‘Prickly, isn’t she?’ Geoffrey murmured.
Eunice turned to him. ‘What did you say?’
‘You can’t whisper in her presence,’ Sunday said. ‘She hears everything, even subvocalisations. I probably should have mentioned that already.’ She sighed and slipped into a momentary aug trance.
Eunice and her chair vanished.
‘What just happened?’
‘I de-voked her and scrubbed the last ten seconds of working memory. That way she won’t remember you calling her prickly, and she won’t therefore hold a permanent grudge against you for the rest of your existence.’
‘Was she always like this with adults?’
‘I don’t think she was particularly receptive to criticism. I also don’t think she was one to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.’
‘Then I suppose she’s just marked me down as one.’
‘Until I scrubbed her working memory. But don’t feel too bad about it. In the early days I must have scrubbed and re-scrubbed about a million times. To say we kept getting off on the wrong foot . . . that would be a major understatement. But again, it’s my fault, not hers. Right now what we have is a cartoon, a crude caricature of the real thing. I’m trying to smooth the rough edges, tone down the exaggerations. Until that’s done, we can’t make any judgements about the real Eunice Akinya.’
‘Then I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. Although she wasn’t much help, was she?’
‘If she has anything useful to tell us, we’ll need to zero in on it with some more information, fish it out of her. It’s that or sit here while she recounts every significant incident of her life – and believe me, your tourist visa won’t begin to cover that.’
A swish of beaded curtains heralded Jitendra’s return.
‘Perhaps I may now be of assistance.’ He held out his hand: the three small wadded packages resting in his palm resembled paper-wrapped candies.
Jitendra put the packages down on the coffee table. They each took one and spread the wrapping open. Coloured stones tinkled out onto the coffee table’s glass top, looking just like the hard-boiled candies the wrappers suggested.
‘Real?’ Sunday asked.
‘Afraid not,’ Jitendra said. ‘Cheap plastic fakes.’
The three of them stared dispiritedly at the imitation gems, as if willing them into semi-precious rarity. Sunday’s were a vivid, fake-looking green, Geoffrey’s blood-red, Jitendra’s a pale icy blue.
There were eight green gems, but perhaps double the number of red and blue ones. Jitendra was already doing a proper count, as if it might be significant.
‘Did you damage the glove getting them out?’ Sunday asked.
‘Not in the slightest,’ Jitendra said. ‘And I was careful to record which finger each group of gems came out of.’
‘We could boot her up again and ask about them,’ Geoffrey said.
‘I don’t think it’ll get us anywhere,’ Sunday said.
‘And I suppose we’d be wise not to deliberately antagonise her by repeating ourselves. Can she keep stuff from us?’ Geoffrey asked.
Jitendra was still moving the gems around, arranging them into patterns like a distracted child playing with his food. ‘Your sister and I,’ he said, ‘have long and involved discussions about the precise epistemological status of the Eunice construct. Sunday is convinced that the construct is incapable of malicious concealment. I am rather less certain of that.’
‘It won’t lie,’ Sunday said, hoping to forestall another long-winded debate about a topic they could never hope to resolve, ‘but the real Eunice might well have done. That’s what we have to remember.’
‘Eight, fifteen, seventeen,’ Jitendra said. ‘Green, red and blue in that order. These are the numbers of gems.’
‘You think there’s some significance to that?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘The green ones are larger,’ Sunday said. ‘She couldn’t get as many of those into the finger.’
‘Perhaps,’ Jitendra said.
‘Maybe it’s the colours that mean something, not the numbers,’ Geoffrey said.
‘It’s the numbers, not the colours,’ Jitendra replied dismissively.
‘You sure about that?’ Sunday asked.
‘Absolutely. The gems are just different colours to stop us mixing them up. Orange, pink and yellow would have sufficed for all the difference it makes.’
‘The bigger question,’ Geoffrey said, ‘is exactly when I should tell the cousins. When I sneaked the glove out of the vault, I didn’t know that there might be something inside it.’
‘Nothing to stop you stuffing the gems back into the glove and claiming you never knew about them,’ Sunday said.
‘Someone will take a good look at the glove when I go through Earthbound customs. Then I’ll have some serious explaining to do.’
