Geoffrey couldn't dismiss an offer of increased funding out of hand, no matter what strings came attached. Pride be damned, he owed it to the herd.

*What do you want?'

*A matter has arisen, a matter of interest only to the family, and which necessitates a suitably tactful response,' Lucas said. *You would need to go into space.'

He'd already guessed it had to be something to do with Eunice. *To the Winter Palace?'

*Actually,' Lucas said, *the Lunar surface.'

*Why can't you go?'

Hector shared a smile with his brother. *In a time of transition, it's important to convey the impression of normality. Neither Lucas nor I have plausible business on the Moon.'

*Hire an outsider, then.'

*Third-party involvement would present unacceptable risks,' Lucas said, pausing to tug at his shirt collar where it was sticking to his skin. Like Hector he was both muscular and comfortably taller than Geoffrey. *I hardly need add that you are an Akinya.'

*What my brother means,' Hector said, *is that you're blood, and you have blood ties on the Moon, especially in the African-administered sector. If you can't be trusted, who can?'

Geoffrey thought for a few seconds, striving to give away as little as possible. Let the two manipulators stew for a while, wondering if he was going to take the bait.

*This matter on the Moon a what are we talking about?'

*A loose end,' Hector said.

*What kind? I'm not agreeing to anything until I know what's involved.'

*Despite the complexity of Eunice's estate and affairs,' Lucas said, *the execution of our due-diligence audit has proceeded without complication. The sweeps have turned up nothing of concern, and certainly nothing that need raise questions beyond the immediate family.'

*There is, however, a box,' Hector said.

Geoffrey raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. *What kind?'

*A safe-deposit box,' Lucas said. *Is the concept familiar to you?'

*You'll have to explain it to me. Being but a lowly scientist, anything to do with money or banking is completely outside my comprehension. Yes, of course I know what a safe-deposit box is. Where is it?'

*In a bank on the Moon,' Hector said, *the name and location of which we'll disclose once you're under way.'

*You're worried about skeletons.'

The corner of Lucas's mouth twitched. Geoffrey wondered if the empathy shunt was making him unusually prone to literal-mindedness, unable to see past a metaphor.

*We need to know what's in that box,' he said.

*It's a simple request,' Hector said. *Go to the Moon, on our expense account. Open the box. Ascertain its contents. Report back to the household. You can leave tomorrow a there's a slot on the Libreville elevator. You'll be on the Moon inside three days, your work done inside four. And then you're free to do whatever you like. Play tourist. Visit Sunday. Broaden your-'

*Horizons. Yes.'

Hector's expression clouded over at Geoffrey's tone. *Something I said?'

*Never mind.' Geoffrey paused. *I have to admire the two of you, you know. Year after year, I've come crawling on my hands and knees asking for more funding. I've begged and borrowed, pleading my case against a wall of indifference, not just from my mother and father but from the two of you. At best I've got a token increase, just enough to shut me up until next time. Meanwhile, the family pisses a fortune into repairing the blowpipe without me even being told about it, and when you do need a favour, you suddenly find all this money you can throw at my feet. Have you any idea how insignificant that makes me feel?'

*If you'd rather the incentives were downscaled,' Lucas said, *that can be arranged.'

*I'm taking you for every yuan. You want this done badly enough, I doubt you'd open with your highest offer.'

*Don't overstep the mark,' Hector said. *We could just as easily approach Sunday and make the same request of her.'

*But you won't, because you think Sunday's a borderline anarchist who's secretly plotting the downfall of the entire system-wide economy. No, I'm your last best hope, or you wouldn't have come.' Geoffrey steeled himself. *So let's talk terms. I want a fivefold increase in research funding, inflation-linked and guaranteed for the next decade. None of that's negotiable: we either agree to it here and now, or I walk away.'

*To decline an offer now,' Lucas said, *could prove disadvantageous when the next funding round arrives.'

*No,' Hector said gently. *He has made his point, and he is right to expect assurances. In his shoes, would we behave any differently?'

Lucas looked queasy, as if the idea of being in Geoffrey's shoes made him faintly nauseous. It was the first human emotion that had managed to squeeze past the empathy shunt, Geoffrey thought.

*You're probably right,' Lucas allowed.

*He's an Akinya a he still has the bargaining instinct. Are we agreed that Geoffrey's terms are acceptable?'

Lucas's nod was as grudging as possible.

*We have all committed this conversation to memory?' Hector asked.

*Every second,' Geoffrey said.

*Then let it be binding.' Hector offered his hand, which Geoffrey took after a moment's hesitation, followed by Lucas's. Geoffrey blinked the image of them shaking.

*Don't look on it as a chore,' Hector said. *Look on it as a break from the routine. You'll enjoy it, I know. And it will be good for you to look in on your sister.'

*We would, of course, request that you refrain from any discussion of this matter with your sister,' Lucas said.

Geoffrey said nothing, nor made any visible acknowledgement of what Lucas said. He just turned and walked off, leaving the cousins standing there.

Matilda was still keeping watch over her charges. She regarded him, emitted a low vocalisation, not precisely a threat rumble but registering mild elephantine disgruntlement, then returned to the examination of the patch of ground before her, scudding dirt and stones aside with her trunk in the desultory, half-hearted manner of someone who had forgotten quite why they had commenced a fundamentally pointless task in the first place.

*Sorry, Matilda. I didn't ask them to come out here.'

She didn't understand him, of course. But he was sure she was irritated with the coming and going of the odd-smelling strangers and their annoying, high-whining machine.

He halted before her and considered activating the link again, pushing it higher than before, to see what was really going on in her head. But he was too disorientated for that, too unsure of his own feelings.

*I think I might have made a mistake,' Geoffrey said. *But if I did, I did it for the right reasons. For you, and the other elephants.'

Matilda rumbled softly and bent her trunk around to scratch under her left ear.

*I'll be gone for a little while,' Geoffrey went on. *Probably not more than a week, all told. Ten days at most. I have to go up to the Moon, and . . . well, I'll be back as quickly as I can. You'll manage without me, won't you?'

Matilda began poking around again. She wouldn't just manage without him, Geoffrey thought. She'd barely notice his absence.

*If anything comes up, I'll send Memphis.'

Oblivious to his reassurance, she continued her foraging.

CHAPTER THREE.

The woman from the bank apologised for keeping him waiting, although in fact it had been no more than minutes. Her name was Marjorie Hu, and she appeared genuinely keen to be of assistance, as if he'd caught her on a slow day where any break in routine was welcome.

*I'm Geoffrey Akinya,' he said, falteringly. *A relative of the late Eunice Akinya. Her grandson.'

*In which case I'm very sorry for your loss, sir.'

*Thank you,' he said solemnly, allowing a judicious pause before proceeding with business. *Eunice held a safe-deposit box with this branch. I understand that as a family member I have the authority to examine the contents.'

*Let me look into that for you, sir. There was some rebuilding work a while back, so we might have moved the box to another branch. Do you know when the box was assigned?'

*Some time ago.' He had no idea. The cousins hadn't told him, assuming they even knew. *But it'll still be on the Moon?'

*Just up from Africa.'

He'd travelled like any other tourist, leaving the day after his meeting with the cousins. After clearing exit procedures in Libreville, he'd been put to sleep and packed into a coffin-sized passenger capsule. The capsule had been fed like a machine-gun round into the waiting chamber of the slug-black, blunt-hulled thread-rider, where it was automatically slotted into place and coupled to internal power and biomonitor buses, along with six hundred otherwise identical capsules, densely packed for maximum transit efficiency.

And three days later he'd woken on the Moon.

No sense of having travelled further than, say, China a until he took his first lurching step and felt in his bones that he wasn't on Earth any more. He'd had breakfast and completed immigration procedures for the African-administered sector. As promised, there'd been a message from the cousins: details of the establishment he was supposed to visit.

Nothing about the Copernicus Branch of the CAB had surprised him, beyond the fact that it was exactly like every other bank he'd ever been in, from Mogadishu to Brazzaville. Same new-carpet smell, same wood-effect furniture, same emphatic courtesy from the staff. Everyone loped around in Lunar gravity, and the accents were different, but those were the only indicators that he wasn't home. Even the images on the wall, cycling from view to view, were mostly of terrestrial locations. Adverts pushed travel insurance, retirement schemes, investment portfolios.

Marjorie Hu had asked him to sit in a small windowless waiting room with a potted plant and a fake view of ocean breakers while she checked the location of the safe-deposit box. He had packed lightly for the trip, jamming everything he needed into a large black zip-up sports bag with a faded logo on the side. He kept the bag between his feet, picking at the terrestrial dirt under his nails until the door opened again and Marjorie Hu came in.

*No problem,' she said. *It's still in our vaults. Been there for thirty-five years, which is about as long as we've had a branch in Copernicus. If you wouldn't mind following me?'

*I was assuming you'd want to screen me or something.'

*We already have, sir.'

She took him downstairs. Doors, heavy enough to contain pressure in the event of an accident, whisked open at the woman's approach. She turned her head to look at him as they walked.

*We're about to pass out of aug reach, and I don't speak Swahili.' From a skirt pocket she pulled out a little plastic-wrapped package. *We have earphone translators available.'

*Which languages do you speak?'

*Mm, let's see. Chinese and English, some Russian, and I'm learning Somali and Xhosa, although they're both still bedding in. We can get a Swahili speaker to accompany you, but that might take a while to arrange.'

*My Chinese is OK, but English will be easier for both of us, I suspect. I even know a few words of Somali, but only because my nanny spoke it. She was a nice lady from Djibouti.'

*We'll shift to English, then.' Marjorie Hu put the earphones away. *We'll lose aug in a few moments.'

Geoffrey barely felt the transition. It was a withdrawing of vague floating possibilities rather than a sudden curtailment of open data feeds.

*Anyone ever come in here that you couldn't translate for?' Geoffrey asked.

*Not since I've been here. Anyone speaking a language that obscure, they'd better have backup.' Marjorie Hu's tone of voice had shifted microscopically now that he was hearing her actual larynx-generated speech sounds.

A final set of pressure doors brought them to the vault. The morgue-like room's walls were lined with small silver-and-orange-fronted cabinets, stacked six high, perhaps two hundred in all. Given the virtual impossibility of committing theft in the Surveilled World, there was no longer much need for this sort of safekeeping measure. Doubtless the bank regarded the housing of these boxes as a tedious obligation to its older clients.

*That's yours, sir,' she said, directing him to a specific unit three rows up from the floor, the only cabinet in the room with a green light above the handle. *Open it whenever you like. I'll step outside until you're finished. When you're done, just push the cabinet back into the wall; it will lock on its own.'

*Thank you.'

Marjorie Hu made a small, nervous coughing sound. *I'm required to inform you that you remain under surveillance. The eyes aren't public, but we would be obliged to surrender captured imagery in the event of an investigation.'

*That's fine. I wouldn't have assumed otherwise.'

She dispensed a businesslike smile. *I'll leave you to it.'

Geoffrey put down his bag as she left the room, the door whisking shut between them. He wasted no time. At his touch, the cabinet eased out of the wall on smooth metal runners until it reached the limit of its travel. It was open-topped, with a smaller cream-coloured box resting inside. He lifted out the box and placed it on the floor. Even allowing for Lunar gravity, it struck him as unexpectedly light. No gold ingots, then. The box, stamped with the bank's logo, had a simple hinged lid with no lock or catch. He opened it and looked inside.

The box contained a glove.

A glove, from a spacesuit. Fabric layers interspersed with plastic or composite plating, lending flexibility and strength. The fabric was silvery or off-white a hard to judge in the vault's sombre lighting a and the plates were beige or maybe pale yellow. At the cuff-end of the glove was an alloy connector ring, some kind of blue-tinted metal inset with complicated gold-plated contacts that would presumably lock into place when the glove was fixed to the suit sleeve. The glove had been cleaned because, despite its apparent grubbiness, his hands stayed unsoiled.

That was all there was. Nothing clutched in the fingers, nothing marked on the exterior. He couldn't see anything lodged inside. He tried pushing his hand into it, but couldn't get his thumb-joint past the wristband.

Geoffrey didn't know whether he felt disappointed or relieved. A bit of both, maybe. Relieved that there was nothing here to taint Eunice's memory a no incriminating document linking her to some long-dead tyrant or war criminal a but subtly let down that there wasn't something more intriguing, some flourish from beyond the grave, the fitting capstone that her life demanded. It wasn't enough just to retire to Lunar orbit, live out her remaining days in the Winter Palace and die.

He started to put the glove back in the box, preparing to stow the box back in the cabinet.

And stopped. He couldn't say why, save the fact that the glove seemed to merit more attention than he had given it. The one constant of Eunice's life was that she was practically minded, scathing of sentiment and pointless gesture. She wouldn't have put that glove there unless it meant something a either to her, or to whoever was supposed to find it after her death.

Geoffrey slipped the glove into his sports bag. He put an Ashanti FC sweatshirt on top, jammed his baseball cap on top of that, resealed the bag and placed the now-empty box back into the cabinet. He pressed the cabinet back into the wall, whereupon it clicked into place and the green light changed to red.

He opened the external door and stepped out of the vault.

*All done,' Geoffrey told the bank woman. *For now, anyway. I take it there'll be no difficulties gaining access again?'

*None at all, sir,' Marjorie Hu said. If she had any interest in what he had found in the box, she was doing a good job of hiding it. This is a big deal for me, Geoffrey thought: family secrets, clandestine errands to the Moon, safe-deposit boxes with mysterious contents. But she must bring a dozen people down here every week.

With the glove still in his possession, he made his way to the underground railway station. Transparent vacuum tubes punched through the terminal's walls at different levels, threading between platforms connected by spiral walkways and sinuous escalators. Everything was glassy and semitranslucent. There were shopping plazas and dining areas, huge multi-storey sculptures and banners, waterfalls, fountains and a kind of tinkling, cascading piano music that followed him around like a lost dog.

He strolled to a quiet corner of the concourse and voked a call to Lucas. When a minute had passed without Lucas picking up, he diverted the request to Hector. Three seconds later Hector's figment a dressed in riding boots, jodhpurs and polo shirt a was standing in front of him.