On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Perhaps you need to get over it.’

  ‘Get over it?’ Feeling a flush of irritation Chiku leaned on the table, making it rock on its uneven metal legs. ‘You don’t get over something like that. Plus that’s just the start of it – they’ve been messing with my family’s business for far too long.’

  ‘But if they can make the ghost go away—’

  ‘He said “help me with that”. That might mean being able to answer the ghost. To find out what Chiku Green wants.’

  ‘Would you want that?’

  ‘I’d like the option. I think maybe . . .’ But Chiku chose not to finish her sentence. She drank some wine. A woman bellowed the same three lines of Fado from the open doorway of one of the bars in the street below, rehearsing for an evening performance. ‘I don’t know if I can trust them. But Mecufi gave me this.’

  She placed the little marble on the table between them.

  Pedro reached out and pinched it between thumb and forefinger with a faint sneer of distaste. He did not approve, Chiku knew. He thought motes somehow short-circuited an essential element of human discourse.

  ‘These aren’t foolproof.’

  She took back the amber marble. It would not work for Pedro anyway. Motes were always keyed to a specific recipient.

  ‘I know. But I’m willing to try it.’

  Chiku crushed the mote. The glassy orb shattered into harmless self-dissolving shards as the mote’s payload – its cargo of emotions – unfolded inside her head like a flower. The mote spoke of caution and hopefulness and a singular desire to be trusted. There were no dark notes in the chorus.

  I was right about Mecufi being a he,’ Chiku decided. ‘That came through clearly.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘He wants me to go to the seasteads very badly. They need me at least as much as I need them. And it’s not just about the ghost. There’s something else.’

  The woman singing Fado ran through the same three phrases again and her voice cracked on the last syllable. The woman laughed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Belém was where she had met Pedro. It had not been long after her arrival in Lisbon. Both of them buying ice creams from the same stand and laughing as wickedly determined seagulls dived and skimmed to scoop away their purchases.

  She went up onto the roof of the Monument to the Discoveries, with its sea-gazing ranks of carved navigators. It was the only place to get a decent view of the Wind Rose. It was a map of the ancient world, laid out across a wide terrace in slabs of red and blue marble. Galleons and seamonsters patrolled its fathomless seas and oceans. A kraken was hauling a ship to the depths in its tentacles. Beyond the map, arrows delineated the cardinal compass points.

  ‘It’s good that you came.’

  She turned around sharply. When she had arrived there had been no merfolk on the Monument’s viewing level, or at least none that she had recognised as such. It was a whisker after ten and she assumed her lateness had caused the agreement to be nullified. And yet here was Mecufi, stuffed now into an upright mobility exo.

  ‘You mentioned the ghost. I’ve seen it once already this morning, on the tram.’

  ‘Yes, it’s getting worse, isn’t it? But we’ll talk about that later. There are a couple of other things on the agenda before that. Shall we fly?’

  ‘Fly?’

  Mecufi looked up. Chiku followed his gaze, squinting against the haze. A shape detached itself from a bright wheel of gulls and grew larger as it descended. It was a flier, about as wide across as the top of the monument.

  ‘We have special dispensation,’ Mecufi said. ‘They love us in Lisbon, after we installed the tsunami baffles. They’ve got long memories here – 1755 was yesterday.’ From the flier’s broad green belly came a warm downdraught. A ramp tongued down and Mecufi directed Chiku to step aboard. ‘Why do you hesitate? There’s no need not to trust us. I gave you the mote, didn’t I?’

  ‘Motes can be faked.’

  ‘Everything can be faked. You’ll just have to trust that it wasn’t.’

  ‘Then we’re back to square one, aren’t we? I have to trust that you’re trustworthy?’

  ‘Trust is a fine and paradoxical thing. I promised I’d have you home before evening – will you take me at my word?’

  ‘We’re just going to the seasteads?’

  ‘And no further. It’s a beautiful day for it. The quality of light on water, as restless as the sea itself! What better time to be alive?’

  Chiku acquiesced. They escalated aboard, taking lounge seats in a generously proportioned cabin. The cabin sealed itself and the flier gathered speed as it rose. In a few breaths they were banking away from the coast. The waters were a gorgeous mingling of hues, lakes of indigo and ultramarine ink spilt into the ocean.

  ‘Earth’s quite nice, isn’t it?’ Mecufi’s exo had deposited him in his seat like a large stuffed toy, then folded itself away for the duration of the flight.

  ‘It was working out for me.’

  ‘The perfect backwater to study your family history? Crumbly old Lisbon, of all places?’

  ‘I thought I’d find some peace and quiet there. Evidently I was wrong about that.’

  The flier kept low. Occasionally they passed a cyberclipper, pleasure yacht or small wooden fishing boat with a gaily painted hull. Chiku barely glimpsed the fishermen busy on deck as the flier sped past, fussing with nets and winches. They never looked up. The aircraft was tidying up after itself, dissipating its own Mach cone so that there was no sonic boom.

  Its hull would have tuned itself to the colour of sky.

  ‘Let me ask you about your counterparts,’ Mecufi said.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

  ‘And yet I must. Let’s begin with the basics. Your mother and father were Sunday Akinya and Jitendra Gupta, both still living. You were born in what used to be the Descrutinised Zone, on the Moon, about two hundred years ago. Do you dispute these facts?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  Mecufi paused to smear some lavender-smelling oil onto himself from a small dispenser. ‘You had a carefree and prosperous childhood. You grew up in a time of tremendous peace and beneficial social and technological change. A time free of wars and poverty and nearly all illnesses. You were extraordinarily fortunate – billions of dead souls would have traded places with you in a heartbeat. And yet as you entered adulthood you detected an emptiness inside yourself. A lack of direction, an absence of moral purpose. It was hard, growing up with that name. Your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents moved mountains. Eunice opened up the solar system for deep-space settlement and exploitation. Sunday and your other relatives opened up the stars! What could you possibly do that would compare with any of that?’

  Chiku folded her arms. ‘Are you done?’

  ‘Not remotely. That’s the trouble with being very long-lived: there’s an awful lot of life to catch up with.’

  ‘So perhaps you should think about cutting to the chase.’

  ‘When you were fifty years old, a new technology came to fruition and you made a momentous decision. You engaged the firm Quorum Binding to produce two clones of you using rapid phenotyping. In a few months the clones were fully formed physically, but little more than semi-conscious blank canvases. They had your face but not your memories; none of your scars, none of the marks life had left on you, nothing of your developmental or immunological history. But that was also part of the plan.

  ‘While the clones matured, you submitted your own body to a process of structural adjustment. Medical nanomachines gorged you down to a woman-shaped core. They took apart your bones and muscles and nervous system and remade them so that they were genetically and functionally indistinguishable from those of your clone siblings. A front of neural machines tore through your brain like a wildfire. They recorded your idiosyncratic connectome – the detailed pattern of your own mental wiring. At the same time, similar machines – scriptors – wrote those same patterns into the minds of your sib
lings. Their minds had always been similar to your own, but now they were identical – even down to the level of memory. What you recollected, they recollected. The process was a kind of stochastic averaging. Some of the innate structures of your siblings were even transcribed back into your head. By the end of it, by the time the three of you were hauled out of the immersion vats, there was literally no way to tell you apart. You looked and thought the same. The telomeric clock of your cells had been wound back to zero. Epigenetic factors had been corrected and reversed. Since you all had access to the same memories, you could not even say for yourselves which was the original. That was precisely the point: that there should not be a favoured sibling. And the firm that had done this to you, Quorum Binding – even they didn’t know which one of you was authentic. Their process was rigorously blind. Their customers expected nothing less.’

  ‘And this would be your business, exactly, because . . .?’

  ‘You have always been our business, Chiku, whether you like it or not. Tell me how you selected your individual paths.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s the one part of your history I can’t get at.’

  Six months after the procedure, the three of them had reconvened in Equatorial East Africa. It was a warm day; they decided on a picnic away from the household. They had gone out in three airpods, skimming low and fast until they found a suitable spot. She remembered the airpods resting on the ground and a table set beneath the drowsy shade of a candelabra tree. Upon some impulse they had agreed to select their individual fates by breaking bread. The loaves contained coloured paper lots, the nature of which they had agreed on beforehand. Two of the siblings would embark on different enterprises which entailed a measure of risk. The third sibling would remain in the solar system as a kind of insurance policy, the only requirement being that she live a life of relative safety. With the family’s investments still growing exponentially, the third sibling would not need to work unless she wanted to.

  Each secretly desired to be the third sibling. There was no dishonour in that.

  Chiku remembered breaking bread three times, from the simultaneous perspective of each woman. After the breaking of the bread they had all undergone the periodic sharing of each other’s memories, and of course those memories all contained the recollection of that day under the tree, seen from a different perspective. The mixture of emotions was in each case distinct, like three photographs that had been tinted in varying hues

  For the sibling who broke her bread to reveal a pale-green lot, the expedition to Crucible beckoned. She experienced a sort of dizzy and delighted apprehension, like the sensation of approaching the first peak of a roller coaster. She would be leaving Earth behind and committing to a century and a half within the stone bowels of a holoship. The risks were difficult to assess: the holoships were new, untested, and such a thing had never been attempted before. But the reward at the end of that crossing – the right to set foot on a new world, orbiting a new sun – was incalculable.

  For the sibling choosing to travel out into space and find the drifting hulk of the Winter Queen – her lot was a pinkish red – the apprehension was sharper and arrived with oboe-like undertones of dread. The risks of this expedition were much more immediately quantifiable. She would be going out alone, pushing a little spacecraft to the outer envelope of its performance. On the other hand, when she returned home with the prize, her debt to posterity would be paid. This was high risk, but maximum reward. And whereas the sibling on the holoship would share her achievement with millions, this triumph would be hers alone.

  For the sibling who had to stay at home, the sibling who drew the yellow lot, the feeling was one of relief. She had drawn the easy duty. But at the same time she felt a sharp, brassy stab of resentment that she would be denied the individual glories of Crucible or the reaching of Winter Queen. Nonetheless, this was what they had agreed. She had no need to feel ashamed of herself. Any of them could have drawn this lot.

  There was a wooden box on the table. As one, their hands moved to open it. They laughed at the awkwardness of this moment, its betrayal of their fixed behaviour. Then by some silent consensus, two of them moved their hands back into their laps and allowed the third – Chiku Yellow – to open the lid.

  The box contained an assortment of Akinya heirlooms, which were few in number. There were some pencils that had belonged to Uncle Geoffrey and a pair of scuffed Ray-Ban sunglasses. There was a print of a digital photograph taken of Eunice when she was little, by her own mother Soya, when the two of them had been climate refugees in some kind of transit camp. There was a rare Samsung mobile telephone, a Swiss Army knife, a compass and a thumb-sized digital memory device in the form of a key ring. There was a tattered copy of Gulliver’s Travels which appeared to be missing some pages. There were six wooden elephants, each fixed onto a coal-coloured plinth – bull, matriarch, two young adults and two calves. The elephants were divided between the two siblings venturing into space. This was what they had agreed.

  After they had divided up the other items, the only thing remaining in the box was a simple wooden charm. It hung from a thin leather strap, a circular talisman of unguessable age. They all knew it had belonged to their great-grandmother, and that it had passed from Eunice to Soya: not the Soya who was Eunice’s mother, but the daughter of Eunice’s former husband Jonathan Beza. Soya had in turn gifted the charm to Sunday, during her time on Mars, and Sunday had passed the charm on to her daughter, Chiku Akinya.

  Now they were three.

  ‘It should remain here,’ said Chiku Green, the version of Chiku travelling to Crucible.

  ‘I agree,’ said Chiku Red, the version of Chiku pursuing Winter Queen.

  ‘We could cut it into three,’ Chiku Yellow ventured, but that was an idea they had already raised and dismissed on a dozen occasions. The simple fact was that the charm belonged on Earth or near to it. It had no business leaving the solar system.

  Chiku Yellow took the charm and slipped the cord around her neck. They were all riding the tramlines of different fates now, but for the first time since the drawing of the lots, she had some tangible sense of her own diminished future. She was not going out there.

  ‘It began well,’ Mecufi said.

  ‘Most things do.’

  Mecufi popped the oil dispenser back into its pouch next to his seat and picked up his potted narrative of Chiku’s life. ‘The idea was that the three of you would have different experiences but remain essentially the same individual. You would go off and live independent lives, but the readers and scriptors in your heads would hold your memories in strict congruence, like bookkeepers maintaining identical sets of accounts. What one of you experienced, so would the other two. It was meant to be a process of periodic realignment rather than constant synchronisation, but for one reason or another you gradually drifted apart. You remained in contact with each other, but the relationships grew distant, strained. You stopped feeling as if you had much in common. There was a catalysing event, of course—’

  ‘I thought you had something to tell me,’ Chiku said. That was how she thought of herself, not as Chiku Yellow. The colours were for keeping tabs on her siblings, not herself. She added: ‘If this is all you’ve got, I think we need to go back to Lisbon.’

  ‘We haven’t got to the ghost yet.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘One of you is trying to re-establish contact. You have disavowed the readers and scriptors from touching your memories, so your sibling is attempting to reach you by other means. Of course, we know which one of you it has to be.’

  ‘No prizes for that – there are only two of us left.’

  ‘I understand why you drifted apart from Chiku Green. The further away she travelled, the longer the time lag became. Weeks and months were almost manageable. But years? Decades? We’re not wired for that. We’re not built to maintain any kind of empathic connection with someone that far from home. Especially when they begin to feel like a rival, so
meone living a better, more adventurous life. A life with a purpose. When you both had children, you felt a kinship – a sense of shared achievement. Chiku Green had Ndege and Mposi. You had Kanu. But when your own son turned from you—’

  ‘He didn’t turn from me. You turned him from everything he knew and loved – his family, his world, even his species.’

  ‘Regardless, his turning brought sorrow. After that, you couldn’t stand to share any part of Chiku Green’s existence. It wasn’t that you hated her – how could you? That would be like hating yourself. But you hated the idea that there was a version of you living a better life. As for your son – I would ask you not to blame us for the choices Kanu made.’

  ‘I’ll blame you for whatever I feel like.’

  Mecufi twisted in his seat. Like a hyperactive child, he appeared easily distracted. ‘Look, we’re coming up on our islands!’

  They were somewhere near the Azores. This, though, was no natural island chain. These were vast floating platelets, hexagonal platforms ten kilometres wide, jigsawed together in rafts and archipelagos, forming larger islands with their own angular coastlines, peninsulas, atolls and bays.

  There were hundreds of distinct island aggregations in the United Aquatic Nations. The smallest were nimble microstates, formed from only a few linked platelets. Others were supercolonies composed of thousands or tens of thousands of platelets, but always in flux – platelets breaking away, reshuffling, honeycombing into new polities and federations and alliances. There were also breakaway states, independencies, fractious alliances between rogue seasteaders and the land powers. No maps existed for these nervous, jostling territories.

  ‘Where does he live now?’ she asked. ‘You’d know that, wouldn’t you? Even if Kanu doesn’t want to talk to me?’

  ‘Your son is still on Earth, but on the other side of Africa, in the Indian Ocean, working with krakens.’