On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

She awoke with her face in grass, blades up her nose, in her eyes, regiments of mud storming the battlements of her teeth.

She heard the urgent patter of approaching feet. Shoe-squelch on grass.

‘Here,’ a voice said. ‘Let me help you back up.’

Hands took her body and eased her into an ungainly sitting position, legs still tangled on the lawn. She felt like a discarded doll. As she wiped the dirt from her face, she noticed that her palm was a greasy green-yellow with the pulp of grass and soil, where she must have reached out to stop her fall.

‘I tripped,’ she said, tongue moving thick and slow in her mouth, like a fat, lazy slug.

‘You had a microsleep episode – normal enough this soon after revival. Usually you’d just stumble through it and not notice, but your inner ear is still a bit wobbly.’ A person dressed in crisp electric-white medical overalls was kneeling next to her. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I think so.’ She tried to remember what was happening before she came to on the grass, but for a moment she was unshackled from everything other than the present. ‘What was I doing? Where am I?’

‘Taking a stroll. You’re in the gardens.’

‘Gardens.’ The word felt novel, unusual in her mouth.

‘Of the revival clinic. We woke you, brought you out of skipover.’

The technician was smiling gently. He was a stocky man with pleasing features and a tonsure of black curls around a gleaming bald spot. She felt certain she knew him, but no name came to mind.

‘You’ve been conscious for a day,’ the man added kindly. ‘It’s perfectly normal to have some setbacks until things settle down.’

Her addled thoughts searched for a point of reference. Where was she? She remembered being in many places lately. On Earth, in space, inside a mad, tumbling moon with a core of scratched glass. In a house of cats. In a box, falling through the sky. In the grip of a sea-monster.

No, she was in Zanzibar. In a revival clinic’s gardens, in one of the community cores.

‘I expect I’ve asked you this already—’ she began.

‘Forty years. And yes, you’ve asked a few times. But again, it’s normal.’

Her throat was wretchedly dry. She felt like a mummy, a thing stitched together from tissue and cloth.

‘I don’t remember the date. When I went under, or what it should be now.’ She was trying to work things out, but her thoughts kept running into a ditch. This, she reflected, was how it must feel to be stupid, unable to hold the simplest chain of reasoning in her head. Even that notion was difficult for her to comprehend.

‘It’s 2388 now. You went under in 2348, forty years ago to the week. Here – do you want to try standing again?’

Chiku took his outstretched hands and let him help her up. She was unsteady on her feet at first, needing the technician’s hand at her elbow for a few moments. ‘I feel like a wreck. I’ve done this before. Why doesn’t it get any easier?’

‘You’re actually doing really well. Forty’s not too bad a skip, anyway – not that the duration makes much difference to the side effects, in my experience. You were authorised for the full sixty, too – the rest of your family are still under.’

‘You’ve told me this already, haven’t you?’

‘About nine times. But don’t worry – it’s all part of the service.’

‘How’s Pedro?’

The technician’s smile tightened. ‘There isn’t a Pedro – not according to my manifest.’

‘No, not Pedro,’ she said, concentrating hard. ‘I mean Noah. And my children – Mposi, Ndege. They all went under when I did. How are they? Have I spoken to them yet?’

‘That would be difficult as they’re all still in skipover.’

‘Then why am I awake?’

‘You asked to be, Chiku.’ There was a faintly impatient edge to his voice now, as if, despite his assurances, there was a limit to how often he ought to have to explain this stuff to her. Perhaps it had been more than nine times.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just need to… clear my head a bit. I think I was going somewhere.’

‘There are some benches over by the fountain. Shall I help you the rest of the way?’

‘No,’ she said, deciding she would make it on her wobbly legs or not at all. ‘I can manage. I feel steadier already.’

She followed the hiss of water to the ornamental fountain. It was just around a curve in the lawn, hidden by a wall of manicured hedge twice as tall as Chiku. Somehow she had half-known the way. She must have already come to the fountain several times since her revival, forever discovering it anew.

The revival clinic had been designed to feel as little like a medical facility as possible. The building behind her was low-ceilinged and white under a wide-brimmed witch’s hat of a roof, with pavilioned walkways and many open windows and doors. It was hemmed in by trees and hedges, a century and a half’s worth of managed growth. The skipover vaults were somewhere else entirely.

Overhead blazed a ceiling of false sky. It struck Chiku that the quality of light had altered since she went under. Which, upon a moment’s reflection, was surely the case: they were adjusting the spectrum and brightness from year to year, slowly transitioning to the conditions anticipated on Crucible. 61 Virginis f, their new star, was slightly smaller and cooler than the Sun, its spectrum fractionally more orange in hue. But no one ever noticed this infinitely slow gradation except skipover sleepers, who woke feeling as if they had coloured filters on their eyes.

Next to the ornamental fountain – a comely astronaut tipping water from her space helmet as if it were a jug – sat three wooden benches of rustic design. Two of the benches were unoccupied, but a woman dressed in white was sitting on the one in the middle. Chiku made to take one of the other benches, but the woman patted the planks next to her.

‘Take a seat. We’ve got a lot to talk about.’

Chiku had given the woman no more than a sideways glance until that point, but now she had her full attention. The woman sitting on the bench was her. A ghost, like the one that had haunted her in Lisbon.

‘How are you here?’ Chiku asked, sitting down where she had been told.

‘I’m not real – I’m in your head. But you guessed that already.’

‘Have we spoken?’

‘Before now? No, this is our first time. I came up on the uplink, a messenger figment. No one else can see or detect me, although your half of the conversation will be open to eavesdropping. So please be extremely circumspect in your statements.’

‘I’m very, very confused.’

‘I understand, but there’s no need to be. I’ve sent my memories back to you, to be scripted back into your head, but you were asleep, in skipover. The memories can only be unpacked by functioning neuromachinery, and that had to wait until you began to warm up.’ The woman in white leaned forwards on the seat, hands laced between her knees. ‘The process has begun – you’re beginning to remember things about my life, things I did and saw. People I knew. Feelings I felt. It’s been tough, Chiku – much tougher than I expected. Much tougher than you expected, to be frank.’

‘I think we should be.’ And she rubbed her scalp, the hair short from skipover, as if there was something itching between her ears. ‘I feel something inside me. Like a stone. What am I carrying around?’

‘Grief,’ the other Chiku explained. ‘Pedro died. We loved him. There was an accident… sort of.’

‘I feel as if I knew him.’

‘You did. Once we started swapping memories, our individual identities lost coherence. That’s why we did this. That was the point – until one of us stopped communicating.’ But then she shook her head, smiling at the same time. ‘There’s no sense in complaining – I might as well blame myself. We’re the same. We made the same mistakes. We can be as stupid as each other.’

Now that the feeling inside her had a name, it hardened rather than eased. A person, a man called Pedro Braga, had been torn out of her life. It was more than just the name, the knowledge of his passing, the recognition that she had loved him. She could hear him, feel him, smell him. Whistling as he worked with wood and resins. Joking at a client’s meanness. Weeping at the sound made by a few fistfuls of air trapped in the hollow belly of a guitar, when all the stars of his craft fell into some rare alignment. Throwing back his head and laughing, the two of them on a balcony in a city she had never visited. The tang of wine in her nostrils. The sweet cool of an evening in the company of her lover. Sea-gulls and ice cream.

She wanted to say that she was sorry, that she commiserated with the version of herself who had lost Pedro, but that was wrong. She was the version who needed solace now.

Both of them were.

‘I know,’ the other Chiku said. ‘It hurts, doesn’t it?’

She realised she was crying, tears spooling out of her, falling onto her hands, through her fingers onto the lawn.

‘He was a good man. I never wanted this. I never wanted anyone to die.’

The ghost dropped a hand onto her knee. She felt nothing of its touch. ‘You did what needed to be done. That’s the hardest part of all. Even given what you know now, you’d still need to send those memories back to me. Of course, with hindsight, we might have done a few things differently.’

For a long minute, Chiku could barely speak. But the memory of death had opened a door.

‘He wasn’t the only one who died, was he?’

‘We lost June Wing, and Imris Kwami was seriously injured. The important thing, though, is that nothing should have happened in vain. I’m going to ask you a question now, and it’s important that you think carefully about the answer.’

Chiku nodded. She was in the presence of a figment of herself, no older or cleverer, but it was difficult to shake the sense that she was being given a kind of sisterly tuition, wisdom delivered from one sibling to the next.

‘Equally,’ the figment continued, ‘I don’t want you to say anything that might compromise your position here. I’ve been drinking from the public nets, and there’ve been some changes around here. Have you kept up with the news?’

Chiku admitted that she had not.

‘Utomi’s gone,’ the figment said. ‘There was an accident, about fifteen years ago – a blowout in one of the cargo docks. Nothing as bad as Kappa, but serious enough. Of course Utomi wanted to be there, helping out – always the big, brave leader. But some kind of secondary failure took out some of the teams who were in there trying to stabilise the place. It all happened very quickly. There was nothing they could do for Utomi and the others, other than collect their bodies when the emergency was over. Sou-Chun Lo is the new Chair.’

She digested the news of Utomi’s death. It was an abstract concept, a proposition rather than an actuality, and she couldn’t quite process it.

Eventually, she said, ‘Sou-Chun’s a safe pair of hands.’

‘For Zanzibar, maybe. Do you remember Travertine?’

‘Of course.’

‘Vis case has come up for appeal three times – once under Utomi, twice under the Sou-Chun administration. Utomi was moved to consider some form of clemency, but Sou-Chun won’t even consider it. It’s not that she has anything personal against Travertine, but Zanzibar needs allies now. Do you remember that hard-line bastard Teslenko, aboard New Tiamaat?’

‘Hard to forget a merman.’ But for a moment it was Mecufi who came to mind, not Teslenko.

‘He’s only grown worse during the years you were out. In a sense, there’s little point blaming Sou-Chun for taking the line she has – if she hadn’t, Teslenko would have annexed Zanzibar years ago, declared it an administrative client state. Regardless, you’re going to find Sou-Chun’s inflexibility… difficult.’

‘I still have my vote, my position on the Assembly. Perhaps I can talk her round.’

‘Good luck with that. You don’t have long to dither, either: less than fifty years until we reach Crucible, whether we slow down for it or not.’

‘Thanks. That cheered me right up.’

‘I haven’t even started. Do you remember the image you saw in the household? The picture of Crucible, the structures that looked like pine cones?’

‘Yes,’ she said, diffidently at first, then with more certainty. ‘Yes, it’s in there – there was blue light shining from one of them.’

‘We still don’t know what those things are, or what Arachne makes of them. There are twenty-two of them, and they’re definitely machines – products of an alien intelligence. Whether it’s the same intelligence that was responsible for Mandala, we can’t guess. Perhaps they’re from somewhere other than Crucible. As for that blue light – it wasn’t an exhaust, or a weapon, or anything like that. It was a beam of information – an optical laser pushing out from the back of one of the pine cones. And they’re all doing it. Think of twenty-two spokes of blue light, with Crucible at the hub. As the structures alter their position around the planet, the spokes sweep space. Sooner or later one of them was bound to cross our line of sight.’

‘What does this mean?’

‘Given the information at our disposal, we can’t begin to tell. But Arachne had the full Ocular data stream, not just the tiny part we hived off. If there’s meaningful structure in that beam, she may have been reading it since the moment she detected Crucible.’

‘Reading isn’t the same as understanding,’ Chiku said.

‘True. Equally, we have no real idea of her intellectual capacity – or what that blue beam has been doing to it. How’s your memory coming along?’

‘Firming up.’

‘Good. I had my doubts when you were stumbling around like that, mixing up one thing with another. You’re going to have to be strong, Chiku Green. Clear of head and clear of purpose. Much needs to be done.’

‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Build a ship, something faster than Zanzibar. Get ahead of the caravan, meet the Providers on your terms, not theirs.’

‘Yes, I’ll get right on with that. Thanks. For a moment there I thought you might have something useful to contribute.’

‘I think we should leave the sarcasm to our great-grandmother, don’t you?’

‘If Utomi wouldn’t sanction a relaxation in the moratorium on the necessary research, what hope have I got under Sou-Chun? Plus I’m not planning on staying awake for months and months.’

‘There is something else,’ the figment said. ‘Do you remember your visit to the Moon? Speaking to Jitendra and our mother?’

Our mother. As if the figment had equal claim on her. ‘Yes,’ Chiku allowed.

‘Jitendra showed her the patterns you left with him, during one of her lucid moments. That was just after your visit, before you reached Earth. As soon as she’d seen the Chibesa syntax, she sank into the deepest state of contemplation Jitendra had ever witnessed. It went on for days, weeks – something close to death. There was still activity in her brain, but he began to believe she was finally lost to him. It was so hard on him, after all he’d been through. But then she turned a corner. Between one hour and the next, she came out of her mathematical fugue. And she’d changed, Chiku. Some tremendous burden of responsibility had been lifted from her. She said she’d finally found her way out, to the light, and that she’d never need to go back. She’d found what she’d always been looking for, and which had eluded everyone else – a pathway into Post-Chibesa Physics. The golden light of PCP. There had been times when she was terribly close, but those symbols finally showed her the way.’ The figment shifted its hand to her own, although still she felt nothing. ‘It’s the one good thing to come out of this. Sunday’s returned to Jitendra. Our mother’s back.’

‘She’s said that before.’

‘It’s not just empty words this time. After she’d rested a while and recuperated somewhat, she still remembered what she had seen. She had a clarity of vision she’d never known before. This wasn’t some mirage of a solution.’

‘I’m happy,’ Chiku said, and it was almost the truth. She was pleased beyond words for Jitendra, pleased that her mother had crawled out of those measureless caverns. But it failed to shift the stone in her chest, or make her feel any less apprehensive about the future.

‘With Jitendra’s help,’ the figment went on, ‘our mother was able to write down the key axioms of PCP – enough to be getting on with, anyway. But they’ll only make sense to someone who’s been butting their head against Chibesa theory for a lifetime.’

‘Travertine.’

‘Ve is the only one who has a chance of building on Sunday’s insights, of turning them into something practical. It could take years – maybe decades. But that’s the only way you’ll get to Crucible ahead of Zanzibar. I’ve arranged for a copy of the axioms to appear in your private files – you’ll find them easily enough.’

‘Do you know what they did to Travertine?’

‘Of course.’ The figment moved to stand. ‘One last thing, before I go. I’ve left something else in your private files – the neural structures Are-thusa managed to extract from the corpse of our great-grandmother.’

‘She said they weren’t worth much.’

‘Possibly not, but I can think of someone who might be able to find some use for them. I’ll leave it to you to work out the necessary arrangements.’

‘Will you be coming back?’

‘I don’t think so. You’d bore of me very quickly – I’m an empty vessel. There’s really not much more in my head.’

‘Then I should say thanks.’

‘For what?’

‘Everything, I suppose. For answering me, in the end. For going to Venus, Saturn and so on. I’m sorry it cost us so much.’

‘So am I,’ the figment said.