‘My older self obviously thought otherwise, or she wouldn’t have buried those papers in Pythagoras.’
‘Well, that worked well, didn’t it? If your older self didn’t anticipate that part of the Moon being swallowed by China, maybe she got her plans wrong here as well.’
‘Do have a little faith, child.’
In one angle of the segment-shaped room was a combination bunk/hammock, optimised for sleep in microgravity conditions. Next to that was a fold-out desk, with a screen and mirror above it. Elsewhere there were equipment lockers and shelves, furnished with boxes, cartons, medical supplies and general spacefaring kipple.
Sunday scuffed her hand along one of the shelves, bulldozing dust. After depressurisation the dust had had decades to resettle, forming a cloying grey sediment on every surface.
Sunday saw something on the bunk. She limped over and tried to pick it up, but her hands were useless.
‘It’s your glove,’ she said. ‘The other half of the pair. It’s just like the one Geoffrey found in Copetown. But I can’t grab hold of it.’ Then a thought occurred to her. ‘Even if I
‘Break the window in the ceiling and throw the glove out – just make sure you don’t put it into orbit.’
‘Then what? By the time it makes it back down to the surface, it could be anywhere on Phobos!’
Eunice had her helmet under her arm and was scratching the back of her head with her other hand. ‘It’s not the glove,’ she said quietly. ‘The glove’s a gift, reassurance that you’re close. But it’s not the glove. That’s not how I think.’
Sunday moved to another part of the room. She had noticed the mirror before, but it was only now that she happened to stand in front of it and glimpse herself. For an instant, the realisation of what she was looking at, what was being reflected back at her, did not quite click. She was chinging an androform robot, as she had expected: hard-armoured and articulated like a human being. The light in the crown of the robot’s head dazzled her as it bounced back from the mirror.
But it wasn’t an androform robot. It was a spacesuit, with a helmet on.
And there was something behind the visor.
Sunday looked at the face of death, looking back at her. There was a skull inside the helmet. A skull with skin pasted on, skin like rice paper.
‘Eunice . . . this isn’t a robot.’ Horror made her own voice sound unfamiliar.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s a spacesuit with a dead body and I’m walking around in it. Please tell me you didn’t know this.’
Eunice looked at her. There was no change of expression on her face, no dawning comprehension. ‘How could I possibly have known, Sunday?’
‘You knew. You looked for something to ching, and you found . . . this. You found a way in. You couldn’t have done that without realising that the ching coordinates pointed to a suit, not a robot.’
‘I . . . improvised, dear. It’s a suit with servo-assist and a camera built into the helmet. It moves, it sees. How, in practical terms, does that differ from a robot?’
‘Because it’s got a corpse in it.’ She was too angry to swear, too angry even to sound angry.
‘Fate presented us with this opening; I took it.’
‘How can you be so callous? This is . . . was a person, and you’re using
them like . . .’ Sunday flustered, ‘like some cheap tool, like some piece of disposable equipment. And I’m locked in with them, in a . . . a
‘Get over it. Do you think this person gives a shit, Sunday? Whoever they are, whoever they were, no one cared enough to come and look for them. They sealed this place up, not even realising there was a dead body inside. That’s how missed this person was.’
‘You’re not making this any easier.’
‘We’ve found them now, haven’t we? When we get back to Stickney we’ll alert the authorities, and they can come and open up the camp. They’ll probably be able run a trace on the suit and find its owner. But in the meantime? Am I going to refuse to make use of this suit just because someone died in it once upon a time? This is serious, Sunday.’
She swallowed her revulsion. ‘Let’s get this over with. And if you ever do something like this to me again —’
‘You’ll do what? Erase me, because I had the temerity to make a decision? I thought you were smarter than that, granddaughter. By the way – while we’ve been talking, I happened to notice that that locker isn’t where it ought to be.’
‘What?’ Sunday asked, wary of a diversion.
‘Check the dust tracks on the floor. It’s been moved. Those may even be my own footprints.’
Sunday could no more grip the locker than she could the mug or the glove, but in Phobos’s gravity it wasn’t hard to shove it sideways until it toppled in slow motion. Sunday directed the helmet torch at the portion of the wall that had been hidden by the locker until then.
Eunice’s intuition had been correct. It was a painting, more properly a mural: brushed directly onto the dome’s curving wall.
Sunday stared at it in wonderment. For a moment, she forgot all about the corpse suit.
‘I know this.’
