On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Over the next few days, in so far as her sense of time allowed her to determine the passage of time, she also spoke with Dr Aziba, Namboze and Guochang. She only ever met with one of them at a time, and Chiku agreed with Travertine that physical movement must be taking place between the towers. But she never had any sense of travelling to their locations, or of the others arriving in her own room.

Still, she had to admit that if this was something other than reality, it was a remarkably good simulacrum. Her nails were longer than when she came out of skipover and needed a trim – she preferred to keep them short. A blister on her index finger, half-healed when they were shot down, had come away in a flake of dry skin. She registered that it was late afternoon when it fell on the floor, and the tiny petal of dead flesh was still there when the sun was again back at the zenith. She concluded that days rather than months were passing between these interludes of consciousness, but she could not be more specific than that.

Travertine had tried to reckon time’s passage by observation of the two moons. But they were not always visible, and since their sizes and markings were similar it was difficult to tell one from the other. Eventually, in a fug of frustration, ve had given up the project as hopeless.

In their exchanges, their questions orbited the same tight cluster of topics. Predictably, they all had theories about the pine cones and Mandala, about what had happened to Zanzibar and what would happen to them. All of the crewmembers had been grilled individually by Arachne, and their experiences tallied with Chiku’s – they were always left with a sense of having gone through an exhaustive process of fact-checking. Equally, they had all been treated well and given the means to stave off boredom.

‘She told me,’ Namboze said, ‘that in a little while we’ll be allowed to mix in larger numbers. Maybe not all of us in one go at first, but that’ll happen eventually.’

Chiku wondered if that was actually good news, or would just signal the point at which Arachne had exhausted the usefulness of the two-way conversation. Perhaps they would be permitted a happy reunion, before more gas flooded in.

During her own ongoing conversations with Arachne, it was difficult at first to detect any shift in her host’s preoccupations. She continued to encourage Chiku to cover the same ground again and again, recounting details of her life and times on Earth. Arachne was also very interested in the holoships, in their numbers and organisation, their technical capabilities. Chiku spoke as candidly as she was able, seeing no benefit in concealment or exaggeration.

‘There are lots of ships,’ she said. ‘Only a dozen in the local caravan, but there are dozens more behind. Each holoship’s carrying millions of people and has hundreds of independent space vehicles. If they do start arriving around Crucible, will you try to prevent the colonists from landing? True, you shot down my little ship, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to hold off the entire caravan.’

‘If you were convinced you could take Crucible by force of numbers, why did you feel the need to send out an advance expedition?’

‘I had this idea that we might be able to avoid conflict.’

Arachne busied herself with the chai. She glanced out of the window once or twice, as if her thoughts were distant. ‘You mentioned something of interest, the other day.’

‘And what would that be?’

‘You spoke of encountering another artilect, another machinesubstrate. Frankly, I find that difficult to believe. According to your legislation, no such machines should be roaming wild.’

‘Maybe I was lying.’

‘Perhaps. Regardless, you said this artilect was superior to me, and that I’d had contact with it. Forgive me, but I find this statement confusing. I’ve had no contact with any other machine consciousnesses except for the Watchkeepers.’

‘This happened a long time ago, before the holoships ever left home. The Arachne of which you’re an offshoot realised that the other artilect was a threat to her. She knew what Arachne had done – doctored the Ocular data, falsified our view of Crucible. Arachne couldn’t allow her to exist, so tried to infect her with a cybernetic weapon. But she survived, and repaired herself, and made herself stronger, and now she’s nearly here.’

‘This cannot be true.’ Arachne shook her head firmly. ‘This is a gambit.’

‘You told me you’re good at detecting lies. Am I lying now?’

‘You have engineered yourself into a state of belief.’

‘In other words, no, you can’t prove that I’m lying. And you can’t take the chance that you might be wrong, either. I have access to this artilect, Arachne. She’ll listen to me.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Eunice. But I’m sure you knew that already.’

Chiku had come to realise that Arachne had the patience of a machine. She had no more capacity for being bored with herself than a screwdriver did, and she could keep doing this dance with Chiku until the stars decayed.

But one night the routine changed. Until that point, Chiku had not been aware of night at all. It would be evening, and then it would be morning, and she would feel as if she had slept but had no memories of rest or dreaming. Her life had compressed down to endless mornings and afternoons of perfectly pleasant interrogation – chai and questions, chai and questions, as if her personality was being demolished with the utmost civility.

Consequently, a new development was welcome – on the face of it, at least.

It was just Chiku and the girl. They were either in a different tower or her own had undergone a radical transformation. The room’s walls and ceiling had become almost transparent, so that Chiku felt as if she was standing on a flat-topped disc suspended high above the canopy. The disc hovered beneath a star-sprayed, moonless sky. The arboreal cover under her feet formed a black supervoid, absent of any feature save the pale stalks of the surrounding towers. She could not see their tops well enough to decide if they had also turned transparent. Perhaps her companions were also awake at this hour, with their own iterations of Arachne.

‘Are you good with astronomy?’ asked the girl.

‘I don’t know. Try me.’

Arachne pointed into the sky, bannered from edge to edge by the knobby, sequined spine of the Milky Way. ‘That white star there – do you recognise it?’

‘Should I?’

‘It’s Sirius. On Earth – or anywhere in your solar system, in fact – it would have been the brightest star in your sky. The Dog Star, heralding summer’s long decline. To the Polynesians, who ventured on their own great voyages, its rising was an omen of winter. But you’ve travelled much further from the sun than Sirius, and Arcturus has become our brightest star. That star a little to the right of Sirius, though – that’s the Sun.’ The girl nodded approvingly ‘How faint it is – how cold and pale. How far we’ve come, Chiku – how wonderfully, terrifyingly far. Like the Polynesians, we’ve crossed an immense and unmapped ocean. And of course if you look in the direction of the Sun, it stands to reason that you must also be looking in the direction of the holoships, for they’ve taken the shortest possible route between our two solar systems. They’re out there, somewhere, in that exact direction – a fleet of worlds, sliding towards us like bobbins on a thread.’ As she delivered this monologue, the girl was standing on the very edge of the disc, hands behind her back, face raised to the sky, fearless of falling. ‘I extracted flight data from your vehicle. I know when you departed the holoship, and how quickly the holoship was travelling at that moment. When you arrived in Crucible’s solar system, the holoships were only a little over one light-year behind you – hardly any distance at all compared to how far you’d already travelled. I was expecting you, of course, long before Icebreaker’s arrival. It won’t come as a surprise to you to learn that I paid great attention to that little patch of sky.’

Arachne elevated a hand and made a circular motion before her, as if she was miming wiping a window. The circular area of sky defined by the movement of her hand began to swell and quickly became as large as a kraken’s eye. ‘The events you’re about to see happened several years ago, while you were still en route here aboard Icebreaker. By this point, ordinary communications from the caravan had ceased. Make of this what you will. I’ll be very interested to hear your analysis.’

The Sun was centred in the enlargement and by far the brightest star in the defined area. There were no other points of reference beyond a dusting of another dozen or so stars of varying degrees of faintness.

Until something flashed. A blip of light, like a firefly’s sudden glow, so close to the position of the sun that the two light sources were almost indistinguishable.

‘The timeframe’s vastly accelerated,’ Arachne said. ‘I’m squeezing weeks of data into a few minutes of real-time.’

Another flash. Chiku could not say for sure, but it looked slightly offset from the position of the first.

Another minute or two passed. Then there came a third flash, again positionally distinct from the first two, but also very close to the Sun.

‘Thoughts, observations?’ Arachne said.

‘I know what you’re showing me – or what you want me to believe it is, anyway.’

‘This data’s totally authentic, Chiku. Those energy bursts must have been very powerful to be visible to me, with my limited optical capability. There were more events, but they were too far beyond the limit of my sensor range to confirm. We’re certain about those three, though, and I measured the spectra of the flashes – a great quantity of metal and rock and water ice was involved in each conflagration – enough to account for the total destruction of a holoship.’

The air had grown no colder, but Chiku shivered. ‘No. We didn’t do this.’

‘You mean you refuse accept that your kind could ever be that foolish?’

‘You don’t know for sure what made those flashes.’

‘No, but I’m perfectly capable of speculating. I’ve discussed the new physics with Travertine. I know about the Pemba event, the loss of that earlier vessel.’

‘Which ships were involved this time?’

‘I can’t say – I’ve had no detailed knowledge of the disposition of your local caravan since the communications blackout. What’s plain, though, is that three ships were either attacked with energy weapons or suffered terrible accidents when they attempted to master that technology. Or some combination of those possibilities.’

‘Fine, then,’ Chiku said, with a heaviness inside her that felt like the pull of an anchor. ‘You don’t need my analysis at all.’

‘Could Zanzibar have been one of the ships affected?’

‘How the hell would I know?’

‘You have no more information than I do,’ the girl conceded, ‘but you have your insight, your shrewd assessment.’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘You had loved ones on Zanzibar – I presume it’s crossed your mind that they might all be dead now?’

‘You’re inside my head – figure it out for yourself.’

‘Oh, Chiku – there’s no need for that tone, not after we’ve worked so hard to forge bonds of mutual understanding.’

‘You’re a fucking machine. You have as much insight into human nature as a wind-up toy.’

‘And this other artilect – this Eunice? Her capabilities are magically superior to my own?’

‘You’re just a bunch of algorithms, Arachne, decision branches and subroutines. Something alien got inside you and made you sick, but that doesn’t change your basic essence – you’re nothing but a load of mathematics trying to understand itself. And failing. But Eunice? She’s something else. My mother made her. She took the output from posterity engines and stitched together the map of a human soul, and then she poured fire into that soul. She created a brand-new type of artilect, one clever enough to be wise to your attempts at deception. You tried to kill Eunice, but by damaging her you only made things worse for yourself. Because I helped Eunice fix the holes in herself by importing actual neural patterns, connective structures extracted from a human brain, the mind of her own living prototype. She was halfway to human already, but those forms pushed her even closer. Perhaps even beyond human, into something weird on the other side. Weirder than you, anyway. I’ve been in her presence and I can’t begin to guess what she’ll do next.’

‘Am I so predictable? Did you predict this?’ Arachne was pointing at the circle of sky still cycling through the sped-up pattern of flashes.

‘No, but you’re like a cuckoo clock. You can do a few surprising things, make a few funny noises, but that’s all. You have no capacity for astonishment. We’ve only known each other for a few days, and you’re already boring me.’

Travertine was laughing. It was some unguessable interval later. Chiku supposed that at some point seasonal variations might manifest in the canopy, but if they were as close to the equator as she suspected, there might not be much change in the yearly climate. She wondered if Crucible had rainy seasons. Perhaps she would look out one afternoon and see dark thunderheads quartering the horizon.

She would have to ask Namboze.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘That your big idea for achieving a tactical advantage here is to insult our host by telling her she’s stupid and useless. Were you hoping to provoke a tantrum?’

Chiku had no laughter left inside her. ‘I want her to feel afraid. She should be. If she views Eunice as a threat, she’ll have a reason to keep us alive.’

‘Keep you alive, you mean. The rest of us might start looking a little disposable now.’

‘It was the only currency I had. But we all have some specialised knowledge that might be useful to her. You can make a PCP engine. The rest of us can’t.’

Travertine had confirmed what Chiku suspected – all the members of her crew had been shown the Pemba events and invited to offer commentary.

‘I wish Zanzibar would speak to us,’ Chiku said dolefully. ‘Just knowing it’s out there would be enough for now. Surely they can’t have been so careless as to blow themselves up.’

‘Maybe someone blew them up.’

‘Mposi did say that the situation was worsening, that it might force Eunice’s hand. To do what, I don’t know. Reveal herself? Blow up the ship as a hopeless cause? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she had the power to do that.’

‘And that’s the last you heard from Mposi? You’ve nothing dated after the three flashes?’

‘None of us know when those flashes happened, and if we asked Arachne we’d have no reason to assume she was telling us the truth. Anyway, there were a few more messages in the desk, but Mposi had no real news for me other than that things were worsening and it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to squeeze out those transmissions. He warned me not too read too much into silence – it wouldn’t necessarily mean the worst, just that it was no longer possible to get a signal out. But then the transmissions stopped for good and despite what he said I still can’t help but think of the worst anyway. I just want to know that Mposi and Ndege are alive. Two facts, that’s all I want. Two yesses, instead of two don’t knows. Is that so hard? Is that so much to ask for?’

After a lull Travertine: ‘I’ve been doing some calculating. I think you’ll find it interesting.’

‘Was there a calculating function in your desk? Or did you talk her into giving you pen and paper?’

‘I had this.’ Travertine tapped the side of vis head.

Now Chiku managed a smile, although it was mostly for appearance’s sake. ‘Go on, then – amaze me.’

‘If one of the holoships has managed to scale up the engine, it’ll take time to achieve slowdown. You can’t just stop. Icebreaker took two hundred hours, but we were a minnow. It’s a totally different proposition, slowing down a holoship.’

‘It took years to get them up to speed, I know that. But if they have the engine, slowing down shouldn’t take as long.’

‘Power isn’t the only constraint. Life has to carry on in the holoships for as long as it takes them to stop. Houses, schools, government buildings – they all have to remain usable. Roads, pathways, farming terraces – everything still has to work. On the acceleration burn, leaving Earth, the load never exceeded a hundredth of a gee. With the right preparations, draining lakes and so on, moving people around, I suppose they might be able to withstand a tenth of a gee. But that’s vastly more than the holoships were ever designed for, and I’m not sure that the cores wouldn’t cave-in under the stress. A thirtieth of a gee sounds much more plausible. Most daily activities could still continue.’

Chiku did not have Travertine’s head for figures. ‘I suppose you know how long that would take?’

‘About four years,’ Travertine answered. ‘That’s how long the engine would need to be active, maintaining steady deceleration. And they’d need to start the deceleration at least a quarter of a light-year out.’

‘Four years in total?’

‘Give or take.’

‘When the engine switches on, it’ll be pointed directly at Crucible, like a searchlight, right?’

‘Yes, and if Arachne can detect those flashes a lot further out, she’ll probably be able to pick up the engine signature. She’ll lose three months’ warning due to time lag – that’s how long it’ll take for the first photon from the drive start-up to reach Crucible. But that still gives her another three and three-quarter years to prepare – that’s more than enough time for her to start laying traps.’

‘What do you think she’ll do?’

‘Pretty much anything she likes. She’ll know the approach trajectories of the holoships, so all she needs to do is seed their paths with enough big dumb rocks.’

‘That wouldn’t work – she’d have to cover every possible approach to allow for unforeseen course changes, and that would mean millions of rocks.’ She imagined each holoship drawing its own coloured line of light through a black void, the caravan weaving a kind of fan, and then she thought of the genetic bottleneck Mecufi had shown her, the bloodlines of ancestry springing out of that ancient pinch.

‘She’s got plenty of other options,’ Travertine said blithely. ‘She can make as many of those kinetic cannons Guochang mentioned – the ones that are meant to deflect asteroids and comets – as she needs, and position them wherever she likes. On Crucible, in orbit, in deep space, way out into the margins, whatever takes her fancy. She can aim them based on her best projections of the holoships’ approach angles, fire the slugs and then finesse their trajectories at the last moment. They’ll be very difficult to detect.’

‘We could be giving her ideas just by talking about this stuff.’

‘She’s got the imagination of a sock, but this wouldn’t have taxed her. She knows about the holoships, she knows she has a good chance of predicting their courses, and she knows she has a means of stopping large objects heading for Crucible.’

‘Then we’re doomed,’ Chiku said. That anchor was there again, hauling her guts downwards. ‘All of us. We haven’t a hope in hell.’