dismaying lack of natural disasters. The Yuan had faltered against the Euro, but not so calamitously that anyone was jumping off skyscrapers. An adult tiger, captured in Uttar Pradesh and found not to be instrumented, led to a panic that other apex predators might yet roam beyond Mechanism control. In the Caspian Sea, a tourist boat had capsized with the loss of two lives. In Riga, the living heirs of a proud artistic lineage claimed that the Mandatory Enhancements had robbed them of the creative skillset that should have been their birthright. A ceremony attended the bulldozing of the world’s last place of incarceration, a former maximum-security prison near Guadalajara. A “golden period” Stradivarius had been destroyed in a freak shipping accident, while a lost Vermeer had turned up in someone’s attic in Naples. On the Moon, a match-fixing scandal surrounding the latest cricket tournament. An outbreak of the common cold, quickly isolated and controlled, in the Synchronous Communities. A pop star was pregnant. Another had broken up with his clone.
By turns she felt little prickles and tingles of returning sensation in different parts of her body, and at last the system informed her that she was now at liberty to make cautious movements.
Sunday got out of bed.
She had to force sluggish muscles to work for her, bullying them like an indolent workforce. She was wearing the same skimpy silvery gown stitched with the Maersk Intersolar logo they’d given her to put on before going under. She hoped her clothes had made it to Mars as well, because this wasn’t going to do.
She tried voking Jitendra. No response.
Presently a door opened in the glade. A Chinese medic came in with a wheeled trolley and performed a few last-minute tests, some of which involved no more sophisticated a procedure than him tapping her knees with a small metal hammer and nodding encouragingly.
‘You’re good to go,’ Sunday was told. ‘Anything feels out of the ordinary, be sure to contact a Maersk representative. But you should have no problems completing the journey to Mars.’
‘I travelled with a friend,’ Sunday said, answering in Swahili. ‘I couldn’t get through to him just now.’
‘Not everyone’s out yet. We don’t have the capacity to revive all the passengers in one go, not since they launched the thousand-berth liners. They’re building a bigger facility on the other side of Fobe, but it won’t be online for a year or so.’
‘Everything’s all right, though?’
The medic was packing away his gear. ‘Everything’s fine. We haven’t lost a passenger in the last ten trips.’
Somehow that wasn’t quite the blanket reassurance she had been hoping for. Sunday decided it had been meant sincerely enough, though, and that she should take it on those terms.
A little later she was shown to another room where her belongings had been unshipped, and she gladly shrugged off the gown and put on her own clothes, opting for an ankle-length skirt and sleeveless top. She selected a lime-green pattern for the skirt, left the top in its default black, tied her hair back with a white scarf and went to find Jitendra.
But Jitendra was indeed still frozen. It turned out that he had been loaded into a different part of the ship – no explanation was offered, beyond that kind of thing being routine – and was only now being offloaded and processed. It would be another six hours before he was conscious and mobile.
She called Geoffrey, without even stopping to check local time in Africa. This wasn’t going to be a real-time ching, so if Geoffrey didn’t want to take the call, he could always play her message later.
‘It’s me, Sunday,’ she said. ‘I’ve arrived safe and sound on Phobos; just waiting for Jitendra to be woken, then we’ll be on our way. Haven’t seen Mars yet, but I’m going outside shortly – I’ll blink you a few snaps from the surface of Phobos. It’s all pretty unreal, brother. I don’t feel like I’ve been asleep for a month. Us being on the Moon, me talking to you the day we departed . . . that all feels like a couple of days ago. I’m a month older, a month closer to my next birthday, and I don’t feel it at all.’
She halted, realised she had spoken only about herself. ‘Hope all’s well back home – I guess the cousins know I’ve taken this little trip by now. I hope they haven’t been making life too hard for you, and that you’ve been able to spend some time with the elephants. And I hope Eunice has been . . . behaving herself. Right now I think she can be useful to us. There’s a copy of her with me, and a copy with you . . . and it’s the same Eunice, give or take a few differences due to time lag. Even when we’re not in contact she can keep synchronising herself, updating her internal memory, learning all the while. And it may help us, brother. She’s the best window we have into Eunice’s actual life, and as I told you on the Moon, the construct will always know more about Eunice’s documented past than I could ever hope to hold in my head. And that could make a difference, for both of us.’
She paused for breath. ‘OK, I’m shutting up now. Reply when you’re able, but don’t sweat it if you’re in the middle of something. We’ll speak again when I’m on Mars.
‘On Mars,’ she repeated to herself softly, when the ching bind had collapsed.
Sunday was already experiencing Martian gravity. She was in one of several concentric centrifuge wheels, packed like watch gears into Stickney, the eight-kilometre-wide crater at one end of the little potato-shaped moon. The shops, boutiques and restaurants were set into facades of rough-hewn reddish stone. Decorated with black and white mosaics, the pavements and thoroughfares wound their way around fountains and signs and items of abstract public art, neon-pink installations mostly themed around dust-devils and sand dunes.
Unadventurous kitsch, but then Sunday wasn’t one to judge: she’d committed her fair share of that.
Travellers were everywhere, some walking confidently, some in exos, some with exos on standby, never straying more than a few paces from their owners. There were also some who were too frail even for exos, or had perhaps forgotten the art of walking entirely. They were supported in reclining dodgem-shaped travel couches, gliding around like deathbed patients on a terminal shopping spree. They’d come to Martian space from Ceres, the other Belt communities, the Galilean satellites, or from the moons of Saturn, or even further out. In their low-gravity worlds, Sunday would be the bumbling oaf, the object of deserved pity.
Panspermian funds allowed Sunday the rental of a Phobos surface suit. A tunnel brought her to the edge of Stickney, into an underground enclosure where rental employees surveyed proceedings with bored, seen-it-all expressions.
Risk had been engineered out of the Phobos suits. They came wobbling in via a ceiling track, like cable cars. Each consisted of an ovoid life-support capsule with a perfectly transparent upper hemisphere, ringed by a thick mechanical girdle. Four infinitely flexible segmented legs were anchored to the girdle, with one of the legs hooked
