‘We can’t speed up the ’bots,’ he went on, ‘but we can slow ourselves down. Even your best civilian implants don’t mess with the brain at a level deep enough to upset the perception of time, so we need some extra assistance. Hence, direct stimulation of the basal cortex. That and some slightly naughty deep-level neurochemical intervention—’
‘As always, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ June Wing said.
Jitendra slipped his wrists into heavy medical cuffs attached to the frame of the chair. ‘They’d throw a fit in the Surveilled World. But of course, we’re not in the Surveilled World now . . . and that doesn’t preclude outside sponsorship, or external spectators. There’s money to be earned, reputations to be made and lost.’
‘I guess the Plexus sponsorship helps,’ Geoffrey said.
‘It’s not just advertising,’ June Wing said. ‘There is some actual R&D going on here. The robots have human drivers but they also have their own onboard battle minds, constantly trying to find a decisive strategy, a goal-winning solution they can offer to the pilot.’
‘OK, here it comes,’ Jitendra said, closing his eyes. ‘Slowdown’s beginning to take hold. Wish me . . .’ He stalled between words. ‘. . . luck.’
And then he was out, as lifelessly inert as the other drivers. Not unconscious, but decelerated into the awesomely slow sensorium of the robot, out in the arena.
‘He’s driving her now,’ Sunday said, pointing to the robot Jitendra was controlling. ‘You can just see the movement if you compare the ground shadow against the one from the support gantry.’
‘What do you do when you want some real excitement – race slugs against each other?’
‘Life moves pretty quickly if you are a slug,’ June Wing admonished. ‘It’s just a question of perceptual reference frames.’ She gestured to one of the vacant cockpits. ‘Geoffrey can spectate, if he wishes. I have a reserved slot, but I’ll pass for today.’
‘I’m carrying some fairly specialised aug hardware,’ Geoffrey said, meaning the equipment he needed to link to Matilda.
‘Nothing will be damaged, brother, I promise you,’ Sunday said.
‘And if it is, my own labs will soon put it right,’ June Wing said, with breezy indifference to his concerns. ‘So jump right in.’
Geoffrey was still wary, but another part of him wanted to get as much out of his Lunar experience as possible.
‘You need to take a leak?’ Sunday asked. ‘You’re going to be in that thing for at least six hours.’
Geoffrey consulted his bladder. ‘I’ll cope. I didn’t drink too much coffee this morning.’
Sunday helped him into the vacant cockpit. ‘The cuffs will be analysing your blood – any signs of stress, above and beyond normal competition levels, and the system will yank you out. Same for the transcranial stim. It’s read/write. There’s not much that can go wrong.’
‘Not much.’
Sunday cocked her head to one side, appearing to think for a moment. ‘Well, there was that one guy . . .’ She lowered the transcranial helmet, adjusting it carefully into position. ‘You were doing this at competition level, we’d cut back those curls to get the probe closer to your skin, but you’ll be fine for spectating.’
Aug status messages flashed into his visual field, informing him that an external agent was affecting his neural function. The implants offered to resist the intrusion. He voked them into acquiescence.
‘So what happened to that one guy?’
‘Nothing much,’ Sunday said breezily. ‘Just that being in the cockpit permanently reset his internal clock. Even after they withdrew the stim and the drugs, he was stuck on arena time.’
‘How’s he doing now?’
‘Thing is, he hasn’t got back to us on that one yet.’
The cuffs dropped their painless fangs into his skin. Two cold touches, neurochemicals sluicing in, and he felt himself sliding, tobogganing down an ever steepening slope. He made to grab onto the sides of the cockpit for support, but his arms, even his fingers, felt sheathed in granite.
Then the rushing sensation ebbed and he felt perfectly still, amniotically calm. Something had failed, he decided.
‘All right,’ Sunday said. ‘What you’re hearing now is me slowed down into your perceptual frame. You’ve already been in the cockpit for twenty minutes.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Make that twenty-one. June and I are off to the bar now; be back in a second or two. We’ll begin piping direct imagery into your head. Enjoy the show.’
He was almost ready not to believe her. But the digits in his tourist visa were whirring at superfast speed.
Geoffrey’s perceptions took a savage lurch and he was suddenly out there, disembodied, able to roam at will in the ching space of the arena. Jitendra’s robot wasn’t crawling now; it was propelling itself in convulsive jerks, tractor claws threshing, body sections pistoning back and forth like some heavy industrial mechanism that had escaped its shackles. Lunar soil, disturbed by the robot’s passage, collapsed back into itself as if composed of molten lead, under Jupiter’s immense gravity.
Around the arena’s perimeter, a frenzy of blurred motion attended the waiting machines. Elsewhere, dual combatants were locked in titanic wrestling matches, writhing and thrashing to the death.
Jitendra’s opponent crossed the graded soil like a demented iron maggot. It differed from Jitendra’s robot in its details but was of a comparable size, equipped with a broadly similar range of offensive devices. On its flanks, in luminous red, shone the Escher triangle logo of MetaPresence, Plexus’s main competitor in ching facilitation and proxy robotics. The nerve-node emblem on Jitendra’s machine was now similarly bright and unfaded, painted over the image by the aug. Accompanying these overlays were a host of statistics and technical readouts, speculating at the likely efficacies of armour, weapons and combat tactics.
The two robots halted at the laser-scribed circle of combat. Articulating two-thirds of the way down their bodies – they had been designed to steer during tunnel-boring operations – the robots reared up and bowed to each other. Agonising minutes must have passed in real-time as this martial ritual was observed.
The engagement was as sudden and brutal as a pair of sumo wrestlers charging into each other. At first, Jitendra’s machine appeared to have the upper hand. It flexed itself around the enemy, using rows of tractor limbs to gain purchase, sinking their sharpened tips into gaps in armour plating. Articulating its head end, it brought the whirring nightmare of its circular cutting teeth into play. As they contacted its opponent’s alloy head, molten metal fountained away on neon-bright parabolas. Reflecting Jitendra’s initial success – and the changing spread-patterns of bets – the statistics shifted violently in his favour.
It didn’t last. Even as Jitendra’s robot was chewing into it, the other robot had retaliatory ambitions. Halfway down its body, armoured panels hinged open like pupal wings, allowing complex cutting machinery to scissor out. Servo-driven vacuum cutters began to burn into the belly of Jitendra’s robot, clamped into place with traction claws. A kind of peristaltic wave surged up the body of the assaulted machine, as if it was experiencing actual pain. It relinquished its hold, bending its body away, disengaging the whirling vortex of its cutting teeth. The stats updated. Pink vapour jetted at arterial speed from the wound that had been cut into the side of Jitendra’s robot: some kind of nuclear coolant or hydraulic fluid, bleeding into space.
The two machines rolled away from each other. The enemy retracted its cutter, the body armour folding back into place. Jitendra’s machine staunched its blood loss. Stalemate ensued for objective seconds, before the resumption of combat. The enemy twisted its head assembly and locked on with clutching mouthparts, horrible girder-thick barbed mechanisms. It was chewing – drilling, tunnelling – into Jitendra’s robot, metal and machine bits spraying away from the cutting head. From the rear of the enemy machine, from its iron anus, a grey plume of processe
d matter emerged. It was chewing, eating, digesting, defecating, all in mere seconds. Jitendra’s stats were now dismal and falling.
But he wasn’t finished. The enemy bit into something it couldn’t process as easily as moon rock: some high-pressure jugular. Bad for Jitendra, even worse for the machine trying to eat him for dinner. The enemy jolted, regurgitating a large quantity of chewed-up machine parts. Mouth-mechanisms spasmed and flopped as a wave of damage ripped through its guts. Jitendra’s machine twisted sharply out of reach. It had been bitten into around the neckline, but its whirling drills were still racing. It reared up like a striking cobra and hammered down on the enemy. Machine parts skittered away in all directions, cratering the arena. Now it was time for Jitendra’s machine to spring out additional grasping and cutting devices, hull plates popping open like frigate gun doors. Jitendra’s stats rallied.
But this wasn’t going to be a victory for either machine. The enemy was wounded, perhaps fatally, but so was Jitendra’s charge. Its drill parts were not turning as furiously as they had been only a few moments before. And its entire body was sagging, no longer able to support itself off the ground even against the feeble pull of the Moon’s gravity. When the end came, it did so with startling suddenness. Jitendra’s machine simply dropped dead, as if it had been pulled to the ground by invisible wires. For a moment the enemy machine made a valiant attempt to regain the advantage, but it was in vain. It too had suffered catastrophic systems failures. Like a deflating balloon, it collapsed to the ground and fell into pathetic corpselike stillness.
In a flash, recovery teams arrived. Tractors shot out from silos. Tiny figures – frantic space-suited Lilliputians – swarmed out of the tractors and bound the fallen monsters in drag-harnesses, cobwebbing them from head to tail with comical speed. The figures buzzed around and then vanished into the tractors again, as if they’d been sucked back inside. The tractors lugged the dead machines to the arena’s perimeter, gouging runway-sized skid marks in the soil.
That was the end of the bout. Geoffrey knew because he was being pulled back into real-time. He felt the chemicals metabolising out of his bloodstream. The visa digits slowed their tumble. The transcranial stim was over, the helmet rising back away from his head.
‘Well?’ Sunday asked, standing over his reclining form. ‘What did you think?’
For a moment his mouth wouldn’t work.
‘How long was I under?’ he managed.
‘Four and a half hours. June’s gone back to work.’
If she was lying, then so was the visa.
‘I guess everyone says the same thing. It didn’t feel like it.’
‘That was a short bout, as they go. Seven, eight hours isn’t unusual,’ Sunday answered, pushing a drink into his hand. ‘Twelve, thirteen, even that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.’
His neck had developed an unpleasant crick. Jitendra, who was being hauled from his cockpit, had the wiped-out, dehydrated look of a racing-car driver. Friends and associates were already mobbing him, patting his back and making sympathetic bad-show faces.
‘I’m sorry,’ Geoffrey said, teetering over to Jitendra. ‘I thought it was going your way for a while there. Not that I’m an expert or anything.’
‘I lost my concentration,’ Jitendra said, shaking his head. ‘Should have switched to a different attack plan when I had the window. Still, it’s not all bad news. A draw gives me enough points to retain my ranking, whereas they needed a win not to go down the toilet.’ He worked his shoulders, as if both his arms had popped out of their sockets and needed to be relocated. ‘And I don’t think the damage is as bad as it looked out there.’
‘Nothing that can’t be welded back together,’ Sunday said.
‘One good thing came out of it,’ Jitendra said, before burying his face in a warm wet towel.
‘Which was?’ Sunday asked.
‘Eight, fifteen, seventeen.’ He gave them both a grin. ‘I figured that bit out, anyway. And I was right. Those numbers do mean something to me.’
When they were back at the apartment, Sunday and her brother prepared a simple meal, and they shared another bottle of wine, one which Geoffrey had insisted on buying by way of celebration for a successful day. They dined with Toumani Diabaté providing kora accompaniment. The recording was a hundred years old, made when the revered musician was a very elderly man, yet it remained as bright and dazzling as sunglints on water.
When the dishes had been cleared and the wine glasses refilled, she knew that the time had come to invoke the construct. This was the crux, she felt certain. If Eunice could offer no guidance on the matter, then all they had was a dirty old glove and some cheap plastic jewels. And with the possibility of mystery safely banished from their lives, they could all return to their mundane concerns.
‘Good evening, Sunday,’ Eunice said, speaking Swahili. ‘Good evening, Jitendra. Good evening, Geoffrey.’
‘Good evening, Eunice,’ they chorused.
‘How are you enjoying your stay?’ Eunice asked, pointedly directing her question at Geoffrey.
‘Very much, thank you,’ he said, but with an edge of nervousness, as if he did not quite trust that Eunice’s working memory had been scrubbed after their last exchange. ‘Sunday and Jitendra are first-rate hosts.’
‘Excellent. I trust that the remainder of your visit will be just as enjoyable.’ She turned her imperious regard onto Sunday. ‘May I be of assistance?’
‘We have a question,’ Sunday said.
‘If it’s about the glove, I’m afraid I have told you all that I am able to.’
‘It’s not exactly about the glove. Well, it sort of is, but we have something different to ask you now.’ Sunday looked at Jitendra, inviting him to speak.
‘I discovered a pattern,’ Jitendra said. ‘Three numbers. They relate to Pythagoras.’
‘Where was this pattern?’ Eunice queried sharply, as if addressing a small boy who had mumbled something out of turn in class.
‘There were gemstones in the glove,’ Jitendra said, ‘red, green and blue ones. The numbers form a Pythagorean triple: eight, fifteen, seventeen.’
‘I see.’
‘It took me a while to make the connection,’ Jitendra went on. ‘It was almost there, but I couldn’t quite bring it out. Then I saw the Meta Presence logo on the side of the other robot . . . the triangle . . . and it was like a key turning in my head. It wasn’t a Pythagorean triangle, of course, but it was enough.’
‘Question is, why Pythagoras?’ Sunday asked. ‘Could mean several things. But seeing as we’re on the Moon, and seeing as there’s a good chance that glove came from a Moon suit . . . I wondered if it might have something to do with Pythagoras itself.’ She swallowed and added, ‘As in the crater, on the Earth-facing side.’
Eunice cogitated for many agonising seconds, her expression perfectly unchanging. Sunday had taken pains to imbue the construct with Eunice’s own speech patterns and mannerisms, and this kind of hiatus was one of them.
‘Something did happen to me there,’ she said, breaking her own silence. ‘Systems failure, coming in to land at the Chinese station in Anaximenes. Lost thrust authority and hard-landed in Pythagoras.’ She smacked her fist into her palm, making a loud, meaty clap. ‘Ship was toast, but I managed to suit-up and bail out before she lost hull pressure. Chinese knew where I’d come down. Problem was, their one rover was out on an excursion and if I sat tight waiting for them to get a rescue party to me, I’d be toast as well. My only option was to walk, and try to meet them two-thirds of the way, on the other side of the crater wall. So that’s what I did: I walked – actually hopped, most of the way – and climbed, and I was down to three hours of useful consumables when I saw their rover cresting the horizon.’ She shrugged, profoundly unimpressed by her own story. ‘It was a close thing, but there were close things all the time in those days.’
‘So that’s it?’ Sunday said, doubtfully. ‘That’s all that ever happened to you in Pythagoras?’
br /> ‘If you would rather I hadn’t made it, dear child, then I can only apologise.’
‘I didn’t mean to downplay what happened,’ Sunday said. ‘It’s just, well, another Eunice story. In any other life it would be the most amazing thing, but in yours . . . it’s not even a chapter. Just an anecdote.’
‘I have had my share of adventure,’ Eunice conceded.
‘When did this happen?’ Jitendra asked.
‘The year would have been . . .’ Eunice made a show of remembering. ‘Fifty-nine, I believe. Back when Jonathan and I were still married. It was a different Moon then, of course. Still a wilderness, in many respects. A lot changed in the next two or three decades. That was why we decided to move on again.’
‘To Mars. With the Indians,’ Sunday said. ‘But even Mars wasn’t enough of a wilderness to keep you happy.’
‘Living out the rest of his life there suited Jonathan. Didn’t suit me. I came back to the Moon eventually, but only when the rest of the system had exhausted its ability to astonish.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t come all the way back, to Africa,’ Geoffrey said.
‘And cripple myself under a gee of gravity again? I’d barely set foot on Earth in forty years, boy. I missed the household; I missed the acacia trees and the sunsets. But I did not miss the crush of all that dumb matter under my feet, pinning me to the earth under a sky that felt like a heavy blanket on a warm night.’ She jabbed a finger against the side of her head. ‘Space changed me; I could never go home again. Space will do that to you. If that bothers you, best stay home.’
‘Excuse me for having an opinion,’ Geoffrey said.
She eyed him, then nodded once. Eunice had always placed a much higher premium on those who dared to stand up to the monstrous force of her personality than those who gave in without a fight.
‘I should not blame you for living later than I did,’ Eunice said, adopting a tone that was as close to conciliatory as she ever got. ‘You did not choose to be born in this century, any more than I chose to be born in mine.’