On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

When Saturn filled half the sky, Kwami called Chiku and Pedro back into the part of Gulliver that until then had been sealed behind glass doors.

Chiku had been correct in her guess that this was some sort of medical facility. Beyond the doors were aggressively sterile rooms filled with extremely modern surgical equipment – scanners, medical pods, mantis-like robot doctors. None of this was very surprising, Chiku supposed. At three hundred and three, and given the life choices she had made in her youth, June would have needed more than a little maintenance. But there was enough medical equipment here to keep a dance troupe alive.

When Kwami showed them the bodies, understanding began to dawn.

They were kept in one room, preserved in glass cylinders. Knots of complex plumbing ran into the cylinders, top and bottom, and each contained a human body floating in some kind of suspension medium.

‘They’re not clones,’ Kwami was quick to point out. ‘They are not even living, in the technical sense. These are robots, android bodies constructed using biomimetic principles. They have bones, musculature, a circulatory system, but they are still machines.’

‘Sort of like ching proxies?’ Pedro asked.

‘The exact opposite, in fact. These forms were not engineered to be controlled from a distance via a mind located in another body. She occupied these bodies from within. She wore them. They were her.’

‘We saw her, Imris. On Venus,’ Chiku said. She was having trouble getting her mind around what she was hearing.

‘You saw another of these bodies. There were ten in all. You will notice that one is missing – that was the body she was occupying at the time of her death.’

‘How long had she been… occupying it?’ Pedro asked, swallowing hard.

‘The surgical integration was quite time-consuming, not to say risky. She did not normally swap bodies more than once or twice a year, and lately, less frequently than that. She had occupied the one she died in for twenty-two months. I do not think she had the fortitude to endure another integration.’

Chiku had no appetite for the details, but they were plain enough. At the time of her death, June had been reduced to little more than a central nervous system. These bodies were vehicles for a brain and some spinal trimmings. Her mind had long been saturated with aug-mediating implants, so it would have been simple for her to send and receive the nervous signals required to drive a prosthetic body.

Essentially, Chiku conceded, it was not so very different from chinging into a proxy or warmblood body. When Chiku had chinged aboard Zanzibar, surgeons could have entered her room in Lisbon and stripped her down to a brain. Provided the brain was kept alive, she would have known no better. The signals fed to her brain during the chinging process were persuasive – she felt herself to be elsewhere.

All June had done was fold that illusion back onto itself, like a trick of origami.

‘She was not alone in this,’ Kwami said. ‘There are thousands like her, even now.’

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Chiku said.

‘The early adopters encountered considerable social revulsion. Later, when the bodies had advanced to the point of being indistinguishable from living forms, there was no need for the occupants to advertise their nature. Certainly no legal obligation to do so. Would you have treated June differently if you had known?’

‘No,’ Chiku said. ‘I mean, I don’t think so.’

‘But there is doubt,’ Kwami said, ‘and you cannot be blamed for it. It is a perfectly human reaction.’

‘Why so many bodies?’ Pedro asked.

‘They are not all the same – it suited her purposes to have a selection of bodies, rather than the complexity of a single body with configurable modes. But as I said, it had been a while since her last change. One or two of them she hardly ever used, but she could not bring herself to destroy them.’

‘Could she have survived… on the surface of Venus, when the accident happened?’ Pedro asked

‘No more than you could, my friend. She may not have needed air and water, but she was no more capable of surviving that atmosphere than the rest of us. But as I said, her state of mind was peaceful. This far into her life, she had faced death many times and had negotiated a kind of acceptance of it.’ Kwami laced his fingers. ‘But now there is work to be done. It was her wish that these bodies be disposed of, should she no longer need them. These are the remains I mentioned.’

‘I’m very sorry, Imris,’ Chiku said.

‘Do not be. She did good work, and lived a long life.’

They sent the nine bodies towards Saturn, spitting them out of Gulliver like seeds, each boosted far enough ahead of the next that they followed independent trajectories. From a window in the ship they watched them fall, twinkling as they tumbled, shock-frozen in seconds. In time, Kwami said, the bodies would ghost through the rings. The particles of ice that circled Saturn were dispersed so tenuously that collisions were unlikely, during the first crossing, at least. But the bodies would loop around and thread the rings over and over again. Sooner or later, on the tenth or the hundredth passage, ice would meet ice, and in that meeting there would be a flash of vapour, a white gasp of kinetic energy. And there would follow a temporary unravelling of the ring’s multistranded weave, visible, perhaps, from space or one of the planet’s airless moons.

But time and gravity would do their healing work. Entrained by the same resonant forces that had sculpted and maintained the rings in the first place, the pieces of June would take their place among the stately processional ooze of all the other icy shards. Save for a gemlike tint of chemical impurity, there would be no way to tell that these pieces had ever contained a life.

Chiku had seen moons and asteroids before, but nothing quite like Hyperion. It was not its potato shape that distinguished the Saturnian moon, although Hyperion was very large for an object that was not spherical. What was remarkable, even beautiful, was the degree to which this little piece of ice and dirt was cratered, its surface so impacted that the walls of the craters touched and intersected, the walls forming knifeblade ridges, the pattern of these ridges suggesting nothing less than some marine growth process, as if this was a moon grown from some pearly grey variety of coral. And the walls went down so far that the deeply shadowed craters became like cave mouths, enclosing dark mysteries. Indeed, Hyperion was riddled with cavities. It was less a moon than a loosely organised swarm of rubble, moving in uneasy consort. There was room to lose cities in those fissures and voids.

As Gulliver closed in, decelerating from thousands to hundreds and then tens of kilometres per second, there was not much to suggest that people had found a use for this place. A handful of strobe lights, a radar bounce off some metallic installation or encampment, but no cities, no landing pads, no train tubes or casino hotels. Strapped into a seat for the duration of the slowdown burns, Chiku thought they were coming in recklessly fast, and she began to wonder if Imris Kwami did in fact have it in mind to dash them all to their doom. Perhaps that had been his intention all along, from the moment he learned of June’s death.

A masterless samurai, scheming his own suicide.

But the burns and course-correction bursts were too calculated for that, and as the craters became a landscape, one of them suddenly ringed itself with blue light. Kwami steered hard for that crater, and the blackness at its base turned milky as they approached. Gulliver slid between razorblade walls, still daggering down too fast, and then there was a sharp irising motion as the crater floor peeled open, and an organised blueness beyond, dense with lights and structures. And then they were through and the crater floor snapped shut behind them, like a fly-trap.

Gulliver slowed harder, until they were moving at only hundreds of metres per second. They were sliding into Hyperion, down an enormous throat. Chiku marvelled. She had seen the interior spaces of the holoships, but this was engineering on an audaciously different scale. The throat branched and rebranched, opening out into many lit vaults. There was a staggering amount of space in this tiny moon.

They pushed on deeper and eventually slowed and docked, Gulliver pinning itself to the concave wall of a bulb-shaped cavity alongside several other ships.

‘All this for artists and malcontents?’ Pedro asked. ‘I’m tempted to give it a try myself.’

‘I am sure you would be made most welcome,’ Kwami said. ‘There is just one difficulty. Almost everyone who has contact with Arethu-sa is obliged to remain here thereafter. Present company excluded, of course.’

‘I sincerely hope so,’ Chiku said.

They disembarked. Even at the surface, the gravity on Hyperion was only a little less feeble than on Phobos; deep inside it was barely distinguishable from weightlessness. This time, there was no offer of bracelets or epidermal patches. The presumption was that if you had gone to the trouble of coming to Hyperion, you must have known what to expect.

Their host, meeting them on the other side of the lock, was a short, broad-framed man with extremely white hair, worn in tight curls like a Roman emperor. Although caucasian, he had deeply tanned skin, which only made the hair shine whiter. He wore brown clothes with a black leather waistcoat. He shook their hands, demonstrating a powerful, sinewy grip. ‘Welcome to Hyperion. I am Gleb.’

The name tickled Chiku’s memory, but the details remained elusive.

‘We’ve come to see Arethusa,’ she said.

‘Of course. Imris – how are you? We were of course most distressed to hear of June’s passing.’

‘I knew the day would come, eventually. I wish it had not happened quite the way it did, but she was never one to shy from risk.’

‘She would have been safe here. I hope she knew that.’

‘She did. But she would also have been bored out of her mind within seconds.’

‘This is understood.’ Gleb offered a sympathetic smile. ‘Well, shall we proceed? Are you all well? Do you have need of refreshment?’

‘I’d prefer to see Arethusa sooner rather than later,’ Chiku said.

‘Some of our visitors expect to be presented with motes before they meet her,’ Gleb said, ‘but that’s not how we do things around here. If you’ve come this far and still have doubts about our trustworthiness, you have more problems than a mote can put to rest.’

‘We’ll manage without, I’m sure,’ Chiku said.

Gleb took them deeper into Hyperion, passing through or around the voids given over to the moon’s permanent colony of artists. Most of the voids were pressurised. Chiku saw artists moving in microgravity, working with tools that looked better suited to construction or even close-quarters combat. Some of them were strapped into four-armed suits, like the units aboard Zanzibar, and a few were laced into exos with eight or ten pairs of limbs, the operation of which must have demanded an astonishing burden of sensorimotor control. They were sculpting and accreting massive but lacy constructs, whimsies of ice and air. One void contained a liquid thing, a kind of trembling pupal sac as large as a house, contained by its own surface tension and suspended in place by gusts of air from automatic nozzles. It constantly branched pseudopods, which broke off, collapsed into shimmering clouds and were reabsorbed by the main mass. In another chamber, there was a twisting, sinuous fire-dragon constructed from some kind of self-sustaining flame. The eyes were little pinched knots of increased combustion temperature, the wings tapering from brightness to sooty black.

They went deeper, travelling via free-fall drop shafts, elevators, escalators, even a brisk train ride through an area of Hyperion not yet hollowed out for the benefit of artists.

‘We must be a long way in by now,’ Chiku said.

‘Approaching the centre of gravity,’ Gleb said. ‘This is where Arethusa spends most of her days.’

‘I know your name – or I think I do, anyway. I’ve been doing some research into my family, writing a history. Or I was, before all this blew up.’ There was also, of course, the memory of Chiku Yellow’s conversations with Eunice, the talk of the elephants.

‘I knew your mother,’ Gleb said pleasantly. ‘And your father, and later your uncle. We were good friends.’

‘Did you meet on the Moon?’

‘Indeed. We ran a sort of underground zoo in the Descrutinised Zone. We, as in Chama and I.’

The fog was gradually lifting from her memory. ‘Chama is your husband.’

‘Was,’ Gleb corrected gently. ‘Chama died about a century ago.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s fine, Chiku.’ Gleb was smiling at her awkwardness. ‘We had a very long and happy life together. Children, everything. More memories than a head can hold. And I’ve been happy since.’

‘It’s good to meet you,’ she said. The four of them – Imris Kwami, Chiku, Pedro and their host – were the train’s only passengers. ‘You mentioned you were involved with a zoo – is that the one that had something to do with the dwarf elephants?’

‘Goodness, that really is ancient history.’

‘From what I remember, those were the first elephants to reach space.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Were you also involved in another project involving elephants?’

He gave her a polite but evasive smile. ‘You’ll have to be more specific.’

‘The creation of elephants with enhanced cognitive faculties. Elephants that can use complex tools. Elephants with language.’

The silence that followed seemed to swallow eternities. The train swerved and dived down a blue gullet. Gleb’s expression was tight, his face masklike. Chiku wondered if she had made some dire miscalculation, or whether Eunice had given her false information.

‘How do you know about that?’ he asked eventually.

‘It’s a little involved.’

‘Try me.’

‘I’ve seen them – the Tantors, if that’s the name you know them by.’

‘How can you have seen them?’

‘I didn’t, exactly. But there’s a version of me aboard the ship that’s carrying them.’

‘When did you see them?’

‘Feels like this version of a few days, but it was actually about twenty years ago, if you take the time lag into account.’

‘But within the last century?’

‘Yes. I saw them several times before sending my memories back to Earth.’

‘Then they’re alive. I mean, as far as you know.’

‘They’re alive and they’re magnificent. They spoke to me, Gleb. She told me their names… Dreadnought, Aphrodite… but there were more, many more. An entire self-sustaining herd.’

‘She. You said “she”.’

‘You know exactly what happened, don’t you? How Eunice and the Tantors got aboard?’

The mask slipped. There was that smile again, and a watery quality to his eyes. ‘Some of it, not all. It was a difficult business, done in a hurry, and none of us knew all the details. But they’re well? And she’s well? After all this time? You’re not lying, could you? You’d have to know about the Tantors to lie about them, and then why would you lie?’

‘They’re doing well, Gleb. Eunice was… damaged, I suppose, by whatever forced her into hiding, but she’s managed to compensate. She was adamant that I had to visit Arethusa. I don’t know what the future holds for Eunice and the herd – there are difficult times ahead, that’s for sure. But they’ve made it this far, which is something, don’t you think?’

‘You’re right, Chiku, that’s definitely something. You have made me very happy.’

‘I wish you could have seen them.’

‘You can tell me about them later. There will be time, I’m sure.’

‘What you and Chama did back then… whatever risks you took, it was worth it. And I’ll tell you everything, I promise.’

Gleb squeezed her hand. He was crying, but appeared unembarrassed by it. Then she felt tears well up in her own eyes, and she cried with him. She had so much on her mind, so many fears, but she was glad to have brought this man some good news.