On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

She had the sense that the girl had been speaking for some time, but it was difficult to hold on to the flow of things. She frowned, but that only made things worse.

The girl paused for a moment, realising that her words were only making partial headway. She smiled a little, nodded and then began again.

‘Can you understand me, Chiku? I do hope you can. I also hope you’re not too uncomfortable – you mustn’t hesitate to tell me if there’s anything we might improve upon. We’ve done our best, but unfortunately our experience with the living has been rather limited.’

She wore a red dress with white socks and well-polished black shoes and held a violin in one hand, resting it against her knee. The other hand held a bow.

‘I know you,’ Chiku said.

‘I doubt that,’ the girl said, but appeared to take no pleasure in the contradiction. ‘You’ve only just arrived.’

‘You’re Lin Wei.’

The girl shook her head. ‘No, I’m Arachne.’

Chiku tried to stay calm, despite the rising terror she felt. ‘No. If you were Arachne, I’d be dead. You tried to kill me on Venus and again in Africa.’

‘I have no recollection of these events. You might conceivably have met another aspect of me, but I’ll have to take your word for it until I read your memories.’

‘You look very like Lin Wei.’ But then comprehension of a sort dawned upon Chiku. ‘You look like her because she made you – she must have used her own personality as a template for your persona before inserting you in Ocular.’

‘I know of an individual named Lin Wei, and if you believe my persona to be derived from hers, I will file that information for future reference.’

‘You don’t know where you came from?’

‘I know that I came from another solar system, but beyond that, I can’t verify much – at least, not to my satisfaction.’ The girl extended the hand that held the bow. ‘Please, would you like to stand? Come to the window – I think you’ll find the view pleasing.’ She was still holding the violin against her knee.

Chiku was in a chair, not a bed. At first she thought she was still dressed in the lightweight garments they had all worn on Icebreaker. But as she moved, the fabric felt silkier than she remembered, and it was much too clean for her to have been wearing it since she came out of skipover. It was, she decided, a clever copy, not the original garment.

She studied her surroundings. She had come to consciousness in a circular room with curving walls and ceiling, interrupted by wide elliptical windows. The room was set with plain but functional furniture.

Through the windows she thought she could see a landscape beneath a sky that appeared to shimmer between pink and orange depending on the directness of her gaze.

‘Do you speak for the Providers?’ Chiku paused for a moment, then added: ‘Are you the Providers? Are the Providers you? Is there more than one of you? You say “I” sometimes and “we” at others.’

‘Come to the window, Chiku. There’s nothing to fear.’

‘Where’s everyone else – Travertine, Doctor Aziba and the others?’

‘They are all alive and well, and you’ll be reunited with them soon.’

‘Are we your prisoners or your guests? Are we free to leave if we want to?’

‘I don’t know enough about you to answer that question yet.’

‘Why did you attack my ship?’

‘That wasn’t an attack.’ The figment or replica of the girl, whatever it was, produced a teasing smile. ‘You saw my capabilities, Chiku. I could have attacked and destroyed you any time from the moment you entered this solar system.’

Chiku rose from the chair and moved to the window. The floor under her feet was a cushion of grey, yielding to her footsteps. Blood-warm and clammy, it reminded her of elephant skin.

‘Are we on Crucible?’

‘Yes. We know from our scans of your ship that you mapped our surface from orbit. Doubtless you saw the evidence of our work?’

‘We saw a lot less than we’d been led to expect. You were supposed to be making cities for us.’

‘Cities? There are only five of you! Plus another fifteen in your caskets, of course. Why aren’t those people awake? Are you intending to wake them at some later point?’

‘Have you hurt them?’

‘Goodness, Chiku – we really do have a massive gulf to cross before you’ll trust me, don’t we?’

‘It was a simple question. You ripped my ship apart, dragged us into Crucible’s atmosphere and then pumped narcotic gas into our hull. You ignored our handshake protocols and uplinked false data to our ships. I’m sorry, but that’s not how you go about building a basis of mutual trust.’

‘Then you must educate me on the correct procedure.’

The girl was standing by the window with her back to the scene. She beckoned Chiku closer, gesturing towards the landscape with her bow, as if presenting a painting for discussion. ‘Crucible,’ she said admiringly. ‘Quite lovely, isn’t it? We’ve travelled some way from where you landed. It will be sunrise here shortly – I thought you’d like that.’

From the view, she surmised that they were in a tower. A number of similar structures were visible from the window. They were pale stalks, rising from a dense canopy of trees or tree-analogues, their leaves a green so dark that it was closer to the lustrous black of a magpie’s feathers. Bean-shaped capsules with elliptical windows topped the stalks, and lower down, aerial bridges linked the stalks in a cat’s cradle of intersecting walkways. Some of the towers were lower and squatter than others, with fatter capsules. Beyond this grouping of structures, she could see no other sign of construction between here and the horizon.

Crucible’s two moons loitered palely together.

‘What is this place – a prison?’

‘It’s somewhere we can all get to know each other better,’ the girl said.

‘Do you know about the caravan? Are you aware that millions more of us are due to arrive very shortly? A whole fleet of holoships, each carrying tens of millions, with shuttles and landers and high-energy propulsion systems that can also be used as weapons?’

‘I have many questions, and there are multiple factors to be considered before any conclusions can be drawn. I propose a period of mutual information exchange. Are you comfortable? I can bring food and drink matched closely to your specifications. Or would you like a moment to yourself, for the purposes of meditation? Perhaps you would like me to leave you to observe the sunrise in private, and return in a little while? Or I could play this violin for you—’

‘Actually,’ Chiku said, ‘what I’d really like is for you to start telling me something useful.’

Eventually Chiku relented and accepted the girl’s offer of chai. Setting aside her violin, the girl knelt on the floor, indicating for Chiku to do likewise. They sat opposite each other, a block-like table between them, set with chai. Its lower edges curved around into the surface of the floor, as if it was being pushed up from underneath. Chiku was pretty sure that the table had not been there when she stood from the chair and walked to the window. Even if it had – she was prepared to allow that the grey table might have blended with the floor – surely she could not have missed the milk-coloured crockery now resting on it.

But she hardly had time to dwell on this oddness before the girl launched into her questions.

‘Tell me about yourself. Everything. Where and when you were born, what you’ve done with your life, what brought you here.’

‘I’m Chiku Akinya. Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know?’

‘Not really.’ The girl was smiling encouragingly. ‘I’d like you to tell me everything about yourself in your own words. Begin with your place of birth. Tell me what it was like.’

‘I was born on Mars.’

The girl cocked her head to one side. ‘Are you certain? Or are you testing my ability to detect a lie?’

‘I was born on the Moon.’

‘That’s better. Why were you born there?’

‘I didn’t have a lot of say in the matter.’ But when the girl remained silent, Chiku had no option but to add: ‘My mother and father lived on the Moon. My mother was born in what used to be Tanzania, in the East African Federation, and my father on the Moon.’

‘Are they still there?’

‘My father still lives there, but my mother died quite recently. I mean, by my reckoning.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear of your loss.’ The girl drank her chai in a very dainty fashion. And she did appear to be drinking it, Chiku decided, not just mimicking the action.

‘Are you really a robot? A construct?’

‘I suppose so. Have you had much experience with my kind?’

‘I’ve met artilects, if that’s what you are. And I already told you I’ve met something that looks exactly the same as you, but goes by a different name.’

‘Indeed you did. But I want to hear more about you, Chiku Akinya. Will you indulge me? Tell me about Earth. Have you ever been to Earth?’

‘Lots of times.’

‘It must be very beautiful. Although not at all like Crucible.’

And so it continued. Chiku soon learned that the girl had a polite relentlessness that was difficult to rebuff. She deflected most of Chiku’s own questions politely but firmly, and hinted from time to time that Chiku’s questions might be answered once her own curiosity had been sated. But there was no telling how long that might take.

The girl was more interested in some parts of Chiku’s story than others, and occasionally her interest sharpened to an almost inquisitorial focus. She kept coming back to certain details and events, almost as if she was trying to force Chiku into self-contradiction. But Chiku had no fear of that – she was trying to tell the truth, not embroider a fiction, and any mistakes or inconsistencies would be innocent errors, not barefaced lies.

True, her life was complicated by the existence of her three selves, but she explained this to the artilect as straightforwardly as she could, and the girl appeared to accept Chiku’s account at face value.

‘You must feel isolated from your other selves, across all this distance.’

‘There’s only one other “me” left,’ Chiku said, ‘and as far as I know she’s happy enough.’

‘What became of the third?’

‘She had an accident.’

‘I’m very sorry for your loss.’

The sun had risen as the gentle interrogation continued, climbing nearly to the zenith, and the black-canopied trees now carpeted the world with a blazing emerald. When Chiku glanced outside in a lull between questions, she wondered how she had failed to notice the ongoing transition in the quality of the light. On one level she felt drained by the endless questioning, as if she had endured weeks of it, but simultaneously she had the odd sense that the day had skipped from darkness to noon without any intervening passage of time.

At length, the questioning ceased. She was hungry enough by then to accept the offer of food, which turned out to be perfectly prepared and entirely delicious. But once again, Chiku lost her sense of time and the food, like the midday sun, appeared before her without her sensing its arrival. The girl absented herself during the meal, but Chiku had no idea whether this was because she had things to attend to, or because she felt Chiku was deserving of a little privacy while she ate.

The room’s furnishings were austere, and when Chiku finished eating, she wondered how she was meant to occupy her time in the girl’s absence. But some time during the afternoon, as the forest transitioned through permutations of darkening green, the girl returned to show her how to use a kind of vanity desk, which opened out to reveal a display surface and an array of white tactile controls embossed with numbers, letters and symbols.

‘I don’t want you to be bored,’ the girl explained, ‘so I thought you might appreciate access to these things. Through this channel, you may examine the entire recovered contents of your vehicle – lifetimes of art, literature, music and scientific and historical documentation.’ Her hand moved in a graceful upswing, like someone miming a tennis stroke. ‘Through this channel, you may intercept the uplinked communication streams and transmissions from Earth and the solar system. We’ve been in constant receipt of these signals since we arrived here, and I’d value your observations and commentary greatly.’

Chiku’s heart skipped a little as she asked: ‘Are any of the signals being relayed from the caravan?’

‘They were for a while, yes, but it’s also possible to intercept signals directly from the old solar system, without leapfrogging here from holoship to holoship.’

‘We detected nothing like that.’

‘But your little ship with its tiny antenna never had the sensitivi ty to pick up transmissions from twenty-eight light-years away. It’s a puzzle, though, that you heard nothing from the holoships?’ She tilted her head to indicate this was a question rather than a statement of fact.

‘What do you think happened to them?’

‘We have some theories. Your departure precipitated trouble, but it’s arguable that things would have deteriorated sooner or later anyway. You developed a potent new technology – the means by which you reached our system ahead of the caravan. Whether people wanted to own that technology or suppress it, there was bound to be disharmony.’

‘They invaded my holoship, put my people under martial rule. They arrested my husband – the man who used to be my husband – and then executed him. That’s not disharmony. It’s the fucking Dark Ages.’

‘I’m very sorry for your loss.’

‘Please stop saying that.’ But after a silence, Chiku said: ‘The last thing I heard before you ripped us out of orbit was a message from my son, Mposi. Were there any more transmissions from Zanzibar in Icebreaker’s memory?’

‘A few more, yes.’ She gestured towards the desk again. ‘Events become… confused – or confusing, to us at least. We’d value your insight – perhaps the messages will make some sense from your perspective. Would you indulge me? Everything we retrieved is open to you. And I promise that in a little while you may meet with your friends.’

Chiku nodded distractedly, unconvinced that the girl meant a word of it. But she was determined to hear anything Mposi and Ndege might have sent, and stale news was better than no news.

The desk turned out to be surprisingly intuitive, functionally, and it did not take her long to locate the time-sequenced transmissions from Zanzibar. As a sanity check, and as painful as it was, she replayed the last message from Mposi.

Yes, Noah was still dead. She had not imagined that awful truth. And Mposi still looked improbably adult and self-assured, although on second viewing she observed that he was also only just on the cusp of adulthood and acting older than his years – striving for a gravitas he had not quite earned. The world had forced this on him. She loathed what it had done to her boy.

She skipped ahead – an interval of months – to another message from Mposi.

‘The situation’s getting worse by the day,’ he told her. ‘Trouble between the constables and the citizenry, a few attempts at organised resistance, but there’s no hope of regaining autonomy, and about a dozen people died in the violence. There are too many of them, too well coordinated, and now we’ve all seen what those enforcement robots can do. Ndege and I are safe, for the moment, although that might not be the case for much longer. Sou-Chun’s doing what she can to protect us, but we’re your children, and that’s enough to damn us in the eyes of your worst critics – even though we had nothing to do with Icebreaker, or with contravening the Pemba rules. How could we? We were children!’

‘You were blameless,’ she answered, as if her opinion mattered to this shadow of her son.

Mposi went on: ‘It’s bad enough that our father was executed for acting in Zanzibar’s best interests – and the interests of the whole caravan! But it looks as if there was more to his arrest and detention than we thought. Noah was questioned… “interrogated” might be a better word, maybe even tortured, or at least coerced into revealing information. I hate to think what they did to him. When they took him out to the Anticipation Park, he looked broken – as if they’d sucked his soul right out of his body. I think they went into his brain.’

She wondered how Mposi could know this, but he was ahead of her: ‘Too many rumours to ignore – and Sou-Chun has friends in the right places, people she can rely on to tell her the truth. With Noah’s testimony, however they got it out of him, the other holoships are making rapid strides towards their own slowdown technology. They’ll have it soon, one way or another, and I don’t know what’ll happen then. You managed it wisely, Mother – but I’m not sure everyone else will.’

She laughed hollowly. Wisely. Yes, and here she was, shot down on an alien planet, prisoner of an artificial intelligence, having achieved almost nothing she had set out to accomplish.

‘If that’s wisdom, Mposi—’ she began, but he was already speaking again.

‘I’ve been in contact with Eunice – Father passed on your ching coordinates to me and Ndege before things got too bad. We’ve spoken to her. No physical access, of course, but… it’s been sufficient for purposes. Why did you hide these things from us, Mother? Why didn’t you trust us?’

‘You were children,’ she said.

‘Eunice is aware of the developing situation and extremely concerned about the potential for violence. She seems to think the troubles may force her hand. I don’t think the world’s ready for her yet – but that won’t necessarily stop her.’

‘You’re right – the world isn’t ready. Not remotely.’

‘I hope we’ll speak again,’ Mposi said. ‘Until then, I trust you have some way of hearing my words, and that you’re well, and that Nedge and I will see you again. Be safe, Mother.’

She was about to skip ahead – if indeed there was a later transmission in the desk’s memory – when another discontinuity interrupted her perception of elapsed time. It was morning again, judging by the angle of sunlight on the surrounding trees. She felt unexpectedly rested and refreshed, as if she had slept very soundly indeed. And clean, although she had no recollection of washing or being washed. She had eaten and drunk, too, she remembered that much, but felt no need to empty her bowels.

And now the girl was back, but the desk was gone, and they were drinking chai again.

‘You’re doing something to me,’ Chiku decided. ‘Manipulating my perception of time on a deep level. I have no idea how long I’ve been here – it feels like a day, but I don’t trust my perceptions at the moment. How do I know I haven’t been here for weeks or months, while you keep resetting some clock in my brain and asking me these questions over and over? Actually…’ She rapped her knuckles on the table, making the crockery clatter. ‘Actually, how do I even know this is a real environment? How do I know you’re not inside my head, rummaging around like they did in Noah’s brain and sucking out information? How do I even know I’m awake? The last thing I’m certain happened to me is being gassed aboard my ship. For all I know I’ve been in a coma ever since.’

‘You must appreciate,’ the girl said, ‘that no answer I could give you would convince you one way or the other. Such an answer would render three thousand years’ worth of philosophical debate superfluous in a single stroke!’

‘I’ll ask you anyway – is this reality?’

‘Yes,’ she said firmly, as if they were playing some kind of question-and-answer parlour game.

‘Am I on Crucible?’

‘Oh yes, definitely. I could tell you our exact surface coordinates—’

‘Where’s Mandala?’

‘Quite a long way to the west, on one of the main continental plates. We’re on one of the larger islands. We’re keeping our distance from Mandala, for now. But that’s enough about me. What did you make of the transmissions from Zanzibar?’

‘No, that’s not nearly enough about you. Give me something for a change. Why would you keep your distance from Mandala?’

‘We were ordered not to investigate until the human settlers arrived.’

‘You were also ordered to build cities. You had no trouble disobeying that order, so why would you comply with another?’ Chiku nodded to herself. ‘Either you’re lying and you have been poking around Mandala, or something else compelled you to keep away. We haven’t discussed the orbiting things yet. They called you here, didn’t they? Ocular picked up their optical communication stream, the blue light. It did something to Arachne, penetrated her deep programming, made her doctor the data before it reached human eyes. On the basis of that false data, we launched the caravans and the Provider seed packages. You rode our expansion wave, surfed ahead of it – machines summoned by machines. But what happened when you arrived? Did you communicate with anyone – or should I say any thing?’

‘Communications are proceeding,’ the girl said, after what Chiku thought was a moment’s hesitation.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Efforts are ongoing. There has been… fruitful exchange.’ The girl smiled quickly. ‘What conclusions have you drawn regarding the twenty-two machines?’

‘None at all, but then we only just arrived. You’ve had more than a century to study them. What have you done? What have you actually learned? Assuming you learned anything at all.’

‘Oh, we’ve learned a great deal. A tremendous amount.’ But there was something almost too forceful about this response, a touch too much protestation.

‘Do you know who sent them? What they’re called? Why they’re here in the first place?’

‘They were drawn by Mandala, as were we. They have an interest in the mutual welfare of… ones such as us.’

‘Artificial intelligences. Artilects.’

‘Machine-substrate consciousnesses,’ the girl said, as if this made some vital distinction. ‘Our name for them… or rather my best understanding of their name, mapped across daunting cognitive horizons… It’s nothing more than an approximation, I hope you understand—’

‘I do,’ Chiku said. ‘Please get to the point.’

‘We call them the Watchkeepers. They’ve been here for about three million years, but they’re much older than that. Clearly, they are unimaginably patient. Our recent activities, our busy goings-on – the emergence of human civilisation twenty-eight light-years away, the arrival of the seed packages, your presence… all these things happened in an instant, from their perspective. They’re not slow-witted, you understand, just anchored to a different idea of time’s flow. Their clock is galactic, not stellar. But it would be wrong to say that they are uninterested in developments in and around this planet.’

‘What have they been doing since you arrived? Just hovering above Crucible?’

‘There have been measurable interactions, as I stated. Preliminaries to deeper communication.’

‘Have you explored them? When we passed one of the machines, we could see some way into it. If I’d been here for decades, I’d have tried to send a probe to find out what was inside.’

‘And what sort of reaction might you have anticipated?’

‘You tell me. I’m not the artificial intelligence – sorry, machine-substrate consciousness – in this conversation.’

The girl raised an arch eyebrow. ‘Self-evidently.’

‘Let’s go back to Mandala for a moment. I can’t believe your curiosity didn’t get the better of you. Did those things – the Watchkeepers – frighten you away?’

‘Why would you come to that conclusion?’

‘Who cares? Those machines aren’t my problem, anyway. If they’ve been orbiting Crucible all this time without doing anything, presumably they aren’t particularly interested in what happens on the planet. All I want is settlement space for my colonists – we can worry about the Watchkeepers when we’ve built some cities and farms.’

‘That’s an admirably pragmatic sentiment. Do you think you could go about your daily lives with mysterious alien machines hovering in your skies?’

‘Our objective was to study Mandala,’ Chiku pointed out. ‘That would have been enough to be starting with, before we turned our attention to the Watchkeepers. Let’s move on, shall we? We had an arrangement – I recall you promising to let me speak to my friends.’

‘But of course.’ The girl looked abashed. ‘I’d hate you to think that my word is anything less than dependable. Who would you like to talk to?’

‘All of them.’

‘But if you had to choose just one… who would it be?’

‘I don’t know. Travertine or Guochang, I suppose.’

The girl nodded sagely, and time slipped another gear.