On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER SIX

From the transit station, all the way up the winding stone-walled paths to her dwelling, Chiku ran a gauntlet of questions from well-meaning citizens. They had learned from Noah about her visit to Kappa and they wanted to know what she had seen inside. Most of all, they wanted reassurance. Chair Utomi might have told everyone that Zanzibar was safe, but what else could he say? Chiku had first-hand information and they were eager for it. She did not have to lie to them, or bend the truth to any excessive degree, to give them what they wanted. Things will be all right, she assured them. It’s bad, but we’ll weather it. We have the local caravan to call on. There will be no more deaths.

Eventually she had to start telling them not to ask any more questions, that she had already told them all she knew. She directed the rest back down the path, to the people who had already interrogated her. Talk to them, they know the picture.

When she finally reached the house, she was surprised to see Noah sitting outside it, squatting on one of the low walls. Mposi and Ndegi were at his feet, squabbling over a game of marbles. Noah had an odd look about him – not the relief and concern she had been counting on.

‘I’m glad you’re safe,’ he said, rising from the wall.

She had expected to find him indoors, preparing a meal, not daydreaming out here. ‘Yes, I’m safe,’ she said guardedly. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Noah embraced her briefly, breaking contact almost as soon as he had initiated it. ‘We have… well, it’s difficult to explain. I think you need to go inside.’

‘Why are you waiting out here?’

‘I think you need to go inside,’ Noah repeated, as if she had not heard him the first time. ‘I’ll wait here with the children. You can decide what we should do next.’

This was definitely more strangeness than she needed at the end of a hard day. But Noah was a good husband and not given to dramas. She nodded wordlessly, knelt down to kiss the children – tousled their hair, whispered that they should play nicely. And then – steeling herself – she entered the house.

Travertine was sitting at the kitchen table, hands before ver, fingering a wine glass.

‘Hello, Chiku.’

Chiku said nothing at first. Travertine had poured the wine from the same bottle she and Noah had started the evening before their mission to Malabar. Chiku eased into the seat opposite Travertine and helped herself to a sip from the same glass. Then the sip became a gulp, and she carried on drinking until the glass was empty and her throat was burning.

She said: ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

‘In the immediate sense, or the existential?’

‘Dead, alive, whatever – you shouldn’t be in my house. Not after whatever happened today.’

‘I have no idea what happened today.’

‘Whatever went wrong, it started with your laboratory. You did this. You did this and they’re going to hang you for it.’

‘Well, it’s good to know I can turn to friends for reassurance.’

‘Get out of my house.’

Travertine took the glass from her and poured more wine. ‘I’m not an idiot. I expect to be arrested for this. The only reason I was able to get here in the first place was because there was so much chaos and confusion.’

‘Were you in Kappa when it happened?’

‘If I had been, we wouldn’t be having this cosy little chat, would we?’

‘I can’t shelter you.’

‘I’m not asking you to.’

‘What happened? What the hell were you doing?’

‘Nothing much. Just trying to save the world. And how was your day?’

‘You were punished once. You were lucky they didn’t lock you up then. Wasn’t that lesson enough for you?’

‘All it did was teach me that I needed to be cleverer.’

‘Oh, please.’

‘In case you haven’t noticed, that little problem of ours hasn’t magically vanished. Does it keep you awake at night? It really ought to. It gives me cold, shivering nightmares.’

‘I won’t argue with you. There’d be nothing to gain. Are you going to turn yourself in, or do I have to call the authorities?’

‘You are the authorities, Chiku. That’s rather the point.’ But Travertine sighed, then. ‘I am going to turn myself in – it’s not as if I’d have a hope in hell of evading justice.’

‘So why have you come here instead of going straight to the constables?’

‘There’s something we need to discuss.’

‘I’ve heard enough of your justifications over the years. You just blew a hole in the skin of the holoship.’

‘True. But you know what? It proves there’s something we don’t understand. Pemba proved it, too, but that time there was no wreckage to comb through, and no survivors to question. We had no idea what they’d been doing in there before it all went pop.’

‘The same as you – meddling.’

‘Meddling is what we do. It’s what defines us. Meddling gave us fire and tools and civilisation and the keys to the universe. Fingers will get burnt along the way, yes. That’s the way of it.’ Travertine examined vis fingers. They were strong and elaborately wrinkled around the knuckles. Unlike Chiku’s, they looked like they had done honest work.

‘Well?’ she prompted, after Travertine fell silent and appeared to be in no hurry to speak again.

‘I found something. A hint of a breakthrough, a door into Post-Chibesa physics. A glimpse of the energies we’ll need to decelerate, when we approach Crucible. I decided to investigate further with a simple experiment. In secret, of course – underneath my lab.’

‘I think you should save all this for the hearing.’

‘When you dig under something, Chiku, you often make discoveries.’

‘What the hell are you talking about, Travertine?’

‘I have some information that I think might interest you, both as a respected member of the Assembly and as someone with influence in the Council of Worlds.’

‘And exactly how long have you had this “information”?’

‘I always knew the time might come when I would need your support, so when I made my discovery, I decided not to act on it immediately.’

‘You kept it back as a bargaining chip.’

Travertine pulled a face as if ve had just sucked on something sour. ‘It sounds terribly cynical, doesn’t it? I prefer to think of it as a wise investment. I wasn’t endangering the community. Whatever I’d found had been there for years and years and done no harm. I had no reason to believe that situation would change.’

‘And what, exactly, did you discover?’

‘Well, now, that brings us right to the nub of things, doesn’t it? As I said, I’m going to turn myself in, and I have no doubt that dreadful things are going to happen to me. Even I have to acknowledge that they’ll be well within their rights to push for the death penalty.’

‘You might want to get to the point, then.’

‘I’m going to need someone on my side. I want you to state my case, put my side of the argument to the authorities – even if that makes you unpopular at committee level. There’ll be plenty of voices ready to condemn me. I need one person prepared to state that I’m not a monster. Someone who’s endured the same nightmares I have.’

Chiku shook her head slowly. ‘I’ll tell the truth – you didn’t need to bargain that out of me.’

‘But I want more than neutrality. I want you to be my advocate, when no one else will stand by me.’

‘You can’t ask that of me.’

‘I can and I will. This matters more than anything in the world, Chiku. I know you and Noah have been working very hard lately, and that you’re hoping to call in some favours – four cosy skipover slots for you and your family, a one-way ticket to the future, an escape from these problems.’

Chiku stared down her friend. All this was true, but she despised Travertine for stating it so bluntly.

‘What the committee makes of your request is their business – I can’t influence them one way or the other.’

‘Perhaps you can, perhaps you can’t. Here’s the thing, though – I absolutely must be allowed to continue my work. And if not me, then a team of people I’ll appoint and supervise. If that doesn’t happen, we’re all finished.’

‘And this… information you’ve been hoarding?’

‘When I excavated underneath my laboratory, I found tunnels in Zanzibar’s skin that aren’t supposed to be there.’

‘I know.’

Travertine’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘That’s easy to say.’

‘I saw a shaft under one of the buildings while I was searching Kappa for survivors. It goes down deep, and it isn’t documented.’

‘Then that’s all you know?’

‘The shaft I saw was some distance from your complex. There’s no reason to assume they’re connected.’

‘They are. I explored. I’m a scientist – what else was I going to do? I mapped a network of tunnels and shafts radiating away from the entry point under my lab. Most of them were dead ends, sealed off with fused rubble or concrete. None of them show up in the official documents, but they’re obviously as old as Zanzibar itself. That means someone put them in deliberately, for a reason, and then decided not to tell anyone about it.’

‘That’s all you’ve got?’ Chiku shook her head. ‘I already knew this, Travertine. I’ll be making an official report as soon as this mess is behind us.’

‘Then the existence of these features isn’t common knowledge yet?’

‘Whether it is or not, it doesn’t give you anything to bargain with.’

‘Then a map of the tunnel system wouldn’t be of any interest to you?’

‘I can make my own map.’

‘I could save you the bother. And save you the trouble of learning something else the hard way, too. I found one tunnel that leads out of Kappa altogether. But I couldn’t explore that one.’

‘Too scared?’

‘Exploring the tunnels was a distraction, remember – I had my official work to be getting on with. Regardless, curious as I was, and even if I’d found the time, I couldn’t have explored it if I’d wanted to. Not easily. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t.’

‘What’s so special about me?’

‘You have the right name.’

‘You’ve lost me, Travertine.’

‘Then I’ll make it very simple for you. There’s a sort of… sphinxware preventing access to the deeper tunnel. My guess – and my guesses tend to be reliable – is that it’s waiting for a blood Akinya to show up. Someone of that ancient and holy lineage. Given time, I could have fooled the sphinxware, but as I said, I had other fish to fry. And I was satisfied that what I’d already learned would be useful enough, when the time came.’

‘Like now, for instance?’

‘Your family and its network of allies played a large role in the building and launching of the holoships, Chiku. Someone connected to the family decided to smuggle a secret aboard this ship.’

‘Impossible. I was alive back then, remember? I saw the holoships being assembled, I saw the first of them leaving.’

‘Then maybe you weren’t as close to the bosom of the family as you liked to think. Maybe there are dark secrets no one involved was quite willing to share with the young and feckless Chiku Akinya.’ Travertine smiled for the first time. ‘Now, shall we discuss my hearing again?’

‘I want your map,’ Chiku said.

‘Is that a promise of assistance?’

Chiku said nothing. She went to Ndege’s room and found a sheet of paper and some wax crayons. She brought them back to the table and set them down before Travertine.

Noah coughed gently as he entered the kitchen.

‘This can’t go on for much longer,’ he said.

Travertine turned to look at him. ‘You can call the constables whenever you like. Say I arrived in a state of distress and confusion. It’ll take them a little while to get here – there’ll be no suggestion that you were harbouring me.’

‘We’re not,’ Noah said. His folded arms conveyed his distaste. Chiku and Noah had both been Travertine’s friends, but Noah’s scepticism had hardened after Travertine’s original censure.

Travertine turned back to the paper and crayons and started to draw.

‘This won’t take long,’ ve said.

Chair Utomi was making another public announcement. Their children now asleep, Chiku and Noah watched it from their kitchen. Both were brittle with exhaustion but anxious to hear the latest news, the latest casualty estimates, the latest hints of a political response from the rest of the local caravan.

‘By now,’ Utomi said, ‘some of you will be aware of compelling evidence that today’s accident was caused by something originating in or near Travertine’s research facility. Some of you will also be aware that Travertine survived the accident. I can confirm that these rumours are correct. I can also confirm that Travertine is now in custody, having turned verself over to the administration. The Council of Worlds can be assured of our total cooperation in all matters relating to this incident. If it transpires that Travertine was involved in actions contrary to the provisions of the Pemba Accord, and that those actions occurred due to our oversight, we will submit to the full weight of caravan authority.’

‘Why not just throw Travertine to the wolves and be done with it,’ Chiku said, when Utomi was done.

‘This isn’t going to end well,’ Noah said. ‘Travertine did this while we were supposed to keep an eye on ver – how does that make us look?’

‘Stupider than Travertine,’ Chiku said. ‘But if that was a hanging offence, we’d all be for the gallows.’

Noah nodded carefully. ‘What did Travertine want to talk about anyway?’

‘Ve was shocked. Who wouldn’t be, under those circumstances? Travertine wanted reassurance that ve was going to get a fair hearing.’

‘Ve got a fair hearing the first time.’

‘It’ll be a different this time.’ Chiku clicked her nails against the table-top. A red circle stained the surface where the wine glass had been. ‘People have died because of the experiment. It’s going to be difficult to get beyond that.’

‘What was Travertine drawing on that piece of paper? Ve didn’t take it with ver, and you didn’t show it to the constables.’

‘Is this my trial, or Travertine’s?’

‘I’m only asking,’ Noah said, and his hurt tone made her wince inside. And she had to admit that, yes, he had only asked, as he had a right to – this was his home as well. They did not normally keep secrets from one another.

‘Travertine wanted to make sure there was no further risk of decompression,’ Chiku said. ‘The sketch shows the underground workings connected to the laboratory, in case any of them need to be sealed off or reinforced.’

This was true, as far as it went – Travertine had mentioned, in passing, that someone should double-check the tunnels and shafts, especially when they started repressurising Kappa. But that had been only an incidental concern.

Chiku did not like lying to Noah – not even by omission.

‘There’s something I want to investigate,’ she said. ‘I would have mentioned it to you sooner, but when I got home Travertine was here, and after that everything got a bit intense. Anyway, when I was in the chamber with Namboze, I saw something unusual. It’s probably nothing, but I need to take a second look at it.’

‘And are you going to tell me what it is?’

‘Probably nothing, which is why I won’t report it just yet.’

‘This isn’t helping.’

‘Look, I was tired when I went in there. I saw what appeared to be a void under one of the buildings.’ She carefully refrained from saying ‘shaft’, because ‘shaft’ implied something that led somewhere else, and that carried a whole freight of implications she did not presently care to unpack.

‘Gonithi saw this, too?’

‘No – she was searching a different part of the building.’

‘But you told her about it.’

‘I didn’t see any need to. As I said, it’s probably nothing, plus I don’t want to make a fool of myself in front of the Assembly until I know there’s definitely something worth bringing to their attention.’

‘Let’s not make a habit of keeping secrets, okay?’

‘I hope we won’t have to.’ She forced a smile – it felt as if she was bending a part of her face that had never bent before. ‘I’ll make arrangements to return to Kappa – they’re going to be sending in search parties for a while.’

‘Whatever you do, don’t get into trouble.’

‘We’re already in trouble – all of us. I can’t make things much worse.’

‘That’s no answer.’ Noah let out an exasperated, world-weary sigh. ‘You’re my wife, and we have Mposi and Ndege to think about. We all want skipover, and our chances are much better now than they were the last time. Whatever you think you owe Zanzibar, it’s not more important than our family.’

‘It never has been,’ she said. ‘And I will be careful.’

The Assembly building lay at the bottom of a bowl of gently sloping ground, hemmed by lawns, lakes and neat copses of quill-like trees. Chiku always had mixed feelings at her first view of the prospect whenever she arrived in Gamma Chamber, the administrative core. There were thirty-six chambers in Zanzibar, twenty-four of them named for the Greek alphabet, and the remaining twelve (there was no logic in terms of utilisation or population density) for the dozen months of the terrestrial calendar, January to December. The ‘A’-shaped building betrayed the heavy hand of the Akinyas in the creation of Zanzibar. It was carefully modelled on the old family home in Equatorial East Africa, duplicated down to the last blue tile, the last white stone and ornamental wall. Chiku had visited the original household on several occasions. She had climbed nearby Kilimanjaro, a gruelling ascent without exo assistance, all the way to the chiselled snowcap where the lasers of the old ballistic launcher still stood sentinel. She had observed the Amboseli herds by airpod and on foot. She had met with patient old Geoffrey, and listened to him as he talked about painting, about the endless negotiation between art and memory.

The cab dropped her off and left to collect new passengers. She walked past the greening bronze statue of her great-grandmother, averting her gaze from that imperious frowning visage. Constables flanked the gate to the grounds. Even though they knew her there were formalities, badges and documents to be presented and scrutinised. The constables asked after Noah, and about the ongoing search effort in Kappa. They asked how her children were coping with the accident. Chiku’s answers were curter than she might have wished, but the constables appeared not to mind. Everyone was on edge today, and allowances could be made.

‘Just a moment,’ Chiku said to them, when she noticed the time.

Overhead, bisecting the false sky from one end of the chamber to the other, was a stiff metal rail. Threaded onto this rail was a black oval about the size of a small house. This oval, a scaled-down model of Zanzibar, was a kind of clock. It had started out at one end when the holoship launched and now it was more than halfway across the chamber. Rather than moving continuously, it ticked along in daily increments of about a hand’s width.

The movements always occurred at noon. Chiku was often coming or going from the Assembly at this hour and she always made a point of looking up at the sky clock. It was difficult to see the model move, but on occasion she had succeeded, especially when the edge of it happened to line up with a projected cloud or some other reference point.

She heard the distant chime that indicated the model had moved forward by its statutory amount. But as was often the case she saw no obvious change in the thing.

The sky clock had appeared to be a good idea, in the early days of Zanzibar’s crossing. A reminder that, as far away as their destination looked, they would get there eventually. It was just a question of adding up those daily chimes. Eighty thousand – fewer than the number of seconds in a single day. Put like that, it felt bearable. A human span.

She had come to hate the sky clock.

Despite her best efforts, she ended up entering the hall alongside Chair Utomi. They were both wearing formal dress, styled along traditional African lines but with a few modern concessions. Utomi was a huge, broad-shouldered man, bulky as a wrestler.

‘It’s an unfortunate mess. Things would be a lot simpler for all of us if Travertine had had the good grace to die along with the rest of them.’

This was an uncharacteristically callous assessment from the normally agreeable Utomi. It offered some gauge of the pressures weighing on him.

‘I’m sure Travertine agrees,’ Chiku said. ‘It’s not going to be easy for ver, going forward.’

‘At least ve’s a realist.’

‘Travertine thinks the death penalty might be imposed. We won’t sink that low, will we?’

‘It’s been done before. I doubt there’d be an outcry against the decision this time.’

‘But Travertine didn’t exactly commit cold-blooded murder.’

‘And none of us has the luxury of splitting hairs. If it wasn’t cold-blooded murder, it was certainly cold-blooded flaunting of our laws.’

‘We need Travertine’s mind. No matter what ve did, that intellect is still too valuable to waste.’

‘It’s not in our hands.’ Under his gold-patterned formal skirt, Utomi’s shoes squeaked on the waxed floor. He had a heavy, solemn stride, with a slight limp from an injury sustained in a vacuum accident many years ago, and which he’d never bothered to correct. ‘This will go to the Council of Worlds. If they want the death penalty badly enough, they’ll get it.’

‘They’ll need to demonstrate malintent.’

‘That won’t be terribly difficult. You can’t say that the provisions of the Pemba Accord aren’t widely known.’

‘We need to hear Travertine’s side of things.’

‘Of course. You spoke to Travertine yesterday, when ve came to your house. How would you describe vis state of mind?’

Chiku deliberated. ‘Troubled.’

‘For verself, or for what ve’s done to us?’

‘A bit of both, I think. Look, I’m not going to pretend that Travertine is an angel, or that ve feels much beyond disdain for most of the rest of us. But ve was shocked by what happened.’

‘That’s odd. Knowing Travertine, I’d have expected cocky disregard.’ They were nearing the heavy black doors of the Assembly chamber. ‘That’s the thing, though – we all know Travertine on some level. That’s unavoidable in a closed community. But if you feel your relationship will affect your impartiality, you shouldn’t hesitate to recuse yourself. The Assembly will accept a temporary leave of absence while this matter is settled. Get some rest, or something. You like gardening, don’t you?’

‘You can count on my impartiality, Chair.’

‘Very good, Chiku.’ Utomi hesitated in his stride, as if the limp had worsened. ‘Oh – one more thing.’

‘Yes, Chair?’

‘Good work on Malabar, and in the Kappa situation. It’s not gone unnoticed. I’m aware of your recent request for full-term skipover.’

‘I see.’

‘Obviously, nothing will be decided until we resolve this crisis. But beyond that, you might want to start making the necessary legal and educational arrangements.’

‘Thank you. It’s very good of you—’

‘Off the record, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘And your children – Ndege and… what’s the other one?’

‘Mposi, Chair.’

‘How old are they now?’

He meant their physiological ages. ‘Ndege’s twelve and Mposi’s eleven.’

‘How do they feel about skipover?’

‘They’ve been through it twice during our last couple of terms. I don’t suppose they remember all that much.’

‘Those were only twenty-year skips, though. Plus they’re older, now – they’ll have friends. They won’t like the thought of being torn away from them for sixty years.’

‘They’ll be happy, Chair. And we’ll all be happy when we get to Crucible.’

Constables opened the double doors and admitted them into the chamber. It was a large dark room with a stepped floor and a fan of seats set in concentric rows. Here at least the Assembly building parted company with its counterpart back in Africa. There had been no room this grand in the original household.

There were thirty-six seats in the concentric rows, one for each of Zanzibar’s chambers. The rows formed a horseshoe, with a smaller arrangement of seats pincered between the extremities. Chair Utomi’s throne-like elevated position faced the elected representatives and was flanked by the chairs and desks of two record-keeping constables. Immediately in front of Utomi and the record keepers was a slablike black table. Above it floated a ghostly schematic of Zanzibar, as if made from many layers of coloured glass. It was an aug-generated figment, the only thing in the room not physically present.

Chiku took her seat in the front row. Only twenty-five representatives were in session, but that was not unusual, especially during a state of emergency. Once preliminaries had been attended to, Travertine was brought into the room under the supervision of a pair of constables. They sat ver down in a chair immediately in front of the image of Zanzibar, so that Travertine faced Utomi. Chiku could only see the side of Travertine’s face.

That suited her very well. She did not want to be making eye contact today.

‘What are the latest casualty figures?’ Utomi asked of his record keepers, once Travertine was settled.

‘Total loss of life, at the latest estimate, stands at two hundred and twelve,’ reported the constable to Utomi’s right. She was a pale, Nordic-looking woman with a bowl of peppery hair. ‘Search-and-rescue efforts are continuing, along with preparations to stabilise the damage. There’s an outside chance that there may still be one or two survivors, trapped in isolated air pockets. We may also expect to find more casualties. Accounting for all the dead – including those caught in the immediate vicinity of the explosion – may take days, possibly weeks.’

Utomi nodded gravely. This uncertainty was the price they paid for their mode of living in Zanzibar. On Malabar – in fact aboard almost any other holoship – the identities and locations of the dead would have been a matter of instantaneous public record. But here, even constables did not have the routine means to track individuals via their implants. On Malabar, Travertine would have found it quite impossible to hide, even for a few hours.

But we do things differently here, Chiku thought. That’s the point of the caravan. We travel in multiple holoships for mutual support and insurance against a disaster like Pemba, but also because it allows us to rehearse different modes of living, new permutations, before we reach Crucible. What worked back home might not work on a new world, under strange and disfigured constellations.

‘We were very lucky, in most respects,’ the constable continued. ‘Fewer people work in Kappa now than before. We lost some air and water, but not enough to cause us immediate difficulties. Our breach-containment systems proved their worth, and there were no critical systems routed through the part of the skin we lost. But the damage is still catastrophic, and if the energy release had been an order of magnitude greater, we could easily be looking at a second Pemba.’

No one needed to voice the silent corollary to that ominous declaration. Had this been a ‘second Pemba’, no one in or near Zanzibar would be in a position to look at anything at all.

Zanzibar would no longer exist.

‘Our good fortune notwithstanding,’ Utomi said, ‘what matters is that our most serious laws – laws enacted to protect the integrity of the holoship – were ignored, treated with disdain, as if they applied to everyone else but Travertine. Do you deny this?’

There was silence in the chamber as they waited for the scientist to respond. Knowing Travertine’s wilful character, Chiku would not have been remotely surprised if ve simply stared them all down in wordless defiance.

But after several seconds of silence, Travertine twisted in vis seat to look around the gathering.

‘What’s the point of all this?’

‘A demonstration of your respect for the authority of this Assembly,’ said Utomi.

‘I’ll respect it when you stop deluding yourselves. This isn’t about me. It’s not even about the Kappa accident. It’s about you and your double standards – enforcing laws while hoping someone breaks them!’

‘You’ve stated these opinions on many occasions,’ Utomi said, visibly weary. ‘You clearly haven’t changed your mind.’

‘Our situation hasn’t changed, either. We’re still hurtling through space at twelve-point-seven per cent of the speed of light with no means of slowing down. In fewer than ninety years, we’ll sail right past our destination. That won’t change until you pull your heads out of the sand and start facing reality.’

‘We do not need to be reminded of our predicament,’ Utomi said, ‘any more than you need to be reminded that we still have many decades of flight ahead of us.’

‘And when will you finally lift the Pemba Accord? Twenty years from now? Fifty? What if that doesn’t give us enough time?’

‘When the terms of the Pemba Accord are relaxed,’ Utomi said, ‘a caravan-wide research programmeme into the slowdown problem will be initiated. Hundreds, thousands of minds, with all the resources and equipment they need. A massive cooperative effort. But that’s never sat very well with you, has it? You could never be part of a collective enterprise. It has to be Travertine, the lone genius.’

Travertine turned around in vis seat again and addressed the Assembly. ‘I was using more energy in my lab than could ever be explained by the experiments I claimed to be doing. But did one of you ever have the courage to question me about it?’

‘That sounds like a confession to me,’ Utomi said. ‘Before my constables commit it to the record for posterity, would you like to amend your statement?’

‘What I did was an obligation, not a crime. My statement stands.’

‘Then why did you run?’ Utomi asked.

‘Because I’m human. Because I know what this will mean for me.’

‘Nothing is… settled,’ Utomi said, as if he sought to offer this beleaguered, belligerent individual some glimmer of hope. ‘The legislation is very precisely worded – it had to be, after you tested our existing laws to destruction last time. We require proof that you knowingly brought this risk upon us, that you deliberately invoked Post-Chibesa Physics rather than stumbling into it by accident, while engaged in some other line of research.’

Travertine rewarded this statement with a look of blazing contempt. ‘I’ve never stumbled into anything in my life.’

None of the representatives had spoken so far, but Chung, the representative from Mu Chamber who was sitting a few spaces to Chiku’s right, could restrain himself no longer. ‘The Pemba Accord wasn’t instigated to stifle scientific enquiry, Travertine. It was to ensure it didn’t accelerate out of our control. If we wished to abandon experimentation altogether, we could easily have done so after Pemba. Yet we still allow it, even encourage it – but always under the assumption that those conducting the research will do so responsibly.’

‘The trouble is,’ said Firdausi, the representative from Sigma Chamber and who was sitting behind Chiku, ‘that we know Travertine’s history. There’s never been anyone less likely to accidentally transgress the Accord.’

‘That’s true,’ Travertine said, with blithe disregard for the consequences of this admission. ‘Why would I ever deny it? We don’t understand Post-Chibesa Physics, so how can we draw a fence around it and say never cross that line?’

‘In time,’ said Utomi, ‘we will develop a much fuller understanding.’

‘Yes,’ Travertine replied levelly. ‘And to the best of my recollection, you were saying exactly the same thing fifty years ago – everything will be all right, little children. Go to bed and stop worrying. And don’t mention slowdown in polite company.’

There was truth in this, Chiku knew. Slowdown had gone from being an awkward, emotionally sensitive topic to something that was barely ever mentioned. As if, by not talking about it, the problem would somehow magic itself away.

The simple fact of it was this: the holoships were travelling too quickly. Early in their voyages, in the flush of optimism that accompanied a time of rapid technological and scientific progress, their governments had wagered against the future. Rather than take three hundred years to cross space to Crucible – the original, achievable intention – the journey could be compressed to a mere two hundred and twenty. The trick was to keep burning fuel, eating into the mountainous stocks that were supposed to be held in reserve until the holoships needed to slow down. Instead of using that fuel to slow down, they would use something else – some more efficient process, or an entirely new propulsion system.

Something – in other words – yet to be invented.

But that ‘something else’ had shown a stubborn reluctance to arrive. Many promising avenues had led to dead ends. Glimpses had revealed themselves to be mirages, hoaxes. Still the researchers forged on: theory buttressing experiment, experiment buttressing theory. The intellectual effort encompassed many holoships and stretched as far back as the solar system. The enterprise swallowed lives and dreams and spat out bitterness and dejection.

No one minded that, at least not to begin with. But gradually the will had faltered. Research lines began to be abandoned, facilities mothballed or dismantled.

Yet there were always a few mavericks, bright minds like Travertine, who were convinced that there was a solution, and that it lay close at hand. Just one more push, and the kingdom would be theirs. They forged bigger and grander experiments, and did increasingly perverse things to matter and energy and spacetime.

Finally they made a breakthrough that could not be disputed.

The energy liberated in the destruction of the holoship Pemba, it was calculated, demanded an explanation outside the framework of orthodox Chibesa physics. It was an ‘existence proof’ of PCP – the Post-Chibesa Physics. If that unwieldy power could be tamed, harnessed for propulsion, all their worries would be over. They could even move a little faster now, if they wished.

But Pemba had been a step too far. Ten million lives had been extinguished in an instant, the result of an experiment whose parameters were sufficiently unclear that it could never be adequately reconstructed, even if the will were there. And the risk of such a disaster happening again, taking out a second holoship, could not be sanctioned. The Pemba Accord had dropped like a guillotine.

So Travertine had set verself on this path, constantly testing Assembly authority, chafing against restrictions, pushing vis luck. After the last censure, ve had done well to avoid imprisonment. But Travertine always rebuilt and pushed further. And Chiku had to agree with ver here – the Assembly always knew what Travertine was up to and chose not to intervene. Because on some unspoken level they wanted ver to succeed.

If there was one positive thing to be drawn from yesterday’s tragedy, Chiku thought, it was that Travertine must have been on to something.

‘Your experiment in Kappa was totally destroyed,’ Chiku said, seizing the opportunity to speak. ‘Along with, I’m guessing, all the records relating to it. But you’ll still be required to give an account of what was involved.’

‘So someone else can reproduce my work?’

‘So we can make sure no one comes anywhere near it,’ Utomi said.

‘Clearly, I made progress.’ Travertine’s chin was elevated now, with that familiar cocksure defiance of vis. ‘And if I had the chance, I’d do it again. I ran an experiment and I got a result. That’s more useful to us than fifty years of theorising.’

‘If you intend to show contrition,’ Utomi said, ‘now would be an excellent place to start.’

‘For what? Two hundred lives?’

‘Two hundred and twelve,’ a constable corrected, before glancing down. ‘Make that two hundred and fourteen. They’ve recovered two more bodies since we went into session.’

‘Make it three hundred. A thousand. You think it matters?’ Travertine surveyed the appalled faces that followed this statement. ‘I grieve for them, believe me. But the survival of this entire holoship depends on slowdown. That’s ten million lives. Hundreds of millions in the local caravan, a billion people spread throughout all the other holoships, and not just those en route for Crucible, but also the other extrasolar worlds in other systems. If my death would guarantee the breakthrough we need, I’d kill myself now.’

‘You truly believe this?’ Utomi said, consternation written in his features.

Travertine’s gaze was unblinking, resolute.

‘Absolutely.’

Chiku studied the dismayed reactions of her fellows. She could not be sure what disturbed them the most: the fact that Travertine could make such an assertion in the one place where ve ought to be pleading for clemency; or the fact that Travertine was utterly and irrevocably sincere in vis convictions.

Perhaps a little of both.