‘What exactly are you after?’ Chama enquired.
Sunday hesitated before answering. ‘My grandmother knew your founder, Lin Wei. They went to the same school, in what used to be independent Tanzania, before the Federation. Here.’ And she cleared part of the table to voke her own image, which was of two girls of similar age. One was her grandmother. The other was Lin Wei.
Lin Wei wore a red dress, white stockings and black shoes.
Sunday glanced at her brother, nodded once. It was clear from the look in her eyes that she had also made the connection with the mysterious girl at the scattering, the stranger with the unresolvable ching bind.
‘Eunice knew the Prime Pan?’ Gleb asked, astonished. ‘How could this not have come to light before?’
‘I only discovered it recently myself,’ Sunday said, shifting on her seat. This was a lie, but in the scheme of things only a white one. Or perhaps off-white.
‘It’s a part of our family history that’s been swept under the carpet,’ she went on. ‘Same on your side, by the sound of things. They were good friends, and they ended up collaborating on the Mercury project. But Eunice abused Lin Wei’s trust somehow. I don’t know how much contact they had afterwards.’
‘Eunice only just died,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Mm, yes,’ Sunday said. ‘I had noticed.’
‘What I mean is, she wasn’t that old. Not by modern standards. So if she went to school with this Lin Wei person, what’s to say Lin Wei isn’t still alive? Never mind the archive, never mind the Pans – you could just ask her directly.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Chama said sadly. ‘Lin Wei was the Prime Pan. She died decades ago.’
Sunday nodded. ‘That’s what I heard as well. I think she drowned, or something horrible like that.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
When Chama’s ching request arrived the following morning, Sunday found herself putting down the coffee pot with a highly specific sense of dread. She accepted the bind with a profound and familiar foreboding.
‘I have some news,’ Chama said. ‘Probably the kind I ought to break to you first, so you can come round to my side and explain things to the others.’
‘This is going to turn out to have something to do with last night’s conversation, isn’t it?’
Boots tramped on metal flooring outside. Someone knocked on the door, vigorously.
‘Brother!’ Sunday called. ‘Can you get that for me?’
Geoffrey went to the door and returned to the kitchen with Gleb. The zookeeper looked harried.
‘This is not good,’ he said.
‘Chama,’ Sunday asked the figment, ‘why are you chinging in from outside the Zone?’
‘Because, given my current circumstances, it would be very difficult to ching in from anywhere else.’
Chama was strapped into a heavy black seat, sunk deep in its padded embrace. He wore the brass-coloured body part of a modern ultralight spacesuit, with the helmet stowed elsewhere.
‘You’re aboard a spacecraft,’ Sunday said. The tag coordinates were updating constantly, the last few digits a tumbling blur. ‘Chama, why are you aboard a spacecraft?’
‘Ever heard of striking while the iron’s hot?’
‘This is very bad,’ Gleb said, wedging his earpiece into place. ‘Sunday, voke me figment privilege, please. I want to be able to see and talk to him as well.’
Sunday already knew the answer to her next question, but she asked it anyway. ‘Chama, are you planning something that might upset the Chinese?’
‘That’s the general drift of things,’ Chama said, while Sunday voked the ching settings to allow everyone else to join in the conversation.
‘Your husband is here,’ Sunday said. ‘He’s not happy.’
‘Gleb, I’m sorry, but this wasn’t something we could sit around and discuss. You’ve always been more cautious than me. You’d have told me to put it off until later, to give it time to settle in.’
‘For good reason!’ Gleb shouted.
‘Had to be now or never. Look, I talked it over with the Pans in Tiamaat. I have . . . tacit authorisation. They’ll bail me out, whatever happens.’
‘You mean they’ll give it their best shot!’
‘They’re very, very good at this sort of thing, Gleb. Everything’s going to be fine.’
‘Whose ship is that?’ Sunday asked. ‘And how secure is this ching bind?’
‘The ship’s Pan-registered,’ Chama said. ‘It’s a short-range hopper, barely has the delta-vee to pull itself out of Lunar gravity but perfectly fine for ballistic transfers, and the occasional illicit touchdown. We’ve used it many times.’
‘And the bind?’ she persisted.
‘Quangled. So it’s very unlikely anyone’s going to be listening in, even the Chinese. Of course, they’ll be trying . . . but it’ll take a while to unravel the quanglement, and we have surplus paths lined up.’ He flashed a grin. ‘All the same, you should still know what you’re dealing with. Basically, I’m about to do something very naughty indeed.’
‘No,’ Sunday said. ‘We should never have discussed this, not even as an outside possibility. It was an idea, Chama, not a binding commitment.’
‘Want to join in? There’s enough capacity on this path to handle a few piggybackers.’
‘This is Akinya business,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’
‘Stopped being Akinya business when the two of you blabbed about it, elephant boy. Anyway, I’m doing you miserable, self-absorbed Akinyas a favour by putting my neck on the block here.’ Chama’s figment glanced to one side as a recorded voice began talking in a firm but not unfriendly voice. ‘Oh, here we go. First alert. Just a polite request to alter my course. Nothing too threatening yet; I haven’t even crossed the Ghost Wall.’
‘Turn around now,’ Sunday said.
‘Bit late for that, I’m afraid. Locked myself out of the avionics – couldn’t change course if I wanted to.’
‘That’s insane,’ she answered.
‘No, just very, very determined. Oh, wait. Second warning. Sterner this time. Notification of countermeasures and reprisals. Gosh, isn’t that exciting?’ His figment reached up and grasped the helmet that had been out of sight until then. ‘I’m not expecting them to shoot me out of the sky. Be silly not to take precautions, though.’
He lowered the helmet to within a few centimetres of its neck ring and let the docking magnets snatch it home, the helmet and ring engaging with a series of rapid clunks and whirrs. Save for a swan-necked column curving up from the nape to the crown, the helmet was transparent.
‘But you can come with me, Sunday. All of you can.’ Chama tapped commands into the chunky rubber-sealed button pad on his gauntlet cuff. ‘Be quick about it, though. Not going to have all the time in the world here, even if they let me get to the burial spot. Oh, I can see the Ghost Wall now. Very impressive. Very Chinese. Does anyone else maintain a consensual border hallucination even halfway as impressive?’
Sunday cut in on Chama’s monologue. ‘What you were saying, about this being untraceable? Are you absolutely, one-hundred-per-cent sure about that?’
‘No,’ Chama said, giving a visible shrug through the tight-fitting suit. ‘How could I be? But you’re in the Zone, Sunday. Power blocs like the Chinese, they hate the Zone precisely because they can’t backtrack signals all the way to their source. And the fact that they loathe and detest us for that is the best possible guarantee I can give that they’re not along for the ride. So live a little. Ching out with me.’
‘Did you bring proxies?’ Gleb asked.
‘Two. All I could squeeze in. The rest of you can go passive.’
Sunday hadn’t thought about proxies. ‘We’re going to have words about this, when you get back,’ she said.
‘Spoken like a true friend. Oh – third warning.’ Chama’s figment jolted violently, as if, in ignorance of the absence of atmosphere, his ship had hit clear-air turbulence. ‘Interesting,’
Chama said, his voice coming through distinctly even with the helmet on. ‘They’re trying to wrestle control from my own avionics. Interesting but not remotely good enough. Going to have to up their game if they want to get anywhere.’
The ship settled down. Sunday inhaled a deep breath. ‘Give me a few moments.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Chama said.
‘Couldn’t you have stopped this?’ she demanded of Gleb.
‘He was up and out of our apartment before I realised what was going on. You think I actually approve of this?’
She cooled her anger. Taking it out on the other zookeeper wasn’t the right thing to do. All of a sudden she realised how hard this must be for Gleb, with his husband out there, taunting the most powerful national entity on the Moon.
‘Well, there are four of us, and two proxies,’ Jitendra said. ‘I’ll go passive. Gleb can take one of the machines.’
‘I’ll manage without embodiment,’ Gleb said. ‘If I had arms and legs, I might be tempted to strangle someone.’
‘If there’s any treasure under that soil,’ Geoffrey said, looking at his sister, ‘it belongs to us. I guess you and I ought to have bodies.’
There were four open ching binds: two for proxy embodiment, two for passive ching. Sunday assigned one of the proxy binds to herself, leaving the other for Geoffrey. Jitendra and Gleb could take care of their own binds.
‘I’m going in,’ she said. ‘The rest of you’d better be there when I arrive.’
She voked for ching. For a moment, one that was far too familiar to be distressing, she felt her soul sliding out of her body, not in any specific direction but in all directions at once, as if she was an image of herself that was losing focus, smearing into quantum haze. That was the neuromachinery taking hold, shunting sensory and proprioceptive inputs to the waiting robot, halfway around the Moon.
And then everything was sharp again, and she was somewhere else, in a different body, in a hurtling spacecraft that had just transgressed the sovereign airspace of the Special Lunar Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China.
She was strapped to a wall mounting, facing Chama.
‘I’m here,’ Sunday said. ‘Now what do I have to do to get you to turn this ship around?’
‘I already told you,’ Chama said, angling his glassy visor to look at the proxy, ‘there’s nothing to be done now except enjoy the trip.’
Sunday felt pinned inside something that didn’t quite fit her body, as if she’d been forced into a stiff, partially rusted suit of armour. Then something gave – something relaxing in her brain – and the final transition to embodiment occurred.
She studied her new anatomy. The cheapest kind of mass-produced Aeroflot unit, little more than an android chassis, all metallic-blue tubing and bulbous universal joints. She was a mechanical stick figure, like a hydraulic car jack that had decided to unfold itself and walk upright.
To her right, another proxy started moving. It was metallic red, but otherwise very similar.
It looked at Chama, then at Sunday. The head was an angular pineapple, faceted with wraparound sensors and caged in alloy crash bars.
‘Well,’ Geoffrey said, ‘I’m here.’ And he moved one of the arms, lifting it up to examine the wrist and hand and elegant, dextrous human-configuration fingers and thumb. Geoffrey’s actions were wooden, but that would soon wear off. It wasn’t as if her brother had never ridden a proxy before; he was just out of practice.
‘Where exactly are we?’ Sunday asked Chama.
‘Good question,’ Geoffrey said. ‘To be quickly followed by: what the hell are we doing here, and why am I involved?’
‘Well inside Chinese sovereign airspace,’ Chama said. ‘Descending over Pythagoras, fifty-five kays from the burial spot. We should be there in about six minutes.’
Sunday appraised her surroundings. She’d been in bigger shower cubicles. The hopper was about as small as spacecraft got, before they stopped being spacecraft and became escape pods or very roomy spacesuits.
‘Whatever’s under the soil,’ Geoffrey said, ‘it’s not your concern, Chama.’
The ship bucked and swayed again, the golems clattering in their wall restraints. Chama cursed and worked the manual joystick set into the armrest of his chair, jerking it violently until the ride smoothed out. ‘They’re cunning,’ he said. ‘I’ll give them that. Found a back door into the command software even I didn’t know about.’
‘I thought you said you didn’t have manual control,’ Sunday said.
‘We’ll talk about it afterwards,’ Chama said again. ‘Where are Gleb and Jitendra, by the way?’
Jitendra’s head and upper torso popped into existence in the cabin. ‘Here.’
‘And me,’ Gleb added.
‘Took your sweet time arriving,’ Sunday said.
‘Bandwidth was tighter than you said,’ Jitendra replied. ‘Kept being put on hold.’
‘That’s the Chinese,’ Chama said, ‘trying to break the quangle paths, or squeeze us on bandwidth.’
‘They can do that?’ Sunday asked.
‘Not difficult, if you’re a government. Diplomatic-priority transmissions, that kind of thing. Flood the bandwidth with a pipe-load of government-level signals that must be routed ahead of routine traffic. It’s very clever.’ Sunday caught a smile through Chama’s helmet. ‘Fortunately, we have some even cleverer people on our side. Uh-oh.’
‘What, in this context,’ Geoffrey said, ‘does “uh-oh” mean?’
‘Means I’ve just been given my final warning,’ Chama said happily. ‘Border enforcement interceptors are on their way.’
‘Could be a bluff,’ Sunday said.
‘Except that radar also has incoming returns, heading our way. Moving too quickly to be crewed vehicles. Probably just armed drones.’
‘Armed drones,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I can’t tell you how good that makes me feel.’
‘Deterrence,’ Chama replied dismissively, as if he’d said something very naive. ‘That’s all it’ll be. No one shoots things down any more. We’re not on Earth now.’
An impact warning started to blare. Those parts of the walling not taken up with windows, instruments and equipment modules began to strobe scarlet. Sunday saw Jitendra and Gleb flicker and vanish, and almost immediately felt puppet strings striving to yank her back into her own body, in the Descrutinised Zone.
She was there, for a heartbeat: standing up in her living room, in the middle of domestic clutter. Then she was back in the hopper, and her friends had returned as well.
‘OK,’ Chama said. ‘Change of plan. I’m taking us in steeper and harder than I was intending. This is all good fun, isn’t it?’
‘I’m in the middle of a major diplomatic incident,’ Jitendra said marvellingly ‘This was so not in my plans for the day when I woke up this morning.’
‘You’re not in the middle of anything,’ Chama corrected. ‘You’re observing. There’s nothing they’ll be able to pin on you for that. Oh, please shut up.’
He was talking to the hopper. It silenced its alarms and ceased strobing its warning lights.
Lunar surface scrolled past with steadily increasing speed as the vehicle lost altitude. Though it was day over Pythagoras, the crater’s high altitude meant that the shadows remained ink-black and elongated. There was little sign that people had ever come to this pumice-grey place; no glints of metal or plastic signifying habitation or even the arduous toiling of loyal machines.
But there were tracks. Against the ancient talcum of the surface, footprints and vehicle marks were immediately obvious to the eye. On Earth, they might have been taken for lava flows or dried-up river beds. On the Moon, they could only mean that something had perambulated or walked there.
Sunday had to adjust her preconceptions when she realised that the curiously stuttered vehicle tracks she was trying to make sense of were in fact footprints, and that the hopper was merely hundreds of metres above the Moon’s surface rather than
several kilometres. They had come down much faster than she had thought.
‘There it is,’ Chama said, pointing ahead. ‘The place where your granny came back – see the scuffed-up ground?’
‘I can’t see anything,’ Sunday said.
‘Voke out the hopper. You have authorisation.’
Sunday issued the command – it hadn’t occurred to her before – and most of the hopper vanished. All that remained was a neon sketch of its basic outline, a three-dimensional wedge-shaped prism with Chama cradled somewhere near the middle. The golems, and Gleb and Jitendra’s disembodied heads and torsos, were flying along for the ride.
And now she could indeed see the disturbed ground where Eunice had returned, some unguessable interval after her long walk from the 2059 crash site. Everything was the same as in the aerial image Jitendra had shown them in the ISS: the touchdown marks from another ship, the hairpin of footprints where someone had crossed to Eunice’s original trail and then headed back to the ship. The area of dug-up regolith, like a patch of dirt where a horse had rolled on its back.
Nothing else. Nothing to suggest that anyone had beaten them to this place.
‘This is where it gets interesting,’ Chama said. ‘Here come the interceptors.’
Sunday tensed. She wasn’t in any conceivable danger, but Chama’s confidence might well be misplaced. It had been decades since any kind of lethal, state-level action had occurred between two spacefaring powers . . . but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen again, given sufficient provocation.
‘How many?’ Gleb asked.
‘Three,’ Chama said. ‘What I expected. Small autonomous drones. Demon-cloaked. You wanna see them? I can override the Chinese aug if you don’t, but they’ve gone to so much trouble, almost be a shame not to—’
The drones came in fast, swerving at the last instant to avoid ramming the hopper. In their uncloaked form they were too fast and fleet to make out as anything other than bright moving sparks. They might have weapons, or they might rely purely on their swiftness and agility to ram any moving object. Whatever they were, beyond any reasonable doubt they were rigorously legal. They might be operating within Chinese sovereign airspace, but they would still need to abide by the wider nonproliferation treaties governing all spacefaring entities.
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