has an obligation to let him dock – then it
‘All well and good, but I’m not sure that gets us anywhere,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Talk to it. Explain that you are Geoffrey Akinya, and that you’re prepared to submit to questioning to prove it.’
‘Think that’s going to work?’ Jumai asked him.
‘Don’t know. Any other bright ideas, short of fighting our way past anti-collision systems? Those are basically
‘Thank you,’ she replied. ‘I do get the fact that there are real risks here.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Geoffrey said. And he meant it, too: of all the people he knew, it was hard to think of anyone less risk-averse than Jumai.
‘Look,’ she said, giving him a conciliatory look, ‘if the construct says this is our best shot—’
‘Are we still on air?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘Say your piece,’ Gilbert confirmed.
He cleared his throat. ‘This is Geoffrey Akinya speaking again. I have no formal means of establishing my identity, not at this range. But I’m willing to talk. Eunice knew me. Maybe not well, but as well as she knew anyone in our family. If there’s something, anything, that I can say to prove myself . . . please ask. I will do my best to answer.’
There was silence. Jumai opened her mouth to speak, but she had not even begun to draw breath when the habitat answered again.
‘Disengage all external comms except for this tight-beam link. Any attempt to query the aug will be detected.’
‘It’s done,’ Arethusa said.
After a moment the Winter Palace said, ‘Wooden elephants, a birthday present. How many were there, and how old would Geoffrey Akinya have been when he received them?’
He looked around at his fellow travellers. ‘I would have been five, six,’ he mouthed, keeping his words low enough not to be picked up on the ship-to-station channel. ‘I don’t remember!’
‘I saw those elephants,’ Jumai said, in the same hushed voice. ‘You told me you didn’t even think they’d come from Eunice.’
‘There was a nanny from Djibouti looking after Sunday and at the time . . . I thought maybe she’d got them, or maybe Memphis.’
‘Ask the construct,’ Gilbert said.
‘Can’t. There’s a copy of her assigned to me, like a cloud hovering around me in data-space, but she’s not inside my skull. Without the aug she can’t tell me anything.’
‘I must have an answer,’ the habitat said. ‘How old was Geoffrey Akinya?’
‘Six,’ he said. ‘Six elephants, and . . . I was six at the time. My sixth birthday.’
Silence again, and then, ‘Approach authorisation granted. Proceed for docking at the trailing pole.’
Geoffrey let out a gasp of bottled-up tension. ‘We’re in. Or at least allowed a little closer.’
‘How’d you figure it out, five or six?’ Jumai asked.
‘I didn’t! It was a guess.’
‘Lucky fucking guess.’
‘She knew about the elephants,’ Geoffrey said, as much to himself as anyone present. ‘She may not have bought them . . . but I didn’t even think she cared enough to know—’
‘Enough to make it the billion-yuan question,’ Jumai said.
‘We’re lined up,’ Mira Gilbert said. ‘Still off-aug, and we’ll stay that way for the time being.’ Then her tone changed. ‘Wait. Something’s happening with the
‘Where’s she headed?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘Give me a few seconds to nail the vector.’ Gilbert watched and waited, tapping commands into her fold-out keyboard and studying the complex multicoloured readouts as they squirmed through various scenarios. ‘Resumed her approach for the Winter Palace,’ she said, sounding doubtful of her own analysis. ‘That can’t be right, can it? He’s only been in there, what, twenty minutes?’
‘Maybe that’s all he needs,’ Jumai said.
‘He still wouldn’t want to call in the
‘We have approach authorisation,’ Arethusa said. ‘If he blocks us, this becomes an interjurisdictional incident.’
‘I think it already became one the moment I signed up for citizenship,’ Geoffrey said.
‘I’m slowing our own approach,’ Gilbert said. ‘Want to see what the
Geoffrey reminded himself that he wasn’t chinging here, his flesh and blood body safely back in Africa. He was
