On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

She risked moving her head, surveying the foreign anatomy in which she now resided. It was a golem, almost certainly the same antique proxy she had seen at Eunice’s camp. It had been inoperable then, but she had had time to effect the necessary repairs. Not that Eunice had wasted any effort on making the proxy look more like a human being. Chiku’s new torso was an open-framed chassis from which her spindly, multijointed arms and legs hung awkwardly. She could see right through herself.

‘What kept you?’

She tracked around towards the sound of the voice. Eunice was a little further along the trail, squatting down and scraping at a rock. She had the contented and carefree look of a beachcomber.

‘How did you know I’d be coming?’ Chiku asked.

‘Ways and means. The companion helped a lot – you should thank your daughter on my behalf.’

Chiku remembered the book she had given Eunice on her last visit before entering sleepover.

‘The companion was meant to allow you access to outside data, not encourage you to plant messages on my desk and set up ching binds. Are you sure this isn’t traceable?’

‘You trusted it, didn’t you?’ Eunice stood up, a trowel in one hand. ‘I’ve been creative, yes. That’s what I do. I also knew you’d come to see me, sooner or later. The public nets told me that Chiku Akinya had emerged from skipover, so it was only a matter of time before you found my message with the ching coordinates. I take it there were no difficulties in making the bind?’

Chiku experimented with some walking. It was awkward at first, but after a few stumbling paces she settled into a rhythm that felt almost natural. ‘Are you certain this is secure?’

‘Very. Where advanced information technologies are concerned, I have a slightly unfair advantage: I am one.’ Eunice beckoned her onwards. ‘Come. I was nearly done here anyway. Let’s head back to the camp.’

Chiku obeyed, quickening her pace. They were on the same side of the valley where she had emerged on the day she fell down the slope and met Eunice for the first time. To her eyes, nothing of consequence had altered during the intervening forty years. A few more black patches in the sky, perhaps some changes to the patterning of trees and open ground along the valley floor, but nothing dramatic. And Eunice, of course, showed no visible trace of time’s passage.

And yet, Chiku felt, she was… different, somehow.

‘You went to a lot of trouble with the proxy. I don’t really need a body to be here.’

‘I don’t like talking to ghosts. It might not be much of a body, but it’s the best I could manage.’

‘Oh, I’m not complaining.’

As they followed the zigzagging trail, Chiku scanned the valley for Tantors, but they were as elusive as before.

‘I’m pleased you came back from the dead,’ Eunice said. ‘I was beginning to wonder.’

‘I said I’d be back.’

‘Yes, and in the entire history of civilisation, no one has ever gone back on a promise. The companion gave me some insights into wider developments beyond the chamber, but it didn’t make me omniscient. I couldn’t trust the public records to tell me the truth, so I had no way of knowing what had really happened to you.’

Eunice paused to kneel down and fix her shoelaces, an oddly human gesture, strikingly at odds with her true being, Chiku thought. How, she wondered, could a machine neglect to tie its shoelaces properly in the first place?

‘Your husband, Noah. The children. Are they all right?’

‘Fine. They’re still asleep.’

‘Noah knew of your plans to wake early?’

‘No. I think he’d have tried to talk me out of it, so the simplest thing was not to tell him.’

‘But you trust Noah. He knows about me. We’ve met.’

‘I’m simply trying to avoid unnecessary complications.’

‘Aren’t we all? And your faculties, since you came out of skipover – no problems in that department?’

‘Nothing other than this weird delusion that I met some talking elephants once.’

She straightened after tying her laces, she shot a sly smile back at Chiku. ‘I hate to break it to you, but that part was real. I’m very glad you made it, anyway. How’s the mood on the street, beyond the chamber? How are the vox populi voxing?’

‘Things are a bit tense,’ Chiku decided.

‘Understandable. By my estimate, we’re twenty-two light-years from Earth. The horror – a skip and a jump and we’ll be on Crucible’s doorstep! That’s when people will really start getting restless.’

‘Some of us already are. I heard back from Chiku Yellow.’ She made the proxy tap an iron finger against its iron head. ‘She sent me her memories. Do you want the bad news, or the really bad news?’

‘Now there’s a choice.’ But the glibness quickly dropped away. ‘How bad is “really bad”?’

‘Oh, the usual. Around Earth, there’s a near-omniscient artificial intelligence prepared to kill to protect itself. Around Crucible, meanwhile, there are machines lying to us about what we’ll find when we get there.’ Chiku surveyed the closest treeline. ‘I haven’t seen any Tantors. I hope nothing bad’s happened to them.’

‘In forty years? Nothing more than the expected ups and downs within any closed population. Actually, that’s not quite true. Something has happened, but it’s too soon to tell what it’s going to mean. The Sess-na is parked nearby. When we get to the camp, I’d like you to meet Dakota. She’s young, as they go – her mother was barely out of adolescence when you were here last time. They go through generations like wildfire, elephants do.’

‘They don’t live as long as us,’ Chiku said.

‘Not yet,’ Eunice said, ‘but stranger things have happened.’

If the camp had altered in the years since she had last seen it, there was no outward sign of it. The same clearing, the same clover-leaf arrangement of drab tented domes. She could see evidence of repairs, methodically executed, but she might not have noticed them on her last visit. She looked up at the sky as they broke through into the clearing, measuring it against her memories of Lisbon and the household. Fretted by branches, it blazed a deep Tintoretto blue.

‘Forgive my poor hospitality,’ Eunice said, ‘but there’d be no point offering you anything to drink.’ All the same, she invited Chiku to sit down. ‘Dakota will be along shortly. Now tell me about Ocular, and Arachne.’

‘How much do you remember?’

‘A bit more than last time.’ She patted something on the fold-up table, and Chiku realised it was the companion. ‘You were right about this – it helped a lot. Being able to tap into Zanzibar loosened some old memories. But there was still a limit to what I could find out.’

‘We’ve all had to tread carefully.’ Chiku reached for the companion, remembering the guilt she had felt when she took it from Ndege. ‘Arachne is everything you feared. Another artilect, very powerful, deeply distributed. She began as the controlling intelligence of the Ocular device, but she’s become much, much more than that. She’s either duplicated herself hundreds of times over or consolidated many other artilects under her control. She has a million faces, and she’s everywhere. There’s almost nothing she can’t influence – machines, animals, practically every aspect of the Surveilled World. She murdered June Wing, almost killed Imris Kwami, probably had a hand in Pedro Braga’s accident. I was very lucky to survive.’

Eunice had taken the seat opposite her. She nodded slowly, as if everything Chiku was saying merely confirmed her deepest anxieties. ‘And yet, no one realises?’

‘Life goes on. The Mechanism’s reach is total, but very few suspect there’s an outside intelligence pulling its strings. Why should they care? Life is good – much better than in the caravans. Limitless resources, prosperity and peace for all.’

‘You said “very few”.’

‘June Wing knew. A few more have their suspicions. Arethusa, the merfolk, maybe others. I’m not sure if they fully understand what they’re up against, but they know something’s not right.’

‘And yet even those who know or suspect daren’t speak openly about it.’

‘Even if they were believed, what good would it do? Arachne’s confined herself to a few easily explained deaths so far, but if she felt truly threatened… it doesn’t bear thinking about, Eunice. If she was forced to defend herself against more than a handful of people, she might kill millions. Look what she was prepared to do on Venus! Nowhere would be safe. Cities, moons… she has access everywhere where the Mechanism has influence. And that would only be the start. It’s within her power to do much, much worse than that.’

‘And yet she tolerates the status quo. She’s been happy to remain undetected for centuries, which would suggest that she doesn’t seek humanity’s annihilation – merely some kind of coexistence.’

‘While it suits her,’ Chiku said. ‘When it doesn’t, who knows? When the holoships approach Crucible, everyone will see we’ve been lied to. There’ll be no explaining that away.’

‘Tell me what you’ve learned.’

So Chiku did, as concisely as she could – speaking first of Mandala, of the probability that it was real, then of the false patterns introduced into the Ocular results, and how June Wing had managed to recover a glimpse of the unadulterated data. She spoke of the hazily resolved structures circling Crucible, and how she had gained a sharper view of them from the household.

‘They’re alien things, that’s all we know. Probes, maybe, sent to study Mandala. If it can attract the attention of one intelligence across light-years of space, why not another?’

And then Chiku told Eunice about the blue lights, the beams that appeared to be a richly encoded optical communications medium, shining out from Crucible like the spokes of a wheel.

‘One thought has occurred to me,’ said Chiku. ‘Something pushed Arachne into becoming the thing she is. Could it have been something to do with that blue light? A message so powerful that it forced her into lying, into spinning this fiction?’

‘I suppose it’s possible, but I’m not the fount of all knowledge. Some questions you’ll have to answer for yourself.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Chiku asked. ‘Even if we find a way to slow down, what kind of welcome can we expect? I’ve been thinking about sending some kind of advance expedition, but we’re no closer to being able to do that now than we were forty years ago. This stupid moratorium.’

‘Speaking of which, I’ve been reading up on your friend.’

‘Travertine? I don’t think “friend” is the word any more.’

‘Associate, then. You were close, once, and you had an influence on vis trial. That’s all in the public files – testimonies, court transcripts and so on. Travertine’s what we used to call a loose cannon. Not that I’m old enought to remember when the phrase originated, I hasten to add.’

‘It’s not funny, Eunice. I’m worried about Travertine, worried about what ve’ll do. Ve’s persona non grata since the trial, but ve could destroy me – and endanger you and the Tantors.’

‘Would ve do that?’

‘Travertine’s dying, slowly, and we did that to ver. If ve could prove I was compromised at the time of the trial, that might be enough to have the sentence rescinded.’

‘It’s such a shame Travertine didn’t have the common courtesy to die while you were asleep,’ Eunice reflected. ‘I mean, some people.’

‘Please don’t be flippant. If this was just about my career, it’d be bad enough. But now that I know about Crucible, about Arachne and the Providers, I can’t let Travertine ruin things.’

‘I can offer you a variety of odourless toxins, and suggest how you might administer them without being detected. Except you’re not totally convinced about the murder thing, are you? ?’

‘Please, Eunice, I’m really not in the mood for jokes.’

‘I’m being totally serious, considering the options. If you won’t do it, I’ll ching a robot on the other side. They’d never be able to link the crime to you.’

‘No one’s killing Travertine – we need ver too much. Collectively, anyway. Travertine thinks there’s some kind of research programmeme going on behind the scenes, trying to build on vis work.’

‘Sanctioned or clandestine, there’s been no progress in the research.’

‘I have something that might get things moving again. In the right hands, there’s a chance it could unlock the breakthrough we need – give us slowdown and the means to send an advance expedition.’

‘So take it to the authorities. Or don’t you trust Sou-Chun Lo to act the way you want?’

‘I don’t know how she’d act. Or any of them, for that matter. I’ve been under too long to have a reliable feel for the political landscape. Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like more than to wash my hands of this whole mess. But even if Sou-Chun took me seriously, there’d be questions I’d rather not have to answer.’

‘Then you have a problem.’

‘I couldn’t even tell my husband the whole truth, and he knows about you. Noah wouldn’t have agreed to me waking early, so I didn’t tell him.’

‘Noah’s sensible.’

‘Thank you, but that won’t help me with this, will it?’

‘Travertine’s your biggest threat,’ Eunice declared grandly, as if the notion had never occurred to Chiku. ‘Ve could undo you with a word, ruin decades of good work. It’s a shame you can’t find a way to bring ver around to your cause.’

‘Travertine’s a person, not a chess-piece.’

‘Everyone has their fulcrum, Chiku. You can bend anyone to any cause with the right timing.’ She clapped her hands decisively, a meaty, human sound that belied her true nature. ‘I promised you Dakota. She’s approaching. Would you like to meet her?’

‘As long as she doesn’t mind this,’ Chiku said, gesticulating at the open chassis of her body.

‘It won’t bother her in the slightest. In her own sensorium she’ll see a human woman. Dakota! Come forward, please. The person you must meet is here.’

The trees parted. A medium-sized Tantor emerged into the clearing and moved quickly in the direction of the camp. It was not a stampede charge, but closer to that than a walk. Despite Chiku’s effective invulnerability, she had to fight the urge to step back.

Eunice offered a reassuring hand. ‘She’s bold,’ she whispered, ‘but there’s no malice in her. She won’t harm you. Say hello to Dakota, Chiku.’

Standing her ground, Chiku looked into the eyes of the enormous creature now confronting her. Like the other Tantors, Dakota wore equipment strapped to her body and head with heavy flexible webbing. She had two tusks of equal size, curving gently to the sky. Her ears flapped gently. Through the ching bind Chiku detected both her smell and the deep, seismic report of her rumbled greeting.

She curled her trunk near the tip and scratched a furrow in the ground, like a line of treaty.

‘Hello,’ Chiku offered. ‘I am Chiku. I’m a friend of Eunice.’

‘She’s sounds more fluent,’ Chiku whispered.

‘Dakota’s been unusually bright since the moment she was born. Her facility with language and abstract reasoning outstrips all her peers.’

‘What did you do to her?’

‘Nothing. I’ve never tried. My stewardship of these creatures extends to keeping them alive and healthy. I wouldn’t know where to begin to make them smarter. What you’re seeing here… it’s merely the chance outcome of shuffling genetic factors that were introduced into their breeding stock generations ago. Her parents were bright, maybe brighter than average. Dakota, though, she’s an outlier. Completely off the scale.’

‘She’s amazing.’

‘Yes. Something marvellous: a genuine cognitive leap. I wish I had the means to scan her mind, probe its fine structure. The other Tantors can use language, but it doesn’t come easily to them. Dakota swims in it. Her fluency exceeds a human five year old’s developmental markers, and she’s still learning. She has a vocabulary of two hundred and fifty words, and it’s growing steadily.’

Chiku decided not to take this on trust. ‘Where are we, Dakota?’

The other Tantors had known nothing of the wider world beyond the chamber, and had no notion of their place in it. Chiku wondered how deep Dakota’s cosmology ran. ‘And what is Zanzibar?’

Chiku looked at Eunice. ‘She really understands all this, not just parroting what you’ve told her?’

‘Go and ask a philosopher.’

‘If I had one, I would.’

‘All the Tantors have a sense of self – they all know that when they look into a mirror, the thing looking back is them. Elephants have a theory of mind – they can think into the head of another elephant and infer their knowledge of the world, including errors and omissions of knowledge. That puts them above all but a handful of species – a few primates, some very smart birds and cetaceans. Tantors build on that – they have a sense of the past, present and future, perhaps some glimmerings of their own mortality. Dakota’s abilities go far beyond that. She’s not as smart as an adult human – yet – but her categorisational framework is at least as sophisticated as a ten-year-old child’s. She can reason in abstract terms. She can plan a complex series of actions and then execute them days later. Her capacity for tool use is exceptional. She can improvise and experiment in ways I’ve never imagined – and she can teach the other Tantors what she’s learned. She’s something new, Chiku. Something new and wonderful and just a little terrifying.’

‘Terrifying? Why?’

‘Because if the random shuffling of some genes can produce this, what else might they conjure up?’

‘Do you think she’s…’ Chiku struggled for words, not wishing to offend either the elephant or her steward. ‘A one-off? A lucky roll of the dice? Or will the next wave of Tantors all be like her?’

‘Maybe not all of them, and maybe not in a single generation. But she’s the herald of something new heading our way. Dakota’s just the first hint of what’s to come.’

‘If she’s nearly as smart as us… what happens if her children are brighter still?’

‘The same thing that always happens when the universe catches us napping,’ Eunice said, with a kind of apocalyptic glee. ‘Life gets interesting.’