Blue Remembered Earth

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

When the hibernation casket brought him to consciousness, Geoffrey’s first intelligible thought was that there’d been a mistake; that something had gone wrong with the process and it must only have been minutes since the casket’s bioprobes had sunk their sterile fangs into his flesh and begun pumping his blood full of sedatives. It was a perfectly human response, after all. He had no memory of dreams, no sense of elapsed time. But it only took him a little longer to realise that matters were not as they had been when he entered the chamber. He was weightless, for one thing. They had been under thrust when he climbed in; now his body was at rest within the casket, cushioned against movement but otherwise floating, with the anxious feeling of falling in his belly.

A glass-mottled form drifted over him. His eyes tried to focus. They were bleary and the sudden intrusion of brightness and colour felt like a billion tiny needles pricking his retinas. He heard a clunk and felt cooler air touch his face. That was nice. The casket’s lid was sliding off him. The blurred form pushed itself closer and assumed the approximate proportions of a human woman.

‘Welcome back, sleepyhead.’

He grasped for her name. His memories weren’t where he’d left them. It was as if they’d been temporarily boxed away in an attic: still in his head, but poorly organised and labelled. Dimly, he began to realise that he might have been in the casket longer than his initial impressions had suggested.

‘Jumai?’ he managed.

‘Looks like we’ve got us a functioning central nervous system, at least.’ She hauled in closer still, fiddling with his restraints. ‘Hector was the first out. He’s been through this kind of thing dozens of times, so it was no biggie to him. I’ve been up about ten minutes. I think we’re all right, for the time being. The ship’s in one piece, and we’re… somewhere, I guess.’

Her words were arriving too quickly, like tennis balls spat out by a service machine. Geoffrey tried to formulate a question. ‘How long?’

‘How long have we been under? Fifty-one days, as far as Hector and I can tell, which is exactly what we dialled in at the start. It’s early May. Isn’t that weird? I skipped a whole birthday while we were out.’

Geoffrey winced as the bioprobes withdrew from his skin. He tried using his arms. They barely felt like a part of him. He had spent some of the Earth-Moon journey unconscious, but nothing about that had prepared him for the fifty-one days he’d been under while the ship took them wherever it was headed. Nonetheless, his arms responded, albeit sluggishly.

‘Muscle tone shot to shit,’Jumai said. ‘What happens when you spend seven weeks weightless. The engine must have cut off within a few hours of us going under; we’ve been coasting most of the way, except for the slowdown at the end.’

Systems in the casket would have done their best to prevent muscle wastage and loss of bone density, but Geoffrey knew nothing was as effective as simply moving around under plain old gravity.

He fumbled his way free of one of the restraints and began to drift out of the casket. Jumai arrested his motion with a gentle application of the palm of her hand. ‘Easy does it, soldier.’

‘We’ve stopped?’ he asked. ‘We’re still a day out, aren’t we?’

‘Ship must have shaved a little time off its estimate. As far as Hector and I can tell, we’ve reached our destination. He’s trying to verify that it’s the same place the ship said it was. I can tell you one thing already.’

‘Which is?’

‘Whatever shit we have to deal with out here, dying of sunstroke isn’t going to be part of it.’

Half an hour later, Geoffrey had made his aching and uncoordinated way up front to join Jumai and Hector in the command deck. All three were buckled into their seats, even though the ship was now floating at rest. They had not needed to provide further blood samples, and what limited control they had possessed before going into hibernation was still theirs. The ship was even willing to let Jumai access some of its top-level systems. She had assigned external views to two of the displays: one showing the view back towards the inner system, the other of the object they were now holding station from at twenty kilometres.

It was the view back home that chilled Geoffrey the most. It was one thing to be aware that they were now beyond the orbit of Neptune, well into the long light-hours on the solar system’s edge. Travel far enough, and that was what happened. It was another thing entirely actually to see how pitifully small and faint the sun now looked from this distance.

Geoffrey had never been further than the Moon in his life. The sun was now more than thirty times as distant as it appeared from his home, and the light it offered was over nine hundred times fainter. It was a bullet hole punched in the sky, admitting a pencil-shaft of watery yellow illumination, too feeble to be called sunshine. For the first time in his life he truly understood that his home orbited a star.

And he felt some sense of the true scale of things. That bullet hole was still the brightest thing in his sky, but he could imagine it shrinking, diminishing, sphinctering tight as he fell further into the outer darkness. Until even that pencil-shaft became just a wavering trickle of ice-cold photons.

He smiled at that, because he had not even come a thousandth of a light-year.

The sun might have been the brightest thing in the sky, but it was not the largest. The iceteroid, which sat in the opposite direction – its visible face illuminated – was fifty kilometres across at its widest point. It was a dark-red potato, its hidelike surface only lightly cratered. Like all Kuiper belt objects, it had been ticking around the sun largely unmolested for more than four billion years. Once in a stupendous while, the gravitational influence of one of the major planets might kick a Kuiper belt object onto a cometary orbit. For the majority of objects, no such glory awaited. They would spend their existences out here, going about their lonely business until the sun swelled up. If, that was, humanity’s machines did not arrive first, to tap their riches.

‘Is it ours?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘If we are where the ship claims to be, then this is Lionheart,’ Hector said. ‘We should be able to cross-check that in a little while, but for the moment I see no reason to doubt it. We’ve come a long way, and that’s pretty obviously an iceteroid.’ He dragged his gaze from the display for a second to meet Geoffrey’s eyes. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘They say it gets easier.’

‘It does. But fifty-one days is a long stretch even for the seasoned space traveller. The cabinets are modern, though. There should be no lasting effects.’ He nodded at one of the schematic diagrams. ‘The ship has even redeployed its centrifuge arms. It wants us to be as comfortable as possible. We should all think about spending some time under gravity, even if we have to do it in shifts while someone monitors things from up here.’

‘You say the cabinets are modern,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Hitachi have been making them for a long while, but the ones we just used are not sixty-two years old.’

‘You said that’s how old the ship is,’ Jumai said.

‘Its basic systems are that old,’ Hector replied, ‘engine, hull, life-support, everything it needed to get back to Lunar orbit. Since then, though, it must have been outfitted with brand-new internal equipment. I suppose the cabinets may have been manufactured onboard, if the repair systems had the right materials and blueprints. But it’s far more likely that they were simply bought and shipped up to the Winter Palace.’

‘Without anyone in the family knowing?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Only one person would have needed to know,’ Hector said, ‘and none of us would ever have had cause to question him.’

‘Memphis.’

‘Who better to supervise whatever provisions were needed? Materials and parts were being shipped up to the Winter Palace all the time, and not one of us batted an eyelid. How hard would it have been to slip six Hitachi hibernation caskets into one of those consignments? Hitachi would have had no reason to ask questions, and the units would have been installed by robots. Only Memphis would have had any real involvement.’

‘Memphis knew,’ Geoffrey said softly. ‘All this time. He knew.’

‘His loyalty to Eunice ran a lot deeper than we realised. He was ready to let the rest of us believe a lie because she asked him to. Even to the point of bringing back what we all thought were her ashes, and going through that whole scattering business.’ Hector was doing his best, Geoffrey saw, but he couldn’t quite keep the disgust out of his voice. He felt some of it himself. One thing to accept that Memphis had known things the rest of the family hadn’t. Another that he had been willing to lie to their faces, and put them all through… what, exactly?

He remembered Memphis meeting him, on the morning that the news of his grandmother’s death had come in. The cool, indigo-shadowed gatehouse; Memphis putting his arm around Geoffrey’s shoulders, offering strength and guidance when it was needed. All the while knowing that the Winter Palace not only did not contain a jungle, but had never been occupied. And if Eunice had not been living up there, and if the ashes Memphis had brought down were not hers, then what proof did they have that she had really died late last year?

‘The only remaining question,’ Hector went on, ‘is a simple one. Why?’

‘I can think of another,’ Geoffrey said, ‘although maybe they’re connected. If Eunice didn’t die in the Winter Palace, then where and when did she?’

‘You don’t even know for sure she’s dead,’ Jumai said quietly.

Geoffrey returned his attention to the iceteroid, shuttering out the thoughts he did not, for the moment, care to deal with. ‘So we just sit here, is that the idea?’

‘We can’t leave,’ Hector said. ‘All we have is short-range manoeuvring capability – enough to make final approach to Lionheart. I can’t believe that’s accidental.’

‘The ship’s brought us this far,’ Jumai said. ‘Ball’s in our court now.’

Hector voked an enlargement, zooming in on the central portion of the iceteroid. ‘It’s rotating very slowly,’ he said, ‘but I’ve corrected for that. This is what we’d see if we were hovering above a fixed point on the iceteroid’s surface.’

The image switched through a series of colour enhancements, revealing surface detail. Spidering out from a central focus were the radial lines and scratches of concentric structures, like ancient crater walls. He voked another enlargement. The zoom jumped to reveal a sprawl of silver-grey grids and modules, pressed into the surface like a child’s building blocks into wet clay. The concentric lines were pipes and tunnels connecting the blocks, the radial arms magnetic catapults. The focus was the main production shaft, bored deep into the iceteroid.

‘What we’re seeing here is more or less what I expected,’ Hector said. ‘There are production assets like this on thousands of Kuiper belt objects, running day and night, fully automated, for decades on end.’

‘Is this one active?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Wait a moment.’ Hector held up a finger, his lips moving slightly as if counting in his head. Then he jabbed the finger precisely. Geoffrey caught a glint of brightness at the end of one of the launchers.

An instant later something razored a cold blue line across the display.

Then the blue line hazed, feathering like a vapour trail. He watched it darken to black.

‘Package shot, on the nose,’ Hector said. ‘Once every ninety seconds. We’ve been tracking them since we got visual.’

‘A package of what?’

‘Processed ice, of course. Water, most likely, although it doesn’t have to be. Boosted at high-gee in a magnetic cradle, followed by a shove from ablative pusher lasers once it’s cleared the launcher. The lasers do most of the work. They can steer the package for quite some distance after launch by applying off-centred ablation. What you saw there was a vapour trail: the package’s own steam-rocket exhaust.’

There was pride in Hector’s voice; pride in a complex technical process working to plan. Geoffrey understood, or thought he did. Hector wasn’t just thinking of this one launch event, or even this one iceteroid. He wasn’t thinking of that single package, beginning its long fall home. He was thinking of the thousands of Akinya assets in the Kuiper belt, the tens of thousands more among the asteroids and iceteroids. Machines doing their work, tirelessly and efficiently, injecting ice and organics and metals into the vacuum, a corpuscular flow that most people barely knew existed. It didn’t matter that this one package would take years or decades to reach its customers. What mattered were the thousands, millions, just like it already on their way ahead. That was the grander machine right there: a single industrial plant wider than the orbit of Neptune. A web of conveyor belts, centred on the sun and its little clutch of warm, inhabited worlds.

Not just any industrial machine, either. One that his family had brought into being, with blood and toil over a hundred hard years. They had built this machine and made it tick and whirr like a Breitling.

The launcher flashed again. The vapour trail gashed an electric-blue wound across his sight.

‘Then we’re wrong,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Or this isn’t where the ship came from originally. If that iceteroid’s still being mined—’

‘That doesn’t prove anything,’ Hector said. ‘A cubic metre of processed water ice, every ninety seconds? That’s nothing compared to the mass of that ’roid. Even if we’d been tapping it for a hundred years, we’d only have extracted a few dozen megatonnes by now. Of course, the ice has to be refined, and some of it’s used for the fusion generators powering the launchers and mining gear… but we’re still talking about an insignificant fraction of the total mass.’

‘He means there’s still plenty of room for something else to be going on in there,’ Jumai said. ‘I think.’

‘This is just camouflage,’ Hector agreed, ‘to keep prying eyes from looking too closely.’

‘Until now,’ Geoffrey said.

The iceteroid’s slow rotation gave it many possible launcher trajectories. Depending on demand, there were few places in the system it couldn’t lob a package towards. Most of them would be aimed squarely at Mars, which was by far the biggest consumer of water ice and organics. A smaller fraction would be shot Moonwards, silvered with a monolayer of reflective insulation, or aimed at Saturn or the Jovian settlements. The gas giants might be used to slingshot or laser-steer payloads elsewhere, if demand patterns shifted in the intervening time.

What could be aimed at a point in the sky, of course, could always be aimed at an approaching ship.

‘We should be wary,’ Hector said, apparently following the same thought train as Geoffrey and reaching a similar conclusion.

‘Eunice arranged for us to come here,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We can be certain of that.’ But he could understand Hector’s trepidation. Hector had already run afoul of Eunice’s secret arrangements, and his own ship had been ripped to shreds by her hair-trigger defences. He did not need to have witnessed the attack on the Kinyeti to remain mindful of the possibilities.

‘Even if I trusted her not to screw up,’ Jumai said, ‘sixty years is a long time for stuff to keep working. She may have programmed this ship to return to Lionheart, and she may have programmed Lionheart to expect it. But what if some part of that plan didn’t make it through the intervening years in one piece?’

‘Do we have external comms?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘We can send and receive between us and Earth, if that’s what you mean,’ Jumai said. ‘There’s a message waiting for you, actually. Do you want to take it privately?’

He looked at Hector before answering. ‘I don’t think there are any secrets between us now, are there?’

‘Perhaps not,’ Hector said.

As he’d expected, the message was from Sunday.

‘I’ll keep this brief,’ her figment said. ‘If you’re where we think you are, round-trip time for this message is going to be close to ten hours. Firstly, I hope you’re all safe and well. We tracked your exhaust until the point when the engine shut off, by which time you were moving faster than any manned ship in history. We didn’t see your slowdown, but that’s to be expected: you’d have been firing away from us by then, and most of the radiation would have headed out of the system, not back towards us. We haven’t been able to tap into telemetry from the ship, but aside from its speed, it looked to be functioning normally. Of course, if you’re hearing this, we can presume that you’ve been brought out of hibernation. As to what you’ll find in Lionheart, I’m afraid I can’t give you much help. There’s a lot to catch up on, brother. I’m with Lucas now: he told me what happened in the Winter Palace. I’m back on Earth, too – you’ll know that from the quangle tags. I came back the fast way, on one of our own ships. What happened in the Evolvarium… it’s complicated, and I’m still not sure I understand it all.’

Sunday hesitated, before continuing: ‘The Pans cheated us, Geoffrey. Truro, Holroyd… the man I met on Mars. Whether that means we can’t trust them at all, or that we can still trust some of them… I don’t know yet. I think we can still trust Arethusa, and I don’t have any doubts about Chama and Gleb… but whether they still count as Pans is harder to say.’ She flashed a triumphant grin. ‘They didn’t win, that’s the main thing. By now I’m fairly sure they’ll have realised as much, which is why I don’t really give a shit if they’re listening in to this transmission. Are you hearing this, Holroyd, Truro?’ Sunday raised a screw-you finger. ‘We duped them – left them holding a decoy, while I got out with the real thing. I spoke to… a recording of Eunice. She told me that one of us needed to get to the Winter Palace.’ Sunday smiled again. ‘By which time you were already on your way. I wish I could have warned you what to expect, but there just wasn’t a means to get through to you in time. But I still don’t know what you’re going to find in Lionheart. Eunice told me stuff… asked me questions. Decided I measured up, I think. But she still didn’t give me any final answers. I’m hoping that’s where you’re going to come in. I wish I could be with you, all the way out there. But you’ve got Jumai and Hector, and that has to be better than nothing. There’s something else, too. You’re out of aug reach, so you can’t access the construct in the usual way. But I had a better idea. I’ve uplinked a copy of her – you should find a memory file sitting in your shipboard inbox. Bandwidth was limited, so I had to strip her down a little – but the important stuff should still be there. You can do what you like with it, but if you think there’s even a chance that Eunice’s advice might come in useful, assign the memory file to a proxy. Bound to be one aboard somewhere.’

Sunday paused for breath. ‘Reply, and I’ll get it in five hours. In ten, you’ll hear back from me again. The household is standing by, Geoffrey – all of us. I’m here, and the elephants are fine. And we want you all back in one piece, as quickly as possible. Take care, brother.’

‘I will,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I’m glad she made it back,’ Hector said. ‘Although it doesn’t sound as if she gained anything by going to Mars.’

That had been Geoffrey’s thought as well, but he decided not to draw any conclusions for the moment. Sunday might have given the impression that she was speaking openly, but that didn’t mean she’d told them everything.

‘You haven’t asked me about the construct.’

‘I assumed that was between you and your sister,’ Hector replied.

Geoffrey watched another ice package shoot away from the iceteroid, right on time, like clockwork.

‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘Do you trust Sunday?’

‘We’ve had our differences.’

‘I mean here, now. With everything that’s happened to us, and what we now know.’

‘I suppose,’ Hector said.

‘She created a simulation of Eunice, a construct. It doesn’t know anything that isn’t in our archives, anything that wasn’t caught by the posterity engines – and if there’s something the real Eunice didn’t want the rest of the world to know, the construct won’t know it either.’

‘It doesn’t sound very useful,’ Hector said.

‘On the face of it, no. But it’s fast and it knows the public side of Eunice’s life inside out, at a level of detail none of us could ever approach. It’s already proven its worth. I think there’s a chance we could still benefit from its input.’

‘I have the file,’Jumai said, tapping a finger against one of the displays. ‘It looks watertight, subject to the usual filters. I can assign it to the proxy that brought me to the medical suite, if you’d like?’

‘We’re confident it came from Sunday?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘That sounded like my sister, and the tags placed her back in Africa. But with the Pans involved, and knowing what they can do with quangle paths, I’m not sure I trust anything any more.’

‘I see your point,’ Hector said. ‘If they faked the tags, there could be anything in that file – including an assassination programme, ready to be loaded into the proxy.’

‘I said it looked watertight,’ Jumai said, as if she hadn’t been heard the first time. ‘We can bounce it back to Sunday if you’re in any doubt.’

‘And wait ten hours for her to reply? And then be faced with the same qualms that the Pans might be hijacking the signal?’ Geoffrey shook his head. ‘That was Sunday. I’d put my life on it. Who else would bother telling me the elephants were fine?’

‘You may be right,’ Hector said. But he softened the remark with a smile. ‘Do it, Jumai. Assign the construct to the proxy. If the Pans are that intent on killing us, that resourceful, they’ll find a way to do it eventually. May as well save them the bother.’

Jumai tapped commands into the console. ‘Assigning… done.’ Almost immediately she added, ‘The proxy’s moving. It’s on its way up to us.’

‘Doesn’t hang around,’ Geoffrey said, pushing aside the ominous feeling in his belly.

‘It’s just a proxy. They can’t inflict lethal injuries, no matter what’s going on inside them,’ Jumai said. ‘Of course, I’ve never put that theory into practice—’

‘I still don’t know where Arethusa and the other Pans fit into all this,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Holroyd was the Pan Sunday met on Mars. I could imagine him betraying us. But I hope Sunday’s right about Chama and Gleb. They’re her friends. Hell, even I started liking them. I even liked Arethusa, although she scared the hell out of me.’

‘There’s a lot you need to tell me about,’ Hector said quietly.

‘We’ll get around to it,’ Geoffrey said.

Jumai muttered something under her breath. ‘Drawing a blank here. I’ve been pinging Lionheart on every channel the ship lets me access. Either our signal isn’t getting through, or they’re not answering.’

‘We can’t just sit here for the rest of eternity,’ Hector said. ‘The ship is stopped, and it won’t let us turn around and go home. It has power and supplies to keep us alive for a while, but it’s not a closed cycle.’ He nodded at the iceteroid. ‘At some point we’re going to have to deal with that. Like I said, we do have steering control. It would be enough to take us the rest of the way in.’

‘And then what?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘I’ve already identified a docking structure, near the main bore. If it’s anything like our other facilities, automated approach and capture should cut in once we’re near. We wouldn’t have to do anything – just sit tight.’

There was a knock at the door. The proxy had arrived. Geoffrey nodded at Hector to let it in. They had committed to a certain course of action the moment they assigned Sunday’s file to the proxy; there was no point having second thoughts now.

‘What name do you answer to?’ Geoffrey asked the blank-faced machine.

‘I’m Eunice. Who else were you expecting?’ The effect was unsettling. The proxy might not have looked like anything other than a robot, but it was adept at mimicking voices.

‘It’s a shame it doesn’t have her face,’ Hector said.

‘Be grateful,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘You might want to punch it.’

The proxy pushed itself into the room and came to a floating rest. It might have sounded like Eunice, but it still moved with the eerie precision of a machine. ‘Would someone like to bring me up to speed, or am I meant to guess what’s going on?’

‘Do you recognise that?’ Geoffrey asked, indicating the iceteroid. ‘You damn well should. It’s an Akinya asset, which you gave a name to. Lionheart.’

‘After Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one,’ the construct answered. ‘It was one of our mining facilities. I also selected it as my refuelling point on my last voyage. Winter Queen was to set down here, refill its tanks and continue into deep Trans-Neptunian space.’

‘We’ve been dragged here,’ Hector said. ‘This ship isn’t Winter Queen: it looks similar enough but under the skin it’s something much newer and faster. You must have known about it.’

‘I know that there was a plan, and that Sunday followed some of the clues.’

‘And the point of that plan was to lead us back to the Moon?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Not solely,’ Eunice said. ‘There was more to it than that. Do you think it was accidental that I showed Chakra’s Folly to Sunday, or asked her that question about the colours of the jewels?’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ Geoffrey said.

‘For the sake of transparency, you should know what I am. There is more to me than just the construct you’ve already met.’

‘Delete it,’ Jumai said. ‘It’s obviously got screwed up in the transmission.’

‘Listen,’ Eunice said sharply, making the word a command rather than an invitation. ‘I am what I am. Sunday found my old helmet on Mars. I… the living me… had installed a low-level interactive persona inside the helmet. This persona, because it had been shaped by me, had the possibility of containing knowledge that the more sophisticated construct couldn’t know. Sunday brought the helmet back to Earth. With care, she was able to bypass the sphinxware and integrate the two versions of me into a single construct – one with the personality of the original construct plus the additional information known only to the helmet version.’

‘And that’s what we’re talking to now?’ Jumai said.

‘No,’ Eunice answered patiently, ‘because there simply wouldn’t have been time to upload that version into the ship. Sunday whittled me down to the essentials as best she could.’

‘There were two of you once,’ Geoffrey said, ‘one haunting me, the other haunting Sunday. Now there are… what, three of you? Four?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Eunice snapped dismissively ‘You only get to talk to this one, and if I ever make it back to the aug, all my existing facets can be reintegrated into a single working model. For the moment, the only thing that matters is my immediate usefulness. So tell me what you’ve been doing since you arrived around Lionheart.’

‘Trying to work out our next move,’ Hector said. ‘According to the files, this ship originated here. Now it’s returned home. But we’re at stalemate. We’re just sitting here, and Lionheart won’t respond to our transmissions. What do you know about this place?’

The construct appeared to weigh up its options. ‘All our facilities carry a degree of fortification against other commercial interests. In the case of Lionheart, I would have amplified those defences. But it should have recognised Winter Queen… or whatever this ship is… by now.’

‘There’s no sign that it has,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Have you considered a slow approach, trusting that the automated docking systems will cut in?’

‘That was going to be our next move,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Provided no one talked us out of it first.’

The proxy swivelled its head to look at the display schematics showing the relative orientation of the vehicle and the iceteroid. ‘The ship may have suffered directional comms damage during its escape from the Winter Palace, something that isn’t showing up on the system overview. Or there may have been some unanticipated failure in the watchdog systems I installed in Lionheart, something that’s preventing a correct reply protocol. Until contact is established, or the counter-intrusion defences are turned offline, there would be an element of risk in continuing with an approach.’

Hector looked incredulous. ‘That’s all you’ve got? An “element of risk”? That’s like saying there’s an “element of risk” in Russian roulette.’

Eunice hesitated before answering. ‘There’ll be a master security override in the airlock at the surface docking facility, but someone will need to disarm it first.’

‘Before we dock?’ Jumai asked.

‘Preferably.’

‘Send the proxy,’ Hector said. ‘It can cope with vacuum.’

‘The airlock may block control signals,’ Eunice cautioned. ‘The system’s designed to dissuade machine intruders. Anyway, the master override may require a human presence, maybe even an Akinya. It would depend on how I configured it.’

‘And you don’t remember?’ Hector asked.

‘If I did, I’d tell you.’

‘We’re ten kilometres from Lionheart,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s insane to think of crossing that kind of distance. Even if we had the suits.’

‘We do,’ Hector replied. ‘I saw them when I was scouting for bomb sites. There are also clip-on manoeuvring units for EVA operations. I’ve used them before – they’re fairly intuitive.’

‘It’s still insane.’

Hector swallowed. ‘And the alternative is… what? Trusting that this ship will hold up all the way in?’

‘You do have the aerobrake,’ Eunice said. ‘It’s built for punching through atmospheres at Mach fifty. It can take some serious crap.’

‘It’s taken crap already, when we broke out of the habitat,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Line it up between Lionheart and the ship, it should still provide some protection,’ Eunice replied.

‘And there’s no risk at all that it’ll look like a battering ram?’ Hector asked.

‘One you’ll have to accept. If you come in laterally, you’re wide open to a broadside attack. I’ll walk you through the turnaround. Do as I say, and then initiate a slow approach.’

‘We’re taking orders from a proxy now?’ Hector asked.

‘Looks that way,’Jumai said.

Geoffrey shook his head. ‘We’re not taking orders. We’re just running a piece of tactical-analysis software and listening to what it tells us.’

‘I’ll remind you that I’m still in the room,’ Eunice said.

‘We know.’ Geoffrey glanced at his cousin, seeing in his eyes that Hector was willing to accept the proxy’s intervention, for now.

Hector’s hands moved to the manual steering controls. ‘Thruster authority is ours. We’ll begin vehicle translation under Eunice’s guidance. Jumai – this could get messy.’

‘I can take messy.’

‘I mean, it might be an idea for all of us to get into suits at this point. Go down to the locker, fix yourself up with one of the units, then slave the other two to yours and bring all three back here.’

‘How do I slave suits?’

‘You ask them nicely,’ Hector said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

They really needed a name for the ship, Geoffrey thought. He was sick of calling it ‘the ship’, but didn’t feel comfortable about reverting to the name Winter Queen when it was so demonstrably not the same vessel Eunice had taken to the edge of the system. Given the affection he felt for it, Bitch or Murderess were looming as distinct possibilities. Perhaps they’d have time to debate the matter when they had docked with Lionheart.

They were turning. It was slow, agonisingly so. Spacecraft were not like aeroplanes, made for hairpin turns and acrobatics. They were more like skyscrapers or transmission masts, with a very narrow range of permissible stress loads. Apply too much torque and a ship as big as this one would snap like a stick of candy.

‘Two kilonewtons and hold,’ Eunice said. ‘Dorsal three, one kilonewton, five seconds.’ She was doling out commands like a stern instructress at a dance class. ‘Damn those centrifuge arms – they’re throwing off my calculations, too much angular momentum along our long axis. Why didn’t we stow them first?’

‘You didn’t suggest it,’ Hector said.

‘Dorsals four and six, one kilonewton each, three seconds. Aft: half a kilonewton, one second.’ She paused, studying the results. As in an aircraft, there was a deceptive lag between input and response. ‘That seems to be doing it.’

Eunice might have had the experience, but only Hector and Geoffrey were able to make the inputs. They were sitting next to each other, waiting on Eunice’s commands. Geoffrey could sense Hector’s tension, boiling off him like vapour. He’d spent half his life in space and had flown many different classes of commercial space vehicle. But nothing this big, this unfamiliar, or under such taxing circumstances.

By the time the ship had reorientated itself, Jumai was back from the suit locker. She was wearing everything but the helmet, her arm scooped through the open visor, and two other suits were shadowing her like zombies. She told them to stay put outside the command deck while she squeezed back into her seat.

‘They’re as modern as the hibernation units,’ Hector observed. ‘Give you credit, Eunice – you didn’t skimp on the essentials. Geoffrey – get into your suit. We’d best be ready for the worst.’

‘Anything from the iceteroid yet?’ Jumai asked.

‘Not a squeak,’ Geoffrey said. He eased out of his seat, selected one of the two remaining suits and spread his arms and legs wide, like a man waiting to be measured by a tailor. ‘Dress me,’ he told it, and the suit obeyed, clamming itself around his body until only his head remained uncovered. Grimacing – the suit had pinched a fold of skin around his thigh – he scooped up the helmet and returned to his seat, leaving Hector to repeat the process with the other suit.

‘Aerobrake is aligned,’ Eunice declared, when everyone was secured. ‘We’ll initiate the approach now. Laterals one, three, six: two kilonewtons, ten-second burst.’

Geoffrey felt the push of acceleration. Almost as soon as he’d counted to ten in his head, it was over. They were weightless again, drifting towards Lionheart.

‘Package launches continuing on schedule,’ Jumai said. ‘That’s a good sign, isn’t it?’

‘As long as they keep away from us,’ Hector said.

For all the countless billions of tonnes of ice still to be mined out of the iceteroid, its gravitational field was puny. They would not be landing on Lionheart, in any strict sense of the term; rather they would be docking with it. There was a part of Geoffrey’s mind that couldn’t really accept that, though. As the iceteroid swelled to dominate the displays, ominous as a bloodstained iceberg, blood that had coagulated to a dark, scabrous red, his brain began to insist that there was a definite up and down to the situation. It took a conscious effort to stop clutching his seat rests, as if he was in danger of falling ahead of the ship.

‘Nine kilometres to dock,’ Hector reported. ‘We’ll need slow-down thrust if approach control doesn’t kick in. Jumai: keep signalling. We may break through at the last moment.’

‘Do you have the faintest idea what we’re going to find in that thing?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘I was hoping you’d have all the answers, cousin.’

‘There are going to be a lot of people very interested in getting a closer look at this ship. Maybe Lionheart has something to do with that.’

‘I’ll remind you that this remains Akinya commercial property,’ Hector said. ‘People will get to look at it if and when we choose. I may have been wrong about wanting to keep Eunice’s legacy locked away, I’ll admit that much. But that doesn’t mean I’m about to neglect my obligations to the family.’

Under other circumstances, Geoffrey might have taken that for a goad. But all he heard in Hector’s words now were weariness and resignation, the drained convictions of a man surveying the grave he’d just excavated for himself.

‘It really matters to you,’ he said, marvellingly.

‘Of course it does.’ Hector sounded surprised that it needed stating. ‘That doesn’t make me a monster, any more than rejecting the family makes you one.’

‘Seven kays,’ Jumai said.

They had always known that Lionheart had the means to strike at them without warning, but it was quite another thing to have that truth demonstrated with such spectacular indifference to their sensibilities. The ice package emerged on schedule, ninety seconds after the last, but as it boosted from the launcher the steering lasers pushed it through nearly ninety degrees. All this happened too quickly to analyse: the first they knew of any strike was when the ship shuddered violently, and then kept shuddering, pitching and yawing as if on a rolling sea. Geoffrey braced for decompression, or something worse, but the air held. His heart racing, he searched the schematics for signs of damage. But Hector was quicker.

‘We just lost a centrifuge arm – it wasn’t shielded by the aerobrake. The other arm’s still revolving – it’s acting like a counterweight.’

‘We should be able to stop it.’ Geoffrey sounded calmer than he felt. ‘Slow it, lock it down or something.’

The pitch and yaw were ebbing; they hadn’t done anything, so the ship must have sensed the damage and acted accordingly. Geoffrey glanced at the console chronometer, counting back in his head. How many seconds had it been?

Hector’s hands returned to the steering controls. ‘Arresting forward motion.’

‘You’ll need to do more than that,’ Eunice said sharply. ‘You’ve been sucker-punched. Ship’s still drifting off-axis. You’ll lose aerobrake protection in about thirty seconds. Dorsal three, two kilonewtons, three seconds. Hit that mark. Now.’

‘Overcorrecting,’ Hector said, when the input had had time to feed through.

‘You were slow. Laterals one and six, two kilonewtons, two seconds. Geoffrey: dorsal four, one kilonewton, one second: hit it.’

‘We’re still drifting,’ Jumai said after a few moments.

‘It’s coming under control. Switch to vernier thrust. Laterals one and three, dorsals two and five: five-second micro-bursts.’

‘Aerobrake is beginning to realign,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Good. Hold this drift for another ten seconds. Stand ready on laterals two and five, two-second bursts. That should kill it.’

When the ship was at rest, holding station relative to Lionheart, Hector said, ‘The remaining centrifuge arm is static and locked down. I don’t think we lost much air – the internal doors must have shut tight as soon as the centrifuge broke away.’

‘Do you think we should pull back to ten kilometres?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘We were fine until we tried moving closer.’

Hector was already unbuckling from his seat. ‘Maybe we were, but if we do that we’re just back to square one – drifting with no fuel to get home. As far as I can see, there’s only one course of action now.’ He pushed himself from the seat, spinning around in the air. ‘I’m going to reach that airlock, disarm the security system.’

‘Across seven kilometres of open space?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Better than ten.’ Hector stabilised himself, brushing fingertips against the wall, and opened the door.

The ship shook again. The impact was much louder this time, and it triggered an avalanche of damage and warning indications. The after-vibrations rumbled like a passing express train, dying away over tens of seconds. ‘Direct hit against the aerobrake,’ Jumai said, when the diagnostic messages had localised the impact point.

‘Even if we started pulling back now, it wouldn’t make any difference,’ Eunice said.

Geoffrey and Jumai abandoned their seats. ‘There has to be an alternative,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If we give ourselves enough drift away from Lionheart, we’re bound to fall out of range eventually.’

Hector was about to lower his helmet into place. ‘Not how it works out here, cousin. Provided Lionheart can see us, it can hit us.’

‘He’s right,’ Eunice said. ‘Unless you can find another comet to hide behind, you have very little choice. The aerobrake won’t hold indefinitely.’

Jumai and Hector were both now fully suited, with helmets on, although Jumai had not yet locked her visor down. Hector was on suit air: an image of his face, distorted and enlarged, had appeared on the external surface of his visor. He’d become a cartoon character of himself.

‘Senseless the three of us crossing at the same time,’ Hector said. ‘Jumai knows more about security countermeasures than either of us, but if she runs into a gene-locked system she won’t be able to disarm it. Besides, it’s not her mess. That leaves you and me, cousin.’

‘Fine,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We’ll cross together.’

‘Better if I cross alone, then you bring the ship in when I give the all-clear.’

There was another impact, just as brutal as the last.

‘At this rate, there won’t be a ship left to bring in,’ Geoffrey said.

Hector opened his mouth as if to argue, then closed it and nodded once. ‘Follow me and I’ll show you how the manoeuvring units work. Eunice, stick by us. You might come in useful yet.’

Geoffrey should have anticipated a complication, but it wasn’t until they had the thruster packs clipped on that he began to grasp what the difficulty might be. It wasn’t with the packs themselves: as soon as he studied the controls, nestling under his arms like seat rests, Geoffrey understood what Hector had meant when he said that the operation was intuitive.

But they were bulky. At a push, two suited people could have squeezed into the ship’s midsection airlock. With the thruster packs in place, the lock could only take one person at a time.

‘We’ll still go over together,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Cycle through and wait on the other side until I get there. We’ll start our crossing after the next package arrives.’

Hector’s cartoon face nodded. ‘That’s a good idea. At least we’ll have ninety seconds of clear time. If we can get close enough to Lionheart, she may not be able to steer one of those packages onto us.’ He reached out a gloved hand and tapped the airlock control. ‘See you on the other side, cousin.’

The ship jolted. Hector propelled himself into the airlock and closed the inner door. The indicator next to the door flicked to red, signifying that decompression was in progress. ‘Ninety seconds,’ Geoffrey said on the pre-assigned suit-to-suit channel. ‘That one felt pretty bad.’

The inner door twitched in its frame, jamming tight into its pressure seals.

‘He just blew the outer door,’ Jumai said, astonished. ‘Didn’t wait for the chamber to depressurise!’

‘Hector, what are you doing? You’ve just dumped a roomful of air!’

‘We won’t miss it, and it was a damn sight quicker than waiting for the normal cycle,’ Hector said, sounding pathologically calm under the circumstances. ‘But don’t worry. The outer door’s closing normally, and it will still hold air. In a minute or so standard pressure should be restored.’

‘He’s leaving,’ Jumai said. She had her open visor pressed up against the inspection porthole next to the airlock.

‘Hector! We had an agreement!’

‘Senseless both of us taking this risk, Geoffrey. You put your neck on the line when you came aboard this ship to find me. It’s only fair that I reciprocate.’

Jumai worked the lock, forcing it to cycle back to readiness. ‘Going to take a while. You can dump air a lot faster than you can pump it back in, and the inner door won’t open until there’s atmospheric pressure on the other side. Maybe if I had an hour I could find a workaround, but—’

‘Never mind.’

Forcing himself to concentrate, Geoffrey stared at the thruster-pack controls again. They’d looked simple at first glance, but that had been with the understanding that Hector was going to show him the ropes once they were both outside.

‘I have to follow him,’ he said. ‘If I don’t, I’ll never be able to look myself in the face again. But you stay here. We need one warm body back on this ship. The proxy doesn’t count.’

The ship jolted again.

The airlock indicator flicked to green, signifying readiness. Other than the venting of some air to space, no damage had been done by Hector’s sudden depressurisation. Geoffrey forced himself to breathe slower, though it did nothing to calm his racing heart. He was terrified. He didn’t want to go out there, into open space. He’d never been outside a spacecraft in his life, much less in a situation where he might be swatted out of existence at any moment. But he’d told Jumai the truth. He had to be able to live with himself, and if he left Hector to his fate, that abandonment would corrode him from within.

The airlock opened. Geoffrey pushed himself inside, clunking against the outer wall with excess momentum. He nodded at Jumai’s cartoon face, and then the inner door was closing.

The emergency vent control, the one that Hector must already have tripped, could not have been more obvious. It was a red handle the size of a shovel’s grip, recessed into the wall so that it couldn’t be activated unintentionally. Geoffrey took a good hold on it. There was another static handle next to it, providing a bracing point against the sudden decompression. He clenched that with his other fist.

‘Venting,’ he said.

He felt the tug as the air gasped from the lock but retained his grip. His head-up informed him that he was now exposed to hard vacuum. Geoffrey eased out of the lock, taking care not to knock the thruster pack as he emerged. His instincts were to retain a point of contact with the ship, but that wouldn’t get him anywhere. He had to submit himself to space, and trust in the harness.

He pushed away.

‘I’m free,’ he reported.

‘Can you see Hector? He’s out of my sightline.’

‘Must be on the other side of the aerobrake.’ Geoffrey positioned his hands over the matched thruster controls and applied a burp of thrust. ‘Hector, can you hear me?’

‘Still with you, Geoffrey. I gather you’re outside the ship.’

‘You knew I’d follow.’

Hector let out a sniff of amusement. ‘I suppose I’d have done the same thing. Doesn’t excuse either of us, though.’

The thrust had steered Geoffrey away from the hull. He looked back, seeing the ship in its entirety for the first time. The aerobrake was a braced circle blotting out a significant fraction of the sky, slightly dished on the surface he was looking at, aerodynamically convex on the other. Even with his eyes amped, there were details he couldn’t make out. The shadows were black, the lit surfaces gloomy.

He would have to edge out from the cover of the aerobrake if he was to follow Hector.

White light rimmed the circular shield, turning it into an eclipsed sun with its own corona. The light faded. He’d felt nothing, heard nothing, but he knew that another package had just hit the aerobrake.

‘Hector?’

‘Still here. How’s Jumai?’

‘I’m fine,’ she replied.

‘Don’t even think about coming after us,’ Hector added.

Geoffrey arrested his lateral drift. He was beginning to emerge from the protective shadow of the aerobrake, with the iceteroid’s launch systems looming into visibility again. Almost immediately, the visor dropped an icon over a tiny point of light. Next to the icon, distance and velocity numerics pointed to an object two kilometres ahead.

‘I see you, Hector.’

‘Good. You’ve made your point, now go back inside.’

Geoffrey stabbed at the arrow-shaped control studs, orientating himself in the same rough trajectory that Hector was already following. He applied a thrust burst, saw the hull of the ship begin to slide by. The aerobrake was looming closer. He studied its approach, hoping he’d given himself enough clearance not to ram against its underside or clip the edge as he passed. The icon put him eighteen hundred metres behind Hector now, but Hector was still pulling ahead. Strobeflashes of blue fire marked his thruster inputs. He was gunning it.

Geoffrey was sliding past the aerobrake now. He’d cut it close – as it neared, it looked as if he’d made a fatal misjudgement – but it whisked past him in absolute silence, and looking back he was at last able to inspect the damage to the ship. It was worse than he’d been expecting. The ice impacts had blasted away the aerobrake’s ablative cladding in metre-thick chunks, exposing an underlying integument of geodesic support elements and shock dampeners. No matter that eighty per cent of the aerobrake was still intact, it was now useless for its intended function.

His suit veered sharply. A fist-sized boulder whipped by in the night. He guessed it was debris from the aerobrake: the suit had detected it and taken evasive action.

‘Jumai,’ he said, ‘stay suited, and make sure you’re clipped into a thruster pack. The ship can’t take much more punishment.’

‘Yeah. I figured that out for myself.’

The timbre of her voice was different, and it took him a moment to understand why. She was on suit air.

He looked back again: just in time to see a tiny figure emerge out of eclipse from behind the aerobrake.

Knowing there was nothing to be done – he could hardly argue with her, when he’d done exactly the same thing – he returned his attention to Hector’s distant form. Twenty-one-hundred metres and receding. He gunned his own thruster pack again, feeling the pressure as it nudged his spine. He held the studs down as long as he dared, watching the relative velocity reach zero and then begin to climb into positive digits. Geoffrey guessed that he’d traversed a kilometre himself, about the length of the ship, since clearing the aerobrake. Hector must be nearing the halfway mark, and he was still out there, still alive.

Blue fire streaked past: superheated steam from an ice package, stabbing out from Lionheart like a chameleon’s tongue. The entire cosmos pulsed white. He looked back, saw the aerobrake glowing against the dim grey nimbus of the inner solar system. The glow faded, darkening to red, then black. There was more damage.

‘Jumai?’

‘Still here. Am I the only one who’s starting to worry about what we do without a ship to get us home?’

‘We can manage without the aerobrake, provided we can top up the tanks with whatever fuel that engine uses,’ Hector said. ‘All I have to do is persuade Lionheart that we’re its new best friends. Doesn’t sound too difficult, does it?’

‘When you put it like that…’ Geoffrey said.

‘I’m about two kilometres out. I can see the lock from here. If the protocols are standard, I shouldn’t have any difficulties working the outer door. I’m a little off-beam, so I need—’

Something white flashed ahead.

Geoffrey’s first thought was that Hector had started correcting his angle of approach, or had even begun to reduce his speed in readiness for landing by the airlock.

That wasn’t it.

‘Hector?’ he asked, dreading what his senses were telling him: that the flash had been much too bright to have been anything so innocent as a course correction.

Hector wasn’t answering.

On the area of Geoffrey’s visor reserved for comms status, a red warning symbol began to pulse.

‘Hector!’ he shouted.

But he knew the truth. He didn’t need the helmet to tell him that. Hector wasn’t responding because Hector wasn’t there any more.

‘He’s gone,’ Jumai said. ‘Isn’t he?’

The two of them were still falling towards Lionheart, towards the point or surface in space where Hector had been intercepted and neutralised.

There wasn’t time for shock or grief, or even terror, over and above the fear that Geoffrey was already experiencing. Just the immediate and pressing calculus of survival. At his present rate of fall, Geoffrey would be passing Hector’s place of execution in only a dozen or more seconds.

‘Do nothing,’ he told Jumai. ‘No course adjustment, no speed adjustment, nothing. Not until we’re almost there.’

‘What happened?’

‘Hector must have directed a burst of thrust towards Lionheart. I don’t think it saw him until then. I don’t think it noticed him. He was just too small a target compared to the ship, and with all the debris floating around from the aerobrake—’

‘You hope.’

‘If I’m wrong, we’ll know it very shortly.’

He supposed that, of the myriad modes of death one might contemplate, being annihilated by a chunk of catapulted ice shot across space so quickly that it arrived without warning, was not the worst way to go. It would be painless. There would be no pain because once that ice touched him – once its kinetic energy began to convert into heat and mechanical forces – there would be no him to experience sensations of any kind whatsoever. He would no longer be an organism. He would be a pink nebula of rapidly expanding and cooling steam with some mixed-in impurities.

But he must have been right about Hector, because Lionheart refrained from killing him. He waited until the dull red world felt only a breath away, a hand’s reach. He didn’t dare begin to slow down until then. Although he knew that the suit had the ability to detect and avoid collisions autonomously, he wasn’t trusting it to arrest his forward motion. Closing his eyes – he did not want to see the ground coming up if it was clear he wasn’t going to stop – he jammed his thumbs onto the reverse-thrust studs. A few seconds passed before it occurred to him that if he didn’t monitor his progress, he might push himself back out into space again.

More by luck than judgement, he found himself settling gently down – or was it sideways? There was still no appreciable gravity – onto Lionheart. There was red ground below him, grey bunkerlike surface installations all around, veined with pipes and gridded with radiators. The tallest structure was a buttressed tower with docking clamps arranged around its top, wide open like a grasping hand. That was where the ship would have berthed, if their approach had been orthodox. The airlock had to be nearby.

His feet touched down, crunching into the surface as if he was breaking through the crust of a cake, into the soggy interior. That was just momentum, not his own weight.

‘I see you,’ Jumai said.

She came down like a strobing angel, and at first he feared that she’d initiated slowdown too high up; that she might yet attract Lionheart’s attention the way Hector had. But her judgement was no worse than his own. She landed a few metres away, and for a moment it was all they could do to stare at their own stupefied cartoon faces.

‘I’m sorry about—’ Jumai started saying.

‘Later,’ Geoffrey said, startled by his own callousness, but knowing that was how it had to be, until they were safe.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

They found an airlock easily enough, set at ground level. Geoffrey didn’t doubt that there was another one situated near the docking clamps, for the convenience of arriving ships. Jumai slapped her palm against the green-lit entry panel and the outer door opened without complaint. The iceteroid’s defences, geared towards the interception of arriving ships, paid no heed to anything happening on the surface.

There was room enough for both of them inside the lock, even with their thruster packs. The outer door closed; air gushed in through slats.

‘We’ve lost contact with the ship,’ Jumai said. ‘Eunice was right – the airlock’s blocking signals.’

When pressure normalised, Geoffrey took off his helmet and allowed it to drift down to the floor.

‘Eidetic scanner,’ Jumai said, directing his attention to a hooplike device set just below the ceiling. ‘And a gene reader, in that wall panel under the scanner. You’ll need to make skin contact with it.’

Geoffrey ordered the suit to remove itself. He stepped out, wearing just his inner layer, shivering as the coldness of the air touched him for the first time. He positioned himself under the eidetic scanner, remembering the similar device in Chama and Gleb’s menagerie. The scanner lowered down until it formed a halo around his head. The device would be primed to respond to visual memories of specific events or locations; it would easily be capable of distinguishing between memories laid down directly and those confabulated from second-hand experience. At the same time he pressed his bare palm against the grey rectangle of the gene reader. He felt the tingle as the reader drew a representative sample of skin cells.

‘State your name,’ a machine-generated voice said, in Swahili.

He swallowed before answering. ‘Geoffrey Akinya.’

‘State your relationship to Eunice Akinya.’

‘I am her grandson. Please cease attack on the approaching ship. It is not hostile. Repeat, it is not hostile.’

If the scanner understood his words, or cared about them, it gave no sign. The hoop tracked up and down, ghost symbols fluttering across his vision – weird and senseless hieroglyphs, in colours that the naked eye could not quite perceive: yellow-blues, red-greens. The scanner was pushing deep and intrusive fingers into his skull. It was reading the architecture of his brain the way a blind person might trace the profile of a human face.

‘Visualise the household, Geoffrey Akinya. You are walking through the west wing, away from the garden. It is late afternoon.’

Picking one memory out of the thousands he held felt dangerously arbitrary. He tried to focus on the details, the specific and telling texture of things. The gleam of polished flooring, the squeak of it under his shoes, the white-plastered walls, the way the light fell on the brown-framed cabinets and cases of the private museum. Dust in lazy suspension, pinned in bars of sunlight. The smell from the kitchen, which managed to infiltrate every corner of the household.

‘Go to your room.’

He walked there, rather than simply imagining the transition. He pushed open the door, trying to recall the precise heft of it. He had been in the room recently, at least by his own sense of time, so it was not difficult to bring to mind its dimensions, the simple layout and sparse furnishings.

‘Sit on the bed. Look around.’

He did as he was told, forcing the act of conscious and continuous recollection – not just bringing to mind disconnected objects and impressions, but replaying the visual scene as a smoothly flowing sequence, his point of view tracking fluidly.

‘Focus your attention on the elephants.’

He had called them to mind, but only as one element of the room’s interior. Then he remembered how the Winter Palace had also narrowed its focus onto the elephants, as if they were a key component in the establishing of his identity.

That had merely been a question about his age when he’d received the gift. This was an altogether more intense act of scrutiny. He sensed that to fail in this specific reconstruction would be to fail entirely. Lionheart was holding its breath, as he held his.

He visualised the elephants. He held them in his mind’s eye as six distinct forms, recalling the weight of them, the smoothness of the carved wood in his hands, the sharpness of the tusks against his fingertips, the rough, dark feel of their bases. The elephants were all slightly different, even allowing for their diminishing sizes. He strove to visualise the distinguishing details, the subtle variations of head, ear and trunk postures, the leg positions. He concentrated until the act of sustained recollection was unbearable.

The image collapsed. The room evaporated from recall.

‘Welcome, Geoffrey Akinya,’ the voice said. ‘You have authorisation to proceed.’

The eidetic scanner slid back towards the ceiling. He removed his palm from the gene reader.

‘Cease the attack against the incoming ship,’ he said again, hoping that the system was sophisticated enough to understand and comply. ‘It is not hostile.’

‘Approach defences have been stood down. Do you have further instructions regarding the ship?’

‘Give me back comms.’

Jumai, who still had her helmet on, said, ‘Link re-established. Eunice – do you hear us?’ She waited a few moments, listening to the voice at the other end of the link. ‘Good. The bombardment should have stopped. I think we’ve managed to persuade Lionheart that we’re not a threat, but it’s probably best if we keep the ship out of immediate harm’s way for the moment. If we can work out how to bring you in under automatic guidance, we’ll be in touch.’

‘Much damage?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Nothing that should prevent us from getting home, provided we can find fuel and make some basic repairs. You think it’s safe to leave the packs and suits here?’

‘Keep your suit on,’ he advised. ‘One of us should maintain a link back to the ship. Besides, it’s cold.’

‘You could put your own suit back on.’

‘Or I could walk through that door now, and find out why we’ve been brought here.’ He clapped his arms against his chest, deciding he could deal with the cold for the time being. ‘Guess which one I’m going for?’

Geoffrey opened the inner lock and pushed through into the iceteroid. He was doing his best not think about Hector.

The door led into a reception bay and storage chamber as large as a warehouse, as deep as a cargo ship’s hold. It plunged down many levels below the point where they’d emerged, all filled with racked machine parts and stacked cargo pods, gaudy with primary-colour paintwork, insignia and warning labels. There was Akinya property here, as well as products and supplies from companies that Geoffrey felt certain had not existed for decades. The ceiling, a level or so overhead, must have pushed above Lionheart’s surface, forming one of the bunkerlike structures Geoffrey had seen upon landing. It was windowless but covered with a matrix of lighting elements. A walkway, enclosed in a grilled tube with numerous hand- and footholds, pushed out from a small ledge at the airlock’s entrance. The bay was brightly illuminated and smelled showroom clean. From somewhere below came the monklike chant of generators and heavy-duty life-support equipment. The throb worked its way through the grilled walkway, trembling it under the push of his fingers. Walking didn’t really work in the iceteroid’s practically non-existent gravity. Geoffrey and Jumai were making long, slow arcing jumps, pushing back from the curve of the ceiling when they rose too high.

Geoffrey was glad to be moving. It was beginning to work the blood back into his limbs and fingers.

‘Is this what you were expecting?’ Jumai asked.

‘Hector would have known better than me what to expect,’ Geoffrey said, between breaths. ‘But if you’d asked me to guess what the inside of one of our mining plants looked like, it wouldn’t be far off this. There has to be pressure and warmth, for the technicians who come out here once in a blue moon. There have to be machine parts and supplies for the things the robots can’t make on their own, or aren’t allowed to make. And we know the facility’s still working as an ice mine.’

‘Eunice didn’t drag us all this way just to inspect the troops.’

‘No.’

At the far end of the covered walkway was another door, heavy enough to contain pressure, but not an airlock. It opened as they approached, revealing a cabin-like compartment set with restraints and four buckle-in chairs. It was an elevator, Geoffrey supposed, or what passed for an elevator on a world that was virtually weightless.

‘We’ve come this far,’ he said, in response to Jumai’s unspoken question.

They chose seats and buckled in – Jumai having to adjust her restraint to fit around the extra bulk of her suit. Only when they were secure did the door close on them. Geoffrey felt an immediate surge of smooth acceleration. Insofar as he trusted his sense of orientation, it felt as if they were heading down, deeper into Lionheart.

‘Eunice?’ Jumai asked, more in hopefulness than expectation.

But there was no answer. The elevator sped on, still accelerating.

The ride lasted a minute or three, long enough – given their evident speed – to reach at least a couple of kilometres into the iceteroid’s interior. It slowed quickly, but it was only when the door opened again that Geoffrey could be sure they had stopped.

They pushed out of the elevator into a white room about the size of a small hotel lobby. With its coved corners and bright handrails, it had the modular and utilitarian feel of a piece of spacecraft, transplanted deep underground. Circular doors led off from three of the walls into curving, red-lit corridors. The generator throb was much more prominent now, and the walls displayed a constant succession of scrolling status updates and complicated multicoloured diagrams. Nothing he wouldn’t have expected in a remotely operated mining facility. That underlying throb might have been the vibration of monstrous drills, gnawing ever deeper into the cold husk of this stillborn comet…

Or something else.

The floor shook.

‘You feel that?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Package launch,’ Jumai said. ‘I felt one earlier, when we were in that tunnel. You must have been airborne when it happened. Seem to be going off on schedule, as before. Business as usual.’

They both tensed. What they heard were not footsteps, precisely, but the unmistakable approach of something, propelling itself limb over limb in the near-weightless conditions. It was coming along one of the red-lit shafts, its busy, bustling sound preceding it. Defenceless, Geoffrey’s only response was to find a handhold and reach for it. Jumai made to seal her visor, then drew her hand slowly back before she’d completed the gesture.

The thing was a golem. He could tell that much as it came around the curve. It was humanoid, but it moved with the manic, limb-whirling energy of a gibbon, the quadruped gait too rhythmic and choreographed to look entirely natural. It was tumbling head over heels, yet maintaining impressive forward momentum. Only when the golem neared the door did its movements settle into something more plausibly organic.

Sunday’s construct had emulated Eunice at the end of her public life, as she had been before going into exile. She’d lived seven decades by then, and taken no great pains to disguise that age. This was different. They were looking at a much younger incarnation now – perhaps half the age of the original construct.

The golem had arrived dressed in a simple one-piece black garment, marked on the sleeves with various flags and emblems. Eunice’s hair was long and black, thick and without a trace of grey, though she had combed it back from her forehead and gathered it into an efficient bun, secured with a black mesh hairnet. The hairstyle was austere, suited for weightlessness rather than fashion, but the effect on the golem was one of understated and modest elegance. Geoffrey had seen countless images of his grandmother as a young woman, but he had never once thought of her as beautiful. She was, though. Small-boned, long-necked, with prominent cheekbones and wide eyes that cut right through him. And the thing he’d never really detected, in all those images – that quiet, knowing smile.

He still hated her for what she had done to Hector. Which was ridiculous, of course: this wasn’t Eunice, even if it was convenient to think of the golem as such.

Yet he had to remind himself of that.

‘I always hoped it might be you, Geoffrey,’ she said, casting a long and appraising glance over him. She had come to rest standing up, her feet on the floor. ‘I didn’t count on it, and it wouldn’t have mattered if someone else had come instead. They’d have been tested as well, and if they were blood Akinyas, with strong ties to the household, I don’t doubt that they’d have passed the eidetic scan just as capably.’

He had too many questions to know where to start. ‘The only reason I’m here is because Hector and Lucas decided to ask me to investigate the safe-deposit box. If they’d sent someone else to do that, you’d be talking to them now.’

‘But would anyone else have had the fortitude to come this far?’ She cocked her head. ‘I extracted some of your memories, during the eidetic scan. Unethical, but it had to be done. I know something of what you’ve been through. And I’m sorry that it was necessary.’

‘She’s bullshitting,’ Jumai said. ‘Eidetic scans can’t extract and process memories that easily. They look for correlations with known image patterns; they can’t just rummage through your head indiscriminately, like someone searching a sock drawer. Machines just don’t have the intelligence to make sense of the raw data. You’d need something with artilect-level cognition, at the very—’

‘Then it’s a good job there’s an artilect running me,’ Eunice said, cutting her off with savage discourtesy. ‘Not one of those modern, declawed weaklings, either. Military grade, more than eighty years old, fully Turing compliant – the kind of thing that the Cognition Police were set up to pulverise.’

‘Should you have told us that?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘Or are you not planning on us ever going home again?’

‘No – you can go home. I’ll put no constraints on that. I’d be a very ungracious host otherwise, wouldn’t I? There’s fuel here and the damage to your ship is nothing that can’t be fixed, given Lionheart’s resources.’

‘For an artilect, you were pretty slow to realise we meant no harm,’ Jumai said.

‘I’m but one facet of the artilect,’ Eunice said, ‘and I was only activated after you had already established your credentials. Until then, Lionheart was guarding itself, as it has done for more than sixty years. If certain autonomic vigilance protocols acted with excessive zeal… then you must forgive me.’

‘If you’ve read my memory, you’ll know that you killed one of us,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I didn’t pick that up,’ Eunice said, and for a moment there was something like contrition in her tone. ‘It must have happened very shortly before the scan. The memories hadn’t had time to cross the hippocampus, to be encoded into long-term storage. If there were casualties—’

‘You killed Hector,’ Jumai told her. ‘He was your grandson as well.’ She shook her head in self-disgust. ‘What am I doing, trying to make an artilect feel guilty? She’s only a mask. Behind her is just… stuff.’

‘Are you finished?’ Eunice asked. ‘I apologised. I did not mean it to happen. But the stakes have always been high. Impossibly so. Do you think any of this was done without good reason?’

‘I have no idea what any of “this” is, other than a means of wasting time and killing innocent people,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We’ll add Memphis to that tally as well. He’d be alive if I hadn’t been dragged into your fun and games.’

‘Memphis is dead?’ The golem looked away, as if there was something on Eunice’s face that she did not wish them to see. ‘I didn’t know,’ she added, in a softer voice than she’d used so far. ‘When did it happen?’

Geoffrey was about to say that it had only been a few days ago, but then he remembered the time he had spent travelling to Lionheart. ‘Seven weeks ago. There was an accident, with the elephants.’

‘If his death was a consequence of my actions… I can’t begin to tell you how that makes me feel.’

‘You don’t feel anything,’ Jumai said.

‘You’re wrong about me,’ the golem told her. ‘This had to be done. Don’t you understand?’

‘We don’t,’ Geoffrey said.

‘You came all this way. Surely you must have an inkling of what this is all about by now?’ She searched their faces for a glimmer of comprehension. ‘You don’t know anything, do you?’

‘My sister said you’d spoken of a gift, something that was both a blessing and a curse,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Yes.’ Eunice nodded keenly. ‘Yes, there was a gift. And you must know about the jewels to have made it this far. And the engine that brought you to Lionheart – surely that can’t have escaped your attention? You made the connection, obviously?’

‘The engine’s better than anything else out there,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It got us to Trans-Neptunian space in weeks rather than months. Is that what this is all about?’

‘No,’ Eunice said, before adding, ‘Well, yes, in one sense. But the engine is… was… only a means of bringing you here, and of demonstrating my, shall we say, sincerity?’ She smiled encouragingly. ‘So that whatever else I do or show you, you’ll have good grounds to take my words at face value?’

‘Every commercial interest in the system is going to want to pick that thing apart,’ Geoffrey said, and suddenly Hector was speaking through him. ‘The ship may be Akinya Space property, but we won’t be able to sit on a secret like that for ever.’

‘You won’t have to – I’ve already made provisions for the engine. And keep in mind that while I live and breathe, I am still running this firm.’

Geoffrey sneered. ‘I hate to break it to you, but the only reason we’re here is because you upped and died at the end of last year.’

‘You and I need a word,’ Eunice said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Jumai had given up trying to contact the version of Eunice back inside the ship. She had removed her helmet and now sat with it in her lap, eyeing Geoffrey as the elevator car sped deeper into Lionheart. The suit rendered her both monstrous and comical.

‘You’ve come a long way,’ the golem said, ‘and I don’t doubt that you both have lives and responsibilities of your own. Unfortunately, you are about to get a severe case of perspective readjustment. Even the most difficult decisions you’ve ever had to make in your lives simply don’t register on this new scale.’ She was sitting with her head low and fingers laced together, looking up at Geoffrey and Jumai as if pleading or begging. ‘That was all inconsequential fluff, like choosing a brand of toothpaste.’

‘We’ve both made life-and-death decisions lately,’ Geoffrey said. ‘So did Hector. So did my sister.’

‘Decisions of strictly local consequence. If you died, your family would continue. If the family ended, that would be an economic catastrophe, but it would not be the end of all things. Do you see what I mean? Local responsibility. Contained consequences. That’s not how it’s going to be from now on.’ Eunice looked down at her interlaced fingers – they were knitting and re-knitting nervously. ‘A hundred years ago, more or less, I stumbled on something. It led, indirectly, to this moment. I’ve lived with the knowledge of that discovery ever since – although even I didn’t grasp the full implications until decades later. Still, I knew it was something worth keeping close to my chest. And I was right about that. If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here now. We’d be a lot of dead dust and rubble piles orbiting the sun, where once there were settled worlds and people.’ She looked up sharply. ‘Doubtless you think I’m exaggerating. I don’t do exaggeration.’

The elevator had arrived. The door opened and Eunice made to stand. ‘What do you know about Mercury, Geoffrey?’ she asked, her tone turning brisk and businesslike again.

‘Are you talking about the falling-out between Akinya Space and the Panspermian Initiative?’

‘Very good. At least you’re up to speed on that.’

‘I’m not,’ Jumai said.

‘The Pans constructed a facility on Mercury,’ Geoffrey said, recalling what he had already learned from Sunday and Arethusa, ‘to build and launch Ocular. It was a telescope, a massive one – made of tens of thousands of individual parts, floating much further from the sun than we are now. To make that happen, they needed Akinya Space involvement. A deal was cut – we’d supply the components, shipping them from Earth and the Moon. In return, we’d get to piggyback our own research outpost on the Pans’ facility.’

He looked at Eunice, waiting for her to contradict him. Instead she offered her palm, encouraging him to continue. ‘The facility needed to be on Mercury because that was the easiest place in the system to tap into lots of free energy. The Pans had already put in place a solar collecting grid to power their assembly line and launcher; we used a fraction of that energy to run some experiments in propulsion physics.’ Geoffrey took a moment to order his thoughts. ‘That was a decoy, though. The real purpose of the Mercury facility was to conduct research into Turing-level artilects. By doing their dirty work on Mercury, my family hoped to keep away from the Cognition Police.’

‘The Pans knew about this?’ Jumai asked.

‘No, and they weren’t happy when they found out. They pulled the plug on the collaboration, booted us off Mercury. We managed to burn the evidence before the Gearheads got a close look: they couldn’t pin anything on us, so they went home empty-handed. That was 2085 – fifteen years before Eunice went to the edge of the system.’

‘At least we know what happened to one of the artilects,’ Jumai said. ‘What has Mercury got to do with this, here and now?’

‘Ocular found something,’ Geoffrey said, ‘just before Eunice died. Arethusa – Lin Wei – felt enough of a debt to her old friend to believe that Eunice ought to be told about the discovery. That seems to have been the trigger for… something.’ He offered an apologetic shrug. It was as much as he’d managed to piece together.

‘There’s a little more to it,’ the golem said. Eunice was leading them down an ice-walled tunnel. It had been bored roughly, then fixed with spray-on sealant. A walkway had been fastened to the floor, handrails and grabs to the walls, lights to the ceiling. The air was turning cold again. ‘Mercury was a double-blind. The artilect research was genuine, but that wasn’t the sole point of our being there. The basic physics research wasn’t just a screen. It was as equally valid – if not more important.’ She was skimming the tunnel in long, loping strides – human locomotion, not the limb-over-limb tumble that the golem had demonstrated earlier. And looking back, smiling with uncontained pleasure. It was the delight of someone who hadn’t had an audience in a very long while. She was enjoying the showmanship, her moment in the spotlight. ‘On Mercury, we tested a hypothesis. We constructed a relatively small-scale experimental physics facility to probe certain obscure byways of high-energy quark-quark interactions. There were bigger physics labs elsewhere – in Earth orbit, on the Moon – but we needed discretion. Above all, we had energy in abundance.’

‘What did you find?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘What appeared to be an unpromising little side-avenue… that turned out to lead to something astonishing. Utterly unsuspected, utterly unexplored. We’d broken through into an entire garden of new physics. We were breaching unification energies almost without trying. Seeing exotic-matter by-products that shouldn’t have been created since the universe was more than a couple of Planck-lengths wide.’ Eunice shook her head in amazement. ‘The wonder was that we didn’t blow ourselves off Mercury. We came close, in the early days. Then we dialled it back a bit and became cautious. Very cautious. It was clear that the physics we were investigating needed a bigger experimental facility.’

‘You say “we”,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Who else was in on this? You can’t keep that kind of thing secret if more than a handful of people are involved.’

‘Only a handful were,’ Eunice said. ‘With artilects and robots handling the complex construction and analysis tasks, it was easy enough to run the physics facility with just a skeleton crew – and most of them thought they were working on minor refinements to propulsion design. As to who knew the full story, there were just two of us.’

‘You were never a physicist,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I didn’t say I was.’

They’d reached the end of the ice-walled tunnel. The door here was as heavy and sturdily armoured as a surface airlock, fixed inside a frame that was obviously well braced into the surrounding ice. It opened for the golem, and she led Geoffrey and Jumai through it.

Inside was a small control room – just a couple of consoles and buckle-in seats facing three large triangular-framed windows screened with heavy-duty slats. The wall behind them, flanking either side of the door, was lined with grey lockers and equipment racks. There was some kind of decorative sculpture on the wall to Geoffrey’s right, while the one to his left was occupied by a single large display which appeared to show Lionheart and its environs at a variety of logarithmic scales, culminating in one that was big enough to encompass the iceteroid’s orbit around the sun. Geoffrey’s eyes tracked to the smaller orbits of the outer gas giants; then inwards to the still smaller paths of Saturn and Jupiter. Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury fell into an area he could easily have covered with the palm of his hand.

They were a long way out. Every now and again something would remind him of that, and the feeling was like vertigo. How could his grandmother ever willingly have sought this isolation, this sense of immense displacement from home?

‘It’s a shame your sister isn’t here,’ Eunice said. ‘I’d have liked her to see this.’

‘This’ was the sculpture, on the wall to his right. It was a slightly irregular rectangle, about the size of a Persian rug, fixed vertically against the wall. The rectangle was in fact a mosaic of smaller pieces – black shapes, mostly about the size of his hand, which, to judge by their jagged outlines, must once have fitted together to form a single whole. Now there were gaps and fissures where they didn’t quite join. There were also entire pieces missing from the edges and the middle – bites and absences where the grey backing of the wall showed through.

For all that their edges were irregular, the surfaces of the pieces – the visible faces – were as smooth as if they’d been chiselled along fracture lines. Aside from the occasional chipped or cratered piece, the dark mosaic was uniform in thickness. It gleamed with a magpie lustre, blues and greens shimmering back at Geoffrey, and within the shimmer the suggestion of faint intersecting scratches. Studying the scratches more intently, he made out what could almost have been totemic figures in cave art – a dance of headless, splayed-limb psychopomps made up of dashes and squiggles and spirals.

‘Would Sunday have recognised this?’ He wondered, momentarily, whether it might actually be his sister’s work, but he didn’t think so. With solid forms, her work tended towards the figurative. When she worked with abstract compositions, she employed every colour in the paintbox.

‘That would depend,’ Eunice said. She had positioned herself at one of the consoles and now opened the shutters covering the main windows. They whisked away with a series of loud clunks, leaving only glass between the control room and what was obviously a very large vacuum-filled cavity inside the iceteroid. ‘That shielding was never going to make much difference if one of the reactions went critical,’ Eunice remarked, ‘but it made me feel marginally safer knowing it was in place.’

They might have been looking at the interior of the drilling operation, spotlit for visitors. The cavity was impressively large – an easy kilometre across, stretching away to the left and right around a great curve so that the far ends were not visible from their vantage point. If in fact there were ends at all, for, Geoffrey decided, it was just as likely that the cavity was toroidal, a doughnut-shaped hole dug out of the middle of Lionheart. Bolstering that suspicion was the fact that a metal tube came around the bend of the cavity, passed by the observation point and continued on its arcing trajectory around the other end. The tube was fixed to the inner walls of the cavity by cartwheel-shaped assemblies, each shock-absorbing spoke as thick as a railway carriage. The tube itself was as wide as a major thoroughfare. Like a sated python, it bulged here and there, and secondary pipes branched out from it at various angles, plunging into the cavity wall.

‘A lot of metal,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Twenty million tonnes,’ Eunice said, with a touch of pride. ‘All of it shipped up from the main belt under the pretence that it was for normal mining operations. Would have been impossible if we didn’t already have a massive system-wide manufacturing and transportation network in place. A few thousand tonnes diverted from this facility, a few more from that… over time, it added up. But books still had to be cooked. One thing to keep a commercial secret from our competitors; another to run a secret project within the family. It took ten years, and there were many occasions when it nearly came undone. I couldn’t have done it without help – someone to cover my tracks, make sure there were no loose ends in the administration.’

‘So that’s two people who knew, other than yourself,’ Jumai said.

Eunice smiled tersely. ‘I made the initial discovery. But – as Geoffrey so kindly pointed out – I’m no physicist. Never was. I could be guided into a kind of understanding, but it was never more than a shallow approximation of the real thing.’

Geoffrey asked, ‘How could you make a discovery, without being a physicist?’

‘By luck. Luck and the wit to know that what I’d found might be useful, and that I should speak to someone who might be better informed than me.’ She touched a control and the shutters slammed back into place with the sound of a dozen rivet-guns firing simultaneously. ‘The experiment’s powered down now,’ she said, ‘but it still gives me the flutters, seeing that thing out there.’

‘You needed the solar grid on Mercury to run the first experiment,’ Jumai said. ‘Sun’s colder than a witch’s tit out here. How did you find the energy?’

Eunice laughed – not because it was a stupid question, Geoffrey decided, but rather one she liked. ‘That’s simple. I ran the second experiment off a small reactor derived from the first.’

She moved to the black tableau on the right-hand wall and detached one of the fist-sized fragments. It came off easily, leaving no trace of a hook or adhesive.

‘A piece of Chakra’s Folly,’ she said, tossing the item to Geoffrey. In Lionheart’s low gravity, he had ample time to catch it. ‘The Phobos Monolith. Your sister would have seen it, I think – on her way to the Indian settlement where I spent some time before descending to Mars.’

Geoffrey caressed the black fragment, convinced that he’d already handled it. ‘This is a piece of Phobos?’

‘Something that ended up there. People have known about the Monolith for at least a hundred and fifty years – they saw the shadow it cast long before they got a good close-up look at the thing itself. For a while, there were cranks who thought it might be an alien artefact – a ship, a sentinel, something like that. But when we got there we found that it was exactly what all reasonable people had always expected: a very big boulder, jammed into Phobos like a splinter. Impressive, hard to miss – a viable tourist attraction. But not an alien machine.’

‘Then why am I holding this?’

‘I wasn’t the first to see it up close. Not even the fiftieth. By the time I got there, nearly a hundred people had already come through Phobos on their way to Mars – I was the ninety-eighth. And countless robot eyes had already scanned and photographed the Monolith. They’d seen it for what it was: a clearly natural feature, the result of some ancient collisional process.’ Eunice waited a breath, then added, ‘But they’d all missed something.’

‘Something you didn’t,’ Jumai said.

‘I found debris,’ Eunice said, ‘near the base of the Monolith, loosely scattered over the Phobos surface material – bound there only weakly, due to the low gravity. That thing had been sticking up from the crust like a target in a shooting gallery for countless millions of years. Eventually something had hit it, some speck of cosmic dirt, and chipped off an entire face. I was looking at the debris, the shards of that high-velocity impact. Others must have realised what had happened, I suppose. But it had never occurred to any of them to pay attention to the debris.’

Geoffrey was still studying the piece in his hand. ‘You realised there was more to it than just debris.’

‘You can’t have missed those fine surface markings. On the face of it, they could be anything: spallation tracks from cosmic rays, crystalline defects… but something about them held my eye. I picked up another piece, lying close by. Then another. Eventually – and my suit air was running low by then – I found a matching pair. I fitted them together and saw that the scratches connected, and that they appeared to form part of some larger… diagram.’

‘I’d laugh if there was any possibility you might be joking,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I went back out there many times over the following weeks. I gathered as many of the fallen shards as I could find, bringing them back to the encampment. It was easy enough to keep the pieces hidden in my personal effects, and since we were going into a gravity well, not crawling out of one, there was no mass restriction for the trip down to Mars.’

‘Did Jonathan know?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘I saw no reason to keep it from him. He was my husband, after all. And I didn’t have any notion of what the scratches would actually turn out to symbolise. Obviously, their mere existence was astonishing. But beyond that… even if I went public, I couldn’t see it being more than a seven-day wonder. So what if the scratches appeared to point to an alien presence on Phobos? It couldn’t be proved, not rigorously. Someone could always claim that the shards had been faked by one of the first hundred. And if aliens had been there, a million or a billion years ago, they’d done nothing beyond leave that one set of scratches. Like someone stopping to take a piss at the roadside before carrying on.’

‘Graffiti. Scratched on the Monolith,’ Jumai said. ‘The kind of thing someone might do if they were stuck somewhere, bored, with nothing else to occupy them.’

‘Jonathan had studied electrical engineering before making his fortune in telecomms,’ Eunice said. ‘As part of his studies, he’d taken modules in modern physics. When I showed him the pieces, arranged as well as I was able, he said that the scratched forms reminded him of something. They look like little men, don’t they, or demons?’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Geoffrey said.

‘To Jonathan they were reminiscent of Feynman diagrams: little conceptual drawings encoding the interaction histories of subatomic particles. They weren’t Feynman diagrams, clearly – that would be as unlikely as finding inscriptions in our own alphabets or number systems. But they were analogous. The lines are the trajectories of particles. The squiggles are the forces mediating the reactions between them. The spirals are by-products of those reactions – other particles, packets of energy. That was just intuition, though. It would take a working physicist to say more than that. A good one, too. And someone I could trust.’

‘And you just happened to know someone,’ Jumai said.

‘We established contact while I was on Mars,’ Eunice answered. ‘He was fascinated by the rock drawings. He said that they already encoded the entire edifice of existing physics, as well as implying the correctness of several models that were still at the preliminary stage. What was more important, though, was that the diagrams pointed to physics we hadn’t begun to probe. Quark-quark interactions that seemed forbidden, on the basis of the known gauge symmetries. Do you know much about quarks? No, obviously not, or you’d have realised that they come in three colours: blue, red and green, like cheap plastic jewels. Or that when Sunday finds me reading a copy of Finnegans Wake, there’s a reason for that.’

‘I don’t think we did too badly to get this far,’ Geoffrey said.

‘The point was, if the diagrams were right…’ Eunice shook her head, as if she was still experiencing the awe of that moment. ‘We could do incredible things. We could build engines powerful enough to fling a ship to Neptune in weeks. But that was just the start of it – the least dramatic breakthrough.’ She smiled again. ‘My physicist was right, too. The engine that brought you to Lionheart was the fruit of that very early research. Really, it’s just a standard VASIMR motor with a few wrinkles smoothed out. The kind of thing we’d probably have stumbled on eventually, given enough time. But this wasn’t a stumble. We saw how to make it better, and it worked. You can’t know how that made us feel. We’d proven that there was testable science in the rock diagrams. But if the least dramatic predictions gave us an engine five times faster than anything else out there, what would we be getting into when we started testing the really frightening predictions?’

‘You tell us,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Even with the scope of the equipment in Lionheart, we could only probe the margins of the new physics. But that was enough, for now. These basic experiments have already pointed to a technology so potent that it would make the engine in that ship look like a toy.’ Eunice gestured at the black mosaic. ‘We can do much better than that. For a hundred and fifty years we’ve been locked into a few hours of space around one little star. Even being able to reach Neptune in a few weeks doesn’t alter that. But now we have the means to break out of the solar system. A stardrive, if you will. If the physics is to be believed, then true interstellar travel is now within our grasp. Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s still going to take a long time. A few per cent of the speed of light, that’s what we’re looking at. Pitiful and inadequate compared to the scale of things. Horsepiss against all that cosmic immensity. Even the nearest solar system will still be hundreds of years away. But that’s hundreds, not tens of thousands!’

She was becoming increasingly animated, as if this whole speech was approaching a carefully scripted climax.

‘We already think on that kind of timescale, as a species. We’re starting to live long enough, and we’ve accepted the burden of century-long endeavours like the repairing of Earth’s climate. So it’s not completely abhorrent to think of interstellar travel in those terms. Of course, there’s a catch.’

‘There’d have to be,’ Geoffrey said, ‘or else why wouldn’t you have gone public sixty years ago?’

She nodded, with what looked to Geoffrey to be inexpressible relief and gratitude, as if her most dire fear had been that he would not understand. ‘I said it wasn’t a toy. Sixty years ago, I did not think that as a species we had the wisdom to accept these gifts. Not at the end of that century, when there were still people who not only remembered wars, but had experienced them… Would you have felt any more confident, in my shoes?’

Geoffrey discarded the flip answer he’d been about to give. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Probably not.’

‘The energy implicit in the rock diagrams would have been enough to wipe us out many times over,’ Eunice said. ‘We’d dodged that bullet once, in the era of nuclear weapons. Did we have the collective smarts to dodge it a second time? I thought not – or at least had such grave doubts that I could not leave matters to chance. So I didn’t. I followed what struck me as the only rational course, under the circumstances. I decided to sleep on matters, and see what happened.’

‘You didn’t sleep,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You went into seclusion, for the next sixty-two years – or however long it was after you figured all this out. Then you died.’

‘I didn’t die,’ Eunice said. ‘I just put other arrangements in place. Lin Wei and I might have had our differences, but I’d always hoped that Ocular would find something remarkable. When Lin came to me, when she presented the evidence of the Mandala structure on Sixty-One Virginis f, a series of processes were set in irrevocable motion. For the first time, we had a clear objective: a target for interstellar exploration. It felt right that we should also have the means to reach that target, if we so chose.’

‘But you can’t decide if the time is right,’ Jumai said. ‘Maybe we’re a fraction smarter than we were a hundred years ago, but is that smart enough? You’re just an artilect. You can’t possibly make that kind of choice.’

‘I don’t have to,’ Eunice said. ‘I’ve merely passed on my responsibility. Now it’s yours.’

‘You’re not serious,’ Geoffrey said.

Eunice’s smile was not without sympathy. ‘I did warn you that I was about to place a heavy burden on you.’ She offered her hand, not for him to take, but to sweep majestically around the room. ‘All this is yours now. The experiment, the rock carvings… do with them as you will. If you think humanity deserves this gift, is ready for it… then it’s yours to disseminate. Not as a commercial property, but as freely distributed knowledge. We’re rich enough as it is, wouldn’t you say? We can afford to give this away. If we’re wise enough to deal with this as a species, then we’re wise enough to deal with it collectively.’

‘And if we don’t think we’re ready?’ Jumai asked.

‘Forget about what you’ve seen in Lionheart, or better still destroy it. You have the resources of the family at your disposal; shouldn’t be too difficult.’

‘Everyone’s seen what the engine can do,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Even if we wanted to keep this quiet, people will want to know how we did that.’

‘Have the engine,’ Eunice said dismissively. ‘Without the conceptual framework of the new physics, it’s an awfully long leap from that to the stardrive.’

‘Even that small advance changes everything,’ Jumai said. ‘Just being able to get out here in a few weeks rather than months is going to shake things up. The outer solar system isn’t going to look so far away any more.’

‘So push the frontier back a little further,’ Eunice said. ‘It’s what I always did.’ She clasped her hands. ‘Now, this may sound ungracious given that you’ve really only just arrived, but we should begin making preparations for your return journey. I was perfectly serious about not keeping you prisoner here. That wasn’t the point of this exercise.’

‘You’ll let us take the ship back?’ Jumai asked.

‘After it’s refuelled and repaired, which – with all of Lionheart turned to the task – shouldn’t take more than a week. Then you can go back into hibernation. Perhaps when you arrive, you’ll be closer to your decision.’

‘I still don’t know what happened to you,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I know you didn’t die in the Winter Palace because there was nobody up there to die, and consequently no ashes to be brought home, either. Which means that the last time anyone saw you alive – anyone we can trust, that is – was before you left for your final mission.’

‘Lin Wei was kind enough to think of me,’ Eunice said. ‘The least I can do is pay her back, in some small measure. Remember these numbers, and give them to Lin. I think they will answer at least one of your questions.’ She reeled off a string of digits, then repeated them. ‘Lin Wei will understand.’

‘There’s one more thing,’ Jumai said. ‘You talk as if you’re the only person… the only thing… that knows any of this. Fine, you’re an artilect – I’m ready to accept that there isn’t another living soul in this iceteroid. But your husband knew, and you’ve told us about the physicist. You’ve also told us that it took insider help to pull all this off without the rest of your family finding out. So we’re not the only ones, are we?’

‘My husband died a long time ago,’ Eunice said. ‘Long before the true significance of the rock drawings became clear. And anyway, even if he’d lived, and known… I’d still have trusted him to keep it all a secret. This information will be destabilising, whenever it’s made public knowledge, and Jonathan liked stability more than anything else. That’s why I left him on Mars.’

‘And the physicist?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘He was a brilliant young Tanzanian,’ Eunice said. ‘A brave and courageous thinker. But the rock drawings destroyed him. Not as a human being, but as a scientist. He’d… seen too much. Glimpsed too much of the inner workings of the universe, too soon and too quickly. He was a searcher after truth, and to have it revealed to him so readily, without effort… the entire intellectual purpose of his life was undermined in one blow. Once the experiments were designed, he pulled back – left the detailed running and interpretation to the artilects.’

‘And the insider?’ Geoffrey probed.

‘The same person,’ Eunice told him. ‘When he turned his back on physics… he returned to Africa. He was a very good man, and none of this could have been achieved without him.’ Then her voice softened. ‘And now he has died, and you must go home to bury him.’

CHAPTER FORTY

They were in Lionheart for a week, as the golem had anticipated. The ship was allowed to approach and dock, and soon after that robots were swarming all over it, attending to the damage and preparing it for the return journey home.

‘We never had a name for it,’ Geoffrey said, ‘since it obviously isn’t the ship you left in.’

‘Call it Summer Queen, if you like,’ Eunice told them.

Since the repairs and refuelling were entirely automated processes, there was nothing Geoffrey and Jumai needed to do but wait until their ride was ready. They had been given the option of re-entering hibernation early, but both had decided against that. Neither wished to go to sleep until the ship was already on its way, putting distance between itself and the iceteroid.

Geoffrey couldn’t speak for Jumai, but he had no difficulty analysing his own reluctance. He simply didn’t have unquestioning confidence in Eunice, or in the artilect emulating her. It had already proven fallible, and for all that it articulated regret and sadness about Hector’s death, and even Memphis’s, he had no reason to suppose that those utterances carried the slightest emotional weight. It was making placating noises, but behind them, as Jumai had already pointed out, was just stuff. Machinery. And while machinery might ponder a set of actions that had led to a less than desirable outcome and adjust its future behaviour accordingly, it was a stretch to call that remorse.

Lionheart had been equipped to care for human visitors, and that was where they spent the week while Summer Queen – that name was as good as any – was overhauled. There was a suite of rooms and modules, a recreation complex, a gymnasium and a couple of centrifuges, one large enough to contain a commons and dining area – enough to keep a team of technical staff comfortable for months. They chose separate rooms and adjusted the furnishings accordingly to suit their preferences. There was entertainment, incoming transmissions – not full aug, but enough to keep them up to date on developments elsewhere in the system – and they had the means to send and receive private communications.

There was a limit to what Geoffrey was willing to discuss until he was face to face with his sister, but he told Sunday that they were both safe, and would be returning home as soon as the ship was cleared for departure. Allowing for the preparations, and the fifty-odd days of journey time it would take to reach near-Earth space, they would be back in two months.

‘We’ll be difficult to miss,’ he said.

Then he called Lucas, and gave him the news about Hector.

Ten hours later, return transmissions arrived from Sunday and Lucas. Neither of them had a lot to say, simply expressing relief that Geoffrey and Jumai were alive, and would soon be on their way home. Lucas thanked Geoffrey for the news about his brother, but beyond that he was implacable, as if he wasn’t entirely ready to take the news at face value. Even Sunday had appeared reticent to comment on it. She was in Africa, Geoffrey learned: after returning from Mars, she had travelled to the household to keep an eye on his elephants. Not just chinging, but physically there, in body and mind. He was grateful, and when he considered that by being in Africa she was necessarily neglecting her own life back on the Moon, her work and commissions, his gratitude became boundless. But Geoffrey and Jumai were coming back now, and Sunday didn’t need to spend all that time waiting on Earth. He asked her to promise him that she would return to the Moon before his arrival.

Later, when Jumai and Geoffrey were dining in the centrifuge, being waited on by Plexus machines, she said, ‘They’re not sure we’re us. That’s why they’re holding back, I think. That and the fact that we’re obviously holding back something as well. Can you blame them? We’ve been duped and manipulated by artilects; Sunday’s been cheated by the Pans. Right now no one knows who or what to trust. For all they know, we might be dead by now.’

Geoffrey agreed. The fact that they couldn’t give a plausible account of what had happened in Lionheart wasn’t helping their case, either. It would be better when they got home, and he could talk properly. Not just with Sunday and Jitendra, but with Lucas as well. There was no escaping that. Lucas would have to be told about Lionheart.

‘That’s not really true,’ Jumai said delicately. ‘Hector never got to find out why Eunice wanted us here.’

‘So you’re saying that because he was never let in on the secret, I don’t have to share it with Lucas?’

‘I’m saying you don’t owe him anything. You didn’t drag Hector into this – it was the other way around. Later, you saved his neck.’

‘Didn’t do him any good, did it? I just postponed it.’

‘If Hector hadn’t died… it would probably have been one of us. So consider that score settled. Did you hate him at the end?’

Geoffrey had to search himself for the honest answer. The automatic reply was to say that no, he had forgiven Hector everything. But the reality was more complicated than that. ‘We saw things differently,’ he said, fingering the stem of his wine glass. ‘I believe there are absolutes. Rights and wrongs, lines in the sand. Moral certainties. I think Hector was wrong to go about things the way he did. He and Lucas shouldn’t have blackmailed me, they shouldn’t have used the elephants as a bargaining chip, and they shouldn’t have put the family name above all other considerations.’ He smiled at himself. ‘But I understand some of the cousins’ fears now. More so than I ever have. I thought we might end up uncovering something, but I had no idea it was going to be this momentous. And Eunice was right: it is dangerous, and this knowledge shouldn’t be shared until we’re absolutely sure it won’t rip humanity apart. Maybe we are ready for it, and maybe we’re not – just yet. Either way, we know about it – you and me, and soon Sunday and Lucas. That means it’s already out there, in a small way. And maybe Eunice was right about that but wrong about something else: that it’ll take an enormous amount of luck for someone to go from Summer Queen to the physics behind the stardrive. If she’s wrong about that, then the genie’s already out of the bottle.’

He paused and gazed at the wine still in the glass. ‘Which means Hector and Lucas were right to be cautious, right to be concerned about something from the past upsetting the present. They couldn’t have known how potentially damaging it was all going to turn out to be, but their instincts were right. And if their instincts were right, then maybe their methods were as well. Maybe the means do sometimes justify the ends.’ He emptied the glass and waited for Jumai to pour him another measure from the bottle, which was a satisfying Patagonian red – shipped up from the inner system in 2129, if the label was to believed.

The year of his birth, not that he attached any significance to that.

‘So they were wrong,’ Jumai said, ‘but maybe they were right as well. And that line in the sand might not be as simple as it looks.’

‘I didn’t hate Hector,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘I used to, I won’t pretend that I didn’t. But not near the end. I can’t say I ever got close to liking him, but when all’s said and done…’

‘He was your cousin, and he did do one brave thing.’ Jumai raised her own glass. ‘To Hector, in that case.’

‘To Hector.’

‘Although Lucas will always be a prick.’

‘One we have to work with, unfortunately,’ Geoffrey said. He sipped the wine, placed the glass down and continued with his meal for a few mouthfuls. ‘Although it’s Sunday that worries me.’

‘I don’t see Sunday as the problem in this situation – especially as she already knows ninety per cent of the story.’

‘It’s the artilect,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Remember what Eunice told us, about how Memphis’s entire mission in life was undermined by the rock diagrams? That’s how it’s going to be with Sunday. She’s spent years creating the Eunice construct, and now I’m going to have to tell her it’s all been wasted effort. That there’s a simulation of Eunice in Lionheart that’s at least as believable as the one she’s created. How’s she going to take that?’

‘She won’t have to.’

It was not Jumai that had spoken, but the golem. It had arrived unbidden and was standing in the doorway to the kitchen area.

‘What do you want?’ Geoffrey asked, considering its uninvited arrival a violation of their privacy.

‘Sunday need never know about me. You haven’t mentioned me in your transmissions home. I’d know if you had, and… well, you couldn’t have, shall we say.’

‘Because you’d have doctored our messages?’ Jumai asked.

‘Better that than have the authorities know the artilect law was breached,’ Eunice said. ‘Things may have relaxed in recent years, but you can never be too careful. No: the world doesn’t need to know about me, and neither does Sunday.’

‘I’m not going to lie to my sister, if she asks a direct question,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Tell her that Lionheart was being run by machines, and that the machines had a figurehead. There’s no lie in any of that.’

He shook his head. ‘You’ll still exist.’

‘No, I won’t.’ The golem moved to their table, drew out a chair for itself, sat down. ‘I had a function, a very limited and specific one, which was to be here for you. I’ve done that now, and there’s no further reason for my existence. You know what you need to know. If you return to Lionheart, the other machines will take care of your needs. They are fully capable of running the experiment should you wish to see it reactivated. And I, for my part, will cease to exist. The routines emulating me will be erased. There will still be an artilect, but it won’t have a human face, or my memories. It won’t even remember being me.’

‘That’s suicide,’ Jumai said.

‘It would only be suicide if I had ever lived.’ Eunice hesitated. ‘Might I ask one indulgence, though? Summer Queen will be made ready regardless of what happens to me, so it would make no practical difference to you if I ended myself now. I’d rather not, though. Not while there’s still the possibility of conversation.’

‘We can’t mean anything to you,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You didn’t even exist before we arrived. You said so yourself.’

‘That’s true.’ Eunice looked at her hands, resting on the edge of the table. ‘I was only actualised at the moment when you proved your identity, in the airlock. Before that… I was a potential in the artilect, a set of dormant routines.’

‘So you shouldn’t have experienced anything before you were actualised,’ Jumai said.

‘I shouldn’t have, and I can’t say I did. But those years of waiting…’ She frowned, as if examining some puzzle or conundrum that refused to make sense. ‘I felt them. Each and every second. And when you came, when human voices returned to this place… I was glad. And I still am. And I do not welcome that which must be done.’ Then her frown softened and she produced a sad and defiant smile. ‘I’m not asking the world, am I? Just a little conversation and companionship, before you go.’

In that moment he thought he could forgive her everything.

‘Of course,’ Geoffrey said.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Summer Queen took them home – back to the inner system, back to Lunar orbit. Jumai and Geoffrey spent a few days with Sunday and Jitendra in the Descrutinised Zone – Sunday had returned home for the last two weeks before his arrival – and then they all took the sleeper down to Libreville. As before, Geoffrey opted to be woken a few hours out from the surface terminal, when they were still high enough to see the blue-bowed curvature of the horizon, the immense, planet-girdling vastness of Africa. On the Moon, Sunday had told him about the pull Earth had exerted on her, when she came back from Mars. He felt something of that now: a deep biological calling, as if a ghostly umbilical linked him with this place where he had been born, where his ancestors had lived and died across numberless generations. That imperative would always be there, he sensed. The outward urge was just as powerful, just as heartfelt, but it wouldn’t go unchallenged. No matter how far out people went, this longing would be present. They could try to ignore it, but this world had been their womb and cradle and that connection was too ancient and strong to be denied. He thought back to the day they had woken near Lionheart, when the sun had been reduced to a single white eye. To imagine going further out than that was to imagine a fundamental wrongness, an act of treason against his basic nature. He didn’t think this made him weak, just human. But evidently his was not a universal reaction. His grandmother had stared into that void and shrugged. Is that the best you’ve got? Impress me. But by no reasonable measure had Eunice been ordinary.

Jumai, Geoffrey felt certain, felt much the same way he did. Giddy with the thrill of having gone as far as they had, but profoundly glad to be on her way home. When she joined him, looking down at Africa, she took a childlike delight in picking out places she knew, communities and landmarks along the coast from Lagos. He couldn’t help but be caught up in her enthusiasm.

Yet it was strange to return. He’d had one set of burdens on his back when he came down the first time; now there was another. Even stranger not to feel entirely at odds with his family, although there would undoubtedly be complications and tensions to come, in the months and years that lay ahead.

‘I’ve been talking to Lucas,’ Sunday said, joining them on the viewing deck. ‘The scattering’s set for the day after tomorrow.’

‘Did you tell him I was sorry we couldn’t bring Hector home?’

‘I did, but you can tell him to his face when you see him.’ She rubbed a hand down her belly, in a gesture he didn’t remember her ever making before. It must have been unconscious, because her eyes were still fixed on the ground, far beneath them. ‘He’s not going to blame you for what happened,’ she went on. ‘If anything, he’s grateful that you tried to save Hector when you did. A lot’s changed, brother. Which is good. We could hardly go on the way we were, especially not now.’

They’d said very little about Lionheart in the Zone, and even less on the elevator. None of them would feel entirely safe until they were back in the household, and even then they would need to be circumspect, guarding a secret that could not be allowed to permeate the Akinya business empire, let alone the outside world. Not until they’d all agreed on the best course of action.

‘I’m just glad some of us made it back,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Including you and Jitendra.’

‘Considering I smashed Lucas’s proxy’s face to a pulp with my foot, he was remarkably accommodating. I think we’ll get on.’ She set her jaw determinedly. ‘We’d better. If the family can’t organise a united front, what hope is there for the rest of humanity?’ She leaned further over the rail, peering down at the wakes of huge ships off the Cameroonian coast: white vees, precise and economical as if they’d been inked in quick slashes by a master calligrapher. ‘I’m still not sure where the Pans fit into all this harmony and niceness, though. They gained nothing, and I’m not even sure what they did counts as a crime. Still leaves a sour taste, though.’

‘We needed them,’ Geoffrey said. ‘They needed us. It was a working relationship that served us all while it lasted.’

‘Have you given any thought to—’ Seeing his reaction, Sunday held up a hand before she’d finished her own sentence. ‘Never mind. You didn’t want to talk about them in the Zone; I shouldn’t have expected you to change your mind this quickly. We owe Chama and Gleb some kind of answer, though.’

‘We don’t owe them anything. Any debt we had to the Pans was wiped clean the moment they decided to shaft you on Mars.’

‘They’re my friends,’ Sunday said. ‘Whatever happened, they weren’t responsible for that. And they’ll still be just as keen to continue work with the Amboseli herd.’

‘Fine,’ Geoffrey said dismissively. ‘If they have a problem, they know where to find me. Now can we talk about something other than elephants?’

From Libreville, they rode a pair of airpods back to household – Geoffrey and Jumai in one, Sunday and Jitendra in the other. It was late when they arrived, the house magnificently gloomy and expansive, full of echoing halls and empty rooms. Lucas was waiting for them, evidently saddened yet bearing up – Geoffrey was surprised at first, until he remembered that he’d had many weeks to adjust to his brother’s death. They hugged like politicians at a summit, holding an uneasy embrace before pulling away and meeting each other’s gaze.

Later, when they were dining, Lucas declared, ‘I am ready to turn over a new page. We had our… differences, I won’t pretend otherwise. But my brother would not have wished there to be any further animosity between us.’ He blew out a breath through pursed lips, as if this utterance alone had already drained him to the marrow. ‘I think it is fair to say that none of us knew what we were getting into.’

‘I wouldn’t quibble with that,’ Geoffrey said.

‘For what it’s worth, you have my word that we will honour our pledges with regard to your funding.’

Geoffrey broke bread. ‘That may not be necessary, Lucas. Although I do appreciate the sentiment.’

Sunday looked at him doubtfully. ‘If you’re still expecting research backing from the Pans, I think you might need to recalculate. I’ve been in touch with Chama and Gleb…’ She hesitated before continuing. ‘They may not be able to count on the full support of the Panspermian Initiative any more.’

‘They didn’t do anything wrong,’ Jitendra said.

‘It’s not them. It’s the organisation. From what they can gather, the events on Mars have caused a rift. There’s disunity at high levels – talk of splinter movements, even.’

‘So much for finding out what those numbers mean,’ Sunday said.

‘Numbers?’ Lucas asked.

Geoffrey was conscious that he’d yet to give Sunday a complete account of what had happened, let alone his cousin. But she knew about the numbers. He invited her to continue.

‘My brother and Jumai encountered a construct in Lionheart,’ she said, ‘a low-level emulation of Eunice, a bit like the one guarding the Winter Palace. It mentioned a sequence of numbers, said they’d mean something to Lin Wei. We’ve no idea what they signify.’

‘You could tell me now,’ Lucas said. ‘I could make enquiries.’

‘They may not be the thing you need to know first,’ Geoffrey said. He took a moment to refill the glasses, including Lucas’s. ‘We’ve been confronted with two difficult decisions, cousin. I’ll come to the second in a moment – it’s complicated, and you may need a little while to take it all on board.’

Lucas gave an easy-going shrug. ‘And the first?’

‘Whether or not to tell you about the second,’ Sunday said. ‘Hell, even I don’t know more than the barest sketch of what happened out there. But my brother says you have a right to know, and I’m prepared to trust him on that.’

Geoffrey smiled and leaned in closer. ‘Think of the most difficult business decision you’ve ever had to make, Lucas. The single hardest choice, in your entire life. Now multiply it by twenty.’

‘You’re not even close,’ Jumai said.

Lucas looked like a man who suspected he might be the butt of a joke. ‘Obviously there are commercial repercussions… we’ll want to reverse-engineer Summer Queen’s engine, lock down all the necessary patents—’

‘The engine’s a detail,’ Geoffrey said. ‘All the construction schedules are aboard the ship. They’re ours. But we don’t get to make one yuan out of it.’

The skin at the side of Lucas’s mouth twitched. ‘If they’re ours—’

‘We get to build copies of that prototype,’ Geoffrey continued, ‘but we waive exclusivity on the design. The licence and all associated technical data are to be held and administered by the United Orbital Nations, or some equivalent body with reach beyond Earth – we’ll figure out the details later. They’ll assign construction rights to any commercial or transnational interest with the necessary background and experience in high-energy propulsion.’

‘That’s a world-changing technology. You’re saying we just give it away?’ Lucas squinted, as if his reality had suddenly loomed slightly out of focus.

‘It’s a sweetener,’ Geoffrey said. ‘There’s no doubt that the new engine will change things – it’ll shrink the solar system overnight, for a start. It could also do a lot of damage, if mishandled. Obviously we’ll have to assess things very carefully. That’s where you come in, Lucas. We want you to be a part of this.’

‘After everything that has happened between us?’

‘Hector would have been involved,’ Sunday said. ‘Whether he liked it or not, he’d have been in on this. Forced to accept his share of responsibility. Now you get to take his place.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Lucas said. ‘You say that this new engine is just a sweetener, as if it’s not even the most important outcome of recent events.’

‘It isn’t,’ Geoffrey said.

Lucas was looking down at his meal, as if somewhere in it there might be at least the hint of an answer. ‘Then perhaps you had better start at the beginning,’ he said.

When they had finished dining, and while Jumai was settling into her room, Geoffrey went wandering, listlessly at first and then with a growing determination. He patrolled the west wing, with its dark-framed cabinets and plinthed and labelled curiosities from his grandmother’s life. That had always been the museum wing, but suddenly it felt as if the museum had swelled to encompass the entire building, for all that it was clearly much too large for the meagre collection it was required to house. He wondered what the point of all this was, now that he knew so much of Eunice’s life had been a lie, or at least an incomplete and misdirecting version of events. Nothing that had really mattered to her was commemorated here. Not Phobos, not her friendship with Memphis, not the truth about Memphis himself, not Lionheart.

For one hot moment Geoffrey was struck by the mad impulse to grab a spade from the garden stores and start smashing wood and glass, reducing this lying past to shards and splinters. A few wheelbarrow loads, that was all it would be.

But the urge passed as quickly as it had arrived. Entirely too melodramatic, and in any case he only had to think of the patient hours Memphis had spent among these artefacts, tending them with devotion and loyalty. Even though he knew at least part of the truth.

He walked to Memphis’s room and pushed open the door. Nearly four months had passed since he was last there, but hibernation had compressed that time into little more than a week and a half of lived experience. He’d been speaking to Memphis, leaning on him to visit the herds. Memphis had obliged, as he always obliged. The next time he’d seen him, Memphis had been lying dead on the ground.

‘Why did you die?’ he asked, to the back of the empty office chair, still parked at its desk. ‘Why couldn’t you have waited until all this was over? The one person I could have used, to give me some guidance—’

‘He didn’t mean to,’ Eunice said.

He’d been wondering when the construct would reassert itself. There had been no sign of her in the Zone, and none on the descent to Libreville. He hadn’t discussed the matter with Sunday – he was still skirting around the subject, hoping she wouldn’t force him to speak about the artilect in Lionheart – and at the back of his mind was the faint and not unwelcome suspicion that his sister had used her privileges to remove the construct from his head.

Evidently not.

‘How could you know?’ he asked her, the wine fuelling his indignation. ‘How could you possibly fucking know?’

She did not appear upset by his tone of address. ‘I knew Memphis, Geoffrey, as well as anyone. He was an old man, but he still loved life. Whatever happened out there… it could only have been an accident.’

‘After all the years he’d been helping me? Why then and there?’

‘You don’t still believe Lucas and Hector were behind it, do you? Not now.’

‘No,’ he said, and it was true; he didn’t. Even though that realisation slammed one door and opened another, revealing an alternative no more pleasing to behold.

‘Memphis had a lot on his mind after my death,’ the construct said. ‘Too much, for one man. When things started to get complicated, and when you started asking tricky questions… I think he found it difficult to focus on everything. That was all it was: the understandable carelessness of a man under pressure.’

‘Then exactly whose fault was that?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Mine, and mine alone,’ Eunice said. ‘I’m willing to accept that responsibility, if you accept yours.’

He kept having to remind himself that this version of Eunice was at least hazily cognisant of his grandmother’s true history. Before his arrival at Lionheart, Sunday had already integrated the contents of the helmet with her own version of the construct. The file she had uploaded to Summer Queen had been stripped down, but there was no reason to assume that this version, the one haunting him right now, was not the most complex iteration to date. Provided that he dismissed all knowledge of the artilect.

‘He never said a word about his past,’ Geoffrey told her.

‘There was no need. He’d shed it, moved on. Would it have changed anything, if you’d known Memphis was more than just a caretaker? Would you have respected him more?’ She shook her head, answering for him. ‘Don’t say “yes” because then you’d disappoint me, and I’d rather you didn’t. He was a good and loyal man, and he served this family well, and raised you and Sunday when your parents were halfway to Neptune, and neither of you turned into monsters, and that’s enough. That’s all anyone could ever ask.’ She touched her ghost hand against the back of his chair. ‘The scattering is tomorrow, isn’t it? I’d like to see it. Would that offend you?’

‘You don’t have to ask my permission,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You can be there whether I like it or not, and I wouldn’t even have to know about it.’

‘That’s exactly why I’m asking,’ Eunice said.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The next day he took an airpod out to the basin, grateful when no one else had made any overtures about accompanying him. Under other circumstances he might have put that down to their lack of interest, and been suitably offended by it. He doubted that was the case now. Sunday, Jitendra and Jumai knew he had matters of his own to attend to, and they were giving him the privacy he needed.

He flew low and fast, trying to empty his mind. It was easier said than done. Though the rains had come in force, greening land that had been parched in January, he knew the old landmarks too well for it to look truly new. He had put down too much of his life here, scratched too much of his history into the terrain. Every waterhole, every copse of trees, every trail had some personal significance, however slight. He had travelled far but he hadn’t broken the ties to this tiny part of Africa. Or the ties hadn’t let him escape.

He circled his usual study areas, relying on his own eyes to pick out the herds and lone males. It was trickier with the increased tree cover, but he’d had enough practice to be sure of not missing much. He knew the elephants’ seasonal movements, their habits and customs and favoured meeting places, and his eyes and brain were attuned to picking out shapes and associations that might have eluded the less experienced.

It did not take him long to locate Matilda and her clan – they were less than half a kay from where he’d assumed they would be – and a quick series of looping inspections established that the M-group had suffered no losses since his last survey. Indeed, there were a couple of babies calved while he was away. There’d been several pregnancies in the group at the time of his departure, so that wasn’t surprising. From the movements of the calves it was impossible to tell who the mothers had been – the babies ambled playfully from one adult to another, sharing in the overall protection and nurturing environment of the M-group.

He made one low pass, to let the elephants know he was arriving – or that someone was arriving, anyway, as they’d normally associate him with the Cessna, not an airpod – and then selected a landing site within easy range of the group. Thick lush grass buckled under the airpod’s skis. He opened the canopy and climbed out, grunting as his shoulders protested with the effort. His muscles and bones were still aching after the prolonged period of weightlessness aboard Summer Queen and Lionheart, but not so much that he felt in need of an exo.

The day was hot, dry and windless. There were no clouds and that was a propitious omen for the scattering. He had learned of the plans and approved of them, although there was still a tiny twinge of doubt at the back of his mind. Memphis had never been one for the attention-seeking gesture, and perhaps he would not entirely approve of the arrangements. But then, if the Akinya family wished to honour him, wasn’t that their prerogative?

That was for later, though. Geoffrey had other business now.

He sealed the airpod and strode through the undergrowth towards the herd. After a few paces he found a stick and grabbed it to beat the ground ahead of him. He carried nothing with him – no monitoring equipment, no sports bag stuffed with pencils and paper. Just the clothes he had on, which were already beginning to stick to his skin. He had made a mental note to allow himself time to change before they all went out from the household – Sunday wasn’t going to get a chance to accuse him of smelling of dung this time. It wasn’t the heat making him sweat, though. Geoffrey was nervous.

‘It’s me,’ he called, as he always did. ‘Geoffrey. I’ve come back.’

He pushed through the trees and bushes, whacking the ground with the stick and calling to announce his approach. From close ahead he heard the threat rumble of an adult female, and then he made out the humped forms of a couple of outlying herd members. He noted their shapes and ear profiles, recognising them as individuals. Still whacking the ground and announcing his arrival, he circled around the pair. He leapt a narrow brook and nearly twisted his ankle on landing. The stick had served its purpose, so he threw it away. He crossed behind another stand of trees and found a group of six elephants, with Matilda facing him. Behind the M-group matriarch stood Molly and Martha, two high-ranking females, both of whom had scarred foreheads, one tusk missing and heavily battle-damaged ears. Melissa, the young elephant that Memphis had helped Geoffrey inject with nanomachines, stood between Molly and Martha, her head lowered and her eyes brimming with alert watchfulness. Two yet-to-be-named calves moved among the larger elephants.

Geoffrey moved into sunlight. He walked slowly, but with all the authority and confidence he could muster. He didn’t doubt that the elephants were aware of his fear, broadcast through the chemical medium of his sweat. But at least he could look the part.

Matilda broke away from the group, taking a handful of lumbering steps in his direction. She emitted a rumble and flicked dirt with her trunk. Not at him, exactly, but a kind of diagonal warning shot across his bows. There was something dismissive in the gesture, as if he scarcely warranted more effort than that. Geoffrey raised his open hands and stood his ground. Such behaviour wasn’t out of character for Matilda. It didn’t imply hostile intent so much as a ritualistic reminder of her status, the way a queen might demand that her courtiers approach the throne bent double and suppliant.

The other five elephants had begun to drift back, though their attention was divided equally between Matilda and the human who had interrupted their communal food-gathering.

Matilda stopped ten paces from Geoffrey. Her trunk was raised, her forehead wide and powerful as a battering ram. He could hardly see her eyes.

‘I know what happened,’ he said, pushing aside thoughts of how absurd it was, to be talking to an elephant. These words weren’t for Matilda, though. ‘I did what I’d been too fearful to do before. I correlated your movements, on the day Memphis died. And I know you were there. I know you were with him.’

He had meant to end it there, to turn around and return to the airpod. Now that the moment was upon him, though, he knew that he would always regret wasting this final opportunity.

He voked the command, opened the neurolink. Her brain appeared next to his, two weird squirming sea-sponges, pulsing with blood and heat and the endless chatter of electrochemical signalling. His own fear centre was already lit up like a football stadium, glowing across the night.

He wasted no time. Up through the tens, twenties, thirties. Forty per cent, then fifty. Her state of mind subsumed his own, crushing his fear, replacing it with something much closer to annoyance, only slightly tempered by wariness. Up through sixty, seventy per cent. Her body image had dismantled his own, distorting his perception of scale. He was huge but tiny; she was tiny but huge.

At ninety per cent, he allowed the neurolink to stabilise.

He knew what she had done. The mind dambursting into his was the mind of a premeditated and calculating killer. Memphis had been careless, it was true: too much on his mind, and when he went out to do Geoffrey’s errands, he hadn’t taken the precautions that would normally have been second nature. Above all, he had made the fatal error of trusting Matilda, simply because she had never once shown the slightest intent to harm him.

It must have been quick. One day, perhaps, Geoffrey would have the courage to review the record of events captured by her own eyes and those of any other elephants close enough to witness the murder – there’d been several. It didn’t really matter, though. He had placed her at the scene of the crime and that was sufficient.

How was the easy part. Memphis had been distracted, and Matilda had closed in on him too quickly for him to react. The aug was thin here, the Mechanism toothless. Had the Mech detected the imminent nature of that violent and terminal act of aggression, it might have done something. But there’d been no time – either for the Mech to intervene, or for Memphis to save himself.

The why was more speculative. Geoffrey had a theory, though.

Matilda had committed the deed, but the fault was not really hers. She had developed a grudge against Memphis, and given his years of uneventful interaction with the herd, there could only be one explanation for that. Geoffrey had implanted the idea in her head that Memphis was an elephant-killer.

Because it was true. Because Geoffrey had known that his whole adult life, and longer. He had known it since the day Memphis came to rescue Sunday from the hole, the depression in the ground where the artilect had been washed out of the earth. When they had been making their way back to the airpod, following a trail through a grove of trees, a bull had blocked their path. Memphis had told Geoffrey to look away, and he had, for a few moments. But he had not been able to resist looking back, thinking that Memphis would never know. And he had seen the fallen bull.

It was only later that he had come to a full understanding of what had happened in that confrontation. Memphis had reached into the adult bull’s mind and used his human privilege to submit a killing command to its implanted neuromachinery A whispered death-order, one softly voked incantation, and that was all it had taken to bring the bull down. At any other time, Memphis might have risked sending a less lethal command, one that would simply put the elephant to sleep.

But he had taken no chances that day. Two children’s lives were in his hands.

Geoffrey had carried the memory of that day ever since, so much a part of him that he barely noticed it. Memphis had taken no pleasure in the act; he’d done it not because he despised or feared the bull but because he had an absolute and binding duty of care to the children in his charge that took precedence over all other considerations. He had dispensed death only as a last resort, and to Geoffrey’s knowledge that was the only time Memphis had ever been called upon to kill another creature. Kill rather than stun, so that the bull never troubled another human being. Geoffrey didn’t doubt that the act had troubled Memphis in the days that followed.

But there had been no witnesses to that act, and the bull had not been part of a herd. Was it really possible that Matilda’s decision to kill Memphis could be in any way linked to that incident from Geoffrey’s childhood?

It wasn’t quite the case that there’d been no witnesses, though. Geoffrey himself had seen what happened, or its aftermath, at least. And, years later, he had welcomed Matilda into his head.

He thought back to the time when he had allowed the neurolink to transmit his mental state into hers, letting her share in the pain of the scorpion sting. He had no conscious recollection of associating Memphis with the death of the bull. But had he inadvertently communicated that association to Matilda? Had he, in the opening of his mind, planted the symbolic notion in hers that Memphis killed elephants?

He wanted to dismiss the idea as absurd. But the more repellent he found it, the more it kept coming back. It wasn’t Memphis’s fault, for being inattentive. It wasn’t even Matilda’s, for taking defensive action against what she now understood to be a threat. She had her herd to think of, after all. She was only doing right by them.

Inescapably, he was forced back to one truth: the fault was his, and his alone.

Intentionally or otherwise, Geoffrey had killed Memphis.

All at once the resolve left him. He had intended to push the neurolink to one hundred per cent, just this once. But the moment had passed. If that meant he was too timid to follow his own investigations to their logical conclusion, then so be it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have known better.’

He closed the connection and turned back for the airpod.

More visitors had arrived by the time he returned to the household, judging by the airpods gathered along the parking area. Jumai was waiting for him, already dressed for the scattering. She wore a tight-fitting black jacket and a slim black skirt, offset with flashes of red around the waistline. She brushed a hand against his arm as they met in one of the hallways, lowering her voice to a concerned hush. ‘How did it go out there?’

‘I had some unfinished business,’ Geoffrey said.

She nodded slowly. ‘And is it finished now?’

‘I think so.’

‘I’ll be heading back to Lagos tomorrow. Not to my old job, but Lagos is still where my contacts are. I’m hoping I might be able to leverage my recent experiences into a new contract, maybe off-Earth. Still a lot of stuff out there that needs cleaning up.’

‘Aren’t you fed up with excitement?’

‘If you mean do I want to dodge high-velocity ice packages for the rest of my life, then the answer’s no. But I do need challenges. I certainly got them when I signed up to help you break into the Winter Palace.’

He smiled tightly. ‘More than you were counting on, I’m sure.’

‘Something’s definitely changed. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s me.’ Jumai looked up and down the hall, holding her tongue as a proxy strode past – not one of the household units, Geoffrey decided. ‘Look, I’ll only say this once. Being here isn’t normal for either of us, and I’m not one for funerals at the best of times. But when I get back to Lagos, will you come over and spend a few days? I mean, work permitting.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘I’ll hold you to it, all right?’ Only then did she drop her hand from his sleeve. ‘You’d better go and scrub up, rich boy. I’ll see you in the courtyard when you’re done – Sunday and Jitendra are already there.’

‘I won’t be long.’

He went to his room, stripped and showered, and was halfway through dressing in clean clothes when his gaze chanced upon the six wooden elephants. He’d been too tired and preoccupied to pay any attention to them yesterday. Why should he? They were part of the furniture, that was all. The fact that the constructs guarding both the Winter Palace and Lionheart had questioned him about them was neither here nor there. It only meant that the elephants really had been a gift from Eunice, as he had believed at the time. Or rather from whatever intelligence had been masquerading as his grandmother, during all the long years of her imaginary exile.

But he realised now that there was rather more to them than that. He sat down on his bed, as momentarily dizzy as if he’d been knocked on the head. It couldn’t be, could it? After all this time, so close at hand. So close to his hands.

He picked up the heaviest of the elephants, the bull at the head of the group. Not very plausible given elephant social dynamics, but he supposed that hadn’t really been the point.

He stroked the elephant’s body, reassuring himself that its composition was what he had always assumed, always been told: some dark, dense wood.

It was. He was sure of that.

But the base material, that was something else. Heavy and black and irregular, flat along the top and bottom, as if cleaved from some larger coal-like motherlode. He tipped the piece to look at its base, the elephant upside down, and made out the faint scratch bisecting it from one side to the other. He’d never noticed that scratch before, and even if he had, he’d have had no reason to attach any significance to it. But now he knew. It only took a few moments to confirm that there were similar scratches on the other five bases.

He knew exactly where they’d come from.

Thinking of what they had lost, what they had gained, what was yet at stake, Geoffrey sat sobbing, the bull elephant in his hand as heavy and cold as a stone.

Sunday and her brother walked out with the rest of the clan, the family and friends, into the evening air, Lucas with them, Jitendra and Jumai not far away. The sky was pellucid and still, as clear as that long-ago evening when they had come to scatter Eunice’s ashes. She had not been embodied then, at least not in flesh and blood, but it was hard to dislodge the memory that she had been here, walking on African soil, breathing African air.

‘I have been giving some thought to the matter we discussed over dinner,’ Lucas said, his voice low enough not to carry more than a few paces. He walked with his back straight and his hands clasped behind his back.

‘If you want evidence,’ Sunday said, ‘that’s going to be a little difficult. At least for the moment. There’s Summer Queen, obviously, but beyond that, you’ll just have to take a trip to Lionheart and see the test machinery for yourself. The construct told my brother that it’s fully operational.’

‘Summer Queen itself points to new physics, or at least an area of current physics that we only thought we understood,’ Lucas said. ‘That in itself does lend a certain credibility to the rest of the story. You’ll excuse any scepticism on my part, though, I hope. Even if it was Hector telling me these things, I’d still want more than mere words. It’s difficult enough to accept that our grandmother knew about this new physics, everything it implies… but to be asked to believe these things of Memphis? That he was not the man we imagined him to be?’

‘He was old enough not to have a past fixed in place by the Mech, or posterity engines,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I admit that there are… absences in his biography. But no more so than would be the case in a million people of his age.’ Lucas touched a hand to his mouth, coughing under his breath. ‘And there was once a physics student with a similar name, born in Tanzania at about the right time.’

‘Then you accept that there’s at least the possibility this is all true,’ Sunday said.

‘It would help if there was something… more. I believe what Geoffrey and Jumai have told me, and I also believe what you have told me about your exploits on Mars. I saw some of that for myself, remember, even if it wasn’t through my own eyes.’

Sunday flinched at the recollection of Lucas’s ruined face, the dislodged eyeball, the milky eruption of the proxy’s slick, wet innards.

‘Might I interrupt?’

The girl asking the question was someone Sunday had seen before, under similar circumstances. She was even wearing the same red dress, the same stockings and black shoes, the same hairstyle.

Out of curiosity, Sunday requested an aug tag. The girl was a golem, although the point of origin of the ching bind couldn’t be resolved.

‘You’re Lin.’

‘Of course,’ the girl said. ‘I knew your grandmother.’

Geoffrey sneered. ‘After what happened on Mars, I’m surprised you’d show your face.’

‘Did I cross you personally?’ she asked, shooting a sharp stare at him from under her straight black fringe.

‘You never got the chance,’ Geoffrey said.

‘If I had something to be ashamed of, do you think I’d have bothered introducing myself? What happened on Mars was not my concern, and I wouldn’t have approved it had I known. As it transpires, the gesture achieved nothing.’

‘Chama and Gleb told me there was a rift,’ Sunday said.

‘The Mandala discovery has only stressed fault lines that were already present,’ Lin Wei said. ‘I think the world has a right to know that we’ve found evidence of alien intelligence on another world, and that it shouldn’t have to wait until that data seeps into the public domain. Some of my colleagues have a different view. If I’m feeling charitable, it’s because they don’t think the rest of humanity is quite ready for such a shattering revelation. In my less charitable moments, it’s because they don’t want to share their secret with anyone.’

‘I can’t help you,’ Geoffrey said.

‘The data will be made public sooner or later,’ Lin Wei said unconcernedly, as if his help didn’t matter one way or the other. ‘I’ve put in measures to ensure that happens. Naturally, I have my critics, even enemies. Some of them are going to make life very interesting for me in the coming years. But that’s not a bad thing: at least I won’t be bored. I was ready to leave Tiamaat long before you gave me an excuse, Geoffrey. But I thank you for providing the spur.’ She paused. ‘I’ve a gift for you, but you’ll have to come and get it. It would be far too bothersome to bring it back down to Earth again.’

Sunday searched her brother’s face for clues. Geoffrey looked none the wiser.

‘You don’t owe me any gifts, Arethusa.’

‘Oh, all right then.’ She wrinkled her nose in irritation. ‘Call it returned goods. Your little aeroplane, Geoffrey. It was retrieved from the sea, when the Nevsky rescued you.’ What was that, Sunday wondered, but a sly reminder of the debt he owed her? ‘In all the fuss, it ended up being loaded aboard the heavy-lift rocket. I’ve had it cleaned and repaired, and it’s yours to take back whenever you like.’

‘What’s the catch?’

‘None, other than that you’ll have to visit one of our orbital leaseholds to retrieve it. But there’ll be no diplomatic complications. You are, after all, still a citizen of the United Aquatic Nations.’

Sunday frowned, wondering exactly what she meant by that. There was still a lot she needed to talk about with her brother. She supposed there would be plenty of time in the days to come.

‘Thank you for saving the Cessna,’ he said.

‘It was the least I could do. Well, almost the least. There is one other—’

But he cut her off. ‘You can take a message to Chama and Gleb for me. Will you do that?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Thank them for helping Sunday, while I was away. And tell them that the elephant work can continue. I have no objection to the establishment of a linked community. The Amboseli herds and the Lunar dwarves – they can share the same sensorium, the way Chama and Gleb planned. I’ll be glad to provide any technical assistance.’

‘I think they’ll be looking for more than just assistance,’ Sunday said. ‘Full collaboration, a shared enterprise.’

‘Then they’ve come to the wrong man.’ He walked on for a few more paces before elaborating. ‘I don’t work with elephants any more. That was something I used to do.’

Sunday could hardly believe what she was hearing. But she knew Geoffrey well enough to be certain that he wasn’t just saying that for dramatic effect, expecting everyone to put an arm around him and tell him how wonderfully important his work was, how he was undervalued and underappreciated, how he owed it to the elephants to keep on with the studies. She’d had that conversation often enough in the past.

This wasn’t it.

‘You’re serious.’

He nodded, but not with any sense of triumph. ‘I think we both have enough to keep us busy, don’t you?’

Lin Wei, to her credit, did not question Geoffrey’s sincerity. Perhaps it was just an outburst, something he’d retract in the days to come, but everything in her brother’s manner said otherwise.

‘Chama and Gleb will be sorry. I know they were looking forward to your involvement.’

‘They’re smart enough to manage without me. It was always the elephants they wanted, not the researcher.’

Lin Wei said, ‘I don’t think it’s very long to the scattering now.’ She made a gesture in the air, shaping a square, and the aug filled the square with darkness. ‘Can you all see this?’

They were still walking, but the square moved with them. One by one they confirmed that they were able to see it.

‘Sunday told Chama and Gleb about the numbers, and they in turn told me,’ Lin Wei went on. ‘The numbers wouldn’t have meant much to an outsider, but their meaning was immediately clear to me – as they would have been to Eunice.’

‘So what do they mean?’ Sunday asked.

The rectangle dappled itself with smudges of milky light. ‘Ocular pointing coordinates,’ Lin Wei said. ‘That’s what they are: a set of directions for the instrument. Before very long my adversaries will make it very difficult for me to access Ocular, but for the moment that is still my privilege – as well it should be, given that I conceived and birthed it. Needless to say, I did not hesitate to abuse that privilege by ordering Arachne to point Ocular in the direction corresponding to the coordinates.’

‘Mandala?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘No. Crucible lies in the constellation Virgo, and this is in the direction of Lyra, a completely different part of the sky. Close to Altair, in fact – one of the stars of the Summer Triangle. Arachne’s search algorithms eliminated any starlike objects from the immediate centre of the field, but you’ll note that there is still something there.’

‘What is it?’ Sunday asked.

‘I thought perhaps you might be able to tell me, given what the two of you have learned of your grandmother. It’s incredibly faint, and at first glance it appears quasarlike. But it’s not a quasar. It’s a… well, I don’t know. Neither does Arachne. She’s seen billions of astronomical objects, but nothing that looks remotely like this… energy source. That’s what it is – an energy source, highly Dopplered, we can tell from the spectrum – moving away from us along what appears to be a radial line of sight. We’ll have a better handle on that as time goes by, if we pick up lateral motion. But I don’t think we will. I think we will find that this thing, this object, started off in the solar system, about sixty years ago. And ever since then it’s been rushing away from us, falling into the summer stars.’

Geoffrey asked, ‘How far out is it now?’

Lin Wei’s smile was impish. ‘I think I’ve given you enough to be going on with, don’t you? Let’s just say it’s a long, long way – further than any human artefact has ever reached. And travelling at a quite ridiculous speed.’

‘To nowhere in particular?’ Sunday probed. ‘There’s no star along that exact line of sight?’

‘There are stars, to be sure. But none that strike us – Arachne or myself – as an obvious candidate.’ Lin Wei made a flicking gesture and the image disappeared.

‘That’s all you’re going to give us?’ Sunday asked.

‘For now. You want more, come and talk to me. I think we all have rather a lot to discuss, don’t you?’

‘She’s in that thing,’ Geoffrey said. ‘That’s what you think. That Eunice is in a ship, a ship that’s been heading away from Earth for sixty years.’

‘She spoke to me once,’ Sunday replied, ‘about how it would feel to just keep going. To never go home again.’ She paused, trying to call her grandmother’s exact words to mind. ‘Until Earth was just a blue memory. What I didn’t realise was… she meant to do it.’

‘She could still be—’ Geoffrey began. But he caught himself before the sentence was out.

Sunday nodded. He didn’t need to say what he was thinking. She was thinking the same thing herself.

She supposed the only way to know for sure would be to go out there. To catch up with that impossibly distant thing and see what was inside it.

A sleeping lion, perhaps. Senge Dongma.

Jitendra said, ‘I think it’s time.’

He was right, too. Sunday could feel the ground rumbling under them as the blowpipe sent its tiny package racing under the plains. As one they turned to face east. As if of its own volition, her hand rose to her neck, fingering the charm she had been given on Mars, binding her to the past, binding her to the future.

They watched the spark rise from the mountain, a tiny bright star climbing against the turn of the heavens. It was travelling ballistically now, carried on the momentum it had gained in the long acceleration as it rode the magnetic catapult. Some of that momentum was already ebbing: the package was encountering atmospheric resistance, albeit from air that was half as thick as at ground level, and gravity was beginning to reassert its claim. Ordinarily the launch lasers would have cut in by now, projecting their ferocious energies onto the underside of the package to give it that extra push into orbit. Some of the onlookers, Sunday felt certain, must already have come to the conclusion that the blowpipe had mistimed. Others, she felt equally sure, were entirely ignorant of the usual mechanics.

The star kept rising – from the party’s vantage point it appeared to be climbing vertically, but it was in fact following an arc, one that was already taking it east, out towards the Indian Ocean. Just when it looked on the point of falling, though, the lasers shone. Their beams scratched diamond-bright tracks in the sky, converging from Kilimanjaro’s summit to meet at a fixed focus point in space, where the air became a little ball of ionised hell. The focus would ordinarily have been immediately underneath the rising object, but the arrangements were different today; the lasers were now directing their energies directly ahead of the package. It had no protection against that; it had been designed to be pushed, not to hit that plasma head-on. With no frontal shielding beyond that necessary to withstand the aerodynamic stresses, the effect on the package was rapid and glorious. The star’s brightness flared by sudden magnitudes, until it looked as if a new day was dawning. Sunday raised her fingers against the dazzle, catching greens and pinks in the tiny blazing point. The light fluttered, and then – as quickly as it had begun – that little new sun began to break up, oozing molten droplets of itself. The colours subsided – gold turning to amber, amber to orange, orange to a slow dulling red. She tried to trace the falling sparks, but they were soon lost in the glow of the sky.

She knew the truth of it, that if any part of him was to rain down from that pyre, it would happen far out to sea. And perhaps no part had survived that incandescence. But from where Sunday was standing, from where everyone now stood, it was very hard not to believe that some part of their friend and mentor would end up touching the summit of that mountain, end up touching the snows of Kilimanjaro.

And that was enough.

We spoke of beginnings, at the start of this. It is well now to speak of endings. That was the last that Geoffrey had to do with Matilda, or the M-clan, or the Amboseli herds, or elephants in general. Or at least the last that any of us ever knew about. There was sadness at first, then anger and remorse, mingled with lingering self-disgust at what he believed he had caused to happen. Then just sadness again, long and slow-dying, like the endless collapsing roll of thunder across the plains. He could not have known, of course. And it took years before he was even ready to speak of what had happened, on that day when Matilda saw too deeply into his head, and understood Memphis for what he was.

Enemy of her kind. Murderer of elephants.

Even though Memphis had done it for no other reason than to protect us. But she could not see that. She was just an animal, after all, no matter how brightly her mind shone.

They’re still out there, the phyletic dwarves. There’s no harm in disclosing this information now. We don’t know where they are, and in all likelihood neither do the orthodox Pans. After the sundering, after the great parting of the ways between Truro and Arethusa, Chama and Gleb took their work deeper underground than it had been before. But somewhere out there, in a solar system still big enough to contain hiding places and dark corners, still big enough for secrets, the elephants thrive. Once in a while, conveyed to us through a labyrinth of quangle paths, all but untraceable, we hear from the zookeepers. They are still happily married, and the great work continues. The elephants are doing well. One day we may yet be a part of it.

Data packets still bind the dwarves to the M-clan, providing that essential socializing framework, but please do not go trying to follow that thread; it’ll get you nowhere. Besides, the bonds between the herds are much weaker now than they were when all this started. Twenty years on, the dwarves have grandchildren of their own, sons and daughters, matriarchs and bulls, family ties, the foundation of a complex, self-sustaining elephant society. One day, when resources allow, they may even be allowed to grow, to stop being dwarves. But perhaps that is for another century.

If Geoffrey misses his role in that enterprise, he is careful not to show it. No more, perhaps, than Sunday misses her former career as an artist, or Lucas misses his as a willing component in the family machine. We have all had other business to keep hands, hearts and minds occupied.

Sunday returned to the Descrutinised Zone, and for a little while she tried to submerge herself in the routines of her old life. She went back to the commissions she had abandoned, before her journey to Mars. Jitendra, too, tried to pick up the pieces of his former existence. But it was hard. They both carried too much knowledge, burning in their heads like a lit fuse. We all did.

For years Sunday had worked to bring the Eunice construct to fruition. That private project had been the mainspring of her life, the thing she cared about beyond any of her tiring, rent-paying commissions. She had abandoned physical sculpture in preference for the sculpting of a single human life, in all its dizzying fractal glory.

And she had not failed. But the construct had grown too clever, too complex. It had torn itself free of Sunday’s plans, become something she could influence but not control. And although Geoffrey and Jumai had tried to shield her from the truth, she had made the necessary deductions for herself. The artilect running Lionheart was everything she had ever hoped her construct might become. The work she strove to complete had already been achieved.

The construct abides. Like the dwarves, it is out there somewhere. Being a bodyless spirit, haunting the aug, there would be even less point in trying to pin it down. We long ago assigned it all the autonomy it craved. Once in a while, we hear from it. Perhaps it thinks of the woman in whose shadow it walks, the figure it can emulate but never become. Perhaps it is content to become something else entirely. Sometimes, when it offers us wise counsel, when it advises us on the intentions of those who would act against us, we are grateful that it is on our side. At other times we slightly fear it. And sometimes we forget that Eunice is an it, not a she.

Of the real Eunice, the living woman, our dead grandmother, things are simpler. At least we know where she is now.

There will, of course, be those who criticise us for waiting as long as we did, before making this decision. What choice did we have, though? When this burden was placed upon us we were, to be frank, little better than children. We needed time to think, time to judge the readiness of the world. Eunice could not make this decision sixty years earlier; we could not make it rashly either. We wished to see how the world would adapt to the new engines, and the knowledge of Mandala.

It’s been twenty years. But now we are ready.

This testimony, written in our shared hand as honestly as we are able, is our attempt at explaining ourselves. We did not go looking for this responsibility, but we have done our best to measure up to it. Looking back across these years, at the way we were then, all our enmities are matters of vanishing consequence, the squabbling of infants. We have moved beyond such things. If nothing else, we owed it to Hector and Memphis to rise above our former selves. Because if we couldn’t do it, if we couldn’t put aside the past, what hope could there be for anyone else?

Twenty years ago the world saw a glimpse of what lay ahead. The improved engines have shrunk the inner solar system, brought Jupiter and Saturn closer, and accelerated the development and colonisation of Trans-Neptunian space. There have been accidents and stupidities, but for the most part the technology has been absorbed without catastrophe. As well it should have been, for what we gave you then was really nothing at all. The real test of our collective wisdom begins here and now.

We call it the Chibesa Principle. The improved engines were merely a glimpse of what this new physics can give us. Properly tamed, the Chibesa Principle will not only shrink the solar system even further. It will put human starflight within our reach.

But understand the risk, as well as the promise. Like the discovery of fire, this is not something that can be uninvented. And in the wrong hands, used maliciously or foolishly, the Chibesa Principle is fully capable of murdering worlds.

That is why our grandmother deemed us unready. But that was more than eighty years ago, and much has changed since then. We think things are different now, and that the species is ready to demonstrate its collective wisdom. If we are wrong, if our wisdom is lacking, the Chibesa Principle will burn us. And if that is the case, and if there is anyone left to cast judgement on our actions, we shall gladly accept history’s verdict. But if we are right, it will give us everything that Soya Akinya showed her daughter, when she held her up in the velvet warmth of a Serengeti night: all these stars, all these tiny diamond lights.

We have been clever, and on occasion we have been foolish. For smart monkeys, we can, when the mood takes us, be exceedingly stupid. But it was cleverness that brought us to this point, and it is only cleverness that will serve us from now on.

We have no time for anything else.