On the Steel Breeze

  ‘I think that’s her,’ Chiku said in a low voice.

  They were drinking coffee in one of the observation lounges, clouds of sackcloth grey testing themselves against the windows, lightning storms pulsing somewhere deeper inside the weather system. Pedro followed her gaze to a small and exceedingly old-looking woman, impeccably dressed, in the company of two expensively groomed younger people. They were gathered around a low table, pointing into some invisible abstraction occupying the space between them, negotiating some fine point of business that might have had nothing at all to do with Venus.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ Pedro said.

  Chiku called up an aug query. This woman was not June Wing, according to the identifiers. But June had been a wily cyberneticist, exactly the sort of person who might have been able to move around under a false signifier.

  ‘It must be her. The aug isn’t placing her anywhere else in the station, so who else can that be?’

  ‘The aug said she was here when we were on our way,’ Pedro pointed out. ‘Why would it change its mind?’

  Eventually the woman stood, rising with the smooth motion that suggested she might be wearing an exo, and left the two younger people. Chiku considered following her, but she had not got very far with that thought when a tall gowned man in a fez loomed over their table.

  ‘Chiku Akinya? I am Imris Kwami.’

  Chiku tried to think of something clever to say, something that would give her the upper hand, but the moment failed her.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘I doubt you’ve heard my name before,’ Kwami said, easing his lengthy frame onto a vacant stool. He smiled at Pedro with a nod. ‘If it had, you would probably have run an aug search on me as well as my employer.’

  ‘You work for June?’ Chiku asked.

  ‘Yes. And I believe you were just about to approach that woman and ask her if she might be June?’

  Chiku frowned. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘A hundred years of practice yields a certain level of competence in such matters.’

  Chiku did not feel good about being this transparent, this open to interpretation. ‘Then if that woman isn’t June, what is she?’

  ‘Nobody – and I mean that in the kindest possible sense. I am certain that she is actually a very nice lady. I would gladly say that she was a decoy we had employed for exactly that purpose, but if you had got a little nearer you would have seen that she really does not resemble June to any large degree.’

  Pedro leaned in. ‘Then where is she?’

  ‘Downstairs,’ Kwami said, as if this explained everything.

  ‘I thought we were on the lowest level,’ Chiku said, glancing down at the floor.

  ‘That’s a colloquialism, I think,’ Pedro said.

  ‘Correct, my young sir. June went down to the surface of Venus about twelve hours ago. I do not suppose you thought to confirm her whereabouts more recently than that?’

  ‘She isn’t in one of the domes, we know that much,’ Chiku said.

  ‘When I say surface, that is precisely my meaning. She is in a surface suit, on one of her scouting expeditions. This is why we have come to Venus. When she is done, we will leave.’

  ‘I’m totally confused now,’ Pedro said.

  ‘I did some background reading on the way over,’ Chiku said. ‘She’s collecting things, gathering them up for a museum or something.’

  ‘Robotic relics of the early space age,’ Kwami said, sweeping his hands overhead as if a banner floated above him. ‘This is her mission in life, the latest of many. Perhaps the last and greatest of them all.’

  ‘How long will she be down there?’ Chiku asked.

  ‘It could be many tens of hours. It is a very tedious business, travelling to and from the surface. You do not simply pop down there for a five-minute stroll.’

  Pedro gave an easy shrug. ‘We can easily wait a day or two, longer if necessary.’

  ‘I am very happy for you, but I am afraid that is not how it works with my employer. She has left me with certain instructions, you see.’ This strange, thin, jovial man of indeterminate age touched his nose and winked. ‘You must understand that she is fully aware of your interest, your intentions, your approach on the loop-liner. She knows that there is more than one of you. She knows also that you have lately had contact with the merfolk.’

  ‘I see,’ Chiku said, with a small private shiver.

  ‘June is very good at detecting interest in herself. You should not be surprised by this. You only have to think her name and she will know it. I exaggerate, of course, but only a little. A moment, please.’ Kwami reached into a pocket and withdrew a small pale-green box. He popped the lid and extracted a lilac mote, which he then passed to Chiku. ‘This was formulated by June. You may open it, if you wish.’

  ‘We don’t want much of her time,’ Pedro said. ‘If she knows as much about us as you say, then she also knows that. Also that we’re not up to any funny business.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ Kwami said, smiling. ‘But I am afraid June was very particular in her wishes. If you wish to speak to her, you must join her down there. She may speak to you, or she may not, depending on her mood. But there is no other way.’

  ‘We do need to speak,’ Chiku said. She fingered the mote, unsure of the specific etiquette in this situation.

  ‘Please,’ Kwami encouraged.

  She cracked the mote. As always, there was an instant before the cargo of emotions began to unpack itself. There was no warmth here, only a stern and forbidding prickliness. She sensed a provisional willingness to be approached, but only on June Wing’s very specific terms. There would be no negotiation and she made no promises. There was also a continuous, low-level drone of constant background dread. It was not that June Wing was frightened, Chiku understood, but that she herself ought to be. The mote was a final warning, a chance to stop now before she went any deeper.

  Know what you are getting into.

  ‘Well, that’s brightened my day,’ Chiku said grimly.

  ‘Your suits are already reserved, as well as an elevator slot,’ Kwami replied. ‘You can be on the surface in a jiffy.’

  ‘People die down there, don’t they?’ Pedro asked.

  ‘Only now and then,’ Kwami said cheerfully.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The elevator was a black bobbin that travelled up and down Tekarohi’s tethering cable. Embarking for Cythera, Chiku thought as they stepped aboard along with a small gaggle of fellow travellers. They were not wearing the surface suits yet, and the forty-kilometre descent would take long enough that the elevator came equipped with a small bar, lounge area and toilet facilities. There were two tiny windows, more like inspection ports than anything that would provide a view. Imris Kwami had waved them off with assurances that everything had been taken care of on the surface, and that the two suits would know where to go.

  ‘Can we trust him?’ she asked once they were under way, sliding down the cable at about two kilometres a minute. A display above the door showed increments of altitude, temperature, pressure.

  ‘Bit late to be worrying about that now!’ Pedro was fingering the table top, perhaps pondering a veneer or lamination that might be suitable for his purposes. His way of coping with the situation, Chiku thought.

  It was not hers.

  Yet down they went, the elevator made ominous little ticking sounds as it transitioned into denser and hotter atmosphere, like a submarine sinking into some acidic boiling trench of the deepest, blackest ocean. Everyone made a great show of not being fazed by these little structural complaints, not even when they amplified to clangs and thuds, as if some very angry thing, presently outside, was trying to break in.

  Ten atmospheres . . . fifty . . . The elevator shook as they passed through some horsetail of wind shear. Then deeper still. Seventy atmospheres, eighty. Smoother now, heavier, as if the atmosphere itself was entirely too sluggish to bother with anything as frivolous as weather. There was only this one car shutt
ling up and down the tether, day in and day out, year after year. Chiku supposed it had become quite adept at handling these pressure changes by now. There was no boat as safe as an old boat, or so the saying went. Perhaps this rule could be safely ascribed to elevators as well, like the one in Santa Justa.

  Eventually the car reached zero altitude. The view through the windows went dark as they slid into the anchorpoint compound on the surface. They were at ninety-five atmospheres, seven hundred and fifty kelvins of temperature.

  The elevator halted and something clamped it tight. More clangs and clattering followed, and then the door opened. Chiku and Pedro followed the passengers out into the anchorpoint’s receiving area. It was a starkly unwelcoming place, a little too warm, with dim industrial lighting, scabbed grey walls and a persistent rhythmic throb of air circulators. A musician sat cross-legged on carpets in one corner, attempting to tune a kora. Or perhaps, Chiku decided, this was his actual playing style.

  Some passengers with expensive luggage were haranguing a tourist official, complaining that the bus to take them to the nearest domed community was running hours late. Their items of luggage, as eager to be moving as their owners, squabbled among themselves. Some other passengers were waiting to go back up the tether, sitting on metal benches or hovering around one or other of the food concessions. Someone was asleep, stretched out on a bench with their coat over their head. Their snoring, Chiku realised, was the source of the annoying rhythmic throb. It had nothing to do with air circulators.

  The suiting area was down one long, sloping tunnel, then up another. When they arrived, someone else was being helped into their suit, which was assembled around them like some contraption of Medieval torture. The process involved robots and winches and complex power tools. Chiku had never seen anything quite as barbaric as a Venus surface suit.

  ‘Why would anyone bother with these things?’ Pedro asked. ‘Aren’t they happy going out in a rover, with some nice seats and a bar?’

  ‘It’s for the bragging rights, mainly,’ Chiku said. ‘So they can say they’ve done something more dangerous and real than their friends.’

  ‘Even if they run a real risk of dying?’

  ‘That’s the downside.’

  ‘I can think of another. Would now be the right time to mention that I’m very slightly claustrophobic?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think so. It’s all right for you, though – you’ve had plenty of time in spacesuits.’

  ‘Not like these, Noah. Even the junk we had to wear in Kappa were more comfortable than these look.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Pedro said, a certain terseness colouring his tone. ‘And for the record, I’m not Noah. Noah is not your husband. Noah is the husband of Chiku Green, this other woman I’ve never met, and never want to meet.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, with obviously forced magnanimity. ‘I suppose it’s to be expected, when you go around swapping memories like pairs of gloves.’

  Chiku thought better of responding.

  The suits were essentially ambulatory tanks. They were gloss white, like lobsters dipped in milk. They had no faceplates, just camera apertures. Instead of hands they had claws. Their cooling systems were multiply redundant. That was the critical safety measure, Chiku learned in the briefing. Death by pressure was so rare that it had only happened a few times in the entire history of Venus exploration. But hundreds, thousands, had died of heat shock when their coolers overloaded.

  Once they were installed in the suits, they spent a few minutes learning basic skills such as walking and object manipulation. Chiku kept flashing back to her time in Kappa, how easy it had been compared to these hulking contraptions. On the other hand, she now felt invulnerable.

  That confidence faded as soon as the airlock doors slammed shut behind them and the atmosphere roared in. As temperature and pressure climbed to surface norms, the suit told her how much work it was having to do to keep her comfortable. Like the elevator, it issued noises of protestation. Systems pushed from green into amber. There was very little cooling capacity to spare once the suit was running at normal workload.

  The outer doors opened and they waddled across a parking area to their waiting rover, which was essentially a chassis on wheels. They climbed aboard and assumed standing position within railed enclosures. The vehicle appeared to know where to take them. They rolled up a ramp into the searing, overcast oppression of noon on Venus. The terrain was not alien to Chiku’s eyes – she had seen mountain areas just as arid as this on Earth, with a similar undramatic topography. The ground was rocky, broken, strewn with boulders and the fragments of boulder. No vegetation, of course, and no evidence that any liquids had ever flowed here. The colours, relayed through the suit’s camera systems, were muted, greys and ochres and off-whites, a smear of paling yellow dusting everything, like a layer of old varnish that had begun to discolour.

  The rover traversed a winding track, rocks and debris bulldozed into loose flanks along either side. Chiku swivelled around, still nervous of damaging the suit, and spied the anchorpoint from which they had emerged. She watched the bobbin of the elevator slide up the taut whip line of the tether until it was lost in the murk of a low cloud deck. These conditions were optimal on Venus: low clouds, no sky, visibility down to a couple of kilometres.

  At length, the rover steered off the main track onto a rougher trail that wound around the side of a dormant volcano, and then they came downslope into a broad depression hemmed on all sides by cracked terrain, fissured in concentric and radial patterns like the wrinkled skin around an elephant’s eye. This spider-web feature, according to the terrain overlay, was called an arachnoid, caused by the deformation and relaxation of the surface under the strain of upwelling magma. Aside from the road itself and the odd transponder pole or piece of broken rover, there was scant evidence of human presence beyond the compound. Near the base of the depression, gleaming in the perpetual half-light, was another vehicle. Like their own rover, it was an open chassis on wheels. It had parked on a gentle slope. Not far from it, further down the slope, was another figure in a Venus suit, attending to something on the ground, almost in the shade of an overhanging cliff a few tens of metres high, formed where one part of the arachnoid had sunk or elevated itself relative to the other.

  ‘June,’ Chiku said, excited and apprehensive at the same time. ‘It’s her. There’s even an aug tag.’

  ‘Open the general channel, see if she’ll talk,’ Pedro said.

  ‘Of course she’ll talk. We came all the way here, didn’t we?’ But she opened the channel anyway. ‘June Wing? It’s Chiku Akinya. I think you’re expecting us.’

  A voice said: ‘Park by my rover, then get out and walk over to me, very carefully. I don’t want you stomping all over this site like a couple of gorillas.’

  ‘Thrilled to meet you, too,’ Pedro said under his breath, but doubtless loud enough that June would have heard it.

  Chiku took manual control and halted the rover by the other vehicle. They stepped out of their enclosures and lowered carefully down onto the Venusian surface. The atmosphere of Venus laid siege to her suit, probing its defences for a weakness.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to see us,’ Chiku said as they made their way downslope.

  ‘I agreed to nothing.’

  ‘But Mister Kwami said—’

  ‘Unless Imris Kwami was failing in his responsibilities, which after a century of employment seems highly unlikely, he made no promises on my behalf. I told him to make it clear that if you didn’t visit me here, you’d have no hope of speaking to me when I returned to the gondola.’

  ‘I opened your mote.’

  ‘Good for you. What you chose to read into it is your business, not mine.’

  ‘We’re here, aren’t we?’ Pedro asked.

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘Mister Kwami told me that you were aware of my dealings with the seasteaders,’ Ch
iku said. ‘If that’s the case, then you’ll also have a shrewd idea what Mecufi and his friends want from you.’

  ‘The Panspermians, or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, burnt their bridges with Arethusa two hundred years ago,’ June declared. ‘It’s a little late now to be seeking rapprochement.’

  Chiku said, ‘Regardless, they’d like to make contact again, if they can. Are you still in touch with her?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m guessing it’s highly likely, if Arethusa’s still alive. And you should definitely speak to me. You knew my mother and father. You helped them.’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  Chiku and Pedro had come within a few paces of the other suited figure. June was examining something on the ground. The suits’ articulation did not allow kneeling, but by bowing at the waist and extending the telescopic forearms, the wearer could handle rocks and other objects. June was busy with a piece of buckled metal about the size of a beach ball, partially dug into the ground as if it had rammed into it at speed.

  ‘The thing is—’ Chiku started saying.

  ‘Do you want to help, or are you just going to stand there gawping?’

  Chiku moved around to the side, keeping her distance from June’s backpack. The glowing exhaust vents were rimmed cherry red, a heat haze boiling off them.

  ‘What is it?’ Chiku asked doubtfully, not sure she wanted the answer.

  ‘Remains of a Russian probe. Been here the thick end of four centuries, just waiting to be found. I’ve been coming back to this area for years, convinced it had to be around here somewhere.’

  ‘Pretty lucky to find it like that,’ Pedro said.