‘Of course you know it. It’s a copy of the one in my room, back in the household. I take no responsibility for the original, but I’m certain I made this copy.’
‘You painted this?’
‘Projected the original onto the wall, copied it. It doesn’t make me an artist.’
She wished that the construct had permitted the tingle of recognition to endure for at least a few moments before shattering the spell. Eunice was quite right, of course. Sunday had visited her grandmother’s abandoned bedroom on a handful of solemn occasions – it had always felt like the room of someone dead, not merely absent – and she recognised the mural from those visits.
‘Who’d have thought it?’
The construct looked at her sharply. ‘Who’d have thought what, child?’
‘That you, the great and fierce Eunice Akinya, could ever have been homesick. Why else would you have brought this piece of your past with you?’
Executed with childlike boldness, the mural was a vivid, colour-drenched painting of Kilimanjaro. The mountain’s steepness was exaggerated, its snow-cap diamond-faceted against deep-blue sky. Cutting across the middle of the painting was a horizontal swathe of trees, depicted with naive exactness and symmetry. Ornamenting the trees, perched on the branches like jewels and lanterns, were many colourful birds with long tails and horned beaks. In the foreground were ochre grasses and emerald shrubs. Woven into the grasses, striped and counter- striped like partial ciphers, were many different kinds of animal, from lions to zebra to giraffe and rhino, snakes and scorpions. There were even Maasai, their tall black and red spear-clutching forms the only recurrent vertical elements in the composition.
‘I wasn’t homesick,’ Eunice said, after a great while. ‘Home-proud. That’s not the same thing.’
Sunday blinked the mural. ‘I’ve captured an image. But I’m not sure this is the thing we were meant to find.’
‘And I’m sure it is. When I came back here, I must have changed the picture. It was well done, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps I redid the whole thing, to make sure the joins wouldn’t show.’
‘What are you on about?’
‘It doesn’t match. I have a memory of the original, and . . . something’s different.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Let’s be sure of ourselves, shall we? I can’t be certain that my memory of the mural is accurate. But your brother’s still in Africa. Have him visit my room and blink the image up to us. Then we can talk.’
Jitendra was on the drowsy cusp of consciousness, in the same kind of room where she had been revived earlier in the day. Sunday sat down in the chair next to the bed and was smiling when he surfaced, squinting against the light and licking sleep-parched lips. ‘Welcome back, lover. We’re on Mars. Almost.’
Jitendra had already been reassigned voluntary muscle function, so he was able to tilt his head and smile back. His face was slack, but the tone would return soon enough.
‘We made it,’ he said, slurring and pausing. ‘Not that I ever had doubts . . . but still.’
‘It’s still a miracle.’ The technician had given her a box holding six little cuboid sponges, stuck on the end of sticks like lollipops. They were soaked with something sweet, chemically tailored to Jitendra’s palate. She leaned over and dabbed his lips with one.
‘Thank you,’ Jitendra said.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Like I’ve been dead for a month.’
‘You have, Mister Gupta. It’s called space travel.’
He struggled into a sitting-up position, propping himself with an elbow. He was wearing silver pyjamas. They had even shaved him, so that when Sunday kissed his cheek his skin was peach soft and perfumed, smelling of violets. Jitendra took in his surroundings, studying the white room and the false window with its ever-breaking waves. ‘Everything went OK, didn’t it?’
Sunday dabbed at his lips again. ‘Not a hitch. They brought me out sooner, but apparently that’s what happens sometimes. Just time to take a little stroll outside, see the scenery.’
‘Please don’t tell me you’ve seen Mars ahead of me.’
‘No,’ she said, just a bit too quickly. ‘Not yet. It was on the other side. We’ll see it together.’
‘I’d like that.’ Jitendra rubbed his slightly stubbled scalp. ‘I need a haircut.’
‘We found something,’ she blurted.
‘We?’
‘Eunice and I. I need to talk to my brother, but . . . I think I already know where we’re going next.’
Jitendra sat in silence, waiting for her to elaborate. ‘Are you going to let me in on the big secret?’ he asked eventually.
‘It’s Mars,’ Sunday said. ‘Which is where we were going anyway, of course. But there’s a complication.’
Jitendra managed a smile. ‘Why am I not surprised?’
When Mars lifted into view its aspect was different, but she made no mention of that. In a way it helped, because this was a different face of the world, not the one she had already seen, and she could study it afresh without having to pretend. Sunday regretted her lie, but it had been a small one.
They were standing next to each other, far enough away from the other tourists that they could imagine themselves alone on this airless ridge, the only living people on Phobos. Soon this would be the memory she chose
