On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The next day, Chiku found herself taking morning chai with Sou-Chun Lo. They were in Anticipation Park, in an area of the administrative chamber. The park was a relatively recent development. Before Chiku entered skipover this whole section had been groved with trees, a place where she often lost herself between legislative sessions. Now the trees had been stripped back and the area re-landscaped. They were seated in a tea-house pagoda, just the two of them, with a couple of constables outside to keep the curious away.

‘Of course, we’re very pleased to have you back with us,’ Sou-Chun said, Chiku detecting an undercurrent of unease she could not quite conceal. ‘Your voice has always been valued in the Assembly, Chiku. Greatly valued. But we’d never expect you to put politics before family.’

‘I don’t intend to.’

‘Truth to tell, we were all a little surprised you chose to wake early.’

Chiku smiled neutrally. ‘I suppose I was afraid of letting go altogether, of being out of it for so long that I became totally disconnected from Zanzibar affairs.’

‘Whereas at the moment you still feel connected enough to play a role?’

‘If my services are required.’

‘But you’ll be returning to skipover, surely – you’re still entitled to the remainder of your sleep slot. We’ll all understand if you decide to rejoin your husband and children.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Best to conserve your energy until the time when it’ll be most useful, don’t you think?’

‘When we reach Crucible, you mean?’

‘Of course Crucible. Where else?’ Sou-Chun’s smile was the merest crease of her lips. While Chiku had been asleep, the Assemblywoman’s face had toughened into something barely capable of expression, while her body had stiffened into a marionette of her younger self, with only a limited repertoire of human gestures still available to her. Her posture was upright and rigid as she took her chai, as if her limbs were operated by wires and pulleys. Her lips barely touched the china.

‘Still a few bridges to cross before we get there, though,’ Chiku said. ‘I’ve been reading up on forty years’ worth of developments, and there doesn’t seem to have been much progress.’

‘Depends how you measure it. The political situation was really quite volatile when you entered skipover. Travertine’s business caused us all a great deal of trouble. But that was then. We’ve reached an accommodation with the other holoships in the caravan, accepted that in – some regards – we were going about things the wrong way. I’m pleased to say that matters are a great deal more stable than when you left us.’

Left us. As if entry into skipover had been an abdication of responsibility rather than the rightful reward for years of diligent public service.

‘Well, if we all pull together, I suppose there’s still a faint chance we might solve the slowdown problem.’

‘Times have changed, Chiku. We prefer not to encourage that kind of scaremongering any more.’

‘Scaremongering, Sou-Chun? We’re way past scaremongering. God help you when the populace realise we’ve slammed past Crucible in the night, and that we’re stuck aboard these ships forever.’

‘You see those constables?’ She nodded beyond the pavilion, where the law enforcers looked bored and petulant. They carried weapons, black cruciform devices of some dark pacifying function. ‘I could have you detained purely on the strength of that outburst.’

‘It was a statement of fact.’

‘But you’re a friend, and you’ve just come out of skipover, so we have to expect a period of transition to our new way of doing things. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt this time – a friendly warning, if you like.’

Chiku accepted this with the last dregs of her dignity. ‘My purpose isn’t to cause trouble, and I can understand some of your reasons for not wanting to talk about this in public.’ She placed deliberate emphasis on that ‘some’. ‘But let’s be frank with each other here. You’re no fool, Sou-Chun. You know, deep down, that we can’t just ignore slowdown, no matter how much it appeases the hard-liners. Look at the sky clock! When I went under, it still had four-tenths of the chamber to cross. Now it’s down to half that distance!’

‘We’re fully aware of our situation,’ Sou-Chun said, with steely insistence.

‘It’s all right for Teslenko and the Panspermians in New Tiamaat,’ Chiku pushed on. ‘They’ve decided they don’t need to live on a planet. But the rest of us signed up for a destination, not an endless journey into the void.’

‘We shouldn’t be bickering,’ Sou-Chun said producing a glimmer of her old warmth. ‘I don’t want to be arguing with an old friend, not when we still have so very much in common. It’s good to have you back among us. Shall we walk? You’ll have to put up with the constables following us, I’m afraid.’

‘Not because they think I’m a menace to public safety, I hope.’

‘Actually, they’re for my benefit. There was an assassination attempt a couple of years ago. It never stood a chance of succeeding, but you can’t dismiss these things.’

‘No, I don’t suppose you can,’ Chiku said as they left the tea-house. She had always considered assassination a relic of the past, and had never expected to hear that such a thing had been considered, let alone attempted. ‘Look, I know we’ve had our differences, but the idea of someone deliberately trying to hurt you—’

‘You wouldn’t approve?’

‘Of course I damned well wouldn’t!’

They walked in silence for a while. ‘What’s become of us?’ Sou-Chun mused. ‘We started off with the best of intentions, and now look where we are. Old friends squabbling. Worlds that barely talk to each other. I miss the old days before Travertine’s accident. Things felt complicated then, but they weren’t really, were they? I like Noah, and your children. It’ll be good to see them again.’

Chiku reached out to touch an alien flower. The park’s flora, although derived from terrestrial stock, had been genetically modified to simulate many of the species they expected to encounter on the new planet. Sou-Chun explained some of the tricks involved, the clever manipulation of a tool-kit of homeobox genes to produce macroscopic structural variations. It was mimicry, but to Chiku’s untutored eyes the effect was thoroughly convincing. Trees, shrubs and grasses had all been shaped according to the biological data sent by the Providers.

Sou-Chun was beaming proudly as she pointed to this or that feature of the park – her friend clearly took a proprietorial interest in this place.

Chiku in turn suppressed a shiver of horror at what actually awaited them, not wanting even to hint at her dejected and fatalistic mood.

‘It’s impressive,’ she said.

‘I’m glad you like it. Do feel free to come here while you’re awake. The constables will see you’re not disturbed.’

Tall black rectangles stood sentinel, flanking the paths in rows and rings. Images of Crucible flickered on their sheer faces, captured from space and the surface. The orbital views showed hemispheres of the globe under different illuminations, or close-ups of land masses, oceans and ice caps under various magnifications and wavelengths. It was a mesmerising display, bounteous and beautiful beyond words: another world, close enough to touch. Not some abstract dot of light in the night sky but a tangible place – or rather a bewildering compendium of places – where a person could roam for the generous measure of a modern lifetime and never cross their own tracks.

A little further on they came to an area of the park set aside for mock-ups and impressions of Mandala. None of it was remotely to scale, of course – a representation of the minutest part of that immense structure would have swallowed Zanzibar whole – but it served its purpose well enough, reminding the citizens that this, ultimately, was what had called them across interstellar space. The chance to interact with something irrefutably alien, and irrefutably the handiwork of directed, tool-using intelligence. There were large images, projected onto house-sized facets. There were rockeries and water-channels and flower borders laid out according to Mandala’s nested geometries. There was a maze, chiselled with laserlike angles from dense green bushes.

‘Sometimes I wish the machines would just damn their programming and get on with it,’ Sou-Chun said. ‘The endless waiting, the need to know more – I can barely stand it!’

‘I know exactly how you feel.’

‘Our day’s coming, though. The citizenry understand that they’ll have to make sacrifices in the short term, that there will be rules and hardships in service of a higher purpose.’ She swept her hand around the miniature versions of Mandala. ‘They know that, eventually, this will be their reward.’

‘Followed by eternal life in the hereafter, as long as they say their prayers and keep to the path of righteousness?’

‘It’s not obligatory to take that tone, Chiku. Must you always be so contrarian?’

Chiku checked the time. ‘It’s almost noon. Do you mind if we look at the sky clock?’

‘By all means,’ Sou-Chun said, ‘but I wouldn’t waste your time. We stopped the mechanism a couple of years ago. It was bad for morale.’

A month passed before Chiku felt willing to risk another ching into Chamber Thirty-Seven.

‘She’s going to be trouble, that one,’ Eunice said as she pottered around her equipment, glancing back over her shoulder at Chiku as she spoke. ‘You never realised how much better off you were under Utomi. He might have been a fat, limping old fool but at least he had our best interests at heart.’

‘Sou-Chun is the card we’ve been dealt,’ Chiku said. She was sitting at the camp’s table. ‘We have to make the best of her. And before you even mention it, assassination isn’t an option in her case, either.’

‘You’re fond of her, then?’

‘She’s not a bad person. Politically ambitious, maybe. Definitely misguided in her willingness to bend to the will of the hard-liners. But in her own way she also wants the best for us.’

‘Fat lot of good that’ll do when we zip past Crucible into the great void beyond.’

‘I’m just trying to see the good in her.’

Eunice hefted a piece of machinery the size of an anvil from one corner of the camp to another. Chiku reflected that Eunice would never have done that when she first visited, but now there was no need for her to hide her true nature.

‘Do you think entering skipover was a mistake, knowing what you do now?’

‘The point is that I didn’t know then what I know now. I had absolutely no idea what was at stake.’

‘Perhaps if you’d remained in the Assembly, you could have steered policy in a different direction.’

‘You overestimate my influence.’

‘Maybe, but you’d have had all those years to increase it. The problem now is that there’s no one around to counterbalance the likes of Sou-Chun Lo. And there’s not much chance of you changing anything for the better in a few weeks or months or however long you plan to spend awake, either.’ The construct stepped away from its work, making a very human business of brushing its palms clean on its knees. ‘You are going back into skipover, aren’t you?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘Seems to me you have a couple of choices here, Chiku. Let me spell them out for you. You could go directly to the highest authority within the caravan and tell them everything you know. That’d be an enormous gamble, though – not just with your reputation, but with the fates of millions of souls. If Teslenko and the others decide to ignore or silence you, all that trouble you and your counterparts have gone to will have been for nothing.’

‘Which is exactly why I’m not telling anyone in authority. Especially not the way things are now.’

‘So that leaves you with option two – return to skipover and hope things have improved by the time you wake. What year will it be then?’

‘2408,’ Chiku said.

‘Less than thirty years before we reach Crucible. Cutting things a bit fine, aren’t you? You might be right about Travertine’s secret research programmeme, but who knows? Meanwhile you’ll have contributed nothing.’

‘I have my family to consider.’

‘You won’t have a family if the Providers turn on us.’

‘You’re a machine. You can make these easy judgements, balance one thing against another as if it’s some kind of mathematical game. But this is my life, Eunice – my husband, my children.’

‘To whom you’ve already lied once. Face it, Chiku – deep down you know where your priorities lie. You love Noah and your daughter and son.’ Eunice, her pottering done, had returned to the table. She took the chair opposite Chiku and planted her elbows on the table-top. ‘More than that, though, you love the idea of them not being dead.’

‘You really are a robot.’

‘I’m a damaged simulation’s best guess at itself, but try not to hold that against me.’

‘I don’t think you’re too far off the mark,’ Chiku said coldly. But then, in a spasm of generosity, she added, ‘I’ve brought you something, all the way from Earth. From Hyperion, actually.’

‘What’s the significance of Hyperion?’

‘It’s where I saw your body.’

‘Ah.’ She nodded slowly. ‘Well, that’s not something you hear every day. Consider my interest tweaked.’

‘You were dead. A woman-shaped ice sculpture, pulped at the cellular level. Beyond any hope of medical revival.’

‘Nicely descriptive.’ She made a little spiralling motion with her hand. ‘Continue.’

‘Arethusa found you – brought you back from deep space. She couldn’t extract much useful structure from your head, but she gave Chiku Yellow everything she managed to salvage. Chiku Yellow gave it to me. It’s in my private files. Could the neural patterns help you?’

‘I don’t know. I have one type of architecture, those are from another. Cut me, I bleed algorithms. I’m not sure how neural patterns will help me.’

‘You’ll have to figure out what to do with the data. If you can do something with it, restore some lost part of yourself… then some of what happened back there, it won’t have been wasted.’

‘Thank you, Chiku.’

‘You almost sound sincere.’

‘I almost feel sincere. You took a risk to bring this to me, didn’t you?’

‘It was a risk to transmit any information back to the caravan, including my memories. I hope it turns out to be worth it.’

‘We shall see,’ Eunice said. And then, as if her words had not carried sufficient weight, repeated: ‘We shall see.’

Even though she had been away from the world for so long, doors still opened for Chiku. There were things she could do, places she could visit, that were barred to the common citizenry or required the negotiation of tedious administrative obstacles – procedural hurdles that could eat up weeks or months of a life. For Chiku, it was principally a matter of deciding where she wanted to go, and when, and then summoning the nerve to do what she planned. In the new regime, no public movement was exempt from tracking and recording. In the early weeks of her revival her fellow politicians would be keeping a particularly keen eye on her activities. They would know she had visited this place.

So be it. She had considered chinging, but would gain nothing by doing so. In theory, at least, the authorities could not track her ching to Eunice’s chamber, although they would know she had chinged some-where, and if they were sufficiently diligent they might find some flaw in the blinds and mirrors Eunice had thrown up to conceal her own whereabouts. This place was different: it was a known space, a documented feature of Zanzibar’s interior. If she chinged here, it would be a matter of immediate public record. So she might as well come in person, because then she would have no reason to doubt what she might see.

The pod car burst through the wall into the holding pen and raced along a glass capillary. She waited a few heartbeats as the pen’s automatic lights detected her arrival and came on. She wondered how long it had been since anyone had bothered to visit – months, years, decades, maybe.

There it was, encased in this little pocket of vacuum. In the flawless blaze of the lights it looked newer than anything else in Zanzibar. In truth, it was quite the opposite.

The high-capacity lander. It was a huge space vehicle, at least by the standards of something designed to enter an atmosphere – three hundred metres from end to end, and just as wide across its upcurving delta wings. It was rounded and smooth flat-bellied, designed to swim, to wallow in alien seas. Black on the underside, and white on the upper surfaces. Windows dotted its sides in stripes like the lateral receptors in a shark’s nervous system.

They had built it to carry ten thousand people from Zanzibar to Crucible’s surface. They had other, smaller landing vehicles, of course – many of them. But the big lander served as an important symbol of voyage’s end, a promise of the reward at the crossing’s end. An insignificant fraction of the millions aboard, but a monumentally significant gesture. The plan had been for them to draw lots to see who would have the honour of making planetfall in the lander. An entire community’s worth of people could be moved down to Crucible almost as soon as Zanzibar made orbit.

The lander had already caused her political damage. Years ago she had tried to have it dismantled, so that this holding pen could be pressurised and used for habitation. Sou-Chun had opposed her – that alone had tested their friendship – and ultimately Sou-Chun had won the day. It had been seen as a humiliating defeat for Chiku, evidence that she had overreached herself. Now, though, she was extremely grateful that her colleague had triumphed.

At least in its intended function, the vehicle was now useless. Optimised for passenger capacity, it had no capability for deep-space operations. But there would be no orbitfall without slowdown, and even if they resolved the slowdown problem, they would still have the Providers to contend with. But still… A sturdily built vessel like this, with ample room inside for modifications… it could be repurposed. And the Akinyas had been masterful repurposers for a very long time. It would need a name, too, and Chiku liked what her mind presented in response to that thought. It had the cold functionality of a surgical instrument. It suggested a vicious clarity of purpose.

Icebreaker.

Yes, that would do perfectly.

And now all she had to do to make it happen was move a few mountains.

Fortunately, that was something else the Akinyas were good at.