Text floated before him:
On: 20/2/62 07:14:03:11 CUT
Subject: Request for disposal of abandoned asset
Asset code: GGFX13419/785G
Asset type: Axially stabilised free-flying habitable structure
Status: Disposal authority granted
Disposal mode: Discretionary
‘What’s troubling you?’ Eunice asked.
He thought about not answering her for a moment, before giving in. ‘They’re going to tear down the Winter Palace.’
‘Let them,’ she said, shrugging with blunt indifference. ‘I don’t live there any more, Geoffrey. Last thing anyone needs is more junk cluttering up Lunar orbit.’
‘It’s not junk. It’s history, part of us. Part of what’s made us the way we are. The cousins can’t just trash it.’
‘Evidently they can.’ She was looking at the text, accessing the same data.
‘Unless someone stops them,’ Geoffrey said.
‘You wouldn’t be planning anything foolhardy, would you?’
‘I’ll get back to you on that one.’
Geoffrey voked the text away and went outside to find the cousins. He encountered Hector first. He was coming back from the tennis court, sweat-damp towel padded around his neck. A proxy strode alongside him, swinging a racquet. Geoffrey blocked the path of the two opponents.
‘Whoever you are,’ he told the proxy, ‘you can ching right back home.’
‘This is unfortunate, Geoffrey,’ Hector said, staring him down. ‘I’m used to your rudeness, but there’s absolutely no need to inflict it on my guests.’
‘I was going anyway,’ the proxy said. ‘Nice game, Hector. Let’s do it again sometime.’ The proxy became slump-shouldered and loll-headed as soon as the ching was broken, the racquet dangling from one limp hand.
Hector took the racquet, clacking it against his own, then told the proxy to store itself.
‘There was no need for that, cousin.’
‘You’ll get over it.’
The proxy scooted away, walking like a person in a speeded-up movie. Hector dredged up a pained smile. ‘And there was me, thinking we were all getting on so well yesterday.’
‘That was then,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Anything in particular I can help you with?’
‘You can start by telling me what really happened out there.’
‘Out where, cousin?’ Hector unwrapped the towel and began rubbing his hair with it.
‘Memphis dying. That was so convenient, wasn’t it? Solved all your problems in one stroke. No wonder you’re in the mood for a game of tennis.’
‘Go back inside, take a deep breath and start again. We’ll both pretend this conversation didn’t happen.’
‘I’m not saying you killed him,’ Geoffrey blurted. He’d gone too far, he realised immediately, let his temper get the better of him. Off in the distance, Eunice was shaking her head.
Hector gave him an appraising nod. ‘Good. Because if you were—’
‘But it works for you, doesn’t it? You can’t wait to bury Eunice and everything she did. You just want to get on with running things, and not have any nasty surprises jump out at you from the past.’
Hector flung his towel onto the path, knowing a household robot would be along to tidy it away. ‘I think you and I need to have a little chat. You’ve been acting very strange since you came back from the Moon. Stranger, I should say. What were you doing in Tiamaat?’
Geoffrey stared at him blankly.
‘What, you think an aircraft can’t be tracked?’ Hector pushed. ‘We knew where you were. Cosying up to the Pans now, are you? Well, they’ve got money, I’ll give you that. Comes at a price, though. I wouldn’t trust them any further than I’d trust us, if I wasn’t already an Akinya.’
‘Man has a point,’ Eunice commented.
‘I’ll choose my own loyalties, thanks,’ Geoffrey said.
‘No one’s stopping you,’ Hector said. ‘Big mistake, though, thinking you can make the Pans work for you. What have you got that they want, exactly? Because it isn’t money, and if it’s charm and diplomacy they’re after . . .’ Hector tapped the doubled racquets against his forehead. ‘Oh, wait. It’s one of two things, isn’t it? Elephants or elephant dung.’ He lowered the racquets. ‘You think you’re ahead of them, Geoffrey? Able to make them work for you, not the other way around? You’re more naive than I thought, and that’s saying something.’ He paused, his voice turning earnest. ‘Lucas and I didn’t give a fuck about Memphis either way, I’ll be honest with you. He was old and past his best. But whatever happened out there, you had better get it into your head that we had nothing to do with it. Whereas you sent an old man to do your dirty work, when you had better things to do. It’s not me who needs to take a good hard look at his conscience.’
‘I won’t let you take down the Winter Palace.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘I don’t need to spell it out. Eunice is gone, Memphis is gone. Now the only link to the past is . . . that thing up there. And you can’t let it stand.’
‘Lucas was right – he did warn me it was a mistake to ask you to do anything useful. I should have listened.’ He pinched sweat from the corners of his eyes. ‘You enjoy certain benefits, cousin. You think yourself to be above the rest of us, but you’re always willing to scuttle back to the household when the need suits you. A room you don’t pay for? Free meals and transportation? Dropping the family name when it helps open doors?’
Geoffrey glared. ‘I’ve never done that.’
‘You need a dose of reality, I think. I won’t throw you out of the household, not when you have a guest here, but consider all other privileges rescinded. Forthwith. I’ll arrange a train ticket for Jumai and an airpod back to the railway station, but it’ll be at my discretion, not yours. You’ve shamed yourself, Geoffrey. Stop before you do any more harm.’
He moved to punch Hector.
It was a stupid, unpremeditated impulse, not something he’d been planning. If he’d thought about it for more than the instant it took the fury to overcome him, he’d have known how utterly pointless the gesture was going to prove.
Hector didn’t even flinch; barely raised the racquets in involuntary self-defence. He simply took a step backwards while the Mechanism assessed Geoffrey’s intent and intervened to prevent the completion of a violent act. It had been different out at the study station, when Geoffrey had clashed with the cousins: there, the aug had been thin, the Mechanism’s omniscience imperfect.
No so here, in the well-ordered environs of the household. A million viewpoints tracked him from instant to instant, an audience of unblinking sensors wired to the tireless peacekeeping web of the Surveilled World. In the dirt under his feet, in the granite glint of a wall, in the air itself, were more public eyes than he could imagine. His movements had been modelled and forward-projected. Algorithms had triggered, escalating in severity. From that nodal point in equatorial East Africa, a seismic ripple had troubled the Mechanism. At its epicentre, one calamitous truth: A human being was attempting to perpetrate harm against another.
The algorithms debated. Expert systems polled each other. Decision-branches cascaded. Prior case histories were sifted for best intervention practice. There was no time to consult human specialists; they’d only be alerted when the Mechanism had acted.
Geoffrey had barely begun to initiate the punch when something axed his head in two.
It was ‘just’ a headache, but so sudden, so agonising, that the effect was as instant and debilitating as if he’d been struck by lightning. He froze into paralysis, not even able to scream his pain. Eunice broke up like a jammed signal. Unbalanced by the momentum he’d already put into his swing, Geoffrey toppled past Hector and hit the ground hard, stiff as a statue.
The paralysis ebbed. He lay helpless, quivering in the aftershock of the intervention, dust and gravel in his mouth, his palms stinging, his trousers wet where he had lost bladder control.
br />
The intervention was over as suddenly as it had arrived. The headache was gone, leaving only an endless migraine afterchime.
‘That was . . . silly,’ Hector said, stepping over him, stooping to tap him on the thigh with the racquets. ‘Very, very silly. Now there’ll have to be an inquiry, and you know what that will mean. Psychologists will be involved. Neuropractors. Our name dragged through more dirt. All because you couldn’t act like a responsible adult.’
Geoffrey pushed himself to his feet. Through the shock of what had happened, the fury remained. Absurd as it was, he still wanted to hit Hector. Still wanted to punch that smile away.
Eunice hadn’t reappeared.
‘This isn’t over,’ he said.
Hector averted his gaze from the sorry spectacle before him. ‘Go and make yourself presentable.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Geoffrey was still shaking, still doing his best not to think through the consequences of what had just transpired, as he tossed his soiled garments into the wash and changed into fresh clothes. His instinct was to blame Hector.
But even if Hector was responsible for him committing the violent act, he could not be held accountable for the intervention. That was the point of the Mechanism: it was oblivious to persuasion, supremely immune to influence. Nor was it done with him. It might take hours, it might take days, but he would be called to account, by shrinks and ’practors, subjected to exhaustive profiling: not just to make sure he was suitably repentant, but to satisfy the Mechanism’s human consultants that the impulse had been an aberration, not the manifestation of some deeper psychological malaise that required further surgical intervention.
So he was in trouble, unquestionably. But he still had every reason to distrust the cousins, every reason to think that they would not waste a moment in erasing Eunice’s legacy.
Still in his room, with the door ajar, he used Truro’s secure quangle path to ching Tiamaat.
‘There’s been a development,’ Geoffrey said, when the smooth-faced merman had assumed form.
‘You’re referring to the disposal plans?’ Truro, who was half-submerged in pastel-blue lather, gave a vigorous blubbery nod. ‘I assumed that would have come to your attention as well. There’s no timescale for the operation, but we can safely assume it will be sooner rather than later, now that permission has been granted.’
‘There’s something else. I’ve just done something . . . impetuous. Or stupid.’ Geoffrey lowered his gaze, unable to look at the Pan directly. ‘I confronted the cousins.’
‘Perfectly understandable, given the circumstances.’
‘And I tried hitting one of them.’
‘Ah,’ Truro said, after a moment’s reflection. ‘I see. And this . . . act – was it—’
‘The Mechanism intervened.’
‘Oof.’ He blinked his large dark seal eyes in sympathy. ‘Painful, I’ll warrant. And doubtless fairly humiliating as well.’
‘I’ve had better mornings.’
‘Any, um, history of this kind of thing?’
‘I don’t routinely go around trying to hit people, no.’ But he had to think carefully. ‘Got into a fight when I was a teenager, over a card game. Or a girl. Both, maybe. That was the last time. Before that, it was just the usual stuff we do in childhood, so that we understand how things work.’
‘Then I doubt there’ll be any lasting complications. We’re animals, at the core, even after the Enhancements: the Mechanism doesn’t expect sainthood. All the same . . . it does complicate things now.’
‘That’s what I was thinking.’
‘Usual protocol in this situation would be a period of . . . probationary restraint, I think they call it – denial of aug and ching rights, restricted freedom of movement, and so forth – until a team of experts decides you aren’t a permanent menace to society and can be allowed to get on with your life without further enhancement . . . with a caution flag appended to your behavioural file, of course. The next time you’re involved in anything similar, the Mechanism won’t hesitate to assume you’re the initiating party . . . and it may dial up its response accordingly.’
No bones: the Mechanism would kill, if killing prevented the taking of an innocent life. Just because it didn’t happen very often didn’t mean that the threat was absent. Geoffrey’s crime put him a long way down the spectrum from the sort of offender likely to merit that kind of intervention. But still . . . just being on the same spectrum: he wasn’t too thrilled about that.
‘What do I do?’
‘We need to get you to Tiamaat before probationary restraint kicks in. A human has to be involved in that process, probably someone with a dozen or so pending cases already in their workfile. That means we may have an hour or two.’
‘Once I’m in Tiamaat, how does that help?’
‘We have . . . ways and means. But you need to get to us, Geoffrey. We can’t come to you now.’
He looked around the little room, underfurnished and impersonal, like a hotel he’d just checked into. He realised he wouldn’t miss it if he never saw it again. Other than a few knick-knacks, there was nothing of him here.
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Make haste,’ Truro said. ‘And speed. Haste and speed, very good things right now.’
Jumai was swimming lengths, cutting through the water like a swordfish, all glossy sleekness and speed. She made this basically inhuman activity appear not only workable but the one viable solution to the problem of moving.
‘I thought we might take a flight, around the area,’ he said vaguely when she paused for breath at one end of the pool, elbows on the side.
‘Is there stuff you need to deal with, to do with Memphis?’
‘Nothing that can’t wait.’
‘You all right, Geoffrey?’ She was looking at his trousers and shirt. ‘Why’ve you changed?’
He offered a shrug. ‘Felt like it.’
She shrugged in return, appearing to accept his explanation. ‘Mind if I do a few more lengths?’
He nodded at the clear blue horizon. It was untrammelled by even the wispiest promise of clouds, the merest hint of the weather system they’d flown through around Kigali. ‘There’s a front coming in. I thought we’d try and duck around it.’
‘A front? Really?’
‘Revised weather schedule,’ he offered lamely.
‘And this can’t wait?’
‘No,’ he said, trusting that she’d understand him, read the message in his eyes that he couldn’t say aloud. ‘No, it can’t.’
‘OK. Then I guess it’s time to get out of the water.’
She changed quickly, hair still frizzy from being towel-dried when she rejoined him. Geoffrey was anxious, wondering when the iron clamp of probationary restraint was going to slam down on him.
‘What’s up?’ she asked him, sotto voce, as they headed towards the parked airpods.
‘Something.’
‘To do with me being here?’
‘It’s not you.’ He was answering in the same undertone. ‘But I need you with me.’
‘Is this about the job?’
‘Might be.’
He beckoned the closest airpod to open itself. Jumai climbed in confidently, Geoffrey right behind her. It was only as he entered the cool of the passenger compartment that he realised how much he’d been sweating. It was drying on him, cold-prickling his forehead.
‘Manual,’ he voked, and waited for the controls to slide out of their hidden ports, unfolding and assembling with cunning speed into his waiting grasp. A moment passed, then another. His hands were still clutching air.
‘Manual,’ Geoffrey repeated.
‘I’m afraid that manual flight authority is not available,’ the airpod said, with maddening pleasantness. ‘Please give a destination or vector.’
Jumai glanced at Geoffrey. ‘You’re locked out?’
‘Take me to Tiamaat Aqualogy,’ he said.
‘That destination is not recognised,?
?? the airpod replied. ‘Please restate.’
‘Take me to the sea, over the Somali Basin.’
‘Please be more specific.’
‘Head due east.’
‘I’m afraid that vector is not acceptable.’
‘You’re not allowed to take me east?’
‘I am not permitted to accept any destinations or vectors that would involve flight over open water.’
Geoffrey shook his head, confounded. ‘Who put this restriction on you?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not permitted—’
‘Never mind.’ Geoffrey clenched his fists, giving up on the airpod. He cracked the canopy, letting out the bubble of cool, scented air, letting the African heat back in. ‘Fucking Lucas and Hector.’
Jumai pushed herself out. ‘They’ll have locked them all down, won’t they?’
‘All the airpods,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Not the Cessna.’
It was parked at the end of the row of flying machines, already turned around ready for taxi. ‘Engine start,’ Geoffrey voked before they’d even got there. The prop began to turn, the hydrogen-electric engine almost silent save for a rising locust hum that quickly passed into ultrasound. That was good, at least: he didn’t think that the cousins had the means to block his control of the Cessna, but there was little he’d put past them now.
‘If you knew they couldn’t stop the Cessna,’ Jumai said, ‘why didn’t we—’
The hydrogen feed line was unplugged, lying on the ground next to the plane. Geoffrey had connected the line when he’d arrived, still focused enough to do that, but he had no idea when the cousins had come along to remove it.
‘Watch the prop-wash.’ Geoffrey opened the door and allowed Jumai to climb under the shade of the wing into the co-pilot’s position. He removed the chocks and joined her in the cockpit. Skipping the flight-readiness checks, he released the brakes and revved the engine to taxi power. The Cessna began to roll, bumping over dirt and wheel ruts on its way to the take-off strip. Only now did Geoffrey check the fuel gauge. Lower than he’d have wished, but not empty. He thought there was enough to make it to Tiamaat.