Blue Remembered Earth

But the moment had passed. If that meant he was too timid to follow his own investigations to their logical conclusion, then so be it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have known better.’

He closed the connection and turned back for the airpod.

More visitors had arrived by the time he returned to the household, judging by the airpods gathered along the parking area. Jumai was waiting for him, already dressed for the scattering. She wore a tight-fitting black jacket and a slim black skirt, offset with flashes of red around the waistline. She brushed a hand against his arm as they met in one of the hallways, lowering her voice to a concerned hush. ‘How did it go out there?’

‘I had some unfinished business,’ Geoffrey said.

She nodded slowly. ‘And is it finished now?’

‘I think so.’

‘I’ll be heading back to Lagos tomorrow. Not to my old job, but Lagos is still where my contacts are. I’m hoping I might be able to leverage my recent experiences into a new contract, maybe off-Earth. Still a lot of stuff out there that needs cleaning up.’

‘Aren’t you fed up with excitement?’

‘If you mean do I want to dodge high-velocity ice packages for the rest of my life, then the answer’s no. But I do need challenges. I certainly got them when I signed up to help you break into the Winter Palace.’

He smiled tightly. ‘More than you were counting on, I’m sure.’

‘Something’s definitely changed. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s me.’ Jumai looked up and down the hall, holding her tongue as a proxy strode past – not one of the household units, Geoffrey decided. ‘Look, I’ll only say this once. Being here isn’t normal for either of us, and I’m not one for funerals at the best of times. But when I get back to Lagos, will you come over and spend a few days? I mean, work permitting.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘I’ll hold you to it, all right?’ Only then did she drop her hand from his sleeve. ‘You’d better go and scrub up, rich boy. I’ll see you in the courtyard when you’re done – Sunday and Jitendra are already there.’

‘I won’t be long.’

He went to his room, stripped and showered, and was halfway through dressing in clean clothes when his gaze chanced upon the six wooden elephants. He’d been too tired and preoccupied to pay any attention to them yesterday. Why should he? They were part of the furniture, that was all. The fact that the constructs guarding both the Winter Palace and Lionheart had questioned him about them was neither here nor there. It only meant that the elephants really had been a gift from Eunice, as he had believed at the time. Or rather from whatever intelligence had been masquerading as his grandmother, during all the long years of her imaginary exile.

But he realised now that there was rather more to them than that. He sat down on his bed, as momentarily dizzy as if he’d been knocked on the head. It couldn’t be, could it? After all this time, so close at hand. So close to his hands.

He picked up the heaviest of the elephants, the bull at the head of the group. Not very plausible given elephant social dynamics, but he supposed that hadn’t really been the point.

He stroked the elephant’s body, reassuring himself that its composition was what he had always assumed, always been told: some dark, dense wood.

It was. He was sure of that.

But the base material, that was something else. Heavy and black and irregular, flat along the top and bottom, as if cleaved from some larger coal-like motherlode. He tipped the piece to look at its base, the elephant upside down, and made out the faint scratch bisecting it from one side to the other. He’d never noticed that scratch before, and even if he had, he’d have had no reason to attach any significance to it. But now he knew. It only took a few moments to confirm that there were similar scratches on the other five bases.

He knew exactly where they’d come from.

Thinking of what they had lost, what they had gained, what was yet at stake, Geoffrey sat sobbing, the bull elephant in his hand as heavy and cold as a stone.

Sunday and her brother walked out with the rest of the clan, the family and friends, into the evening air, Lucas with them, Jitendra and Jumai not far away. The sky was pellucid and still, as clear as that long-ago evening when they had come to scatter Eunice’s ashes. She had not been embodied then, at least not in flesh and blood, but it was hard to dislodge the memory that she had been here, walking on African soil, breathing African air.

‘I have been giving some thought to the matter we discussed over dinner,’ Lucas said, his voice low enough not to carry more than a few paces. He walked with his back straight and his hands clasped behind his back.

‘If you want evidence,’ Sunday said, ‘that’s going to be a little difficult. At least for the moment. There’s Summer Queen, obviously, but beyond that, you’ll just have to take a trip to Lionheart and see the test machinery for yourself. The construct told my brother that it’s fully operational.’

‘Summer Queen itself points to new physics, or at least an area of current physics that we only thought we understood,’ Lucas said. ‘That in itself does lend a certain credibility to the rest of the story. You’ll excuse any scepticism on my part, though, I hope. Even if it was Hector telling me these things, I’d still want more than mere words. It’s difficult enough to accept that our grandmother knew about this new physics, everything it implies . . . but to be asked to believe these things of Memphis? That he was not the man we imagined him to be?’

‘He was old enough not to have a past fixed in place by the Mech, or posterity engines,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I admit that there are . . . absences in his biography. But no more so than would be the case in a million people of his age.’ Lucas touched a hand to his mouth, coughing under his breath. ‘And there was once a physics student with a similar name, born in Tanzania at about the right time.’

‘Then you accept that there’s at least the possibility this is all true,’ Sunday said.

‘It would help if there was something . . . more. I believe what Geoffrey and Jumai have told me, and I also