let’s talk terms. I want a fivefold increase in research funding, inflation-linked and guaranteed for the next decade. None of that’s negotiable: we either agree to it here and now, or I walk away.’
‘To decline an offer now,’ Lucas said, ‘could prove disadvantageous when the next funding round arrives.’
‘No,’ Hector said gently. ‘He has made his point, and he is right to expect assurances. In his shoes, would we behave any differently?’
Lucas looked queasy, as if the idea of being in Geoffrey’s shoes made him faintly nauseous. It was the first human emotion that had managed to squeeze past the empathy shunt, Geoffrey thought.
‘You’re probably right,’ Lucas allowed.
‘He’s an Akinya – he still has the bargaining instinct. Are we agreed that Geoffrey’s terms are acceptable?’
Lucas’s nod was as grudging as possible.
‘We have all committed this conversation to memory?’ Hector asked.
‘Every second,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Then let it be binding.’ Hector offered his hand, which Geoffrey took after a moment’s hesitation, followed by Lucas’s. Geoffrey blinked the image of them shaking.
‘Don’t look on it as a chore,’ Hector said. ‘Look on it as a break from the routine. You’ll enjoy it, I know. And it will be good for you to look in on your sister.’
‘We would, of course, request that you refrain from any discussion of this matter with your sister,’ Lucas said.
Geoffrey said nothing, nor made any visible acknowledgement of what Lucas said. He just turned and walked off, leaving the cousins standing there.
Matilda was still keeping watch over her charges. She regarded him, emitted a low vocalisation, not precisely a threat rumble but registering mild elephantine disgruntlement, then returned to the examination of the patch of ground before her, scudding dirt and stones aside with her trunk in the desultory, half-hearted manner of someone who had forgotten quite why they had commenced a fundamentally pointless task in the first place.
‘Sorry, Matilda. I didn’t ask them to come out here.’
She didn’t understand him, of course. But he was sure she was irritated with the coming and going of the odd- smelling strangers and their annoying, high-whining machine.
He halted before her and considered activating the link again, pushing it higher than before, to see what was really going on in her head. But he was too disorientated for that, too unsure of his own feelings.
‘I think I might have made a mistake,’ Geoffrey said. ‘But if I did, I did it for the right reasons. For you, and the other elephants.’
Matilda rumbled softly and bent her trunk around to scratch under her left ear.
‘I’ll be gone for a little while,’ Geoffrey went on. ‘Probably not more than a week, all told. Ten days at most. I have to go up to the Moon, and . . . well, I’ll be back as quickly as I can. You’ll manage without me, won’t you?’
Matilda began poking around again. She wouldn’t just manage without him, Geoffrey thought. She’d barely notice his absence.
‘If anything comes up, I’ll send Memphis.’
Oblivious to his reassurance, she continued her foraging.
CHAPTER THREE
The woman from the bank apologised for keeping him waiting, although in fact it had been no more than minutes. Her name was Marjorie Hu, and she appeared genuinely keen to be of assistance, as if he’d caught her on a slow day where any break in routine was welcome.
‘I’m Geoffrey Akinya,’ he said, falteringly. ‘A relative of the late Eunice Akinya. Her grandson.’
‘In which case I’m very sorry for your loss, sir.’
‘Thank you,’ he said solemnly, allowing a judicious pause before proceeding with business. ‘Eunice held a safe- deposit box with this branch. I understand that as a family member I have the authority to examine the contents.’
‘Let me look into that for you, sir. There was some rebuilding work a while back, so we might have moved the box to another branch. Do you know when the box was assigned?’
‘Some time ago.’ He had no idea. The cousins hadn’t told him, assuming they even knew. ‘But it’ll still be on the Moon?’
‘Just up from Africa.’
He’d travelled like any other tourist, leaving the day after his meeting with the cousins. After clearing exit procedures in Libreville, he’d been put to sleep and packed into a coffin-sized passenger capsule. The capsule had been fed like a machine-gun round into the waiting chamber of the slug-black, blunt-hulled thread-rider, where it was automatically slotted into place and coupled to internal power and biomonitor buses, along with six hundred otherwise identical capsules, densely packed for maximum transit efficiency.
And three days later he’d woken on the Moon.
No sense of having travelled further than, say, China – until he took his first lurching step and felt in his bones that he wasn’t on Earth any more. He’d had breakfast and completed immigration procedures for the African- administered sector. As promised, there’d been a message from the cousins: details of the establishment he was supposed to visit.
Nothing about the Copernicus Branch of the CAB had surprised him, beyond the fact that it was exactly like every other bank he’d ever been in, from Mogadishu to Brazzaville. Same new-carpet smell, same wood-effect furniture, same emphatic courtesy from the staff. Everyone loped around in Lunar gravity, and the accents were different, but those were the only indicators that he wasn’t home. Even the images on the wall, cycling from view to view, were mostly of terrestrial locations. Adverts pushed travel insurance, retirement schemes, investment
