‘To this point. And I’m not done with you yet. Not by a long mark. There’s a choice that needs to be made, a difficult one, and in all conscience I just don’t have the mental capacity to make it.’
‘That’s uncharacteristically modest of you.’
‘Oh, I’m not talking about
‘It is.’
‘If you’ve managed to find the helmet, then you’ll get past the sphinxware guarding the Palace. And if you are, as you say, Akinya . . . then the rest will follow.’ She paused. ‘At some point, you will be challenged by more sphinxware. The answer you give will be critical. But I can’t tell you what that answer should be. I’ve been buried under Mars for sixty years.’
‘And that’s meant to be helpful . . . how, exactly?’
Her eyes twinkled. ‘Forewarned is forearmed.’
‘Thank you,’ Sunday said, drenching her answer with as much sarcasm as she could muster.
‘I wish I could tell you more, but the simple fact is that I only know the things I need to know, here and now. Yet wisely or otherwise I have faith in you, Sunday Akinya.’
‘You just told me you’re a bunch of routines stuffed into a helmet. How could you possibly know whether I’m up to the task?’
‘Because you remind me of me,’ Eunice said.
‘You mean, up my arse with my own divine self-importance?’
‘It’s a step in the right direction.’
Sunday took deep and grateful gulps of air. Her clothes were soaked with sweat, sticking to her as she was extricated from the suit.
‘I hope that wasn’t too traumatic,’ Jonathan said, pushing a glass into Sunday’s clammy hand.
‘You’ve had the helmet all this time, yet in sixty years you never figured out a way to break through the sphinxware?’ She drank the glass down in one go. ‘Even if you couldn’t do it, surely someone else would have been able to?’
‘There might have been a way,’ Jonathan said, ‘but would the risk have been worth it? If the helmet sensed it was being hacked, it might have erased its contents. Besides, it didn’t really interest me.’
‘I can’t believe that.’
‘You have to remember that I was the one who bored your grandmother. When she’d grown restless of Mars, I was happy to put down roots. The helmet was from that other part of her life, the part I had nothing to do with.’
Soya dabbed Sunday’s forehead with a cloth.
‘Then why dig it up?’ Sunday asked.
‘I still wanted to make sure it reached the right hands. If that meant acting as a curator, so be it. If I hadn’t, the machines would have recycled it decades ago.’
‘You can’t argue with that,’ Soya said.
‘No, but I’m not sure what either of us has achieved. Yes, there was a message from Eunice in the helmet, and it told me some stuff. But answers? All she gave me was some cryptic horsepiss about something being a blessing or a curse. She wouldn’t say which. Other than that I need to get to the Winter Palace, which is back where I started.’
‘She dragged you all the way to Mars . . . to tell you the answer is on your doorstep?’ Jitendra asked.
‘I don’t know what she was telling me.’ Sunday accepted another glass of water from Jonathan. She was beginning to feel human again, save for the lingering aches and pains where the suit had been squeezing her. ‘There was some stuff about looking back at Earth, seeing it from all the way out.’ She paused and said doubtfully, ‘Maybe there’s more it can tell me.’
‘You want to get back in that thing?’ Jitendra asked, with what struck her as a particularly touching concern for her well-being.
‘Maybe, when we’re back in aug reach, the construct can find a way in without tripping the sphinxware to self- erase. But we have to leave the Evolvarium for that. She thinks she might have created this place, by the way. By accident!’
‘She was here,’ Jitendra admitted. ‘No one can argue with that. And when all this is over, someone really needs to dig around and find out how the Evolvarium got started. Maybe I’ll do it.’
‘You’ll ruffle a few feathers,’ Soya said.
‘Good. It’s about time.’
‘That’ll have to wait, I’m afraid,’ Sunday said. ‘I need to get a message to Geoffrey, very urgently. Even if I left Mars right now, I’m still more than a month from home. That’s too long. One of us needs to look inside the Winter Palace before Hector or Lucas gets the same idea.’
‘We can reach Vishniac by tomorrow morning,’ Soya said.
‘Cross the Evolvarium at night?’
‘It’s safer when you have friends in the right places,’ Jonathan said. There was a gleam in his eyes that didn’t belong in a man that old. ‘Trust Soya – she’ll get you back in one piece. But promise me something – this won’t be
