‘A confused, frightened baby with just enough recollection to know what it was missing,’ the specialist went on. ‘Memory. Language. All traces of family and friendship. The hard-earned skills and knowledge of a lifetime. And with not enough life ahead of it ever to recover what was lost. We will of course abide by your wishes, but I urge you to give deep consideration before taking this course.’
No discussion was required. For once, the Akinyas were all in agreement. The decision was entirely in their hands, as Memphis had no family but the one that employed him.
‘We wouldn’t want that,’ Hector said softly, Geoffrey nodding his assent, and knowing as he did so that he was answering for Sunday as well.
‘I think you’re doing the right thing,’ the specialist said. ‘And I am so sorry that this has happened.’
Geoffrey was still trying to come to terms with what the day had delivered. Everything felt unreal, off-kilter. Memphis had been part of his life in a way that Eunice never had. She was a reclusive figure who sometimes beamed herself down from the Winter Palace, but who never walked the household in person. Having her removed from his life was the same as having a part of his own past dismantled, boxed away for posterity. He was sad about it, but it didn’t rip him apart.
It was different with Memphis. He’d always been there, a living, breathing, human presence. The smell of him, the prickly texture of his suit fabric, the squeak of his shoes on waxed flooring as he patrolled the household’s corridors at night, more vigilant than any watchdog. Kind when he needed to be, stern when the moment called for it. Always willing to forgive, if not necessarily forget. The most decent human being Geoffrey had ever known.
He remembered Lucas’s words: You imposed on his good nature.
The implication wounded, but he had done exactly that. Always had done.
‘Thank you for letting me know,’ Sunday said, when she chinged back in response to his earlier transmission. ‘Right now, I don’t really have a clue what to say. I’m still processing it. I’m so sorry that you had to see him . . . the way he was. But whatever you might think, this wasn’t your fault, OK? You asked Memphis to do something for you, but that doesn’t mean you have to take responsibility for what happened to him. Memphis was old enough to make his own decisions: if he’d felt your request endangered him, he’d have told you so. So don’t go making this any harder on yourself than it already is. Please, brother? For me?’ Sunday collected herself; from the figment, it was hard to tell if she’d been crying or not. ‘I’m on my way to Pavonis Mons right now. Keep me informed, and I’ll be in touch as soon as I’m able.’ She touched a finger to her lips. ‘Love you, brother. Be strong, for both of us.’ He nodded.
He would try, although he did not expect it to be easy.
Geoffrey had to get out of the house, so he went for a walk in the gardens, forcing his mind from its rut as best as he was able. Everywhere he went, though, he found evidence of Memphis’s handiwork. Choices about the redevelopment of the grounds, the refurbishment of ornamental fountains, the arabesque detailwork in the enclosing wall, the selection of flowers and shrubs in the beds – all these things had ultimately fallen to Memphis. Even when the family had been presented with a series of options, Memphis would already have whittled down a much larger set of possibilities, to the point where any one of the final choices would have been acceptable to him. One of his greatest, subtlest gifts to the Akinyas had been granting them the illusion of free will.
Later that afternoon, when Geoffrey had returned indoors, Jumai chinged to say she was on the train from Lagos. Geoffrey was momentarily befuddled, until he remembered that he had in fact called and left a message with her, shortly after the body was taken away. Everything had been a blur. Jumai had been working, so couldn’t take the call there and then. He was still startled that she was on her way.
‘Get off the train in Kigali,’ he told her. ‘I’ll meet you there.’
‘All right,’ she said, doubtfully, as if that wasn’t the kind of reception she’d been expecting.
‘It will be good to see Jumai again,’ Eunice said, announcing her presence.
‘You never knew her,’ Geoffrey snapped. ‘You never knew anyone at all.’
It was only later that he realised she’d had the good grace to keep out of his skull while he’d been wandering the grounds.
It was a two-hour flight, and mid-evening by the time he landed in Kigali. Rain was descending, soft and warm, honey-scented, dyed scarlet and cobalt and gold by the station’s old-fashioned neon signage. He’d just missed Jumai’s arrival: she was sheltering under the concourse’s overhanging roof, while taxis and airpods fussed about and vendors packed up for the night. Two black bags, sagging on the damp concrete either side of her feet like exhausted lapdogs, were her only luggage.
‘You didn’t have to do this,’ Geoffrey said when they were in the air, wheeling over night-time Kigali on their way back to the household.
‘I knew Memphis pretty well,’ Jumai said, as if he might not remember. They’d both got wet between the station and the airpod, but were drying off quickly with the cabin heater turned up. ‘I was part of your life long enough, don’t forget.’
‘I’m not likely to.’ But while he’d remembered to call Jumai – she’d have been hurt if he hadn’t – it was only now that he was beginning to remember how closely braided their lives had really been. Weeks, months, in Amboseli. Memphis had often come out to the research station while Jumai was fashioning the architecture for the human– elephant neurolink. They’d often ended up eating together, late at night, under a single swaying lamp around which mosquitoes orbited like frantic little planets, caught in the death-grip of a supermassive star.
Long stories, silly laughter, too much wine. Yes, Jumai knew Memphis. Had known, he corrected himself. All past tense from now on.
He started crying. It was ridiculous – there’d been no particular spur to it, save the helter-skelter progression of his own thoughts, but once he started he could not stop himself. How foolish he had been to think he could keep it together, at least until he was out of anyone’s sight.
‘I’m sorry, Geoffrey.’ Jumai squeezed his hand. ‘This must be really hard on you. I know how much he meant to you.’
‘It’s hard on Sunday as well,’ he said, when he was able to speak.
‘Is she flying in?’
‘Not really an option – Sunday’s on Mars, on her way to Pavonis Mons.’
They were crossing the southern tip of Lake Victoria. The clouds had parted overhead, the waters as still and clear as if they were cut from black marble.
‘What’s going on, Geoffrey? Eunice dies. Memphis dies . . . Your sister decides to go to Mars.’
‘Something. I don’t know what.’ After a moment he added, ‘I might need to go back into space myself. There’s a job . . .’ He closed his eyes. ‘It’s related, but I can’t say much more than that. I might have to break into family property.’
‘Is that why I’m here? Because I can be useful to you?’
‘You know me better than that.’
‘Perhaps.’ She was silent for a few seconds. ‘Well, as it happens, I just quit in Lagos. Bad day at the office.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. Nearly got spiked. Figured it was time to bail out, before we hit something really nasty. And for what? A dickhead of a boss? Bank accounts from a hundred years ago, the tawdry blackmail secrets of the rich and famous?’ She looked cross-eyed and appalled, as if she’d just picked something repulsive out of her nose. ‘Frankly, if I’m going to die on the job, I’d rather it was for something more interesting than century-old scandal fodder.’
Geoffrey considered the Winter Palace.
‘I’m afraid century-old scandal fodder may be the best I can offer instead.’
There was a silence. The airpod made a tiny course adjustment. Once in a while another one zipped by in the other direction, but aside from that they had the night sky all to the
mselves.
‘You want to talk about what happened,’ Jumai said after a while, in not much more than a whisper, ‘it’s all right with me.’ When Geoffrey was not immediately forthcoming, she added, ‘You said they found him near the elephants, that there’d been an accident.’
‘Something out there got him. But it wasn’t elephants.’
‘What, then?’
‘I don’t know. Something else. Memphis knew his way around the herd. Elephants didn’t do this.’
After a while she said, ‘It must have been quick.’
‘That’s what the doctor thought. He couldn’t have had any warning, or he’d have . . . protected himself.’
‘I’ve never seen anyone do that.’
‘I have,’ Geoffrey said, thinking back to the day they had found the death machine, and Sunday had nearly died. ‘Once, when I was little.’
It was during breakfast with Jumai the following morning that the thought struck him, the one that, in retrospect – and given his ideas about the cousins – he might reasonably already have entertained. Perhaps, on some unspoken level, he had indeed done that. But he had not come close to voicing it to himself at the level of conscious assessment. And now that he had, now that the thought had pushed itself into his awareness like a rhino charging into daylight, it was all he could do to sit in stunned wonderment, awed at what his mind had dared to conjure.
‘What are you thinking?’ Eunice asked.
‘I’m thinking it would be a good idea if you fucked off.’
‘Geoffrey?’ Jumai asked.
He was staring past her, through the window, out to the trees beyond the border wall. Eunice was gone.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said distractedly. ‘It’s just—’
‘It was a bad idea me coming here, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s not it,’ he said.
But in truth it was disconcerting, having Jumai back at the household, but them not sleeping together. Doubly so in that Memphis was not around. Time and again his thoughts kept plummeting through the same mental trapdoors. Memphis should hear this. Memphis will know. What will Memphis have to say? And each time he caught himself and swore that that would be the last time, and each time he was mistaken.
They’d slept in separate rooms, and met in the east wing for breakfast. The household staff vacillated between subdued discretion and the putting on of brave faces, acting as if nothing had happened. This grated on Geoffrey until he realised he was doing exactly the same thing, smiling too emphatically, cracking nervous little half-jokes. They were all simply trying to do what Memphis would have wanted, which was to keep on with business as usual exactly as if nothing had happened. They were all overdoing it, though.
‘You don’t have to apologise,’ Jumai said. ‘You’re bound to be upset by what’s happened. But if this is making you feel awkward, me being here, I can leave at any time.’ She dropped her voice to a stage whisper. ‘It doesn’t prevent me working on that, um, commission.’
‘Honestly, it’s not you,’ Geoffrey assured her. ‘I’m glad to have some company. It’s just . . . there’s a lot going on in my head.’
Like the ghost of his dead grandmother, bothering him from beyond the grave. Like the possibility that one or both of the cousins had killed Memphis.
There it was, stated as unambiguously as possible. No pussyfooting around that one.
The cousins killed Memphis.
He’d hoped, upon erecting this suspicion, to be able to knock it down immediately. Bulldoze the rubble away and forget about it. Until that point he hadn’t hated the cousins, after all. Or at least if there were degrees of hate, his was on the mildly antipathetic end of the spectrum, repelled by their manipulative gamesmanship, sickened by their avarice, disgusted by their attachment to family above all else. But not actually despising them. Not actually wishing pain upon them. Most of the time.
But the idea that they might have killed Memphis, or made his death probable . . . well, when framed so plainly, why exactly not? The cousins bitterly regretted bringing Geoffrey in to help them, that was clear. Since his return from the Moon, they’d been well aware that he was keeping information from them, and that this deceit extended to Sunday. It was all to do with Eunice, so what better way to limit any further damage than by removing the one man who’d had more access to the old woman than any of them? Killing Memphis blocked Geoffrey’s investigations in that particular direction. It also meant that anything damaging that Memphis might have had cause to disclose was not now likely to come to light.
And yes, murder . . . a difficult thing, that, in the Surveilled World. Easier to steal the Great Wall of China. The very word had the dark alchemical glamour of crimes now banished to history, like regicide or blasphemy.
But still. Murder wasn’t impossible, even in 2162. Even beyond the Descrutinised Zone, in the loving panoptic gaze of the Mechanism. Because the Mechanism wasn’t infallible, and even this tireless engineered god couldn’t be all places at once. The Mandatory Enhancements were supposed to weed out the worst criminal tendencies from developing minds before people reached adolescence . . . but those very tendencies were imprecise, and it was inevitable that someone, now and then, would slip through the mesh. Someone with the mental wiring necessary to premeditate. Someone capable of malintent.
And if you wanted to commit a crime like that, the Amboseli Basin was far from the worst place you could think of.
When had Memphis died? When Geoffrey was away, not keeping his eye on the old man.
Where had he died? Out in the sticks, where the aug was stretched thin, the Mechanism ineffectual. Memphis wasn’t even wearing his biomedical bracelet – although that could easily have been removed after his death.
Who’d found him? Hector and Lucas. The cousins.
Geoffrey closed his eyes, trying to derail his thoughts, to get them off this tramline. It didn’t work.
The cousins killed Memphis.
‘I’m sorry I dragged you into this,’ he said.
‘Dragged me into what? We’ve barely begun.’
‘Family,’ he said. ‘Memphis. Everything.’
‘You’ve given me an out from Lagos, Geoffrey. I’m hardly going to resent you for that.’
‘Even if there’s an element of self-interest?’
‘Like we said, it’s business. So long as we’re clear about that, all’s well.’ She picked at her food like a bird rooting through roadside scraps. Geoffrey didn’t have much of an appetite either. Even the coffee sat heavily inside him, sloshing around like some toxic by-product. ‘Has there been any talk . . .’ she began, then faltered.
‘Of what?’
Jumai set her face in an expression he remembered well, drawing in breath and squaring her jaw. ‘I’m assuming there are funeral arrangements. I couldn’t make it back for your grandmother’s scattering, but now that I’m here—’
‘There’s nothing in hand. Memphis never talked to me about what he wanted to happen in the event of his death, and I can’t imagine he was any more frank with the rest of the family. Even Sunday wasn’t as close to him as I am. Was.’ He dragged up a smile. ‘Still adjusting. But I’m glad you mentioned the funeral, because I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought.’
‘Really?’
‘I’ve been so fixated on what happened, and what it means . . . but you’re right. There will be a funeral, of course, and I want my sister to be part of it.’
Jumai looked doubtful. ‘Even though she’s on Mars?’
‘She’ll be back sooner or later. Memphis doesn’t have to be cremated and scattered in a hurry, the way my grandmother was. There wasn’t time for everyone to get back home then, especially not when some of us were as far out as Titan. It won’t be the same with Memphis.’
Jumai nodded coolly. ‘And you’ll make damned sure of that.’
‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Because I owe it to my sister. And it’s what Memphis would have wanted.’
‘That’s one thing I neve
r understood about your grandmother,’ Jumai said. ‘I can understand why no one wanted to move the scattering to suit my needs. But why did the rest of you have to get here so quickly?’
‘Because that’s what Eunice wanted,’ Geoffrey said. ‘A quick cremation, and a quick scattering. She didn’t want to wait a year, or however long it would take for the whole family to get back to Africa.’
‘She told you that?’
‘No,’ he answered carefully. ‘But Memphis did.’ And then he thought about that, and what exactly it meant.
After breakfast Jumai went to swim. Geoffrey returned to his room and sat on the made bed. He slid open the lower drawer of the bedside cabinet and took out the shoe he’d brought with him from the study station. He held it in his hands, chalky ochre dust soiling his fingers. The laces were still tied: the shoe had slipped off the old man’s foot without them coming loose. Geoffrey touched the knot, wondering if Memphis had been the habit of tying his left shoe first or his right. He had a picture in his mind of Memphis resting one foot on the Cessna’s undercarriage, doing up his laces, but he couldn’t remember which shoe Memphis had started with. Details, ordinary quotidian details, beginning to slip out of focus. And no more than a day had passed.
He put the shoe back in the drawer, slid it shut. No idea why he had been moved to pick it up, as Memphis’s chrysalis-bound body was being loaded into the medical transport. Hector and Lucas might even have seen him do it, he wasn’t sure.
He moved to his desk, settled into the chair and voked a request to the United Orbital Nations for information relating to the status of asset GGFX13419/785G, aka the Winter Palace. The data was open and public, but even if it hadn’t been, his request was coming through Akinya channels.