‘I’ll accept the consequences. Geoffrey – I can’t force you to do this, but you have my consent to fly the Quaynor. If Eunice is able to help with that, so much the better.’
‘You must do this,’ Eunice said. Her tone turned needling. ‘You let elephants into your head, grandson. Surely you can make an exception for me.’
‘Give me the controls,’ he said, popping his knuckles, spreading his fingers, loosening his shoulder muscles, just as if he was readying himself for an hour in the Cessna. ‘Eunice – I’m letting you in. You know I can kick you out at any time, so don’t overstay your welcome.’
‘As if I’d ever do that.’
He voked the rarely given command, the one that assigned full voluntary control of his own body to another intelligence. There was nothing magical about it; it was merely an inversion of the usual ching protocols: nerve impulses running one way rather than the other, sensory flow leaving his head rather than entering it.
Still it was strange for him. People did this sort of thing all the time, hiring out their bodies as warmblood proxies. He’d never had cause to ching into a warmblood himself – but if the situation had demanded it, and there’d been no other choice, he supposed he’d have accepted the arrangement without complaint. But the other way round: to be the warmblood? Never in a million years.
And here he was being driven by his grandmother.
She stole his eyes first. Between one moment and the next, they weren’t looking where he wanted, but where she needed to see – and her intake of visual information was so efficient that it felt as if he had gone into a kind of quivering optic seizure, his eyeballs jerking this way and that in the manner of REM sleep. Then she took his hands. They started moving on the fold-out keypads, rap-tapping commands into the Quaynor’s avionics. It felt, for an instant, as if his hands were stuffed into enchanted gloves that forced his fingers to dance.
Then she stole his voice. It still sounded like him: she could make him speak, but she couldn’t alter the basic properties of his larynx.
‘I have an approach solution. It’s imperfect, and it will still expose us to the Winter Palace’s countermeasures. If we were to attempt to match her spin precisely, we’d break up inside sixty seconds. This is a compromise that gets us to the dock and minimises our likelihood of suffering catastrophic damage. I will assume control all the way in, and make any necessary adjustments as we go. Do I have authorisation?’
‘Do you need it?’ Gilbert asked.
‘I thought it best to ask first, child.’
‘Do it,’ Arethusa said.
The acceleration came without warning, without a cushioning transition from zero-gee. To his horror and wonderment, Geoffrey realised that he could hear the engines, even in vacuum. They had been cranked up so high that something of their output, some phantom of undamped vibration, was propagating through the chassis of the ship, despite all the intervening layers of insulation and shockproofing. It sounded like a landslide or a stampede and it made him very, very nervous. Red lights started flashing, master caution alarms sounding. The Quaynor was registering indignant objection to the punishment it was now enduring.
It had served its human masters well. Why were they putting it through this?
‘She’s holding,’ Eunice announced, through Geoffrey’s throat. ‘But that was the easy bit.’
The Quaynor had to execute a curving trajectory to match, or even come close to matching, the Winter Palace’s spin. In the Cessna, it would have needed nothing more than a modest application of stick and rudder. But curvature was acceleration, and in vacuum that could only be achieved by thrust, directed at an angle to the ship’s momentary vector. The magnetoplasma engines could not be gimballed, and therefore the Quaynor was forced to use auxiliary steering and manoeuvring rockets, pushed to their limits. Under such a load, the possibility of buckling was a very real risk. Geoffrey needed no sensors or master-caution alarms to tell him that. He could feel it in the push of his bones against his restraints, the creaks and groans from his surroundings.
When something clanged against the hull he assumed it was the resumption of the Winter Palace’s attack, but no: it was just a speck of debris from the wreckage of the Kinyeti. More came, in drumming volleys, and then they were through the thickest part of it. The acceleration and steering thrust intensified and abated in savage jerks as Eunice finessed her approach solution. They were very close now, fewer than a dozen kilometres from the station, and the extent of its damage – or lack of it – was becoming much clearer. A fraction, maybe one in five, of the pirate devices appeared unharmed. They wheeled slowly into view and then slowly out of view again, like cabins in a Ferris wheel.
‘Maybe we still have approach authorisation,’ Jumai said.
Something hit them. There’d been no warning, and they were so close to the Winter Palace that even a kinetic-energy slug arrived almost instantaneously. The Quaynor shook, and kept shaking, as the energy of the impact whiplashed up and down her chassis. Two or three seconds later, the habitat scored another strike. In the neurotic jitter of his vision, Geoffrey caught Mira Gilbert studying a schematic: an outline of the ship with the damaged areas pulsing an angry red. He wanted to speak, wanted to ask how serious the injuries were, but Eunice still had him in her thrall.
Then it quietened – there were no more impacts – and just as miraculously the acceleration eased, smoothed, reduced to zero. They had transited the volume of maximum hazard.
The Quaynor gave one more creak, and then all was silent. Even the master-caution alarm had stopped blaring.
‘We’re clear,’ Eunice said. ‘My guns can’t touch us now – there’s a zone of avoidance around either docking pole, and we’re well inside it. Normal approach and docking will be completed in . . .’ She made a show of hesitation, although the answer was surely known to her in advance. ‘Thirty seconds. Please fold away your tray-tables and place your seats in the upright position. Thank you for flying with Akinya Space.’
‘Why did you shoot at us?’ Gilbert asked.
‘That wasn’t shooting. That was a reminder not to take anything for granted.’ She made him let out a small, prideful sigh. ‘Well, grandson – now that my work here is done, would you like your body back?’
His eyes stopped their jerky dance. He could speak again, and move his hands normally.
‘You did well,’ he said.
‘You feel the need to compliment me?’
‘It’s what Sunday would do,’ he said, addressing the now disembodied voice. ‘That’s all.’
Soon came a gentle clunk, followed by a quick sequenced drumroll of capture clamps, primed like the petals of some carnivorous plant to lock on to any vehicle that made it this far.
Geoffrey began to undo his restraints. It had been difficult, but they had docked with the Winter Palace.
Now all they had to do was go inside and see what had become of Hector.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
There was darkness, an absence of experience, then dawning amber light, the primal stirrings of consciousness. Then there was a room, warm and golden and as bedecked with finery as the inside of any wealthy merchant’s tent, in any desert caravan from the Arabian Nights.
And Sunday was awake, looking at herself.
A memory stirred: an error she would not make twice. It was not her own face looking down at her, but there were sufficient similarities that a blood relationship could not be denied. A woman’s face, close enough to her own that they might have been sisters or cousins. And she had seen this woman before, behind layers of glass, in a landscape older than Africa.
Her mouth was dry, her lips gummed together. Nonetheless she managed a word.
‘Soya.’
‘Glad you remember me. You were both pretty cold by the time we reached you. Your suits only had a few hours of effective life support left in them.’ Soya was dressed in a white blouse, draped with about a dozen necklaces, some hung with jewelled pendants, some with wooden ch
arms. She was all skin and bones, lean and angular where Sunday (as she would readily admit) was padded and ample. They had genes in common, but they’d been raised on very different worlds. Soya’s legs, in leather trousers with calf-length boots, were stupidly long and slender. She was taller than Sunday, and towered over her even more so now that Sunday was lying on her back, on a couch or bed in one corner of the room. It had curtains rather than walls. Incense smoked in candleholders. The air smelled of honey, cinnamon, baking bread.
‘Jitendra?’ she asked, forming his name in three distinct syllables, each of which cost her effort.
‘He’s well, don’t worry.’ Soya was pouring something into a glass. Bangles clashed against each other on her wrist, making a constant metallic hiss whenever she moved. ‘You don’t remember much about being rescued?’
‘No,’ Sunday said.
‘But you know my name.’
‘We’ve met before.’
‘Yes, we did.’ There was a note of reproach in that. ‘And still you got into trouble with those people. Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned.’ Soya leaned down and offered the glass to Sunday’s lips. ‘Drink this.’
The liquid was sugary and welcome. It rinsed some of the dryness from her mouth and throat; notched her one step closer to the living.
‘I don’t know who you are, Soya.’ Sunday dredged a hard-won memory from the recent past. ‘You told me you were born here, on Mars. You said something about Nigeria. We’re still on Mars, aren’t we?’
‘You’ve only been out about thirteen hours. It’s tomorrow.’ Soya smiled at that, and the smile cut through Sunday. She’d seen it a million times, in her own reflection. Just not as much lately as she might have wished.
‘And that’s all I get? We’re related, Soya. I’ve known that from the moment I first saw your face. And why would you make contact with me if it wasn’t connected with my family?’
Soya smiled, but with less assurance than before. ‘I know you want answers, but you’ve had a difficult couple of days and you should probably rest first.’
‘You just told me I’ve been asleep since yesterday.’
‘After nearly dying.’
Sunday took a leap into the void. The question was absurd on a number of levels, but she had to ask it. ‘Are you . . . related to Eunice? Are you some granddaughter or grand-niece I never knew about?’
‘No, I’m not related to her. I’d offer you a cell scraping, if you had a means of testing it.’ Soya looked down, fiddling absently with the necklaces. ‘But you and me, that’s a different story. We do have a common ancestor. But it’s not Eunice.’
Sunday pushed herself up from the couch. Heavy blankets slid away from her. She was wearing lime-green football shorts and a cheap yellow tourist T-shirt with an animated space elevator printed on the front. The logo said Pontaniak.
‘Who, Soya?’ The other woman had half a head on her, but she still took a step away, as if she hadn’t anticipated a show of determination quite this valiant.
‘Jonathan,’ Soya said. And as if that was not enough – there was only one Jonathan in Sunday’s firmament – Soya added, ‘Beza. Eunice’s husband. The man she came to Mars with.’
Sunday shook her head reflexively. ‘Jonathan Beza died more than sixty years ago. Eunice and he had divorced by then. There was an accident, here on Mars. Some kind of pressure blow-out.’
‘And that precludes me from being related to him?’
‘He remarried before his death. He had more children, and some of them had children themselves. Nathan even came to the funeral, and I know about all the others. There’s no Soya anywhere in that family tree.’
‘In which case you’re looking at the wrong tree.’
It had not been Soya who said that. This voice was deep and sonorous, varnished and craquelured. It spoke Swahili, but with an old-fashioned diction that called to mind nothing in Sunday’s experience but Memphis Chibesa.
She turned to follow the voice to its origin. There, standing in a gash of the curtain – like an actor hesitating to join the stage – was the oldest man she had ever seen.
‘I am Jonathan Beza,’ the man said. ‘I am your grandfather, Sunday Akinya. I was married to Eunice. And yes, I am very much alive.’
Jitendra was looking to her for guidance. She signalled with the slightest nod that yes, she believed this man to be exactly who he said he was. As absurd as that was to take in, after everything she had accepted in her life.
‘It was easier to die then,’ Jonathan Beza said. ‘You must remember that this was a different Mars, a different time. Even now, as you’ve experienced, there are places on this world where a person can disappear very effectively. Or be made to disappear.’ He stopped to pour chai for his daughter and their two guests.
‘You mean there was never an accident?’ Sunday asked.
‘There was. The same sort of accident that still happens very occasionally nowadays. It was real, and I didn’t engineer it in any way. I should hope not: good people died in it, after all.’
‘But you saw your chance to vanish,’ Jitendra said.
‘The thought had been at the back of my mind for some time. The Mech was so primitive back then we didn’t even call it the Mech. The few implants I carried were easily disabled, or fooled into giving false reports. When the opportunity to fall off the edge of the world presented itself, I took it.’ He fixed his gaze on Sunday. ‘Your grandmother didn’t know. She wasn’t complicit in this. She even came to my funeral.’
‘That was when she returned to Phobos,’ Sunday said.
‘Yes.’
They were sitting in a different curtained room. Sunday still had no idea where they were, beyond Jonathan’s assurance that it was still Mars. There was no aug reach, no Eunice. In their place was a noise like distant engines and the occasional bump or sway that led her to think she was in a vehicle.
A possibility had presented itself, but she’d dismissed it instantly.
‘You found us in the Evolvarium,’ Jitendra said. ‘Have you any idea what we were doing there?’
Jonathan said, ‘Dying?’
‘Other than that,’ Sunday said.
‘Yes, I have a shrewd idea what you were doing. Better than a shrewd idea, actually.’ He paused, apparently to collect himself, marshalling energies before proceeding. Jonathan was small, wiry, obviously immensely old but nowhere near as frail as Sunday might have expected for one of his age. He was even older than Eunice: she’d have queried the construct for his date of birth, if the construct had been reachable. Born 2020 or thereabouts, if not earlier. A man now in his hundred-and-forties. That made him old, but not impossibly so. He wore the inner layer of a spacesuit, a tight black garment sewn with coolant lines and studded with the gold-plated discs of biomonitor sockets. His arms were scrawny but there was still muscle tone there, and no trace of arthritis or neurodegenerative tremor in his fingers. Sunday had watched as he poured the chai; he hadn’t spilt a drop. His head was mostly hairless, save for a corona of fine white fuzz around his scalp, his face abundantly wrinkled, the already dark skin mottled by pure black lesions, yet remaining startlingly expressive. His eyes were clear and focused, his smile alarmingly youthful.
‘Then you’ll know it was a waste of time,’ Jitendra said.
‘I know Dorcas cheated you. That may not amount to quite the same thing.’
‘How much do you know?’ Sunday asked, directing her question at Soya. ‘You were in Crommelin. You must be registered as a citizen or tourist to be anywhere on Mars, so you can’t have dropped off the map the way your father has.’
Jonathan answered for her. ‘Soya has been my lifeline, Sunday. She has been able to move in the Surveilled World, be my eyes and ears. She has arranged medicine for me, on the few occasions when I have needed it.’
‘I have a false history,’ Soya said, looking at Sunday and Jitendra in turn. ‘My connection to my father . . . and by extension your grandmother . . . isn’t part of that
history.’
‘You could never do such a thing on Earth, or any place where the Surveilled World is fully developed. On Mars, now, it would be difficult. It was easier when Soya was born.’
‘How old are you?’ Sunday asked.
‘Fifty,’ Soya said. ‘Does that surprise you?’
‘I don’t suppose it should.’
‘Eunice wasn’t her mother,’ Jonathan said, confirming what Soya had already told Sunday. ‘There was a woman, an investigator. Her name was Lizbet. She had her doubts about my death, and she followed them to me.’
‘I never heard about any investigation,’ Sunday said.
‘Lizbet decided not to go public with her story once she’d heard my side of things. She became my companion, and we had a daughter. We were happy. Lizbet died twenty years ago.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sunday and Jitendra said in unison. Then, on her own, Sunday continued, ‘And what was your side of the story, Jonathan? Why this secrecy? What persuaded Lizbet to keep it to herself?’
‘I know why your grandmother came back to Mars. My funeral was a useful pretext, but she’d have found a way to do it whatever happened. She spent time on Phobos, more than she needed to. I don’t know what she got up to there, but I presume whatever it was led you here?’
Sunday eyed Jitendra before proceeding. ‘We’ve been following something ever since she died. It began with an anomaly in her private banking files. That led us from Africa to the Moon. On the Moon my brother found something in a safe-deposit box. That led us to Pythagoras. What we found in Pythagoras led me to Phobos. Phobos led me to the Evolvarium.’
‘And now to me,’ Jonathan said.
‘Except I didn’t find you,’ Sunday said. ‘You found me. Soya knew I was on the planet: that’s why she contacted me in Crommelin.’
‘It was easy to track your arrival,’ Soya said. ‘Given the timing, there couldn’t be any other reason why you’d come to Mars, other than to find out what your grandmother had buried here.’
‘I failed,’ Sunday said.
Jonathan braced his hands on his knees and rose from his chair. ‘Do you have any idea where you are?’