Walking with time lag was hard, but stopping was even worse. No harm could possibly come to Geoffrey or his environment, of course, and the ching was considerate enough to slow him down or adjust his trajectory before he appeared to run into obstacles, and therefore risked looking clumsy.
Other than that, it was disarmingly easy to forget there was any time lag at all. He could turn his head instantly, but that was because his ‘eyes’ were only ever intercepting a tiny slice of the available visual field.
He wandered the lounge, completing a full circle of the centrifuge without seeing anything of the ship. Eventually he found his way out of the centrifuge, into a part of the station that wasn’t rotating. The ching protocols permitted a form of air swimming, which was in fact far more efficient than would have been the case had he been embodied. He paddled his way to a window, incurving so that it faced the station’s core, and there was his sister’s swiftship, skewering the hollow cylinder from end to end.
Geoffrey looked at it for several minutes before it occurred to him to invoke Eunice.
‘You should see this,’ he said quietly, when she had appeared next to him. ‘That’s Sunday’s ship, the one that’s going to take her to Mars. She’s aboard now. Probably unconscious.’
‘You’re speaking to me again?’ Eunice asked. ‘After that unpleasantness with the elephants?’
‘Sunday says you need more stimulation.’ He waved at the view. ‘So here’s some stimuli. Make the most of it.’
Eunice’s ghost hands were resting on the curving handrail. No one was paying her the slightest attention. Geoffrey’s figment might be visible to anyone who chose to see it, but Eunice was an entirely private hallucination.
‘They’re nearly ready to go,’ Eunice said. ‘Docking connections, power umbilicals, all decoupled and retracted.’ She was silent for a few moments, looking at the liner.
The Maersk Intersolar vehicle was essentially a single skeletal chassis a thousand metres long, with the engines at one end, various cargo storage, navigation and manoeuvring systems in the middle, and the passenger and crew accommodation at the front, tucked behind the blunt black cone of the ship’s aerobrake. The engines were a long way down the cylinder, difficult to make out beyond an impression of three city-block-sized rectangular structures, flanged with cooling vanes. The swiftship was ugly and asymmetric because there wasn’t a single kilogram of mass aboard that wasn’t mission-critical. In Darwinian terms, it was as sleek and ruthlessly efficient as a swordfish.
‘That business with the Pans hiring her as an artist,’ Eunice remarked, ‘obviously a cover, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I don’t have an opinion on the matter.’
‘Don’t be obtuse, Geoffrey. We can be as hurtful or helpful as we please, and today I’ve come to help. I know why Sunday has to go to Mars – it’s because of what we found in Pythagoras.’
‘We,’ he scoffed. ‘Like you’re part of this now.’
‘Look at that ship, though,’ Eunice said, with renewed passion. ‘What we would have given for something like those magnetoplasma rockets when I was young. Even our VASIMR engines couldn’t touch what she can do. Exhaust velocities in the range of two hundred kilometres per second, specific impulse off the scale – we’d have murdered our own mothers for that. Our best fusion plants back then were the size of battleships, even with Mpemba cooling – not exactly built for lugging around the solar system. Mars in four weeks now, and you don’t even have to be awake for the trip! That’s the trouble with you young people – you barely know you’re born. We were just out of the chemical rocket era, and we still did more in fifty years than you’ll do in a century.’
‘You lived to see all this develop,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but instead of enjoying it you chose to rot away in seclusion.’
‘I’d had my hour in the sun.’
‘Then don’t blame the rest of us for getting on with our lives. You pushed back the boundaries of outer space. There are plenty of us doing the same with inner space, the mind. It might not have quite the grandeur or romance of exploring the solar system, but that doesn’t make it any less vital.’
‘I’m not arguing. Still want to be on that ship, though.’
After a moment he said, ‘I know when you were last on Phobos – 2099, just before your final expedition. A year later, maybe less, you donated the book to the museum. And if we could pin down when you returned to Pythagoras, it would have been around the same time, wouldn’t it? You were rushing about, hiding these clues. What’s Sunday going to find on Phobos?’
‘I don’t know.’ Seeing Geoffrey’s frustrated expression, she added, ‘You still don’t understand. I’m not here to lie, or keep things from you. If I think I know something useful to you, you’ll know about it.’
‘But you don’t even know what you did on Phobos.’
‘I went back to Mars for Jonathan’s funeral. I don’t know what I got up to, or where. But it’s a small moon, and there aren’t many possibilities.’
‘Sunday should still have told me her plans.’
‘And risk being found out by the cousins? We can have this conversation safely enough now, but a routine ching bind between Earth and the Moon, with minimal quangle? Sunday didn’t dare take that chance, Geoffrey.’
‘Hector and Lucas couldn’t have stopped her.’
‘You’re still not getting it. It’s not them pressuring her that Sunday was concerned about. It’s them pressuring
‘I’ll be glad when she’s home,’ Geoffrey said after a while, when he’d had time to mull Eunice’s words and decide that she was probably right. ‘Glad when I know she’s only as far away as the Moon.’
‘I’m looking after her. She’ll be fine.’
For all that it was a commonplace event, the departure had drawn a small crowd of watchers, including proxies and golems. Two orange tugs pushed the liner slowly out of the way station until the engine assembly had cleared
