‘That’ll be me,’ Gleb answered timorously.
‘Gleb Ozerov, you are charged with the care of this individual under Lunar law. Indicate compliance.’
‘I comply,’ Gleb said. ‘I most definitely comply. Thank you. That’ll be fine.’
There was rather more to it than that, of course, but the additional terms of Chama’s release were packed into a lengthy, clause-ridden aug summary that his husband had already read and acknowledged before the handover.
Given the scope of possible repercussions, there was no denying that they had all got off lightly. After eight hours of detention and debriefing, Chama had been shipped back to Copetown by suborbital vehicle and released into the custody of the proctors. The robots had taken him to the railway station and onto the next available train. Chama was still standing meekly between his captors when Sunday, Geoffrey, Jitendra and Gleb met him at the tram terminal.
‘Wow,’ Sunday had breathed. ‘They really mean business. I’ve never even
‘They were scary,’ Geoffrey said.
‘That was the idea,’ Sunday answered.
Once the boilerplate had been stripped away the terms looked generous. No charges had been issued against Chama, although he had been given a formal warning which would remain on file until well into the next century. He was forbidden from entering Chinese territory, on the Moon or anywhere else in the system, for another decade. Furthermore, he was required to remain in the Descrutinised Zone for the next hundred days, a form of soft detention that also forbade the use of passive ching or embodiment. Communications with any individual outside the Zone would be subjected to routine machine and human interception and analysis.
Beyond that, Chama was technically ‘free’.
Sunday harboured some qualms about going to meet Chama, fearing that it tied her too closely to the border incident. Jitendra insisted she had nothing to fear. ‘If Chama got into this without us being involved,’ Jitendra said, ‘we’d still have been dragged into it by now. We’re his friends.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘Of course he’s right,’ Gleb said. ‘But thanks for being there, anyway. I didn’t much care for those proctors.’
‘None of us did,’ Sunday said.
Chama had precious little to say in the minutes after the handover. Perhaps he couldn’t quite believe that he wasn’t still in custody. Chama’s release, and his return to the Zone, had been played out in the full public gaze of the Surveilled World. Chama might only have had a small number of close friends, but he was familiar to hundreds of his fellow citizens, and they all wanted to know why he’d been dumped at the tram station by the evil-looking robots. By the time they reached the queue at the taxi stand, they were fending off enquiries from all corners. Well-wishers even began to ching in, a ghost crowd clotting around Chama and his friends like a gathering haze of cold dark matter.
‘This won’t make things any easier with Hector and Lucas,’ Geoffrey said as the taxi barged through midtown traffic.
‘Fuck ’em,’ Sunday said. ‘Hector was only calling to gloat. It’s not like he was ever going to lift a finger to help.’
‘They’ll still give me a hard time when I get back.’
‘So start working on your story. You found a glove, that’s all. If Hector and Lucas want to think there’s a connection to what happened in Pythagoras, that’s their problem. We don’t have to help them along the way.’
‘What about these?’ Jitendra asked, opening his fist to reveal the coloured gems. ‘Do they go back with Geoffrey or not?’
Sunday reached over Jitendra’s shoulder and scooped them into her palm. ‘They stay with me. You weren’t even meant to take them out of the apartment.’
‘We’re all here,’ Jitendra said. ‘I was worried about someone turning the place over while we were out.’
‘Oh,’ Sunday said, her unhappy tone indicating that was a possibility she hadn’t even considered.
Geoffrey and Jitendra were up front, Sunday, Chama and Gleb in the rear. Chama was still wearing the hard- shelled spacesuit, with the helmet cradled in his lap. He had his arms around it, chin resting on the bulbous crown. The Chinese had given the suit a thorough clean. It spangled with showroom freshness.
‘Looks like they were thorough,’ Geoffrey said.
Chama’s head bobbed in the neck ring. ‘Enough.’
‘And I don’t suppose they changed their minds about letting you keep anything you dug up out there,’ Sunday said.
Chama looked regretful. ‘I didn’t push my luck. They were doing me a big enough favour by letting me go.’
‘It was never going to work,’ Geoffrey said. ‘What did we actually get out of this except a close encounter with border security, a debt to pay back to Truro and a few grey hairs?’
‘That’s for you to figure out.’ Chama rolled the helmet over and dug into its open neck. ‘Here. Make of it what you will.’
He passed something to Sunday. It was a stiff off-white cylinder, like a section of bamboo.
It took her a moment to realise it was paper, rolled up tight and bound with a rubber band. Sunday snapped off the rubber band and carefully unwound the scroll. It was a collection of pages, a dozen or so coiled loosely together. The paper felt delicate, ready to crumble at the least provocation. The text was in English, she could tell that much from the words, although the sentences were difficult to parse. Even when her eyes dropped a Swahili translation filter over the page, it still didn’t make much sense.
