But here was June, being extracted from her suit, and there had been some mistake, obviously, some mix-up outside, because this was not a three-hundred-year-old organism. This was a normal-looking woman, grey-haired and visibly older than Chiku, but not by so much that she looked as if she had climbed out of a gerontology textbook. This was no relic from the dawn of history who just happened to have lucked her way into the present.
June hopped down from the suiting platform. She wore black trousers, a black blouse with a high collar, a jewelled clasp at her throat her only ornamentation. Her skin was tanned, wrinkled and mottled in mildly interesting ways. Her reflexes looked sharp, and her bones showed no sign of shattering as she touched down in nine-tenths of a gee.
‘So – where were we?’ said June.
‘I was expecting . . .’ But Chiku could think of no way to end that sentence that would not make her sound fatuous. ‘What do you want to do with the box?’
‘I doubt they’ll let us take up valuable space in the elevator, unless we’re the last to go.’ June smoothed down her hair where the helmet had mussed it. She wore it in a short bob that covered her ears. ‘Anyway, it’s locked and tagged,’ she went on. ‘I can come back for it, if the worst happens.’
‘I’m curious what scenario would be “the worst” from your perspective.’
Pedro stepped up before June could reply. ‘We should go through, see how long we have to wait.’ He was focused on working stiffness out of his shoulder and did not see June at first, standing behind Chiku. ‘Oh, hello, June – I mean, Ms Wing. It feels as if we haven’t really met until now.’
‘We haven’t, but I think we can dispense with the pleasantries for now.’
They returned to the main holding area, which was a lot less busy than it had been earlier. Other than Chiku, Pedro, June and the three service staff who had accompanied them from the suiting area, there were only six other people present. They were watching the elevator’s progress on the panel over the door, tracking its return to the gondola. The emergency system was still repeating the message they had heard earlier, and red bars and panels were flashing in the walls, floor and ceiling.
‘Not far to go,’ Chiku said.
‘They’ll unload quickly,’ one of the service staff told her, perhaps thinking she needed reassurance. ‘Empty, they drop like a stone – shouldn’t take more than ten minutes to get back to us, and then we’re out of here.’
‘Evacuation status?’ June queried.
‘Proceeding smoothly. There’ll be a shuttle docked and ready by the time we’re topside. Any luck, in a few hours this is all going to look like a massive over-reaction. If the ’bots can stabilise the flotation, we’ll be able to stand down from emergency condition.’
June held up a hand. ‘Wait. I’m hearing from Imris again.’ Her face assumed the slack composure of aug trance, as if someone had just snipped all the nerves under her skin. After a minute she nodded gravely, took a deep breath. ‘Well, that puts a different sheen on things. I don’t think we’ll be needing that elevator now, thanks.’
‘What’s going on?’ Pedro asked.
‘They haven’t managed to stabilise the gondola. Apparently, the robots they sent out to fix the rigging have managed to make things worse, not better. According to Imris, the gondola is sinking faster than before. There’s no chance of stabilising it now. It’s coming down.’
‘How deep can they go?’ Pedro asked.
The technician said, ‘Twenty, thirty atmospheres shouldn’t be a problem. But fifty’s pushing it, and it’s definitely not engineered to survive surface pressure.’
Chiku shook her head. ‘This is too much of a coincidence for it to be an accident. It’s connected to Arethusa, or the construct, or something, isn’t it?’
‘It’s not about us,’ Pedro said. ‘We’re not the ones on that thing, sinking down into the atmosphere.’
‘We’re not,’ June said, ‘but if something up there wanted to hurt us indirectly, that’s one excellent way of going about it.’
‘Something wants to hurt us?’ the technician asked, frowning.
‘Private conversation,’ she said, creasing out a smile. And then she clapped her hands and raised her voice. ‘Everyone – minor change of plan! In light of recent information, we probably don’t want to be under the drop zone for much longer.’
‘It’s got forty kilometres to fall,’ said one of the other passengers, a burly European with a thatch of coppery hair. ‘What are the odds of it landing right on top of us, with the winds and everything?’
‘Very low odds indeed,’ June said brightly. ‘But wherever that gondola falls, the tether’s still anchored to this facility. Now, do you really want to take a chance that there aren’t going to be complications when that thing comes hammering down, like god’s own bullwhip?’
‘It won’t be that bad,’ one of the technicians said. ‘It’s just a cable—’
‘Fine,’ said June. ‘Anyone who doesn’t want to play physics roulette – there are Venus suits waiting for us. There are enough for all of us, aren’t there?’
‘I think so,’ the technician said. ‘I mean, yes, there should be.’
‘Should be?’
‘We have twenty suits, but there’s a mandatory maintenance cycle. They won’t all be available.’
‘There are twelve of us,’ June said, looking around at the party. ‘I’m pretty sure I saw more than twelve suits out there earlier, when we were waiting to come back in.’
‘It’s got to be worth a try,’ Pedro said.
‘Imris again,’ June said, after slipping into aug trance for a moment. ‘Gulliver is detached, he has evacuees aboard and is monitoring the gondola’s descent. Sounds like they’ve lost another balloon . . . we’re looking at fifteen minutes, twenty if we’re lucky. Shall we adjourn? Venus is so lovely at this time of year.’
The others needed little persuasion. By then even the anchorpoint staff had given up on any hope of using the elevator. The tether was screaming anxious error conditions as the stress loadings went off the scale. As they made their way to the suiting area, Chiku’s thoughts flashed back to when they were waiting their turn to come back inside. She had definitely seen other people besides them in suits, but she could not swear she had seen twelve altogether. Had June just been saying that to hurry them along?
There were several independent suiting rooms, each of which contained three or four suits. It was not immediately clear, to Chiku’s eyes, which units were ready to use and which were off-line for overhaul. Prior to being worn, they were partly dismantled anyway, broken down into huge white eggshell sections.
‘Impact in . . . somewhere somewhere between sixteen and twenty minutes,’ June reported. ‘Imris would like to be more precise, but there are a lot of variables.’
‘Can’t he bring that ship down here and let us board from the airlock?’ asked one of the other tourists, hands on her hips.
‘Not unless you fancy squeezing inside a lump of buckled metal the diameter of a drainpipe,’ June said.
‘We have a problem,’ said one of the technicians.
June smiled tightly. ‘And my day just keeps on improving.’
‘Suit availability is . . . less than optimal.’
‘Don’t sugar the pill.’ Her tone was ferociously sweet. ‘What are we looking at? Quick – we need five minutes just to suit up, then we still have to clear the airlock.’
‘We need twelve functioning suits,’ said the technician. ‘We have six good to go. Three more are marginal: they came in with faults, which would normally send them straight into maintenance, but in an emergency we can override those errors and force the suits outside. The rest are . . . too far into the tear-down-and-rebuild cycle. Except for one, maybe, but even that—’
June said, ‘So we have nine suits, which is three fewer than we need. And the clock’s still ticking.’
‘Staying here isn’t an automatic death sentence!’ said the passenger with the
coppery hair. ‘It’s a question of risk-management, that’s all. I’ll take my chances indoors.’
‘So that’s two suits fewer than we need,’ said the technician. ‘Fine – I’ll take my chances here as well. Now we’re only short one unit. Anyone up for drawing straws?’
‘I’ll remain here,’ June said, with an easy little shrug, as if nothing much was at stake. ‘Now we’re good. Nine suits, nine happy campers.’
‘Nine what?’ Chiku asked.
‘You can’t stay here,’ said the woman who had asked about Imris. ‘Not after you made such a big song and dance about how important it is for us to use the suits.’
‘I still think the best odds involve going outside,’ June said, with magnificent equanimity. ‘However, it’s your decision, not mine. I choose to sacrifice my position. I’m three hundred and three years old – at this point, every breath’s a blessing.’
‘I don’t believe you. This is some kind of—’
‘Trick? Yes, I’ve tricked you into an increased chance of survival – how utterly, utterly thoughtless and reprehensible of me. Look, we’re probably down to six minutes by now, maybe less. Do you really want to waste more of them arguing the finer points of personal morality?’
‘This isn’t right,’ Chiku said. ‘We need you . . . I need you. I came here to find you. We can’t just leave you here.’
‘Chiku, will you come here for a moment? The rest of you – decide among yourselves who’s staying and who isn’t, but make it snappy.’
Chiku was breathing hard. She wanted to be outside now, getting as far away as possible from this place. She couldn’t imagine herself making June’s awesome abdication. ‘It might not be too bad—’ she started saying.
‘We’ll know soon enough. Regardless, you need to listen to me very carefully. I’m glad you came to Venus, and that you told me about Eunice and the Tantors. But now we have a problem.’
‘Yes,’ Chiku said, looking at the ceiling, imagining the gondola dropping down on them like a million-tonne chandelier. Sliding down through the clouds of Venus, gathering speed by the second.
‘A much bigger problem than this little debacle,’ June said sternly. ‘The thing you were about to mention out there – I’m pretty sure it knows what you’ve learned from your clone-sister. This is Arachne’s doing – she’s protecting herself the only way she can.’
Chiku thought back to her conversations on the holoship, to Eunice’s dark conviction that an artilect called Arachne had infected her with a wasting virus and pursued her into hiding.
‘Then you know what’s going on.’
‘I know parts of the story, maybe enough to fill in some of the missing pieces. But we don’t have time to swap anecdotes now. You must survive this, Chiku, then make contact with Imris. It shouldn’t be too difficult – he’ll be looking for us, one way or another. And when you see him, you give him a message from me.’
‘What message?’
‘A code. Pleistocene, grapefruit, rococo. Can you remember those three words? Pleistocene, grapefruit, rococo.’
Chiki repeated the words. ‘What do they mean?’
‘Authorisation.’ She held up a finger before Chiku could interrupt. ‘Imris will understand. Then tell him that you must make contact with Arethusa, and Imris will take care of the rest. You can trust her implicitly, tell her everything you know about this business. But be careful, Chiku – more careful than you’ve ever been in your life.’
‘What about Crucible?’
‘Crucible is a lie. What we think is there . . . it’s not the truth, or at least not all of it. The data arriving from that world is false. Whatever Zanzibar and the other holoships think they’re going to find when they arrive . . . it isn’t real.’
Chiku shook her head. ‘You can’t know this for certain. And if it’s true, why haven’t you told anyone?’
‘To know that something is a lie . . . that’s not enough. I needed to find the truth Arachne has concealed behind the lie, whatever it might be. That’s what I’ve been doing all these years – patiently, quietly, beneath the radar of her scrutiny. Obviously, I’ve been managing fairly well until now. But it’s not your fault. I always guessed she’d find me eventually.’
‘This is too much. I can’t just leave you here, knowing all this.’
‘You can and you will. And perhaps I’ll survive. But those three words, Chiku – don’t forget them.’
Chiku swallowed. ‘Pleistocene, grapefruit, rococo.’
‘Very good. Now run along and get into your suit. There can’t be much time left now.’
‘I’m sorry, June.’
‘Don’t be. I’m extremely glad we finally met. Now go.’
Chiku nodded, took June’s hands in hers for a moment, then returned to the suiting area. Her head was ringing with the implications of what she had just been told. But there was no time right now to think any of it through, not until they were safe.
The others had agreed to draw lots for the suits. Someone had fetched nine coffee stirrers from one of the concessions, of which three had been shortened to represent the defective suits. Chiku drew her stirrer and ended up with one of the good suits. Pedro chose one of the compromised units, an arrangement he accepted with cheery indifference. There was no arguing, no swapping of suits. They had all agreed to accept the verdict of the draw.
June and the two other stay-behinds helped with the final phase of suiting. Chiku and Pedro were among the last to leave. June gave Chiku’s suited arm an encouraging pat, sending her toward the airlock. They were running an emergency protocol this time, flooding the lock with Venus atmosphere instantly without first withdrawing the breathable air. They were finally on their way up and out, into the dismal brightness of high noon on Venus.
The technicians knew the prevailing winds and estimated that the gondola would fall somewhere along a forty-kilometre track dictated by the wind vector. So they steered the rovers away from the vector, driving hard, maintaining a straight line as well as the terrain permitted. By now Chiku had lost all sense of how much time was likely remaining, whether they had seconds or minutes. She glanced back and saw that the tether was still angling away from the top of the anchorpoint at forty-five degrees to vertical, maybe fifty. That was good, she told herself. It was an arrow pointing through the clouds, telling them where the gondola had to be. They were already well out of danger, provided the winds held. Even June ought to be safe, if the gondola fell as far downwind as it appeared to be heading.
Then the angle of the tether increased, fifty, five-five degrees, as fast as the second-hand on a watch. Chiku watched it with mesmerised fascination. If the tether was tens of kilometres long, then the object at the end of it was now falling a lot faster than before – not just descending, but plummeting. Something catastrophic must have happened to the gondola, the final failure of its balloons, or perhaps the collapse of the entire structure in the inexorable iron crush of the atmosphere. Or perhaps the tether had simply snapped and was now lashing down under its own weight, while the winds tore the gondola even further away.
A moment later, the tether appeared to vanish, as if it had been ripped free from the ground. It was an illusion. The tether was still plugged into the anchorpoint, but it had whipcracked, blurring like a plucked guitar string, and the energy contained in the tether now had nowhere to go but back into the anchorpoint.
The end ripped free. The tether was gone. Chiku watched nuggets of metal and carbon and concrete smear the sky. And then something as horrible as it was transient – a thing like a whirlpool, carved out of air, corkscrewing in the sky above the anchorpoint. It was glass-edged, betrayed by its own turbulence. It lived for a second, maybe two, then snapped out of existence. Venus, reclaiming the little pocket of Earth the humans had dug into its crust.
It was June dying.
A moment later, Chiku felt an impact shudder through the rover’s floor – the seismic record of the gondola ramming down, the heaviest thing to hit Venus
in recorded history. The crust here was a thin scurf of rock over restless oceans of magma. It tremored, wobbled, the roiling magma beneath it poised to burst through at any moment. Across the planet’s single tectonic plate, measuring devices spiked alarmingly. Nothing like this had been registered in decades.
Gradually the ground vibrations abated and Venus returned to stillness. No magma had broken through anywhere near them. The air above the anchorpoint had quietened, the tether lying slack on the ground. Chiku did not want to think about what it had been like for June and the others. Quick, she hoped. But sooner or later, rescuers would need to send suits or robots into the remains of the anchorpoint to extract the dead.
Chiku, Pedro and the seven other survivors were barely out of harm’s way themselves. The rovers had carried them ten kilometres from the anchorpoint along another bulldozed trail before emergency advisories told them that rescue was on the way. People and machines were travelling to them overland from surface settlements, but the nearest of those were more than eight hundred kilometres away. At the same time, hardened shuttles were preparing to drop suited rescuers and proxies nearer to the disaster site. The closest gondolas were sending assistance down their tethers, but again, the overland distances between their anchorpoints and the survivors were as immense and incomprehensible as the gaps between galaxies. The odds were against them surviving until help reached them.
But it transpired that a different sort of help was on its way. Providers had been tasked with a construction project only a couple of hundred kilometres from the anchorpoint and the huge armoured robots were approaching in seven-league strides.
Chiku thought of the Providers she had seen on Earth, like the pair supervising the renewal of the bridge over the Tagus. Machines so huge and slow that sometimes they became part of the landscape, a background feature the eye edited out. There were thousands of them on Earth, assisting with the most arduous projects – new cities, aqueducts, roads and spaceports. Tens of thousands more were spread throughout the solar system – machines big enough to move mountains, almost literally.