He had passed through one set of customs at Lunar immigration; now there was another at the Libreville end. Geoffrey knew that his documents were all in order and that he was not knowingly breaking any rules. But he was still dwelling on the Chinese border incident, convinced that sooner or later his name would be dragged into proceedings. A tap on the shoulder, a quiet word in his ear. Ushered into a windowless room by apologetic officials with an arrest warrant.

But nothing happened in Libreville. They weren't even interested in the glove, which he made a point of declaring before passing through security. Puzzled, perhaps, as to why anyone would go to the trouble of importing such a thoroughly unprepossessing object, but not puzzled enough to make anything of it.

He wandered the anchorpoint gardens for a little while, taking regular pauses at park benches to rest his muscles. Fountains hissed and shimmered around him. It was mid-afternoon and cloudless, the sky preposterously blue and infinite, as if it reached all the way to Andromeda rather than being confined within the indigo cusp he had seen from space. After the floodlit caverns of the Descrutinised Zone, it was as if a separate dimension had been bolted onto reality. He was perfectly content just to lean back on the park bench, following the six guitar-string threads of the elevator as they rose and diminished to nothing, in an exact, vaulting demonstration of vanishing-point perspective. Thread-riders climbed and descended, meniscoid beads of black oil sliding along wire. Breakers hurled themselves against the peninsula sea wall, lulling with their endless cymbal-crash roar. Seagulls scythed across his view, dazzlingly white bird-shaped windows into another, purer creation.

He strained to his feet and hefted the sports bag, which now felt as if it had been stuffed with a dozen tungsten ingots. Grimacing with the effort, he walked back through the shimmering gardens to the railway station, where he fully expected to catch the equatorial express back to Nairobi. The overnight train would give him time to gather his thoughts, and it would put off the homecoming for a few more hours. But when he arrived at the concourse the aug informed him that a private airpod was now waiting in the reserved landing area, sent specially for him.

*Fuck you very much,' he said under his breath.

Two hours later, he was back over EAF airspace. The sun hadn't even set when he touched down at the household; he found an exo waiting for him, standing there like a headless skeleton, ready to accept Geoffrey into its padded embrace. He kicked the exo aside and stalked into the house like a man bristling for a bar fight.

Hector and Lucas were waiting for him, lounging in garden chairs while they supped late-afternoon drinks on the west-facing terrace. Spread before them like a tabletop game was the hovering projection of a Premier League football match.

*Geoffrey,' Hector said, making a show of almost rising from his seat without actually completing the motion. *Wonderful to see you back on terra firma at last! I see you found the airpod.'

*Hard to miss,' Geoffrey said, dropping the sports bag at his feet. *You needn't have bothered, though.'

*It seemed expedient to facilitate your speedy return,' Lucas said, reaching down to scratch at the skin under the bright plastic centipede clamped to his leg. He was wearing shorts, tennis shoes and a slash-patterned orange and yellow shirt. *You opted not to use the exo?'

*I'm not a cripple, cousin.'

*Of course not.' Lucas voked the football match into invisibility. *We only had your best interests at heart, though. My brother and I adapt readily to Earth gravity now, but that's only because we've both accumulated a great many space hours. Adaptation does become easier with experience.'

*I'll bear that in mind.' He didn't want to be too nice to the cousins, not when he had something to conceal from them. *Not that I have any plans to go into space again.'

*The Moon barely counts anyway,' Hector said. *But let's not spoil things for Geoffrey a I'm sure it felt like a great adventure. And that awkwardness, the business with your friend being detained? We'll say no more about it. Truthfully, we're very grateful.' He glanced suggestively at the bag. *The . . . um . . . thing a it's in there?'

Geoffrey bent down and unzipped the bag. The glove was on top of his clothes; it had been the last thing put back in after customs. He pulled it out and tossed it unceremoniously to Hector, who had to rush to put his glass down to catch it.

Hector examined the glove with the narrowed, probing eyes of a stamp collector.

*Let me see,' Lucas said.

*We can consult the house records,' Hector said, passing the item to his brother, *see if it matches any of the suits Eunice was known to have worn.'

Lucas fingered the glove with rank distaste, the tip of his nose puckering. *On a strict cost-benefit basis, sending Geoffrey all the way to the Moon to retrieve this may not have been the most prudent of our recent financial decisions.'

*It does look a bit tatty,' Hector admitted, before returning to his drink. *And there really wasn't anything else in the vault, Geoffrey?'

*That's what I said.'

*Nothing else?' Lucas probed. *No accompanying documentation?'

*Just the glove,' Geoffrey said testily.

*She was dotty,' Hector said, taking the glove back from his brother. *That's the only possible explanation. Not that it particularly matters why she put it there. Our concern was that there might be something hurtful in the vault, something that could impinge on the family's reputation. At least we can set our minds at ease on that score, can't we?' He was still examining the glove, peering at it with renewed concentration.

*I suppose so,' Lucas allowed. *Our primary concern, at least, has been allayed.'

*Which was?' Geoffrey asked.

*That we'd find paperwork, documents,' Hector said. *Something that needed to be followed up. Not some old relic we can safely bury in the family museum, where it'll never get a second look.'

*If that's all you need me for . . .' Geoffrey said, reaching to zip up the sports bag.

*Yes, of course,' Hector said, beaming. *You've done magnificently! The very model of discretion. Hasn't he done splendidly, Lucas?'

*Our requirements in this matter,' Lucas affirmed, *have been satisfactorily discharged.'

*I'll say this about you, Geoffrey,' Hector said. *Whatever opinion anyone has voiced in regard to your commitment to the family in the past, you've come through on this one with flying colours. You can hold your head up as a true Akinya now, with the rest of us.'

*That's very kind of you,' Geoffrey said.

*And we will of course honour our side of the arrangement,' Hector continued. *As soon as I finish this drink, I'll release the first instalment of your new research budget.'

Geoffrey slung the bag over his shoulder. *Is Memphis around?'

*Business necessitated a physical journey to Mombasa . . .' Lucas looked at Geoffrey with sharp interest. *But he should be home by now. Anything in particular you wanted to discuss with him?'

*He's my friend,' Geoffrey said. *I just want to catch up.'

Lucas smiled tightly. *It behoves us all to extract the maximum return from such a valued resource.'

He voked the football match back into existence, clapping his hands at a swooping pass from Cameroon's current top midfielder. *Seal genes,' he confided to his brother appreciatively. *Enhanced muscular myoglobin density for increased O2 uptake and storage. Thinking of having some put in myself.'

Geoffrey gladly abandoned the cousins and their soccer for the cool of the house. His room was clean and spartan, the bed crisply made, the shelves bare save for one or two books and artefacts. Drapes stirred softly in the afternoon breeze, the window slightly ajar. He touched the carved wooden bull elephant at the head of its procession, stroking its smooth, polished back, and placed his bag on the bed. He opened one of the cupboards to check that there was a change of clothes.

He sat down at the writing desk and voked into his research funds. The first instalment was already present, as Hector had promised. It was a staggering amount of money; more than Geoffrey had ever seen sitting in any of his accounts at one time. He was meant to spend it on his elephant studies, but he doubted the cousins cared where it actually ended up. Money, at least in these quantities, was like water to them. It had a function, like hydraulic fluid, but in such small measures it barely merited accounting.

Delaying his shower, he left the room and wandered the house until he found Memphis, sitting in his office on the ground floor with his back to the doorway. Ramrod-straight spine, the old but immaculate suit hanging off the sharp scaffolding of his shoulders, household finances auged up around him in a half-circle of multicoloured ledgers and spreadsheet accounts. He was moving figures from one pane to another, cajoling the bright symbols through the air like well-trained sprites.

*Memphis,' Geoffrey said, knocking lightly on the doorframe. *I'm back.'

Memphis completed a transaction and then dismissed the ledgers and accounts. His old-fashioned pneumatic swivel-chair squeaked as he spun around and beamed at Geoffrey. *How was your return journey?'

*Fast. I was looking forward to taking the overnight train, but the cousins had other ideas. They sent an airpod.'

*I can understand how you might have wished to take your time. Still, I suppose another part of you was just as anxious to get back home.'

*Not that I had any doubts that you could take care of things in my absence.'

*My talents are perhaps better suited to household administration than animal husbandry. You have visited the herd already?'

*No a not yet. I'll fly out in a while, just to let them know I'm back. Then in the morning . . . I was wondering if you felt like coming with me?'

*I'm afraid I have more business in Mombasa, and you know my aversion to chinging. I could change my plans, but-'

*No need,' Geoffrey said. *What about the day after?'

*I don't see why not. Is there anything in particular you want to show me?'

*Just the usual. It's good for the elephants to encounter you on a regular basis, and that they associate you with me.'

*I'm happy to be of assistance. Whatever business you were on, I trust it's done and you can return to normality?'

*I hope so.'

Memphis nodded once. *As do I.'

Geoffrey said goodbye and set off wandering the house again, until his perambulations took him into the cool of the museum wing. No one else was abroad, no other family members, hangers-on or normal household staff, so he did something uncharacteristic of him and loitered, examining the glassed-over cases that had hitherto merited no more than a glance.

Eventually he found the book, the copy of Gulliver's Travels Memphis had mentioned during the scattering. It was sitting in one of the cases, mounted on a black stand so that it stood nearly upright.

Geoffrey opened the case's lid. It squeaked on old metal hinges. Holding it open with one hand, he reached down with the other and lifted out the book. The cover was a faded blue-grey, dog-eared at the edges. It looked dustier than it was. He gently eased the book open.

Marbled paper lined the cover's interior. He made out scratchy grey marks, an unfamiliar but not inelegant script. It was in English, but too faint and cursive for the aug to detect and translate without coaxing. *To Eunice, on her twentieth birthday, January twentieth, 2050,' he read, speaking the words aloud. *With all our love, Mother and Father.'

The book was obviously much older than that; it must have been an antique even at the time Eunice received her gift. He kept turning the pages, into the main story itself.

Presently he found the gap where sheets were missing, a little over halfway through the book. It was hard to spot unless one was looking for it: just a slight irregularity in the way the bound sets of pages were fixed into the spine. Perhaps the omission had been spotted when the book was placed in the library, noticed and then thought no more of a treasured books were at particular risk of suffering damage, after all, by virtue of being read and carried. On the other hand, it was equally likely that no one had ever realised.

He made a mental note of the missing page numbers, then returned the book to its rightful position. He was about to close the lid and walk away when he noticed the fine white text engraved into the base of the book's stand.

Donated to the private collection by Eunice Akinya in 2100, immediately prior to her last deep-space mission.

She had come back a year and several months later, from the edge of the solar system. Even now, almost no one had gone that far out. But upon her return to Lunar orbit, Eunice had been in no position to go burying things on the Moon. Had she left the Winter Palace, her movements would have been tracked and recorded for posterity. She had spent the entire subsequent sixty years in the station.

Whatever she had done, from the glove in the safe-deposit box to the papers under the soil of Pythagoras, and assuming no one else had been involved, must have been done before she left for deep space.

So it was premeditated.

CHAPTER NINE.

Kilimanjaro was a cut diamond dropped from the heavens, sliced at its base by a sliver-thin line of haze. It appeared to float just off the ground, by some mountainous marvel of levitation.

He found the clan without difficulty, after less than thirty minutes in the air. He came in low, executing a sharp turn with his starboard wingtip almost scything the marula and cabbage trees bordering one of the waterholes. The elephants turned to watch him, elevating trunks and flapping ears. Matilda was easy to pick out among them: she was the one carrying on unimpressed, scuffing and probing with her trunk, trying valiantly to give the impression that his return was really not all that big a deal.

He picked a stretch of ground, the grass worn away in arid furrows where he had landed on many previous occasions, and brought the Cessna in at a whisker over stall speed. He cut the engine just after the tyres bounced and let her roll in near-silence, the wings and undercarriage swishing and crackling through dry undergrowth, until the aircraft came to a stop. Still wearing the same clothes he'd put on before leaving Sunday's apartment, he grabbed his kitbag and climbed out of the cockpit.

Geoffrey left the aircraft and walked slowly through the grass towards the elephants. The breeze, such as it was, was at his back, ushering his scent ahead of him. He had not changed his clothes, nor showered, for precisely that reason. After such an absence he wished to take no chances. Periodically he clapped his hands and bellowed a wordless call, to further reinforce his identity.

It was late in the day. Shadows spread, black and grey and purple, moving and coalescing as the breeze stirred nets and fans of vegetation. His brain began to fill in the gaps, suggesting muscular crouched forms, pairs of tracking eyes agleam with single-minded vigilance. The dusky sighing of grass on grass became the slow inhalation of patient, hungry things, drawing a final breath before the neck-breaking pounce. Random shapes in the soil assumed a crawling, serpentine aspect, making him hesitate with every third or fourth stride. That part of his brain, ancient and stupid as it was, couldn't be switched off completely. But he had learned to disregard that nervous monkey babble as well as he could.

There, ahead, was Matilda, her darkening profile broken behind two candelabra trees. He whooped and clapped again, his armpits damp with sweat, then called out, *Hello, Matilda. It's me, Geoffrey. I've come home.'

As if she didn't know it was him, dropping in from the skies. The Cessna was as weird and singular as a unicorn.

She allowed him to approach, but there was a wariness in her posture, a sense of caution that the other elephants picked up on. Geoffrey halted as he heard and felt a threat rumble from one of the other high-ranking females. Matilda answered with a vocalisation of her own, perhaps a signal for reassurance or merely the elephant equivalent of, Shut up and let me handle this.

Geoffrey waited a while and then resumed his approach.

*I told you I had to go away,' he said. *Be glad I wasn't gone longer.'

He took in her family. Hovering in the air, an aug layer had verified that all were present and correct, but it was only on the ground that he could look for signs of injury and illness. He paid particular attention to the youngsters, and saw nothing amiss.

*So it's all been business as usual,' he said softly, as much for his own benefit as Matilda's.

He found a tree-stump, squatted on it and drew out his sketchbook and 2B pencil. He worked with furious energy as the light ebbed, striving to capture the essence of the moment with as few pencil strokes as possible, like some mathematician searching for the quickest route to a theorem. No time for nuance or detail or shading; it was all about brutal economy and a devout, martial approach to the act of marking the paper. He drew until the gloom was absolute, the elephants no more than round-backed hillocks, grey shading into purple. His eyes had amped up, and the aug offered to drop an enhancement layer over his visual field, but Geoffrey declined.

When he had filled three pages he packed the sketchbook away, shouldered the bag and rose from the stump with aching bones. The elephants were calmer now, accepting his presence with benign indifference. He approached the matriarch, stood his ground and allowed her to examine him with her trunk.

*You won't believe where I've been,' he told her. *Or maybe you would, if you were capable of understanding it. Maybe it wouldn't seem much further away to you than Namibia. I was on the Moon, Matilda. How amazing is that? I was up there.'

He couldn't see the Moon tonight, but he would have pointed it out to her if he'd been able.

Geoffrey voked the link, Matilda's real-time brain scan appearing in the upper-left corner of his visual field. There was activity in all the usual functional areas, but nothing untoward. Her state of mind was as unexceptional as he had ever seen it, allowing for the normal patterns associated with nocturnal watchfulness.

He shouldn't do it, he told himself. It was too soon after his return to proceed to the next step of initiating the full mind-to-mind link. But why not? He was supremely calm now, his mind settled by the flight and the placidity of the herd. Tomorrow might be different.

He voked his own brain image and began the transition. He pushed quickly through the low percentages, ten, twenty and beyond. At twenty-five per cent he felt his self-image losing definition, his mind decoupling from his body, his sense of scale undergoing a ballooning, dreamlike shift, Matilda losing size until she appeared no larger to him than one of the phyletic dwarves.

He passed through thirty-five per cent, then forty. The neural schematics showed areas of congruency, territories of brain lighting up in unison. The anatomical details were different, of course, but the functional relationships were precisely conserved. Matilda's thought processes were guiding his own, moving fire around in his skull. He still felt calm and in control, aware that his mind was being influenced by an external agency yet retaining sufficient detachment not to be unnerved by the process. There was no fear a yet a even as he pushed through forty-five per cent and then hit the psychological barrier of fifty per cent, more than he had ever dared risk before. He didn't just feel disconnected from his own body now; he felt multitudinous, part of a larger whole. Matilda's identity as matriarch was so closely bound to her family that her identity encompassed other elephants. Geoffrey reeled, dizzy with the perceptual shifts, but he steeled himself and continued pushing through to fifty-five per cent, then sixty. He was a long way out now, swimming in deep neural waters. The world was coming through with the preternatural sharpness of a hallucination, dambursting his senses, flooding his brain with more stimulation than it could readily assimilate. The background noise of the waterhole and its surroundings was teased apart, deconstructed like the mathematical separation of a signal into its Fourier components, unwoven into threads of distinct and specific sound a each tree, each bush whispering its own contribution, each breath, each footfall a thing unto itself. Rumbles from elephants near and far, felt in his belly more than his head.

Yet that endless complex proclamation was only one part of the sensory tapestry. Matilda's sense of smell was acute and untiring, and the link was lighting up Geoffrey's olfactory centre accordingly. The translation was too crude to replicate the specific impressions, but Geoffrey nonetheless felt overwhelmed with smells drawn from his own experience, each of which arrived with an accompanying gift-wrapping of memories and emotions. The odour of freshly laid frond-carpet, in a newly furnished room at the household, when he was eight. The smell of transmission oil leaking from one of the jeeps. A box of paper-wrapped wax crayons, spectrum-ordered, like a perfumed rainbow waiting to spill its hues onto paper. Pushing his hand into a mound of fresh hyena dung when he'd tripped on the ground a and running crying into the household, holding his soiled hand as if he'd cut himself. The memories were usually of things that had happened to him when he was small, coming from old-growth brain structure, laid down when the architecture of his mind was still vigorously open to change.

Sixty-five per cent, seventy. That was enough for now, he told himself. It might even be enough for ever. Further refinements could follow a fine-tuning the interface so that the sense impressions were rendered more precisely, so that when Matilda smelled lion, he would smell lion too, and know it for what it was. It would only be a matter of building up data, cross-correlating neural states with external factors. There was no theoretical or philosophical reason why he couldn't experience her world the way she did, with all its specificities. And then, only then, might he begin to glimpse something of her thought processes, if only in the play of shadows on the cave wall of her mind.

In all this, she had remained supremely calm and attentive, oblivious to the machines reading her mind; oblivious to the fact that her mind was being echoed and mirrored in another creature's head. Geoffrey knew that this was the point where he should break off contact, having already achieved more than during any of his previous sessions. But another part of him wanted to forge ahead, now that he had overcome his initial fears. Not by pushing the percentage level higher, but by allowing traffic in the other direction. That had, after all, always been his ultimate goal: not just to peer into her mind, but to establish a communication channel. What was the phrase June Wing had used a a cognitive gate? The neuromachinery protocols were already in place; it would take no more than a sequence of voked commands to begin pushing his state of mind into Matilda's head.

Was she ready for it, though? How would an animal cope, in the absence of any rational framework to temper its instinctive reactions? Nothing in her evolutionary past had equipped Matilda with the apparatus to grasp what he was contemplating doing to her.

Still, he hadn't come this far with the project to allow such qualms to stop him now. The point was to conduct the experiment and then learn something a even if the only conclusion was that the work was a dead end, of no further value.

As a precautionary measure, he dialled the existing neural interface threshold back down to thirty per cent. It was low enough that his sense of self returned more or less to normal, but not so low that he couldn't still feel Matilda's sense-world bleeding into his own, with all its gaudy welter of multichannel impressions.

Five per cent in the other direction, he thought. That was more than enough to be starting with.

He thought about not doing it, of closing the link and returning to the Cessna. Then he thought of Sunday, how she would have shaken her head at his lack of boldness.

He voked the command.

The lack of any obvious change was disheartening. Matilda's brain activity was varying by the second, but it had been doing so from the moment he activated the link. All he was seeing was the natural background noise caused by constant random stimuli, as the other elephants moved and vocalised, and more remote sights, sounds and smells came to her attention. His own mind was subject to the same continuously firing patterns, but it wasn't putting out a strong enough signal to evoke a measurable response in Matilda's scan. He was merely adding noise to noise.