On the Steel Breeze

  ‘Well, it’s good to know I can turn to friends for reassurance.’

  ‘Get out of my house.’

  Travertine took the glass from her and poured more wine. ‘I’m not an idiot. I expect to be arrested for this. The only reason I was able to get here in the first place was because there was so much chaos and confusion.’

  ‘Were you in Kappa when it happened?’

  ‘If I had been, we wouldn’t be having this cosy little chat, would we?’

  ‘I can’t shelter you.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to.’

  ‘What happened? What the hell were you doing?’

  ‘Nothing much. Just trying to save the world. And how was your day?’

  ‘You were punished once. You were lucky they didn’t lock you up then. Wasn’t that lesson enough for you?’

  ‘All it did was teach me that I needed to be cleverer.’

  ‘Oh, please.’

  ‘In case you haven’t noticed, that little problem of ours hasn’t magically vanished. Does it keep you awake at night? It really ought to. It gives me cold, shivering nightmares.’

  ‘I won’t argue with you. There’d be nothing to gain. Are you going to turn yourself in, or do I have to call the authorities?’

  ‘You are the authorities, Chiku. That’s rather the point.’ But Travertine sighed, then. ‘I am going to turn myself in – it’s not as if I’d have a hope in hell of evading justice.’

  ‘So why have you come here instead of going straight to the constables?’

  ‘There’s something we need to discuss.’

  ‘I’ve heard enough of your justifications over the years. You just blew a hole in the skin of the holoship.’

  ‘True. But you know what? It proves there’s something we don’t understand. Pemba proved it, too, but that time there was no wreckage to comb through, and no survivors to question. We had no idea what they’d been doing in there before it all went pop.’

  ‘The same as you – meddling.’

  ‘Meddling is what we do. It’s what defines us. Meddling gave us fire and tools and civilisation and the keys to the universe. Fingers will get burnt along the way, yes. That’s the way of it.’ Travertine examined vis fingers. They were strong and elaborately wrinkled around the knuckles. Unlike Chiku’s, they looked like they had done honest work.

  ‘Well?’ she prompted, after Travertine fell silent and appeared to be in no hurry to speak again.

  ‘I found something. A hint of a breakthrough, a door into Post-Chibesa physics. A glimpse of the energies we’ll need to decelerate, when we approach Crucible. I decided to investigate further with a simple experiment. In secret, of course – underneath my lab.’

  ‘I think you should save all this for the hearing.’

  ‘When you dig under something, Chiku, you often make discoveries.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about, Travertine?’

  ‘I have some information that I think might interest you, both as a respected member of the Assembly and as someone with influence in the Council of Worlds.’

  ‘And exactly how long have you had this “information”?’

  ‘I always knew the time might come when I would need your support, so when I made my discovery, I decided not to act on it immediately.’

  ‘You kept it back as a bargaining chip.’

  Travertine pulled a face as if ve had just sucked on something sour. ‘It sounds terribly cynical, doesn’t it? I prefer to think of it as a wise investment. I wasn’t endangering the community. Whatever I’d found had been there for years and years and done no harm. I had no reason to believe that situation would change.’

  ‘And what, exactly, did you discover?’

  ‘Well, now, that brings us right to the nub of things, doesn’t it? As I said, I’m going to turn myself in, and I have no doubt that dreadful things are going to happen to me. Even I have to acknowledge that they’ll be well within their rights to push for the death penalty.’

  ‘You might want to get to the point, then.’

  ‘I’m going to need someone on my side. I want you to state my case, put my side of the argument to the authorities – even if that makes you unpopular at committee level. There’ll be plenty of voices ready to condemn me. I need one person prepared to state that I’m not a monster. Someone who’s endured the same nightmares I have.’

  Chiku shook her head slowly. ‘I’ll tell the truth – you didn’t need to bargain that out of me.’

  ‘But I want more than neutrality. I want you to be my advocate, when no one else will stand by me.’

  ‘You can’t ask that of me.’

  ‘I can and I will. This matters more than anything in the world, Chiku. I know you and Noah have been working very hard lately, and that you’re hoping to call in some favours – four cosy skipover slots for you and your family, a one-way ticket to the future, an escape from these problems.’

  Chiku stared down her friend. All this was true, but she despised Travertine for stating it so bluntly.

  ‘What the committee makes of your request is their business – I can’t influence them one way or the other.’

  ‘Perhaps you can, perhaps you can’t. Here’s the thing, though – I absolutely must be allowed to continue my work. And if not me, then a team of people I’ll appoint and supervise. If that doesn’t happen, we’re all finished.’

  ‘And this . . . information you’ve been hoarding?’

  ‘When I excavated underneath my laboratory, I found tunnels in Zanzibar’s skin that aren’t supposed to be there.’

  ‘I know.’

  Travertine’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘That’s easy to say.’

  ‘I saw a shaft under one of the buildings while I was searching Kappa for survivors. It goes down deep, and it isn’t documented.’

  ‘Then that’s all you know?’

  ‘The shaft I saw was some distance from your complex. There’s no reason to assume they’re connected.’

  ‘They are. I explored. I’m a scientist – what else was I going to do? I mapped a network of tunnels and shafts radiating away from the entry point under my lab. Most of them were dead ends, sealed off with fused rubble or concrete. None of them show up in the official documents, but they’re obviously as old as Zanzibar itself. That means someone put them in deliberately, for a reason, and then decided not to tell anyone about it.’

  ‘That’s all you’ve got?’ Chiku shook her head. ‘I already knew this, Travertine. I’ll be making an official report as soon as this mess is behind us.’

  ‘Then the existence of these features isn’t common knowledge yet?’

  ‘Whether it is or not, it doesn’t give you anything to bargain with.’

  ‘Then a map of the tunnel system wouldn’t be of any interest to you?’

  ‘I can make my own map.’

  ‘I could save you the bother. And save you the trouble of learning something else the hard way, too. I found one tunnel that leads out of Kappa altogether. But I couldn’t explore that one.’

  ‘Too scared?’

  ‘Exploring the tunnels was a distraction, remember – I had my official work to be getting on with. Regardless, curious as I was, and even if I’d found the time, I couldn’t have explored it if I’d wanted to. Not easily. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t.’

  ‘What’s so special about me?’

  ‘You have the right name.’

  ‘You’ve lost me, Travertine.’

  ‘Then I’ll make it very simple for you. There’s a sort of . . . sphinxware preventing access to the deeper tunnel. My guess – and my guesses tend to be reliable – is that it’s waiting for a blood Akinya to show up. Someone of that ancient and holy lineage. Given time, I could have fooled the sphinxware, but as I said, I had other fish to fry. And I was satisfied that what I’d already learned would be useful enough, when the time came.’

  ‘Like now, for instance?’

  ‘Your family and its network of allies pla
yed a large role in the building and launching of the holoships, Chiku. Someone connected to the family decided to smuggle a secret aboard this ship.’

  ‘Impossible. I was alive back then, remember? I saw the holoships being assembled, I saw the first of them leaving.’

  ‘Then maybe you weren’t as close to the bosom of the family as you liked to think. Maybe there are dark secrets no one involved was quite willing to share with the young and feckless Chiku Akinya.’ Travertine smiled for the first time. ‘Now, shall we discuss my hearing again?’

  ‘I want your map,’ Chiku said.

  ‘Is that a promise of assistance?’

  Chiku said nothing. She went to Ndege’s room and found a sheet of paper and some wax crayons. She brought them back to the table and set them down before Travertine.

  Noah coughed gently as he entered the kitchen.

  ‘This can’t go on for much longer,’ he said.

  Travertine turned to look at him. ‘You can call the constables whenever you like. Say I arrived in a state of distress and confusion. It’ll take them a little while to get here – there’ll be no suggestion that you were harbouring me.’

  ‘We’re not,’ Noah said. His folded arms conveyed his distaste. Chiku and Noah had both been Travertine’s friends, but Noah’s scepticism had hardened after Travertine’s original censure.

  Travertine turned back to the paper and crayons and started to draw.

  ‘This won’t take long,’ ve said.

  Chair Utomi was making another public announcement. Their children now asleep, Chiku and Noah watched it from their kitchen. Both were brittle with exhaustion but anxious to hear the latest news, the latest casualty estimates, the latest hints of a political response from the rest of the local caravan.

  ‘By now,’ Utomi said, ‘some of you will be aware of compelling evidence that today’s accident was caused by something originating in or near Travertine’s research facility. Some of you will also be aware that Travertine survived the accident. I can confirm that these rumours are correct. I can also confirm that Travertine is now in custody, having turned verself over to the administration. The Council of Worlds can be assured of our total cooperation in all matters relating to this incident. If it transpires that Travertine was involved in actions contrary to the provisions of the Pemba Accord, and that those actions occurred due to our oversight, we will submit to the full weight of caravan authority.’

  ‘Why not just throw Travertine to the wolves and be done with it,’ Chiku said, when Utomi was done.

  ‘This isn’t going to end well,’ Noah said. ‘Travertine did this while we were supposed to keep an eye on ver – how does that make us look?’

  ‘Stupider than Travertine,’ Chiku said. ‘But if that was a hanging offence, we’d all be for the gallows.’

  Noah nodded carefully. ‘What did Travertine want to talk about anyway?’

  ‘Ve was shocked. Who wouldn’t be, under those circumstances? Travertine wanted reassurance that ve was going to get a fair hearing.’

  ‘Ve got a fair hearing the first time.’

  ‘It’ll be a different this time.’ Chiku clicked her nails against the table-top. A red circle stained the surface where the wine glass had been. ‘People have died because of the experiment. It’s going to be difficult to get beyond that.’

  ‘What was Travertine drawing on that piece of paper? Ve didn’t take it with ver, and you didn’t show it to the constables.’

  ‘Is this my trial, or Travertine’s?’

  ‘I’m only asking,’ Noah said, and his hurt tone made her wince inside. And she had to admit that, yes, he had only asked, as he had a right to – this was his home as well. They did not normally keep secrets from one another.

  ‘Travertine wanted to make sure there was no further risk of decompression,’ Chiku said. ‘The sketch shows the underground workings connected to the laboratory, in case any of them need to be sealed off or reinforced.’

  This was true, as far as it went – Travertine had mentioned, in passing, that someone should double-check the tunnels and shafts, especially when they started repressurising Kappa. But that had been only an incidental concern.

  Chiku did not like lying to Noah – not even by omission.

  ‘There’s something I want to investigate,’ she said. ‘I would have mentioned it to you sooner, but when I got home Travertine was here, and after that everything got a bit intense. Anyway, when I was in the chamber with Namboze, I saw something unusual. It’s probably nothing, but I need to take a second look at it.’

  ‘And are you going to tell me what it is?’

  ‘Probably nothing, which is why I won’t report it just yet.’

  ‘This isn’t helping.’

  ‘Look, I was tired when I went in there. I saw what appeared to be a void under one of the buildings.’ She carefully refrained from saying ‘shaft’, because ‘shaft’ implied something that led somewhere else, and that carried a whole freight of implications she did not presently care to unpack.

  ‘Gonithi saw this, too?’

  ‘No – she was searching a different part of the building.’

  ‘But you told her about it.’

  ‘I didn’t see any need to. As I said, it’s probably nothing, plus I don’t want to make a fool of myself in front of the Assembly until I know there’s definitely something worth bringing to their attention.’

  ‘Let’s not make a habit of keeping secrets, okay?’

  ‘I hope we won’t have to.’ She forced a smile – it felt as if she was bending a part of her face that had never bent before. ‘I’ll make arrangements to return to Kappa – they’re going to be sending in search parties for a while.’

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t get into trouble.’

  ‘We’re already in trouble – all of us. I can’t make things much worse.’

  ‘That’s no answer.’ Noah let out an exasperated, world-weary sigh. ‘You’re my wife, and we have Mposi and Ndege to think about. We all want skipover, and our chances are much better now than they were the last time. Whatever you think you owe Zanzibar, it’s not more important than our family.’

  ‘It never has been,’ she said. ‘And I will be careful.’

  The Assembly building lay at the bottom of a bowl of gently sloping ground, hemmed by lawns, lakes and neat copses of quill-like trees. Chiku always had mixed feelings at her first view of the prospect whenever she arrived in Gamma Chamber, the administrative core. There were thirty-six chambers in Zanzibar, twenty-four of them named for the Greek alphabet, and the remaining twelve (there was no logic in terms of utilisation or population density) for the dozen months of the terrestrial calendar, January to December. The ‘A’-shaped building betrayed the heavy hand of the Akinyas in the creation of Zanzibar. It was carefully modelled on the old family home in Equatorial East Africa, duplicated down to the last blue tile, the last white stone and ornamental wall. Chiku had visited the original household on several occasions. She had climbed nearby Kilimanjaro, a gruelling ascent without exo assistance, all the way to the chiselled snowcap where the lasers of the old ballistic launcher still stood sentinel. She had observed the Amboseli herds by airpod and on foot. She had met with patient old Geoffrey, and listened to him as he talked about painting, about the endless negotiation between art and memory.

  The cab dropped her off and left to collect new passengers. She walked past the greening bronze statue of her great-grandmother, averting her gaze from that imperious frowning visage. Constables flanked the gate to the grounds. Even though they knew her there were formalities, badges and documents to be presented and scrutinised. The constables asked after Noah, and about the ongoing search effort in Kappa. They asked how her children were coping with the accident. Chiku’s answers were curter than she might have wished, but the constables appeared not to mind. Everyone was on edge today, and allowances could be made.

  ‘Just a moment,’ Chiku said to them, when she noticed the time.

  Overhe
ad, bisecting the false sky from one end of the chamber to the other, was a stiff metal rail. Threaded onto this rail was a black oval about the size of a small house. This oval, a scaled-down model of Zanzibar, was a kind of clock. It had started out at one end when the holoship launched and now it was more than halfway across the chamber. Rather than moving continuously, it ticked along in daily increments of about a hand’s width.

  The movements always occurred at noon. Chiku was often coming or going from the Assembly at this hour and she always made a point of looking up at the sky clock. It was difficult to see the model move, but on occasion she had succeeded, especially when the edge of it happened to line up with a projected cloud or some other reference point.

  She heard the distant chime that indicated the model had moved forward by its statutory amount. But as was often the case she saw no obvious change in the thing.

  The sky clock had appeared to be a good idea, in the early days of Zanzibar’s crossing. A reminder that, as far away as their destination looked, they would get there eventually. It was just a question of adding up those daily chimes. Eighty thousand – fewer than the number of seconds in a single day. Put like that, it felt bearable. A human span.

  She had come to hate the sky clock.

  Despite her best efforts, she ended up entering the hall alongside Chair Utomi. They were both wearing formal dress, styled along traditional African lines but with a few modern concessions. Utomi was a huge, broad-shouldered man, bulky as a wrestler.

  ‘It’s an unfortunate mess. Things would be a lot simpler for all of us if Travertine had had the good grace to die along with the rest of them.’

  This was an uncharacteristically callous assessment from the normally agreeable Utomi. It offered some gauge of the pressures weighing on him.

  ‘I’m sure Travertine agrees,’ Chiku said. ‘It’s not going to be easy for ver, going forward.’

  ‘At least ve’s a realist.’

  ‘Travertine thinks the death penalty might be imposed. We won’t sink that low, will we?’

  ‘It’s been done before. I doubt there’d be an outcry against the decision this time.’

  ‘But Travertine didn’t exactly commit cold-blooded murder.’