Outside it was Africa.
It was somewhere near dusk, some season when the skies held an abundance of clouds, gaudy with underlit colours: salmon-pink, vermilion, rare shades of rose and tangerine. Between the clouds, improbably, the slashes of clear sky were luminous cobalt. The trees, darkly silhouetted, reminded her of toy-theatre cut-outs.
The view tracked around. Kilimanjaro slid into sight, snowless. The household, blue-tiled and white-plastered, the walls reflecting sky in a hundred pastel combinations. A flight of cranes, like birds in a Chinese watercolour.
A stand of trees, more solid and real-looking than the silhouettes. Her point of view commenced towards that place of shelter. And the woman who had been leaning with her back against one of the trees, sitting down as she read in the last light of some long-gone day, made to stand up, neither hurriedly, as if she had been disturbed, nor languidly, as if she had all the time in the world. As if this was simply the ordained moment.
The figure rested one hand on her hip. The other grasped the book she had been reading, resting against her thigh. She wore riding pants and boots, and a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up to bony elbows. The blouse looked very much like the one Soya had been wearing.
‘Good evening, Sunday,’ the woman said.
‘How do you know my name?’ Sunday asked, wondering what she was dealing with.
‘You told me, just now, when you answered the helmet’s questions. Do you understand what I am?’
‘Not really.’
‘When I buried this helmet on Mars, it was already forty years old. I had its systems upgraded as best I could, but there were still limitations to what could be achieved. You are not interacting with Eunice Akinya, rather with a very simple model of her, with a limited range of responses and a very restricted internal knowledge base. Don’t go mistaking it for me.’
‘So . . . this is you speaking now?’
‘This is . . . an interactive recording, a message to you, whoever you may be. The sphinxware wouldn’t have admitted you unless you’d uncovered the trail that led to this point, so the chances are excellent that you’re a member of the family, or at least someone with close ties to it.’
‘As you just said, I’ve told you who I am.’
‘You have, and we shall proceed on that basis.’ Eunice – the recording of Eunice – glanced down at the book she’d been reading. ‘Firstly, you’ve done well to come this far. That took resourcefulness. I trust there were no particular unpleasantnesses along the way?’
‘You could have picked a better burial site on Mars.’
Eunice’s eyes sharpened. ‘There were local difficulties?’
‘This is the middle of the fucking Evolvarium, Grandmother.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. Evol-what? Succinctly, please.’
‘Other than burying your helmet in a minefield, you couldn’t have picked a worse spot on Mars. This whole area, for a thousand kilometres in any direction, is a no-go zone. It’s a place where self-replicating machines are allowed to run riot. They evolve through generations, fighting for survival. Every now and then that evolutionary process throws up some gimmick, some idea or gadget that someone can make money from outside the ’varium. The machines are dangerous, and the people who run the place don’t take kindly to outsiders poking around. Our guide was killed out there, and Jitendra and I came close to dying as well.’
‘I’m . . . sorry.’ The contrition sounded genuine. ‘I meant you to be challenged, but not put in real peril. Still, I can’t be held accountable for what happened to Mars after the burial.’ Again there was that sharpening of her gaze. ‘It’s an odd thing to happen, though. This is the only place like it on Mars?’
‘I told you, you couldn’t have picked a worse location.’
‘Then that’s strange. I’m not one for coincidences, Sunday. Not this kind, anyway. There must be an explanation.’
‘You tell me.’
‘I only know what I know. But how could my little adventure on Pavonis Mons have led to this?’ She gave every impression of thinking about that, reopening the book and leafing through it, scratching her fingernail against the fine Bible-thin paper, even though her eyes were not on the close-printed text. ‘After I lost the aeroplane . . . but no.’ A quick dismissive head-shake. ‘That can’t be it.’
‘What can’t be what?’
‘I had to take shelter while the storm raged. The Russian station was still airtight, and it had power and the basic amenities. But I couldn’t stay there for ever. The wind had damaged the aircraft, but I still needed a way out.’
Sunday issued a terse, ‘Continue.’
As if Eunice needed permission.
‘The Russians had left a lot of equipment in their station, some of it still semi-functional. Before landing, I’d scouted a number of abandoned facilities and assets in the area. If I could salvage some of that junk, I’d be able to keep myself alive longer. Batteries, air-scrubbers, that kind of thing. Maybe even rig up some kind of repair to the aircraft. But I couldn’t go out there. My suit wasn’t stormproof, and in any case it only had limited range. I couldn’t have walked far enough to do any good.’
‘So you were in deep shit.’
‘Until I found the robots.’ Eunice snapped the book shut again. ‘The Russians had left them behind, in one of the storage sheds. I’m not surprised: they were old, slow, their programming screwed. Still, I didn’t need them to do much for me.’ She smiled quickly, as if abashed at her own resourcefulness. ‘I . . . patched them together, fixed their programming as best I could. Took me eight days, but it kept my mind off the worst. Then I sent them out in different directions, running on maximum autonomy. I’d told them to locate anything that looked potentially useful and drag it back to me.’
