to hold on to, letting the earlier one wither. And in time she might even come to believe that this was, indeed, the first time she had seen Mars rising, in all its ancient, time-scarred immensity.
‘It’s wonderful,’ Jitendra said.
‘It’s a world. Worlds are wonderful.’
They stood in silence, transfixed, until a soft chime from the console told them it would soon be time to return their rented suits, and make ready for the rest of their journey.
‘Before we go inside,’ Sunday said, ‘you should see Chakra’s Folly. Reckon we’ve still got time. On the way, you can tell me all about the Evolvarium.’
‘Why are you interested in that all of a sudden? I thought that was more my area.’
‘Because that’s where we’re going.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The ching was passive, but the resolution more than adequate for his purposes. He exited his standing body, rose into the air and drifted over the treetops, gaining speed and altitude. Sometimes it was good not to take the Cessna, or one of the other machines; just to become a disembodied witness, with a viewpoint assembled from distributed public eyes. The scene was rendered with exacting thoroughness down to the last leaf, the last hoofprint or elephant footprint in the dust. Any uncertainty in the image flow was seamlessly interpolated long before his brain had to fill in any gaps.
He found the herd soon enough. Whatever status Matilda might have lost among the other females when she was startled by Eunice’s figment had been regained over the ensuing weeks. Her position and body posture were as authoritative as ever. She was leading her family along a narrow trail bordered by acacia and cabbage trees.
Revelling in the freedom – as much as he loved flying the Cessna, there was something delicious about lacking body and inertia, the ability to traverse the sky like a demon, at the merest whim – Geoffrey scouted the other herds, taking the opportunity to refresh his memories of their structures and hierarchies. He also pinpointed the roving bulls, solitary or in small, quarrelsome gangs. The minds of bull elephants, soaked with testosterone, preoccupied with status and mating, felt infinitely more alien to him than those of the matriarchs and their herds. And yet he’d known many of these bulls when they were juvenile males, as boisterous and carefree as the rest.
Minds were deeply strange things. When these elephants were young, it had required no great effort to see the sparks of human awareness in their curiosity and playfulness. It was even possible to think that their minds were in fact more human before adulthood clamped down and locked those attributes away, secure behind iron walls of dominance and aggression.
Elephant society was a product of necessity, shaped by environmental factors over countless millions of years. But what did that mean, here and now? Things were changing for the elephants; had been changing for centuries. Humans had come, and the humans had done things to the climate that had made the world convulse. Steamships to space elevators: all that in a Darwinian eye-blink, a strobe-flash of massively compressed change. Elephants were still dealing with the fact that monkeys had fire and spears; they hadn’t even
Bolder changes still were coming down the line, changes that even humans would struggle to accommodate. Panspermian Initiatives, the Green Efflorescence.
Observing elephants, monitoring them – even creeping into their skulls – that was acceptable to Geoffrey. But making them into something else, rewiring their society as if it was no more than a defective mechanism, transforming it into something better equipped to survive . . . ? He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. People had done enough harm, even with the best of intentions.
When he chinged back into his body, someone was waiting for permission to manifest. The tag was unfamiliar, so for a moment he presumed it was Sunday, coming in via an unorthodox, highly quangled routing.
He took the call in the research shack. He had made coffee before chinging and now, as the figment assumed reality, he drained the bitter dregs into his cup.
‘I hope I haven’t caught you at an inopportune moment, Mister Akinya. I did say I’d be back in touch, didn’t I?’
Geoffrey studied the blank-eyed man, with his sea-green suit and toothless gash of a mouth, his skin so pale that it might have been grafted from a reptile’s belly.
‘Kind of hoping you might have forgotten, Truro.’
‘Well, I can’t fault your honesty. But no, we don’t forget our debts. Especially when they’ve been extended. Remortgaged.’
‘If Sunday cut a deal with you, that’s between you and her.’
‘Ah, but it doesn’t work like that. If it ever did. We’ve done you two favours now, Mister Akinya. I’d very much like us at least to begin to discuss something by way of reciprocity.’
‘You can start by telling me where you’re chinging from.’
‘Oh, not so very far from you. Your sister correctly deduced that I was based on or near Earth. As it happens, I’m practically within spitting distance. I’m calling from Tiamaat, not too far from your Somalian coast. You’ll have heard of it, of course.’
‘I’m not an idiot. Why have you waited until now to contact me?’
‘You needed time to reflect, to assess your obligations to family. Sunday has arrived at her destination: we facilitated her visit, and the quangled bind from Phobos. She is awake. History has begun again. It felt like an appropriate time to resume negotiations.’
Geoffrey knew that Sunday was safe. He had received her message and made a point of blinking her a view of Kilimanjaro by way of reply.
‘I’m not sure anything needs negotiating.’
‘Chama Akbulut . . . found something, didn’t he? On the Moon, in the Chinese sector?’
Geoffrey picked a fly out of the coffee’s cold meniscus. ‘If you say so.’
‘I’ll confess, there are two reasons why we ought to meet in person, and with some urgency. One is the
