On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Providers kept watch until the overland rescue parties arrived, and then they were on the move again, the prefabs stashed aboard heavy-duty rovers far bigger than the ones they had ridden from the anchorpoint. It was a long but uneventful trek back to the nearest gondola’s anchorpoint. They rode a cargo elevator up its thread, and in the gondola there was a medical check-up, a debriefing, some legal formalities, requests for interviews from media affiliates – all declined, and then admittance into a public holding area where Imris Kwami had been waiting anxiously for hours, aware of the news but fearfully keen for confirmation.

‘We were outside when it happened,’ Chiku said. ‘I think it was fast. It looked fast. We’re really sorry, Imris.’

‘She was very brave,’ Pedro said. ‘I almost can’t imagine that kind of courage. I’m sure she knew what the odds were.’

‘Almost certainly,’ Kwami said.

‘It’s going to be a while before they can get search parties into the anchorpoint,’ Pedro said. ‘There could be air pockets in there, safety doors that closed.’

Kwami touched the little fez perched on his scalp. ‘I have been in neural contact with June ever since she first employed me. Her deepest thoughts were closed to me, of course, and I would not have chosen otherwise, but I have always felt her as a living presence, no matter how far apart we have been. When the accident happened, I felt a sharp severance, as if the aug itself had failed. The breaking of contact was so profound, so quick, her death could only have been instantaneous.’ The long, bony twigs of his fingers meshed and re-meshed as he spoke. ‘There was no fear, no regret, no moment of terror. Only a serene acceptance, as if she was waiting for the sun to rise, that lasted until the final instant of her life. It has been my singular privilege to have known this woman.’

‘She told me something,’ Chiku said, ‘before we parted. You have to help us, Imris. She said you can get us to Arethusa.’

He smiled, not without sympathy. ‘Did she, now?’

‘Pleistocene, pineapple, rococo,’ Chiku said. ‘Does that change things?’

After a long silence Kwami said: ‘Pineapple?’

Hastily Chiku said: ‘I meant grapefruit.’

‘Well, then, young miss. That does rather change things.’

Gulliver was a carbon black needle with deep-system capability and cryoberths that could keep its crew alive all the way out to the Oort cloud and back. Packed with retractile wings and control surfaces ready to spring out like the blades of a pocket knife, it was sleek and agile enough to handle almost any atmosphere in the system. Inside, it was sumptuous and easily spacious enough for thirty passengers, let alone the three who were present. There were libraries, dark-cased troves of red-and green-spined printed books, thousands of inert kilograms of lavishly processed wood-pulp. There were marble statues and busts – yet more profligate tonnage. An entire area of the ship, closed to routine access, appeared to be an extensive and well-equipped medical facility.

Chiku had barely known Imris Kwami before June’s death, so it was difficult to say how well he was bearing up. He certainly appeared to be driven, anxious to be getting on with business. Chiku had mentioned Arethusa, June’s insistence that they make contact. Imris had said that yes, this would happen, he promised it, but in the meantime there was talk of Mars, some rendezvous that must be made.

When they were twelve hours out from Venus, slicing across the spacelanes of the imperiously slow loop-liners, the three of them gathered around a low jade table in Gulliver’s lounge. Kwami had prepared chai. The ship was too small for centrifugal spin, but the constant-thrust engine provided a quarter-gee of gravity.

Chiku sipped the warm, soothing drink gratefully and said, ‘Imris, I need to be really clear about something, but it’s difficult to discuss.’

‘You’ve spoken the three words, Chiku – there’s no need for secrets between us now.’

‘I know this is going to sound silly, but I came to June because I was afraid of something, and I think this… thing may have tried to deliberately harm us on Venus.’

He tilted his cup, which was barely larger than a thimble. ‘You speak of Arachne.’

Chiku felt a kind of giddy relief that she was not going to be required to explain everything from the beginning, like some kind of babbling madwoman.

‘I think Arachne sabotaged the gondola, so my question is – can she attack us here?’

‘Her influence is extensive,’ Kwami said, nodding gravely, ‘but she’s not omniscient. She would like to be, but her reach is constrained by physics and the limitations of the devices and networks she must co-opt and infiltrate. June, fortunately, is… was a very clever woman.’ The error embarrassed him. ‘You must excuse me.’

‘Please,’ Chiku said, waving aside his lapse.

‘There have always been gaps in Arachne’s perception. June learned to slip through these gaps and exploit them. This ship is secure, insofar as we can ever be certain of such things. Our long-range communications are a different matter, however. Arachne can probably decode any encryption we can devise.’

Pedro leaned back in his chair, one leg hooked underneath him. ‘What does she want?’

‘Her primary goal, young sir, is the same as ours – to continue existing. She knows that the Cognition Police would have eliminated or neutralised her long ago had they learned of her true nature.’

‘But they knew she was an artilect,’ Chiku said.

‘Of course, but she exists on the borderline of what they were prepared to tolerate,’ Kwami said, his tone conveying gentle correction. ‘They made allowances since Ocular could not have functioned without the aid of a high-level controlling intelligence. But Arachne was much cleverer than they realised.’ He paused to pour some fresh chai. ‘June used to speak of two orders of cleverness. The first advertises itself, craves attention. The second is wiser. It wraps itself in layers of concealment and will appear to act stupidly, if needs must.’

‘That was Arachne,’ Pedro said.

‘No one guessed her true nature until it was far too late,’ Kwami said.

‘Except for Eunice,’ Chiku said. ‘The construct, anyway.’

‘Indeed. You have communicated with the robot?’

‘Yes. Only on a couple of occasions, but it was enough to get the picture.’

‘June spoke of it, but for obvious reasons I never expected to meet anyone who had actually encountered it. Or perhaps I should say her.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Chiku said, ‘the construct didn’t remember much about Arachne, or indeed about June, beyond the fact that it was vitally important I speak to her as soon as possible. Well, I did that, and now I’m here, but I’m none the wiser. Did she tell you the whole story, Imris?’

‘Everything she deemed important.’

‘The stuff about Crucible, about how it might not be what we’re expecting?’

‘She shared some theories, nothing concrete.’

Chiku touched her head, echoing Kwami’s earlier gesture. ‘I have a device in my head installed by Quorum Binding. It links me to my counterparts. Or counterpart, now.’

Kwami gave a precise little nod. ‘I am aware of such practices. They were very commonplace during the early years of the holoships.’

‘I’m here now because the version of me on Zanzibar wanted this version to make contact with June. Chiku Green sent me her memories… they were scripted into my head, forcing me to act. Now I need to send my memories back to Zanzibar, so that Chiku Green can decide how to act on them.’

‘Can’t you simply transmit the information as a message, the normal way?’ Pedro asked.

‘No – this has to be for my ears only. For Chiku Green’s ears, I mean. If it becomes widespread knowledge, it’ll rip Zanzibar apart.’

‘You are right to be cautious,’ said Imris. ‘The normal message protocols between here and Zanzibar… I could not guarantee that they are immune to interception by Arachne. And that’s before we consider the possibility of human eavesdropping as the signals are relayed along the caravan.’

‘What’s to say the same won’t happen to her memories?’ Pedro asked.

‘It might, but the level of encryption will be significantly higher than for normal traffic – that’s why you needed the merfolk to unlock the memories in the first place.’

‘So you know about that,’ Chiku said.

‘The problem now is that Arachne will be paying particular attention to you, Miss Akinya, concentrating her resources against your efforts.’

‘She could have killed me when the Providers came.’

‘Yes, but such a thing would have been difficult to explain as an accidental death. Believe me, Arachne is old and wily enough to be adept at covering her tracks.’

‘But she’ll get us in the end, won’t she?’ Pedro asked. ‘If she’s so keen to protect herself, she’s bound to, right? And we can’t tell anyone about her because they’d either not believe us or there’d be mass panic and more deaths.’

‘We are in something of a bind,’ Kwami admitted, with magnificent understatement.

‘Dangerous or not, I still have to act,’ Chiku said. ‘I’ve got to tell Chiku Green about Crucible. Even if I can’t tell the people on the holoship what’s really there, surely it’s better for them to know they’re being lied to, isn’t it?’

‘I can offer you an alternative that you might find acceptable,’ Kwami said. ‘You mentioned Arethusa.’

‘Yes,’ Chiku said. ‘June said we had to speak to her, too.’

‘Can you make that happen?’ Pedro asked.

‘I can. But first we have to collect something from Mars. We shall not be staying long, of course – or getting too close.’

‘I hope not,’ Chiku said.

Phobos and Deimos had been important staging points in the exploration of the solar system since the infancy of the space age. Outposts had been built on both moons, fuel depots and teleoperation camps offering way stations before the descent to the Martian surface. Eunice Akinya had lived on Phobos for months, trapped there until the weather changed. A century later, Chiku’s mother had set her own footprints on the misshapen little moon. By that time, one of the largest craters – Stickney – had become the infection site for a major outbreak of hotels and deep-space servicing facilities. As Gulliver closed in on final approach, Chiku found it difficult to believe that Phobos had ever been a thing, a place made by nature. The moon was gone now, smothered under a fester of human habitation. Neon-scribbled structures wrapped it from pole to pole – hotels and casinos and malls, pleasure domes and observation platforms. It was like a dream of a city, wrapped around itself.

‘How safe is it down there?’ Chiku asked. ‘If Arachne could get to us on Venus, she can easily reach us here.’

‘Faking an accident on Venus, where many things go wrong as a matter of course, is not the same as faking an accident around Mars.’

‘I hope you’re right about that, Imris.’

‘I am right about most things.’ He said this without a trace of irony. ‘One more thing, Chiku: the man we are meeting, Victor Gallicean, is someone we can trust. He has been a very good and loyal friend over the years, and has played a great part in helping June assemble the museum. But he knows nothing of Arachne, and it would be best not to mention her.’

They docked, cleared immigration and moved through bright warrens of commerce and glitz. Chiku glimpsed Mars occasionally, through a picture window, this prize that was close enough to touch. It transpired that June had already arranged this meeting long before her misadventures on Venus. They met Victor Gallicean, an ‘extraction specialist’, in the lobby of a hotel. The structure was spun up to half a gee and the landscape scrolled past constantly outside the windows. Gallicean turned out to be an ogre of a man with a faintly piratical demeanour, his face a map of interesting scars and lesions. He embraced Imris Kwami, then shook hands with Chiku and Pedro.

‘I am very sorry to hear the news, Imris. I didn’t believe it at first. After all this time, something as stupid as that ended June Wing? A ridiculous accident, on Venus? I mean, really.’

‘There is no such thing as a good way to go when you are three hundred and three years old,’ Kwami said sagely.

‘If she hadn’t given up her suit, Pedro or I might not be here,’ Chiku said.

‘Had you known her long?’ Gallicean asked.

‘No time at all, really, but there’s a connection with my family. June used to know my mother and father, back when they were all living on the Moon.’

‘Which would make you one of those Akinyas, not just any old Akinya.’

‘Yes,’ Chiku said. ‘But don’t hold it against me, will you?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ Gallicean had a bushy black beard, which presumably served to cover up yet more blemishes, and a mop of unruly black hair. A plain gold earring pierced one cratered lobe. His clothes ran to the ostentatious. ‘Look, let’s not stand around like fools. There’s a pretty good bar at the other end of Phobos – we should drink ourselves into an absolute stupor, in her memory.’

‘Except I do not drink,’ Imris Kwami said.

‘No, but you have a remarkable tolerance for the drunkenness of others.’

‘This is true.’

‘Plus you know more June stories than any other person alive. With the possible exception of me.’

‘This is also true.’

Wormlike trains burrowed through the moon. They were soon inside the bar, seated at a table with a commanding view of the lit face of Mars. The only gravity here was the feeble pull provided by Phobos itself, but the drinks arrived in exquisite squeezebulbs, and there were bracelets and epidermal patches for those unaccustomed to near-weightlessness. Pedro and Chiku ordered a couple of patches, then buckled into padded observation chairs.

‘He’s far too modest to brag about it,’ Kwami said, ‘but our friend Victor here is one of the very few people to have set foot on Mars in the last fifty years – on several occasions, in fact. How many is it now, Victor? Four?’

‘Six,’ Gallicean said, with a cough. ‘Actually, seven.’

‘I’m surprised anyone goes down to Mars these days,’ Chiku said.

‘It’s all unofficial and uninsured,’ Gallicean said. ‘We go down fast, pick our landing sites very carefully and don’t hang around to sniff the daisies – on my most recent trip, I was down there under eight minutes. My cumulative Martian surface time over my entire career as an extraction specialist is still less than an hour.’ He sniffed, scratching at his nose. ‘Never saw the place in the old days. Rather regret that now.’

‘I’ve heard about thrill-seekers going after an adrenalin rush,’ Pedro said.

‘Fools and knaves,’ Gallicean replied, his features settling into an expression of unbridled contempt. ‘They drop something on the surface, like a bone. Then, dogs that they are, they race each other to see who can get to it first, ahead of the machines, and then return to orbit. There’s money and prestige involved, of course – why else would they debase themselves?’

‘Victor Gallicean considers such activities beneath him,’ Kwami said, as if the subject of his statement were not sitting directly opposite him.

‘Yes, he does,’ Gallicean said firmly. ‘I face comparable risks, but I do so for a purpose beyond my own personal glorification.’

It was cloudless and windless on Mars, so they could see all the way down to the surface without difficulty. By some fluke, they were looking down on the place where it all began – the Tharsis ridge, three shield volcanoes laid out in a chain like bullet-holes, and to the east the spider-web fracturing of the Valles Marineris canyon system, scarring so deep that even from orbit Chiku could see the contrasting elevations. Where the machines had been busy, their activities had left visible traces on the surface, as if Mars had been subject to a new and sudden epoch of weathering. There were bright new craters, blasted by weapons, and the notches and zigzags of trenches dug for fortification. Elsewhere, the machines’ tracks were stranger and more transient. Geometric patterns flickered across the dust, squares and clusters of squares hundreds of kilometres across. Sometimes these formations met other clusters of squares and formed battle fronts, arcing lines, continental in scale, where geometries tussled and ruptured. These patterns bloomed in a day and faded overnight, the evidence of subterranean processes beyond the reach of orbital sensors. More and more, the machines were keeping their secrets to themselves.

Defence platforms circled Mars, nervously vigilant against any attempt the machines might make to reach space.

‘So what,’ Pedro said, ‘does an extraction specialist actually extract?’

‘Different things for different clients, and not just from Mars. I’ve worked all over the system. For our dear friend June, it has usually involved robotics.’

‘The whole of Mars involves robotics,’ Chiku said.

‘We are speaking now of a much earlier phase of robotic activity. Doubtless Imris has spoken of the museum? For years, June has been bent on collecting the surviving relics of the dawn of robotic exploration, where such recovery is feasible. Landers, probes, rovers. It’s surprising how many of these things were still lying around when she began her work.’

‘It’s why she came to Venus,’ Chiku said, remembering the relic they’d abandoned in the anchorpoint.

‘At her time of life,’ Gallicean replied, ‘she was probably unwise to take on so much of the work. But would she listen?’

‘I argued against it as best I could,’ Kwami said.

Gallicean fidgeted in his chair, adjusting the restraint straps. ‘This may be indelicate, Imris, but it’s better said now than later or not at all. Are there plans for the continuation of the museum?’

A new face of Mars was turning slowly into view as Phobos orbited. On the horizon’s bow, mysterious dust plumes curled into the high, thin reaches of the atmosphere. The night face, which would be visible soon, was often alive with patterns of lights, pastel blues and greens, shining up from the ground or floating in the air. No one really had a clue about what the machines were doing down there.

‘Matters are in hand,’ Kwami said.

‘Well, that’s as clear as mud,’ Gallicean said.

‘You know as well as I do that she was in no hurry to complete the project – she never set a date for the opening, and she left no instructions regarding how the museum would function once she deemed the collection ready for visitors. And there are still many artefacts around the system still to be gathered.’

‘Forgive my inquisitiveness,’ Gallicean said, lifting his squeezebulb in an apologetic toast. ‘It was rude of me to talk business.’

‘Not at all,’ Kwami said. ‘But as you raised the topic – your trip was, I trust, successful?’

‘I got what you sent me to find. A few dents and scratches, but nothing unexpected after so long down there. I’m just sorry she isn’t here to see it herself.’

‘What did you extract?’ Chiku asked.

‘A rover. Indian Space Agency, mid-2030s. It’s difficult to believe, I know, but there are still things wandering around on Mars that by some great good fortune have not yet been picked apart by the Evolvarium. In some cases, it appears to have allowed them to live. We’ll never know for sure, but it’s almost as if the ’varium’s taking pity on them, or showing respect to a few older, more venerable machines. The ISA rover has experienced some contamination, some degree of upgrading and evolution, but June would have been expecting that.’

‘She’d have been very grateful,’ Kwami said. ‘I thank you on her behalf for the risks you took.’

‘Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves.’ He saluted this observation with a sip from his squeezebulb, nodding in immodest self-approval.

‘Do you think we’ll ever go back?’ Pedro asked. ‘To Mars, I mean. Or is it gone for good?’

‘It’s not our world now. And what would be the point, anyway? I’d far rather sit things out and see what happens. The Evolvarium is moving through distinct developmental phases. It started with the blood-red Darwinian survival struggle, every creature for itself, and now we’re seeing an organisational shift to something more complex. Cooperative alliances, hints of machine altruism – the emergence, perhaps, of machine statehood, the onset of a global civilisation of competing factions. There’s no telling what Mars will be like when they start getting really clever. We may need to send down ambassadors!’

‘Unless they beat us to it and send up their own first,’ Chiku said.

After that, there were many stories. Gallicean started, but Imris Kwami soon joined in, both men happily accusing the other of embellishment and exaggeration, but equally content to laugh at the other’s tales and wince at some of the more awkward moments, of which there was no small number. Listening to these accounts, funny and bracing and sad, Chiku felt something very close to vertigo, a dizzy sort of perception that she had only just begun to grasp the vertical depth of a very long life, the sense of how far it plumbed the past. A life that went down like a lift-shaft, each floor containing an ordinary life’s worth of love and loss, adventure and disappointment, dreams and ruins, joy and sorrow. There were empires and dynasties that had not endured as long as June Wing had. It was true that she was an outlier, a statistical extreme, with her three hundred and three years of mortal existence. But there were more like her all the time. Before long, a life as prolonged as hers would be considered unusual rather than exceptional, and eventually unremarkable rather than unusual.

Very soon it was time to go. Their medical bracelets blasted them back to cold sobriety, all except Imris Kwami, of course, who had never been anything other than clearheaded. Needles of clarity pierced Chiku’s skull. For a few minutes her thoughts ran supercooled, as if her entire brain had been dipped in liquid helium. It was not entirely pleasant. The four of them returned by train to the spacedocks, where Gulliver hummed in its clamps, still refuelling. Kwami and Gallicean completed the paperwork for the handover of the Martian relic.

‘Where are you going now?’ Gallicean asked.

‘Saturn, where we hope to catch up with an old friend. Of course, there is also the small matter of disposing of June’s remains. Fortunately, she was very specific in her instructions.’

‘June would not be June were the instructions anything other than specific,’ Gallicean said sagely.

‘You are welcome to accompany us. We’ll be there and back inside of a month.’

‘No, but I thank you for the kindness. Work to be done, fortunes to be won and lost, et cetera. There will be some record of the event?’

‘I’ll see that you receive a copy. And thank you again – for everything.’

Chiku wondered if she was still suffering some kind of residual drunkenness, as none of this exchange made sense to her. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Imris, but how can there possibly be remains? We left her on Venus.’

‘It’s complicated,’ Imris Kwami said.