Aziba said, ‘Perhaps a more direct approach is warranted?’
‘Falling into orbit should do it, I think,’ Chiku said. ‘And if that doesn’t get their attention, we land.’
Chiku had now been awake for six hours. The stiffness had exited her bones and muscles. She was warmer now and free of nausea. Her thought processes felt sharp, racing through possibilities with nervous threshing efficiency. She could have done with a bit less of that.
Crucible had grown visibly larger in that time – her eye alone was now able to make out the greens and blues of the planet’s surface features, as well as the black circles and hyphens caused by the orbiting structures. She could not have told what they were, or that they were hovering in space, but the uncanny regularity of their spacing was enough to signal a distinct and lingering wrongness – the imposition of order and symmetry where none was expected. Icebreaker had already made a small course adjustment, to slide close to one of the pine cones as it curved in for orbit. They had simply chosen the one that required the least expenditure of fuel, judging that the twenty-two forms were essentially identical, at least in their gross details.
Zanzibar had to be out there, she told herself. It could not simply have disappeared, let alone all the other holoships. Even if they had started conducting large-scale PCP experiments, they could not all have suffered a Pemba event at the same time. Not every holoship would have been running the same experiment, or been close enough to another to be wiped out in the same accident. But there were other possibilities, and Chiku felt her mind beginning to run out of control, anxiety fuelling her worst-case scenarios. What about contagion, for a start? Constables moving en masse from world to world would have increased the likelihood of disease propagation. If a large enough percentage of the citizenry were infected, the holoships’ social organisations would begin to collapse, leading to a breakdown of control. Survivors might manage to eke out some miserable kind of subsistence in the darkened social cores, but they wouldn’t have the means to keep up the transmissions. She thought of her children, grubbing around for scraps, slowly turning feral as the holoships sailed on past Crucible, bearing cargoes of savagery to the stars . . .
But the caravans had been travelling for two centuries without significant loss of life to widespread disease, and the few small outbreaks had been quickly contained, with very few casualties. Coincidences happened, she knew, but it was highly unlikely that a dire contagion had been lurking all that time, only to spring out once Icebreaker was already on its way.
No, the silence could only be political.
But that was good news only in the narrowest of senses, in that it did not preclude the survival of her loved ones. It also meant that things must have taken a sharply authoritarian turn. Noah and the other Assembly members would never have allowed that, not if they were still in some kind of control.
So that was not good at all, either.
Stomach knotted with apprehension, Chiku summoned Travertine and Aziba. ‘It’s time to wake Gonithi and Guochan. I don’t want to throw them into this at the last minute.’
Travertine glanced at Aziba. ‘Both of them at the same time?’
‘Yes. Doctor, are you with me?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘Because I’ve lied to you, and put you in a significantly more dangerous situation than you were expecting. I’m really sorry it had to happen this way, but it did, and it’s crunch time. If I sense you have any intention of jeopardising our mission, for whatever reason, I’ll have no choice but to stop you. And I really, really, don’t want to have to do that.’
‘How far would you go to stop me?’ Aziba mused.
‘I’ll kill you, if I have to. Or try to, anyway. Yes, I’m capable of it, and there are tools on this ship I could use. It wouldn’t be difficult, especially this far from authority. But I’d really rather not. I like you, and I think you’re going to be very useful to us down the line, so please, please, don’t force my hand. Gonithi and Guochan are going to be just as bewildered and frightened as you were, but we need them on our side just as much as we need you. I’ve lied, yes, but only ever in the best interests of the caravan. Do you care about your people, Doctor Aziba?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘As do I. Passionately. Please believe me when I say that nothing is more important to the continuing welfare of our citizens than the success of this mission. We have worlds to save, Doctor Aziba.’
‘That sounds . . . compelling,’ the physician allowed.
‘It’s all we’ve got,’ Travertine said. ‘You might talk Namboze and Guochan into taking this ship from Chiku and me, but you know what? You’ll still be in exactly the same mess you are now – only there’ll be two fewer brains and bodies to throw at the problem. We need every single one of us to have a hope in hell’s chance of dealing with what’s coming.’
‘Let’s wake them,’ Chiku said.
Aziba said, ‘I can do it. We don’t all need to be here.’
Travertine said sceptically, ‘Leave you alone with Namboze and Guochan?’
‘If you trust me, yes. I give you my word that I’ll state our position to them very honestly. I’ll explain that they’ve been lied to, but that killing you now won’t help their chances of survival.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s up to you. If you don’t trust me now, you’ll be looking over your shoulder for ever.’
‘You’re right,’ Chiku said, sighing heavily. ‘It’s either complete trust or nothing at all. Wake them up and give them the good news.’ But after a pause, she said: ‘I still owe them an explanation, face to face.’
‘Go and attend to your work. I’ll call you when Namboze and Guochan have been briefed.’ Chiku opened her mouth to speak, but he raised a silencing finger. ‘I don’t like this situation at all. I’d much rather not be here, and I won’t pretend that I harbour no resentment about the manner in which I was manipulated. But I’m also a physician, and you are all within my duty of care. I believe I’m capable of putting my personal feelings aside and doing my job.’
Chiku nodded. Further talk was superfluous. She realised that she’d chosen well in this man. His ability to speak plainly about his resentment rather than pretend there was none actually made her feel more comfortable. She felt certain he would do as he promised.
‘I have an idea,’ Travertine said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Sooner or later it would have occurred to Chiku. Communications from Zanzibar must surely have continued until some point in their journey. Perhaps it had been only days after departure, or perhaps it been years. But what was certain was that the incoming transmissions would all have been buffered and stored in Icebreaker’s memories, until the moment when the transmissions were curtailed.
It did not take long to find them. They were in time-sequenced order, beginning from the departure. For a few months, the transmissions were continuous – an uninterrupted umbilical uplink, connecting Icebreaker back to her mother vessel. This stream consisted not merely of signals of direct relevance to the lander, but the full torrent of the ho-loship’s newsfeeds, as well as those it relayed from elsewhere in the caravan, including updates from Earth and the solar system. Later, though, the transmissions stopped being continuous and the data content dropped precipitously. Weeks might go by without a signal, then there might be two or three transmissions in close succession. Then more weeks of silence. Weeks and months, sometimes. Longer than that, as Chiku skipped forward via the time-tags. She had not yet begun to pick through the detailed contents of any of the messages. But she could already tell that a large number were headed as originating from Noah.
That changed, as time went by.
Her impulse was to jump to the final transmission, which had arrived more than two years ago, but she resisted and went right back to the start. The early transmissions were rich enough with data to allow full immersive ching. She returned to Zanzibar, walked its parks and avenues to see things for herself. She gently interrogated
her fellow citizens, and although her interactions were merely the ching’s best guesses as to how similar encounters might have played out in real-time, the encounters were more than sufficient to give her a feel for the atmosphere aboard the holoship.
During the month following their departure, ships had continued to arrive from the local caravan, bringing huge numbers of incomers. Many of them were constables, redeployed from their duties elsewhere, along with an increasing number of political agents: the observers and bureaucrats of the new regime, tiers of functionaries, supervisors and analysts. Even while normal Assembly business continued, the newcomers began to manoeuvre themselves into positions of influence. Rules and ordinances were redrafted, and the citizens – her citizens – chafed against stifling new restrictions. Movements between holo-ships were now tightly regulated, dividing families and friends. There were even some constraints on movement within Zanzibar – access to the transit pods was now under direct government control. Families were relocated to better utilise Zanzibar’s community cores, and other holoships, bulging under population pressure, were sending citizens into Zanzibar. The integration of these newcomers inevitably caused friction. Chiku decided that the relocations were not really about population management, but rather aimed to erode whatever social cohesion had existed within Zanzibar before Icebreaker’s departure. Chiku bore the newcomers no ill will – they were pawns in a much bigger game.
Noah’s private communications confirmed her suspicions, as they walked together in Anticipation Park.
‘I know you won’t access any of this until you wake,’ he told her, ‘but recounting the events as they happen helps me to get my thoughts in order. Is that ridiculous?’
‘I’d do the same thing,’ she told Noah’s figment, this bloodless but plausible notion of how Noah might interact with her.
‘Things are moving much faster than any of us anticipated – they keep sending more constables, as if there’s a limitless supply of them. Our airlocks have never been busier. Pretty good rehearsal for Crucible, I guess.’
She asked about Ndege and Mposi.
‘They’re all right,’ Noah said, after giving the question due consideration. ‘The first few weeks were very hard on them, but a month’s a very long time in their world.’
She skipped that same span of time and toured her world again. As she wandered the cores, bodyless, Zanzibar felt strangely hollow, as if it had already shed its burden of humanity. The public spaces were mostly empty, and there was a kind of prevailing twilight gloom, as if the skies had been dimmed. She realised with a jolt that this was exactly what had happened. The external powers had declared some kind of curfew, apparently in response to an act of public disobedience against the new constables.
She met Noah at the Assembly. Technically, he was still a functioning member of Zanzibar’s government, but its decision-making powers had been all but eliminated, he told her, and worse was to come. There were prosecutors at large who were trying to identify those members of the Assembly with direct knowledge of Icebreaker. A number of preliminary hearings had already been held, and Noah had been called to testify on two occasions regarding fellow members. It was only a matter of time before they turned their attention to him personally.
‘There’s talk of execution,’ he said.
She shuddered. ‘We didn’t execute Travertine, and ve killed two hundred people!’
‘They want to make an example the rest of the caravan can’t ignore.’
‘It can’t come to executions, Noah – we agreed to submit to a peaceful takeover, not a fucking bloodbath. We’re a democratic society! There hasn’t even been a single murder during the entire voyage, and we’ve managed that without the Mechanism mothering us into submission!’
‘I’m sorry,’ Noah offered, as if she was holding him personally accountable.
She had not been able to ching into Chamber Thirty-Seven. ‘Have you spoken to . . . ?’ she began.
‘Yes – once. But it’s very difficult now – my movements are monitored constantly, and I can’t risk someone backtracking the ching bind. Even speaking about it in these messages—’
‘I’m not blaming you for any of this,’ she said. ‘Please never think that. I just want you to be safe, and to do everything you can for our children.’
She asked him what he knew regarding efforts to scale up the PCP engine, but that taxed the immersive simulation to its limits and Noah could not offer anything concrete. But Chiku thought it likely that someone, somewhere, would be trying to build on Travertine’s work, perhaps even aboard the very holoships currently imposing the tough new regime on Zanzibar. The new engine was tactically decisive technology, whether it was used for slowdown or not. Absurd that it had come to this, after all: strategic balances, superpowers, super-weapons, as if history was a kind of machine with only a limited number of permutations. At one time, she had dared to believe that history could break free of its patterns. Nature was not hidebound, tied into endless, dull reiteration. It produced marvels and monsters with equal fecundity. So why did people have so much trouble breaking free of old patterns?
She was about to skip ahead when Travertine tapped her out of the ching bind.
‘They’re awake.’
Chiku summoned them all to the cockpit. She nodded at Namboze and Guochang, fresh out of skipover. They were clutching squeeze-bulbs, both of them looking as if they had been repeatedly slapped in the face, like drunkards or hysterics. Gonithi Namboze had also spent time in skipover since the Kappa incident, and she was still essentially the same person Chiku had known back then: an extremely thin woman with long fingernails and complexly braided hair. Guochang, whom she knew less well, was a squat, muscular man with the core body strength of a Cossack.
‘I understand if you want to punish me,’ Chiku said, ‘but could you wait until we’ve completed our mission?’
‘If,’ Namboze said, drawing a nod from Guochang.
‘I know,’ Chiku said. ‘I won’t downplay the danger – I’ve got too much respect for the pair of you. But it’s not a suicide mission. Guochang: we must make contact with the Providers, and establish a negotiating position. Something, anything. You know them as well as anyone. Namboze: there’s a planet down there that we might end up having to live on, if we’re lucky, but not in the way most of us were expecting. We’ll likely be starting from scratch, with the tools and materials we bring from space. You’ve spent most of your life studying the adaptations and measures we’ll need to make a living on Crucible. Now your insights are going to matter more than ever.’
Eventually she said: ‘Those black things. What if they don’t want us there?’
‘We don’t know what they do or don’t want – if anything,’ Chiku answered. ‘Maybe all they do is observe. Witness. They may not care. It’s the Providers that are our concern. But we must find a solution, a way that benefits us all – machine and human.’
Namboze sneered. ‘A truce with machines, after they’ve lied to us? We should be destroying them, not negotiating with them!’
‘We don’t know their strengths or capabilities,’ Travertine said. ‘If we had the full caravan behind us, we might stand a chance in a fight. But we’re a single ship, almost powerless. We have to negotiate.’
‘With what?’ Namboze asked.
‘Our best intentions?’ Chiku said. ‘Good will? We’re almost certainly dealing with artilect-level cognition – machines, or an assemblage of machines, with a collective intelligence equalling or exceeding our own. I’ve met one, and we can’t assume we’ll have mental and military superiority on our side.’
‘I’d like access to Icebreaker’s communications systems,’ Guochang said. ‘There are some channels you may not have tried – command-level paths, that kind of thing.’
‘Good start,’ Chiku said.
‘It’ll give me something to take my mind off everything else. May I?’
‘Yes, but keep one antenna sweeping behind us for signals from the ca
ravan. Namboze: the closer we get, the better our view of the surface conditions. I want you to start updating the maps. I want to know immediately if you find any significant points of deviation between the data in our files and the real Crucible. And if you find any sign of Provider activity on the surface or in space, bring it to our immediate attention.’
‘Are we taking orders from you now?’ Namboze asked.
‘No,’ Travertine said. ‘We’re dividing responsibility.’
Namboze turned her attention to the physicist. ‘What about you? I thought you were supposed to be dying, rotting like a corpse. I thought that was supposed to be your punishment for nearly killing us all.’
‘Travertine’s sentence was formally commuted,’ Chiku said. ‘Ve broke our laws, it’s true. But Travertine’s paid a steep price for that. We also owe ver a debt of gratitude for the risks ve took. If by some miracle any of us ever set foot on Crucible, we’ll have Travertine to thank.’
‘I wouldn’t start planning any monuments to me just yet,’ Travertine said.
Chiku was also glad to have something to take her mind off things, but she could not say for sure which was the more unpleasant source of anxiety: the news from home, or their immediate prospects on Crucible. On one hand, while Noah’s reports spoke of a steady deterioration in the conditions on Zanzibar, and she was worried for Ndege, Mposi and Noah because of that, the fact was that the news was old. She could not change the past, and she was basically engaged in the excavation of history. She could treat Noah’s reportage as a kind of fiction, a narrative in which she had only theoretical involvement. This was in contrast to the alien things, which – although they had done nothing as yet to provoke this fear – might reach out and annihilate the little ship without warning.