On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Chiku’s first thought, when the ching bind became active, was that Guochang must have made a mistake. Sure enough, she felt herself to be somewhere other than the surface of Crucible, and there was a hard, rough-textured slope under her shoes that was quite unlike the flooring in Arachne’s towers. There was a sultriness to the air as well, and palpable sense of open space rather than enclosure. She felt herself to be outdoors, or at least in a much larger space than any of the tower-top rooms. But she could not see anything. Some lapse, then, in the visual data that was supposed to be flooding her cortex, overriding the signals from her optic nerves.

But as the seconds ticked by, the blackness became less absolute. She was not blind, merely immersed in a space much darker than anything to which she had lately been accustomed. Here and there, growing more visibly by the minute, were faint traces of illumination, but they appeared to be quite far away.

‘Where are we?’ Dr Aziba asked.

‘The holoship, I think,’ said Namboze, but she did not sound particularly confident in her own assessment. ‘But it shouldn’t be this dark, and the air feels much too warm. I know we were turning up the temperature, adjusting to Crucible’s climate, but it can’t have changed this much in only a few years. Not unless something’s gone badly wrong with the thermal regulation. And where’s the sky? It should be blue up there, or full of stars.’

‘I’m starting to see things,’ Travertine said. ‘There’s a path sloping down, maybe some buildings over there, by those lights.’

‘You should know it,’ Chiku replied. A sudden intuition had made her grope around until she found the knobbed spine of a stone wall flanking the steep trail on which they rested. ‘I think this is the community core where I used to live. If I’m right, those lights are inside my house. I can’t believe this is accidental.’

‘Lead on,’ Travertine said spiritedly.

They picked their way through the barely relieved darkness towards the little cluster of dwellings surrounding Chiku’s old house. It had not been so very long since she was last here, at least by the faulty reckoning of her memory, and she knew the walls and the twist and gyre of the paths well enough to guide the others. Their night vision was also improving by slow degrees. The chamber was still much too dark, but soon they could make out other clots of light on the far side of the space, and save for the darkness, Chiku noted that the place had not changed all that much.

As she approached her home, she made out a shadow perched on the wall, propped on two long legs with one foot hooked over the other. The shadow’s face was underlit by an orange glow, rendering the woman’s features unfamiliar. She had long hair tied back in a ponytail. The source of the light was the flat, glowing rectangle of a companion, cradled in the figure’s lap. She appeared to be engrossed, only acknowledging their presence as the little procession reached the wooden gate leading into Chiku’s garden.

Chiku scrutinised the seated figure. The throw of light had tricked her, but there was something in the woman’s posture that called across the years.

‘Ndege?’ she asked.

The woman dimmed the companion and rose from the wall. ‘Inside,’ she said, nodding towards the open doorway of the house, and Chiku had no idea whether that was an answer to her query or not, and no further clarification was offered beyond the one-word instruction.

‘This is a very simple constructed environment,’ Guochang said under his breath, as if the figments within it were capable of taking offence. ‘It won’t permit rich interactivity, and anyone we meet will only be a very pale shadow of their true selves. That transmission didn’t have the bandwidth for anything more complicated.’

‘I guess they did the best they could under the circumstances,’ Chiku said as Ndege’s figment entered the house.

‘Do you want to go in on your own?’ asked Namboze.

After a moment’s deliberation, Chiku said: ‘No. This concerns us all.’

But she led the way inside.

Ndege and Mposi were waiting for their visitors, sitting elbow to elbow on the other side of her kitchen table. A lamp offered a measure of illumination, enough to render their faces recognisably those of her children. It was less of a shock to see Mposi, of course, for she had already encountered this adult version of her son. He was a little older again, now. Layers of muscle had moved around in his face, hardening his features. Fanning out from his eyes were faint lines that she did not recall from the earlier transmissions – not exactly wrinkles, but the foundation marks where wrinkles would take hold, as if his face was the preliminary blueprint for an older version of the same man. She could see Noah in her son more clearly than ever before. She was surprised to note a prominence to the brow that called to mind her father Jitendra, and something in the shape of the folds of skin between his mouth and nose made her think of Sunday, as she lay dreaming of mathematics, and that in turn reminded her of Eunice Akinya.

Ndege had aged no more than Mposi had, of course, but for some reason this woman looked so much older than Chiku’s last clear memory of her daughter. Ndege was taller and leaner than her brother, as long in the neck as one of Sunday’s old statues. She was, Chiku decided, both extraordinarily beautiful and more than a little terrifying to behold. Perhaps the fierce dismissiveness of her first utterance was colouring every subsequent impression. She saw Sunday more than Jitendra in her daughter, Jonathan Beza more than Eunice. But Eunice was there as well, in the shape of her eyes, the imperious ridges of her cheekbones, the half-smile, somewhere between derision and admiration, that appeared to be her mouth’s default expression.

‘What do you want?’ Ndege asked.

‘You sent these ching instructions to Icebreaker,’ Chiku ventured. ‘We’re in it now.’

‘We’ve seen the destruction,’ Mposi said. ‘The weapons raining onto Crucible. This is a very bad development. There was no guarantee that you’d be alive to read our transmission, but we felt that the risk of sending it was justified. If you are still alive, you need to know what’s been going on here.’

‘The other holoships received your transmissions,’ Ndege said, her voice level and cool. ‘Your reports on Crucible as you made your approach, and your data regarding the alien structures in orbit around the planet. By then, of course, the holoships were close enough to our destination to begin verifying some of your observations, and that information fostered internal tensions beyond anything the regular constabulary could contain. The information about Crucible and the fact that the Providers cannot be trusted is on its way back to Earth! God alone knows what it’ll do when it arrives. It’s been bad enough in the caravan: widespread dissent, arrests and executions, attempted coups and civilian take-overs.’

‘There was a big fight for control of the slowdown technology,’ Mposi said, ‘both to use it and to suppress it. A rush to duplicate your prototype and scale it up; an equal rush to sabotage those efforts or bend the new technology into devastating weaponry. As the public unrest intensified, so the authorities tightened their noose around Zanzibar. These were extremely dangerous times – very difficult for Ndege and me, because of our connection to you and Noah. But after father’s death, things only got worse. Those of us who had some inkling of what your expedition was about – yes, Father did confide in us, as much as he was able, before… Well, we knew there could be no easy arrival around Crucible. But none of us was ready to give up on Crucible, this amazing new world we’d been promised! We couldn’t allow Teslenko’s agenda to prevail. Equally, we had no desire to move to a war footing, readying for a military engagement with the Providers, a battle for control of Crucible. There had to be a third way. And so we called on Eunice.’

‘She would’ve emerged sooner or later,’ Ndege said, taking over from her brother, ‘but these events were the spur she’d been waiting for. It was a moment of maximum crisis – public fear of machines had never been greater!’

‘I’m surprised they didn’t tear her limb from limb,’ Travertine said.

Guochang and the others were by now at least partially aware of Eunice’s origin and capabilities. But there was much that Chiku had not yet had the time or inclination to reveal to her fellow hostages.

‘How did she get out of the chamber?’ Namboze asked. ‘The same way you came in, presumably?’

‘No,’ Chiku said. ‘Not unless she had earth-moving equipment. That route was blocked off when they repaired Kappa – they sealed it up thinking it was just some abandoned service duct.’

‘She’s a robot,’ Dr Aziba said. ‘Did she even need to physically leave? Couldn’t she simply gain control of another machine somewhere else on the ship, as one might ching into a proxy?’

‘I suppose she could,’ Chiku said, ‘but there were never many machines like that in Zanzibar, and anyway, she’s something special. She… inhabited her robotic form as comfortably as if it was her own skin. I think being in that body, being strong and vulnerable in equal measure, had defined her personality, how she thought of herself – a contained being, a soul in a bottle, like one of us.’

‘Like one of you, you mean,’ Arachne said patiently.

‘She used to be like you,’ Chiku said, ‘ghosting around the solar system, not tied to any single physical location, a bodiless intelligence running on ambient processing resources. That was how Sunday designed her – an idea of Eunice, not a walking, talking emulation. But you forced her to become smaller, more real – you gave your enemy flesh! When you made her run, you turned her into what she is now. She crashed an aircraft once, just because she felt reckless! I doubt she’d have wanted to leave her body even if it was an option.’

‘It’s moot, anyway,’ Mposi said. ‘There was another way out of the chamber – the pod line has branches running to multiple exit points.’

‘She told me that,’ Chiku said, remembering, ‘but she never said where they came out.’

‘We shall show you one of them,’ Ndege said. ‘You will find it surprising, I think.’

So they went out into the night again, into the oven-warm air of this overcooked world, and made their way to the transit terminal where they boarded a pod, eight of them between two compartments. Speeding through cores and connecting tunnels, the pod passed through many iterations of darkness. Occasionally distant lights were visible, defining huddles and hamlets of buildings, sometimes a larger community, but never the blue blaze of day or the splendour of a simulated starscape.

Chiku’s head bubbled with questions, but she decided to allow Ndege and Mposi to parcel out the answers as they saw fit. She would save any unanswered questions until she had some sense of what had happened during the unrecorded years since Ndege’s last communication.

‘Eunice didn’t need to reveal her true nature as a construct,’ Ndege said as they tunnelled through the darkness. ‘She simply appeared and declared that she was Eunice Akinya. We’d all seen the statue of her, before they pulled it down, so she was instantly recognisable to a lot of people.’

‘And those who knew their history remembered the tale of Winter Queen, of course.’ Mposi said. ‘They knew she’d never returned to Earth, so it was at least conceivable that she might be the real woman, somehow stowed away on Zanzibar all these years. After all, they had the evidence of their senses – she looked totally real, totally plausible. She claimed to be Eunice Akinya, risen to save us – and she’d become very good at being human.’

‘I know,’ Chiku said.

‘I saw her breathe on a mirror once,’ Ndege added. ‘She could even do that.’

‘We have an attachment to myths,’ Mposi said, ‘of sleeping kings, and sleeping queens, slumbering until the moment of need, when they are summoned to save the living. The queen we needed was Senge Dongma, the lion-faced messiah. Mother of us all.’

The pod was slowing, and Chiku concluded from what little she could see outside that they were arriving in the administrative core. She remembered the last time she was in this space, on the day of Icebreaker’s departure – rushing through her resignation as her plans collapsed around her. In some ways it felt like yesterday, just another part of her personal life, but in other respects it felt like a documented historical event that belonged in someone else’s political history. This couldn’t be the same holoship she had left.

‘Why is it so warm, and so dark?’ Namboze asked.

‘During the troubles,’ Ndege said, ‘we broke from the local caravan. That was after Eunice’s appearance – she said we’d be much better off travelling independently.’

‘I guess she was right,’ Chiku replied.

‘We survived,’ Mposi said, ‘but it’s not been easy. You might have seen the explosions – we lost two holoships, Bazaruto and Fogo, and New Tiamaat was fatally damaged. We still don’t know how much of that was due to accident, stupidity or deliberate military action. Perhaps a little of each. It was good that we’d already broken away by the time that happened, but we weren’t remotely ready for total independence. Zanzibar never had a strong industrial capability – we always relied on the rest of the caravan for imported technologies. Building Icebreaker stretched our capabilities to the limit, and at that time we were still able to call on external assistance.’

Chiku knew from memory that they were walking down the paths leading from the transit terminal to the flat ground fronting the administration building, but could see almost nothing of her surroundings. The building itself appeared to be totally unlit, defined only as a wedge of darkness lodged in the slightly paler margin of its grounds.

‘Many of our technical systems have already failed or are close to collapse,’ Ndege said. ‘We’ve done our best, but our capacity to repair and renew is very limited, and we’re hampered by the additional constraint of having to work covertly.’

‘The rest of the holoships – certainly the local caravan – consider us dead or dying,’ Mposi said. He was walking alongside his sister, who was easily a head taller than her stocky, broad-shouldered brother. ‘It was touch and go for a while. There was contagion, possibly deliberately introduced, and the sabotage or accidental breach of two community cores – thousands of people died. We also created the illusion of more widespread systems failures to discourage our enemies from taking any further interest in us. All operations beyond Zanzibar’s skin were suspended and we allowed our external structures to fall dark. Total communications silence, of course. We run our world on a trickle of energy, using just enough to get by, which is why the skies are dark and the thermal regulation’s barely effective. If we used more, they’d detect it. They might simply not care about Zanzibar any more, but we can’t afford to risk attracting their attention.’

‘Besides,’ Ndege said, ‘it’s not always dark. If it were, we’d all have gone mad years ago.’

‘Tell me what happened to Eunice,’ Chiku said.

Her daughter swept a hand towards the wedge of darkness. ‘She made her first appearance from beneath the administrative building – there was a shaft leading right up to the basement level that no one ever knew was there! It was well concealed, of course, with false walls that only she could open from her side. So she emerged in the heart of government itself!’

Mposi said, ‘By the time she appeared, a number of Father’s friends and allies had prepared the ground for a coup against the occupying constabulary. Sou-Chun was involved, too – she still had political connections even after years of house arrest. We were ready for Eunice, and we timed our strike to coincide with her appearance. We didn’t need her superhuman speed and strength to prevail – her face, her bearing, her aura of authority paralysed our enemies when they saw this relic of the past walking around – and we quickly gained control of the administrative building. Eunice had already reached much further than that. She could push her face wherever she wanted, reach any data system or archive in the holoship, and there was nothing the constables could do.’

‘That was how she destroyed Sou-Chun’s career,’ Chiku said.

‘Sou-Chun was never totally innocent,’ Ndege said. ‘She made political mistakes. But her downfall was the best thing that happened to her – it kept her out of Teslenko’s machinations. She never spoke badly of you.’

‘What happened to Sou-Chun?’

‘The coup took many of us,’ Mposi said.

Chiku walked in silence for a few more steps, thinking of her friend and the damage done to their relationship by events beyond their control. She wanted to thank Sou-Chun for taking care of her children in spite of everything that had happened between them.

‘The coup was a success, though,’ Chiku said. ‘You gained control and moved Zanzibar to safety.’

‘If you can call this safe,’ Ndege answered. ‘We were fighting for the right to arrive at Crucible under our own terms, but we lost everything. Our enemies stole our technology. Zanzibar can’t be slowed! Inside, we grub around in darkness. Soon we’ll be travelling away from Crucible, not towards it! Some people argue that things would’ve been no worse if we’d sided with Teslenko and committed our holoship to continued interstellar flight.’

‘Not a view you share, I hope,’ Chiku said to her daughter. ‘You had dreams, Ndege. You spent so many hours with your head buried in the companion, imagining what we’d find on Crucible. You mustn’t lose sight of that. I’ve been there – all of us have. It’s a real world, ours for the sharing, if we can find a way.’

‘You still haven’t told us what happened to Eunice, after the occupation of the government building,’ said Namboze.

They were walking down the slope to the level ground in front of the main building. ‘It took a while to gain total control,’ Mposi said. ‘The constables were here in large numbers and they had their robots. We had command of the Assembly and the public will to coordinate a takeover, but the citizens simply couldn’t overcome the constables and their machines by themselves. We needed something more.’

‘It’s time for the sky,’ Ndege said.

It was not the gradual transition from night to dawn that Chiku remembered, nor the slow dimming of skyfade. The sky came alive in patches, flickering before settling into blocks and ribbons of blue in a larger expanse of black, like a negative version of the damaged sky in Eunice’s chamber. Gradually, the areas of brightness cross-hatched and linked up, the sky colouring itself the way a child would, with a furious lack of organisation.

‘We allow ourselves an hour a day,’ Mposi said. ‘It takes a lot of energy to light a holoship. We have limited resources and don’t want to risk being detectable from outside.’

‘We live for this hour,’ Ndege said.

Chiku had been so fixated on the sky that it took an effort of will to lower her gaze to the surrounding landscape of the core. Much was as she remembered it – of course, she had spent much less time aboard Icebreaker and on Crucible than she had slept away in skipover on Zanzibar, and there simply were not the resources aboard the holoship to engage in sweeping alterations.

But there had been changes. Now that she had a proper view of it, she could see that the Assembly Building, the replica of the Akinya household, was visibly damaged. The rightmost wing of the ‘A’-shaped structure had suffered some kind of collapse. An entire storey had slumped into ruin, the blue-tiled roof peeled off and discarded like a scaly scab. The formerly white walls were now predominantly black and grey, scorched by fire or weapons, punctured and penetrated in many places, reefed with knee-deep rubble piles where the wall’s outer cladding had crumbled away.

The other wing and the connecting spar between the two angled flanks had suffered less. It must have been a kind of siege, Chiku supposed – Eunice and her band of conspirators holed up in that part of the building while they fought to gain decisive control of the rest of the holoship. Eunice had a technical reach far beyond her body and the ability to infiltrate and manipulate data systems, but she could not apply physical force against the constables and their autonomous enforcement robots.

But Chiku’s eye had lingered on the ruined household long enough. It was sad, to see it like that. She thought of the building’s counterpart in Africa, also crumbling, overgrown and cat-haunted. Chiku Yellow had been inside that building with Pedro.

She had spent her last good hours with Noah inside this replica of it.

Her attention tracked over the intervening ground, surveying the flat terrain where her own constables had come to arrest Sou-Chun Lo. Huge squat-bodied things were moving over the ground. There were three of them that she could see. They were bigger than vehicles and by her recollection of things much bigger than the enforcement robots. They seemed partially armoured. Removed from their usual context, there was a moment when her mind struggled to identify these slow-moving, house-sized forms.

But only a moment.

‘Tantors,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Tantors! She brought the Tantors into Zanzibar!’

‘It was the only way the citizenry could ever hope to overcome the occupiers,’ Ndege said. ‘The Tantors gave them the advantage they needed.’ She was speaking with the flat objectivity of someone recounting age-old dramas.

‘What are they?’ Namboze asked, and Chiku realised that there were still some things she had not told her companions after all.

‘Elephants, I think,’ Dr Aziba stated drily.

‘More than elephants,’ Chiku said. ‘A daughter species – elephants with enhanced cognitive capabilities and the rudiments of language, and the ability to make and use sophisticated tools. They’ve been with us the whole time, an entire breeding group of them, hidden away in a part of Zanzibar most of us never even knew existed. Eunice was put aboard to shepherd them.’

‘And to escape me,’ Arachne pointed out, as if the omission of this fact was a slur on her capabilities.

‘To escape the other you,’ Chiku said.

‘They’re huge,’ Travertine said. ‘I saw the shaft, under Kappa. A person could have climbed up and down it, but not an elephant. How did they get out of their chamber?’

‘Mother,’ Mposi said, ‘do you remember the size of that transit pod you used to travel between Kappa and Chamber Thirty-Seven? It was easily large enough to carry a Tantor.’

‘That still doesn’t answer Travertine’s question,’ Chiku observed.

‘There were also larger exits points than the one in Kappa,’ Ndege said, ‘ramps and spirals big enough for a Tantor to use. They weren’t documented either, but Eunice showed us where to find them. There was one right under the assembly building, very close to her own exit point. It’d been filled in with rubble, probably at the time of Zanzibar’s launch. It took a while, but eventually we cleared it all the way down to the transit tube and Eunice started moving the Tantors out of Chamber Thirty-Seven!’

Chiku took a deep breath and reminded herself – and not for the first time – that none of this was actually happening now. She was not on Zanzibar, and these figments were not her children. It felt real, of course – the ching protocol cut to the very marrow of the brain’s sense of physical immersion – but she had no proof that what she was being shown had any connection with historical fact. Except, paradoxically, for the presence of the Tantors. When she was on Zanzibar, her episodes among them had felt dreamlike and unverifiable. Here, now, they were tokens of an objective reality – elements of Zanzibar that no one could have known about unless they had had contact with Eunice.

With a dark thrill she wondered if this all might be true after all.

‘How many were there?’ she asked, trying to remember the size of the population during her last visit.

‘About a hundred,’ Mposi said. ‘The herd had grown a lot in the last couple of generations – Eunice had been forcing a breeding programme on them to swell their numbers. By the time of the breakout, about half of their number were fully grown adults.’

‘Fifty doesn’t sound like enough to take a holoship,’ Chiku said.

‘On their own, probably not, but they had the citizens on their side, and there was – how shall I put it – a certain psychological shock value that counted for more than numbers.’ Mposi smiled. ‘A talking, tool-using bull elephant will do that to you.’

‘Besides, we also had the other elephants,’ Ndege said. ‘The normal population you were so concerned about way back when. It turns out that elephants are more than happy to follow Tantors. Herd dynamics still count for something, and a talking matriarch trumps a mute one. With Tantors and baseline elephants acting in coordinated herds, our effective force was hundreds strong – easily sufficient to evict the constables from the thirty-six public cores.’

‘I hope you treated them decently,’ Chiku said, without much conviction. ‘They were just normal people, doing the wrong job.’

‘There were deaths on both sides,’ Mposi said, ‘but we tried to be decent. Once they’d been neutralised and disarmed, the occupiers were given a choice. They could join our citizenry, under certain probationary conditions, or risk being packed into shuttles and sent back home. About a third of them decided to join us. Most of them have managed to integrate without too much trouble.’

‘We needed more hands and minds,’ Ndege said. ‘It’s been difficult, the way things have gone.’

Chiku had barely been able to tear her eyes from the Tantors. ‘I’d like to see them properly,’ she said. ‘Walk with them, touch them. There was one called Dakota, the cleverest of them all. Eunice said she was a true evolutionary leap. Do you know if she’s still alive?’

‘It’s possible,’ Mposi said.

‘What he means,’ Guochang whispered, ‘is that you’ve exhausted the limits of his knowledge. Remember, you can only go so deep with these things.’

‘I’d still like to take a closer look at the Tantors,’ Chiku said.

Ndege nodded at the patchwork sky. ‘There’s still time. They see much better than us in the dark, of course, so the night doesn’t really matter to them. Deep down, they’re still elephants.’