of a figurehead.’
‘Fortunately, that doesn’t really concern me.’
‘You may not think so. But even on the periphery of things, you are still an Akinya. That goes for your sister as well.’
Geoffrey said nothing until they were standing in the spacious entrance lobby of the household’s left wing. The place was as crypt-silent and forbidding as a locked museum. Glass cabinets, minor shrines to his grandmother’s illustriousness, trapped her past under slanted sunlight. Spacesuit components, rock and ice samples gathered from all over the solar system, even an antiquated ‘computer’, a hinged grey box still fixed together with yellow and black duct tape. Printed books, with dusty, time-faded covers. A dismal assortment of childhood toys, no longer loved, abandoned.
‘I don’t think you realise how little effect this is going to have on Sunday and me,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Eunice was never that interested in either of us, once we strayed from the path.’
‘You are quite wrong about Sunday. Eunice meant a great deal to her.’
Geoffrey decided not to press Memphis on that. ‘Do my mother and father know?’
‘They’re still on Titan, visiting your Uncle Edison.’
He smiled quickly. ‘That’s not something I’d forget.’
‘It will be a couple of hours before we are likely to hear from them. Perhaps longer, if they are occupied.’
They had nearly reached the ground-floor office where Memphis spent most of his time, managing the household’s affairs – and by implication a business empire as wide as the solar system – from a room not much larger than a decent-sized broom cupboard.
‘Anything I can do?’ Geoffrey asked, feeling awkwardly as if there was some role he was expected to play, but which no one had told him about.
‘Nothing immediately. I shall be going up to the Winter Palace in due course, but I can take care of that on my own.’
‘To bring back her body?’
Memphis gave a half-nod. ‘She wishes her remains to be scattered in Africa.’
‘I could go with you.’
‘Very kind, Geoffrey, but I am not too old for spaceflight just yet. And you must be very busy with your elephants.’ He lingered at the threshold of his office, clearly anxious to return to his duties. ‘It’s good that you are back here now. If you could stay a day, that would be even better.’
‘I feel like a loose end.’
‘Be here for the rest of your family. You will all need to draw strength from each other.’
Geoffrey offered a sceptical smile. ‘Even Hector and Lucas?’
‘Even them,’ Memphis said. ‘I know that you do not get on, but perhaps now you will be able to find some common ground. They are not bad men, Geoffrey. It may feel like a long time ago to you, but I can still remember when you were all young enough not to hate the sight of each other.’
‘Times change,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Still, I’ll make an effort.’
He sat on the edge of his crisply made bed, in the room he had spent hardly any time in these recent years. In his hands was one of the wooden elephants Eunice had given him as a birthday gift. It was the bull, one of a set of six, diminishing in size down to the baby. The other five were still on the shelf where he had left them the last time he’d handled them. They stood on black plinths of some flinty, coal-like material.
He couldn’t remember how old he had been when the elephants arrived, packed in a stout wooden box with tissue paper to protect them. Five or six, maybe. The time when the nanny from Djibouti was still taking care of his education and upbringing. The same year he stepped on the scorpion, perhaps?
It had taken him a little while to realise that his grandmother lived in orbit around the Moon, not on or in it, and even longer to appreciate that her infrequent gifts did not actually come from space. They were made somewhere on Earth; all she did was arrange for them to be sent to him. Later it had even occurred to him that someone else in the family – the nanny, perhaps Memphis – was choosing them on her behalf.
He’d been disappointed with the elephants when he opened the box, but not quite adult enough to hide that disappointment. He had wanted an aeroplane, not useless wooden animals that didn’t do anything. Later, after a gentle reprimand, he had been made to speak to Eunice’s figment and tell her how grateful he was. She had addressed him from the green jungle core of the Winter Palace.
He wondered how good a job of it he had made.
He was reaching to put the bull back on the shelf when the request began pulsing with gentle insistence in his visual field.
>>open: quangled bind
>>via: Maiduguri-Nyala backbone
>>carrier: Lufthansa Telepresence
>>incept: 23/12/2161 13:44:11 UTC
>>origin: Lagos, Nigeria, WAF
>>client: Jumai Lule
>>accept/decline ching?
He placed the bull back at the head of its family and returned to the bed, accepting Jumai’s call with a single voked command. The bind established. Geoffrey’s preference was always for inbound ching, remaining in his local sensorium, and Jumai would have expected that. He placed her figment by the door, allowing her a moment to adjust to her surroundings.
