‘And you won’t be watching the world through my eyes, when I think you’re somewhere else?’
‘That would be unconscionably rude. What I see and hear is only that which the environment permits. I won’t be invading what little privacy you have left.’
‘But you’ll be talking to Sunday as well?’
‘I am one copy; Sunday has another. We were the same until the instant we were duplicated, but I have now seen and experienced things that the other one hasn’t . . . and vice versa, of course. Which makes us two different people, until we are consolidated.’ She cocked an eye to the ceiling, heavenward. ‘Periodically, there’s an exchange of memories and acquired characteristics. Remergence. We won’t ever be quite the same, but we won’t diverge too radically either.’ She moved a hand closer to his, but refrained from touching. ‘Look, don’t take me the wrong way, Geoffrey. I wasn’t sent to torment you, or to make your life a misery. Sunday had the best of intentions.’
‘I’ve heard that before.’
‘You two are so very alike.’ She returned her gaze to the window, a smile lingering on her face. In the time that Geoffrey had been standing on the observation deck, the thread-rider’s relentless descent had brought the Earth closer. The horizon’s curvature, though still pronounced, was not as sharp as when he had arrived at the observation window, and he could begin to discern surface features that had not been visible before. There, not too far from the anchorpoint, was the crisp white vee of a ship’s wake – he could even make out the ship itself, where the white lines converged. It was probably the size of an ocean liner, but it looked like a speck of glitter. He could also distinguish smaller communities – towns, not just cities.
‘It is beautiful, isn’t it?’ Eunice said. ‘Not just the world, but the fact that we’re here, alive, able to see it.’
‘One of us is.’
‘I never thought I’d live to see the snows come back to Kilimanjaro. But things are improving, aren’t they? Green returning to the desert. People reinhabiting cities we thought were abandoned for good. It won’t ever be the same world I was born into. But it’s not hell, either.’
‘We shouldn’t be ungrateful,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If the world hadn’t warmed, we wouldn’t have made our fortune.’
‘Oh, it’s not that simple. Yes, we were there at the right time, with the right ideas. But we didn’t just luck into it. We were clever and adaptable. It’s not as if we depended on some drip-feed of human misery to make our happiness.’
It was true, he supposed – or at least, he was willing to let her believe it. Not that anyone could ever know for sure. You couldn’t rewind the clock of the last hundred and fifty years, let the Earth run forward with different starting conditions. The Cho family had made their money with the self-assembling, self-renewing sea walls – prodigious, damlike structures that grew out of the sea itself, like a living reef. When the oceans had stopped rising, the same technologies enabled the Cho industrialists to diversify into submerged structures and mid-ocean floating city-states. They grew fabulous Byzantine marine palaces, spired and luminous and elegant, and they peopled them with beautiful mermaids and handsome mermen. They were the architects and artisans behind the aqualogies of the United Aquatic Nations.
The Akinyas had done well out of the catastrophe, too. Like elixir to an ailing man, their geothermal taps, solar mirror assemblies and lossless power lines had given the world the gigawatts it needed to come through the fever of the twenty-first century’s worst convulsions. That artifice with deep-mantle engineering, precision mirror alignment and super-conducting physics had provided the basic skill set necessary to forge the Kilimanjaro blowpipe.
Accidents of geography and circumstance, Geoffrey thought. The Akinya and Cho lines had been bright and ambitious to begin with, but brightness and ambition weren’t always sufficient. No matter what Eunice might think, blind luck and ruthlessness had both played their parts.
‘I don’t know if we have blood on our hands,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know if we’re blameless either.’
‘No one ever is.’
‘Except you, of course. Sitting in judgement on the rest of the human species from your castle orbiting the Moon. Laughing at us from beyond the grave.’
Her voice turned stern. ‘Being dead isn’t a laughing matter for anyone, Geoffrey. Least of all me.’
‘So why did you do it?’
‘Why did I do what, child?’
‘Bury those things in Pythagoras.’ He shook his head, maddened at his own supine willingness to accept this figment as a living, thinking being. ‘Oh, what’s the point? I might as well interrogate a photograph. Set fire to it and demand it tells me the truth.’
‘As I think Sunday made adequately clear, I cannot lie, or withhold information. But I also can’t tell you anything I don’t know.’
‘So you’re fucking useless, in other words.’
‘I know a lot, Geoffrey. Sunday’s packed a whole lifetime’s worth of public scrutiny in me. And I’d tell you everything, if I could – but that would take another lifetime, and neither of us has quite that much time on our hands. Instead, we’re just going to have to live with each other. If you have a specific query, I will do my best to answer. And if I have a specific observation that I think may be useful to you, I will do my best to provide it in a timely fashion.’
‘You sound like there’s a mind at work behind those eyes.’
‘So do you.’
It was sleight of hand, of course. No conscious volition animated the Eunice construct, merely ingenious clockwork. Across a life’s worth of captured responses, data gathered by posterity engines, there would be ample instances of conversational situations similar to this one, from which Eunice’s actual, documented responses could be extracted and adapted as required. A parlour trick, then.
But, he had to admit, a dazzling one.
‘Well, I merely wished to make my presence known,’ Eunice said. ‘I’ll take my leave of you now. I expect you have a lot on your mind.’
‘One or two things.’
‘It would be good to see the household again. You’ll at least give me that satisfaction, won’t you?’
He was being pleaded with by algorithms. ‘Provided you don’t make a nuisance of yourself.’
‘Thank you, Geoffrey. You’ve been tolerant. But then Sunday promised me you would be. I always did like you two the most, you realise. Out of all my children and grandchildren, you were the only ones who showed that rebellious spark.’
Geoffrey thought of all the times Eunice had bothered communicating with him, when she had been alive. If the construct’s opinion was an accurate reflection of the real woman’s feelings, she had done an excellent job of concealing them from the rest of the family. Orbiting above him, looking down from her Lunar exile, she had exuded about as much warmth as Pluto.
‘You really made us feel appreciated,’ he said.
It was a jolt to find himself out in the sunshine, back in Gabon, a free man returned to Earth.
He had passed through one set of customs at Lunar immigration; now there was another at the Libreville end. Geoffrey knew that his documents were all in order and that he was not knowingly breaking any rules. But he was still dwelling on the Chinese border incident, convinced that sooner or later his name would be dragged into proceedings. A tap on the shoulder, a quiet word in his ear. Ushered into a windowless room by apologetic officials with an arrest warrant.
But nothing happened in Libreville. They weren’t even interested in the glove, which he made a point of declaring before passing through security. Puzzled, perhaps, as to why anyone would go to the trouble of importing such a thoroughly unprepossessing object, but not puzzled enough to make anything of it.
He wandered the anchorpoint gardens for a little while, taking regular pauses at park benches to rest his muscles. Fountains hissed and shimmered around him. It was mid-afternoon and cloudless, the sky preposterously blue and infinite, as if it reache
d all the way to Andromeda rather than being confined within the indigo cusp he had seen from space. After the floodlit caverns of the Descrutinised Zone, it was as if a separate dimension had been bolted onto reality. He was perfectly content just to lean back on the park bench, following the six guitar-string threads of the elevator as they rose and diminished to nothing, in an exact, vaulting demonstration of vanishing-point perspective. Thread-riders climbed and descended, meniscoid beads of black oil sliding along wire. Breakers hurled themselves against the peninsula sea wall, lulling with their endless cymbal-crash roar. Seagulls scythed across his view, dazzlingly white bird-shaped windows into another, purer creation.
He strained to his feet and hefted the sports bag, which now felt as if it had been stuffed with a dozen tungsten ingots. Grimacing with the effort, he walked back through the shimmering gardens to the railway station, where he fully expected to catch the equatorial express back to Nairobi. The overnight train would give him time to gather his thoughts, and it would put off the homecoming for a few more hours. But when he arrived at the concourse the aug informed him that a private airpod was now waiting in the reserved landing area, sent specially for him.
‘Fuck you very much,’ he said under his breath.
Two hours later, he was back over EAF airspace. The sun hadn’t even set when he touched down at the household; he found an exo waiting for him, standing there like a headless skeleton, ready to accept Geoffrey into its padded embrace. He kicked the exo aside and stalked into the house like a man bristling for a bar fight.
Hector and Lucas were waiting for him, lounging in garden chairs while they supped late-afternoon drinks on the west-facing terrace. Spread before them like a tabletop game was the hovering projection of a Premier League football match.
‘Geoffrey,’ Hector said, making a show of almost rising from his seat without actually completing the motion. ‘Wonderful to see you back on terra firma at last! I see you found the airpod.’
‘Hard to miss,’ Geoffrey said, dropping the sports bag at his feet. ‘You needn’t have bothered, though.’
‘It seemed expedient to facilitate your speedy return,’ Lucas said, reaching down to scratch at the skin under the bright plastic centipede clamped to his leg. He was wearing shorts, tennis shoes and a slash-patterned orange and yellow shirt. ‘You opted not to use the exo?’
‘I’m not a cripple, cousin.’
‘Of course not.’ Lucas voked the football match into invisibility. ‘We only had your best interests at heart, though. My brother and I adapt readily to Earth gravity now, but that’s only because we’ve both accumulated a great many space hours. Adaptation does become easier with experience.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ He didn’t want to be too nice to the cousins, not when he had something to conceal from them. ‘Not that I have any plans to go into space again.’
‘The Moon barely counts anyway,’ Hector said. ‘But let’s not spoil things for Geoffrey – I’m sure it felt like a great adventure. And that awkwardness, the business with your friend being detained? We’ll say no more about it. Truthfully, we’re very grateful.’ He glanced suggestively at the bag. ‘The . . . um . . . thing – it’s in there?’
Geoffrey bent down and unzipped the bag. The glove was on top of his clothes; it had been the last thing put back in after customs. He pulled it out and tossed it unceremoniously to Hector, who had to rush to put his glass down to catch it.
Hector examined the glove with the narrowed, probing eyes of a stamp collector.
‘Let me see,’ Lucas said.
‘We can consult the house records,’ Hector said, passing the item to his brother, ‘see if it matches any of the suits Eunice was known to have worn.’
Lucas fingered the glove with rank distaste, the tip of his nose puckering. ‘On a strict cost-benefit basis, sending Geoffrey all the way to the Moon to retrieve this may not have been the most prudent of our recent financial decisions.’
‘It does look a bit tatty,’ Hector admitted, before returning to his drink. ‘And there really wasn’t anything else in the vault, Geoffrey?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘Nothing else?’ Lucas probed. ‘No accompanying documentation?’
‘Just the glove,’ Geoffrey said testily.
‘She was dotty,’ Hector said, taking the glove back from his brother. ‘That’s the only possible explanation. Not that it particularly matters why she put it there. Our concern was that there might be something hurtful in the vault, something that could impinge on the family’s reputation. At least we can set our minds at ease on that score, can’t we?’ He was still examining the glove, peering at it with renewed concentration.
‘I suppose so,’ Lucas allowed. ‘Our primary concern, at least, has been allayed.’
‘Which was?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘That we’d find paperwork, documents,’ Hector said. ‘Something that needed to be followed up. Not some old relic we can safely bury in the family museum, where it’ll never get a second look.’
‘If that’s all you need me for . . .’ Geoffrey said, reaching to zip up the sports bag.
‘Yes, of course,’ Hector said, beaming. ‘You’ve done magnificently! The very model of discretion. Hasn’t he done splendidly, Lucas?’
‘Our requirements in this matter,’ Lucas affirmed, ‘have been satisfactorily discharged.’
‘I’ll say this about you, Geoffrey,’ Hector said. ‘Whatever opinion anyone has voiced in regard to your commitment to the family in the past, you’ve come through on this one with flying colours. You can hold your head up as a true Akinya now, with the rest of us.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Geoffrey said.
‘And we will of course honour our side of the arrangement,’ Hector continued. ‘As soon as I finish this drink, I’ll release the first instalment of your new research budget.’
Geoffrey slung the bag over his shoulder. ‘Is Memphis around?’
‘Business necessitated a physical journey to Mombasa . . .’ Lucas looked at Geoffrey with sharp interest. ‘But he should be home by now. Anything in particular you wanted to discuss with him?’
‘He’s my friend,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I just want to catch up.’
Lucas smiled tightly. ‘It behoves us all to extract the maximum return from such a valued resource.’
He voked the football match back into existence, clapping his hands at a swooping pass from Cameroon’s current top midfielder. ‘Seal genes,’ he confided to his brother appreciatively. ‘Enhanced muscular myoglobin density for increased O2 uptake and storage. Thinking of having some put in myself.’
Geoffrey gladly abandoned the cousins and their soccer for the cool of the house. His room was clean and spartan, the bed crisply made, the shelves bare save for one or two books and artefacts. Drapes stirred softly in the afternoon breeze, the window slightly ajar. He touched the carved wooden bull elephant at the head of its procession, stroking its smooth, polished back, and placed his bag on the bed. He opened one of the cupboards to check that there was a change of clothes.
He sat down at the writing desk and voked into his research funds. The first instalment was already present, as Hector had promised. It was a staggering amount of money; more than Geoffrey had ever seen sitting in any of his accounts at one time. He was meant to spend it on his elephant studies, but he doubted the cousins cared where it actually ended up. Money, at least in these quantities, was like water to them. It had a function, like hydraulic fluid, but in such small measures it barely merited accounting.
Delaying his shower, he left the room and wandered the house until he found Memphis, sitting in his office on the ground floor with his back to the doorway. Ramrod-straight spine, the old but immaculate suit hanging off the sharp scaffolding of his shoulders, household finances auged up around him in a half-circle of multicoloured ledgers and spreadsheet accounts. He was moving figures from one pane to another, cajoling the bright symbols through the air like
well-trained sprites.
‘Memphis,’ Geoffrey said, knocking lightly on the doorframe. ‘I’m back.’
Memphis completed a transaction and then dismissed the ledgers and accounts. His old-fashioned pneumatic swivel-chair squeaked as he spun around and beamed at Geoffrey. ‘How was your return journey?’
‘Fast. I was looking forward to taking the overnight train, but the cousins had other ideas. They sent an airpod.’
‘I can understand how you might have wished to take your time. Still, I suppose another part of you was just as anxious to get back home.’
‘Not that I had any doubts that you could take care of things in my absence.’
‘My talents are perhaps better suited to household administration than animal husbandry. You have visited the herd already?’
‘No – not yet. I’ll fly out in a while, just to let them know I’m back. Then in the morning . . . I was wondering if you felt like coming with me?’
‘I’m afraid I have more business in Mombasa, and you know my aversion to chinging. I could change my plans, but—’
‘No need,’ Geoffrey said. ‘What about the day after?’
‘I don’t see why not. Is there anything in particular you want to show me?’
‘Just the usual. It’s good for the elephants to encounter you on a regular basis, and that they associate you with me.’
‘I’m happy to be of assistance. Whatever business you were on, I trust it’s done and you can return to normality?’
‘I hope so.’
Memphis nodded once. ‘As do I.’
Geoffrey said goodbye and set off wandering the house again, until his perambulations took him into the cool of the museum wing. No one else was abroad, no other family members, hangers-on or normal household staff, so he did something uncharacteristic of him and loitered, examining the glassed-over cases that had hitherto merited no more than a glance.
Eventually he found the book, the copy of Gulliver’s Travels Memphis had mentioned during the scattering. It was sitting in one of the cases, mounted on a black stand so that it stood nearly upright.