Chama looked up from the third course he had ordered while the others were on their seconds. ‘Gulliver went to Mars? I don’t remember that part.’
‘That was Robinson Crusoe,’ Gleb said firmly. ‘At least, I think he was on Mars. Otherwise why would there be a city there named after him?’
‘The point,’ Sunday said, before the conversation drifted irrevocably off course, ‘is that Gulliver met the Laputan astronomers. On their flying island. And the astronomers showed Gulliver their instruments and told him that there were two moons going around Mars.’
‘Which is sort of . . . unremarkable, given that there
Sunday gritted her teeth and pushed on. ‘This was before anyone knew of the real moons. Swift took a guess. Even put in their orbits and periods. Didn’t get them right, of course, but, you know, give the man credit for trying.’
‘And you think this is the clue?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘I ran it by the construct. She agrees with me.’
‘You made her,’ Geoffrey said. ‘That’s maybe not too surprising.’
Sunday deployed a fierce frown. ‘She’s perfectly capable of shooting my theories down in flames, brother. This time she thinks I’m on the right lines.’
‘Mars is a big planet,’ Gleb mused. ‘Where are you going to start?’
‘The clue indicates the moons, so that’s where I’ll look. And we can rule out Deimos immediately – Eunice was never there. Which leaves—’
‘Phobos,’ Chama said. ‘Fear, to Deimos’s Panic. Hmm. Are you really sure you want to go to a chunk of rock named Fear?’
Jitendra was recharging their glasses. ‘It could be called Happy Smiley Fun Moon and it wouldn’t make it any easier to get to. Look, it’s a nice idea, all this adventuring, but we need to be realistic. We can’t afford Mars.’
‘I could go on my own,’ Sunday said.
‘And that suddenly makes it achievable?’ Jitendra shook his head, smiling with the supercilious air of the only grown-up in the room. ‘This is out of our league, I’m afraid. You have commissions to finish, I have research to complete for June Wing. We can’t afford to let people down, not when we’ve bills to pay.’
Sunday was not proud of herself, but she pouted anyway. ‘Bills can fuck off.’
‘And so can Eunice,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘Even if she planted clues all over the system, she obviously did it decades ago. What difference does it make if we follow this up now, or wait a few years?’
‘Oh, brother. You really don’t get it, do you?’ She was shaking her head, stabbing her finger on the table. ‘This is life. It’s not a dress rehearsal. If we don’t do this now, we may as well start planning our own funerals. I don’t want to be sensible and prudent. Being sensible and prudent is for arseholes like Hector and Lucas. We turned away from all that, don’t you realise? We wanted life, surprises, risk . . . not stocks and shares and tedious fucking boardroom meetings about the cost of importing ice from fucking . . . Neptune.’ Realising that she was getting loud, drawing glances from across the restaurant, she dialled down her voice. ‘That’s not the life for me, all right? Maybe you’ve changed your mind. I haven’t. And if I have to find a way to get to Mars, I will.’
Geoffrey gave her his most infuriating calm-down nod. ‘All right. I get it. Really, I do. And although you may not believe me, I agree. But if we do this, we have to do it together. A shared risk. And we mustn’t rush into it.’
‘You’ve spent your whole life not rushing into things.’
He shrugged off the barb. ‘Maybe I have, Sunday, but I’m serious. If you insist on going to Mars, then I want to be part of that. She’s my grandmother, too. But we do it on our own terms, without begging favours from anyone. The cousins promised to pay me pretty well for coming to the Moon, and there’s more funding to follow. If I can find a way to channel some of that into a ticket to Mars . . . even two tickets . . . I will. But I’ll need time to make it happen, and the last thing I want to do is give them even more reason to get suspicious.’ He paused, absently picking at the edge of a wine bottle label. ‘If that means waiting months, even a year, so be it.’
‘There’s a favourable conjunction right now,’ Sunday said. ‘Mars is never closer, the crossing never easier.’
‘What goes around, comes around,’ Geoffrey answered.
‘Thank you. I think I have at least a basic grasp of orbital mechanics.’
Jitendra took her hand. ‘Maybe Geoffrey’s right, you know? No one’s saying we should forget all about this. But a year, two years . . . what difference will that make, given how long these clues must have been sitting around?’
Geoffrey nodded keenly. ‘Whatever we do, we shouldn’t act right now. That’ll be the worst possible thing, if we want to keep Hector and Lucas off our backs. Once I’m home I’ll give them the glove, and in a few weeks they’ll have forgotten all about it. Trust me on this – they don’t have the imaginations to think further ahead than that. Not unless money’s involved.’
‘Let the trail go cold . . . then strike?’ she asked.
‘Exactly.’ She sensed his pleasure and relief that she had come round to his way of thinking. ‘In the meantime, it’ll give us all the opportunity to . . . think things over. We really don’t know what we’re getting into here. Today we escaped, but we were lucky, and we won’t necessarily be lucky next time. We may think we know Eunice, but this could just as easily be her way of having a good laugh at our idiocy from beyond the grave. Or burial site.’
‘She went to a lot of trouble to put that box under Pythagoras,’ Sunday said. ‘Whatever was motivating her then, it wasn’t just spite. And she won’t be sending us to Mars out of spite either. She knows only family could get into that vault. She might want to test us, but she won’t want to hurt us.’
‘You hope,’ Geoffrey said.
‘I know this woman, brother. As well as anyone alive.’
