‘The small fact that she just died. Very near the Moon. And all of a sudden you just happen to drop by to visit your sister, when I’ve been inviting you for ages and you’ve never come. Until now. Forgive me if I can’t help wondering whether someone in the family has put you up to something.’
Geoffrey squinted, as if she’d used some out-of-coinage phrase. ‘Put me up—’
‘Just do one thing for me, brother. Tell me there’s nothing going on that I need to know about.’
At that awkward juncture, Jitendra turned away from the stall, brandishing hard-won trophies.
‘More junk,’ Sunday said with a sigh. ‘Because we don’t have nearly enough lying around as it is.’
Geoffrey reached into his sweatshirt pocket for the Cessna baseball cap. His fingers closed on air. The hat, it began to dawn on him, had been stolen. The feeling of being a victim of crime was as novel and thrilling as being stopped in the street and kissed by a beautiful stranger.
Things like that just didn’t happen back home.
CHAPTER FOUR
They lived in a stack apartment. It had been Sunday’s originally; now they cohabited. The apartment was at the top of a tower of repurposed container modules, locked together in an alloy chassis and cut open to allow for windows and doors. Even at night Geoffrey easily discerned the faded colours and logos of the modules’ former owning companies, various Chinese and Indian shipping and logistics firms. The edifice was barnacled with air-conditioning units, spidered with pipework, ladders and fire escapes. Some kind of ivy was attempting to turn the whole stack into an olive-green monolith.
There was no elevator, not even up to the tenth-floor module where Sunday and Jitendra lived. Bounding up the skeletal staircase bolted onto the side of the stack, Geoffrey quickly understood why: reaching the tenth floor cost him no more effort than climbing a two-storey building back on Earth. He wasn’t even sweating when they arrived in Sunday’s kitchen.
‘This is amazing,’ he cried, almost happy enough that he’d put the theft of the baseball cap behind him. ‘It’s like being five again!’
‘You get used to it after a while,’ Sunday said, deflatingly. ‘Then it starts feeling like ten stories again.’ She opened a cabinet and extracted a bottle of wine, a dry white Mongolian this time. ‘Guess neither of you have any objections to another drink? Take him into the living room, Jitendra. And try not to let him break his neck on any of your toys.’
Geoffrey had never seen the apartment, had never even chinged into it with full embodiment, yet he still felt as if he had been there before. It wasn’t the layout of the rooms, the divided partitions of the cargo module, or even the furniture and textiles used to screen off the bare composite walling of the original structure. It was the knick- knacks, the little ornaments and whatnots that could only have belonged to his sister.
Glad as he was to be surrounded by things that connected him to his past, they came from a time and a place neither of them could return to. They were both grown up now, and Memphis was old, and the household felt far too small ever to have contained the limitless rooms and corridors of Geoffrey’s childhood.
He forced himself out of his funk and accepted a glass from Sunday.
‘Apologies for the mess,’ she said.
Geoffrey had seen worse. On the shelves, in between Sunday’s numerous keepsakes and
He was aware, even as he planted himself on a soft chair, that he was being surveilled. Eyes – some on single stalks, others in gun-barrel clusters – swivelled and focused. Limbs and body segments twitched and flexed.
‘Are you using any of these in the Robot Wars?’ Geoffrey asked.
Geoffrey’s question appeared to confuse Jitendra. ‘In the Robot Wars?’
‘Tomorrow. You said you’re a competitor in the Robot Wars.’
‘Ah,’ Jitendra said, something clicking. ‘Yes, I am, but no, it won’t be with these robots. They’re built for cleverness, not combat. These are my test-rigs, where I try out different cognitive approaches. The ones we use in the Wars . . . well, they’re bigger.’ He poured himself a half-glass of wine. ‘Quite a bit bigger.’
‘You have no idea, do you?’ Sunday was sprawling on the sofa, shoes kicked off, feet resting on the mirror- bright coffee table.
Geoffrey felt at a disadvantage. ‘Evidently not.’
She looked at him, marvelling. ‘Sometimes it’s as if you’re living a century behind the rest of us.’
‘Elephants don’t care what century it is. They care what
‘I’m going to ching June,’ Jitendra said, jumping up and wandering into another area of the apartment. ‘Need to fine-tune plans for tomorrow. Back in a moment.’
Tiredness washed over Geoffrey, bringing with it a fizzing tide of stirred-up emotions. From one moment to the next he knew he couldn’t go on with the pretence.
‘Don’t hate me for this,’ he said, unable to meet his sister’s eyes, ‘but I didn’t just come here to see you.’
‘Like I ever thought that was the case.’
Geoffrey looked up – he’d been expecting a completely different reaction. ‘You didn’t?’
‘You can’t break the habits of a lifetime just like that.’
‘Are you cross?’
Sunday cocked her head from side to side. ‘Depends what the “something else” was.’
Geoffrey sighed. ‘I didn’t want to lie to you, but I was put in a position where I really had no choice.’
‘Someone pressured you.’
