On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Later, much later, there was another drum-roll of thunder. This time it arrived out of an almost clear sky, and the progenitor of the thunder was not lightning but the movement of a small blunt thing cleaving through layers of air that rather resented being ripped apart at supersonic speed. Chiku raised a hand to shield her brow from the sun, squinting until the little craft snapped into sharper focus. It was white on the top, black on the belly, and it had flung out stubby, Dumbo-like wings for aerodynamic control. It was banking now, executing a series of spirals to shed the last vestiges of its orbital insertion velocity. Compared to the speeds it had attained before its arrival around Crucible, the heady fractions of the speed of light, this last little succession of hairpins barely counted as movement at all. But calamity was still just as possible, even in this terminal phase of the expedition.

Atmospheres, as Eunice Akinya had once declared, were a bitch. They gave no quarter.

The sixteen human survivors on the surface of Crucible had been monitoring the shuttle’s final approach for many days. They had witnessed the late stages of its breaking phase as it rode the brilliant flame of its PCP engine, and they had been in contact with the vehicle and its crew as it drew nearer to Crucible. This far, at least, things had gone well. The shuttle had homed in on its landing zone without incident and all technical systems were working normally. The sea was auspiciously calm. Where the algal load was highest, it was swamp-green and as thick and slow-moving as clotting blood.

Chiku and her fellow first settlers had agreed that the Providers should begin construction of the first city at one of the coastal locations. This was not the land mass on which Mandala lay, but the archipelago to the east. It would serve, though, until the colonists had gained a secure footing. For now, accommodations were spartan. The Providers had begun to create a harbour, but at the moment it was little more than a chain of rubble and boulders arcing out into the bay. Arachne’s machines moved like huge strutting birds, picking their way through shallows and along the shore as they progressed with their earth-moving labours. It was mesmerising to watch them, and at times a little unnerving. They were gigantic, but they had to be. They had a century’s worth of construction to catch up on.

Chiku and the little reception party stood on a shelf of flattened rock connected to the ground below by a zigzag of stairs fused directly into rock. The machines had provided a balustrade and a number of stone chairs and tables. Surveying the proceedings from this vantage point, Chiku felt as if she had been placed in a scene of deliberate timelessness, as if the vessel they were here to greet had come not from the stars, but from the orient, or somewhere beyond the narrow knowledge of Earth’s first mariners. She thought of the compass rose in Belém, the marble argosies and sea-monsters drawn on the map of the known world. But the impression of timelessness crumbled as soon as it washed over her. The human members of the welcoming party all wore atmospheric breather masks, for a start, and the girl with them was merely the immediate physical manifestation of a machine-substrate consciousness. Four of the humans had been awake when they arrived on this world, but the other twelve had only lately been brought out of skipover. There had been some interesting explaining to do when they awoke.

‘Airbrakes,’ Travertine said, directing Chiku’s attention to the movable surfaces sprouting from the shuttle’s wings and hull, plumping it up like a chick. ‘And now drogue chutes and main chutes, I hope. This is how we’d have come in, if we hadn’t had our wings clipped.’

‘It looks quite small,’ Namboze said.

‘It is,’ Chiku answered. ‘Only about a quarter the size of Icebreaker. But they did well just to build this one shuttle. We’ll have to put it on a plinth or something, when we’re certain we don’t need it any more. That might be a while off, though.’

The current tentative plan was to refuel the shuttle for one or more round-trip voyages to Zanzibar. Arachne had the means to make the fuel and her rockets could lift the vehicle back into orbit before the PCP engine was re-lit. But a lot would depend on how well it had endured this first crossing.

They would find a solution, one way or another.

The shuttle popped its parachutes, and for a moment, it hung impossibly in one spot over the ocean. It was a trick of vision, for the shuttle was still travelling quite quickly. When its belly kissed the water, it threw off two butterfly wings of green-stained spray. The shuttle surged and stopped, and then rocked on the swell. Sluggish waves oozed away from it.

It looked tiny, bobbing out there on the vast ocean.

Four Providers tasked to bring the vehicle to shore waded out on their strutting crane-like legs, and Chiku tracked the seabed’s gentle declivity by the water rising up their metal flanks. The crew remained inside the shuttle, as instructed, but Chiku could imagine their apprehension well enough. They had been in contact with the humans on the surface, but no assurances could have silenced their deepest qualms. They had witnessed terrible things being done to Crucible, and they had seen an equally terrible reprisal. They had no absolute proof that Chiku and her companions had survived the first expedition. Transmissions could have been faked, lies perpetuated. It was entirely possible that these towering robots were about to pick their ship apart like a meaty carcass.

But the Providers were not there to do harm. They reached down with their snaking manipulators and tentacles, tipped with tools that could reshape a coastline, and plucked the shuttle from the sea with great care. It had only been in the water for minutes and already a green hem had formed around its lower hull. The Providers carried their dripping prize back to shore and set the shuttle down on a large apron of level ground a short walk from the overlooking balcony.

It had looked small in the air and tiny in the sea, but once the party walked into the shadow of its wings and overhanging body, the vehicle’s true proportions were more than a little forbidding. All things were more forbidding in gravity, Chiku had decided. It rested on the thick keel of its hull, balanced by sturdy retractable landing skids deployed when the Providers were almost ready to set it down. In the original scheme, the shuttles would have landed on prepared surfaces, ready to be turned around and sent back to orbit – the sea-splashdown capability was only ever a secondary contingency.

Chiku waited impatiently as Travertine and two of the revived technicians walked around the still-hot machine, verifying that it was safe to lower the ramps. They folded out of the hull with grinding slowness: one main cargo ramp at the rear of the belly and two smaller ones near the front of the crew compartment. The forward ramps formed stairs when they were fully deployed.

‘I think,’ Chiku said to Arachne, ‘it would be best if you wait a moment. Arriving here will be enough of a shock.’

The girl reflected on this for a moment or two before nodding. ‘There will be time to make their acquaintance later. Do you think they’ll be satisfied with the arrangements?’

Behind the landing area, on gradually rising ground backdropped by a dense curtain of forest, stood a cluster of stalk-towers much like the ones where Chiku and the other hostages had spent their early days on Crucible. This was a much more extensive hamlet, though, containing several dozen towers, and the cross-linked domes varied in size and height.

‘Cities would have been nice,’ Travertine said, ‘but these will do for now. Do you think they’ll find room for a prison cell?’

‘Who did you have in mind?’ Chiku asked, surprised by the question.

‘Well, me, at the very least. I was pardoned, it’s true. But there have been a couple of regime changes since then. I’m not sure in what sort of light I’m going to be viewed once we get onto all the interesting stuff, like governments and judiciaries and penal systems.’

‘Your pardon still stands. I’ll stake everything on that. And you have my word that whatever medical resources we can bring to bear, you will be given the utmost priority.’

Travertine glanced down at vis bracelet. ‘That’s very reassuring, Chiku. But I’ve been thinking things over since we arrived. I’m not sure I want that reversal therapy after all.’

‘You have every right to it.’

‘And every right to decline, if I choose. You can’t argue with that, can you? Perhaps I want to grow old. Perhaps our brave new world could use a little mortality, just until we’re up and running.’

‘You don’t have to make any decisions immediately,’ Chiku said.

‘Oh, I think my mind’s adequately settled. But it’s good of you to give me that option. You seem – I was going to say self-absorbed, but that’s not quite what I mean. There’s still something on your mind, isn’t there?’

‘When is there not?’

Chiku adjusted the pressure seals on her breather mask. She hated wearing the things, but in fairness so did everyone. In some respects, though, the news of the last six months was quite good. Crucible’s micro-organisms, airborne or otherwise, had produced remarkably few ill effects in the sixteen settlers of the first expedition. Short of wearing spacesuits, it was impossible to keep the micro-organisms from infiltrating the body. They slipped in around the edges of the mask and reached the eyes, invaded through the pores of exposed skin. But other than some pseudo-allergic reactions, a bout of red eyes and itchiness, it could have been much worse. Dr Aziba had been monitoring their blood almost constantly, and as yet had nothing too problematic to report. Travertine’s bracelet continued functioning normally despite the thudding it had taken against the physician’s jaw. Crucible’s biology appeared Earth-like on the macroscopic scale, but at the level of molecular and chemical processes it was simply too alien to do much harm.

Satisfied that there was nothing to be gained in delaying, Chiku walked to the base of one of the forward ramps and began to ascend. Any exertion was physically taxing on Crucible, and she had learned the hard way not to rush her movements. What the excess oxygen provided, the stifling heat and humidity took away. They would adapt eventually, just as primates had adapted to almost every climate and terrain on Earth. For now, though, the idea of ever finding life on Crucible pleasant struck Chiku as laughably unlikely.

But as callous as the thought made her feel, that was not going to be her particular problem, anyway.

She was halfway up the ramp when the door at the top opened and a pair of figures appeared in the aperture. She paused in her ascent. She recognised them instantly, for it had not been so long since she was last in their virtual presence. Ndege looked, if anything, taller than she remembered. And Mposi, still shorter than his sister, appeared to have gained broadness and strength. Their faces, naturally, were hidden behind masks.

Chiku steadied herself on the ramp. On an impulse, she slid her mask aside. ‘Don’t do this!’ she called. ‘It’s tolerable for a short period, but only after repeated exposure. It’s taken me weeks to build up to this!’ And that declaration was in itself almost too much, for she felt the dizziness coming on almost immediately. She allowed the mask to snap back over her face. Finding some reserve of strength, she pushed on to the top of the ramp. It was impossible to choose which child to embrace first, but Mposi spared her the difficulty by hugging her first, their masks pressing against each other, and then surrendering his mother to his sister. They embraced as well.

Through her mask, Ndege said, ‘This is real, isn’t it? We’ve really made it? It’s not some trick made up by machines?’

‘You’re here,’ Chiku said. ‘You’re here and this is real. I should say, welcome to Crucible! Somebody should say it, if only for the history books. The welcome we received was a bit different.’

‘I can’t get over the colour of that sea,’ Mposi said, looking out beyond the sea wall. ‘I thought it was an illusion from orbit, but it’s just as remarkable down here! It’s not the mask, is it?’

‘Keep it on,’ Chiku said. ‘You’ll thank me for it later. In a few days, with Doctor Aziba on hand, you might be able to take a few seconds of direct exposure. But don’t run before you can walk.’

‘I never thought we’d meet again,’ Ndege said.

‘Did you really understand, the day I left?’

‘In our own way,’ Mposi said. ‘Later, definitely, when we had some idea of what you’d really done for us.’

‘I’m so sorry about Noah. It was brave of you to risk as much as you did sending those transmissions. But when we stopped hearing from Zanzibar, I thought the worst as well.’

‘Zanzibar’s still a problem,’ Ndege said, as if this fact might somehow have slipped Chiku’s mind. ‘Every second takes her forty thousand kilometres further away from us – that’s the circumference of this planet!’

‘All’s not lost,’ Chiku said. ‘For Zanzibar, or Malabar, or Majuli, or any of the other holoships. We’ll find a way. Muddle through. But look: there’s a welcoming party down there, waiting to speak to you. I’m sure we’ve all got a thousand questions for each other, but there’ll be time for that later.’

Ndege cast a sceptical glance at the array of towers. ‘Is that the city?’

‘It’s a start,’ Chiku said. ‘You’ll just have to make the best of it for now.’

‘You mean “we”,’ Mposi said. ‘We’re all in this together, aren’t we?’

Chiku smiled through her breather mask. ‘Of course.’

Four other people had accompanied them from Zanzibar, and Chiku greeted and hugged these courageous newcomers as they emerged from the shuttle. It was brave, what they had done: crossing space on such long odds. Brave what they had all done, truthfully. Feeling a surge of pride, she watched as they followed her children down the ramp to the waiting reception area. A gust of air, warm as a furnace, slapped the bare skin around the sides of her mask.

The shuttle contained only two more passengers, and the first of these was waiting just inside the door. Like Arachne, she had no need of a mask, but her clothing, all pockets and pouches, did at least suggest someone preparing to test her wits against nature. She had not aged by a nanosecond since their last encounter.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Chiku said.

‘You know me – one little holoship was never going to be enough to keep me entertained. Especially when they took my Tantors away.’

‘You mean, when you allowed them to be released into Zanzibar, out of your immediate control. When you were finally forced to share your secret with other people. Did it make you jealous, not being their keeper any more?’

‘I was never their keeper, and anyway, what was there to be jealous about?’

‘Actually,’ Chiku said, ‘jealousy would mean you’d added another human tic to your repertoire.’

‘And we’re off to such a good start. For the record, though, I’m pleased that the Tantors have broken out of my control. That’s what I always wanted. And you’ve seen them, haven’t you? We owe them just about everything, Chiku. We may have saved the elephants, but the Tantors saved Zanzibar.’

‘I hope they’ll be able to live here.’

‘They’re adaptable. They’ll find a way, with or without our assistance.’

‘Whatever they become, I hope we can be part of it. Eunice, I have to ask you something. You offered yourself up to the people of Zanzibar. Ndege and Mposi told me how it happened. You must’ve known there was a chance they’d tear you limb from limb.’

‘Sooner or later they’d have found out about me. I’m good, but I’m not that good.’

‘Still, the risk you took… were you ready to die? Or whatever you want to call it?’

‘I think dying will serve very nicely. And no, I wasn’t ready. Not remotely. But when are we ever ready, Chiku? When do we ever feel that we’ve completed our plans? I had work to be getting on with. I’ve always had work to be getting on with. It’s what the universe was put there for: to give me things to do.’ The construct narrowed an eye. ‘Is there a point to this interrogation?’

‘You’re here. You’ve put yourself on the line again.’

‘This time there’s no mob.’

‘But there’s Arachne, and the Watchkeepers.’

‘She’s very interested in me, isn’t she? I’d almost be flattered if we didn’t have the history we do.’

‘A version of her tried to kill you once. I think she fears what you’re capable of now. At the same time, she’s fascinated to see what you’ve become. She knows about the neural patterns you incorporated into yourself.’

‘Been talking about me behind my back again, have you?’

‘We needed leverage,’ Chiku said. ‘I felt that my knowledge about you might extend my usefulness to Arachne, and thereby help the five of us being held hostage. Or four, after Guochang died. There was another motivation, too. The Watchkeepers say that organic and machine intelligences can’t coexist: that the organic will always attempt to destroy the machines. But you’re proof that it doesn’t have to be that way. You revealed your nature to the citizens of Zanzibar and they didn’t rip you apart. That has to count for something, doesn’t it? And then there are the Tantors. You worked to help a living intelligence become something more than it was. A machine showed kindness to animals, and the people showed forgiveness to a machine. This is proof that we don’t have to fall into the same old patterns of behaviour. We have a chance to prove the Watchkeepers wrong, and finally convince Arachne that we can all share this planet: people, Providers, Tantors. This is the only way forward.’

‘We have a few bridges to cross before we get there. I’m also sensing a complicating factor that you still haven’t mentioned.’

‘You coming here has probably saved us. It gave Arachne a reason to keep talking and the Watchkeepers a reason not to wipe us all off the face of Crucible. They were very close to doing that, I think. We’d been beneath their threshold of annoyance, and then quite suddenly we were above it. We’d become an irritation, a damaging factor. When that impactor nearly struck Mandala—’

‘They say you had an encounter with one of the Watchkeepers.’

‘Yes, Arachne and me. Machine and person. Or robot and politician, as Travertine had it. Eunice, I have almost no memory of what happened to either of us inside the Watchkeeper. I think it quite likely that I was dismantled, taken apart and examined the way Arachne dismantled our ship. I remember a blue radiance, and floating in the utmost serenity, a kind of neon womb. But then I was put back together, like a repaired watch. My identity returned to me – all my memories, my sense of self, but almost no clear knowledge of what had just happened. All I knew for sure was that there’d been a kind of negotiation, and between us, Arachne and I made a deal with the Watchkeepers.’

‘A deal,’ Eunice repeated.

‘They’ve been here for a very long time, but the important phase of their observations is now over. I suppose they’ve been marking time… waiting for some spur to push them on. Well, turns out we’re that spur. We’ve arrived – Provider and human. And they’ve decided to allow us to begin examining Mandala. I think we represent a test case: a puzzling, possibly anomalous example of human-machine cooperation. But they’re prepared to let this experiment play itself out for a little while. Say, a few thousand years. And soon we can get on with what we came here to do in the first place – examine Mandala. And we can build our cities and harbours and start to feel like this is a home, not a destination. They won’t stop us. They won’t interfere in our daily actions on any level.’

‘You have their word on that, do you?’

‘I don’t really need it. They’ll be gone. The twenty-two will be leaving Crucible soon.’ Chiku cocked her head towards the door, out to the open sky and the reception committee at the base of the ramp. ‘They don’t know that yet. No one knows, except Arachne and me. And now you, of course. That was the deal.’

‘With deals,’ Eunice said carefully, ‘there’s generally small print.’

‘The catch is that I have to travel with the Watchkeepers. Call me an ambassador, or a hostage, or a biological sample reserved for further study. I don’t suppose it really matters. The point is I’m going somewhere, and I don’t think it can fail to be interesting.’

‘When you say “no one knows”—’

‘No one, not even Ndege and Mposi. I’ll tell them, of course. But not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow. There’s no immediate rush. I have days, yet, possibly weeks or months. When the time comes, one of the Watchkeepers will penetrate the atmosphere again. There’s no point hiding – they always know where I am. I could drown myself in the sea and I suspect they’d still find me.’

‘You’ve earned this world, Chiku. You shouldn’t have to give it up so soon.’

‘Don’t feel too bad for me. I’ve been here for months. Besides, I’m hoping I won’t be travelling alone.’

Eunice understood immediately. ‘Ah.’

‘I couldn’t speak for you, but I hope you’ll come. It’s just the way it has to be. The price we have to pay.’

‘Then it’s a good thing the crowd didn’t pull me apart, isn’t it?’

‘You’ve always been the explorer, the novelty seeker. I wondered if that part of you had made it into the construct. I had some doubts, until you accepted the neural patterns. When you crashed that aircraft… You’re not angry with me, are you?’

‘You did what needed to be done to save a world. Besides, I can’t say it was a total surprise. I always expected the Watchkeepers to have some interest in me. I’d have been disappointed if they didn’t. I suppose that’s a kind of vanity, isn’t it?’

‘A very human failing, if it is,’ Chiku said. ‘We’ll allow you that.’

‘Thank you. Very decent of you.’

‘There’s something else you need to know. It won’t just be the two of us. The Watchkeepers have requested… actually, demanded would be closer to the truth… a third representative. A third type specimen of the new order. They have their human, and they have their machine-substrate consciousness. That’s you, by the way.’

‘And the third?’

‘An emergent intelligence, the product of mutual human and machine developmental assistance.’

‘You’re speaking about Dakota, of course.’

‘Did she make it here safely?’

‘I expected her to die years ago, but she’s old and stubborn. Plus each generation of Tantors seems to live a bit longer than the last. She’ll be with us for a little while.’

‘A proper wrinkly old matriarch, you called her.’

‘Older and wrinklier, by now. But still very canny. I assumed she’d be in the vanguard when the Tantors come to settle Crucible.’

‘They’ll come,’ Chiku said. ‘One way or another. We might have to build big domes first – I can’t see them adapting to breather masks. But in a decade, we might be ready for them.’

‘It’ll take that long to figure out how to bring them off the holoships.’

‘I know. A world of problems, and we’ve only just started. We still have some delicate negotiations with Arachne ahead of us. Troubled waters. She’s defended herself once by destroying holoships, and she can do it again.’ Chiku felt a sudden wave of tremendous weariness crash over her. ‘Look at us! There aren’t even two dozen people on Crucible yet, and we’re already worrying about Arachne’s reaction! How’s she going to feel when we start moving in by the millions?’

‘Great diplomacy will be needed. Continual reinforcement of trust and mutual goodwill. Constant practical demonstrations of benign intentions. Forgiveness and tolerance on both sides. There are going to be some setbacks, Chiku. Some fuck-ups.’

‘I know.’

‘For the most part, though, it sounds as if they’re going to be someone else’s problem.’ The construct’s expression brightened. ‘You’ve got things off to a tolerable start, at least. Could be worse, as they say.’

‘That’s the sum story of human history, isn’t it? Could be worse. As if that’s the very best that we can manage.’

‘Your people are waiting,’ Eunice said. ‘I don’t think we should delay our descent too much longer.’

‘I’d like to see Dakota first.’

‘Tantors aren’t very good at keeping secrets, so you might want to keep your plans for her just a little vague for now.’

‘We owe her an explanation, at some point.’

‘At some point, yes. Maybe not now.’

Chiku nodded. In the moment, at least, this made perfect sense to her. She would be careful not to lie to the Tantor, though. In fact, if she could get through the rest of the day without lying to anyone or anything, she would be very pleased with herself.

But she had to be realistic.

Sixty-One Virginis f, their new star, the star they would eventually come to call their sun, was boiling its way down towards the horizon. It was always warm on Crucible, especially at these equatorial latitudes. But the heat had moderated itself, offering the tiniest morsel of respite to the humans gathered on the overlook. In a little while, when the breathing creatures had wearied of masks and filters, they would retire to their new living quarters. The robots, of course, had no such difficulties. But they would indulge the humans for the sake of etiquette.

‘The sky is beautiful,’ Ndege was saying. ‘So many colours… I’ve never even imagined a sunset like that.’

Chiku wanted to tell her daughter that the show of pinks and crimsons and salmons and lambent golds was only a consequence of the dust grains still circling in the high atmosphere. Week by week, after the cessation of the impactors, in rains and downdraughts, the atmosphere had begun to repair itself. The Watchkeepers, Chiku was certain, had played some role in that restoration – their machines had dipped in and out of the air for weeks, stirring and clearing it like whisks.

Whatever the case, much of the dust had now returned to the surface. In the high canopies it formed a talcum film that slowly worked its way back into the green furnace of the world. Over the coming months, these fire-stoked sunsets would abate.

But there were things Ndege did not need to know tonight.

Or, for that matter, tomorrow.