*I could go with you.'

*Very kind, Geoffrey, but I am not too old for spaceflight just yet. And you must be very busy with your elephants.' He lingered at the threshold of his office, clearly anxious to return to his duties. *It's good that you are back here now. If you could stay a day, that would be even better.'

*I feel like a loose end.'

*Be here for the rest of your family. You will all need to draw strength from each other.'

Geoffrey offered a sceptical smile. *Even Hector and Lucas?'

*Even them,' Memphis said. *I know that you do not get on, but perhaps now you will be able to find some common ground. They are not bad men, Geoffrey. It may feel like a long time ago to you, but I can still remember when you were all young enough not to hate the sight of each other.'

*Times change,' Geoffrey said. *Still, I'll make an effort.'

He sat on the edge of his crisply made bed, in the room he had spent hardly any time in these recent years. In his hands was one of the wooden elephants Eunice had given him as a birthday gift. It was the bull, one of a set of six, diminishing in size down to the baby. The other five were still on the shelf where he had left them the last time he'd handled them. They stood on black plinths of some flinty, coal-like material.

He couldn't remember how old he had been when the elephants arrived, packed in a stout wooden box with tissue paper to protect them. Five or six, maybe. The time when the nanny from Djibouti was still taking care of his education and upbringing. The same year he stepped on the scorpion, perhaps?

It had taken him a little while to realise that his grandmother lived in orbit around the Moon, not on or in it, and even longer to appreciate that her infrequent gifts did not actually come from space. They were made somewhere on Earth; all she did was arrange for them to be sent to him. Later it had even occurred to him that someone else in the family a the nanny, perhaps Memphis a was choosing them on her behalf.

He'd been disappointed with the elephants when he opened the box, but not quite adult enough to hide that disappointment. He had wanted an aeroplane, not useless wooden animals that didn't do anything. Later, after a gentle reprimand, he had been made to speak to Eunice's figment and tell her how grateful he was. She had addressed him from the green jungle core of the Winter Palace.

He wondered how good a job of it he had made.

He was reaching to put the bull back on the shelf when the request began pulsing with gentle insistence in his visual field.

>>open: quangled bind >>via: Maiduguri-Nyala backbone >>carrier: Lufthansa Telepresence >>incept: 23/12/2161 13:44:11 UTC >>origin: Lagos, Nigeria, WAF >>client: Jumai Lule >>accept/decline ching?

He placed the bull back at the head of its family and returned to the bed, accepting Jumai's call with a single voked command. The bind established. Geoffrey's preference was always for inbound ching, remaining in his local sensorium, and Jumai would have expected that. He placed her figment by the door, allowing her a moment to adjust to her surroundings.

*Hello, Jumai,' he said quietly. *I guess I know why you're calling.'

*I just got the news. I'm really sorry, Geoffrey. It must be a big blow to the family.'

*We'll weather it,' he said. *It's not exactly unexpected.'

Jumai Lule was wearing brown overalls, hair messy and tied up in a meshwork dust cap, marks on her face from the goggles and breathing gear now hanging around her neck. She was in Lagos working on high-risk data archaeology, digging through the city's buried, century-old catacombs for nuggets of commercially valuable information. It was dangerous, exacting work: exactly the kind of thing she thrived on, and which he hadn't been able to offer her.

*I know you weren't that close to her, but-' Jumai began.

*She was still my grandmother,' Geoffrey countered defensively, as if she was accusing him of indifference to the matter of Eunice's death *I didn't mean it that way, as you well know.'

*So how's work?' Geoffrey asked, trying to sound as if it mattered to him.

*Work is . . . fine. Always more than we can keep up with. New challenges, most of the time. I probably need to move on at some point, but . . .' Jumai let the sentence hang.

*Don't tell me you're getting bored already?'

*Lagos is close to being tapped out. I thought maybe Brazilia, even further afield. Like, maybe space. Still a lot of militarised crap left lying around the system, nasty shit they could use people like me to break into and decommission. And I hear the Gearheads pay pretty well.'

*Because it's dangerous.'

Jumai offered the palm of her hand to the ceiling. *What, and this isn't? We hit Sarin nerve gas last week. Anti-tamper triggers, linked to what we thought was part of a mainframe's cryogenic cooling reservoir.' She grinned impishly. *Not the kind of mistake you make twice.'

*Anyone hurt?'

*Nothing they couldn't fix, and they upped our hazard bonus as a consequence.' She looked around the room again, scanning it as if she half-expected booby traps in the made bed, or lurking on the neat white shelves. But anyway, this isn't about me a are you all right?'

*I'll be fine. And I'm sorry a I shouldn't have snapped. You're right a Eunice and I were never that close. I just don't really like having my face rubbed in it.'

*What about your sister?'

*I'm sure she feels the same way I do.'

*You never did take me up to meet Sunday. I always wanted to meet her. I mean properly, face to face.'

He shifted on the bed. *Full of broken promises, that's me.'

*You can't help the way you are.'

*Maybe not. But that doesn't stop people telling me I should broaden my horizons.'

*That's your business, no one else's. Look, we're still friends, aren't we? If we weren't, we wouldn't keep in touch like this.'

Even if it had been months since the last call, he thought. But he had no wish to sound sour. *We're good,' he affirmed. *And it's very thoughtful of you to call me.'

*I couldn't not call you. The whole world knows a it wasn't news I could easily miss.' Jumai reached down for her goggles. *Look, I'm only on a break a got to get back to the front line or my extraction chief will be yelling her head off a but I just wanted to say I'm here if you need someone to talk to.'

*Thank you.'

*You know, we could still go to the Moon one day. Just as friends. I'd like that.'

*One day,' he agreed, safe in the knowledge that she didn't really mean it either.

*Tell me when they sort out a date for the funeral. If I can make it, and if it isn't a family-only thing . . .' she trailed off.

*I'll let you know,' Geoffrey said.

Jumai settled the goggles over her eyes and eased the breathing mask into place. He'd tell her about the funeral plans, yes a but he doubted she'd come, even if the ceremony was extended to include friends of the Akinyas, rather than just close relatives. This call had already been awkward enough. There'd be a reason, a plausible excuse, to keep her away. And that, in truth, would be easiest on both of them.

Jumai waved a hand and chinged out of his life. Geoffrey considered it quite likely that he would never see her again.

For all that Eunice's death hit the family hard, it wasn't long before she was shunted from the headlines. A simmering sex/vote-rigging scandal in the Pan-African Parliament, a dispute between the East African Federation and the African Union about cost overruns on a groundwater bioremediation programme in former Uganda, a stand-off between Chinese tecto-engineers and Turkish government mandarins concerning the precise scheduling of a stress-management earthquake along the North Anatolian Fault. On the global scale, continued tensions between the United Surface Nations and the United Aquatic Nations regarding extradition rules and the extent of aug access rights and inter-regional Mechanism jurisdiction. Talk of expanding the scope of the Mandatory Enhancements. A murder attempt in Finland. Threat of industrial action at the Pontianak space elevator in western Borneo. Someone in Tasmania dying of a very rare type of cancer, something of a heroic achievement these days.

Only at the household, only in this part of the East African Federation, had the clocks stopped. A month had passed since Geoffrey was called from the sky with news of his grandmother's death. The scattering had been delayed until the twenty-ninth of January, which would give most of the family time to make reasonable travel arrangements for their journeys back to Earth. Miraculously, the delay was deemed agreeable to all the involved factions.

*Do try not to scowl, brother,' Sunday said in a low voice as she walked alongside him. *Anyone who didn't know better would think you'd rather be somewhere else.'

*They'd be absolutely right.'

*At least we're doing this to honour her,' Sunday replied, after the standard EarthaMoon time lag.

*Why are we bothering, though? She didn't go out of her way to honour anyone else while she was alive.'

*We can give her this one.' Sunday wore a long skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, both in black velvet offset with luminous entwining threads. *She may not have expressed much in the way of love and affection, but without her we'd be less filthily rich than we actually are.'

*You're right about the filthy rich part. Look at them all, circling like flies.'

*I suppose you mean Hector and Lucas.' Sunday kept her voice low. The cousins were not very far away in the procession.

*They've been hanging around like ghouls ever since she died.'

*You could also say they're taking on a burden so that the rest of us don't have to.'

*Then I wish they'd get a move on with it.'

The cousins had been born on Titan. They were the sons of Edison Akinya, one of the three children Eunice had had with Jonathan Beza. Until recent years the cousins hadn't spent a lot of time on Earth, but with Edison showing no signs of relinquishing his particular corner of the business empire, Hector and Lucas had turned their attentions sunwards. Geoffrey had no choice but to deal with them during their frequent visits to the household. The cousins had a large say in how the family's discretionary funds were allocated.

*Bad day at the office?'

*My work's suffering. They've blocked grant allocations while they sort through Eunice's finances. That makes it difficult for me to plan ahead, which in turn isn't doing wonders for my mood.' He walked on a few paces. *Difficult for you to grasp, I know.'

Sunday's look was sharp. *Meaning I haven't got a clue about planning and responsibility because I don't live in the Surveilled World? Brother, you really have no idea. I didn't move to the Zone to escape responsibility. I went there to find out what it feels like to actually have some.'

*Right. And you think the Mech treats us all like a bunch of helpless babies.' He closed his eyes in weariness a this was a spiralling conversation they'd had a hundred times already, without ever reaching a conclusion. *It's not like that either.'

*If you say so.' She exhaled a long sigh, her capacity for argument evidently just as exhausted as his own. *Maybe you'll get your funding back soon, anyway. Memphis told me there isn't much more to be done now, just a few loose ends. What the cousins are telling him, anyway.'

Geoffrey hoped that was the case. The scattering, symbolic as it was a Eunice had been a lifelong atheist, despite being born to Christian parents a ought to draw a line under the recent limbo. The wheels of the Akinya juggernaut would start to turn again, from Earth to the Moon, out to their automated mining facilities in the asteroids and the Kuiper belt. (Not that the machines had ever stopped, of course, but it was tempting to think of the robots standing to attention, heads tilted in deference.) Then they could all get on with their fantastically glamorous lives, and Geoffrey could go back to his dull grey elephants.

*I did consider coming in person,' Sunday said.

*I thought for a minute you had, at least when you first showed up.'

*Even you can't have missed the time lag, brother.' She ran a hand down her sternum. *It's a prototype, a kind of claybot a I'm road-testing it.'

*For . . . what's the name of that boyfriend of yours?'

*Oh, this is way out of Jitendra's league. It's a friend of his, someone working in mainstream robotics. I'm afraid I'm under strict orders not to mention the firm involved, but if I said it rhymed with Sexus-'

*Right.'

Sunday grabbed his hand before he could react. *Here. Tell me how it feels.'

Her fingers closed around his.

*Creepy.'

The hand felt colder than it should have, but the effect was otherwise convincing. Her face was almost as realistic. It was only when she pushed the sunglasses back onto her scalp that the spell failed. There was a deadness to the eyes, the difference between paste jewellery and the real thing.

*It's pretty good.'

*Better than good. But you haven't seen the half of it. Watch this.'

Between one breath and the next, Sunday departed. He was suddenly looking at an old woman, grey hair tied back in an efficient bun, her skin a map of thirteen decades.

Geoffrey barely had time to react before Eunice vanished and Sunday returned.

*Given the circumstances,' he said, *that was very disrespectful.'

*She'd have forgiven me. That's the breakthrough, the reason for the prototype. The rapid-morph material came from the Evolvarium on Mars a it's some kind of adaptive camouflage, in its original context. Plexus . . . did I just say that? They've got exclusivity on it. They're calling it "Mercurial". Faster and more realistic than anything else out there.'

*So you see a big market for this?'

*Who knows? I'm just along for a free ride while someone else gets test data.' Sunday let go of Geoffrey's hand and tapped a finger against her cheekbone. *We're recording constantly. Every time someone sees me, their reactions are filed away a micro-expressions, eye saccades, that kind of thing a then fed into the system and used to tweak the configuration algorithms.'

*What about manners? It's not good form to let people think they're talking to a real person when they're not.'

*Their fault for not having the right layers enabled,' Sunday said. *Anyway, it's not just me: there are twenty of us walking around now, all chinging in from the Zone. We're not just testing the realism of the configs. We're seeing how well they can maintain that realism even with EarthaLunar time lag thrown in.'

*So you could go to the trouble of sending down a body, but you couldn't come in person?'

She gave him a quizzical look. *I showed up, didn't I? It's not like Eunice would have cared whether any of us was physically present.'

*I'm not sure I knew her well enough to say for sure.'

*I doubt she'd have given a damn who's here in the flesh and who isn't. And she'd have hated all this fuss. But Memphis had a bee in his bonnet about us all leaving the household on time.'

*I noticed. My guess is that Eunice stipulated something, and he's just following the script.'

After a moment, Sunday said quietly, *He looks really old now.'

*Don't say that.'

*Why not?'

*Because I was thinking exactly the same thing.'

Memphis was leading the procession, walking ahead of the main party with an earthenware jar in his hands. Since leaving the house they had been walking due west towards the grove of acacia trees that marked the limit of the crumbling boundary wall.

*Still got the old suit, though,' Geoffrey said.

*I think he's only ever had the one.'

*Either that or hundreds of exactly the same style.'

The favoured black business suit remained immaculate, but it draped off his thin frame as if tailored for some other, bulkier man. The hands that had carried Sunday out of the hole all those years ago must have been the same ones now gripping the earthenware jar, but that seemed impossible. Where once Memphis had walked with confident authority, now his gait was slow and measured, as if in every footfall lay the prospect of humiliation.

*At least he dressed for the occasion,' Sunday said.