On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Three days later, she was on her way to the Assembly Building, thinking only of the hours immediately ahead and forcing all the other difficult thoughts from her mind, when she noticed a congregation of black vehicles in the courtyard before the main doors.

Her first guilty presumption was that the vehicles and constables were waiting for her; that some aspect of her secret activities had been brought to light, and they were waiting to arrest her as she arrived for business. But they would not have taken the chance on her turning around and going back home.

So it was something else.

Chiku quickened her pace, breaking into a jog that nearly had her stumbling head over foot as she negotiated the steep pathways down to level ground. The black vehicles were jockeying around. They were trying to get one of the vans lined up right before the main doors. Now there was a commotion as a group of people emerged into daylight, flanked by constables. Chiku’s jog became a run. She had seen a face in the commotion, but only for an instant. She dared not trust her senses.

But no – there it was again.

Sou-Chun Lo was in the midst of the throng, surrounded by representatives and constables, her face the usual leathern mask. But this time it was as if she had swapped one mask for another – replaced stony indifference with stony indignation. Chiku blinked, trying to process what she was seeing. This could not be what it looked like, surely?

Were they arresting Sou-Chun Lo?

They hustled her into the black vehicle parked directly outside the building’s main doors. A brief struggle ensued as the van broke through the confusion of people and vehicles milling all around, and then it was speeding away with a high-pitched electric whine, charging towards the sloping road and the nearest pod terminal.

By the time Chiku reached the crowd, she was sweating and out of breath. She leaned forward, hands on knees, and took deep, measured breaths until she had enough composure to speak.

‘What just happened?’ she asked the nearest constable.

Initially, no one appeared to know for sure, and a number of rumours circulated in quick succession. There had been another assassination attempt and Sou-Chun had been spirited away for her own safety. There was an emergency somewhere else in Zanzibar and Sou-Chun was needed urgently. An outbreak of contagion, maybe…

But none of those stories sounded right to Chiku, so she kept asking questions, working her way around the other representatives present, some Sou-Chun loyalists, others not, as they milled around outside the building under the false sky. Gradually, something that sounded like the truth began to emerge, like a signal from background noise. It was indeed an arrest – or rather, an ‘administrative detainment’, as if that made any difference from Sou-Chun’s point of view. An hour earlier, information had begun to appear on many public and private media channels from an anonymous source – information extremely detrimental to Sou-Chun’s professional reputation. Records of financial irregularities, undisclosed ingoing and outgoing payments, over many years. Individually, the amounts involved were small, but the cumulative sum was substantial. Even worse, many of the payments were clustered around times when the Assembly had voted on important, world-changing matters in which Sou-Chun’s voice had been decisive.

The evidence was almost too damning to be believed. Sou-Chun’s supporters were already claiming foul play, and that a proper accounting of her finances would show that nothing underhand had occurred. And there would be such an accounting, Chiku knew, and Sou-Chun would be given every chance to defend herself. They were a civilised society, after all.

At length, when the novelty of her detainment had worn off and no further news was forthcoming, the gathering gradually dispersed. Most of the vehicles drove away, and the constables allowed the representatives to re-enter the building. But the morning’s events had blown a hole in the day, and it quickly became apparent that ordinary business would have to be postponed. By the middle of the afternoon, Chiku was back home, her every certainty undermined. She spent a long hour reviewing the public statements, sifting analysis and debate. Mass opinion appeared to be divided in three broad directions. Some felt that Sou-Chun was totally innocent, the victim of a politically motivated smear campaign. Others felt that she was entirely culpable. A third group maintained that while she might not be guilty of all the alleged irregularities, an investigation into her affairs was bound to unearth skeletons. Chiku, of course, was canvassed for her own thoughts – there were three calls and a knock on the door during the hour she was home – but she refused to be drawn, saying only that she had every confidence that due process would be followed.

When skyfade came, she chinged over to Eunice. Day was concluding there as well, and for some reason – Eunice would have had no need of them – there were lanterns on in the camp.

‘You did this,’ Chiku declared, before the construct had opened its mouth.

‘Did what, my dear?’

‘Planted that information, all that stuff that they’ve arrested Sou-Chun for. As if you didn’t know.’

‘Oh, that.’ Eunice brushed it aside as if it was nothing, a matter utterly beneath consideration.

‘They’ve arrested her. There’s going to be a full investigation, probably a trial.’

‘And your point is?’

‘You can’t do this. You can’t just make up lies about people because they’re inconvenient. You can’t simply destroy someone’s reputation because it suits you.’

‘We didn’t ask Sou-Chun to become an obstructive influence, Chiku.’

‘That’s no excuse for what you’ve done! She’s a human being, someone who used to be a friend… you can’t arbitrarily decide she needs to be eliminated.’

‘It’s politics. She very nearly crushed your reputation when it came to the lander question. Did she show you an ounce of mercy back then?’

‘That was different! We were fighting for opposing positions, not trying to stab each other in the back!’

‘Well, there’s a hell of a lot more at stake now. I studied her case very carefully, you know. If there’d been a way of turning her, of bending her to our cause… of course I’d have preferred to do things that way. But she left us no option.’

‘Us.’ Chiku shook the proxy’s head fiercely. ‘No. You planted these lies. I want no part of this.’

‘Fine. Go to the Assembly and tell them you have evidence that the evidence is fabricated.’

‘I don’t need to. Whatever you’ve done, it won’t stand up to detailed scrutiny. As soon as the legal teams start picking through your lies, they’re going to find loose ends, details that don’t add up. They’ll prove someone fabricated it all, and then we’ll be worse off! Sou-Chun will have been vindicated – she’ll be stronger than ever!’

‘You don’t think I’m good enough to cover my tracks?’

‘You’ve overreached yourself. In a day, or a week, they’re going to realise the evidence isn’t watertight. Then they’ll start picking at the threads, looking very carefully at data traffic connected to those faked-up records… If you’ve not been as careful as you think you have, they’ll trace it all the way back to you!’

‘If that happens, I’ll just have to stay one step ahead of them.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself, Eunice. You’re not that good.’

‘Fine. If you think Sou-Chun is worth defending, I won’t stop you. Go to the highest levels of government and bleat away about robots and hidden chambers. See how far that gets you.’

‘And the alternative?’ she demanded. ‘Just to go along with this travesty and leave her to her fate?’

‘Sou-Chun has her friends, but she also has her share of enemies. There’ll be plenty of people ready to welcome a fresh face at the top of the pile.’

Chiku laughed. ‘You mean me, don’t you?’

‘We need a change of policy. The will to push forward with Travertine’s work and start turning that lander into a deep-space vehicle – however many enemies it makes at caravan level.’

Chiku felt the proxy’s fingers curling in response to her frustration, and she fought the urge to raise its hands to scrunch non-existent hair. ‘What were you thinking? This is real life, not chess!’

‘Sometimes you just have to play the long game. You have a chance now, Chiku – we all do. But you can’t go back into skipover with Noah and your children.’

She had disdained the offer of a breathing mask and thermal hood, and now she was regretting the vanity of that impulse. The cold was a membrane that fixed itself first to her skin, then the surface of her eyes, the interior of her mouth, her nasal lining. A frigid octopus, suckering itself to her face.

She made herself move before her muscles froze and her bones locked together. Down the long, cold vaults, with their aisles of skipover caskets, each casket tucked into a recess and plugged into a complicated support chassis. Now and then she encountered a technician, suited up, goggled and masked, scrolling a flow of data on a clipboard or doing something with a tool trolley.

They nodded as she passed.

She turned down an aisle, following colour codes and patterns of numbers. Hundreds, thousands were sleeping – women, men and children, each casket with its own little glowing status panel giving name and family data, a biomedical summary, scheduled revival date. Some of them had only a few years to go now, while others were in for a substantially longer haul. She was jealous of the long-haulers. Whatever happened in the years ahead, they would sleep through it all. Nothing, not even catastrophe, would impinge on their dreamless oblivion. They would never need to know that this great enterprise had failed.

She turned a final corner, the cold so thick now that it was something she had to swim through, and there they were, ranked one above the other. Four caskets, the lowest empty at present. That had been hers, when she was still sleeping. Noah, Ndege and Mposi slumbered on in the other three. She could see the outlines of their recumbent forms through the skipover caskets’ translucent lids and sides. Save for the occasional change in the biomed summary, tracking some faint and ghostly whisper of brainstem traffic, shooting stars grazing the mind’s night sky, there were no signs of life. Their outlined forms never moved.

‘I’m sorry,’ Chiku said, in a voice so low that it sounded only at the base of her throat. ‘I can’t come back to you just yet. There’s nothing I want more than to be with you. But I can’t. I need to be here, with the living, for a little longer than I expected.’ These words, now she’d spoken them aloud, sounded inadequate to her purpose. They were a statement of fact, not an explanation for her actions. ‘I know this isn’t right, and it’s not what I would have wished. But things are happening that will affect us all, and I need to be a part of them, ensure we make the right decisions. I only wanted to wake to hear the news, but now I’m here, I have no choice but to do my duty.’ Inside her head, she heard her own sceptical retort: There’s always a choice, and duty’s only what you make of it. Aloud, she added: ‘I didn’t want any of this. I didn’t go looking for it. It came to me, and now I know what’s at stake… I have no choice but to see it through. I know I’m putting the world above my family, and I’m sorry. But it still has to be done.’ She touched a hand to the side of Noah’s casket. ‘I love you, husband. I love you, my children. And I’ll be with you as soon as I’m able.’

The casket was colder even than the air, and when she withdrew her hand, the skin ripped away leaving two fine epidermal layers behind. She could see them now, embossed on the side of Noah’s casket, two whorls of ridged skin like a pair of spiral galaxies. It felt like a commitment, a binding promise to the future.

‘I love you all,’ she said softly, and turned from them.

But in twenty-four hours she had forgotten the cold, and in a week her fingertips had healed over.