Picking one memory out of the thousands he held felt dangerously arbitrary. He tried to focus on the details, the specific and telling texture of things. The gleam of polished flooring, the squeak of it under his shoes, the white- plastered walls, the way the light fell on the brown-framed cabinets and cases of the private museum. Dust in lazy suspension, pinned in bars of sunlight. The smell from the kitchen, which managed to infiltrate every corner of the household.
‘Go to your room.’
He walked there, rather than simply imagining the transition. He pushed open the door, trying to recall the precise heft of it. He had been in the room recently, at least by his own sense of time, so it was not difficult to bring to mind its dimensions, the simple layout and sparse furnishings.
‘Sit on the bed. Look around.’
He did as he was told, forcing the act of conscious and continuous recollection – not just bringing to mind disconnected objects and impressions, but replaying the visual scene as a smoothly flowing sequence, his point of view tracking fluidly.
‘Focus your attention on the elephants.’
He had called them to mind, but only as one element of the room’s interior. Then he remembered how the Winter Palace had also narrowed its focus onto the elephants, as if they were a key component in the establishing of his identity.
That had merely been a question about his age when he’d received the gift. This was an altogether more intense act of scrutiny. He sensed that to fail in this specific reconstruction would be to fail entirely. Lionheart was holding its breath, as he held his.
He visualised the elephants. He held them in his mind’s eye as six distinct forms, recalling the weight of them, the smoothness of the carved wood in his hands, the sharpness of the tusks against his fingertips, the rough, dark feel of their bases. The elephants were all slightly different, even allowing for their diminishing sizes. He strove to visualise the distinguishing details, the subtle variations of head, ear and trunk postures, the leg positions. He concentrated until the act of sustained recollection was unbearable.
The image collapsed. The room evaporated from recall.
‘Welcome, Geoffrey Akinya,’ the voice said. ‘You have authorisation to proceed.’
The eidetic scanner slid back towards the ceiling. He removed his palm from the gene reader.
‘Cease the attack against the incoming ship,’ he said again, hoping that the system was sophisticated enough to understand and comply. ‘It is not hostile.’
‘Approach defences have been stood down. Do you have further instructions regarding the ship?’
‘Give me back comms.’
Jumai, who still had her helmet on, said, ‘Link re-established. Eunice – do you hear us?’ She waited a few moments, listening to the voice at the other end of the link. ‘Good. The bombardment should have stopped. I think we’ve managed to persuade Lionheart that we’re not a threat, but it’s probably best if we keep the ship out of immediate harm’s way for the moment. If we can work out how to bring you in under automatic guidance, we’ll be in touch.’
‘Much damage?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘Nothing that should prevent us from getting home, provided we can find fuel and make some basic repairs. You think it’s safe to leave the packs and suits here?’
‘Keep your suit on,’ he advised. ‘One of us should maintain a link back to the ship. Besides, it’s cold.’
‘You could put your own suit back on.’
‘Or I could walk through that door
Geoffrey opened the inner lock and pushed through into the iceteroid. He was doing his best not think about Hector.
The door led into a reception bay and storage chamber as large as a warehouse, as deep as a cargo ship’s hold. It plunged down many levels below the point where they’d emerged, all filled with racked machine parts and stacked cargo pods, gaudy with primary-colour paintwork, insignia and warning labels. There was Akinya property here, as well as products and supplies from companies that Geoffrey felt certain had not existed for decades. The ceiling, a level or so overhead, must have pushed above Lionheart’s surface, forming one of the bunkerlike structures Geoffrey had seen upon landing. It was windowless but covered with a matrix of lighting elements. A walkway, enclosed in a grilled tube with numerous hand- and footholds, pushed out from a small ledge at the airlock’s entrance. The bay was brightly illuminated and smelled showroom clean. From somewhere below came the monklike chant of generators and heavy-duty life-support equipment. The throb worked its way through the grilled walkway, trembling it under the push of his fingers. Walking didn’t really work in the iceteroid’s practically non- existent gravity. Geoffrey and Jumai were making long, slow arcing jumps, pushing back from the curve of the ceiling when they rose too high.
Geoffrey was glad to be moving. It was beginning to work the blood back into his limbs and fingers.
‘Is this what you were expecting?’ Jumai asked.
‘Hector would have known better than me what to expect,’ Geoffrey said, between breaths. ‘But if you’d asked me to guess what the inside of one of our mining plants looked like, it wouldn’t be far off this. There has to be pressure and warmth, for the technicians who come out here once in a blue moon. There have to be machine parts and supplies for the things the robots can’t make on their own, or aren’t allowed to make. And we know the facility’s still working as an ice mine.’
‘Eunice didn’t drag us all this way just to inspect the troops.’
‘No.’
At the far end of the covered walkway was another door, heavy enough to contain pressure, but not an airlock. It opened as they approached, revealing a cabin-like compartment set with restraints and four buckle-in chairs. It
