‘No,’ Chama said, giving a visible shrug through the tight-fitting suit. ‘How could I be? But you’re in the Zone, Sunday. Power blocs like the Chinese, they hate the Zone precisely because they
‘Did you bring proxies?’ Gleb asked.
‘Two. All I could squeeze in. The rest of you can go passive.’
Sunday hadn’t thought about proxies. ‘We’re going to have words about this, when you get back,’ she said.
‘Spoken like a true friend. Oh – third warning.’ Chama’s figment jolted violently, as if, in ignorance of the absence of atmosphere, his ship had hit clear-air turbulence. ‘Interesting,’ Chama said, his voice coming through distinctly even with the helmet on. ‘They’re trying to wrestle control from my own avionics. Interesting but not remotely good enough. Going to have to up their game if they want to get anywhere.’
The ship settled down. Sunday inhaled a deep breath. ‘Give me a few moments.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Chama said.
‘Couldn’t you have stopped this?’ she demanded of Gleb.
‘He was up and out of our apartment before I realised what was going on. You think I actually approve of this?’
She cooled her anger. Taking it out on the other zookeeper wasn’t the right thing to do. All of a sudden she realised how hard this must be for Gleb, with his husband out there, taunting the most powerful national entity on the Moon.
‘Well, there are four of us, and two proxies,’ Jitendra said. ‘I’ll go passive. Gleb can take one of the machines.’
‘I’ll manage without embodiment,’ Gleb said. ‘If I had arms and legs, I might be tempted to strangle someone.’
‘If there’s any treasure under that soil,’ Geoffrey said, looking at his sister, ‘it belongs to us. I guess you and I ought to have bodies.’
There were four open ching binds: two for proxy embodiment, two for passive ching. Sunday assigned one of the proxy binds to herself, leaving the other for Geoffrey. Jitendra and Gleb could take care of their own binds.
‘I’m going in,’ she said. ‘The rest of you’d better be there when I arrive.’
She voked for ching. For a moment, one that was far too familiar to be distressing, she felt her soul sliding out of her body, not in any specific direction but in all directions at once, as if she was an image of herself that was losing focus, smearing into quantum haze. That was the neuromachinery taking hold, shunting sensory and proprioceptive inputs to the waiting robot, halfway around the Moon.
And then everything was sharp again, and she was somewhere else, in a different body, in a hurtling spacecraft that had just transgressed the sovereign airspace of the Special Lunar Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China.
She was strapped to a wall mounting, facing Chama.
‘I’m here,’ Sunday said. ‘Now what do I have to do to get you to turn this ship around?’
‘I already told you,’ Chama said, angling his glassy visor to look at the proxy, ‘there’s nothing to be done now except enjoy the trip.’
Sunday felt pinned inside something that didn’t quite fit her body, as if she’d been forced into a stiff, partially rusted suit of armour. Then something
She studied her new anatomy. The cheapest kind of mass-produced Aeroflot unit, little more than an android chassis, all metallic-blue tubing and bulbous universal joints. She was a mechanical stick figure, like a hydraulic car jack that had decided to unfold itself and walk upright.
To her right, another proxy started moving. It was metallic red, but otherwise very similar.
It looked at Chama, then at Sunday. The head was an angular pineapple, faceted with wraparound sensors and caged in alloy crash bars.
‘Well,’ Geoffrey said, ‘I’m here.’ And he moved one of the arms, lifting it up to examine the wrist and hand and elegant, dextrous human-configuration fingers and thumb. Geoffrey’s actions were wooden, but that would soon wear off. It wasn’t as if her brother had never ridden a proxy before; he was just out of practice.
‘Where exactly are we?’ Sunday asked Chama.
‘Good question,’ Geoffrey said. ‘To be quickly followed by: what the hell are we doing here, and why am I involved?’
‘Well inside Chinese sovereign airspace,’ Chama said. ‘Descending over Pythagoras, fifty-five kays from the burial spot. We should be there in about six minutes.’
Sunday appraised her surroundings. She’d been in bigger shower cubicles. The hopper was about as small as spacecraft got, before they stopped being spacecraft and became escape pods or very roomy spacesuits.
‘Whatever’s under the soil,’ Geoffrey said, ‘it’s not your concern, Chama.’
The ship bucked and swayed again, the golems clattering in their wall restraints. Chama cursed and worked the manual joystick set into the armrest of his chair, jerking it violently until the ride smoothed out. ‘They’re cunning,’ he said. ‘I’ll give them that. Found a back door into the command software even I didn’t know about.’
‘I thought you said you didn’t have manual control,’ Sunday said.
‘We’ll talk about it afterwards,’ Chama said again. ‘Where are Gleb and Jitendra, by the way?’
Jitendra’s head and upper torso popped into existence in the cabin. ‘Here.’
