Sunday shook her head reflexively. ‘Jonathan Beza died more than sixty years ago. Eunice and he had divorced by then. There was an accident, here on Mars. Some kind of pressure blow-out.’
‘And that precludes me from being related to him?’
‘He remarried before his death. He had more children, and some of them had children themselves. Nathan even came to the funeral, and I know about all the others. There’s no Soya anywhere in that family tree.’
‘In which case you’re looking at the wrong tree.’
It had not been Soya who said that. This voice was deep and sonorous, varnished and craquelured. It spoke Swahili, but with an old-fashioned diction that called to mind nothing in Sunday’s experience but Memphis Chibesa.
She turned to follow the voice to its origin. There, standing in a gash of the curtain – like an actor hesitating to join the stage – was the oldest man she had ever seen.
‘I am Jonathan Beza,’ the man said. ‘I am your grandfather, Sunday Akinya. I was married to Eunice. And yes, I am very much alive.’
Jitendra was looking to her for guidance. She signalled with the slightest nod that yes, she believed this man to be exactly who he said he was. As absurd as that was to take in, after everything she had accepted in her life.
‘It was easier to die then,’ Jonathan Beza said. ‘You must remember that this was a different Mars, a different time. Even now, as you’ve experienced, there are places on this world where a person can disappear very effectively. Or be made to disappear.’ He stopped to pour chai for his daughter and their two guests.
‘You mean there was never an accident?’ Sunday asked.
‘There was. The same sort of accident that still happens very occasionally nowadays. It was real, and I didn’t engineer it in any way. I should hope not: good people died in it, after all.’
‘But you saw your chance to vanish,’ Jitendra said.
‘The thought had been at the back of my mind for some time. The Mech was so primitive back then we didn’t even call it the Mech. The few implants I carried were easily disabled, or fooled into giving false reports. When the opportunity to fall off the edge of the world presented itself, I took it.’ He fixed his gaze on Sunday. ‘Your grandmother didn’t know. She wasn’t complicit in this. She even came to my funeral.’
‘That was when she returned to Phobos,’ Sunday said.
‘Yes.’
They were sitting in a different curtained room. Sunday still had no idea where they were, beyond Jonathan’s assurance that it was still Mars. There was no aug reach, no Eunice. In their place was a noise like distant engines and the occasional bump or sway that led her to think she was in a vehicle.
A possibility had presented itself, but she’d dismissed it instantly.
‘You found us in the Evolvarium,’ Jitendra said. ‘Have you any idea what we were doing there?’
Jonathan said, ‘Dying?’
‘Other than that,’ Sunday said.
‘Yes, I have a shrewd idea what you were doing. Better than a shrewd idea, actually.’ He paused, apparently to collect himself, marshalling energies before proceeding. Jonathan was small, wiry, obviously immensely old but nowhere near as frail as Sunday might have expected for one of his age. He was even older than Eunice: she’d have queried the construct for his date of birth, if the construct had been reachable. Born 2020 or thereabouts, if not earlier. A man now in his hundred-and-forties. That made him old, but not impossibly so. He wore the inner layer of a spacesuit, a tight black garment sewn with coolant lines and studded with the gold-plated discs of biomonitor sockets. His arms were scrawny but there was still muscle tone there, and no trace of arthritis or neurodegenerative tremor in his fingers. Sunday had watched as he poured the chai; he hadn’t spilt a drop. His head was mostly hairless, save for a corona of fine white fuzz around his scalp, his face abundantly wrinkled, the already dark skin mottled by pure black lesions, yet remaining startlingly expressive. His eyes were clear and focused, his smile alarmingly youthful.
‘Then you’ll know it was a waste of time,’ Jitendra said.
‘I know Dorcas cheated you. That may not amount to quite the same thing.’
‘How much do you know?’ Sunday asked, directing her question at Soya. ‘You were in Crommelin. You must be registered as a citizen or tourist to be anywhere on Mars, so you can’t have dropped off the map the way your father has.’
Jonathan answered for her. ‘Soya has been my lifeline, Sunday. She has been able to move in the Surveilled World, be my eyes and ears. She has arranged medicine for me, on the few occasions when I have needed it.’
‘I have a false history,’ Soya said, looking at Sunday and Jitendra in turn. ‘My connection to my father . . . and by extension your grandmother . . . isn’t part of that history.’
‘You could never do such a thing on Earth, or any place where the Surveilled World is fully developed. On Mars, now, it would be difficult. It was easier when Soya was born.’
‘How old are you?’ Sunday asked.
‘Fifty,’ Soya said. ‘Does that surprise you?’
‘I don’t suppose it should.’
‘Eunice wasn’t her mother,’ Jonathan said, confirming what Soya had already told Sunday. ‘There was a woman, an investigator. Her name was Lizbet. She had her doubts about my death, and she followed them to me.’
‘I never heard about any investigation,’ Sunday said.
‘Lizbet decided not to go public with her story once she’d heard my side of things. She became my companion, and we had a daughter. We were happy. Lizbet died twenty years ago.’
