say that? They’ve got exclusivity on it. They’re calling it “Mercurial”. Faster and more realistic than anything else out there.’
‘So you see a big market for this?’
‘Who knows? I’m just along for a free ride while someone else gets test data.’ Sunday let go of Geoffrey’s hand and tapped a finger against her cheekbone. ‘We’re recording constantly. Every time someone sees me, their reactions are filed away – micro-expressions, eye saccades, that kind of thing – then fed into the system and used to tweak the configuration algorithms.’
‘What about manners? It’s not good form to let people think they’re talking to a real person when they’re not.’
‘Their fault for not having the right layers enabled,’ Sunday said. ‘Anyway, it’s not just me: there are twenty of us walking around now, all chinging in from the Zone. We’re not just testing the realism of the configs. We’re seeing how well they can maintain that realism even with Earth–Lunar time lag thrown in.’
‘So you could go to the trouble of sending down a body, but you couldn’t come in person?’
She gave him a quizzical look. ‘I showed up, didn’t I? It’s not like Eunice would have cared whether any of us was physically present.’
‘I’m not sure I knew her well enough to say for sure.’
‘I doubt she’d have given a damn who’s here in the flesh and who isn’t. And she’d have hated all this fuss. But Memphis had a bee in his bonnet about us all leaving the household on time.’
‘I noticed. My guess is that Eunice stipulated something, and he’s just following the script.’
After a moment, Sunday said quietly, ‘He looks really old now.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I was thinking exactly the same thing.’
Memphis was leading the procession, walking ahead of the main party with an earthenware jar in his hands. Since leaving the house they had been walking due west towards the grove of acacia trees that marked the limit of the crumbling boundary wall.
‘Still got the old suit, though,’ Geoffrey said.
‘I think he’s only ever had the one.’
‘Either that or hundreds of exactly the same style.’
The favoured black business suit remained immaculate, but it draped off his thin frame as if tailored for some other, bulkier man. The hands that had carried Sunday out of the hole all those years ago must have been the same ones now gripping the earthenware jar, but that seemed impossible. Where once Memphis had walked with confident authority, now his gait was slow and measured, as if in every footfall lay the prospect of humiliation.
‘At least he dressed for the occasion,’ Sunday said.
‘And at least there’s a heart beating under these clothes.’
‘Even if they do reek ever so slightly of elephant dung.’
‘I thought I’d have time to get back to the research station and change, but then I lost track and—’
‘You’re here, brother. That’s all anyone would have expected.’
The party numbered around thirty, including the two of them. He’d done his best to identify the various family branches and alliances that were present, but keeping tabs on the wilder offshoots of the Akinya tree had never been his strong suit. At least elephants had the decency to drop dead after fifty or sixty years, instead of hanging around and procreating into their second century. In the Amboseli basin there were nearly a thousand individuals. Geoffrey could identify at least a hundred of them with a single glance, assessing shape and size and posture with barely any conscious application of effort, calling to mind age, lineage and kin affiliations, status within family, bond group and clan. Tracking Akinyas ought to have been trivial in comparison. There was even a matriarch, bull males and a watering hole.
Predators and scavengers, too.
What were they all doing here? Geoffrey wondered. What did they all expect to get out of it? More pertinently: what did
A pat on the head for being a dutiful grandson? Not from his father and mother, who – like Uncle Edison – were still on Titan. Kenneth Cho and Miriam Beza-Akinya had sent golems of themselves, but the time lag was so acute that the machines were acting under full autonomy, mostly witnessing rather than interacting.
Had he expected something more of them?
Perhaps.
‘I am glad you both found time in your busy personal schedules,’ Hector said, sidling over to Geoffrey and Sunday.
‘We were always going to be here, cousin,’ Sunday said. ‘She meant as much to us as she did to you.’
‘Of course.’ Like his brother Lucas, who had also joined them, Hector wore a dark suit of conservative cut, offset with flashes of tribal colouration. The tall, muscular siblings looked uncomfortable in their formal wear. The cousins had spent so much time in space that African heat did not become them. ‘And perhaps now that we are all together again,’ Hector went on, ‘it might be an apposite time for some of us to rethink our positions within the fold.’
As if recalling some obscure biblical proverb, Lucas declared: ‘A household needs many pillars.’
‘I think the household’s doing fine without us,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Besides – aren’t we both beyond redemption as far as you’re concerned?’
