‘Hello, Jumai,’ he said quietly. ‘I guess I know why you’re calling.’
‘I just got the news. I’m really sorry, Geoffrey. It must be a big blow to the family.’
‘We’ll weather it,’ he said. ‘It’s not exactly unexpected.’
Jumai Lule was wearing brown overalls, hair messy and tied up in a meshwork dust cap, marks on her face from the goggles and breathing gear now hanging around her neck. She was in Lagos working on high-risk data archaeology, digging through the city’s buried, century-old catacombs for nuggets of commercially valuable information. It was dangerous, exacting work: exactly the kind of thing she thrived on, and which he hadn’t been able to offer her.
‘I know you weren’t that close to her, but—’ Jumai began.
‘She was still my grandmother,’ Geoffrey countered defensively, as if she was accusing him of indifference to the matter of Eunice’s death
‘I didn’t mean it that way, as you well know.’
‘So how’s work?’ Geoffrey asked, trying to sound as if it mattered to him.
‘Work is . . . fine. Always more than we can keep up with. New challenges, most of the time. I probably need to move on at some point, but . . .’ Jumai let the sentence hang.
‘Don’t tell me you’re getting bored already?’
‘Lagos is close to being tapped out. I thought maybe Brazilia, even further afield. Like, maybe space. Still a lot of militarised crap left lying around the system, nasty shit they could use people like me to break into and decommission. And I hear the Gearheads pay pretty well.’
‘Because it’s dangerous.’
Jumai offered the palm of her hand to the ceiling. ‘What, and this isn’t? We hit Sarin nerve gas last week. Anti- tamper triggers, linked to what we thought was part of a mainframe’s cryogenic cooling reservoir.’ She grinned impishly. ‘Not the kind of mistake you make twice.’
‘Anyone hurt?’
‘Nothing they couldn’t fix, and they upped our hazard bonus as a consequence.’ She looked around the room again, scanning it as if she half-expected booby traps in the made bed, or lurking on the neat white shelves. But anyway, this isn’t about me – are
‘I’ll be fine. And I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have snapped. You’re right – Eunice and I were never that close. I just don’t really like having my face rubbed in it.’
‘What about your sister?’
‘I’m sure she feels the same way I do.’
‘You never did take me up to meet Sunday. I always wanted to meet her. I mean properly, face to face.’
He shifted on the bed. ‘Full of broken promises, that’s me.’
‘You can’t help the way you are.’
‘Maybe not. But that doesn’t stop people telling me I should broaden my horizons.’
‘That’s your business, no one else’s. Look, we’re still friends, aren’t we? If we weren’t, we wouldn’t keep in touch like this.’
Even if it had been months since the last call, he thought. But he had no wish to sound sour. ‘We’re good,’ he affirmed. ‘And it’s very thoughtful of you to call me.’
‘I couldn’t not call you. The whole world knows – it wasn’t news I could easily miss.’ Jumai reached down for her goggles. ‘Look, I’m only on a break – got to get back to the front line or my extraction chief will be yelling her head off – but I just wanted to say I’m here if you need someone to talk to.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You know, we could still go to the Moon one day. Just as friends. I’d like that.’
‘One day,’ he agreed, safe in the knowledge that she didn’t really mean it either.
‘Tell me when they sort out a date for the funeral. If I can make it, and if it isn’t a family-only thing . . .’ she trailed off.
‘I’ll let you know,’ Geoffrey said.
Jumai settled the goggles over her eyes and eased the breathing mask into place. He’d tell her about the funeral plans, yes – but he doubted she’d come, even if the ceremony was extended to include friends of the Akinyas, rather than just close relatives. This call had already been awkward enough. There’d be a reason, a plausible excuse, to keep her away. And that, in truth, would be easiest on both of them.
Jumai waved a hand and chinged out of his life. Geoffrey considered it quite likely that he would never see her again.
For all that Eunice’s death hit the family hard, it wasn’t long before she was shunted from the headlines. A simmering sex/vote-rigging scandal in the Pan-African Parliament, a dispute between the East African Federation and the African Union about cost overruns on a groundwater bioremediation programme in former Uganda, a stand-off between Chinese tecto-engineers and Turkish government mandarins concerning the precise scheduling of a stress-management earthquake along the North Anatolian Fault. On the global scale, continued tensions between the United Surface Nations and the United Aquatic Nations regarding extradition rules and the extent of aug access rights and inter-regional Mechanism jurisdiction. Talk of expanding the scope of the Mandatory Enhancements. A murder attempt in Finland. Threat of industrial action at the Pontianak space elevator in western Borneo. Someone in Tasmania dying of a very rare type of cancer, something of a heroic achievement these days.
Only at the household, only in this part of the East African Federation, had the clocks stopped. A month had passed since Geoffrey was called from the sky with news of his grandmother’s death. The scattering had been
