Not everyone in attendance knew what was happening, but one by one those who had some inkling turned to face Kilimanjaro. They knew what was coming next, and their anticipation soon spread to the other members of the party. Everyone looked to the fire-bright snowcap.
The emerging payload was a swiftly rising glint.
In less than a second, the pusher lasers were activated and aligned. There were five of them in all, stationed in a wide ring around the exit iris, a few hundred metres below the summit. They were highly efficient free-electron lasers, and most of the energy they were emitting was shone straight onto the underside of the rising payload, creating an ablative cushion of superhot plasma. Their cooling systems were deep inside the mountain, so that they did not disturb the snowcap. Sufficient stray light was reaching his eyes to make the lasers visible, five platinum threads converging at the top, the angle between them slowly narrowing as the payload rose, and then appearing to widen again as it fell further and further to the east. The guests were looking along the payload’s line of flight, so they couldn’t easily tell that it was rising at forty-five degrees rather than vertically. But by now it was almost certainly out over the Indian Ocean, over the sovereign seaspace of the United Aquatic Nations.
Someone started clapping. It was, perhaps, not quite the appropriate response. But then someone else joined in, and then a third, and before long Geoffrey found himself clapping as well. Even Sunday was giving in to the mood. Memphis had by then disposed of the ashes and was looking, if not precisely pleased with himself, then not entirely dissatisfied with the way events had ensued.
‘I hope you will forgive that little piece of showmanship,’ he said, raising his voice just enough to quell the clapping. Before continuing, he looked down at the ground, almost shamefacedly. ‘A couple of days ago, after I had already returned with the ashes, I learned that an all-up test was scheduled for this afternoon. Nothing had been publicised, and the engineers were particularly keen that there be no announcement beforehand. I could not let the opportunity slip.’
‘I thought you were years away from operation.’ This was Nathan Beza, grandson of Jonathan Beza, Eunice’s late husband. Jonathan had remarried on Mars; Nathan – who had come from Ceres for the scattering – had no blood ties to Eunice.
‘So did we,’ Geoffrey muttered under his breath.
‘The damage was never as bad as we thought when this happened,’ said Hector, rubbing a finger along the sweat-line where his collar bit into his neck ‘The engineers were right to err on the side of caution, even if it hurt our shares at the time of the malfunction. But it made our competitors complacent, snug in the knowledge that we’d be out of business for a long, long time to come.’
‘What did we just put up?’ asked Geoffrey, breaking his vow of silence.
‘A test mass,’ said Lucas. ‘Offsetting of repair and redesign costs could have been achieved with a commercial payload, but the risk of a security leak was deemed unacceptably high.’ Lucas had the easy, authoritative diction of a newsfeed anchordoll. ‘Implementing watertight non-disclosure protocols within our core engineering staff has already proven challenging enough.’
‘So other than you two and Memphis, who exactly knew about this?’ Sunday asked.
‘Matters proceeded on a need-to-know basis,’ Lucas said. ‘There was no need to risk exposure beyond the family.’
‘My sister and I are still family,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Last time I checked, anyway.’
‘Yes,’ Hector said, over-emphatically. ‘Yes, you are.’
‘A number of technical and legal hurdles must be surmounted before a satisfactory transition to full commercial operations can be effected,’ Lucas said, sounding as smooth and plausible as a corporate salesbot. ‘A robust testing regime will now ensue, anticipated to last three-to-six months.’
‘The main thing,’ Hector said, ‘is that Grandmother would have found it a fitting tribute. Don’t you agree, Geoffrey?’
Geoffrey was composing a suitably tart riposte – everything he knew about Eunice told him that this was exactly the kind of self-aggrandising spectacle she’d have gone out of her way to avoid – when he realised that by wounding his cousin he would be hurting Memphis as well. So he smiled and shut up, and shot Sunday a glance warning her to do likewise.
Sunday set her jaw in defiance, but complied.
They watched until, as suddenly as they had activated, the lasers snapped off. Presuming that the launch had proceeded without incident, the lasers would by now have pushed the payload all the way to orbital velocity, doubling its speed upon emergence from the mountain. Barring any adjustments, the payload would be back over equatorial Africa in ninety minutes. By then all the stars would be out.
The party was beginning to drift back to the house. Geoffrey lingered a while, thinking about waiting until the payload returned. It was then that he noticed the child who had been there all along, mingling with the party but never attaching herself to any part of it. She was a small girl, of Chinese appearance, wearing a red dress, white stockings and black shoes. Sunday and Geoffrey both carried Chinese genes, but this girl did not look in the least African. The style and cut of her dress brought to mind a different century.
Geoffrey didn’t recognise her at all, but she was looking at him with such directness that he glanced around to see who might be standing behind. He was alone.
‘Hello?’ he said, offering a smile. ‘Can I—?’
He voked an aug layer. The girl wasn’t a girl at all, but another robot proxy. Maybe she was part of Sunday’s field test. He looked for his sister, but she was twenty paces away, talking to Montgomery, Kenneth Cho’s brother, who walked with the stiff gait of someone using a mobility exo under their clothes.
Geoffrey sharpened his aug query. He wanted to know who was chinging into this proxy body. But the aug couldn’t resolve the ching bind.
That, if anything, was even stranger than the appearance of an unknown child at his grandmother’s scattering.
CHAPTER TWO
‘Not clever, brother. It’s a long way down.’
Geoffrey steadied himself and stepped away from the roof’s edge. He’d been craning his neck, following a bright point of light as it tracked overhead. A Balinese orbital manufactory, according to the aug. For a moment, it had exerted a hypnotic draw on his gaze and he’d begun to topple.
Sunday was right: the old building lacked the safety features it was so easy to take for granted these days. No barrier around the roof, and no hidden devices waiting to spring into action to intercept his fall.
He caught his breath. ‘I didn’t hear you come up.’
‘Lost in your own little world.’ She took the wine glass out of his hand. ‘I thought you were feeling sick.’
‘Sick of playing my part, more like. Did you hear what Lucas said to me?’
‘Have a heart. I had my own conversation to handle.’
‘I bet it wasn’t as dull as mine.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Hector can give Lucas a run for his money when it comes to boring the crap out of people.’
The stars were out, the western horizon still glowing the deep shimmering pink of a plasma tube. After leaving the dinner, he had stepped over the glass skylights and made his way to the unprotected edge. Looking up, he’d studied the riverine ooze of the Near-Earth communities. The aug identified the stations and platforms by name and affiliation, painting flags and corporate symbols on the heavens. Beautiful, if you stopped to think about what it actually all meant, what it signified in terms of brute human achievement, generations of blood and sweat. Peaceful communities in orbit, cities on the Moon and Mars and further afield, and all of it theoretically within his grasp, his for the taking.
In 2030, when Eunice had been born, there’d been nothing like this. Rockets that used chemistry to get into space. A couple of mouldering space stations, bolted together from tin cans. Footprints on the Moon, undisturbed for sixty years. Some clunking, puppyish robots bumbli
ng around on Mars, a few more further afield. Space probes the size of dustbin lids, falling into the outer darkness.
A night sky that was a black, swallowing ocean.
‘Lucas asked me what I want to do with my life,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I said I’m taking care of it myself, thank you. Then he asked me why I’m not making a name for myself. I said my name was taken care of at birth.’
‘Bet that went down well.’
‘Having the keys to the kingdom is all very well, Lucas told me, but apparently you still need to know which doors to open.’
‘Lucas is a prick. He may be blood, but I can still say it.’ Sunday knelt down, placing Geoffrey’s glass to one side. She lowered her legs over the side of the building, assuming a position that struck Geoffrey as being only slightly less precarious than standing right on the edge. ‘He’s had an empathy shunt installed. It’s legal, surprisingly enough. When he needs to become more detached and businesslike, he can turn off specific brain circuitry related to empathy. Become a sociopath for the day.’
‘Even Hector hasn’t gone that far.’
‘Give him time – if having a conscience comes between him and a profit margin, he’ll march straight down to the nearest neuropractor and have his own shunt put in.’
‘I’m glad I’m not like them.’
‘That doesn’t change the fact that you and I are always going to be a crushing disappointment to the rest of the family.’
‘If Father was here, he’d back me up.’
‘Don’t be so sure. He may not have quite as low an opinion of us as our cousins, but he still thinks you’re only pretending to have an occupation.’
Above the household, glowering down on Africa, the full Moon gave every impression of having been attacked by an exuberant child with a big box of poster paints. The Chinese, Indian and African sectors were coloured red, green and yellow. Blue swatches, squeezed between the major geopolitical subdivisions, indicated claims staked by smaller nation states and transnational entities. Arrows and text labels picked out the major settlements, as well as orbiting bodies and vehicles in cislunar space.
Geoffrey voked away the layer. The naked Moon was silver-yellow, flattened-looking. Any other time of the month, cities and industries would have spangled in lacy chains and arcs in the shadowed regions of the disc, strung out along transit lines, political demarcations and the ancient natural features of the Lunar surface. Rivers of fiery lava, seeping through a black crust. But the fully lit face, too bright for any signs of habitation to stand out, could not have looked so different to Geoffrey’s moonstruck hominid ancestors.
He still found it difficult to accept that Sunday wasn’t sitting right next to him, but was up there, on that bright nickel coin hammered into the sky.
‘Did you see that strange little girl at the scattering?’ he asked her.
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘I was going to ask if you knew who she was. I tried resolving her bind, but—’
‘It didn’t go anywhere.’ Geoffrey nodded. ‘That’s weird, isn’t it? You’re not meant to be able to do that.’
‘Doesn’t mean there aren’t some people capable of doing so.’
‘Like your friends?’
‘Ah, right. I see where this is going. You think she has something to do with the Descrutinised Zone. Well, sorry, but I don’t think she does. Plexus are monitoring Earth–Lunar traffic and they didn’t pick up anything that looked like an unresolved ching bind. Not that they’re infallible, of course, but my guess is that she wasn’t chinging in from Lunar space. Somewhere closer, maybe.’
‘Still doesn’t tell us who she is.’
‘No, but if I allowed myself to get sucked into every little mystery surrounding this family . . .’ Sunday left the remark unfinished. ‘Someone must know her, and that’s all that matters to me. What other possibility is there? Someone showed up at our scattering without an invitation?’
‘Maybe everyone just assumes she was invited.’
‘Good luck to her, in that case. No secrets were revealed, and if anyone wanted to eavesdrop, there were a million public eyes they could have used. Sorry, but I’ve got other things on my mind right now. Deadlines. Bills. Rent to pay. That kind of stuff.’
Sunday was right, of course – and given Geoffrey’s shaky grasp of the internal politics of his own family, it was entirely possible that the girl was some relative he’d forgotten about.
‘I can’t even point to the DZ,’ he said, grasping in a single remorseful instant how little he knew about her life.
‘It would be a bit weird if you could, brother – it’s on the other side of the Moon, so it’s never actually visible from here.’ She paused. ‘You know, the offer’s always there. You can get a tourist visa easily enough, spend a few days with us. Jitendra and I would love to show you around. There’s something else I’m dying to show you, too. That thing I did with Eunice’s face . . .’ Sunday hesitated. ‘There’s a bit more to it, it’s kind of a long-term project of mine. But you’d have to come and see it in person.’
Geoffrey delved into his box of delaying tactics. ‘I need to get a couple of papers out before I can take any time off. Then there’s an article I need to peer review for Mind.’
‘What you always say, brother. I’m not criticising, though. You love your work, I can see that.’
‘I’m flying out tomorrow. Want to come and see the herd?’
‘I . . . need to report back, about this body,’ Sunday said. ‘Sorry Like you say: maybe next time.’
Geoffrey smiled in the darkness. ‘We’re as bad each other, aren’t we?’
‘Very probably’ his sister answered, from wherever on the far side of the Moon her flesh-and-blood body presently resided. ‘Me, I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
He had hoped Sunday might change her mind – there was so much of his work he would have gladly shared with her – but when Geoffrey flew out in the morning it was on his own. The waterhole, he observed, was smaller than it had been at the start of the short dry season that accompanied the turning of the year. Patches of once-marshy ground were now hardened and barren of vegetation, forcing animals to crowd closer as they sought sustenance. Rather than the intense vivid green of the rainy season, the grass was now sun-bleached brown, sparse and lacking nourishment. Trees had been stripped of anything edible and within reach of trunks. Many decades had passed since the last prolonged drought in this part of Africa, and a real drought would never be permitted now, but it was still a testing time.
Soon he spotted a huddle of elephants near a grove of candelabra trees, and another about a kilometre further away, with a mother and calf trailing the group. Squinting as the sun flashed off what little water remained, he made out a lone bull picking its way through a stand of acacia and cabbage trees. The elephants were battleship grey, with only a few olive-green patches testifying that they had, against the odds, located some cool mud.
By the shape of his body, the relative length and curvature of his tusks and a certain sauntering quality to his gait, the lone adult male was almost certainly Odin, a generally bad-tempered bull with a range that encompassed most of the basin. Odin had his trunk curled nonchalantly over his left tusk and was making progress in the direction of the nearest grouping, the O-family into which he had been born some thirty years ago.
Geoffrey voked an aug layer, the aug dropping an arrow and data box onto the bull, confirming that it was indeed Odin.
The Cessna continued its turn. Geoffrey spotted another group of elephants, even further from the waterhole than the second. It was the M-family, his main study group. They had moved a long way since yesterday. ‘Turn north-west,’ he told the Cessna, ‘and take us down to about two hundred metres.’
The aircraft obeyed. Geoffrey counted the elephants by eye as best he could, but that was hard enough from a fixed position. He overflew the group once, had the Cessna make a loop and return, and got different numbers: eleven on the first
pass, ten on the second. Giving in, he allowed the aug to label and identify the party. He was right about the M-family identification and the aug found only the expected ten elephants. He must have double-counted one of the rambunctious calves.
He had the Cessna overfly the M-family one more time, lower still, and watched elephants lift their heads to follow him, one of the older members even saluting him with her trunk. ‘Give me manual,’ he told the plane.
He selected a ribbon of land and came down three hundred metres from the M-family. The aug detected no other elephants – and certainly no bulls – within three kilometres. An adequate margin of error, and he would be alerted if the situation changed.
He told the Cessna that he would return within two hours, grabbed his shoulder bag from behind the pilot’s seat and then set off in the direction of the herd. Leaving nothing to chance, Geoffrey hefted a dead branch from the ground and used it to beat the earth as he walked, occasionally raising his voice to announce his arrival. The last thing he wanted to do was startle a dozing elephant that had somehow managed not to pick up on his approach.
‘It’s me, Geoffrey.’
He pushed through the trees, and at last the elephants were in sight. Ten, as the aug had confirmed – grazing peacefully, snuffling and rooting through dried-up grass. The matriarch, Matilda, was already aware of his presence. She was a big elephant with a broad face, missing a tusk on the right side and possessed of a distinctive Africa-shaped notch in the side of her left ear.