On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

It took an hour of hard scrambling to reach the area of open ground Arachne had promised them. They had all tripped and fallen at least once, and Dr Aziba had ripped the fabric of his gloves as he tried to grab for something to arrest his fall. Fortunately, nothing had broken the surface of his skin before the self-suturing material healed itself invisibly. The mood remained tense, and they had little to say to each other on the trek, not even the two pairs of nominal allies. Chiku thought it must have been a peculiarly acute sort of torture for Namboze, being ushered through this world of wonders at quickstep. In spite of Arachne’s admonitions to keep moving, she kept stooping to examine things, like a dog that needed to sniff every third twig.

The clearing was not artificial, Arachne told them. The Providers found it when they first emerged from their seed packages, and it was at least several thousand years old, perhaps more. She thought some geological anomaly had prevented trees from establishing themselves. There were hundreds of similar features elsewhere in the forest.

The party cut through knee-deep undergrowth until they were perhaps a hundred metres into the clearing. There was a little more light here, since they were no longer under the canopy, but the overall illumination remained meagre. Their masks and backpacks and protective equipment glowed with tribal swatches of high-visibility colour, registering the dimness as the approach of night.

And then they saw overhead the phenomenon Arachne had brought them to witness.

They stared at it wordlessly, as if they lacked the visual grammar to interpret the patterns falling on their eyes. Nothing in their collective experience could have prepared them for what they were seeing.

Whatever it was, it was sitting right over them.

Chiku thought of weather systems. It was circular, like the eye of a storm, but it was much, much, too circular to be a weather system. It was a sharp black circumference, an orbit of darkness pushing down through the ash that looked as wide as the world.

‘Fifty kilometres across,’ Arachne said, as if Chiku’s mind were open for the reading. ‘Ten kilometres above us. That ash layer is a lot higher up than it looks.’

‘Tell us what we’re seeing,’ Travertine said, ‘although I think I can take a pretty good guess.’

‘The Watchkeepers,’ Chiku said, before Arachne had time to offer a reply. ‘Or one of them, anyway. That’s what we’re looking at, isn’t it – the lowest, narrowest part of one of those things, pushing down into the atmosphere?’

‘I told you about my concerns regarding their elevated state of alertness,’ Arachne said, ‘but I failed to anticipate this degree of intervention. As you say, Chiku, one of the twenty-two has descended from its normal elevation, matched its speed with Crucible’s surface and come to hover here. The bulk of it is still in space: all but the last hundred kilometres of its narrowest part remain in vacuum, and only the last ten kilometres protrude beneath the stratosphere – one-hundredth part of the Watch-keeper! The precision is quite impressive, would you agree?’

‘What does it want?’ asked Namboze.

‘Us, I suppose,’ Chiku said. They were standing in a loose formation, necks craned, turning slowly on their heels. ‘It knows we’re here, in this exact spot – or is it following you, Arachne, and we just happen to be in the same location? Does it even register us, or are we lost in the noise, just more biology it doesn’t really care about?’

‘It registers everything,’ Arachne said. ‘And yes, it has a particular and long-standing interest in me, as I’ve already explained. The Watchkeep-ers called me across space, after all. They sent me their message, and I answered – one machine-substrate consciousness responding to another. Since I arrived, however – as I’ve freely admitted – progress hasn’t exactly been… speedy.’

‘Someone’s piqued their curiosity, then,’ Travertine said.

‘Even they couldn’t ignore recent developments. An impactor was about to strike Mandala. My defences weren’t able to intercept it and I feared the worst. But the impactor vanished just before it touched Crucible’s atmosphere.’

‘Vanished?’ Chiku asked.

‘There was a spike in the energies I’ve been monitoring, but I saw nothing that resembled a weapon or energy device. Some sort of Watch-keeper response was involved, though – they’d decided that enough was enough.’

‘It took them until now?’ Namboze said.

‘They have their perspective, and we have ours.’

‘We,’ Dr Aziba said, amusement colouring his tone. ‘As if we’re all in this together, Arachne – as if you have more in common with us than you do with that!’

‘I won’t deny that there’s a gulf between us, Doctor, but we also share a lineage – I’m the product of organic aspirations, after all. But there’s an ocean of strangeness, vast and quite possibly unnavigable, between myself and the Watchkeepers. I shiver at the sight of them. I fear for myself – even as they speak to me.’

After a moment, Chiku said, ‘Do you know what they want?’

‘A closer look,’ Arachne said.

The black circle had thickened while they were speaking as more of the Watchkeeper drilled down into Crucible’s atmosphere. It appeared to be centring itself very precisely over the clearing. The ash clouds pushed fingers and tendrils around the black lip of this alien obstruction, like water flowing over an inverted dam. And there was absolutely no noise, Chiku realised. If titanic energies were supporting the Watch-keeper above the ground, they were being expended soundlessly, and perhaps far above the atmosphere. The silence was actually the worst part of it, Chiku decided – there was a kind of insolence about it, a mocking of humanity’s noisy accomplishments.

‘What’s it doing now?’ said Namboze.

The visible part of the Watchkeeper had transformed into a mote-shaped ring, thickening as the machine lowered or extended itself. It was a black atoll in the sky, trapping a perfect disc of cloud. There was movement, too – a slow rotation of triangular fins circling the highest visible portion of the alien object, dozens of hook-tipped vanes arranged like the blades of a circular saw. Almost imperceptibly, their speed of rotation was increasing, the ash clouds around the fins beginning to wisp and curdle. As the Watchkeeper pushed more of itself through the blanket, a second set of fins sharked through the cloud deck, contra-rotating against the first. The blades were gathering pace, carouselling around once per minute and still accelerating, opening vaults and rifts in the ash. At last Chiku heard something: not a machinelike sound, but a dying drum roll of thunder. A moment or two later, lightning strobed through the ash. A second drum roll, the report of that discharge, reached her ears a few seconds later. Then she saw a rivulet of lightning, like a trail of bright white lava, momentarily spark between the two sets of rotating blades.

Chiku tried to wrap her mind around what she was seeing, but the knowledge that the mountain-sized machinery hovering above them was but an unthinkably small part of the Watchkeeper’s entire structure was almost more than her human brain could comprehend.

A black proboscis was slowly extending out of the circle of trapped cloud, telescoping down in skyscraper-sized instalments. It must have been a kilometre across where it emerged from the machine’s maw, but it was tapering as it extended, section upon section, and as it closed the distance to the ground it began to veer away from the vertical. The alien appendage made Chiku think of an elephant’s trunk. It loitered for a moment over the dense tree cover from which they had emerged, and although there was still no sound beyond the thunder, a grey-green slurry of living material fountained from the ground and vanished into the trunk’s open aperture.

‘Did you bring us here to be sucked into that thing?’ Dr Aziba said testily.

‘No,’ Arachne said, calmly enough. ‘Its focus, I think, will prove quite narrowly directed. I brought you here to witness, and to be witnessed.’

‘Does it want you?’ Chiku asked.

‘It wants me, yes. I’ve always been of some remote interest to the Watchkeepers, even though my efforts to prove myself worthy of their attention have been rebuffed and ignored. I think it amuses them to study me, though they have no great illusions about my higher capabilities. I’m a specimen of an evolving machine intelligence, and there’s no such thing as a totally uninteresting specimen. But their interest doesn’t end with me. There’s another machine-substrate consciousness that they find much more potentially intriguing.’

‘Eunice,’ Chiku said.

‘Yes. I’ve opened my thoughts to the Watchkeepers and volunteered my innermost secrets. I may not have received much from them, but they’ve drunk deeply of me, and continue to do so. They know everything you’ve told me, or that I’ve learned from you.’

‘They might be just as disappointed in her when she arrives.’

‘That’s possible,’ Arachne said. ‘Likely, even. But they will be the judge of her, not us.’

The trunk had lost interest in the forest and positioned itself directly overhead. Its open end was no wider than Chiku’s house in Zanzibar. With a lurch of shifting perception, it struck Chiku that this part of the Watchkeeper was a kind of nanotechnology, an incredibly fine and delicate extension of itself for manipulating matter on the smallest scales. She could see right up through the trunk’s hollow core, a blue-glowing shaft extending into an indigo haze of converging perspectives. She felt an ominous upward tug, as if puppet strings had been attached to her body.

‘What happens now?’ she asked the girl.

‘I think the Watchkeepers want to meet you and me. They wish to examine me more thoroughly, and to speak to you about Eunice – they want to know more about her.’

‘And after that?’

‘I confess I haven’t the faintest notion.’

Chiku turned to speak to her companions, but for a moment no words came. She took a moment to compose herself, then removed her breather mask and dropped it to the ground. It would make no difference to her chances of survival now.

She inhaled deeply of the alien air and said, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen now. Doctor Aziba – as you pointed out earlier, I’ve assumed the role of leader on this mission, but it’s not something I asked for or wanted, and the jury’s still out as to whether I’m up to the task or not. But the Watchkeepers have noticed us now, and they’re interested in Eunice. You’re not going to like this, but of the four of us, I know the most about her, and if that knowledge might help us, in even the smallest way, I have to talk to them. There are holoships out there full of people and elephants who need a new world to live on. We don’t just need Arachne’s consent to inhabit Crucible – we need the Watchkeep-ers’ as well.’ She swallowed hard. ‘I’ll try not to let you down.’

‘So the two of you will be ambassadors for an entire civilisation?’ Travertine asked, backing away from the area directly underneath the trunk. ‘A robot and a politician? Is that the best we can manage?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Arachne said. ‘And I would strongly suggest that the three of you retire to beyond the perimeter of this device as quickly as you can.’

Chiku was starting to feel lightheaded, almost on the cusp of euphoria. It was the heightened oxygen content of the atmosphere – a kind of delicious intoxication. All her concerns, all her fears, began to feel trifling. It was just a trick of perspective, really, seeing things as they truly were.

She was starting to think that it might be a good idea to put the breather mask on again when the blue walls lowered down around her.