On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER TWELVE

The room was lightless except for the glowing coloured threads stretching from floor to ceiling in a bundle, braided into a thick, multicoloured column as wide as Chiku’s fist. The column maintained the same width until it reached eye level, where it fanned out in an explosion of threads, taut as harp-strings, which arrowed towards the ceiling at many different angles. The individual threads, which had been linear from the point where they came out of the floor, now branched and rebranched in countless bifurcations. By the time the pattern of lines brushed the ceiling, it was all but impossible to distinguish individual strands.

Mecufi was with her, upright in his mobility exo. He had been present since the scriptors started work and her memories began to unpack themselves.

‘We really are remarkably fortunate,’ he said.

He was engaging her in conversation, exploring her responses to a spectrum of stimuli, to gauge how well the scriptors had functioned.

‘How so?’

‘We nearly ended ourselves,’ he said, gesturing towards the threads with an upsweep of his arm. ‘It was only by some great grace of fortune that we made it into the present, tunnelled through the bottleneck, exploded into what we are today.’

‘A squabbling mess,’ Chiku said.

‘Better a squabbling mess than non-existence. You can always improve a mess. That bottleneck is the point where we nearly became extinct. There were tens of thousands of us before this happened, one hundred and ninety-five thousand years ago. Then something brought a terrible winnowing. The climate shifted, turning cold and arid. Fortunately, a handful of us survived – emerging from some corner of Africa where conditions hadn’t become quite as unendurable as they were elsewhere. We were smart by then – we know this from the remains we left behind – but intelligence played only a very small part in getting us through the bottleneck. Mostly we owe our success to blind luck, being in the right place at the right time, and then following the shoreline as it rose and retreated, over and again. It was the sea that saved us, Chiku. When the world cooled, the oceans gave us sustenance. Shellfish prefer the cold. And so we foraged, never far from water, along beaches and intertidal zones, and lived in caves, and spent our days wading in the shallows. The lap of waves, the roar of breakers, the tang of ozone, the mew of a seagull – there’s a reason we’re comforted by these sounds. And here we are, a genetic heartbeat later. Returning a debt, giving back to the oceans what the oceans gave us. The seas saved us once. Now we’re saving the seas, and taking them with us to the stars.’

‘It’s a very nice sculpture.’

‘By the time it touches the ceiling, there are twelve billion threads. Spiderfibre whiskers, just a few carbon atoms wide – the same stuff they used to make the cables for space elevators – one for every person now alive, on Earth, orbiting the sun, in the Oort communities and the holoship migrations. I can identify your thread, if you’d like… you can watch it glow brighter than the others, follow its path all the way into history, see where three became one. See where you fit into the bottleneck.’

‘There’s a point to all this, I’m presuming?’

‘Arethusa liked to call us Poseidon’s Children. Orphans of the storm. We’d endured the worst the world could throw at us, the worst consequences of our own stupidity, and came through, like the survivors on The Raft of the Medusa, ready to face the dawn. But there are always more storms, Chiku. Arethusa knew that better than most. The question we need to face now is: have we weathered the worst? Or is there something we haven’t anticipated coming down the line?’

She thought back to the freight of feelings Mecufi had packed into his mote, on the night before she went to the seasteads. Less than a week ago, although that seemed impossible to square with the huge new freight of memories now burdening her head.

‘Something’s got you worried, hasn’t it? That’s why you’re in such a rush all of a sudden to contact Arethusa. That’s why you need me.’

‘We saw an opportunity to do good. That it happens to coincide with a need of our own… let’s just call it a happy accident, shall we?’

They were in one of the Atlantic seasteads, not far from the Azores. Chiku’s progress was being assessed from hour to hour as the new memories branched and rebranched. The Merfolk had considered this a wise precaution. Many years had passed since the Quorum technology had last been allowed to work as intended, and the presence of anti-tamper countermeasures beneath the ones they had already identified and neutralised could not be eliminated. Some glitches in mnemonic transcription, harmless or malign, were also possible.

But Chiku at least had detected no obvious signs of error. The memories went back to Chiku Green’s meeting with Representative Endozo aboard the holoship Malabar the day Kappa exploded, and not much further. When she packaged the memories for transmission back to Earth, she had only sent Chiku Yellow a sliver of her life. The rest, everything that had happened since Pemba, was merely implicit. A good wife, a good husband, two good children and a position of responsibility in the Legislative Assembly. What more could she have wanted?

Odd now to think of herself for a moment not as Chiku but as Chiku Yellow, as if in some sense she was standing outside her own body, observing. It had been like this during the early years of their triplication, but she had forgotten that peculiar sense of non-localisation – as if her sense of self belonged not in any one particular body but in the shifting, unstable centre of gravity located between them.

Yet there was a quality, the most delicate chromatic tinting, the most subtle modulation of timbre or microscopically altered angle of reflection, which denoted that these memories of Zanzibar were new experiences, things that had happened to this other version of her. This was some clever thing done to her hippocampus, to enable her to organise and orientate the two experience streams. Without that, it would have been too confusing for words.

So she knew who she was, and what had happened to her, in both streams. Holding the shifted timeframes in her mind was more difficult. These were not fresh memories. They felt new, but they had been on their way back from Zanzibar for seventeen years.

Here, now, on Earth, the year was 2365. The memory package had been on its way since 2348 – time enough for it to hopscotch back home and then circle the world for months, waiting to be opened. These events, these things that had happened to Chiku Green, lay just as far back in Chiku Yellow’s past. Ndege and Mposi were older now, and would be older still by the time any response made its way to Zanzibar. It would be more like forty years before her counterpart received a reply.

How was a person supposed to deal with this?

Chiku wondered what her counterpart could possibly have expected of her. Was she really out there, prepared to wait forty years for an answer? Could anything matter that much?

A shaft leading underground. The brilliance of a blue sky, etched away in geometric patches. The stomp and snort of Tantors, the subsonic throb of a musth rumble. The voice of Dreadnought, booming out like a biblical proclamation. A woman who looked like her great-grandmother, sitting on the wheel of an aircraft. A name – Arachne – that might mean nothing at all.

Another, June Wing, which certainly meant something.

And the merfolk, here and now, expecting her to do them a favour in return for these memories. It had not slipped her attention that they also had an interest in the elusive June Wing.

Popular woman, Chiku thought.

She said to Mecufi, ‘You want me to make contact with this person, hoping she might put you in touch with Arethusa.’

‘I’m very encouraged that you remember that as clearly as you do. Very occasionally the new memories will cause some confusion with those laid down just before the start of the mnemonic scripting. In your case things seem to have proceeded without complication.’

‘I feel fine. You said something about June Wing being on Venus.’

‘Indeed, but June moves around a lot, gathering pieces for her collection, and she won’t stay there long. You should be on your way sooner rather than later, while she’s still in the inner system.’

‘I can’t promise anything.’

‘But you’ll do your best. The memories appear to be stable, but we can continue monitoring them all the way to Venus. Do you own a spaceship?’

‘I don’t think so.’ But she had owned several in her youth, including a sleek little number that she had been very fond of. ‘Not lately, no. I had to sell them – that’s what it’s come to, being an Akinya.’

‘Poor little you,’ Mecufi said.

He was all for her leaving immediately, riding the great glass chimney to orbit and then a commercial loop-liner to Venus. Chiku, against the merman’s wishes, insisted on returning to Lisbon first. They argued the point until Chiku won.

When she returned to Pedro’s studio, he came to the door with the neck of a guitar in his hands, neatly slotted for frets. He appraised her carefully, as if she might be an impostor. ‘It’s been a day longer than you said. I wondered if I ought to worry. Then I thought, what can possibly go wrong?’

‘Almost nothing.’

‘That’s what I figured. They’d have told me if there was a problem. I mean, what’s so unusual about having thousands of new memories stuffed into your head by tiny machines?’

Before they kissed, before she sat down, even, she got the worst news out of the way. ‘I need to go to Venus.’

‘It’s a lovely place. When the tides are low, some of the old buildings are visible.’

‘Venus. I said Venus, not Venice.’

Pedro smiled. ‘I know.’

‘According to Mecufi, the conjunction’s especially favourable right now, and it shouldn’t take me long to do what I have to do.’

‘Which is?’

‘Catch up with June, this woman who used to know my mother and father. All the Pans want me to do is tell her they’d like to get back in touch with Arethusa. She can help them do that, if she wants. If she doesn’t, it’s really not my problem.’

‘And then – what – your obligations are over?’

‘More or less.’

Pedro put down the guitar neck. ‘I don’t like the sound of this. Fine, they’ve done you a favour. That doesn’t mean they own you for life. It’s not like you ever had any interest in June before all this started.’

‘Actually I always meant to talk to her at some point, if I could make it happen – for the biography, if nothing else.’

‘But there’s more to it than that now, isn’t there?’

She did not want to be having this conversation right now, or in fact at any point between now and the end of the universe. But better out than in, as the saying went.

‘There’s another reason I’d like to meet June.’

‘Then it’s something to do with the ghost, the memories from the other Chiku.’ Pedro did that endearing thing he did when puzzled, which was to scratch beneath his fringe, squinting out at her under an overhang of curls. ‘Which you haven’t mentioned yet.’

‘Can we eat? I’m starving.’

‘And then talk?’

‘Let’s eat. And you can open a bottle of wine – at least one of us is going to need it.’

‘We’re all out. I meant to go shopping, but I got tied up with this commission. It’s not too late, is it?’

They went out to buy wine, Chiku light-headed with Tantors and artilects, bobbing through the streets of Lisbon like a balloon on a string, barely anchored to the world. They bought a nice bottle of Patagonian merlot, then changed their plans and stopped at a restaurant on their way back to the apartment. The establishment had mustard-coloured walls, crumbling plaster that must have been overpainted a thousand times and could still have used another coat. It was already dusk. Musicians and their instruments were tucked into a red-lit corner, like statues in a shrine.

‘It’s complicated,’ Chiku said, when they were halfway through their meal.

‘Please,’ Pedro said, pausing between bites. ‘When is anything with you not complicated?’

‘I have Chiku Green’s memories now, and I know why she was trying to reach me.’ She was glad of the musicians, the fado singer, the illmannered diners who refused to lower their voices while they performed. The hubbub created a background that made their conversation much more intimate than if they had been in the studio, with its silent audience of unfinished guitars.

‘What she’s relayed to me is important, and there are things I probably can’t tell anyone.’

‘Not even me?’

‘Chiku Green trusted me with something significant.’ She closed her eyes. She desperately wanted to tell him. But it would have to wait, the full truth of it, her doubts about Arachne and Crucible, until she had spoken to June Wing. She could barely trust herself with this knowledge. It felt like a fire on her tongue, burning for release.

‘Well?’

‘I made a discovery, on Zanzibar. I mean, Chiku Green did. I… she wants me to talk to June.’

‘Wait. I’m totally confused now. The Pans want you to talk to June, and so does your counterpart?’

‘Yes. But it’s not that straightforward. The Pans want June for one thing, and Chiku Green wants her for another. And right now I don’t think I want to tell the Pans about the second thing.’

‘Well, I’m sure they’ll be fine with that.’

‘I just have to reach her. I don’t give a damn about Arethusa, she can tell me to go to hell as far as that’s concerned. But the other thing… I’ve got to speak to her about that, and it has to be somewhere safe. There’s a ship leaving for Venus tomorrow. The Pans will get me aboard. I have to be on that ship, Pedro. Right now there’s nothing more important in the world.’

‘That message took years to get to you – what could possibly be this important?’

‘Everything. Nothing. I don’t know, and I won’t until I’ve spoken to June. She’ll know, I think.’

‘And she’ll talk?’

‘She knew my mother. My father was a friend of hers before he ever met Sunday.’

‘Perhaps you should speak to your parents instead.’ He corrected himself. ‘I mean, to Jitendra. I’m sorry.’

Her mother and father were both still alive. Jitendra was in his two hundred and thirtieth year, hitting the long-delayed consequences of the prolongation therapies he had undergone late in his first century. Sunday was… somewhere over a cognitive horizon, her mind altered and re-altered as she chased a deeper understanding of Chibesa physics.

‘Even if they could help, it’s not their problem. Or yours. This is between me and June.’

‘I still don’t understand why you have to go to Venus.’ He said this as if interplanetary travel was some risky new fad, like hot-air ballooning.

‘Even if June was the other side of Lisbon, I’d still need to visit her in person. She won’t want to speak to me, so if there’s the slightest chance of avoiding contact, she’ll take it. She could always decline a ching, or ignore a proxy. She’ll find it tougher if I’m there in the flesh, having come all the way from Earth.’ Chiku dabbed at her lips with the napkin. ‘Look, it’s only Venus – we’re not talking about the Oort cloud.’

‘I could come with you.’

‘Or you could stay here and try to keep your business afloat.’

‘I am several months behind on commissions,’ Pedro admitted.

‘Exactly.’

‘So a week or two more won’t make any difference, will it?’

‘No, categorically not.’

‘Talk to this fish-faced friend of yours. Tell him it’s very simple. If he can move the world to make you go to Venus at the drop of a hat, he can certainly find room for another passenger. I’m very inexpensive. I’ll even pay for my own drinks.’

‘Mecufi won’t go for it.’

‘And you won’t know that for sure unless you ask, will you?’ He smiled at her, lifted his glass and sipped.

A couple of days later they took a maglev from Lisbon, then a black and yellow passenger airship from the maglev terminal flew them out to sea, to the base of one of the atmosphere chimneys. They boarded the shuttle at sea level, through a pressurised connecting dock. The ship was already in vacuum, ready to depart. Its engine was totally silent and smooth – Chiku strained to detect even a rumour of a rumble as they gathered speed, but there was only the white noise of air conditioning, the murmur of a low conversation from two Tamil businessmen a little way down the cabin.

From the chimney’s trumpet-shaped maw, the shuttle rose and kept rising. Then it transitioned into true spaceflight and there was an hour or two to be killed until they made rendezvous with the passing loop-liner. It was like a fatter, gaudier version of the liner that had once carried Chiku out to the birthing orbits. It was white with gold and platinum trim. Huge millwheel parts of it were counter-rotating, simulating various planetary gravities. Other components – central spheres and cylinders – remained static. It reminded Chiku of an over-elaborate wedding cake.

Three days to Venus barely gave them time to unpack their bags. The loop-liner was so huge that it would have taken weeks or even months to explore all its promenades and galleries, its curving rows of boutiques and restaurants. Chiku and Pedro contented themselves with the areas of the ship outfitted for terrestrial gravity, and even then there was far too much to investigate. Wandering the halls, Chiku came upon a reproduction of Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera. There was a quality of melancholia about the painting despite – or perhaps because of – its oddly contradictory subject matter: the frolicking nymphs and cupids, its groups of wistful, trysting lovers seemingly preparing to board the boat to leave this breezy island arcadia rather than arrive there. Not an embarkation, then, but a farewell.

Chiku’s mother had always been opinionated about art. She wondered what Sunday would have said about this painting.

The hours gobbled each other. Periodically, Mecufi checked in to make sure Chiku’s memories were behaving themselves. Pedro chinged back to Earth to complete some business until the time lag made it difficult. When they were together, there was only so much they could talk about. Chiku would not be drawn on the matter of June Wing, not until she had spoken to the woman. Pedro accepted this, to a point. He had secrets of his own, after all.

‘Let’s be honest,’ he said on the third evening of their crossing. ‘There’s a lot we don’t know about each other.’

‘A lot we don’t want to know,’ Chiku said.

‘Speak for yourself. But I hope we can be more open when this is all over and done.’

‘When I’m ready to talk about June, you’ll be the first to know. But it cuts both ways. Who are you, really? How did you end up with that studio, all those connections? You’re not from Lisbon – or if you are, you’ve travelled widely. You speak Swahili and Zulu and who knows what, with or without the aug. You make a big song and dance about me going to Venus, but it turns out that you’re not in the least bit bothered by space travel or weightlessness.’

‘I’ve been around. Done some stuff.’

‘I’d like to know about it.’

‘You could query the aug and find out most of it before I’ve had time to finish this drink.’

‘But that wouldn’t be the same as having you share it with me.’

Pedro smiled and looked away for a moment. ‘I’ve done… things.’

‘Well, that narrows it down.’

‘Quite interesting things, which we’ll speak of eventually, but not here and definitely not now. You will tell me about June, though, won’t you?’

‘Assuming there’s anything to tell.’

And so they circled around what could or would not be said, and as the Earth and Moon receded, so Earth’s sweltering, cloud-garbed sister grew larger.

First a pale dot, crescented by shadow, then a milky marble, like an eyeball with major cataracts.

From the loop-liner a shuttle took them to one of the orbiting stations necklacing Venus. They would not be staying long. Subtle enquiries had already established that June Wing was still down in the clouds. Not on Venus, exactly, but in one of the many floating gondolas tethered against the endless cycling winds. Chiku and Pedro were offered the option of chinging into receptacle bodies, organic or mechanical, but Mecufi had cautioned them against visiting June in anything other than full fleshly embodiment. She was particular about that. So they went down by Maersk Intersolar shuttle, an arrowheaded transatmospheric vehicle built like a bathyscaphe.

The shuttle slid into the dayside atmosphere like a syringe, then flicked its hull to transparency. Gradually their angle of flight levelled out. It was all sleighride smooth. Chiku got up and walked around, leaving Pedro snoozing. They were still a long way up from the surface – forty hellish kilometres – but the pressure outside was already a frankly absurd two atmospheres. It was stormy, too, although the shuttle was smoothing out the turbulence long before it had a chance to upset the passengers. Venus was a machine for making bad weather. It took eight months to rotate on its axis, a planet with a day longer than its own year, but these wind-whipped clouds chased their tails around the planet in mere dozens of hours.

The gondola – the place where June was supposed to be – was called Tekarohi High. They saw very little of it until the last few moments of the approach, the clouds thinning rather than parting, Tekarohi High looming like some gothic castle in a thunderstorm. It was a chubby cylinder the size of several skyscrapers lumped together. This habitable volume was only part of the structure. From the base, beneath a fringe of docking ledges and platforms, extended a tremendously strong guyline that vanished into the underlying clouds, forty kilometres of cable anchoring the station to Venus’s crust. Above, just as invisibly distant, were the monstrous balloons that held the platform aloft. Bracketed out from the main body of the platform were numerous turbines drawing power from the unending blast of the winds. Clearly they had more than enough for their purposes. Tekarohi High’s hundreds of floors of windows were great flickering acres of neon.

They docked near the base, clamps securing the hovering shuttle, and then there was the usual tedium and delay before they could actually exit the shuttle and walk into the gondola. Beneath Chiku’s feet, the floor felt as solid as if there was a planet right underneath, rather than forty kilometres of scalding, crushing carbon dioxide, delicately laced with sulphuric acid.

At odd intervals, wherever the internal architecture of the platform made it practical, the builders had set glass plates into the floor. Elsewhere, along corridors and viewing decks, stupendous armoured windows curved to horizontal near their bases, offering a view straight down. Outside was a shifting grey migraine. Views of the surface were occasionally possible at this altitude, apparently, but Chiku never saw anything she could definitively identify as something other than a figment of her own imagination. She kept thinking about that old caution against staring into the abyss.

‘I think that’s her,’ Chiku said in a low voice.

They were drinking coffee in one of the observation lounges, clouds of sackcloth grey testing themselves against the windows, lightning storms pulsing somewhere deeper inside the weather system. Pedro followed her gaze to a small and exceedingly old-looking woman, impeccably dressed, in the company of two expensively groomed younger people. They were gathered around a low table, pointing into some invisible abstraction occupying the space between them, negotiating some fine point of business that might have had nothing at all to do with Venus.

‘I don’t know…’ Pedro said.

Chiku called up an aug query. This woman was not June Wing, according to the identifiers. But June had been a wily cyberneticist, exactly the sort of person who might have been able to move around under a false signifier.

‘It must be her. The aug isn’t placing her anywhere else in the station, so who else can that be?’

‘The aug said she was here when we were on our way,’ Pedro pointed out. ‘Why would it change its mind?’

Eventually the woman stood, rising with the smooth motion that suggested she might be wearing an exo, and left the two younger people. Chiku considered following her, but she had not got very far with that thought when a tall gowned man in a fez loomed over their table.

‘Chiku Akinya? I am Imris Kwami.’

Chiku tried to think of something clever to say, something that would give her the upper hand, but the moment failed her.

‘Hello.’

‘I doubt you’ve heard my name before,’ Kwami said, easing his lengthy frame onto a vacant stool. He smiled at Pedro with a nod. ‘If it had, you would probably have run an aug search on me as well as my employer.’

‘You work for June?’ Chiku asked.

‘Yes. And I believe you were just about to approach that woman and ask her if she might be June?’

Chiku frowned. ‘How did you know?’

‘A hundred years of practice yields a certain level of competence in such matters.’

Chiku did not feel good about being this transparent, this open to interpretation. ‘Then if that woman isn’t June, what is she?’

‘Nobody – and I mean that in the kindest possible sense. I am certain that she is actually a very nice lady. I would gladly say that she was a decoy we had employed for exactly that purpose, but if you had got a little nearer you would have seen that she really does not resemble June to any large degree.’

Pedro leaned in. ‘Then where is she?’

‘Downstairs,’ Kwami said, as if this explained everything.

‘I thought we were on the lowest level,’ Chiku said, glancing down at the floor.

‘That’s a colloquialism, I think,’ Pedro said.

‘Correct, my young sir. June went down to the surface of Venus about twelve hours ago. I do not suppose you thought to confirm her whereabouts more recently than that?’

‘She isn’t in one of the domes, we know that much,’ Chiku said.

‘When I say surface, that is precisely my meaning. She is in a surface suit, on one of her scouting expeditions. This is why we have come to Venus. When she is done, we will leave.’

‘I’m totally confused now,’ Pedro said.

‘I did some background reading on the way over,’ Chiku said. ‘She’s collecting things, gathering them up for a museum or something.’

‘Robotic relics of the early space age,’ Kwami said, sweeping his hands overhead as if a banner floated above him. ‘This is her mission in life, the latest of many. Perhaps the last and greatest of them all.’

‘How long will she be down there?’ Chiku asked.

‘It could be many tens of hours. It is a very tedious business, travelling to and from the surface. You do not simply pop down there for a five-minute stroll.’

Pedro gave an easy shrug. ‘We can easily wait a day or two, longer if necessary.’

‘I am very happy for you, but I am afraid that is not how it works with my employer. She has left me with certain instructions, you see.’ This strange, thin, jovial man of indeterminate age touched his nose and winked. ‘You must understand that she is fully aware of your interest, your intentions, your approach on the loop-liner. She knows that there is more than one of you. She knows also that you have lately had contact with the merfolk.’

‘I see,’ Chiku said, with a small private shiver.

‘June is very good at detecting interest in herself. You should not be surprised by this. You only have to think her name and she will know it. I exaggerate, of course, but only a little. A moment, please.’ Kwami reached into a pocket and withdrew a small pale-green box. He popped the lid and extracted a lilac mote, which he then passed to Chiku. ‘This was formulated by June. You may open it, if you wish.’

‘We don’t want much of her time,’ Pedro said. ‘If she knows as much about us as you say, then she also knows that. Also that we’re not up to any funny business.’

‘Of course, sir,’ Kwami said, smiling. ‘But I am afraid June was very particular in her wishes. If you wish to speak to her, you must join her down there. She may speak to you, or she may not, depending on her mood. But there is no other way.’

‘We do need to speak,’ Chiku said. She fingered the mote, unsure of the specific etiquette in this situation.

‘Please,’ Kwami encouraged.

She cracked the mote. As always, there was an instant before the cargo of emotions began to unpack itself. There was no warmth here, only a stern and forbidding prickliness. She sensed a provisional willingness to be approached, but only on June Wing’s very specific terms. There would be no negotiation and she made no promises. There was also a continuous, low-level drone of constant background dread. It was not that June Wing was frightened, Chiku understood, but that she herself ought to be. The mote was a final warning, a chance to stop now before she went any deeper.

Know what you are getting into.

‘Well, that’s brightened my day,’ Chiku said grimly.

‘Your suits are already reserved, as well as an elevator slot,’ Kwami replied. ‘You can be on the surface in a jiffy.’

‘People die down there, don’t they?’ Pedro asked.

‘Only now and then,’ Kwami said cheerfully.