On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

‘I’m sorry to bring bad news,’ Kanu said, one bright morning in Lisbon, ‘but Mecufi is dead. I thought you’d both like to know.’

For a while, their son had fallen into the habit of visiting his mothers once or twice a year, returning from the seasteads to spend a day or two in their company. Lately, though, the visits had become less frequent. Chiku had not minded that, for she knew that Kanu had many demands on his time, especially now that he had risen to a position of some considerable responsibility in the Panspermian hierarchy. The main thing – indeed, the only thing that really mattered – was that they were in communication again, however irregularly. And that, by some silent token of understanding, they had agreed to forgive each other for whatever transgressions and misunderstandings each might have committed. Chiku, for her unwillingness to let her son choose his own path, even if that meant surrendering his future to the inscrutable objectives of the capricious merfolk, who could veer from allies to enemies with the turning of the wind. Kanu, in turn, for failing to see how much his decision would hurt his mother, and rather than explain himself he had chosen instead absolute isolation, refusing all contact until that day when he rode his kraken to her rescue. Pride against love, stubbornness against blood and kin.

All that was behind them now, and the world was better for it. Kanu had never become the totally alien being she feared – he had stopped his transmigration long before he became fully committed to the aquatic and maintained that he had no plans to further alter his current anatomy, which allowed him to move with relative ease on dry land. Chiku, for her part, wondered exactly what it was she had always feared. He was still her son, after all, no matter the changes rendered to his anatomy. With hindsight she should have urged him forward, grateful that the Akinyas would at last have some small leverage within the merfolk.

So many regrets, she thought. They were the stitches that held her life together. She feared that if they were unpicked, her past would unravel and reveal itself to be a single thread, not the complex knotted design she imagined. One of the downsides of a long life was the almost infinite scope it offered for reflection.

And by any measure, she was becoming a very old creature indeed.

‘Why did Mecufi die?’ she asked.

As time went by and prolongation techniques improved, there was increasingly little acceptance of death as a natural outcome of old age. When her mother died in 2380, she had been part of a slow-crashing wave of die-offs, one of what the experts predicted would be among the last statistically significant human extinction events. Almost everyone born later than Sunday Akinya – meaning almost everyone now alive – had started life with a superior suite of genetic and exosomatic prolongation options. Chiku was now two hundred and fifty – almost the same age her mother had been at the time of her death – and she had lived the full and merciless measure of those years, spending none of them in skipover.

She was not immortal. Someone born now might have every expectation of living five hundred years or more – long enough to see in the fourth millennium, if their cards fell right. As the genetically oldest of the three clones, Chiku Yellow’s options were less favourable. It would be complex and risky to submit to a second triplication process, and in any case she lacked the necessary funds. But she had no complaints, and no strong sense that she was about to die. Another century was within her grasp, and if it came to less than that, she would not complain.

It was 2415 now. Sometimes she looked at the date and thought: That’s not right. It’s a mistake, some weird way of saying fifteen minutes after midnight. Not a year I happen to be living in.

‘It wasn’t a bad death,’ Kanu said. ‘He didn’t suffer. But he was very old – nearly as old as June Wing, or Arethusa – and the years finally caught up with him. There was a lot they didn’t understand, back in the early days of aquatic remodelling, and they did a lot of unintentional damage to his genes.’

The three of them were down at the quayside, sitting with their legs hooked over the side of the dock, the water trembling and spangling below. Seagulls loitered and squabbled. The air smelled brine-laden and fishy. Coloured boats were bobbing a little way along the dock. The light coming off the suspension bridge was so bright that Chiku had to keep blinking. It was as if the thing had been carved out of filaments of the sun and magicked into trembling solidity.

‘I’m grateful for the things he did for us,’ Chiku said. ‘At least, I am now. I wasn’t always convinced at the time.’

Chiku Red added, ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Kanu. You knew him very well.’

Chiku Red mostly spoke Portuguese these days. Chiku Yellow had gained a halting sort of fluency – some command of a language was required to teach it, after all – and over the years Kanu had picked up a satisfactory working knowledge. They could communicate in Portuguese without the aug – Chiku Red had no access to it, anyway. Sometimes Kanu and Chiku Yellow swerved into words or phrase-fragments from Swahili or Zulu or Mandarin or Gujarati for a little colour, but seldom whole sentences. Chiku Red preferred them to confine their efforts to Portuguese, and Chiku Yellow had no difficulty understanding why. It was a good language, old and road-tested. It had been an Olympic endeavour for Chiku Red just to regain any use of one language after the damage her mind had suffered.

‘Thank you,’ Kanu acknowledged. ‘Even Arethusa has transmitted her condolences, although for obvious reasons she won’t be returning to Earth. You did a good thing, Chiku, bringing her back into contact with us.’

Arethusa, Chiku had long since gathered, was in danger of becoming the oldest living sentience in the universe. Unless, of course, anyone knew something to the contrary. It was all dumb luck, in the end. The genetic alterations she had worked on herself had turned out to be beneficial rather than detrimental. Although by all accounts, like a free-market economy, she had no option but to just keep growing. It was said that she would only leave Hyperion when the moon became too small for her and she had to discard it like a too-tight garment.

‘Mecufi had no particular reason to trust me,’ Kanu said. ‘I could have been an agent of the family, sent to undermine everything he stood for, but he never doubted me.’

‘That would have been a bit ruthless, even for us,’ Chiku said.

‘There’ll be a funeral, of sorts. Would you like to come?’

‘Both of us?’ asked Chiku Red.

Kanu gave a nod of his majestic head. ‘Both of you.’

‘We don’t leave Lisbon very often,’ Chiku said.

‘I hope you’ll make an exception. I won’t insist, of course, but I think you’ll find it worth your while.’

‘She hasn’t made a move against us in fifty years,’ Chiku said. ‘I like it this way. I wouldn’t want to do anything that might provoke her.’

‘You went to the Moon once, and to the seasteads to bring Chiku Red home,’ Kanu pointed out. ‘Neither of those things did you any harm. Nor will this.’

‘What are your funerals like?’ Chiku Red asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Kanu admitted. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever been to one.’

There was no need for haste, so they went by sailing ship. Chiku had seen the cyberclippers coming and going along the Tagus for as long as she had been in Lisbon, but this was something different. From a distance, as they approached along the quay – they had taken the tram to Estoril – nothing marked the craft as unusual. It had a sleek catamaran hull, covered in a frictionless coating that gave off odd optical effects, like a meniscus of oil in a puddle. It had an abundance of sails and sail parts of different shapes, sizes and function. The sails gathered sunlight as well as wind. They were also optically strange, capable of flicking from one extreme of reflectivity to another. There was an absurdity of rigging, too many lines and winches and pulleys to make any sense at all. The thing seemed complicated for the sake of it.

There were also people making it all work. This was what made the ship different. The cyberclippers ran with no crews at all, save for the occasional technician, and they spent months at sea following optimum path solutions, carrying cargoes that did not need to be anywhere fast. But there were dozens of merfolk on the deck of this ship, and even some up in the sails and rigging, and they were all doing something.

Chiku and Chiku Red stared in wonder and horror at the sight of it all.

‘They could fall,’ Chiku said. It was obvious to her that the merfolk had no lines or safety nets to catch themselves if something went wrong.

‘They won’t,’ Kanu said. And to prove his point, even before the ship had left the dock, he had slipped up to the top of one of the main masts, hand and foot, so fast and agile that it looked like a trick, as if he were being ascended by a hidden rope. From the top he waved and laughed and then came back down again.

Chiku felt a flush of pride and bewilderment. It felt impossible to her that this was her son, doing this impossible thing.

‘Why did you make this boat?’ Chiku Red asked, when they were at sea and Estoril was a biscuit-coloured margin on the horizon. ‘It needs too many people.’

‘It can go faster than a cyberclipper,’ Kanu explained, the wind tugging back his long roped locks. ‘Sometimes. Cyberclippers are very good at finding a reliable course, very good at getting goods from one port to another, but they don’t always make full use of the wind. With a good crew on board, this thing can really fly.’

It was true. Chiku had been to the stern of the catamaran and watched two troughs of water close up behind the two keels of the fast-rushing hull. The troughs looked so sharp edged it was easy to think they had been chiselled into ice. Of course, there was a stiff breeze today. But it was astonishing to think that this was all that was making them go through the water: just that breeze, hardly enough to be called a wind, acting against a sufficient acreage of sail. Even the solar energy was only there to operate the electrical winches and steering systems. They banked some of it into fuel cells, Kanu said (actually very efficient gyroscopic flywheel storage units) but it was a matter of pride not to use that stored power for locomotion. There were other ships like this, Chiku gathered, and other crews. They were extremely competitive.

But her fundamental question still remained: so what if the sailing ship went a little faster than a cyberclipper, on average? Why not use airpods, or fliers, or maglevs, or even the hulking nuclear submarine Uncle Geoffrey had told her about way back when?

‘It’s just for the fun of it, I suppose,’ she suggested to Kanu.

Her son gave her a stern but forgiving look. ‘It’s much more than that. The cyberclippers are very elegant, but they’re totally dependent on the Surveilled World. Without the aug, they don’t know where they are, and without the Mech, they don’t know what to do next.’

‘And this is a problem how, exactly?’

‘You’ve swum in the Surveilled world from the moment you took your very first breath. I suspect you probably find it quite difficult to imagine any other way of living.’

‘You’d be surprised. Anyway, you’ve grown up with it as well.’

‘But I joined the Pans,’ Kanu said, ‘and the Pans have their own way of doing things, disdaining the easy solutions. To begin with, these were aesthetic and philosophical choices as much as anything else. We didn’t care for the idea of telepresence and virtual spaces, thinking that these tools would discourage us from actually going out there, into space, when we could send robots or figments instead. And we were right! But that’s almost beside the point now. For philosophical and spiritual reasons, we set ourselves on a path that took us away from the excesses of the Surveilled World. And now we hear that the Surveilled World is poisoned!’

Perhaps it was just the breeze, but Chiku’s neck hairs bristled at his words. It felt impetuous to be discussing Arachne so openly. She sent Kanu a silencing glare.

‘It’s all right, Mother,’ he said, smiling. ‘We’re safe enough here. That’s the point of this creaky old thing – she can’t touch it, or get herself aboard it, or know what we’re saying or thinking.’ Kanu patted one of the wooden handrails running the length of the catamaran. ‘It’s a sort of insurance, if you like. If the world stops working tomorrow, if the Mech crashes and burns and takes the aug down with it, we’ll still have the wind and we’ll still know how to rig up these sails. We could still go anywhere in the world.’

‘The Mech isn’t going to crash,’ Chiku said. ‘It’s been around too long. We need it too much.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Chiku Red.

They sailed to the seasteads. What had taken an hour by flier took most of the day by catamaran. At twilight they ate on deck, watching the sky shade through russets and pinks and gentle lilacs, and the sea darken to wine. Some dolphins provided company. Chiku and Chiku Red raced from one side of the hull to the other, watching the water glimmer and glow where the dolphins had torn it open. It was amazing and wonderful, a moment to justify a life. Chiku and Chiku Red could not stop laughing, giddy with the thrill of it all. Even Kanu, who must have seen this spectacle a thousand times before, watched on with fond amusement. He seemed more delighted by the reactions of his mothers than the dolphins themselves.

Not long before midnight, lights pushed above the horizon. The catamaran docked at a floating pontoon and the passengers were conveyed by electric car into the main mass of the seastead. The air was warmer than it had been in Lisbon, the stars so near and bright it was as if they had been lowered down on threads. Along the dock the rigging of many boats whipped and rattled impatiently.

‘The funeral is tomorrow,’ Kanu reported, before they were taken to their underwater rooms, barnacled down from the seastead’s underside.

‘Is there anything we need to know? Chiku asked.

‘Not really. It’s actually going to be quite a modest ceremony. Mecufi wasn’t one for dramas.’

Chiku thought of the melodramatic way in which Mecufi had first intruded on her life, but she was careful not to contradict her son. And indeed, when the funeral came around, it was much less ostentatious than she had begun to fear. They went out shortly before dawn, in a great procession of small, lantern-lit boats. They were all either saildriven or propelled by oars. Though the wind snatched at the sails, the muscle-powered craft had no difficulty keeping pace. The oars were worked by heroically strong aquatics, creatures shaped for the sea. Many aquatics simply swam alongside in the water, as effortlessly as the dolphins they had watched the night before. Chiku saw all sorts of anatomies, from the almost human to the barely identifiable.

One boat, propelled by both sail and oar, was twice as large as any of the others. This craft carried Mecufi’s body, covered in a shroud and resting on a raised platform beneath a pennanted awning. Chiku and Chiku Red watched Kanu move around on the larger boat, supervising the rowers and the merfolk working the sails. Chiku was rather glad that she and her sibling had not been expected to travel on Mecufi’s vessel. It would have felt like an intrusion to share the funeral boat with these strange and lovely creatures. It was enough of a privilege for any drylander to see such a ceremony.

Presently the boats arrived at some designated area of sea that looked like everywhere else to Chiku. The sun had not yet risen and there were still a few stars overhead. The lanterns, hundreds of them, cast coloured reflections on the waters. The seas were still now and the air nearly motionless.

In response to some unheard command, the boats arranged themselves into a ring around the largest craft, enclosing it within a circle of water. The aquatics who had swum out with the procession scrambled and slithered onto the encircling boats. Many of them were standing now, holding lanterns and candles. Chiku and Chiku Red glanced at each other, neither knowing quite what to expect. There was no sound but the occasional slap of water against a hull. She watched the aquatics on the main boat as they moved in silent ceremony around the shrouded body on its platform.

If there was a signal, a voiced or silent command, Chiku missed it. But from one of the boats came a sudden and sustained keening sound. It was deeply foreign to her ears, pitched too high to be anything she would have called music. But music was exactly what it was. An aquatic had started singing, generating a powerful ululation. Soon another joined in, and then a third. Colouration had entered the tone. It began to shift in frequency. Two more voices joined the song, and then two more. It was, she would later learn, a motet for forty voices, divided into eight five-part choirs: forty aquatic voices, a sound to stir the oceans to their beds. The contributions of the choirs began to chase each other, phasing in and out of harmony – contrapuntal passages shifting into broad chordal phrases of heart-stopping intensity.

As the voices soared and swooped, lights began to appear in the circle of enclosed water – darting blue and green phosphorescent stabs, cometstreaks of opal and aquamarine that danced and dervished. They organised themselves into wheels and flourishing progressions, galaxies and flowers of ever-opening light. Chiku realised that it was some clever orchestration of living matter; just as the Mechanism could turn a panther into a weapon, so the Pans had the means to bend the sea’s living biomass to their will. Here they persuaded it to exalt the memory of one of their own as forty voices moved the air. Another marvel, as lovely as it was sad, and she wished that Pedro Braga was here to witness this astonishing thing, to add it to his life’s store of wonders.

But there was Chiku Red, at least, and as the music surged through them both – it was, she thought, what the siren choirs of the ancient mariners must have sounded like – she knew that her sibling was feeling it just as profoundly.

The sky was brightening, the wheels and flowers fading, the lanterns losing their radiance. But before the spell was broken she watched Kanu and eleven other aquatics lift the shrouded body from its platform and allow it to slip into the paling water.

The motet reached its climax. Forty voices sustained a note for longer than seemed possible, and then when the silence fell it was as if silence itself was a kind of song.

The boats began to break their circle.