that much time on our hands. Instead, we’re just going to have to live with each other. If you have a specific query, I will do my best to answer. And if I have a specific observation that I think may be useful to you, I will do my best to provide it in a timely fashion.’
‘You sound like there’s a mind at work behind those eyes.’
‘So do you.’
It was sleight of hand, of course. No conscious volition animated the Eunice construct, merely ingenious clockwork. Across a life’s worth of captured responses, data gathered by posterity engines, there would be ample instances of conversational situations similar to this one, from which Eunice’s actual, documented responses could be extracted and adapted as required. A parlour trick, then.
But, he had to admit, a dazzling one.
‘Well, I merely wished to make my presence known,’ Eunice said. ‘I’ll take my leave of you now. I expect you have a lot on your mind.’
‘One or two things.’
‘It would be good to see the household again. You’ll at least give me that satisfaction, won’t you?’
He was being pleaded with by algorithms. ‘Provided you don’t make a nuisance of yourself.’
‘Thank you, Geoffrey. You’ve been tolerant. But then Sunday promised me you would be. I always did like you two the most, you realise. Out of all my children and grandchildren, you were the only ones who showed that rebellious spark.’
Geoffrey thought of all the times Eunice had bothered communicating with him, when she had been alive. If the construct’s opinion was an accurate reflection of the real woman’s feelings, she had done an excellent job of concealing them from the rest of the family. Orbiting above him, looking down from her Lunar exile, she had exuded about as much warmth as Pluto.
‘You really made us feel appreciated,’ he said.
It was a jolt to find himself out in the sunshine, back in Gabon, a free man returned to Earth.
He had passed through one set of customs at Lunar immigration; now there was another at the Libreville end. Geoffrey knew that his documents were all in order and that he was not knowingly breaking any rules. But he was still dwelling on the Chinese border incident, convinced that sooner or later his name would be dragged into proceedings. A tap on the shoulder, a quiet word in his ear. Ushered into a windowless room by apologetic officials with an arrest warrant.
But nothing happened in Libreville. They weren’t even interested in the glove, which he made a point of declaring before passing through security. Puzzled, perhaps, as to why anyone would go to the trouble of importing such a thoroughly unprepossessing object, but not puzzled enough to make anything of it.
He wandered the anchorpoint gardens for a little while, taking regular pauses at park benches to rest his muscles. Fountains hissed and shimmered around him. It was mid-afternoon and cloudless, the sky preposterously blue and infinite, as if it reached all the way to Andromeda rather than being confined within the indigo cusp he had seen from space. After the floodlit caverns of the Descrutinised Zone, it was as if a separate dimension had been bolted onto reality. He was perfectly content just to lean back on the park bench, following the six guitar-string threads of the elevator as they rose and diminished to nothing, in an exact, vaulting demonstration of vanishing- point perspective. Thread-riders climbed and descended, meniscoid beads of black oil sliding along wire. Breakers hurled themselves against the peninsula sea wall, lulling with their endless cymbal-crash roar. Seagulls scythed across his view, dazzlingly white bird-shaped windows into another, purer creation.
He strained to his feet and hefted the sports bag, which now felt as if it had been stuffed with a dozen tungsten ingots. Grimacing with the effort, he walked back through the shimmering gardens to the railway station, where he fully expected to catch the equatorial express back to Nairobi. The overnight train would give him time to gather his thoughts, and it would put off the homecoming for a few more hours. But when he arrived at the concourse the aug informed him that a private airpod was now waiting in the reserved landing area, sent specially for him.
‘Fuck you very much,’ he said under his breath.
Two hours later, he was back over EAF airspace. The sun hadn’t even set when he touched down at the household; he found an exo waiting for him, standing there like a headless skeleton, ready to accept Geoffrey into its padded embrace. He kicked the exo aside and stalked into the house like a man bristling for a bar fight.
Hector and Lucas were waiting for him, lounging in garden chairs while they supped late-afternoon drinks on the west-facing terrace. Spread before them like a tabletop game was the hovering projection of a Premier League football match.
‘Geoffrey,’ Hector said, making a show of almost rising from his seat without actually completing the motion. ‘Wonderful to see you back on terra firma at last! I see you found the airpod.’
‘Hard to miss,’ Geoffrey said, dropping the sports bag at his feet. ‘You needn’t have bothered, though.’
‘It seemed expedient to facilitate your speedy return,’ Lucas said, reaching down to scratch at the skin under the bright plastic centipede clamped to his leg. He was wearing shorts, tennis shoes and a slash-patterned orange and yellow shirt. ‘You opted not to use the exo?’
‘I’m not a cripple, cousin.’
‘Of course not.’ Lucas voked the football match into invisibility. ‘We only had your best interests at heart, though. My brother and I adapt readily to Earth gravity now, but that’s only because we’ve both accumulated a great many space hours. Adaptation does become easier with experience.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ He didn’t want to be too nice to the cousins, not when he had something to conceal from them. ‘Not that I have any plans to go into space again.’
‘The Moon barely counts anyway,’ Hector said. ‘But let’s not spoil things for Geoffrey – I’m sure it felt like a great adventure. And that awkwardness, the business with your friend being detained? We’ll say no more about it. Truthfully, we’re very grateful.’ He glanced suggestively at the bag. ‘The . . . um . . . thing – it’s in there?’
Geoffrey bent down and unzipped the bag. The glove was on top of his clothes; it had been the last thing put back in after customs. He pulled it out and tossed it unceremoniously to Hector, who had to rush to put his glass down to catch it.
