CHAPTER FOUR

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVE

 

 

BEYOND THE PROTEIN Complex the desert was trackless and vast, reaching south for miles of wasteland before encountering the receding hairline of the far side of human habitation, the desperate scratch-farms and mining claims where there was some residual ground water, or where water was worth bringing. Between here and there were all the bones of last generation’s final flourish of excess: the Estate and the grand homes that had surrounded it. An oasis maintained with all that money could buy by the grand plutocrats who had ordained the Ankara and the Grand Celeste, and who had gone up the cable to their own personal Ascension and rebirth. But even they had not been able to take it all with them, and what they had left behind was a wasteland of dead gardens; grand houses like bleached skulls; laboratory complexes in whose dry wells and cellars, by repute, failed experiments yet survived, somehow, when nothing else could.

And the solar fields that had once provided the colossal power to wrest comfortable living here in the heart of the dead land, now fed to Ankara Achouka—or they were supposed to. They could have been torn up and rebuilt to surround the Anchor Field, of course, but that would have meant cost and delay. Cost was something the sonko were used to laying out, but delay was the thing they would not tolerate. All those kilometres of sun-drinking black were left in place with their custodian robots, to weather the dust and the heat and the sheer neglect.

And they wouldn’t last forever, of course, as Hotep was happy to point out. They wouldn’t even last another generation; by the time Mao’s youngest kids were heading out into the desert themselves, most of it would have gone to ruin. But, from the point of view of the men who ordered those fields built, all that mattered was that they lasted long enough for the final guest of the Grand Celeste to take their one-way ticket out of the Roach Hotel.

The solar fields were vast; the desert was large enough to lose them a hundred times over. That meant Hotep got to navigate, and because it was something she was interested in doing, Mao knew he could rely on her to do the most exacting job possible, even if she kept up a constant rattle and drum on the dashboard as she did. Navigating south of the Ankara was a tricky business for most, but Hotep had a secret weapon and it was called the Grand Celeste. The vast spaceship docked up at the anchor cable had a full suite of instruments and subordinate satellites, and could give a band of Firewalkers the most precise GPS known to humankind, guiding them infallibly through the wastes to their desired destination. It wasn’t supposed to, of course. Hacking into and co-opting the liner’s systems was absolutely forbidden. But Hotep didn’t care. She considered it her birthright. She had been born within the Celeste’s gently curving walls, one of the first human children to take their first breath in the constant free-fall of orbit. Her people were rich beyond all the less important dreams of people like Mao’s family, labouring on the Earth beneath them. Hotep had learned all she knew of gravity from rotating sections and vitamin supplements. Her childhood playpark had been made of centrifuges and the eternally rising slope of the running track. She was going to be an astronaut when she grew up, and, of all the children in history who had claimed that, she was surely right.

Except that Hotep—Corey Dello as was—wasn’t right. She wasn’t within the narrow tolerances of her kind, up there. She drummed and fidgeted and never seemed to be paying attention, even if she could later recount lessons and conversations wholesale. She laughed at the wrong times, cried at the wrong things, took away the wrong message from jokes. She flicked switches and disassembled devices, and in a spaceship, that was frowned upon. And one day they had come and told her she wasn’t going to be an astronaut after all, nor was she going to stay aboard the Celeste, because the choice had either been to conform to the expectations of her parents and their peers, or fall. And so she fell.

Mao had heard it all before, in various permutations and levels of detail. Hard, honestly, to be that sympathetic for the sonko girl who was bitching about having to live in the world he was born to and would never escape, the world that was dying off, the dog’s corpse that the fattest of the fleas were abandoning. For now all that mattered was that Hotep carried a grudge bigger than the Grand Celeste itself and didn’t mind using it to help them find their way across the desert to the solar fields and the bones of the old manor houses.

He was driving, trying not to let Hotep’s fidgeting bug him. Lupé was asleep; soon enough it would be her turn at the wheel. The air conditioning whined like an overtired child, succeeding only in pushing oven-hot air around a bit, except he knew that outside it was ten degrees hotter and dry enough to turn his tongue into a withered strap of leather. When he sucked a mouthful of water from the pipe next to his head, it tasted faintly of chemicals that suggested the filtration plant at the back needed looking at. And he reckoned one of the big, fat, self-resealing tyres was low. And the solar panels up top needed scraping free of dust the moment the sun was down, because they didn’t have the power to keep going overnight as he’d have liked. All par for the course, for a Firewalker. All reminders that Firewalkers died, and that Firewalkers were young because almost none of them got old.

They’d been on the dust road for days now, Okereke’s plant far behind them. There had been a dead tree, the day before, and after that a great irregular depression stained with red and brown where some toxic spill of liquid had met its final end beneath the unyielding stare of the sun. Forests, he thought, remembering the pictures in M. Attah’s office. He always wondered that Lupé wasn’t as mad as Hotep about how things had got. Of all of them, this was her birthright, after all. Her long-back kin had lived in these parts, he knew: miners, city folk, artists, computer programmers, farmers, whatever the hell trades people had done back then. And had they brought the hammer of the sun down on their own heads? Not really, no more than anyone. But that hammer had come down and they’d scattered under its strike: north, south, because to stay here was death by drought and famine and carcinoma.

And then, generations later, some of them had come back, because there was work, and where the sonko needed work, there was food and shelter and water as well. They’d come back and mingled with Mao’s kin and the rest, and made a new people, just for a while. And who’d blame them for being mad about it, whetting a knife for every wabenzi who pushed them around on their own land? But Lupé didn’t have room in her for grudges. Lupé had a family who ate what she earned for them, skills people paid for, and she was dumb enough to say yes when some dangi Viet kid asked her to come Firewalking with him.

 

 

THEY PASSED THE first big house a day or so after that, just an immaculate shell covering the same sort of ground a neighbourhood would, back at the Ankara. Four levels, servants’ quarters, lifts and escalators, a helipad on the roof, and all still standing with metal shutters over the windows and doors. The inhabitants had gone to a better place, as they said, gone out of this world entirely, never to come back, but they still begrudged three lowlife kids any shelter from the noon sun, still maintained the old divisions of ours and not-ours as though they were going to put the place up for rent some day, a grand tenement on the sandy shores of hell. It took Lupé twenty minutes to crack their security and break in. They spent an hour fitfully reclining on upholstery so parched it was mummified. There was no power, and the interior of the building, stripped of its mod cons, was murderously hot, insanely badly designed.

Later they passed grand houses that had not been secured, and one that had fallen, undermined by soil contraction as subterranean aquifers had dried out. By then, though, they were seeing the problem. They were passing solar fields as well, or places that the Grand Celeste believed were solar fields. They were stripped, not just chessboard-patchwork like the one around the protein plant, but whole tracts gone entirely, torn up at the root, while beside them another field gleamed under the sun, scratched but intact. Mao wondered if this was old news, some turf war between the absurdly rich, fighting over who owned what piece of dust. That night, Lupé did a bit of investigating and reckoned the edges were too newly broken for that. Recent, she said. This was what was causing the brownouts at the Hotel, and likely they were only going to get worse.

“Turn back now?” she asked, but Mao reckoned they’d not earned their double-double yet.

“Something’s doing this,” he pointed out.

“Maybe we can…” He stopped before saying anything as dumb as ‘fix it,’ but he wanted to know. He wanted to have a solution, even if it wasn’t anything he himself could bring about, because that would keep him valuable, keep him on the payroll maybe.

“Celeste thinks this is all still fields,” Hotep muttered, snapping fingers and thumbs together like irritable lobster claws.

“Well, it’s supposed to be,” Mao said.

“No, Celeste looks down here, and still sees fields, solar your heart out,” Hotep told him. “Not updating the records up there. Fucking amateurs.” She’d do it better, of course. The way she told it, when they’d sent her down the line, the astronaut business had lost ninety per cent of its talent base.

 

 

A DAY AND a night after that revelation, through the weirdly piecemeal solar fields and the broken estates, and there was light ahead.

At first none of them understood what they were looking at. Hotep was asleep in back, and Lupé’s best guess was that it was a repair site, not too far off. They’d seen some of the automatic systems, robots slow-stepping or rolling around, sweeping dust, repairing connections. They’d come with the fields; they were going the same way. There had been a fair few by the road seized up and immobile, dead between one job and another. Mao felt a bitter kind of kinship with them. Always someone worse off than you are. At least he got to knock off for a bottle of Regab Plus Extra when he was home. No beer for robots.

But they kept driving, and the light was still off there, and Mao began to realise whatever they were looking at was further away, therefore way bigger than a couple of repair robots lighting up some panels to run diagnostics.

“Wake Hotep?” Lupé suggested.

“Wait.” Mao kept driving, running along between two untouched fields of panels now, that gleamed when the headlights caught them. The words It might be nothing turned up in his mouth and he spat them out unsaid because plainly it was something.

They got closer; it got bigger, the light condensing from a diffuse glow to the distinct squares of windows, doorways, a spread of wings: not avian but architectural, and no less fantastic for all that. Mao blinked and blinked, wanting to rub his eyes but not trusting his hands off the wheel.

“Fukme,” Lupé breathed. “Will you just look at that, chommie?”

“I am looking,” Mao confirmed. “Not believing, but looking. Reckon they know this is still out here?” But of course they didn’t, and serious money was obviously going into it, if what Hotep had said about the Celeste was true.

It was one of the big houses, one of the abandoned domains of the super-rich who’d come out here, a second colonial wave that could conquer even land held by the armies of sun and dust. But it wasn’t just a shell, either sealed or cracked or falling down. Every window shone with spendthrift light, and the exterior was lit up all around by lanterns and lamp-posts that looked like they came from some old drama where Queen Victoria met Jack the Ripper. And there were gardens. They weren’t perhaps the flower-garlanded wonders of times past, but someone had taken the hardiest gene-modded cacti and succulents and planted them in great rows, engineered them for different colours, even given them the old phosphorescent jellyfish treatment to have some of them glow in the dark. There must be buried pipes below, hauling water from some damn place, because otherwise even cacti wouldn’t last out here in the heat-death waistband of the world. Water, out here, in some private paradise. And Mao was still driving towards it, no matter how far someone had gone to keep it a secret, because he was a moth and this was the biggest flame in the world now the sun was past the horizon.

Behind him, Hotep sat up suddenly. “The fuck?” she exclaimed, bouncing like a little kid on the back seat. “The fuck? The actual fuck?” And for once her reactions to things were smack in the middle of normal as far as Mao was concerned.

They were getting close now, out of the solar fields, into the actual grounds, the bristling globes and fans of cacti on either side. Was that movement in the windows? The light was too bright to see properly, light that streamed to them from another time, flat and flickering as an ancient film.

“Is that… a pool?” Lupé asked in a quavering voice. Mao saw where she was looking and his hands jerked on the wheel involuntarily, ploughing them off the dust-buried path and crunching through a king’s ransom of genetically engineered peyote. Out there, there was water shimmering like a mirage and he was going to end up nose-diving the ’Bug right into it.

Then the ’Bug died, and simultaneously Hotep cried out in horror and agony. “Blind! I’m blind!”

And she began fighting them, or fighting the back seat of the ’Bug, or just fighting. Mao and Lupé piled the hell out as though the vehicle was going to go up in flames, because there was more than one broken nose back at Ankara Achouka to tell a story about restraining Hotep. She went berserk. She had been born for the untrammelled void of space, perhaps; being restricted to one body and a gravity well was almost more than she could take. Physically holding her down, well, you might as well just run face first into a wall and then hit yourself in the balls with a bat.

Eventually she calmed down and came out of the vehicle, and Mao stared. Her bandages were in disarray, as though she was moulting snakeskin, but more than that, for the first time in human history, her goggles were up. Hotep’s eyes were dark, more slanted than Mao had expected. The skin around them was, somehow, even paler than the rest of her fishbelly complexion.

“I’m not blind,” she said in a small voice. “The goggles don’t work anymore. Something shut them down.” Those horribly naked eyes flicked from one to the other, flinching.

Mao tried the ’Bug again, but it remained resolutely dead, which was going to be a problem as soon as the sun came up or the water in the filtration plant started to stagnate. “Some bastard’s put us on the plate,” he decided. “Because of this thing. So maybe they’ve got garages full of fancy cars. Maybe they’ve got a helicopter can take us all the way back to the Ankara.”

“Maybe they’re giving out bullets as free samples,” Lupé muttered, but right then seeing what the hell this place was about seemed irresistible. It wasn’t even the mission, exactly, although this secret sonko hideout must have been guzzling power. This was like a ghost, like a time machine. It was a thing they only ever heard of, an extinct beast or storied emperor. There weren’t supposed to be things like this in the world, still; not any part of the world they might get to see.

Whoever lived here had surely picked up the arrival of the ’Bug, but they went in all stealthy anyway, crouched low as they skirted the prickly fields of desert plants, things transplanted here from Arizona or the Australian outback, or things never born of nature anywhere.

Mao saw at least one shadow at the windows as they approached; he thought it was a man, broad-shouldered, staring out at the night. The ground all around the big white-walled house was floodlit, the sand turned white, ranks of succulents and halophytes sending stark shadows across their neighbours. The three Firewalkers had been slowly curving their path as they approached, and Mao would have said it was because he was looking for an unobtrusive entrance, but in truth it was because of the pool, which was just drawing them in like the song of a siren.

It was indoors, of course, and even then it must have needed constant topping up to fight off the sheer evaporation. It was in a one-room, one-storey piece of the house that had glass walls, or maybe some super-thermoregulatory clear plastic like Mao had heard of, that they’d designed for the Celeste. It was all lit up, too, above and below the water, so the whole looked like a blue jewel the size of five family residences back in Achouka.

There were sliding doors thrown back, and they could see the steam of the water boiling out to mix with the muggy night. Insects made mad, swarming assaults on the outside lights, but none of them went near the doors themselves, warned off by ultrasound or anti-insect smells, or maybe there were tiny robots that went from bug to bug and served little cease-and-desist notices. Right about then, Mao would have believed anything. And then she came out, and his entire ability to distinguish the real from the made-up world of the Jo’burg sonko soaps just broke down like the ’Bug had done.

His mother and his grandmother and his aunt were mad-keen for those soaps, which all came out of the busy studios of the South African Republic, which were enjoying a febrile renaissance because there was skilled technical labour there and it was so damn cheap right now. There were about a dozen long-running shows, all set two generations back when these estates had been all bustle, telling the stories of those sonko dynasties of the super-rich, their loves and betrayals. Intellectually, Mao couldn’t fathom why the hell his dirt-poor family got so into the imagined lives of fictional rich people whose troubles and worries never involved not having enough to eat or dying of heatstroke. Emotionally, get him sitting in front of one of those shows and he’d never get up until it was done, and then he’d be wondering for the next day whether Ilena would find out that Jean-Sante had been unfaithful, or whether Klaas would get away with forging the will.

And there was a lot of sex in those shows—or not actual sex, because Grandma wouldn’t stand for that, but a lot of almost-sex, where beautiful people were plainly going at it like rabbits just off camera. And there was always this scene—there was a pool, like this one, and some elegant, perfect rich girl would turn up in a tiny bikini for a midnight swim. Like this.

Mao felt his jaw just drop open and hang there. He had never seen anything like it, not in all his days. Even the actresses of the Jo’burg soaps couldn’t compare. She was close on his own age, and breath-taking: not just that she was stunningly lovely in and of herself, but that she’d had a life of good food and no childhood diseases—or, if all else failed, she’d had surgeons on hand to correct any imperfections. She stepped out to the poolside and dived right in, into all that wealth of water that lay there for no other reason than it might divert her a little, on a hot night when she couldn’t sleep.

She was golden-skinned, and she seemed to glow as she kicked off from the side, as though there were extra invisible lamps just for her. He reckoned that part of it was just that she was so flawless, no cancer-marks, no worm-scars, none of the accumulated detritus of slum living on her, so that every piece of skin shone like stained glass with a light behind it. And part of it was probably his own libido because, Firewalker or not, he was a man of a certain age.

“Hey.” Lupé was staring too, but she had enough possession to elbow him in the ribs, a pain he took gratefully. “We do what, now, exactly?” The three of them had advanced almost to the doorway. The artificial light washed about them, so painfully bright it seemed to exert almost a physical pressure. Hotep looked like she was squinting into the heart of the sun.

Mao watched the girl’s glossy black hair stream behind her as she coursed most of a length underwater. Past the amazement and the semi-erection that was giving him a second reason for his stealthy hunched posture, he felt unutterably sad. He was nineteen and a Firewalker, and he knew damn well this wasn’t going to be that scene in the soap where the rich young daughter falls for the handsome, husky gardener’s boy.

“We find a vehicle. We go,” Hotep said, sounding as though she was trying to keep from eroding, just ablating away in the light.

Someone coughed politely and the three of them virtually leapt into each others’ arms. Mao was imagining guards, machine guns, because those things belonged in his world. What belonged in that made-up soap opera world, of course, was servants. Servants who coughed politely, even though they didn’t need to; who bowed perfectly, even though no amount of money could quite keep them in the immaculate condition their masters would surely have preferred.

“If you would follow me, sir, mesdames.” The voice was rich, pleasant and speaking goat, as the saying went. Meaning European, French in this case, and Mao’s grasp of it was rusty enough that Lupé had to translate. The servant—and Mao’s memory of the soaps furnished the word butler—had a pleasant, avuncular face, simultaneously dark and bright. Dark, because that had been the fashion back then, or so the soaps said; not as dark as Lupé but a lot darker than the swimming girl. Bright, because it was an image, projected on the front of a featureless head of plastic. The butler was a humanoid robot, and Mao had heard about such extravagances from Hotep because the Grand Celeste had hot and cold running automata in every room. He’d never seen one, not even in the soaps.

Its posture wasn’t as human as the shape they’d given it, too stiff, except maybe that was fine for a butler. Possibly it was capable of superhuman feats of mayhem. Possibly it was packed with weapons. Possibly it had an off button behind its ear and they could lump it back to the Ankara and sell it for a fortune.

“Follow you where?” Lupé asked.

The plastic head cocked slightly, the face staticking out of focus for a brief second before re-establishing itself, one eyebrow quizzically raised. “Why, M. Fontaine is keen to meet his guests.”

“Don’t suppose you’ve got a mechanic robot can get our car working?” Lupé asked warily.

“I’m sure the staff can accommodate you,” the robot butler replied. Now it had spoken three times, its tones seemed very repetitive, precisely the same minimal rise and fall, but perhaps that was de rigeur for butlers as well.

“Lead on,” Hotep told it, and it inclined slightly and then turned, striding off.

“Dzam,” Hotep said appreciatively, “look at the balance. I swear that thing’s walking better than the bots up on the Celeste. What the fuck is this place?”

Mao glanced back, as they set off. The girl was propping her elbows up on the poolside, watching him go. He felt a shock of contact as she met his eyes, something that skewered into his chest like a harpoon, leaving a cord connecting them, no matter how far he might walk. Or that was what it felt like to him. She smiled as Lupé hauled him off, and waved at him.

The butler led them into the house, into the cool wash of top-quality air conditioning, discreetly keeping the residual mugginess of the night out just like the butler itself might turn away unwanted callers. The place was bright, unsleeping, every bulb a-glow in its gilded sconce or crystal chandelier. There were paintings of mad things on the walls: great ships under full sail against louring grey seas; cityscapes of white walls and blue roofs over black sand beaches; oddly-proportioned, fantastically-dressed men and women on horseback, chasing a white beast with a spiralling golden horn. There were vases of translucent porcelain inked in blue with intricate scenes of rice farms and clouds and writhing serpents. There was furniture of black wood carved like foliage, like lions, in eye-twisting arabesques. The butler led them past it as though it was commonplace, and each piece of excess and wealth and beauty was lit too brightly, as though there were suns hidden in the heart of every artwork. Mao felt himself reeling inside, as though the very air in this place was too rarefied to keep his brain on the level.

Then they were in one more huge room, where a man was finishing his dinner. He was pale, though not pasty like Hotep; the sun had at least a nodding acquaintance with him. He had a moustache that might almost have been drawn on, a narrow dart of beard at his chin. His forehead was high, his hair flecked with grey above the ears—but artfully, as though he had a master painter apply a few years to him each morning after rising. When he saw the three scruffy Firewalkers he actually smiled, and it was such a pleasant, warming smile that Mao had to work hard not to instantly start liking him. At his shoulder, having apparently eaten already, was a slender woman, her lustrous dark hair pinned back in spiralling coils, her face substituting a certain rigidity for the conventional tells of age. She looked Chinese, Mao reckoned. Even as the butler turned side-on, able to address both parties, the girl from the pool was entering from another door, already dry and with a silk gown thrown over her bikini, thin enough that Mao’s imagination wasn’t taxed overmuch. The two women stood either side of the man in a tableau simultaneously relaxed and too contrived to be natural.

“Sir, your guests,” the butler announced. “M. Nguyễn Sun Mao, Mlle. Mutunbo Lupé, Mlle. Cory Dello. Ladies and gentleman, M. Bastien Fontaine, Mme. Li, Mlle. Juān.” Mao had to shake himself, because he’d seen this scene a dozen times in those soaps, and surely it wasn’t how people really made introductions, cramming all those names in for the benefit of an audience, except apparently it was. Or maybe the butler spent his nights off watching the self-same Jo’burg trash dramas.

The others had twitched, at hearing their names from those insubstantial lips, but to Mao it seemed entirely natural because he was already in some mad dreamworld.

Bastien Fontaine pincered a sliver of some dark meat with his chopsticks and gestured for them to sit with his off hand. There was no room, in that economical gesture, for refusal. Mao had lived his whole life with authority, the people who you played extra nice with because it was their gift whether you worked, whether you ate. Fontaine oozed it from his pores in place of the sweat he was apparently too good for. Mao sat down meekly at the table, raising a cloud of dust from the chair, which looked padded as hell but was surprisingly hard on the backside. A moment later, Juān had sat beside him, elbows casually on the table, smiling.

“So, M. Nguyễn,” she said softly. “Why don’t you tell us something about yourself?”

Lupé was sitting down on the other side of the big table, turning her chair backwards so that if things kicked off, she could kick off with them. Hotep was looking about, skin tight about panicky eyes, and Mao wondered if that was situation-specific or if she always looked like that under the goggles.

But then Juān was leaning in, the gown falling open just a little at the décolletage, and who knew, maybe those soaps had got it right about the welcome a rough kid might receive from a bored debutante stuck out here on the last big house still working?

 

 

MAO WASN’T MUCH use after that, and what happened next behind his back, he had to rely on Lupé to tell him after. Mostly, Lupé was suspicious as hell and it was plain that Mao could give rocks, right now, about their actual job, and Hotep was twitchy as a cockroach on a griddle. Which left her.

Fontaine was still eating, and his petite wife Li stood at his shoulder as though needing permission to sit down. The admittedly eye-catching girl was leaning in to Mao, her shoulder not-quite-touching his. Lupé heard herself give a string of monosyllabic replies to the pleasantries being tossed her way. Just this once, she wanted Hotep to do something unforgivably gauche, make a scene to break through the slender conversational ties that seemed to lie on her like iron wires. The girl looked terrified, though; like she was drawing on a well of mental restraint she’d sure as hell kept hidden through all their months of acquaintance up till now. Right in the middle of getting seriously pissed at her, Lupé suddenly realised that all this, here, must be too much like home for Hotep. She knew the girl had got kicked out of the family hard enough that she fell all the way to Earth, but how had it gone up until that point? Plenty of slaps and shouting behind closed doors, no doubt. Plenty of Just behave like all the other kids, Cory, from furious mother and father, and their defective girl trying and trying, fighting down the thing inside her that was her true self, trying to be a mirror to all those other perfect sonko boys and girls. And failing, always, eventually, but she’d kept trying. Lupé could see, from how she was right now, just how hard she’d tried.

“M. Fontaine,” she said, in her best polite speak-to-the-wabenzi voice. “My friend and I, we’re vai tired, been driving a long time.” And hungry, and surely it was basic politeness to feed your guests, but apparently only the man of the house got to eat tonight. “We’d like to get something from the car and then bed down, if that’s okay?”

There was a pause where Fontaine just looked blank but then he smiled again, that win-you-over expression, those perfect white teeth gleaming like they were lit up under UV. “Of course. Castille will escort you.”

Castille was the robobutler, apparently, snapping into motion at the sound of its name. Lupé didn’t much like leaving Mao in the house, liked even less having the mechanical presence at her elbow. Its face gleamed out like a torch, lighting the way with its superior expression. Behind them, Hotep hopped from foot to foot like she was trying to shake the crazy off before she had to go back inside.

Lupé snagged some chewies and filled a half-dozen canteens from the filtration reservoir, because better that than it all go sour in the tank without power. The air around the garden lights had insects like a broken screen had static. Lupé didn’t know how that weight of bugs could even survive out here with so little water, but they sure as hell did, between naturally economical metabolisms and the genetic engineering work that got loose in the wild. And that made her think of the Protein Complex and the whole what-the-fuckery that had gone down there on M. Okereke’s watch. Was that Fontaine? Can I make that his fault, somehow? But there was no link between them save that both were inexplicable.

“Bastien Fontaine,” Hotep told the interior of the ’Bug, her stiff shoulders telling Lupé just how aware she was of the robot standing a few feet away.

“That’s what the man said, chommie,” Lupé agreed.

“Name doesn’t mean anything to you?”

“Should it?”

Hotep’s face twisted with at least three emotions at once. “He was one of the big backers for the Anchor project and the Celeste. And not just idle sonko money, either. He was like my folks. Made his fortune on the tech markets, revolutionised personal connectivity. They taught him in school, what he’d done. Genius, they called him.”

“Called, past tense?”

“They all think he’s dead,” Hotep said, soft as breathing. “He never got to the Celeste, anyway. Supposed to have died just before the Ankara got going or he’d have been on the first car up the line, surely. And I thought… they did something to him. Some falling out, some clash over who got to wear the big hat, up the line.”

“They taught you that?” Lupé asked sceptically.

“Fuck, no, but I always thought. He was like my… patron saint, you know. Easy to like someone who got elbowed out, who’s supposed to be safely dead.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m not sure I like him anymore. And I want my fucking goggles back.”

Back inside, Lupé turned brightly to Castille’s projected face and said, “Hey, before we turn in, how about you give us a tour of the place? We’re both vai excited to be here, you know.” She tried to look full of girlish enthusiasm, which was presumably something she’d been some time ago, before she turned twelve or so. Castille halted entirely and his face fuzzed out for a second, which was nasty, but then it was back, smiling with that perfect mesh of politeness and bemusement that someone had obviously thought a butler should have, and he was nodding, new instructions received.

“I would be delighted to show you the house,” said the thing that couldn’t really be delighted at anything. “We get so few visitors. M. Fontaine would love you to see it all.”

A half-hour later, she and Hotep were in the guest bedroom, staring at beds the size of apartments, a portrait of a Fontaine-looking old man on the wall, a full-length mirror across from it.

Hotep tore into a chewie, heedless of what flavour its wrapper claimed. “The fuck?” she said when she’d choked down the first mouthful.

Lupé looked at herself in the mirror, connections already reaching towards each other in her head like the fingers of God and Adam. She looked good, in that mirror. She looked fine, no dust from the road on her, like the expensive cleanliness of the house had sucked it all off. Until she looked down at herself and saw it all there in the creases of her overalls. But in the mirror she looked like she’d been polished. And if she hadn’t been looking for the discrepancies, she might have bought into it. But she saw the joins, now. She could see how every part of her had been tweaked by an aesthetic not her own: eyes, hair, waist, hips. And it might have been the lighting, but she could hold up a hand, and her reflection in the mirror brought up its twin that was a good few shades lighter, the fuckers.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked Hotep.

Cory was halfway through guzzling an entire bottle of beer. Lupé was impressed. She hadn’t seen the girl take anything from the ’Bug but now there were two more bottles standing on an antique mahogany sideboard, waiting their turn.

“I’m thinking,” Lupé soldiered on, “that our man Castille just went right past one door on the ground floor, didn’t even acknowledge it was there. So I want to see what’s in it.”

Hotep drained the bottle but didn’t reach for the next one. “You’re on,” she said.

Fontaine was right outside their door when they opened it. Just… standing there. Despite herself, Lupé squeaked when she saw him, luminous in a white blazer. The house lights were dimmer now, gradually fading as the sky outside greyed with pre-dawn. Soon they’d get to test out how good the AC was in here.

“I’m sorry,” she said hurriedly. “We were… not as tired as we thought, M. Fontaine. We were going for a walk, maybe. This is such an exciting house you have. We’ve not seen anything like it, where we’re from.” She was trying hard for childish innocence, all big eyes and wonder, and hoping it wasn’t coming over as flirting.

He smiled at her, though for a moment she wasn’t entirely sure he saw her. “I can have Castille show you around, of course.”

“Oh, he’s already given us the tour,” Hotep broke in. “Look, M’sieur, we’re from Ankara Achouka. You never wanted to go there?”

“I have all I want right here, child.” That same winning smile, so exactingly repeated it was like a facial tic.

“You don’t think your work would be easier,” Hotep pushed, “if you were on the actual ship you designed, where your computers are?”

“My work? All done now. All behind me. Let others shoulder the burden. I would rather spend time with my family.”

Lupé had been sidling in the direction of the offending door, but Fontaine was apparently along for the ride, striding along his corridors, occasionally introducing them to some piece of art or other, a whole catalogue of provenance at his finger-tips for anything and everything in the house, as though they were getting led through an eclectic museum. His newly-pressed blazer was so crisply bright it seemed to light their way as much as the ebbing lamps.

The thought hit Lupé then, when it was too late to ask Hotep discreetly. After all, Fontaine was to have been first up the line from the Anchor Field. Which put him in her grandfather’s generation at the very latest, and likely earlier. Of course, the very rich had means to stave off time and age for a while.

And yet…

Then they were at the door, and she was looking anxiously about for Castille, but the automaton was presumably off bossing about the rest of the robot staff. Although, apart from a few gardener models, they hadn’t seen any others save the antiquated butler.

Lupé was going to indicate to Hotep, by complex signs and insinuations, that she should go take Fontaine off somewhere, talk to him about his illustrious achievements and how much of a goddamn genius he was or something, so she could get to work on the door.

Hotep had other ideas, though. “Where does this go?” she asked, right out, and Lupé cursed wearily. There went subtlety, pissed away on the floor.

But Fontaine just cocked a quizzical eyebrow. “Hmm?” he asked the girl. “Whatever do you mean?”

“This…?” But no matter how Hotep gestured to it, even rattled the handle, Fontaine’s eyes never rested on the door itself, just sliding off to the surrounding walls, the ceiling, anything.

“This was something we picked up in Cuélap,” he told them genially, indicating a blocky, toad-like sculpture on a plinth beside the door. “Peru, you know. It dates to several centuries before the conquest, some god forgotten even by the people the Spanish found there.”

“Get rid of him,” Lupé hissed. She had her tools palmed, ready to make an assault on the lock that she could see but Fontaine, apparently, could not.

Hotep glowered at her, but then she was pointing out something through a doorway, in a further room. “This piece, though,” she said, suddenly speaking goat like a native, all that drawling European talk that sounded so sneering and superior. Fontaine drifted after her, and Lupé was struck by how little he seemed like the master of this house. More like just another exhibit.

It took her a shade under two minutes to persuade the door to yield to her, unleashing a ghostly torrent of air so dry she could feel her eyes and throat withering. After that, she only needed another ten seconds’ glimpse inside before she had it shut again and was running to get the others.