‘I found a glove,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It was in a safe-deposit box of the Central African Bank, in Copernicus City. The box was registered in your name.’
‘What kind of glove?’ Eunice asked, with the sharpness of a fierce cross-examiner.
‘From an old spacesuit. We think maybe it belonged to a Moon suit.’
‘We wondered if it might mean anything,’ Sunday said. ‘Like, was there a glove that had some particular significance to you, something connected to one of your expeditions?’
‘No.’
‘Did you lose a glove, or have something happen in which a glove played a decisive role?’
‘I have already answered that question, Sunday.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘There’s something inside the glove,’ Geoffrey said, ‘stuffed into the fingers. Jogging any memories?’
‘If I have no recollection of the glove, then I am hardly likely to be able to shed any light on its contents, am I?’
‘All right,’ Sunday said, sensing a brick wall. ‘Let’s broaden the enquiry. You used a few spacesuits in your time. Was there one that stands out above all the others? Did one save your life, or something like that?’
‘You’ll have to narrow it down for me, dear. The primary function of spacesuits is to preserve life. That is what they do.’
‘I mean,’ Sunday elaborated patiently, ‘in a significant way. Was there an accident, something like that – a dramatic situation in which a spacesuit played a pivotal, decisive role?’ As accustomed as she was to dealing with the construct – and she’d logged hundreds of hours of conversation – she still had to contain her annoyance and frustration on occasion.
‘There were many “dramatic situations”,’ Eunice said. ‘One might venture to say that my entire career was composed of “dramatic situations”. That’s what happens when you choose to place yourself in hazardous environments, far from the safety net of civilisation.’
‘She only asked,’ Geoffrey said.
‘We’re on the Moon,’ Sunday said, the model of patience ‘Did anything ever happen here?’
‘Many things happened to me on the Moon, dear child. It was no more or less forgiving an environment than anywhere else in the system. Just because Earth’s hanging up there like a big blue marble doesn’t mean it’ll save you if you do something stupid. And I was not stupid and I still got into trouble.’
‘Prickly, isn’t she?’ Geoffrey murmured.
Eunice turned to him. ‘What did you say?’
‘You can’t whisper in her presence,’ Sunday said. ‘She hears everything, even subvocalisations. I probably should have mentioned that already.’ She sighed and slipped into a momentary aug trance.
Eunice and her chair vanished.
‘What just happened?’
‘I de-voked her and scrubbed the last ten seconds of working memory. That way she won’t remember you calling her prickly, and she won’t therefore hold a permanent grudge against you for the rest of your existence.’
‘Was she always like this with adults?’
‘I don’t think she was particularly receptive to criticism. I also don’t think she was one to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.’
‘Then I suppose she’s just marked me down as one.’
‘Until I scrubbed her working memory. But don’t feel too bad about it. In the early days I must have scrubbed and re-scrubbed about a million times. To say we kept getting off on the wrong foot . . . that would be a major understatement. But again, it’s my fault, not hers. Right now what we have is a cartoon, a crude caricature of the real thing. I’m trying to smooth the rough edges, tone down the exaggerations. Until that’s done, we can’t make any judgements about the real Eunice Akinya.’
‘Then I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. Although she wasn’t much help, was she?’
‘If she has anything useful to tell us, we’ll need to zero in on it with some more information, fish it out of her. It’s that or sit here while she recounts every significant incident of her life – and believe me, your tourist visa won’t begin to cover that.’
A swish of beaded curtains heralded Jitendra’s return.
‘Perhaps I may now be of assistance.’ He held out his hand: the three small wadded packages resting in his palm resembled paper-wrapped candies.
Jitendra put the packages down on the coffee table. They each took one and spread the wrapping open. Coloured stones tinkled out onto the coffee table’s glass top, looking just like the hard-boiled candies the wrappers suggested.
‘Real?’ Sunday asked.
‘Afraid not,’ Jitendra said. ‘Cheap plastic fakes.’
The three of them stared dispiritedly at the imitation gems, as if willing them into semi-precious rarity. Sunday’s were a vivid, fake-looking green, Geoffrey’s blood-red, Jitendra’s a pale icy blue.
There were eight green gems, but perhaps double the number of red and blue ones. Jitendra was already doing a proper count, as if it might be significant.
‘Did you damage the glove getting them out?’ Sunday asked.
‘Not in the slightest,’ Jitendra said. ‘And I was careful to record which finger each group of gems came out of.’
‘We could boot her up again and ask about them,’ Geoffrey said.
‘I don’t think it’ll get us anywhere,’ Sunday said.
‘And I suppose we’d be wise not to deliberately antagonise her by repeating ourselves. Can she keep stuff from us?’ Geoffrey asked.
Jitendra was still moving the gems around, arranging them into patterns like a distracted child playing with his food. ‘Your sister and I,’ he said, ‘have long and involved discussions about the precise epistemological status of the Eunice construct. Sunday is convinced that the construct is incapable of malicious concealment. I am rather less certain of that.’
‘It won’t lie,’ Sunday said, hoping to forestall another long-winded debate about a topic they could never hope to resolve, ‘but the real Eunice might well have done. That’s what we have to remember.’
‘Eight, fifteen, seventeen,’ Jitendra said. ‘Green, red and blue in that order. These are the numbers of gems.’
‘You think there’s some significance to that?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘The green ones are larger,’ Sunday said. ‘She couldn’t get as many of those into the finger.’
‘Perhaps,’ Jitendra said.
‘Maybe it’s the colours that mean something, not the numbers,’ Geoffrey said.
‘It’s the numbers, not the colours,’ Jitendra replied dismissively.
‘You sure about that?’ Sunday asked.
‘Absolutely. The gems are just different colours to stop us mixing them up. Orange, pink and yellow would have sufficed for all the difference it makes.’
‘The bigger question,’ Geoffrey said, ‘is exactly when I should tell the cousins. When I sneaked the glove out of the vault, I didn’t know that there might be something inside it.’
‘Nothing to stop you stuffing the gems back into the glove and claiming you never knew about them,’ Sunday said.
‘Someone will take a good look at the glove when I go through Earthbound customs. Then I’ll have some serious explaining to do.’
Sunday shrugged. ‘Not exactly crime of the century, smuggling cheap plastic gems.’
‘And I’m a researcher crawling around on his belly begging for money. The slightest blemish on my character, the slightest hint of impropriety, and I’m screwed.’
Geoffrey was standing now, with his arms folded, striking a pose of imperturbable determination. Sunday knew her brother well enough to realise that he was not likely to budge on this point.
So she wouldn’t push him just yet.
‘Eight, fifteen, seventeen,’ Jitendra said. ‘I know these numbers. I’m sure they mean something.’ He pressed his fingers against his forehead, like a man tormented.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the morning the taxi dropped them at the base of
one of the ceiling-penetrating towers, a faceted pineapple with neon snakes coiling up its flanks. In the smoke-coloured lobby a queue for the elevators had already formed. Serious-looking young people milled around, several of whom were evidently well known to Sunday and Jitendra. Hands were pumped, knuckles touched, high-fives made, whispered confidences exchanged. They were speaking Swahili, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Punjabi, English. Some were multilingual, others were making do with earphone translators, usually ornamented with lights and jewellery, or just enthusiastic gesturing. The air crackled with rivalry and the potential for swift backstabbing.
Geoffrey hadn’t sensed anything like it since his last academic conference.
‘It’s a big deal for Jitendra,’ Sunday explained. ‘Only two or three tournaments a year matter as much as this one. Reason everyone’s come out of the woodwork.’ She gave her partner a playful punch. ‘Nerves kicking in yet, Mister Gupta?’
‘If they weren’t, there’d be something badly wrong with me.’ Jitendra was working his fingers, his forearm muscles tensing and relaxing in a machinelike rhythm. He jogged frantically on the spot until their elevator arrived. ‘But I’m not afraid.’
The elevator shot them up through the core of the building, through the ceiling, through metres of compacted Lunar soil, onto the night-drenched surface. They exited in small glass-sided pimple: the embarkation lounge for bubble-canopied rovers, docked like suckling piglets around the building’s perimeter. In all directions, a hundred or so metres apart, the ground was pierced by the uppermost sections of other structures, glowing with lights and symbols, spilling reds and blues and greens across the wheel-furrowed ground. A couple of suited figures trudged between parked vehicles, carrying suitcase-sized toolkits. Other than that, there was a striking absence of visible human activity.
‘Is this where it all happens?’ he asked.
‘Way to go yet, brother,’ Sunday said.
Before very long they were aboard one of the rovers, gliding away from the embarkation structure. The rover had six huge openwork wheels, the powdery soil sifting through them in constant grey cataracts. As the rover traversed a boulder, the wheels deformed to ensure the transit was as smooth as possible. The driver – and there was a driver, not just a machine – clearly took a gleeful delight in heading directly for the worst of these obstacles. She was sitting up front, hands on joysticks, dreadlocked scalp nodding to private music.
Soon the buildings receded to a clot of coloured lights, and not long after, they fell over the horizon. Now the only illumination came from the moving glow of the rover’s canopy and the very occasional vehicle passing in the other direction.
‘I thought I’d be picking up full aug signals by now,’ Geoffrey said. With the bubble canopy packed to capacity, the three of them were strap-hanging. His aug icon still showed a broken globe.
‘You’re still in the Zone,’ Sunday said. ‘Think of this as a tongue sticking out, with a little micro-Zone at one end of it. There’s no Mech here, just our stripped-down private aug. Even if the Surveilled World could reach us here, we’d put in our own jamming systems.’
In the absence of airglow it came as a surprise to summit a slight rise and suddenly be overlooking an amphitheatre of blazing light: a kilometre-wide crater repurposed as arena, with pressurised galleries sunk back into its inner wall. Spherical, hooded viewing pods resembled so many goggling eyeballs, linked by the fatty optic nerves of umbilical connecting tunnels. The rover passed through an excavated cleft in the crater wall, then drove around the perimeter.
Geoffrey pushed to the window. Huge machines littered the ground, beached by some vast Selenean tide. Worms or maggots or centipedes: segmented, with plates of deftly interlocking body armour and ranks of powerful tractor limbs running down the lengths of their submarine-sized bodies. They had chewing mouths, drilling probosces, fierce grappling and ripping devices. The ghosts of sprayed-on emblems survived here and there, almost worn away by abrasion where the machines had rolled over on their sides or scuffed against each other. Vivid silvery scars, not yet tarnished by the chemical changes caused by cosmic ray strikes, betokened fresh injury.
The machines lying around the perimeter were being worked on, readied for combat. Service gantries and cherry pickers had been rolled up, and suited figures were repairing damage or effecting subtle design embellishments with vacuum welding gear. There must have been at least twenty machines, and that wasn’t counting those located further into the arena, lying side by side or bent around each other, mostly in pairs. Geoffrey presumed this was a lull between bouts, since nothing much appeared to be happening.
‘I’m guessing these machines weren’t originally made for your fun and games,’ he said to Jitendra.
‘Heavy-duty mining and tunnelling equipment,’ Jitendra said. ‘Too beat-up or slow for the big companies to keep using, so they sell it off to us for little more than scrap value.’
Geoffrey laughed. ‘And this is the most productive thing you could think of doing with them?’
‘It’s a damn sight better than staging real wars,’ Sunday said.
‘This is mine,’ Jitendra said as they drove past one of the waiting combatants. ‘Or rather, I have a quarter stake in it, and I get to drive it when my turn comes around.’
If anything it looked a little more battle-scarred than its neighbours, with chunks nibbled out of its side-plating exposing a vile gristle of hydraulics, control ducting and power cables. Plexus’s nerve-node emblem was faint on the machine’s side.
‘She’s taken a few hits,’ Jitendra explained, superfluously.
‘Do you . . . get inside it?’
‘Fuck, no.’ Jitendra stared at Geoffrey as if he’d lost his mind. ‘For a start, these things are dirty – they’re running nuclear reactors from the Stone Age. Also, there’s no room inside them. Also, it’s incredibly dangerous, being inside one robot while another robot’s trying to smash yours to pieces.’
‘I suppose it would be,’ Geoffrey said. ‘So – when does it all start?’
Jitendra looked at him askance. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I mean, when does the fighting begin?’
‘It already has, brother,’ Sunday said. ‘They’re fighting now. Out there. At this very moment.’
When the rover docked, they took him up into one of the private viewing pods. It contained a bar and a semicircle of normal seats, grouped around eight cockpits: partially enclosed chairs, big and bulky as ejector seats, their pale-green frames plastered with advertising decals and peeling warning stickers. Five people were already strapped in, with transcranial stimulation helmets lowered over their skulls.
‘Geoffrey,’ Sunday said, ‘I’d like you to meet June Wing. June – this is my brother, up from Africa.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Geoffrey.’
June Wing was a demure Chinese woman in a floor-length black skirt and maroon business jacket over a pearl blouse, with a silver clasp at the neck. Her grey-white hair was neatly combed and pinned, her expression grave. The look, Geoffrey concluded, was too disciplinarian to be unintentional. She wanted to project authoritarian firmness.
They shook hands. Her flesh was cold and rubbery. Another golem, then, although whether it was fixed form or claybot was impossible to determine.
‘We sponsor Jitendra’s team,’ June said. ‘I can’t normally find time to make it to the tournaments, but today’s an exception. I see you’re here in the flesh – how’s your trip been so far?’
‘Very enjoyable,’ Geoffrey said, which was not entirely a lie.
‘Sunday told me you’re working on elephant cognition. What are your objectives?’
Geoffrey blinked at the directness of June Wing’s interrogation. ‘Well, there are a number of different avenues.’
‘The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, or towards some practical goal?’
‘Both, I hope.’
‘I’ve just pulled up your pubs list. Considering you work alone, in what m
ight be considered a less than fashionable area, you have a reasonable impact factor.’
Reasonable. Geoffrey thought it was a lot better than reasonable.
‘Perhaps you should come and work for Plexus,’ June Wing said.
‘Well, I—’
‘You have obligations back home.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re very interested in minds, Geoffrey. Not just in the studying of mental processes, but in the deeper mysteries. What does another mind think? What does it feel? When I think of the colour red, does my perception tally with yours? When we claim to be feeling happy or sad, are we really experiencing the same emotions?’
‘The qualia problem.’
‘We think it’s tractable. Direct mind-to-mind process correlation. A cognitive gate. Wouldn’t that be something?’
‘It would,’ he admitted. June Wing clearly had more than a passing understanding of his work, or had deduced the thrust of it from a cursory review of his publications list. He was inclined to believe the latter, but with that came an unsettling implication.
He must be talking to one of the cleverest people he’d ever met.
How would it feel to be in the same room as her, not just a robot copy?
‘Well, you know how to reach me if you ever decide to broaden your horizons. First time at Robot Wars?’
‘Yes. Doesn’t seem to be much going on, though. Is it always like this?’ He felt even more certain of this now. Across the arena, the pairs of machines hadn’t moved to any obvious degree since he had seen them from the rover.
‘Only one of the operators is actually driving a robot right now,’ June Wing said. ‘The other four are spectating, or helping with the power-up tests on one of the backup machines. The rival operators – our competitors – are in the other viewing pods.’
‘But nothing’s happening.’
‘They’re tunnel-boring machines,’ Jitendra said. ‘They’re built to gnaw through lunar bedrock, not set land-speed records.’
Even as he spoke, Jitendra was lowering himself into one of the vacant cockpits. He reached up and tugged the transcranial stimulator down, nestling it onto his skull.