Sunday saw no point in denying it. ‘We currently have a mutually beneficial relationship.’
Soya laughed at that. ‘I don’t doubt it. But let’s not pretend that they’re in this out of the goodness of their hearts.’
‘Never said they were. They’re helping me, and my brother’s helping them. Everyone’s a winner.’
‘You may see it that way. I’m not sure they do.’
Sunday was wearying of this. ‘Get to the point, whatever it is.’
‘Let’s be clear. I’m not saying the Pans are evil. They’re zealous, certainly, and a little scary when they talk about their long-term goals, and how the rest of us are going to get sucked along for the ride whether we like it or not . . . but that doesn’t make them villains. But in it for themselves, when push comes to shove? Most definitely.’
‘We’re all in it for ourselves on some level.’
‘Indeed. Why are you here, if not driven by intellectual curiosity? Isn’t that a fundamentally selfish motivation, when you get down to it? You want those answers so you can feel better yourself, not because you think they’ll necessarily do the rest of us any good.’
‘Until I get the answers, I’m not going to know, am I?’
‘If you get the answers,’ Soya corrected. ‘That’s the point. The Pans have been watching you every step of your journey, haven’t they? Always there, always willing to be helpful. Who were you meeting on the cable car if it wasn’t the Pans?’
‘I can’t do this without them. I’m not the spoilt rich kid you might have heard about.’
‘I don’t doubt that. But be clear about one thing: whatever you find here, your powerful new allies are likely to be at least as interested in learning about it as you are – and they may well decide to cut you out of the loop at the last minute.’
‘This is nothing to do with them. Or you, for that matter.’ Sunday stepped back from the edge, but took care not to break contact with the other woman. ‘OK, you’ve told me your name. But that means nothing. Who are you, Soya? What’s your agenda?’
‘Consider me a friend,’ Soya said. ‘That’s all you need to know for the moment.’ Using her other hand, the one that wasn’t resting on Sunday’s sleeve, she reached up and touched a stud in the side of her helmet. The visor de-mirrored instantaneously. Soya looked around, letting Sunday see her face behind the glass, and for a moment it was all she could do to keep her balance.
The face was her own.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
They flew Geoffrey back to Africa early the next day. The sickle-shaped craft was supersonic, a gauche indulgence when even the fastest airpods didn’t break the sound barrier. Geoffrey was the flier’s only occupant, and for most of the journey he stood at the extravagant curve of the forward window, hand on the railing, Caesar surveying his Rome.
Once they were over open water, back into aug reach and outpacing every other flying thing for kilometres around, Eunice returned.
‘I’ve been worried about you. I hope no mischief occurred while I was absent.’
‘I’m capable of taking care of myself, Grandmother.’
‘Well, that’s a development, you calling me “grandmother”.’
‘It just slipped out.’
‘Evidently.’ She fell silent, Geoffrey hoping that was the last she had to say, but after a suitable interval she continued, ‘So what happened down there? Or are you not going to tell me?’
‘We talked about Lin Wei, the friend you duped.’
‘I don’t even know of any . . . oh, wait – you mentioned her already, didn’t you?’
‘What did you actually do on Mercury, Eunice?’
‘Whatever anyone does: collected a few souvenirs, soaked up the local colour.’
He abandoned that line of enquiry, guessing how far it would get him. ‘Lin Wei came to you just before you died.’
‘How would you know?’
‘Because I think I might have met her. She didn’t “drown” at all. Or if she did, it was only a metaphorical drowning. Becoming one with the sea. Changing name and form. She’s a whale now, did you know? Calls herself Arethusa.’
‘Try to make at least some sense.’
‘Ocular found something. You remember Ocular, don’t you? Or perhaps that’s another part of your past you’ve conveniently buried.’ He gave an uninterested shrug. ‘What does it matter? I’ll tell you anyway. Lin found evidence of alien intelligence, the Mandala structure, and she thought you ought to know about it. Obviously still felt she owed you that, despite whatever it was you did to her.’
Eunice was standing next to him at the window, with the African coast racing towards them. The off-white wall of the coastal barrage was like a sheer chalk cliff rising from the sea. Fishing boats and pleasure craft slammed by underneath. They were flying at scarcely more than sail height, but even at supersonic speed the Pan aircraft would have been all but silent.
‘My involvement with Ocular was no more than peripheral,’ Eunice’s figment said.
‘Maybe that’s what the public record says. But Lin must have known there was more to it than that. Reason she made a point of keeping her side of the bargain, by giving you this news. And then a little while later you go and die.’
‘And that sequence of events troubles you?’
‘Starting to feel like a bit too much of a coincidence. Lin must have felt the same way or she wouldn’t have told me. She came to your funeral, you realise. That little girl in a red dress, the one none of us knew? It was a ching proxy of Lin Wei, manifesting as a child. The way she’d have been when the two of you were friends.’ After a moment he added, ‘I’m going up to the Winter Palace. If there’s anything I need to know about it, now’s the time to tell me.’
‘What would I know?’
‘You lived there, Eunice. You created it.’
‘I wish I could help you, Geoffrey. I would if I could.’ She turned to face him. ‘I’ll say one thing: be very careful up there.’
He knew something was not quite right as soon as the Pan flier dropped subsonic and began circling over the study station, selecting its landing site. The Cessna was where he’d left it, pinned like a crucifix to the tawny earth. Parked a little distance from it – not too far from the station’s triad of stilt-mounted huts – stood a pair of clean, gleaming airpods. One was amber, the other a vivid, too-bright yellow. He could see figures on the ground, coming and going from the huts. People, robots and golems. Something on the ground like a foil-wrapped mummy, with a robot or golem bent over it.
‘Put me down,’ he snapped. ‘Anywhere.’
The flier VTOL’d onto the nearest patch of open ground. Geoffrey dropped out of the belly hatch before the landing manoeuvre was complete, flinging his bag ahead of him. He thumped to the hard-packed earth, pushed himself to his feet, grabbed the bag and started sprinting the remaining distance to the huts. A shadow passed over him as the Pan flier returned to the sky. Geoffrey barely registered it.
‘Geoffrey,’ Hector said, noticing his approach. ‘We tried calling you . . . tried chinging. You weren’t reachable. Where the hell have you been?’
‘I told you to keep away from here,’ Geoffrey said. He coughed as dust, stirred up by the flier, infiltrated his lungs.
‘It’s Memphis,’ Lucas said. He was standing next to the mummy-like form lying on the ground.
‘What?’ Geoffrey asked, stupefied.
‘Memphis was late back at the household,’ Hector explained. ‘This morning.’ He was flustered, sweat prickling his forehead. ‘He was expected at a particular time – we were supposed to be meeting him, to talk about the household accounts.’
‘No ching bind could be established,’ Lucas said, repeating himself a moment later. ‘No ching bind could be established.’ As if this very fact implied the opening up of an entire chasm of existential wrongness, a baleful perversion against the natural order of things.
‘We came out here straight away,’ Hector said. ‘His airpod .
. . we could see where he’d landed.’
Geoffrey pushed Hector back until he was standing next to Lucas, who was staring blankly at the ground. He coughed some more dust from his windpipe. The ocean, the turquoise realm of Tiamaat, the night dance of the merpeople, felt like a lovely dream from which he’d just been abruptly woken. No medical diagnosis was needed to tell Geoffrey that Memphis was dead. His body was visible through the protective chrysalis that had been sprayed around him. Through its emerald tint, Memphis’s bloodied and crushed form looked like a toy that had been given to a boisterous, vengeful child. He would have been unrecognisable were it not for his signature suit, caked with dirt and blood but insufficiently so to conceal the familiar pinstriping. One of Memphis’s black leather shoes had come off his foot, exposing a dusty sock. The shoe was on the ground, outside the chrysalis.
‘What happened?’ Eunice whispered, appearing next to him.
‘Not now. Of all times, not now.’
She kept looking at the body, saying nothing. The robotic form that had been stooped over the chrysalis rose to its full bipedal height. It was one of the household’s usual proxies, Geoffrey saw – Giacometti-thin, with holes and gaps in its limbs, torso and head-assembly.
‘There’s nothing you could have done,’ the proxy stated, with a smooth Senegalese accent. ‘Judging by these injuries, he was killed very quickly. There will have to be a full medical examination, of course, given the accidental nature of his death, but I doubt there will be any surprises. You say his body was found near elephants?’
‘He was working with them,’ Lucas said, glancing at Geoffrey.
‘Elephants didn’t do this,’ Geoffrey said.
Hector placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘I know it will be hard for you to accept . . .’
Geoffrey nearly wrenched his cousin’s hand off. ‘It wasn’t the elephants.’
‘These are crush injuries,’ the proxy said hesitantly, as if it didn’t want to get dragged into a family dispute. ‘And this wound in his abdomen . . . it is consistent with a tusk injury.’
‘Seen a lot of those, have you?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘I thought accidents were supposed to be rare these days.’
‘I’ve seen wounds like this in the textbooks,’ the proxy replied.
‘The doctor’s only trying to assist us,’ Hector said placatingly.
‘He’s right,’ Eunice said, in little more than a murmur. ‘It’s not the proxy’s fault, or the fault of the physician on the other end.’
But Geoffrey still couldn’t accept the evidence of his senses, or the honest testimony of the medical expert.
‘Elephants didn’t do this,’ he said again, only softer this time, as if it was himself he was trying to convince.
‘He should not have come out here alone, at his age,’ Hector said.
‘He was only a hundred,’ Lucas pointed out.
‘He’s not been looking strong to me lately. This was a risk he should never have taken. What was he doing out here, Geoffrey?’ Hector had his hands on his hips. ‘This was your work, not his.’
In a monotone, Geoffrey said, ‘Memphis always helped me.’
‘You should not have asked it of him,’ Lucas said. ‘He had enough to be doing at the household. You imposed on his good nature.’
Geoffrey took a swing at him, but missed. His own momentum sent him spinning off balance. He would have fallen had Hector not reached out to steady him.
‘This isn’t the time for recriminations,’ Hector said, directing the comment at his brother. ‘This is upsetting for all of us.’
‘Get a grip on yourself,’ Eunice admonished, her arms folded disapprovingly. ‘If the Mech was any thicker, it would have dropped you like a stone just for thinking violence.’
Geoffrey gave a last cough. There was dust in his lungs, up his nose, in his watering eyes. ‘He was just doing routine work for me,’ he said in a wheeze as Hector relinquished his grip. ‘While I was away.’
‘You still haven’t told us where you were,’ Lucas said.
‘Because it’s none of your fucking business, cousin.’
The proxy swivelled its head, reminding them that it was still present, still being chinged.
‘I’ve called for a scrambulance. The body will be taken to the hospital in Mombasa. They’ll do what they can, but I should tell you now there’s little prospect for revival.’
Hector nodded gravely. ‘Thank you for your honesty, Doctor.’
‘If I’d been able to get to him sooner . . .’ The proxy shook its head. ‘I do not understand why he allowed this to happen.’
‘Allowed?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘In a place this dangerous,’ Lucas said, looking around, ‘he should not have been on his own. The Mechanism can’t be all places at all times – it’s not god. A watchdog should have come out with him, in case he got into difficulties.’ He pointed at the encased form. ‘Look, he’s not even wearing a bracelet. What was he supposed to do if a snake bit him, or he sprained his ankle and couldn’t walk back to the airpod?’
‘He knew what he was doing,’ Geoffrey said.
‘He must have been startled,’ Hector said. ‘That’s the only explanation. The elephant was on him before he had a chance to do anything about it.’
‘I doubt very much that he suffered,’ the doctor said. ‘As you say, if he’d had any inkling that he was in peril—’
‘We would have found a dead elephant near his body,’ Lucas said. ‘Or dead elephants.’
Eunice looked Geoffrey in the eye, then absented herself.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sunday and Jitendra were on the overland bullet train, speeding west through the plains of Chryse in the middle of the Martian day, when Geoffrey chinged in.
Sunday knew at once that something was wrong.
‘If you can,’ his figment said, ‘take this call somewhere private. I don’t mean from Jitendra. It would be good if Jitendra could be with you. But you shouldn’t be in public.’ Geoffrey’s face told her everything she needed to know, except the worst part of it. ‘I don’t have good news.’
The Pans had paid for a private compartment in the train so there was no need for Sunday to take the call anywhere else. She allowed the figment to continue speaking, cursing the distance that prevented her from responding to him in real-time. Cursing physics, the basic organising framework of reality.
‘It’s just after noon here. This morning I came back from Tiamaat. I was due to land at the study station, but as I came in I saw that something was happening on the ground. The cousins were there, and they’d found Memphis.’ Geoffrey swallowed, moved his jaw. ‘He was dead, Sunday. Something had happened out there and . . . he was dead, on the ground, just lying there.’ Geoffrey stopped and looked down at his feet. ‘There was already a doctor on-scene when I arrived, but too much time had passed. They’ve taken Memphis to Mombasa, but it’s not looking good . . . I don’t think there’s going to be much they can do.’
Jitendra had already closed his hand around hers, though she barely felt his presence, the train compartment, the pressure-tight glass, the rushing red scenery beyond, everything receding into galactic distance.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ Geoffrey went on. ‘He’d agreed to help me with the elephants while I was away. The doctor says he was crushed . . . as if he got into trouble with the elephants. But that can’t have happened. Memphis knew the herd almost as well as I did – I wouldn’t have asked for his help otherwise, and there’s no one else I’d have trusted to do the job properly.’ He closed his eyes. ‘That’s all I have right now. I’ll call you as soon as there’s more news, but I think you should be prepared for the worst.’ He opened his eyes, started to say something before abandoning the attempt. ‘I feel I ought to say that I wish I could be with you, but that’s a lie. I wish you were here, back with me, in Africa. Right now Mars feels like a very long way away.’ He nodded, his eyes meeting hers with uncanny directness. ‘Take care, sister. I love you.’
Geoffrey was gone. The train sped on its way, oblivious to her news. It should be slowing, she reckoned, allowing her thoughts time to catch up. That would be the decent thing.
She did not know what to do or say, so when Jitendra tightened his hold on her and said that he was sorry, she was as glad as it was possible to be in that moment.
‘I have to get back to Earth.’
‘Wait for what the doctors have to say. Neuropractors can do wonders nowadays.’
‘You heard what my brother said – it had been too long.’
Jitendra had no answer for that. He had meant to be kind, she knew, but there was reasonable hope and there was false hope, and she would not cling to the latter.
‘I have to get back,’ she repeated.
‘It . . . won’t make any difference.’ Jitendra was speaking very carefully. ‘It’s taken you a month to travel here, and even if we got back into orbit and miraculously found a slot on the next swiftship out . . . it’d be five weeks, at least, before we’ll be anywhere near Earth.’
‘Every week I spend here, Earth is further away.’
‘If there’s going to be a funeral, then you’ll have either already missed it, even if you leave now, or they’ll have to wait until you get back. Who was closest to Memphis? You and your brother. And your brother’s back in Africa. He’s not going to let anything happen until you get home, is he?’
‘Please don’t talk about funerals,’ Sunday said. ‘Not yet. Not before we’ve heard from Mombasa.’
But he was right. She had already been thinking of funerals.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Chinging in from Mombasa, where Memphis’s body had been examined in detail, the neuropractor delivered her verdict to the family members gathered in the household.
They could bring him back to life, the figment said, that was always an option, albeit an expensive one. But so much of his brain would need to be rebuilt from scratch that the end result wouldn’t be the man they had known. The basic structural organisation of his personality had been blasted to shards. ‘There is no gentle way of putting this, but what you would be getting back would be a baby in an old man’s body,’ the figment informed them, Geoffrey unable to shake the sense that this was all fractionally too rehearsed, a speech that the neuropractor kept up her sleeve to deliver on occasions such as this, while trying to make it sound suitably impromptu and sincere. He wanted to resent her for that, but couldn’t. She was just being kind.