up speed so quickly that she felt the air being sucked in its wake. Then it was gone, and there was still no golem.

There were no customs or immigration formalities for travel between Martian administrative sectors, so they were quickly through the station and into the shabby glitz of the Vishniac public concourse. It had the look of a place that had been fresh and modern about thirty years ago, but had since been allowed to fade. Sunday located the café where they had been told to meet Gribelin; it was tucked between a florist and a closed-for-business nail salon.

Their guide was already there, sitting by himself at an outlying table with one leg hooked over the other, sipping from a white coffee cup not much larger than a thimble. His bug-eyed goggles appeared to have been surgically grafted to his face. He was bald and cadaverous.

‘Mister Gribelin?’ Sunday ventured.

He set the coffee down on the glass-topped table with a precise and delicate chink and stood up, retrieving a knee-length leather overcoat from the back of his chair. He was tall even by Lunar standards, towering over both Sunday and Jitendra.

‘Can’t hang around,’ he said, without a word of welcome. ‘Your friend caught the next train out of Crom. He’s been right behind you all the way.’

‘How long does that give us?’ Sunday asked.

‘Two hours, maybe less. Means we’ve already pissed away most of our head start.’ He shrugged on the murky brown coat. It had wide shoulder patches and a collar that went halfway up the sides of his skull. Now that she had a good look at him, Sunday saw fine tattoos covering every visible piece of skin, from his face to his scalp and the back of his head. The tattoos were of weird little dancing stick figures, executed in primitivist lines and squiggles.

She had nothing against weirdness – hell, she lived in the Descrutinised Zone – but she’d been hoping for a driver who exuded quiet authority and confidence, not someone who looked borderline psychotic.

‘So much for your cousins seeing sense,’ Jitendra said gloomily.

‘Maybe the golem’s on autopilot. Either way, I’m not in the mood to talk to it.’

‘You all right?’ Gribelin asked her, casually, as if he had only marginal interest in the answer.

Her face was reflected back at her from his bug-eyes. ‘Had better weeks. Can we just get going?’

‘Sure thing, sweet cheeks.’

They took an elevator. In the enclosed space, Gribelin gave off a hard-to-place mustiness, like the contents of an old cupboard. A garage lay three or four levels under the concourse. It was pressurised and floodlit, but even colder than the public spaces above. Sunday coveted Gribelin’s coat and boots. The floor was covered with a tan-coloured tar of compacted oily dust that stuck to her shoes. They walked past rows of bulky machines, some of them as large as houses: cargo haulers, excavators, tourist buses, all mounted on multiple sets of springy openwork wheels.

‘Here’s your ride,’ Gribelin said, stopping at one of the trucks. ‘Don’t scuff the paint job.’

He cranked down a ladder and made his limber way up into the cab airlock. Halfway up he paused, looked down and reached for Sunday’s luggage. She passed him her bag, then Jitendra’s, and then followed him up into the vehicle, trying to kick as much of the muck off her soles as she was able. The paint, what remained of it, could fuck itself.

It was a six-wheeled truck with a crudely airbrushed dragon on the side. Up front was a rounded accommodation and command bubble, with engine and cargo space at the rear, comms blisters and deployable solar vanes on the roof, now tucked back like retracted switchblades. Clamped to the front like a trophy, under the chin of the command bubble, was an androform maintenance robot.

There was more room inside than Sunday had been expecting. Two small sleeping cabins – one for Gribelin, another for his passengers – and a mini-galley with four fold-down seats. They took seats either side of their guide in the command bubble. The truck smelled as musty as its owner, dirt and mould in the corners, cigarette burns in some of the upholstery.

Gribelin had one hand on a steering yoke, the other on a bank of power-selector levers. They hit the steep upgrade of the garage’s exit spiral; the truck laboured, then found its stride. Gribelin floored it, there was a lurch of wheelspin and then the curving walls were speeding by only a hand’s width from the wheel rims. They climbed and climbed, barely slowing when the ramp flattened and the truck barged through a trio of self-sealing pressure curtains.

Then they were outside. For a few minutes they rumbled along surfaced roads, between low banks of bunkerlike buildings with narrow slitted windows and faded, weatherworn plastic logos on their roofs. The roads were perforated sheets, raised up on stilts. Signs on masts advertised the businesses along the route, with enormous neon-lit arrows pointing off to airlocks and parking ramps. Power lines ran overhead, sagging low above the road and its intersections. It was sprawl, the outskirts of a one-horse town on a planet where even the biggest city was small by Earth or Lunar standards. Sunday saw a repair crew working with welding torches on part of the road, but no pedestrians at all.

The buildings thinned out and soon they passed through a gate in a concrete dust-wall, flanked by flashing beacons, beyond which the road abandoned its lofty ambitions and settled for being a two-lane dirt track. Boulders and large stones, bulldozed out of the way and left along the sides, formed a crude demarcation. Every few hundred metres they passed a transponder or beacon on a flimsy pole, and that was the extent of the road markings.

Not that it appeared to matter to Gribelin, who was only pushing the truck harder. Sunday watched the speedometer climb up to one hundred and sixty kilometres per hour. Dust billowed out of the wheels, and wind-sculpted undulations in the road caused the truck to nose up and down like a small boat in high seas.

‘How long until we reach the Evolvarium?’ she asked.

Gribelin made a show of opening a hatch in the dashboard and rolling himself a cigarette before answering, stuffing it with some dark-red weed.

‘Eight, nine hours,’ he said eventually. ‘Can’t be more precise than that.’

‘I wish we had more time on Lucas.’

He drew on the cigarette, examined it carefully before answering. ‘That your buddy in the train, the golem?’

‘He’s not my friend,’ Sunday said.

‘Figure of speech, sweet cheeks. Kind of obvious you’re not on kissing terms.’ The truck reached the summit of a hill; Gribelin upshifted one of the power-selector levers. They passed the wreck of another vehicle, turned turtle in the dust. ‘The golem’ll need to hitch itself a ride out of town, unless it’s planning on walking. Maybe you’ll get lucky and there aren’t any rides until morning. Who’s on the other end of the proxy?’

‘My cousin, back on Earth.’

He nodded slowly. ‘Same place you’re from, right?’

‘The Moon,’ Sunday said. ‘There’s a difference.’

‘Earth, Moon, just tiny pissholes in the sky here. What is this, some kind of family feud?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Next time, maybe give some thought to settling your scores back home.’ He scratched at the skin around the edge of his goggles. ‘Had enough Earthside politics exported up here to last six fucking lifetimes.’

‘Thanks for sharing. You’re being paid handsomely for this little job, aren’t you?’

He shrugged at Sunday’s question. ‘No complaints, sweet cheeks.’

‘Then please shut the fuck up until I ask you a direct question. I’ve just lost someone very precious to me and the last thing I need is a dose of small-minded Martian nationalism.’ She took a breath. ‘And if you call me “sweet cheeks” one more time, I’ll personally rip those goggles off and ram them down your windpipe.’

Gribelin grinned, took another draw on his cigarette and leaned over to say in Jitendra’s ear: ‘I’m liking her more by the minute. She always this way?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Whatever the Nevsky had just docked with – there’d been a dull metallic clunk as it engaged with something – Geoffrey knew it could not be the aqualogy. They hadn’t come far enough. Yet communicated in that clunk had been an impression of immense, dull solidity. A station, perhaps, rooted to the seabed, or a much larger ocean-going vessel.

Merpeople led them down damp black corridors of armoured metal with flume tubes stapled to the ceiling and water-filled channels sunk into the floor. Through doorways Geoffrey saw more merpeople, lubber technicians and robots toiling under bright lights, surrounded by pallets stacked with elaborately decaled cargo pods. A striding exo-clad merwoman was actually checking something off on a clipboard using a glowing-tipped stylus.

Shortly after he grasped that they’d arrived in the launching facility for one of Tiamaat’s surface-to-orbit lifters, they showed him the rocket itself.

Blunt-nosed and pale green, it sat in its silo like a cartridge in a chamber. Loading belts poked through the walls, thrusting across open air to reach into the lifter’s cargo bays. The lower part of the three-hundred-metre-tall rocket was already submerged. Even as Geoffrey watched, the tide rose perceptibly, lapping over the aerodynamic bulge of its engine fairings. They were flooding the chamber in readiness for launch.

‘Basically just a big bottle of fizzy water,’ Mira Gilbert said as they viewed the rocket from one of the silo’s observation windows. ‘Given a good shake, waiting for someone to pop the cork.’

The rocket’s fuel was metallic hydrogen. Geoffrey knew just enough about MH to be suitably unnerved being this close to so much of the stuff. Nothing exotic or rare about MH: it was out there in bulk quantities, found naturally in the solar system, absolutely free for the taking. The snag was that it only existed at the bottom of the atmospheres of gas-giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, where it had been formed by the brutal crush of all that overlaying gas. Under barely comprehensible pressures of many dozens of gigapascals, normal hydrogen underwent a phase transition to an ultradense electrically conductive state. The key to MH was its metastability: after the pressure was withdrawn, it didn’t immediately revert to normal hydrogen. That didn’t mean it was safe, by any definition, just that it was stable enough to be transported and utilised as an energy-dense rocket propellant with a potential specific impulse far beyond anything achievable through purely chemical reactions.

They weren’t mining it yet. Akinya Space had a share in the programme established to develop MH extraction technology, literally lowering a piezoelectrically stabilised bucket into Jupiter’s atmosphere on a spiderfibre cable and ladling out the stuff, and there’d been some promising feasibility demonstrations, but doing that on a cost-effective, repeatable scale made space-elevator technology look like the work of Neanderthals. It was decades, maybe even centuries down the line, and a dicey investment given that MH had no clear economic application for deep-space propulsion, only the short-haul business of escaping planetary gravity wells. So for now they manufactured it, at ludicrous expense, in mammoth orbital production platforms, tapping the kinetic energy of incoming spacecraft to drive diamond-anvil pistons that were themselves as large and complex as rocket engines.

‘The tanks aren’t completely full of MH,’ Gilbert said. ‘That would be really terrifying. The MH tank is tiny, just a little bubble right down at the base of the vehicle. Problem with MH is that it burns hotter than the surface of the sun, and we still can’t make pumps or nozzles that can tolerate that kind of heat without melting. So we have to dilute it, to lower the burn temperature to the point where we can just handle the reaction, and for that we use liquid hydrogen.’

‘In other words,’ Jumai said, ‘MH is so scary that it makes normal hydrogen, this horrible flammable substance, this stuff that explodes and kills people, seem like the safe, cuddly option.’

‘It gets better,’ Gilbert said, cheerfully indifferent to the dangers. ‘You’re going up in it, both of you. Lifters are normally cargo-only shots but they are fully human-rated. It’s bumpy, but you don’t need to worry about that: you’ll be sedated for the ride.’

‘All that, just to get us to the Winter Palace?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘The launch was scheduled anyway,’ Gilbert said, deflating him slightly. ‘Besides, you’re not the only living, breathing passengers.’ And she nodded down towards one of the conveyor belts, at the torpedo-shaped cargo pod that was being fed into the lifter’s side. It was much larger than any of the other containers they had seen, and it was accompanied by six or seven technicians, mer and lubber, riding alongside like pall-bearers, giving every impression of attending to the pod with particular diligence.

‘What’s inside that?’ Jumai asked.

‘Not what,’ Gilbert corrected gently. ‘Who.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The ground refused to stop rising. Ever since leaving Vishniac they had been driving into the cold afternoon of an early spring day on Mars, ascending, always ascending. They were high up on the Tharsis plateau now, nine kilometres above the mean surface level of the rest of the planet, traversing a vast continent-sized lava bulge higher than Kilimanjaro, higher than Everest, higher than any spot on the surface of the Earth. Even now the terrain forged up towards the cone of Pavonis Mons.

Peacock Mountain. They couldn’t see it yet – the summit was mist-shrouded, and the volcano wouldn’t appear as much more than a gentle bump even in clear visibility.

And this wasn’t even the tallest volcano on Mars.

They’d passed nothing in the way of functioning civilisation. A handful of abandoned vehicles, the descent-stage of a long-abandoned or forgotten rocket, the shrivelled, wind-ripped carcass of a transport dirigible that must have come down decades ago. Once they’d passed near a tiny hamlet, a cluster of pewter-coloured domes with fantails of dust on their leeward sides. Lights were on in the comms towers above the domes, but there was no other indication that anyone lived there. None of these dismal landmarks merited even the briefest of glances from Gribelin. Sunday supposed that he drove this way often enough that the scenery offered little in the way of interest. That had been two hours into the trip. They’d gone a long way since then.

‘Here’s your fence, kids,’ Gribelin said eventually, slowing to guide the truck between a line of transponder masts, most of them leaning away from the prevailing wind direction. ‘Don’t mean a whole lot, truth to tell. Machines sense it, and they know they’ll be punished if they cross over. But that doesn’t mean they don’t try it on for size now and then. Also doesn’t mean we’re going to run into machines as soon as we cross it.’ He tapped a finger against a fold-down map, a physical display of the area east of Pavonis Mons. The display flickered and bled colour under his fingernail. Contour lines showed terrain elevation. Cryptic symbols, horse heads and castles and knights and pawns – like chess notation, except that there were also scorpions and snakes and skulls – were dotted in clumps and ones and twos throughout the roughly circular demarcation of the Evolvarium. There were hundreds of pawns, not so many scorpions, snakes and horse heads, only a few knights and skulls and castles. ‘It’s a big area, and there’s a fuck of a lot of room to get lost in,’ he said.

‘Are those symbols telling you where the machines are?’ Sunday asked.

‘Telling me where the best guess for their location might be, based on the last hard sighting, which could be hours or days ago. Bit of a head-trip for you, the concept of not knowing where something is?’

‘I’m from the Descrutinised Zone,’ Sunday said. ‘There’s no aug, no Mech, in the Zone – at least, not as most people would understand those terms.’

‘But that’s intentional,’ Jitendra said. ‘In the Zone, they’ve chosen to go that way. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to know where these machines are.’

‘There are public eyes in orbit,’ Gribelin said, ‘but when the dust’s up they can’t see shit. Machines are sly – they’ll exploit the dust whenever they can, and if there’s no dust many of them are able to kick some up or tunnel underground or use camouflage. Your next question’s going to be: why don’t they just carpet-bomb the whole fucking landscape with eyes?’

Sunday bristled. That had indeed been her next question. ‘And?’

‘Machines ate ’em. You’re basically throwing down foodstuff, nourishment, in a desert. Yum, yum.’

‘Fix trackers to the machines, then,’ Jitendra said.

‘Same problem. Any kind of parasite like that, anything not directly beneficial to the host, gets picked off and eaten like a grub.’ He tapped the map again. ‘Lame as it is, this is the best we’ve got. Based on intel compiled and shared by the Overfloaters, when they’re feeling in a compiling and sharing mood.’

‘Overfloaters?’ Sunday asked.

Jitendra cut in before Gribelin had a chance to reply: maybe he wanted to show that he wasn’t completely ignorant of the situation here; that he had done at least some homework. ‘The brokers who run the Evolvarium. Think of them like . . . cockfighters, trying to create the ideal fighting animal. They’re always dreaming up new ways to stress the population, to force the machines to keep evolving. And whenever the machines throw up something useful, some innovation or wrinkle on an existing idea, the brokers race each other to skim it off and make some money on the technologies exchange. That’s why this place is on June Wing’s radar.’

‘June Wing?’ Gribelin asked.

Jitendra smiled quickly. ‘A . . . friend of mine. With an interest in fringe robotics. How much do you know about us?’

‘Just that there’s a job, that the fish-faces are behind it, and beyond that I’m not to ask questions.’

‘You knew about the golem,’ Sunday said.

‘The Pans said not to hang around once you were off the train. I was also told to watch out for a claybot, in case your follower got the march on you. As to why the golem’s on your tail, sweet cheeks, I didn’t ask and they didn’t tell.’ He grinned a mouthful of weirdly carved and metal-capped teeth at her. ‘Shit, I called you it again, didn’t I?’

‘We’re not tourists,’ Sunday said levelly, deciding to let her earlier threat slide. ‘The Pans will have told you to take me as near as possible to a set of coordinates in the Evolvarium. There’s a reason for that.’

‘Which is?’

Sunday and Jitendra exchanged glances before she spoke. ‘There’s something buried in the area, something that belongs to me.’

‘Belongs?’

‘Family property,’ she said. ‘But not property that I’d want the golem to get hold of ahead of me.’

‘And you know it’s buried?’ Gribelin asked.

‘If it isn’t, what are the odds of it still being here?’

‘Pretty fucking slim.’

‘I still have to be sure,’ Sunday said.

Gribelin’s skull bobbed up and down as he shrugged. ‘Your call.’

After a moment she asked, ‘What are those things on your skull?’

‘Ears.’

‘I mean the tattoos. Do they signify something? They look like rock art or something.’

‘Rock art.’ He grinned again. ‘Yeah, that’d be about right.’

They passed their first carcass an hour into the Evolvarium.

Dust-scouring wind and the graft of enthusiastic scavengers, both human and mechanical, had stripped the war machine back to a rust-coloured skeleton, a hundred metres from tip to tail. Formed from dozens of articulated modular segments, the ruined robot resembled the vulture-picked spine of some much larger creature. The dust was thin on the Tharsis Bulge, a layer only a centimetre deep covering laval rock, so the war machine’s metal bones were exposed almost entirely to the sky. Gribelin slowed to skirt around the corpse, eyeing it warily.

‘Been here longer than most,’ he said in a low murmur. ‘Deadsville, completely harmless and pecked clean of pretty much anything usable. But sometimes active units use it as a place of concealment. Ambush predators. I think we’re good today, but—’

‘Would they attack us?’ Sunday asked.

‘Mostly, the machines are smart enough to leave us alone.’ He shot her a glance, Sunday’s face bulbous in his goggles. ‘Basic self-preservation: fight each other, use whatever they can, evolve, but don’t piss off the Overfloaters.’

‘You said “mostly”,’ Jitendra said.

‘Darwinism in action, my friend. Every now and then something comes along and tears up the rule book.’

‘You’re risking a lot, bringing us here,’ Jitendra said.

‘I know the terrain.’ He eyed the map again. ‘And I know who to keep away from. You think I’d be here if I didn’t believe the odds were in my favour? Your friends are paying well, but nothing’s worth suicide.’

At four in the afternoon, a quill of orange-red dust feathered up from the horizon. It scribed its way across the landscape, propelled by an invisible hand. Sunday’s first thought was that they were watching a dust-devil, but Gribelin’s map showed a pawn symbol close to their present location.

‘Sifter,’ he said. ‘Your basic low-down grazing caste. Chew through the dust and the top layer of rock, looking for anything recyclable. What they can use to repair or fuel themselves, they use. What’s left over, they barter between themselves or trade on up the food chain.’

‘What’s that?’ Sunday asked, pointing dead ahead, up the gently rising lie of the land. A grey-black smudge floated in the sky, like a dead fly on the windshield, just above the horizon. It dangled entrails, as if it had been swatted. She had tried zooming, but the aug was all but absent.

Gribelin tugged down a pair of binoculars fixed to the ceiling on a scissoring mount and settled his goggled eyes into the rubber-shielded cups. ‘Lady Disdain,’ he said quietly. ‘Not usually this far east. Might be following the sifter, looking for anything thrown up behind it.’

‘Can we avoid her?’ Jitendra said.

‘Only if Dorcas is feeling nice.’ Gribelin steered left, the Overfloater craft veering slowly to the right in the window. He slid the binoculars towards Sunday. ‘Be my guest.’

The rubber eye-cups were greasy with sweat and tiny skin flakes. It took a moment for the binoculars to sense her intended point of interest. The view leapt, stabilised, snapped to sharpness, overlaid with cross hairs and distance/alt-azimuth numerics.

The Overfloater machine was a fat-bellied airship, approximately arrowhead-shaped. Slung under it, blended into the deltoid profile of its gas envelope, was an angular gondola. The ‘entrails’ were sinuous, whiplike mechanical tentacles, a dozen of them, emerging from the base of the gondola. The airship skimmed the surface at a sufficiently low altitude that the arms were able to pluck things from the ground. That was what Lady Disdain was doing right now: loitering, examining.

It brought to Sunday’s mind one of Geoffrey’s elephants, nosing the dirt with its trunk. Or a family of them, bunched into a single foraging organism.

‘Is Dorcas a friend of yours?’ Sunday asked.

‘Friend,’ Gribelin said, chewing over the word as if it was a new one on him. ‘That’s a tricky concept out here. Pretty much dog eat dog all the way down. Machines fuck each other over, Overfloaters fuck the machines over, Overfloaters fuck each other for a profit margin. I fight for the scraps. Me and Dorcas? We go back some. Don’t exactly hate each other. Doesn’t mean we’re kissing cousins either.’

‘Wouldn’t you rather be at the top of the rat heap?’ Sunday asked. She had some idea of how it worked: how the machines, in their endless evolutionary struggle, occasionally splintered off some novelty or gadget or industrial process that the rest of the system could use. Like the technology behind the prototype claybot, the one she’d chinged to the scattering. That rapidly morphing material had been a spin-off from the Evolvarium, and now it stood to make trillions for Plexus. ‘Floating up there like a god, being worshipped. Because that’s what’s going on here, isn’t it? Gods hovering over mortals, taking amusement in their endless warfare and misery.’

‘Wouldn’t go that far,’ Jitendra said. ‘These machines might be super-adaptive, but there’s no actual cognition going on down here. The machines don’t understand that they’re machines. All they know how to do is survive, and try not to fall behind in the arms race. They’re no more capable of religion than lobsters.’

‘Nice if it was that clear-cut,’ Gribelin said. ‘Me, I ain’t so sure. Spend as much time out here as I have, you’ll see some things that make you question your certainties.’

‘Really?’ Jitendra asked sceptically.

‘You think these machines don’t grasp what they are, that they don’t get the difference between existence and non-existence?’ He paused to take a sip from his liquor bottle, flicking the cap off with his thumb while steering one-handed. ‘Once, out by the western flanks, I saw a sifter begging for its life, begging not to be destroyed by a rogue collector.’

‘An evolved response, like a whimpering dog,’ Jitendra said dismissively. ‘Doesn’t prove there’s anything going on inside its head.’

‘You’d seen what I saw, you’d feel differently.’

‘Show me the imagery, I’ll make up my own mind.’

‘Not enough public eyes to catch it,’ Gribelin answered. ‘My own eyes were surrendered to the Overfloaters. They wiped the evidence.’

‘I can see why they might want to,’ Sunday said.

Lady Disdain was powering downslope, three or four tentacles dragging the ground. Sunday had a better impression of the manta-like vehicle now. It was enormous – as it had to be, given the tenuousness of the Martian atmosphere. Ducted engines as large as ocean turbines were bracketed to the drab green gondola.

She felt that it ought to make a sound, a terrible droning approach, but there was nothing.

‘Can you outrun it?’ Jitendra asked.

Gribelin gave a brief shake of his head. ‘Not a hope in hell, and even if we did, we’d only run into more Overfloaters further into the Evolvarium. But don’t worry – I’m sure I’ll find a way to sweet talk Dorcas.’

‘Using your natural charm and diplomacy,’ Sunday said.

‘You’d be surprised how far it gets me.’

The airship circled the moving truck then headed slightly south, dropping its triangular shadow over them like a cloak. Gribelin was still driving, but he was making no effort to push the truck to its limits. Sunday looked up, watching as the underside of the airship, hundreds of metres across and speckled with patch repairs, began to eclipse the sky. The gondola was as large as the Crommelin cable car, aglow with tiny yellow windows.

Figures stole around up there, backlit and mysterious.

Something clanged against them. Sunday jumped. Jitendra grabbed for the nearest handhold. Gribelin swore, but appeared otherwise resigned. The truck pitched as if it had just run into a sand-trap. The ground pulled away, dust cataracting from the wheels. Lady Disdain was lifting them into the sky, hauling them up with one or more of her tentacles.

Fifty metres, then maybe a hundred. The horizon began to rotate, the deltoid canopy gyring slowly overhead. The tentacles held them level with the front of the gondola so that they were looking back at the deep, slanted windows of what was evidently the airship’s bridge. The bridge was wide, and there were at least six visible crew, none of whom were obviously proxies.

One figure drew Sunday’s attention. A woman garbed in a long black coat that went all the way to her boots strode from one side of the bridge to the other, pointing and jabbing at her underlings. She came to rest at a console or podium, then angled some cumbersome speaking device to her lips.

A head and shoulders appeared in the truck, hovering above the dashboard and rendered with slight translucence.

‘Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something here, Gribelin?’ She was ghost-pale, slender-faced, with a sharp chin and long ash-grey hair brushed in a side-parting so that a curtain of it covered half her features. Her nose was pierced and many rings hung from the lobe of her one visible ear.

‘We’re kind of in the middle of something, too, Dorcas,’ Gribelin said. ‘As you’ve probably worked out. You mind letting us go, while there’s still some daylight?’

‘You cross the ’varium on our terms, when we feel like letting you. Why do I have to keep reminding you of that?’

‘Look, it would be nice to chat, but . . .’

The woman combed fingers through her hair, allowing it to fall back into place. ‘You’re not usually in this much of a hurry. Anything to do with the vehicle following you from Vishniac?’

Sunday glanced at her driver. ‘Ask her how far behind it is.’

‘No need, I heard you anyway,’ Dorcas said. ‘You weren’t aware of it until now?’

‘You know how tenuous things get out here,’ Gribelin said.

‘Especially after someone went to a lot of trouble to tie up all the proxies and swamp the public eyes with dumb queries. You usually operate alone, Grib. Why do I have the feeling someone’s pulling strings behind your back this time?’

‘Tell me about the vehicle,’ Sunday said. ‘Please.’

Something in Dorcas appeared to relent, albeit only for the moment. ‘A rented surface rover, a little smaller than your truck. About two and a half hours behind you, maybe a little less.’

‘Lucas,’ Sunday said, as if there could be any doubt. ‘Quick off the mark, too. He must have arranged the vehicle rental before the train got in.’

‘Not a friend of yours?’ Dorcas asked.

‘I’m on an errand for a couple of clients,’ Gribelin explained. ‘A golem’s been following them since they left Crommelin.’

‘This errand . . . it wouldn’t be anything that will get in the way of my business, would it?’

‘You know what the Evolvarium is to me, Dorcas – just a place I like to get in and out of as quickly as possible.’

‘And your clients?’

Sunday leaned forward. ‘We’ll be in and out of here as swiftly as we can, and nothing we do will have any impact on your line of work.’

‘And I’m supposed to just take that on trust?’

Sunday closed her eyes while she organised her thoughts. ‘I’m going to tell you the truth. Whether you believe me or not is entirely up to you. My name is Sunday Akinya.’

‘As in—’

‘Sixty-odd years ago, my grandmother buried something here, smack in the middle of the Evolvarium. Of course, it wasn’t the Evolvarium then. It was just an area of Mars that meant something to her. Now I’m here to find out what she considered important enough to bury, and that means I have to locate the burial spot and dig.’

‘I’ve already told her she’s crazycakes if she thinks there’ll be anything to dig up,’ Gribelin said, ‘but she’s fixed on seeing this through.’

‘You have coordinates?’

Sunday nodded. ‘There’s some uncertainty, but I think I can get close. My grandmother spent time at an abandoned Russian weather station near here, before she came back to bury whatever it was. The station’s location is known, and there haven’t been any geological changes since she last visited.’

‘We’re about two hundred kays out,’ Gribelin said. ‘We can be there in two hours, maybe three if we have to run around any big players.’

‘By which time it’ll be dark,’ Dorcas said. ‘Not much you’ll be able to do then.’

‘At least we’ll be there first.’

Dorcas considered this at length before responding, taking whispered asides from her crew while she contemplated her answer. ‘We’ve always had a good working arrangement, haven’t we, Grib?’

‘It’s had its ups and downs,’ Gribelin said.

‘Neither of us is a philanthropist. But over the years we’ve mostly managed not to tread on each other’s tails.’

‘Fair assessment.’

‘Even, some might say, helped each other when the situation demands it.’

‘Which it does now.’

‘Indeed. In that spirit, I’m going to make you an offer. I’ll get you closer to the landing site in much less than three hours. We’ll use the full resources of Lady Disdain to search for your object, and I’ll hand it to you intact when – if – we locate it. In return, you’ll give me twenty-five per cent of whatever you’re being paid. Whether or not we find anything.’

‘I’m not made of money,’ Gribelin said.

‘But someone else is. One way or the other, I’ll find out who’s involved and what they’re paying you.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of fobbing you off, Dorcas.’ For a moment, Gribelin looked paralysed with indecision, before deciding that honesty was the only viable option. ‘It’s the Pans,’ he said, letting out a small audible sigh. ‘You’d have figured that out sooner or later, based on the comms trickery.’

Dorcas sneered. ‘Why are you letting the Pans yank your chain?’

‘They pay well. Amazingly well. And my clients—’

‘We’re not Pans,’ Sunday said emphatically. ‘We’ve just got mixed up with them. What I want, and what they want . . . they coincide, up to a point. That’s why they’ve paid for me to be here, and why they’re helping slow down the golem. But we’re not Pans.’

‘Yes.’ Dorcas allowed herself the thinnest of smiles. ‘Think I got that the first time.’

It was teatime on the Lady Disdain. They knelt around a table while one of Dorcas’s underlings attended to their white porcelain Marsware cups. Tactical status maps, vastly more complicated than Gribelin’s simple readout, jostled for attention on the table’s slablike surface. These real-time summaries of the Evolvarium were accompanied by a constant low murmur of field analysis from the crew. Around the walls, systemwide stock exchange summaries tracked technologies commodities from Mercury to the Kuiper belt. Histograms danced to hidden music. Market analysis curves rose and fell in regular sinus rhythms like the Fourier components of some awesome alien heartbeat. Newsfeeds dribbled updates. Outside, the sun was beetling towards the horizon as if it had work to be getting on with.

The chai was watery but sweet – infused with jasmine, Sunday decided. She and Jitendra were kneeling on one side of the table, Gribelin and Dorcas on the other. Kneeling was very nearly as comfortable in Martian gravity as it was on the Moon, which was to say a lot easier on the knees than on Earth.

The conversation was flowing in at least two directions, maybe three. Jitendra relished the chance to learn as much as he could about the history and organisation of the Evolvarium, and his questions were divided equally between Dorcas and Gribelin. Dorcas, for her part, appeared willing to humour him . . . but she had her own interrogative agenda, too, with her probing directed mostly at Sunday. She wanted to know more about this buried secret, and why it might be of interest to more than one party.

‘I can’t tell you what she buried there,’ Sunday said. ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t have had to come all this way. I can’t even be sure this is where she meant me to go.’

‘And the Pans?’ Dorcas asked. ‘What’s their angle?’

Remembering Soya’s warning, Sunday wondered how much she was at liberty to discuss. ‘They have an interest in my grandmother,’ she said, circumspectly. ‘She knew Lin Wei, who’s as close to being the Pans’ founder as anyone.’

‘And that’s all it is – mere historical interest?’

‘I suppose they can’t help being curious now,’ Sunday said.

One of Dorcas’s staff approached, leaned down and whispered something in her ear. She nodded, danced her fingers above the table. The positions of some of the Evolvarium players shifted around. ‘Revised intel,’ she explained. ‘Increased sifter activity in sector eight, and two new hunter-killer subspecies out in three. Meanwhile, the Aggregate’s been unusually active these last few days.’

‘The Aggregate?’ Jitendra asked, beaming like a kid who was getting all his presents at once. ‘Have you encountered it?’

‘Grib’s had his share of run-ins with it, haven’t you?’ Dorcas said.

‘I keep out of its way, best as I’m able.’

Dorcas gave a knowing nod. ‘Sensible man.’

‘What is it?’ Sunday asked.

‘What happens when a bunch of machines get together and decide to act in unison, rather than fighting for scraps,’ Jitendra said. ‘A kind of emergent proto-civilisation. A quasi-autonomous motile city-state made up of hundreds of cooperating machine elements.’

‘A nuisance to some,’ Dorcas said. ‘An incipient Martian god to others. Isn’t that right, Grib? Or is that something you don’t like to talk about these days?’

‘All in the past, as you well know.’

Dorcas smiled once. ‘Did he tell you about the tattoos? I’m guessing not.’

‘If I was bothered about the tattoos, I’d have had them removed.’

‘Which would cost money, which you’d sooner spend on whores, narcotics or truck parts.’ Dorcas gave a little throat-clearing cough, now that she had their attention. ‘Thirty, forty years back, Gribelin ran into a little group of mental cases just outside the Evolvarium. Something about the scenery, the emptiness, the mind-wrenching desolation reaches in and presses the “god” button some of us still have inside us. What were these people called, Grib?’

‘Aggregationists,’ he said tersely. ‘Can we move on now?’

‘They’re all gone now. Word is their leader, the crackpot behind the whole thing, woke up one morning and realised he was surrounded by lunatics. Not only that, but fawning lunatics he’d helped along with their craziness. The Apostate, they call him. He cleared out and left them to get on with it. You met him, didn’t you, Grib?’

‘Our paths crossed.’

Dorcas poured some more chai for her guests. ‘Whatever became of the Apostate, the Aggregate’s doing pretty well for itself. It’s entirely self-sufficient, as far as we can tell, so it doesn’t have to deal with sifters. It’s also strong enough to be able to deter most mid-level threats, and agile enough to keep out of the way of anything large enough to intimidate it. If the original construct was a nation state, this is a walled city.’

‘I guess the next question is . . . is there any way to make money from it?’ Jitendra asked.

‘If there is, no one’s thought of it yet,’ Dorcas said, not appearing to mind the directness of his question. ‘The Aggregate doesn’t shed bits of itself, and until it dies, we can’t very well pick it apart and look inside. But someone will get there eventually. Our . . . rivals won’t stop trying, and nor will we. So far, it’s rebuffed our efforts at negotiated trade. But everything has a price, doesn’t it?’

‘Be careful you don’t end up evolving anything too clever,’ Sunday said. ‘We all know where that leads.’

Dorcas smiled tightly. ‘We have sufficient demolition charges on just this one ship to turn the entire Evolvarium into a radioactive pit, if we so wished. No one takes this lightly.’ She directed a sharp look at Sunday. ‘Of course, you’d rather we didn’t do that any time soon, wouldn’t you? Not while this secret of yours is still to be unearthed.’

‘I don’t even know if there is a secret,’ Sunday said.

‘You’ve come this far, you can’t have too many doubts. Nor the Pans, given their level of interest. What do you imagine she might have left behind?’

‘For all I know, it’s just another cryptic clue leading to somewhere else.’

Dorcas raised a finely plucked eyebrow. ‘On Mars?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘And if at the end of this there’s nothing, no bucket of gold, what then?’

‘We all go home and get back to our lives,’ Sunday said.

Another aide came to whisper something to Dorcas. She listened, nodded once.

‘The other vehicle has crossed the perimeter,’ she said. ‘Its point of entry was very close to your own, and it’s following roughly the same course you were on before we picked you up. You say there’s a golem in that thing?’

Sunday nodded. ‘It’s pretty likely.’

‘Then it must be acting near-autonomously by now. Does it know exactly where the burial might have taken place?’

‘The people behind the golem,’ Sunday said circumspectly, not wanting to give away more information about her family than she needed to, ‘they’re smart enough to have joined the same dots I did.’

‘Not much we can do about that,’ Dorcas said. She put down her teacup and rose from a kneeling position, smoothing the wrinkles out of her long black coat as she did so. ‘No matter: we have a good two hours on the rover, and we’re very nearly at the location.’

‘You don’t expect to find anything, do you?’ Sunday said.

‘The machines are thorough, but if something was buried sufficiently far down . . . well, there’s a possibility it’s still there, albeit a remote one.’

‘Except Eunice wouldn’t have seen any reason to bury something so deeply,’ Jitendra said.

‘Let’s err on the side of optimism,’ Dorcas said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Of the Russian weather station, of the evidence of Eunice’s return decades later, nothing now remained. All traces had been erased by wind and time; all artefacts and trash long since absorbed and recycled by the Evolvarium’s machines. But the location was known to within a handful of metres, and as Lady Disdain adjusted her engines to maintain a hovering posture, there could be no doubt that they were sitting over exactly the right patch of ground.

‘If there was anything large and magnetic sitting right below the dust, we’d already know about it,’ Dorcas said. ‘I’m afraid that’s not looking good right now. Same for gravitational anomalies. If there’s something buried right under us, within a couple of metres of the surface, it must have the same density as the rock, to within the limits of our mass sensors.’ She was standing at a pulpit-like console, arms spread either side of an angled display. ‘There are a few more things to try, though, before we think about looking deeper.’

‘Ground-penetrating radar?’ Gribelin asked.

‘Already down to a depth of three metres, over a surface area of fifty-by-fifty. We can expand the search grid, of course – but that’ll take time.’

Gribelin had his arms folded across his chest. ‘What about seismic?’

‘On the case – again, the data will take a little while to build up.’

From the gondola’s downward-looking windows, Sunday watched as the tentacles picked up loose-lying boulders, lofted them high into the air and then flung them back down at the ground. Other tentacles, spread out as far from the airship as was possible, brushed their tips against the surface to catch the vibrations transmitted through the underlying geography. The arrival times of the impulses would enable Dorcas to build up a seismographic profile of the local terrain, penetrating much deeper than was possible with radar. It was slow and haphazard, though – the airship obviously didn’t come equipped with specialised seismic probes or the routines to crunch the data swiftly – and Sunday wondered what effect all that crashing and banging was having on the Evolvarium’s native inhabitants. If they wanted to approach this search in a discreet manner, without drawing attention to their activities, this struck her as exactly the wrong way to go about it.

‘Eunice, Eunice, Eunice,’ she said under her breath. ‘Why couldn’t you make this simple for us?’

Now that the construct was denied her, she missed having it around. Eunice might be an illusion, a parlour trick that only looked and spoke like a thinking human being. But her eyes were not Sunday’s eyes. And she had seen things Sunday never would.

‘This wasn’t exactly how I was hoping things would pan out,’ Gribelin said, his musty aroma announcing his arrival by her side a moment before he spoke, ‘but I think we can trust Dorcas.’

Sunday was effectively alone now, the other Overfloaters busy with their instruments and technical systems, while Jitendra dug into firsthand summaries of the Evolvarium’s history. ‘You think or you know?’ she asked.

‘Nothing watertight where Dorcas is involved, kid.’ His voice was a low confiding rasp. ‘We’ll just have to take things as they come and . . . be flexible. She can be slippery, that’s a fact. But then so can we.’ He shifted something around in his throat, some loose phlegmy package that obviously felt at home. ‘My manner back there . . . when I first picked you up . . .’ He trailed off, as if he needed some invitation to continue.

‘Go on,’ Sunday obliged.

‘This line of work, you get to meet all sorts. Rich kids, especially. Thrill-seekers. I knew there was money behind you, but . . . you’re not really here for the thrills, are you?’

‘I had a good life on the Moon. I didn’t want any of this. It came after me, not the other way round.’ Sunday fell silent for a moment. ‘You wouldn’t be apologising, would you, Gribelin?’

‘For giving you a hard time?’ He shrugged, as if that was all that needed to be said on the subject. ‘From here on, though . . . whatever happens, when I take a job on, I don’t let my clients down.’

‘And if our host has other ideas?’

‘We’ll play things by ear. And if things get . . . intense, you and the beanpole do exactly what I tell you, all right? No second-guessing old Gribelin. Because if the shit comes down, there won’t be time for a nice chinwag about our options.’

‘We’ll listen,’ Sunday said. ‘Not as if we’re spoilt for choice with guides out here.’ Softly she added, ‘Thank you, Gribelin.’

He made to turn away – she thought he was done with her – but something compelled him to halt. After a silence he said, ‘You asked about the marks on my skull, back when we were driving. Dorcas mentioned my run-in with the Apostate. I figured you’d be even more curious after that.’

‘The way I see it, it’s none of my business.’

‘Way I see it, too. But not everyone would agree.’ Gribelin looked down before continuing, ‘I went a little mad out there. They put ideas in my head. Little dancing men, figures scratched in rock. The Apostate had gone mad himself, once, but I think he got better. It took me longer, and maybe some of it’s still lodged inside me. But that’s between me and the god I don’t believe in.’

The shadows had lengthened and evening winds had begun to howl in from the northern lowlands when Dorcas lifted her gaze from a hooded viewer. ‘I don’t know quite what to make of this,’ she said, fingering the fine-adjustment controls set into the viewer’s side.

‘Not sure how to break it to me that there’s nothing here?’ Sunday asked.

‘No.’ Dorcas pushed her hair back over one ear, to hook it out of her eyes. ‘How to break it to you that we’ve found something. There’s an object down there. It’s metal, and it’s not too far from the surface. Which, frankly, isn’t possible.’

But the digging would have to wait until daybreak. It got cold at night, and cold made everything harder, but that was not the reason for their delay. At night, as the cold and darkness clamped down, the bottom-feeding castes became much less active, generally opting both to conserve energy and cool their external shells as close to the ambient surroundings as possible, so that they were harder to detect. The predators, conversely, became more active. Kills remained difficult, but the likelihood of success, once a pursuit or strike had been initiated, was now much higher. There was never a good time to be down on the surface, Dorcas explained, but night was worse than day, even for Overfloaters, and they would not risk drilling until sunrise.

‘And the golem? We’ve gained this lead on it – what’s the point of throwing it all away now?’

‘Your golem is on land,’ Dorcas said. ‘That means it won’t be going anywhere until sun-up, either. Not if it knows the first thing about the Evolvarium, and wants to make it through to dawn in one piece. So get some sleep. Be our guests.’

But Sunday couldn’t sleep much, not while that thing was down in the rock, calling to her. So that night, while the Overfloater held station and a skeleton crew manned the graveyard shift, she stood in darkness aboard the gondola and watched. Radar and infrared sensors swept the parched, dust-tormented plateau. Very occasionally, halfway to the horizon or further, something would break cover. Fleeting and swift, it would slink across the land’s contours. The ambush predators were experts at concealment, from jack-in-the-box variants that dug themselves into rock holes and natural fissures, compressed like springs, to shapeshifting forms that were able to pancake their bodies into the very top layer of the dust, to lurk unseen. There were things like flatfish and things like snakes. There were also stalking, prowling horrors that quartered the night on endless deterrent patrols, searching for the weak, the maimed or the dead. She saw one of these loping jackal-like things traverse the horizon line: it had so many jointed legs that it appeared to move in spite of itself, riding a bickering tumble of independent limbs. There was also something like a convoy of scorpions, one after another, that might (horrifyingly) have been a single entity, and a flat-topped creature like a house-sized hairbrush, supported on countless bristling centipede legs, that could have been a grazer or a killer.

It was wonderful in a way, she supposed. There was astonishing variation in the Evolvarium, a staggering panoply of evolutionary strategies, bodyplans, survival mechanisms. Life on Earth had taken three and a half billion years to achieve the radiative diversity that these swift, endlessly mutable machines had produced in a matter of decades. Artificially imposed selection pressures had turned life’s clock into a screaming flywheel. The arms race of survival had been harnessed for the purposes of product development, feeding an endless supply of new technologies, new materials and concepts, into the systemwide marketplace. In that sense, it was almost miraculous: something for nothing, over and over again.

But it wasn’t free, was it? The Evolvarium was death and fear, terror and hunger, on endless repeat. The machines might not have enough cognitive potential to trouble the Gearheads, but that didn’t make them mindless, no matter what Jitendra might care to think. She thought of the sifter Gribelin had told them about, the machine that had begged. Maybe he’d been exaggerating. Maybe he’d been imposing human values on an exchange that was fundamentally alien, beyond a gulf of conceptualisation that could never be crossed.

She wondered. She wondered and knew that she would be very, very glad when they were out of this place.

Jitendra slipped his arm around her waist. ‘I’m sorry about Memphis,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sorry that we aren’t back home, with your brother. But I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this for the world.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s marvellous,’ he said.

Beyond the horizon, red and green radiance underlit the night’s dust clouds. Something was dying in fire and light. Sunday shivered.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

By the time he came to groggy consciousness, Geoffrey was already halfway to the Moon, and a minor diplomatic squall was busy playing itself out back on Earth. Mechanism apparatchiks were not at all happy about Geoffrey having absconded before submitting to a pysch assessment, and they were taking an increasingly sceptical stance regarding Jumai’s supposed innocence in the whole affair. The Nigerian had committed no direct wrongdoing, but the message – in no uncertain terms – was that it would be in her absolute best interests if she were to submit to Mech jurisdiction at her earliest convenience. In other words, she was a whim away from being declared a fugitive herself. Tiamaat, meanwhile – and by extension the Panspermian Initiative – was using every stalling measure in its arsenal, arguing that because Geoffrey had requested aqualogy citizenship, it had no option but to discharge its own procedural obligations in this regard, and that if it did not do so, it would be in grave dereliction of its charter.

Smoke and mirrors, bluff versus bluff, two geopolitical superpowers playing an old, old game. As long as it bought Geoffrey time, he didn’t really care. Worse, as far as he was concerned, was the reaction of the cousins.

Lucas and Hector had been trying to ching from the moment he was picked up by the Nevsky. Their requests had been systematically rebuffed – and Geoffrey had been unconscious for much of the ensuing time – but the cousins hadn’t been daunted. They’d had no trouble tracking the Nevsky – the movements of any seagoing vessel, let alone one as large and ponderous as a former Soviet nuclear submarine, were publically visible – and they’d had no trouble making the obvious connection between the Nevsky’s destination and the lifter’s ascent into orbit. Geoffrey had dropped off the Mechanism’s radar, so they couldn’t be sure that he was in space. But he wasn’t anywhere else under Mechanism jurisdiction either, which did rather argue for him being aboard the rocket. It would not have taken limitless resources to track the rocket’s rendezvous with the deep-space vehicle Quaynor, and to presume that Geoffrey and Jumai were now aboard that ship.

When they had eventually given up on trying to speak to him directly, Hector had recorded a statement, one that Geoffrey had finally felt obliged to listen to.

‘We know what you intend to do, cousin. We know what your new friends think they will help you to achieve. But you are wrong. This will not work. And you are making a very, very serious mistake. You have no business in the Winter Palace, and you have no right to trespass where you are not welcome.’

‘I have as much right to it as you do,’ Geoffrey mouthed.

‘If you have ever thought of yourself as an Akinya,’ Hector went on, ‘do the right thing now. Turn around. Abandon this folly. Before you damage the family name beyond repair.’

‘Fuck the family name,’ Geoffrey said. Then, softly: ‘Fuck the family while you’re at it. I’m out.’

There was a dull propellant roar from somewhere in the ship, a ghost of gravity as the ship trimmed its course, and from that moment on the Quaynor was aimed like an arrow for the orbiting prison where his grandmother had ended her days.

‘Not much to look at,’ Jumai said, six hours later, when they had their first good view of the Winter Palace. ‘I don’t know what I was expecting. Bit more than this, though.’ She paused to tap her medical cuff, instructing it to up her anti-vertigo dosage. Geoffrey had caught her vomiting into a sick bag a few hours into the flight, curled into a foetal ball in the module that had been assigned as her temporary quarters, making dry retching sounds. He’d asked her why she hadn’t managed the nausea, and she’d said that the cuff’s chemicals took the edge off her concentration, and for Jumai that was less acceptable than the occasional heave.

‘We need you sharp at the station,’ he’d argued. ‘That means not being worn out from puking your guts up before we get there.’ And he took her wrist, gently, and tapped up her discretionary dosage to match his own.

‘Yes, Doctor,’ she’d said, half-sullenly, but the message – he was relieved to see now – had got through.

‘She had it built around her old ship, the Winter Queen,’ he said, when the grey cylinder hung before them, massively magnified. They were still fifty thousand kilometres out, so the imagery was synthesised from distributed public eyes in cislunar space rather than the Quaynor’s own low-res cameras. ‘I never went inside it, of course – never even chinged up there. But I know what it’s like. Saw images often enough, whenever she deigned to address us from her throne. It’s a jungle, humid and sticky as a hothouse. Ship’s a rust-bucket; it was just about capable of keeping her alive, supplying power to the station, but no more than that. That’s why the cousins can make a good case for decommissioning it – the reactor’s almost as old as the one in that submarine.’

The cylinder had the proportions of two or three beer cans stuck together top to bottom, bristling with docking/service equipment at either end. It was rotating slowly, spinning on its long axis, bringing most of the surface into view. Between the endcaps, the station’s outer skin was smooth, uninterrupted by machinery, sensory gear or anything that might indicate scale. Eunice had wrapped her own iron microcosm around herself, and she’d never felt the slightest inclination to see what was outside.

‘She never left this?’ Jumai asked, the horror seeping through her voice. ‘I mean, not even to step outside, in a suit? In all that time?’

‘We’d have known. There was never a point when someone, somewhere, wasn’t watching the Winter Palace. Ships came and went occasionally – automated supply vehicles, Memphis on one of his errands – but no one else ever came out. Her star may have faded, but even in her last years she was still enough of a celebrity for that to have made the news, if it had happened.’

‘But to live inside that thing – after all she’d done, all she’d seen. How could she do that to herself?’

‘By going a little mad,’ Geoffrey said.

‘She could ching, I suppose. But that wouldn’t have been enough consolation for me.’

‘You’re not my grandmother. Whatever she needed, it was in there.’

‘That’s not living.’

‘Never said it was,’ Geoffrey replied.

After a silence Jumai went on, ‘Well, we dock first. That’s clear. Then we see how easy it is to break inside. Figure you expect some complications, or you wouldn’t have brought me along.’

‘If you don’t have to lift a finger, you’ll still get paid,’ he reassured her.

‘You still think I’m a mercenary to the core.’

‘I think you like risk. Not quite the same thing.’

‘In your book.’ Jumai gave an unconcerned shrug, her nausea blasted away for the time being. ‘So: let’s see what our docking options are.’ And she reached out and tumbled the image of the Winter Palace like a toy suspended over a cot until she’d brought one of the endcaps into view. She plucked her fingers to zoom in, frowning at the details. ‘See anything out of the ordinary? You’re the seasoned space traveller, not me.’

‘Can’t say I’m any kind of expert on docking systems.’

‘You don’t need to be,’ said a voice behind them. It was Mira Gilbert, weightless now, fully divested of her mobility harness but equally at home in zero gravity as she was under water. She wore a skintight zip-up orange and grey outfit fitted with pockets and grab-patches. ‘We’ve assessed the situation. Perfectly standard interfaces and capture clamps: the Quaynor will be able to hard-dock without difficulty.’

‘You came just to tell us that?’ Geoffrey asked. He’d barely seen Gilbert since his revival.

‘Actually, I came to tell you that there’s been a development back in the East African Federation. Public eyes detected the activation of the Kilimanjaro ballistic launcher.’

‘Fuck,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Not sure what came up: could be a test package, a cargo pod, or something else. Right now we’re leaning towards “something else”. Whatever it was got pushed all the way to orbit, where it was met by another vehicle.’

‘What kind?’ Jumai asked.

‘The Kinyeti, an asteroid miner registered to Akinya Space,’ Gilbert answered slowly, so the words had time to hit home. ‘Something with at least the range and capabilities of the Quaynor, if not greater.’

She pulled up an image: either a long-range real-time grab or an archival picture of the same ship. As far as Geoffrey was concerned, he could have been looking at another view of the ship he was travelling in. The Kinyeti had the same skeletal outline, built for operations in vacuum with no requirement to withstand atmosphere or hard acceleration/deceleration. It had engines and fuel tanks at one end, docking and mining equipment at the other, and a pair of contra-rotating centrifuge arms mounted at the midsection bulge of her main crew quarters, with habitat modules on the end of each arm.

He’d seen the Quaynor’s arms from inside the ship. They were static, welded into immobility, their only remaining function to serve as outriggers for comms gear and precision manoeuvring systems.

‘Been on high-burn ever since it met the blowpipe package,’ Gilbert went on. ‘Keeps that up, it’ll reach the Winter Palace about ninety minutes ahead of us.’

‘Has to be one or both of the cousins,’ Geoffrey said.

‘This caught us with our flippers off,’ Gilbert said. ‘We didn’t think the blowpipe was working yet.’

‘It wasn’t,’ Geoffrey told her. ‘Not properly. They tested it when my grandmother was scattered, but it wasn’t ready for people . . . not by a long margin. Only Lucas or Hector would be fucking mad enough to risk their necks riding the blowpipe.’

‘They want to catch up with us, they wouldn’t have had much choice,’ Gilbert said. ‘Libreville would have taken too long to get to, and they didn’t have access to their own rocket. Would’ve been blowpipe or nothing.’

‘Someone means business,’ Jumai said. ‘But we knew that already. OK, what does this change?’

‘Nothing,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘We’re not turning around. Can we squeeze some more speed out of this thing, Mira? Now that we no longer need to hide our intentions?’

‘Depends how fast you want to go,’ the merwoman said. ‘And how many space-traffic violations you want to stack up.’

‘Enough to make sure the cousins don’t get there ahead of us. All we need to do is shut them out – shouldn’t be too hard, should it? We get in, find out what, if anything, Eunice left behind up there, and leave. And then, if at all possible, we can all get on with our lives.’

‘This is your life now,’ Gilbert reminded him gently. ‘Citizen Akinya.’

Geoffrey touched the damp, warm glass of Arethusa’s container, trying to make out the form it held. With the way the hold’s lights were arranged, he could discern little more than a dark hovering shadow in the green-stained murkiness of the water tank.

‘It’s an extravagance, of course,’ Arethusa confided. Her voice came straight into his head via the ship’s onboard aug. ‘Moving me around. I’m not just meat and bone, like you. I weigh fifty tonnes to begin with, and I also need thousands of litres of water to float in. But they can owe me this one. We have fuel to spare – or at least we did, before your family decided to race us to the prize – and in an emergency my suspension fluid can always be used for coolant or reaction mass or radiation shielding.’

‘What would happen to you?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘I’d die, very probably. But I wouldn’t object to the basic unfairness of it. Doesn’t mean I’m tired of life, or ready to end it – not at all. But I’ve long since reached the point where I accept that I’m living on borrowed time. Every waking instant.’

‘I still don’t understand. Why now?’

‘Why what now?’ She sounded unreasonably prickled by the question.

‘Don’t tell me you just decided to leave the planet at the drop of a hat, Arethusa. Something’s prompted this. Where are you going, anyway? You can’t stay in the Winter Palace.’

‘I don’t plan to. But it’s been time to move on for a while now. I bore easily, Geoffrey. Life in the aqualogy stopped offering me challenges decades ago, and for that reason alone I need new horizons. Ocular’s finally given me the spur to make the transition.’

‘To leave Earth.’

‘I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time. But this news – the Crucible data, the Mandala and the death of my old friend Eunice – it really feels as if the time is right. Carpe diem, and all that. If I don’t do this now, what else will it take? We Pans preach outward migration, exploration and colonisation as a species imperative. The least I can do is offer deeds instead of words.’

‘You mean to stay in space, then?’

‘I’m not going back,’ she affirmed. ‘And most certainly not after all the fuel expenditure it took to haul me up here. Do I want to look profligate?’ She fell silent, ruminating in darkness. The tank chugged and whirred. ‘There’s a whole system to explore, Geoffrey,’ she said eventually. ‘Worlds and moons, cities and vistas. Wonder and terror. More than Lin Wei could ever have imagined, bless her. And that’s just this little huddle of rock and dust around this one little yellow star.’

‘You are Lin Wei,’ he said quietly. ‘You never drowned. You just became a whale.’

She sounded more disappointed than angered. ‘Can we at least maintain the pretence, for the sake of civility?’

‘Why did this happen to you?’

‘I made it happen. Why else?’ She sounded genuinely perplexed that the question needed answering. ‘It was a phase.’

‘Being a whale?’

‘Being human.’ Then, after a moment: ‘We both became strange, Eunice and I, both turned our backs on what we’d once been. Me in here. Eunice in her prison. We both lived and loved, and after all that, it wasn’t enough.’

The impulse to defend his grandmother was overwhelming, but he knew it would have been a mistake. ‘At least you haven’t turned into a recluse. You’re still in the world, on some level. You still have plans.’

‘Yes,’ Arethusa acknowledged. ‘I do. Even if, now and then, I scare myself with them.’

‘Do you know why she hid herself away?’

‘She was never the same after Mercury. But then again, who was?’ Arethusa paused. She was still Arethusa to him: try as he might, he couldn’t relate this floating apparition to his notion of Lin Wei, the little Chinese girl who had befriended his grandmother, back when the world was a simpler place. ‘My doctors – the people who helped shape me – tell me I could live a very long time, Geoffrey. One way to cheat death is to just keep growing, you see. I’m still forming new neural connections. My brain astonishes itself.’

‘How long?’

‘Decades, maybe even a century: who knows? No different for you, really. You’re a young man. A hundred years from now, do you honestly expect medicine not to have made even more progress?’

‘I don’t think that far ahead.’

‘It’s time we got into the habit. Every living, breathing human being. Because we’re all in this together, aren’t we? We endured the turmoil of climate change, the Resource and Relocation wars, the metaphorical and literal floods and storms, didn’t we? Or if we didn’t, we at least had the marvellous good fortune to have ancestors who did, to allow us to be born into this time of miracles and wonder, when possibilities are opening rather than closing. We’re all Poseidon’s children, Geoffrey: whether we like it or not.’

‘Poseidon’s children,’ he repeated. ‘Is that supposed to mean something?’

‘We came through. That’s all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it’s time to start doing something useful with our lives.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Sunday’s boots crunched into Tharsis dust. This, she was startled to realise, was the first time that she had actually set foot on Martian soil. The strip of plasticised ground in the arrivals terminal hadn’t counted, nor the spidering walkway in Crommelin. She was outside now, hundreds of kilometres from anything that might even loosely be termed civilisation. Between her body and the dust and rock of this vastly ancient planet lay only the thinnest membrane of air and alloy and plastic. She was a cosy little fiefdom of warmth and life, enclaved by dominions of cold and death.

She was accustomed to wearing a suit, accustomed to being outside in the Moon’s vacuum and extremes of temperature. Mars was different, though. It lulled with its very familiarity. It didn’t look airless, or even particularly antipathetic to life. She had spent enough time on Earth to recognise the handiwork of rain and weathering. The sky wasn’t black, it was the pale pink of a summer’s twilight. There were clouds and corkscrewing dust-devils. The ground, its temperature and texture transmitted through the soles of her boots, did not feel unwelcoming. She felt as if she could slip the boots off and pad barefoot through the dust, as if on a beach.

This was how Mars murdered, with an assassin’s stealth and cunning. People came from Earth or elsewhere with the best of intentions. They knew that the environment was lethal, that only suits and walls would protect them. Yet time and again, men and women were found outside, dead, half-out of their suits. They weren’t mad, exactly, and most of them had not been suicidal. But something in the landscape’s familiarity had worked its fatal way into their brains, whispering reassurance, even friendliness. Trust me. I look welcoming, because I am. Take off that silly armour. You don’t need it here.

This was not the Mars that Eunice had first set foot on a hundred years earlier, Sunday reminded herself. She might be a long way from Vishniac, and Vishniac might be a long way from the nearest city, but, crucially, there were cities. There’d been none in Eunice’s time. No trains, no space elevator, no infrastructure.

If Sunday’s suit failed now, which was about as mathematically probable as her being hit by a falling meteorite, Dorcas and her crew were close at hand. And if Dorcas and her crew ran into trouble, help would arrive from other Overfloaters soon enough. Vishniac could send an airship or plane, and by bullet train nowhere on Mars was more than a day from Vishniac. She was plugged into a planetary life-support system no less capable than the one clamped onto her back.

Sunday’s courage wasn’t lacking; she did not need anyone to tell her that. But it was a different order of courage that had brought Eunice to this world, one that had no currency on this prosperous and confident new Mars, with its casinos and hotels and rental firms. Even here, in the Evolvarium, the risk to which Sunday exposed herself was measured, quantifiable – and if she didn’t like it, she could leave easily enough. And in the worst of scenarios, it would not be Mars that killed her. It would be the things people had brought to Mars, and set amok.

‘We start here,’ Gribelin said, nudging the drill into place. ‘If we’re off, it’s not by more than a couple of centimetres, and we should be able to refine our bore once we get closer.’

‘How long?’ Sunday asked.

‘To chew down?’ He shrugged through the tight-fitting armour of his surface suit. ‘Two, three hours, if it was solid Tharsis lava. But it’s not. It’s been shattered and poured back into the shaft, so progress’ll be a lot easier. Shouldn’t take us much more than an hour.’

The Overfloaters had lowered his truck back down from their ship, depositing it gently a few metres from the drill site. The truck had deployed bracing legs, and then Gribelin had swung a vertical drill out from the rear of the cargo bed, directing the heavy equipment into place with gestures, voked commands and the occasional shove from his shoulder. The drill was greasy with low-temperature lubricant and anti-dust caulk. He guided the bit into position, allowed it to rotate slowly as it chewed through the top layer of dust and reached rock. Then it began to spin faster, a tawny plume of digested rock arcing out from the top of it. Sunday could feel its grinding labours through the soles of her boots.

‘See now why we held off until sun-up?’ Dorcas said, angling her head back to track the plume’s trajectory, making sure it went nowhere near her precious airship. ‘Machines hunt with vibrations. Would’ve been a very bad idea to be sat here at night, practically inviting them to come and take a closer look.’

Sunday nodded: she could see the prudence in that, but she could also see the sense in being done with this as quickly as possible. The drill was already making tangible progress, its cutting head a hand’s depth into the solidified lava.

There were five of them in suits: Gribelin, Jitendra and Sunday, Dorcas and one of her senior crew, another Martian woman who Sunday had gathered was called Sibyl. The Overfloaters had their own suits, very sleek and modern, with Neolithic and Australian aboriginal animal designs embossed on them in luminous holographic inks. Jitendra and Sunday made do with the units Gribelin carried on his truck for emergency use. They were clunkier, with stiffer articulation and no fancy ornamentation, but they worked well enough, and there was sufficient comms functionality to facilitate a sparse local aug. Tags identified the other suited figures, and a simplified version of the tactical map hovered in Sunday’s upper visual field, ready to swell and assume centrality when she needed it. There had been no significant alterations to the map during the night, but in the morning the Overfloaters had acquired intelligence from their fellow brokers, and the positions of the Evolvarium’s chief protagonists had been updated.

There were shifting networks of rivalry and cooperation, favour and obligation. It wasn’t transparently clear that all this intelligence was reliable, but Dorcas was used to applying her own confidence filters. Her high-value allies had reported that the golem was on the move again, heading their way after spending the night immobile. ‘But it’s taking a big chance,’ Dorcas had explained, while they were suiting up.

‘Aren’t we all?’ Sunday asked.

Dorcas tapped a version of the map. ‘Two C-class collectors moved into this sector since we passed through. A pair of hammerheads. Not the worst, but bad enough. If your golem carries on, it’ll pass within two or three kays of their present positions.’

It’s not my golem, Sunday thought sourly. ‘Is that going to be a problem for him . . . I mean, it?’

Dorcas nodded sagely. ‘He won’t automatically be ambushed, not in daylight. But then again one or both of the hammerheads may decide to have a go at him, if it thinks the likelihood of reprisal is small. Which it would be – the golem’s not even a warmblood – but the hammerheads probably don’t know that.’

‘Probably?’

‘Don’t put anything past these things. Sniffing comms traffic, distinguishing between a human pilot and a chinged proxy – that’s within their cognitive bound, just as it’s within ours.’

Sunday brushed a gauntleted finger against the largest icon on the map. ‘The Aggregate?’

‘Yes,’ Dorcas said.

‘Maybe it’s me, but it looks closer than it did yesterday.’

‘It’s covered some ground overnight. It probably doesn’t mean anything.’