‘Perhaps if you’d remained in the Assembly, you could have steered policy in a different direction.’
‘You overestimate my influence.’
‘Maybe, but you’d have had all those years to increase it. The problem now is that there’s no one around to counterbalance the likes of Sou-Chun Lo. And there’s not much chance of you changing anything for the better in a few weeks or months or however long you plan to spend awake, either.’ The construct stepped away from its work, making a very human business of brushing its palms clean on its knees. ‘You are going back into skipover, aren’t you?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Seems to me you have a couple of choices here, Chiku. Let me spell them out for you. You could go directly to the highest authority within the caravan and tell them everything you know. That’d be an enormous gamble, though – not just with your reputation, but with the fates of millions of souls. If Teslenko and the others decide to ignore or silence you, all that trouble you and your counterparts have gone to will have been for nothing.’
‘Which is exactly why I’m not telling anyone in authority. Especially not the way things are now.’
‘So that leaves you with option two – return to skipover and hope things have improved by the time you wake. What year will it be then?’
‘2408,’ Chiku said.
‘Less than thirty years before we reach Crucible. Cutting things a bit fine, aren’t you? You might be right about Travertine’s secret research programmeme, but who knows? Meanwhile you’ll have contributed nothing.’
‘I have my family to consider.’
‘You won’t have a family if the Providers turn on us.’
‘You’re a machine. You can make these easy judgements, balance one thing against another as if it’s some kind of mathematical game. But this is my life, Eunice – my husband, my children.’
‘To whom you’ve already lied once. Face it, Chiku – deep down you know where your priorities lie. You love Noah and your daughter and son.’ Eunice, her pottering done, had returned to the table. She took the chair opposite Chiku and planted her elbows on the table-top. ‘More than that, though, you love the idea of them not being dead.’
‘You really are a robot.’
‘I’m a damaged simulation’s best guess at itself, but try not to hold that against me.’
‘I don’t think you’re too far off the mark,’ Chiku said coldly. But then, in a spasm of generosity, she added, ‘I’ve brought you something, all the way from Earth. From Hyperion, actually.’
‘What’s the significance of Hyperion?’
‘It’s where I saw your body.’
‘Ah.’ She nodded slowly. ‘Well, that’s not something you hear every day. Consider my interest tweaked.’
‘You were dead. A woman-shaped ice sculpture, pulped at the cellular level. Beyond any hope of medical revival.’
‘Nicely descriptive.’ She made a little spiralling motion with her hand. ‘Continue.’
‘Arethusa found you – brought you back from deep space. She couldn’t extract much useful structure from your head, but she gave Chiku Yellow everything she managed to salvage. Chiku Yellow gave it to me. It’s in my private files. Could the neural patterns help you?’
‘I don’t know. I have one type of architecture, those are from another. Cut me, I bleed algorithms. I’m not sure how neural patterns will help me.’
‘You’ll have to figure out what to do with the data. If you can do something with it, restore some lost part of yourself . . . then some of what happened back there, it won’t have been wasted.’
‘Thank you, Chiku.’
‘You almost sound sincere.’
‘I almost feel sincere. You took a risk to bring this to me, didn’t you?’
‘It was a risk to transmit any information back to the caravan, including my memories. I hope it turns out to be worth it.’
‘We shall see,’ Eunice said. And then, as if her words had not carried sufficient weight, repeated: ‘We shall see.’
Even though she had been away from the world for so long, doors still opened for Chiku. There were things she could do, places she could visit, that were barred to the common citizenry or required the negotiation of tedious administrative obstacles – procedural hurdles that could eat up weeks or months of a life. For Chiku, it was principally a matter of deciding where she wanted to go, and when, and then summoning the nerve to do what she planned. In the new regime, no public movement was exempt from tracking and recording. In the early weeks of her revival her fellow politicians would be keeping a particularly keen eye on her activities. They would know she had visited this place.
So be it. She had considered chinging, but would gain nothing by doing so. In theory, at least, the authorities could not track her ching to Eunice’s chamber, although they would know she had chinged some-where, and if they were sufficiently diligent they might find some flaw in the blinds and mirrors Eunice had thrown up to conceal her own whereabouts. This place was different: it was a known space, a documented feature of Zanzibar’s interior. If she chinged here, it would be a matter of immediate public record. So she might as well come in person, because then she would have no reason to doubt what she might see.
The pod car burst through the wall into the holding pen and raced along a glass capillary. She waited a few heartbeats as the pen’s automatic lights detected her arrival and came on. She wondered how long it had been since anyone had bothered to visit – months, years, decades, maybe.
There it was, encased in this little pocket of vacuum. In the flawless blaze of the lights it looked newer than anything else in Zanzibar. In truth, it was quite the opposite.
The high-capacity lander. It was a huge space vehicle, at least by the standards of something designed to enter an atmosphere – three hundred metres from end to end, and just as wide across its upcurving delta wings. It was rounded and smooth flat-bellied, designed to swim, to wallow in alien seas. Black on the underside, and white on the upper surfaces. Windows dotted its sides in stripes like the lateral receptors in a shark’s nervous system.
They had built it to carry ten thousand people from Zanzibar to Crucible’s surface. They had other, smaller landing vehicles, of course – many of them. But the big lander served as an important symbol of voyage’s end, a promise of the reward at the crossing’s end. An insignificant fraction of the millions aboard, but a monumentally significant gesture. The plan had been for them to draw lots to see who would have the honour of making planetfall in the lander. An entire community’s worth of people could be moved down to Crucible almost as soon as Zanzibar made orbit.
The lander had already caused her political damage. Years ago she had tried to have it dismantled, so that this holding pen could be pressurised and used for habitation. Sou-Chun had opposed her – that alone had tested their friendship – and ultimately Sou-Chun had won the day. It had been seen as a humiliating defeat for Chiku, evidence that she had overreached herself. Now, though, she was extremely grateful that her colleague had triumphed.
At least in its intended function, the vehicle was now useless. Optimised for passenger capacity, it had no capability for deep-space operations. But there would be no orbitfall without slowdown, and even if they resolved the slowdown problem, they would still have the Providers to contend with. But still . . . A sturdily built vessel like this, with ample room inside for modifications . . . it could be repurposed. And the Akinyas had been masterful repurposers for a very long time. It would need a name, too, and Chiku liked what her mind presented in response to that thought. It had the cold functionality of a surgical instrument. It suggested a vicious clarity of purpose.
Icebreaker.
Yes, that would do perfectly.
And now all she had to do to make it happen was move a few mountains.
Fortunately, that was something else the Akinyas were good at.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Three days later, she was on her way to th
e Assembly Building, thinking only of the hours immediately ahead and forcing all the other difficult thoughts from her mind, when she noticed a congregation of black vehicles in the courtyard before the main doors.
Her first guilty presumption was that the vehicles and constables were waiting for her; that some aspect of her secret activities had been brought to light, and they were waiting to arrest her as she arrived for business. But they would not have taken the chance on her turning around and going back home.
So it was something else.
Chiku quickened her pace, breaking into a jog that nearly had her stumbling head over foot as she negotiated the steep pathways down to level ground. The black vehicles were jockeying around. They were trying to get one of the vans lined up right before the main doors. Now there was a commotion as a group of people emerged into daylight, flanked by constables. Chiku’s jog became a run. She had seen a face in the commotion, but only for an instant. She dared not trust her senses.
But no – there it was again.
Sou-Chun Lo was in the midst of the throng, surrounded by representatives and constables, her face the usual leathern mask. But this time it was as if she had swapped one mask for another – replaced stony indifference with stony indignation. Chiku blinked, trying to process what she was seeing. This could not be what it looked like, surely?
Were they arresting Sou-Chun Lo?
They hustled her into the black vehicle parked directly outside the building’s main doors. A brief struggle ensued as the van broke through the confusion of people and vehicles milling all around, and then it was speeding away with a high-pitched electric whine, charging towards the sloping road and the nearest pod terminal.
By the time Chiku reached the crowd, she was sweating and out of breath. She leaned forward, hands on knees, and took deep, measured breaths until she had enough composure to speak.
‘What just happened?’ she asked the nearest constable.
Initially, no one appeared to know for sure, and a number of rumours circulated in quick succession. There had been another assassination attempt and Sou-Chun had been spirited away for her own safety. There was an emergency somewhere else in Zanzibar and Sou-Chun was needed urgently. An outbreak of contagion, maybe . . .
But none of those stories sounded right to Chiku, so she kept asking questions, working her way around the other representatives present, some Sou-Chun loyalists, others not, as they milled around outside the building under the false sky. Gradually, something that sounded like the truth began to emerge, like a signal from background noise. It was indeed an arrest – or rather, an ‘administrative detainment’, as if that made any difference from Sou-Chun’s point of view. An hour earlier, information had begun to appear on many public and private media channels from an anonymous source – information extremely detrimental to Sou-Chun’s professional reputation. Records of financial irregularities, undisclosed ingoing and outgoing payments, over many years. Individually, the amounts involved were small, but the cumulative sum was substantial. Even worse, many of the payments were clustered around times when the Assembly had voted on important, world-changing matters in which Sou-Chun’s voice had been decisive.
The evidence was almost too damning to be believed. Sou-Chun’s supporters were already claiming foul play, and that a proper accounting of her finances would show that nothing underhand had occurred. And there would be such an accounting, Chiku knew, and Sou-Chun would be given every chance to defend herself. They were a civilised society, after all.
At length, when the novelty of her detainment had worn off and no further news was forthcoming, the gathering gradually dispersed. Most of the vehicles drove away, and the constables allowed the representatives to re-enter the building. But the morning’s events had blown a hole in the day, and it quickly became apparent that ordinary business would have to be postponed. By the middle of the afternoon, Chiku was back home, her every certainty undermined. She spent a long hour reviewing the public statements, sifting analysis and debate. Mass opinion appeared to be divided in three broad directions. Some felt that Sou-Chun was totally innocent, the victim of a politically motivated smear campaign. Others felt that she was entirely culpable. A third group maintained that while she might not be guilty of all the alleged irregularities, an investigation into her affairs was bound to unearth skeletons. Chiku, of course, was canvassed for her own thoughts – there were three calls and a knock on the door during the hour she was home – but she refused to be drawn, saying only that she had every confidence that due process would be followed.
When skyfade came, she chinged over to Eunice. Day was concluding there as well, and for some reason – Eunice would have had no need of them – there were lanterns on in the camp.
‘You did this,’ Chiku declared, before the construct had opened its mouth.
‘Did what, my dear?’
‘Planted that information, all that stuff that they’ve arrested Sou-Chun for. As if you didn’t know.’
‘Oh, that.’ Eunice brushed it aside as if it was nothing, a matter utterly beneath consideration.
‘They’ve arrested her. There’s going to be a full investigation, probably a trial.’
‘And your point is?’
‘You can’t do this. You can’t just make up lies about people because they’re inconvenient. You can’t simply destroy someone’s reputation because it suits you.’
‘We didn’t ask Sou-Chun to become an obstructive influence, Chiku.’
‘That’s no excuse for what you’ve done! She’s a human being, someone who used to be a friend . . . you can’t arbitrarily decide she needs to be eliminated.’
‘It’s politics. She very nearly crushed your reputation when it came to the lander question. Did she show you an ounce of mercy back then?’
‘That was different! We were fighting for opposing positions, not trying to stab each other in the back!’
‘Well, there’s a hell of a lot more at stake now. I studied her case very carefully, you know. If there’d been a way of turning her, of bending her to our cause . . . of course I’d have preferred to do things that way. But she left us no option.’
‘Us.’ Chiku shook the proxy’s head fiercely. ‘No. You planted these lies. I want no part of this.’
‘Fine. Go to the Assembly and tell them you have evidence that the evidence is fabricated.’
‘I don’t need to. Whatever you’ve done, it won’t stand up to detailed scrutiny. As soon as the legal teams start picking through your lies, they’re going to find loose ends, details that don’t add up. They’ll prove someone fabricated it all, and then we’ll be worse off! Sou-Chun will have been vindicated – she’ll be stronger than ever!’
‘You don’t think I’m good enough to cover my tracks?’
‘You’ve overreached yourself. In a day, or a week, they’re going to realise the evidence isn’t watertight. Then they’ll start picking at the threads, looking very carefully at data traffic connected to those faked-up records . . . If you’ve not been as careful as you think you have, they’ll trace it all the way back to you!’
‘If that happens, I’ll just have to stay one step ahead of them.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself, Eunice. You’re not that good.’
‘Fine. If you think Sou-Chun is worth defending, I won’t stop you. Go to the highest levels of government and bleat away about robots and hidden chambers. See how far that gets you.’
‘And the alternative?’ she demanded. ‘Just to go along with this travesty and leave her to her fate?’
‘Sou-Chun has her friends, but she also has her share of enemies. There’ll be plenty of people ready to welcome a fresh face at the top of the pile.’
Chiku laughed. ‘You mean me, don’t you?’
‘We need a change of policy. The will to push forward with Travertine’s work and start turning that lander into a deep-space vehicle – however many enemies it makes at caravan level.’
Chiku felt the proxy’s finger
s curling in response to her frustration, and she fought the urge to raise its hands to scrunch non-existent hair. ‘What were you thinking? This is real life, not chess!’
‘Sometimes you just have to play the long game. You have a chance now, Chiku – we all do. But you can’t go back into skipover with Noah and your children.’
She had disdained the offer of a breathing mask and thermal hood, and now she was regretting the vanity of that impulse. The cold was a membrane that fixed itself first to her skin, then the surface of her eyes, the interior of her mouth, her nasal lining. A frigid octopus, suckering itself to her face.
She made herself move before her muscles froze and her bones locked together. Down the long, cold vaults, with their aisles of skipover caskets, each casket tucked into a recess and plugged into a complicated support chassis. Now and then she encountered a technician, suited up, goggled and masked, scrolling a flow of data on a clipboard or doing something with a tool trolley.
They nodded as she passed.
She turned down an aisle, following colour codes and patterns of numbers. Hundreds, thousands were sleeping – women, men and children, each casket with its own little glowing status panel giving name and family data, a biomedical summary, scheduled revival date. Some of them had only a few years to go now, while others were in for a substantially longer haul. She was jealous of the long-haulers. Whatever happened in the years ahead, they would sleep through it all. Nothing, not even catastrophe, would impinge on their dreamless oblivion. They would never need to know that this great enterprise had failed.
She turned a final corner, the cold so thick now that it was something she had to swim through, and there they were, ranked one above the other. Four caskets, the lowest empty at present. That had been hers, when she was still sleeping. Noah, Ndege and Mposi slumbered on in the other three. She could see the outlines of their recumbent forms through the skipover caskets’ translucent lids and sides. Save for the occasional change in the biomed summary, tracking some faint and ghostly whisper of brainstem traffic, shooting stars grazing the mind’s night sky, there were no signs of life. Their outlined forms never moved.