‘Is there some significance to this?’ she asked, leafing through the pages.
‘You tell me,’ Chama said. ‘That was the only thing in the box.’
Geoffrey looked around the taxi. ‘We know what was in the box, Chama. We saw it. It was some junk, not a roll of paper. We’d have known if we saw a roll of paper.’
Chama sighed. ‘The junk was for the Chinese. Figured they’d confiscate anything I turned up in that ditch, so I took something along with me. By the time you chinged into my sense-space, I’d already opened the box once, swapped the paper for the junk. Didn’t you notice that I got it open very easily the second time, as if I knew exactly what to do?’
‘You couldn’t have known that was going to work,’ Geoffrey said.
‘You don’t get very far in life if you’re not prepared to take a few chances. So I had to be able to open the box and switch the contents without the drones getting a good look at what I was doing. Wasn’t all that hard, though, because the drones didn’t want to get too close, not with them being basically nuclear-powered missiles and me a fragile human in a spacesuit, on the surface of the fucking Moon.’
‘OK,’ Sunday said, accepting this explanation for the moment, ‘I can see how you might have switched the junk, and I can see how the Chinese would have confiscated the junk as if it was the thing inside the box all the time. But I can’t believe they didn’t spot the paper afterwards, when you were being debriefed.’
‘Oh, they did. But I told them I’d had it on me all the while. Said it was a keepsake, a lucky charm. Just a roll of paper, after all. Why would they doubt me? Why would they expect someone to have dug up some old papers on the Moon?’
‘Damn lucky,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You couldn’t have known there was paper in that box.’
‘Damn lucky, absolutely. Anyhow, regardless of what I’d found, the switch still bought me a little time to examine whatever was inside. The Chinese confiscated the box straight off. Didn’t get around to searching my suit until two hours later, when I was in their holding tank. Even if they had taken whatever was in the box, I’d still have had plenty of time to examine it.’
According to the print at the top of the odd-numbered pages, the sheets had been liberated from a copy of
‘Course, that wouldn’t necessarily have helped,’ Chama said, as if he had a hotline into Sunday’s head. ‘I mean, I’m assuming those pages mean something specific to you Akinyas, something way over my head.’
‘Eunice liked to read it,’ Geoffrey said. ‘That’s all. It ties the paper to her, but beyond that—’
‘She buried it for a reason,’ Sunday said. ‘You did well, Chama. To sneak this out, under the noses of the Chinese . . . that took some doing.’
‘I thought so,’ Chama said.
‘But it doesn’t get us anywhere,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Yet,’ Sunday corrected. ‘We still need to run it by the construct, see what she makes of it. We can also run tests on the paper, check whether there’s something on it we can’t see right now – invisible ink, microdots, secret codes worked into the text, that kind of thing. Or maybe something in the words themselves.’
‘Have fun. Tomorrow I’m on my way back to Africa. Visa runs out in the afternoon, and I’m not going to push my luck for the sake of a few hours.’
‘So you’re just leaving this with me?’
Geoffrey looked surprised at her question. ‘Do what you want with it. I’ll back you all the way.’
‘In mind, if not in body.’
‘I can’t be in two places at once. If I start chinging up here at every opportunity, the cousins will really start wondering what’s going on. And we don’t want that, do we?’
‘No,’ Sunday said, with reluctance. ‘That we don’t.’
‘But you should be ready for whatever Eunice throws at you,’ Chama said. ‘She’s taken you from Earth to the Moon. Do you honestly think she meant you to stop there?’
‘My sister has to pay the rent as well,’ Geoffrey said. ‘She can play Eunice’s little game up to a point but at some point reality has to kick in. We both have day jobs. And in case you got the wrong impression, neither of us has buckets of money to throw around.’
‘Then dinner’s on me,’ Chama said grandly. ‘That’s only fair, isn’t it? I feel like celebrating. It’s not every day you become a pawn in international relations.’
So they went out that night, the five friends, to a good place that did East African and Indian, and when they had finished two courses and finally fended off the last of the inquisitive well-wishers, eager to congratulate Chama on his safe return, Sunday took out the cylinder of rolled paper, snapped it free of its rubber band and spread it carefully on a part of the table as yet unblemished by food and wine spillages. Two full wine bottles served as weights, to stop the pages curling back into a tube.
‘I think I have it,’ she said, hardly daring to voice her suspicion aloud, for fear that it would strike the others as foolish. ‘The fact that this is
Geoffrey sounded wary but curious. ‘Go on.’
‘When you get back home I want you to confirm that these pages really were ripped from the copy of the book in the household archive. I’m betting they were, though. I’m also betting that Eunice picked this part of the book very deliberately. It’s a signpost. It’s telling us where to look next.’
‘Which would be?’ Jitendra asked.
Sunday sucked in a breath. ‘I have to go to Mars. Or rather, the moons of Mars. That’s the point, you see.’
