On the Steel Breeze

  ‘That doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense.’

  ‘Welcome to politics.’

  ‘But why would she do that? We already had the research lines – why would she outlaw them, then start them up again in secret?’

  ‘To curry favour with the other holoships, obviously. To be seen to be doing the right thing while conducting business as usual behind the scenes. Because secretly, deep down in her soul, Sou-Chun Lo is scared shitless. As well she should be.’

  ‘This is just speculation.’

  ‘I wish it was. From time to time, I receive these . . . visitors. They’re always civilians, never anyone claiming to act on the Assembly’s behalf. They say they’re lawyers or journalists, working to build a case in my defence. In order to help me, they need more details about what happened in Kappa. So of course I oblige. Slowly, though, the conversations begin to take peculiar turns. Odd non sequiturs lead to detailed questions regarding physics or mathematics, as if that was the point of their visit all along. And would you say your problems stemmed from a miscalculation of the capture cross-section, in failing to allow for all third-order terms? That kind of thing.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why would they do that?’

  ‘Because there’s something going on and they don’t have all the answers. Or any of them, truth be told. And of course I play along, because even though I’m being used, it amuses me intellectually.’ Travertine shifted vis weight on the chair. ‘The ruse is utterly transparent – they’re not trying to build a case for my defence. They’re trying to repeat my experiment.’

  Chiku absorbed that. Even allowing for Travertine’s cynical predisposition, it had the nasty taint of plausibility.

  ‘It’s possible you’re reading too much into a few innocent questions.’

  ‘I’m not. And it explains why they’re so keen to prevent me from committing suicide – I’m still useful to them.’

  ‘All right. Suppose you’re not making this up or imagining it and there really is something going on, with or without Sou-Chun’s authorisation – is that really so terrible? You might not like being lied to, but at least it means that someone’s finally taking this stuff seriously.’

  ‘We might still be too late.’

  ‘But surely it’s better to be doing something rather than nothing, even if it’s clandestine. Who knows – they might find a practical application for whatever they discover long before we figure out how to slow down something as massive as Zanzibar.’

  Travertine had been looking at vis hands, which were raw around the knuckles from some sort of physical labour, but now ve looked up sharply.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Chiku said, feeling as if her thoughts were written on the outside of her skin, scrolling like a newsfeed. ‘A ship or something.’

  For long moments the two of them just looked at each other, measuring time by the ticks of the black bracelet, each pulse a reminder of Travertine’s forced mortality.

  ‘You must have wondered.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Why I never used that broken promise against you. You’ve always had principles, Chiku – it was strange to me when they deserted you so rapidly. I heard rumours that Utomi blackmailed you into that vote, that if you’d gone against the majority verdict you’d never have been granted skipvover.’ Travertine was studying Chiku with a particular shrewdness now. ‘That never washed with me – those principles of yours again. Skipover would have meant a lot to you, but enough to go back on a promise? That’s not the Chiku I knew.’

  ‘We all change.’

  ‘And you changed so much that you were willing to break a promise and risk being exposed by me?’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve had something so significant to occupy that fancy brain of yours, these past forty years.’

  ‘Yes, and while we’re on the subject . . . why forty years, exactly? The public files are transparent, you know, even to a pariah like me. You and Noah and the children were granted sixty years, not forty, so what brings you out so soon?’

  ‘I was just dying to reminisce with you about the old days.’

  ‘I bet you were. But let’s turn things around for a moment. Did you ever wonder why I didn’t go public with the map, the sphinxware, the stuff under Kappa?’

  ‘You’d have been censured for not disclosing it as soon as you discovered it.’

  ‘Fair point, but given that I was already being tried for causing the deaths of two hundred and fourteen people, do you seriously think I’d have lost any sleep over that? Be real, Chiku – they couldn’t have punished me more, so what did I have to lose by telling them the rest? They’d already decided the death penalty was too much of a kindness.’

  ‘Fine, I give up.’

  ‘I didn’t use that information against you because I wanted to see what your next move would be. I decided to play the long game: take my punishment, become this thing that I’m turning into and watch what happened. I’ve been watching you for forty years, waiting for something to happen. And now you’re out of skipover, without your family, and you don’t look happy – I can’t help but wonder why.’

  ‘Maybe I’m unhappy that you’re in my kitchen. Maybe I’m unhappy that in forty years I’ve been on ice, and we’re still no closer to slowdown. Maybe I’m unhappy because I somehow have the idea this is all my fault, as if I’m to blame for your woes.’

  ‘All good reasons to be miserable, Chiku.’ With a scrape, ve pushed back the chair. ‘Well, I’ll be on my way. It’s been lovely to catch up. You’ll be going back into skipover at some point, won’t you?’

  ‘If I choose to,’ Chiku said.

  ‘I envy you the possibility. I’m dying to know what we’ll find when we get to Crucible. Literally, as it happens.’

  ‘It’s still a long way off.’

  ‘But closer than when we started this conversation,’ Travertine said.

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘You crucified me for a reason. Maybe I’m being too generous, but I don’t think it was just so you could get that skipover assignment. Or if it was, you wanted skipover for some other reason than the one everyone believes. Something bigger than personal advancement, bigger than taking care of your family and making sure your lovely children have a shot at seeing our destination. The problem is, for the life of me I can’t think what that might be, other than that it must have something to do with whatever you found in Kappa. Which brings me back to my original question – why are you awake now? You’re carrying something, Chiku. You look like a woman with a lot on her mind.’

  ‘It’s called responsibility.’

  ‘I know all about that. It’s seriously overrated.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  She risked moving her head, surveying the foreign anatomy in which she now resided. It was a golem, almost certainly the same antique proxy she had seen at Eunice’s camp. It had been inoperable then, but she had had time to effect the necessary repairs. Not that Eunice had wasted any effort on making the proxy look more like a human being. Chiku’s new torso was an open-framed chassis from which her spindly, multijointed arms and legs hung awkwardly. She could see right through herself.

  ‘What kept you?’

  She tracked around towards the sound of the voice. Eunice was a little further along the trail, squatting down and scraping at a rock. She had the contented and carefree look of a beachcomber.

  ‘How did you know I’d be coming?’ Chiku asked.

  ‘Ways and means. The companion helped a lot – you should thank your daughter on my behalf.’

  Chiku remembered the book she had given Eunice on her last visit before entering sleepover.

  ‘The companion was meant to allow you access to outside data, not encourage you to plant messages on my desk and set up ching binds. Are you sure this isn’t traceable?’

  ‘You trusted it, didn’t you?’ Eunice stood up, a trowel in one hand. ‘I’ve been creative, yes. That’s what I
do. I also knew you’d come to see me, sooner or later. The public nets told me that Chiku Akinya had emerged from skipover, so it was only a matter of time before you found my message with the ching coordinates. I take it there were no difficulties in making the bind?’

  Chiku experimented with some walking. It was awkward at first, but after a few stumbling paces she settled into a rhythm that felt almost natural. ‘Are you certain this is secure?’

  ‘Very. Where advanced information technologies are concerned, I have a slightly unfair advantage: I am one.’ Eunice beckoned her onwards. ‘Come. I was nearly done here anyway. Let’s head back to the camp.’

  Chiku obeyed, quickening her pace. They were on the same side of the valley where she had emerged on the day she fell down the slope and met Eunice for the first time. To her eyes, nothing of consequence had altered during the intervening forty years. A few more black patches in the sky, perhaps some changes to the patterning of trees and open ground along the valley floor, but nothing dramatic. And Eunice, of course, showed no visible trace of time’s passage.

  And yet, Chiku felt, she was . . . different, somehow.

  ‘You went to a lot of trouble with the proxy. I don’t really need a body to be here.’

  ‘I don’t like talking to ghosts. It might not be much of a body, but it’s the best I could manage.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not complaining.’

  As they followed the zigzagging trail, Chiku scanned the valley for Tantors, but they were as elusive as before.

  ‘I’m pleased you came back from the dead,’ Eunice said. ‘I was beginning to wonder.’

  ‘I said I’d be back.’

  ‘Yes, and in the entire history of civilisation, no one has ever gone back on a promise. The companion gave me some insights into wider developments beyond the chamber, but it didn’t make me omniscient. I couldn’t trust the public records to tell me the truth, so I had no way of knowing what had really happened to you.’

  Eunice paused to kneel down and fix her shoelaces, an oddly human gesture, strikingly at odds with her true being, Chiku thought. How, she wondered, could a machine neglect to tie its shoelaces properly in the first place?

  ‘Your husband, Noah. The children. Are they all right?’

  ‘Fine. They’re still asleep.’

  ‘Noah knew of your plans to wake early?’

  ‘No. I think he’d have tried to talk me out of it, so the simplest thing was not to tell him.’

  ‘But you trust Noah. He knows about me. We’ve met.’

  ‘I’m simply trying to avoid unnecessary complications.’

  ‘Aren’t we all? And your faculties, since you came out of skipover – no problems in that department?’

  ‘Nothing other than this weird delusion that I met some talking elephants once.’

  She straightened after tying her laces, she shot a sly smile back at Chiku. ‘I hate to break it to you, but that part was real. I’m very glad you made it, anyway. How’s the mood on the street, beyond the chamber? How are the vox populi voxing?’

  ‘Things are a bit tense,’ Chiku decided.

  ‘Understandable. By my estimate, we’re twenty-two light-years from Earth. The horror – a skip and a jump and we’ll be on Crucible’s doorstep! That’s when people will really start getting restless.’

  ‘Some of us already are. I heard back from Chiku Yellow.’ She made the proxy tap an iron finger against its iron head. ‘She sent me her memories. Do you want the bad news, or the really bad news?’

  ‘Now there’s a choice.’ But the glibness quickly dropped away. ‘How bad is “really bad”?’

  ‘Oh, the usual. Around Earth, there’s a near-omniscient artificial intelligence prepared to kill to protect itself. Around Crucible, meanwhile, there are machines lying to us about what we’ll find when we get there.’ Chiku surveyed the closest treeline. ‘I haven’t seen any Tantors. I hope nothing bad’s happened to them.’

  ‘In forty years? Nothing more than the expected ups and downs within any closed population. Actually, that’s not quite true. Something has happened, but it’s too soon to tell what it’s going to mean. The Sess-na is parked nearby. When we get to the camp, I’d like you to meet Dakota. She’s young, as they go – her mother was barely out of adolescence when you were here last time. They go through generations like wildfire, elephants do.’

  ‘They don’t live as long as us,’ Chiku said.

  ‘Not yet,’ Eunice said, ‘but stranger things have happened.’

  If the camp had altered in the years since she had last seen it, there was no outward sign of it. The same clearing, the same clover-leaf arrangement of drab tented domes. She could see evidence of repairs, methodically executed, but she might not have noticed them on her last visit. She looked up at the sky as they broke through into the clearing, measuring it against her memories of Lisbon and the household. Fretted by branches, it blazed a deep Tintoretto blue.

  ‘Forgive my poor hospitality,’ Eunice said, ‘but there’d be no point offering you anything to drink.’ All the same, she invited Chiku to sit down. ‘Dakota will be along shortly. Now tell me about Ocular, and Arachne.’

  ‘How much do you remember?’

  ‘A bit more than last time.’ She patted something on the fold-up table, and Chiku realised it was the companion. ‘You were right about this – it helped a lot. Being able to tap into Zanzibar loosened some old memories. But there was still a limit to what I could find out.’

  ‘We’ve all had to tread carefully.’ Chiku reached for the companion, remembering the guilt she had felt when she took it from Ndege. ‘Arachne is everything you feared. Another artilect, very powerful, deeply distributed. She began as the controlling intelligence of the Ocular device, but she’s become much, much more than that. She’s either duplicated herself hundreds of times over or consolidated many other artilects under her control. She has a million faces, and she’s everywhere. There’s almost nothing she can’t influence – machines, animals, practically every aspect of the Surveilled World. She murdered June Wing, almost killed Imris Kwami, probably had a hand in Pedro Braga’s accident. I was very lucky to survive.’

  Eunice had taken the seat opposite her. She nodded slowly, as if everything Chiku was saying merely confirmed her deepest anxieties. ‘And yet, no one realises?’

  ‘Life goes on. The Mechanism’s reach is total, but very few suspect there’s an outside intelligence pulling its strings. Why should they care? Life is good – much better than in the caravans. Limitless resources, prosperity and peace for all.’

  ‘You said “very few”.’

  ‘June Wing knew. A few more have their suspicions. Arethusa, the merfolk, maybe others. I’m not sure if they fully understand what they’re up against, but they know something’s not right.’

  ‘And yet even those who know or suspect daren’t speak openly about it.’

  ‘Even if they were believed, what good would it do? Arachne’s confined herself to a few easily explained deaths so far, but if she felt truly threatened . . . it doesn’t bear thinking about, Eunice. If she was forced to defend herself against more than a handful of people, she might kill millions. Look what she was prepared to do on Venus! Nowhere would be safe. Cities, moons . . . she has access everywhere where the Mechanism has influence. And that would only be the start. It’s within her power to do much, much worse than that.’

  ‘And yet she tolerates the status quo. She’s been happy to remain undetected for centuries, which would suggest that she doesn’t seek humanity’s annihilation – merely some kind of coexistence.’

  ‘While it suits her,’ Chiku said. ‘When it doesn’t, who knows? When the holoships approach Crucible, everyone will see we’ve been lied to. There’ll be no explaining that away.’

  ‘Tell me what you’ve learned.’

  So Chiku did, as concisely as she could – speaking first of Mandala, of the probability that it was real, then of the false patterns introduced into the Ocular results, and ho
w June Wing had managed to recover a glimpse of the unadulterated data. She spoke of the hazily resolved structures circling Crucible, and how she had gained a sharper view of them from the household.

  ‘They’re alien things, that’s all we know. Probes, maybe, sent to study Mandala. If it can attract the attention of one intelligence across light-years of space, why not another?’

  And then Chiku told Eunice about the blue lights, the beams that appeared to be a richly encoded optical communications medium, shining out from Crucible like the spokes of a wheel.

  ‘One thought has occurred to me,’ said Chiku. ‘Something pushed Arachne into becoming the thing she is. Could it have been something to do with that blue light? A message so powerful that it forced her into lying, into spinning this fiction?’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible, but I’m not the fount of all knowledge. Some questions you’ll have to answer for yourself.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Chiku asked. ‘Even if we find a way to slow down, what kind of welcome can we expect? I’ve been thinking about sending some kind of advance expedition, but we’re no closer to being able to do that now than we were forty years ago. This stupid moratorium.’

  ‘Speaking of which, I’ve been reading up on your friend.’

  ‘Travertine? I don’t think “friend” is the word any more.’

  ‘Associate, then. You were close, once, and you had an influence on vis trial. That’s all in the public files – testimonies, court transcripts and so on. Travertine’s what we used to call a loose cannon. Not that I’m old enought to remember when the phrase originated, I hasten to add.’

  ‘It’s not funny, Eunice. I’m worried about Travertine, worried about what ve’ll do. Ve’s persona non grata since the trial, but ve could destroy me – and endanger you and the Tantors.’