‘Hell, yeah,’ Jumai said.
And tapped the keypad.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Jonathan Beza whipped the blanket free with a magicianly flourish, beaming at Sunday as if this was a moment he had been planning for years.
The blanket had concealed a box. It was, superficially, much like the box that Gribelin’s proxy had unearthed the day before: the same dimensions, the same grey alloy casing. It looked older, though. Sunday couldn’t put her finger on exactly why that should be so, but she knew she was looking at something that had been locked and buried a long time ago. The dents and scratches had provenance.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Eunice came back for my funeral,’ Jonathan said. ‘This we know. But she didn’t just come back for that. I . . . followed her.’ He hesitated, looking aside as if there was shame in what he had done. ‘At a distance, obviously, and I don’t think she ever suspected anything. It wasn’t difficult to track her movements, and there was no Evolvarium then. I traced her return to her old landing site, near Pavonis Mons – the burial spot.’
‘You saw her bury the box?’ Sunday asked.
He shook his head firmly. ‘No – I couldn’t get that close, not without making my presence known. But when she’d gone, there was nothing to stop me returning to the landing site. I gave it a year or two, just to let the dust settle. Part of me worried that the whole thing was a trap to flush me out.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘As much as it pains me, I think I was the last thing on her mind by then. Even my funeral . . . it suited her to come back to attend it, but maybe she already had other plans . . .’ He trailed off. ‘Perhaps you’d better open the box.’
‘Do you know what’s in it?’ Jitendra asked.
‘Yes, and it’s perfectly safe. But it won’t talk to me.’
As Sunday worked the catches at the side of the box, she said, ‘I still don’t get it. The box Dorcas stole – where did that one come from?’
‘Oh, that,’ Jonathan said, as if this was a detail he had nearly allowed to slip his mind. ‘I put that there, obviously. I knew that the real box was meant for someone to find, someone connected to the family. For sixty years, no one came. Then Eunice’s death was announced, and less than four months later her granddaughter shows up on Mars.’ He touched his fingers to his chin, as if mulling a difficult problem. ‘Hm. I wonder if those two things might possibly be connected?’
‘I was keeping an eye on things for him,’ Soya said. ‘When it became clear that you intended to enter the Evolvarium, there was no doubt that you’d come for the box.’
‘While Soya was meeting you in Crommelin,’ Jonathan said, ‘I was out there burying the decoy box. No one saw me do it. With the machines sniffing around, it wouldn’t stand a chance of going undetected for more than a few weeks. But we didn’t need that long, just the few days it would take you to cross Mars and reach the burial site.’
‘It was good that I warned you that the Pans couldn’t necessarily be trusted,’ Soya said. ‘It meant that you understood the situation the moment Dorcas turned on you. From what we can gather, you played your parts very well indeed. Dorcas never had the slightest idea that she’d been duped.’
‘She got the wrong box,’ Jitendra said, marvellingly.
‘And left you to the mercy of the Evolvarium,’ Soya added. ‘She cut a lot of deals to make that snatch. Frankly, no one will be shedding any tears if the other Overfloaters rip the Lady Disdain to shreds.’
Sunday had finally succeeded in opening the catches. She eased back the lid, the hinges stiff but manageable. She wasn’t sure what to expect this time. There had been a smaller box inside the decoy, but perhaps the point of that had just been to delay the Overfloaters. Inside this box she found a dense matrix of foam packing, and a rounded object poking through the top of the packing.
‘Take it out,’ Jonathan said. ‘It won’t bite.’
She understood the significance of his comment as she withdrew the ancient space helmet from the box. Even in Martian gravity it was heavy in her hands: like something forged from iron or cut from solid marble. She had never handled a helmet quite so antiquated.
But she had seen it before.
Vivid paintwork covered the helmet: slashes of yellow, gold and black, daubs of white and red around the visor’s rim. The paintwork had chipped to reveal bare metal in places, was scuffed and dirty elsewhere, but the design was still clear. It was a fierce blue-eyed lioness, her mouth gaping wide around the faceplate.
‘Senge Dongma,’ Sunday said, in reverence and awe. ‘The lion-faced one. This is Eunice’s actual helmet.’
‘Knew you’d recognise it,’ Jonathan said.
Sunday bit back the admission that she would have recognised nothing were it not for the construct. ‘I . . . saw an image of it on Phobos,’ she said. ‘Very recently. Was this really hers?’
‘This is what she buried. It’s been in my care ever since.’
She turned the helmet around in her hands, wheeling it like a globe, cradling history between her fingertips. In forced exile from her own family, Sunday had handled remarkably few artefacts with a direct link to her grandmother. This helmet, had it been back in the household museum, would have been one of the most hallowed relics.
‘This is all there was?’ she asked. ‘Nothing else with it?’
‘Were you expecting more?’ Jonathan responded.
‘It is just a helmet. The other things we’ve found pointed to something – another burial. This doesn’t.’
‘You’re sure of that?’ he asked.
‘It doesn’t take me any further than Mars. I know she had this helmet when she was on Phobos, so she would have brought it down to Mars when the dust storm cleared. But we’re on Mars already. It’s a dead end.’
‘Unless you’re missing something,’ Jonathan said.
‘It’s not just a helmet,’ Jitendra said, ‘is it? I mean, it is a helmet, but that doesn’t mean it’s just a lump of metal and plastic. There’s computing power inside it. It will have seen and recorded things, while she was using it.’
She looked at Jonathan. ‘Have you investigated that?’
‘The helmet is old,’ Jonathan said, ‘but from a mechanical standpoint there’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t have an internal power supply of its own, though. It will only work when it’s connected to a suit, via a compatible neck ring.’
‘Tell her,’ Soya said.
Jonathan shot his daughter a tolerant smile. ‘The suit could be anywhere, if it still exists. Eunice only left the helmet here, at this particular burial site. But it doesn’t have to be the same suit to make the helmet work. It just has to fit.’
‘You’d still have to find an old suit,’ Jitendra said.
‘That’s what antiques markets are for,’ Soya said, with a glimmer of pride. ‘It took me a long, long time, but I found one in the end, not far from Lowell. Not as old as the helmet, only about seventy years, but with the same coupling.’ She whisked aside one of the room’s curtains, revealing an old-fashioned composite shell spacesuit, olive drab and grey, with evidence of damage and repair all over it. The suit was complete from the neck ring down, hanging from a rack that had been bolted to the metal innards of the Aggregate. ‘It’s a piece of shit,’ Soya explained. ‘You’d trust your life to this thing only if it was the absolute last resort. But it can still juice the helmet.’
Sunday asked the obvious question. ‘Have either of you tried it on?’
‘Both of us,’ Jonathan answered. ‘Some kind of low-level sphinxware running inside it. Beyond a few gatekeeper questions, it won’t talk to either of us. But it might work for you.’
There was no part of getting into that musty old suit that Sunday could be said to have enjoyed. The suit was a poor fit in all the critical places (it felt as if it had been tailored for a portly child, not a woman) and being seventy years old, it did nothing to assist
in the process of being worn. Without the complicity of Jitendra, Jonathan and Soya, she doubted she would have been able to put the hideous old thing on at all. Conversely, without them there, she probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to keep trying. Each component of the suit, as it clicked into place, added to her sense of imprisonment and paralysis.
The suit was not functioning, in any accepted sense of the word. Its motive power-assist was dead, so it required all of Sunday’s strength and determination to move it even slightly. The best she could manage was a ghoulish, mummylike shuffle, and the effort of that would soon tax her to exhaustion. Not that she could go very far anyway. Its cooling and air-recirculation systems were only barely operative, so it was as hot and stuffy as the inside of a sleeping bag. It had no independent internal power supply, but needed to be connected to the Aggregate by an energy umbilical. Only then could the suit feed power to the helmet, which had to be locked into place before it would boot-up and function. Sunday felt ready to be buried. The air circulator huffed and wheezed like an asthmatic dog. Caution indicators, blocked in red, were already illuminating the faceplate head-up display. Even before it had fully booted, the helmet knew that it was plugged into a piece of barely safe garbage, and it wasn’t too happy about it.
‘The current user is not recognised,’ the helmet said, its waspish buzzing into her ears in Swahili. ‘Please identify yourself.’
With an assertiveness that rather surprised herself, she declared, ‘I am Sunday Akinya.’
The helmet went quiet for a few seconds, as if it was thinking things over. ‘Please state your relationship to Eunice Akinya.’
‘I’m her granddaughter. I’ve come to Mars for this helmet. Please recognise my authority to wear it.’
‘What brought you to Mars?’
She had to think about that, sensing that the suit might be looking for a very specific answer. ‘Something I found in Phobos,’ she said, cautiously.
‘What did you find in Phobos?’
‘A painting.’ She took a breath, feeling sweat prickle her forehead. ‘A mural. There was a mistake . . . an alteration. The peacock should have been a different bird. A crane, maybe an ibis.’
‘What brought you to Phobos?’
Had she passed the first test, or merely skipped to the next question having failed the first one? The suit gave no clue. ‘Pages from a book,’ Sunday said, swallowing hard. ‘Gulliver’s Travels. It was a clear reference to the moons of Mars, and Eunice had only ever spent time on Phobos, so that had to be the right moon.’ Through the helmet glass, which was beginning to mist up, Jitendra and the others were watching her with avid interest. They were ready to spring to her aid should something go wrong with the life-support system, but knowing that didn’t alleviate Sunday’s sense of confinement. ‘I found the pages on the Moon – Earth’s Moon,’ she added. ‘In the crater Pythagoras.’
‘What led you to Pythagoras?’
‘A glove, which we found in a safe-deposit box, also on the Moon. The glove used to belong to Eunice Akinya. There were . . . gems in the glove. Plastic gems, three different colours. The numbers corresponded to a Pythagorean triple. Knowing Eunice’s history, we were able to pinpoint a crash site in the crater.’ She felt as if she was going to faint. ‘That’s all I’ve got. The existence of the safe-deposit box came from an audit of Eunice’s affairs, after her death.’
‘What was the significance of the coloured gems?’
‘The colours had . . . no significance.’ But why would the helmet have asked her that if the answer was so simple? ‘Except they had to be different colours so that we could count them.’
That was what Jitendra had said, at least – and she’d been more than ready to accept that explanation. But the gems had been stuffed into different fingers. Given the care they’d taken with the examination, they’d have been unlikely to muddle them up.
‘You have failed to pass all security questions,’ the helmet said. ‘Nonetheless, you are recognised as having the necessary authority. Please wait.’
‘Please wait for what?’
‘Please wait.’
Even through the fogging glass, Jitendra must have seen the doubt in her eyes. He pushed his face close to the visor. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked, voice muffled as if many rooms away.
‘It asked me a bunch of questions!’ she shouted back, making herself feel lighter-headed in the process. ‘I failed at least one of them, but it’s accepting me anyway. Can you crank up the cooling on this thing? It’s like a Turkish bath in here.’
Jitendra and Jonathan exchanged words. Soya nodded and went to one side, out of Sunday’s field of view. A moment later she felt knocking and tapping as Soya fiddled with the suit’s backpack.
The faceplate continued to fog over, even as the air grew fractionally cooler than it had been before. Sunday wondered whether it was better to close her eyes than confront that misted-over glass only centimetres from her nose and mouth.
Then the mist began to clear. But just when the condensation had shrunk back almost completely around the faceplate’s borders, it greyed over again. Sunday was about to call out to Jitendra when she realised the greyness wasn’t more condensation; rather it had been caused by the head-up display obstructing her entire forward view. The head-up view was changing now, but the image that resolved wasn’t the room inside the Aggregate.
What she could see was a broken aeroplane.
It lay upside down, snapped wings scissored across its fuselage. Dust had gathered in its lee. The plane slumped on the crest of a gently sloping ridge, bone-white against a horizon of darkening butterscotch. More dust spilt from the ruptured eye of its bubble canopy. Sunday thought of her brother, that this was some dire vision of the Cessna, crashed and upended. But this was not Geoffrey’s aircraft.
To the right of the wreck, a hundred paces further up the shallow incline, sat a squat compound of pressure-tight huts. The huts’ rib-sided shells had been scoured to a grey metal sheen by dust storms. Dust had also built up in their wind-shadows. Faded almost to illegibility was a hammer-and-sickle flag. A wind gauge, its cups as large as washbasins, whirred atop the roof of the largest hut.
Sunday found her point of view moving towards the aircraft. Acting independently of her volition, her line of sight dipped as if she was kneeling to peer into the inverted bulge of the shattered canopy. The seat was upside down, the buckled harness dangling open where it had been released. The cockpit was empty.
Her point of view turned from the aircraft, again without her direction, and approached the cluster of huts. The significance of the weather station and the smashed aeroplane was unavoidable. It was here, on the slopes of Pavonis Mons, that Eunice had landed and then sought shelter during a particularly ferocious storm. The plane had been intact when she brought it down, but had subsequently been plucked from its moorings by the winds, upended and crushed like a paper toy.
The station and the plane were gone now, but the documented fact of this episode had been the only thing pointing to a specific part of the terrain around the Martian volcano. Sunday already knew this. She could not have found the helmet without already making this connection.
So what did Eunice want with her now?
Metal steps, the lower treads buried in dust, led to the airlock in the largest of the Russian huts. The outer door and its interior counterpart were both open. Sunday’s point of view ascended the steps.
Inside, it was brightly lit and wrong: physics and common sense were in dreamlike abeyance. It was not the interior of a Russian weather station on Mars but an annexe of the household. The light blazed in through square, thick-walled windows at a steep slant. It fell on recognisable furniture: chairs and tables, rugs and hangings, white-plastered walls. There were ornaments on the tables, dust-glints trembling in the air. In place of one wall, silk curtains billowed. Sunday would have been drawn to the curtains even if she’d had control of the suit’s point of view.
A gloved hand reached out an
d parted the curtains. She pushed on through.
Outside it was Africa.
It was somewhere near dusk, some season when the skies held an abundance of clouds, gaudy with underlit colours: salmon-pink, vermilion, rare shades of rose and tangerine. Between the clouds, improbably, the slashes of clear sky were luminous cobalt. The trees, darkly silhouetted, reminded her of toy-theatre cut-outs.
The view tracked around. Kilimanjaro slid into sight, snowless. The household, blue-tiled and white-plastered, the walls reflecting sky in a hundred pastel combinations. A flight of cranes, like birds in a Chinese watercolour.
A stand of trees, more solid and real-looking than the silhouettes. Her point of view commenced towards that place of shelter. And the woman who had been leaning with her back against one of the trees, sitting down as she read in the last light of some long-gone day, made to stand up, neither hurriedly, as if she had been disturbed, nor languidly, as if she had all the time in the world. As if this was simply the ordained moment.
The figure rested one hand on her hip. The other grasped the book she had been reading, resting against her thigh. She wore riding pants and boots, and a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up to bony elbows. The blouse looked very much like the one Soya had been wearing.
‘Good evening, Sunday,’ the woman said.
‘How do you know my name?’ Sunday asked, wondering what she was dealing with.
‘You told me, just now, when you answered the helmet’s questions. Do you understand what I am?’
‘Not really.’
‘When I buried this helmet on Mars, it was already forty years old. I had its systems upgraded as best I could, but there were still limitations to what could be achieved. You are not interacting with Eunice Akinya, rather with a very simple model of her, with a limited range of responses and a very restricted internal knowledge base. Don’t go mistaking it for me.’
‘So . . . this is you speaking now?’
‘This is . . . an interactive recording, a message to you, whoever you may be. The sphinxware wouldn’t have admitted you unless you’d uncovered the trail that led to this point, so the chances are excellent that you’re a member of the family, or at least someone with close ties to it.’