On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I’ll answer that, but you need to know a little about Ocular to begin with. Before the instrument came online, Eunice and I inserted a blind spot in its architecture. Arachne is – or was – the spider at the centre of the web, collating data sent back from the individual elements of the Ocular array. That’s all she knew. But we were sensible enough not to put all our faith in an artilect, and as a sanity check, once in a very great while, each of those elements was also programmed to squirt raw data packets somewhere else.’

  ‘Anywhere in particular?’ asked Chiku.

  ‘To anything Arachne wouldn’t notice that could store those data packets. Half-forgotten networks, addressing dormant or semi-derelict archives. Anything with a memory. Moribund offshore bank accounts, floating in the asteroid belt. Deep-space network routers, still up and running. Military encryption devices. Space probes and landers with a trickle of electrical power still running through their circuits. Dead astronauts, drifting through space, but whose spacesuits still had some functionality. They weren’t our only fail-safes, but they gave June a pretext for the rest of her activities. Were we being unreasonably cautious – paranoid, even? It’s entirely possible.’

  ‘So, these devices,’ Pedro said, ‘they stored the data before she got hold of it? So all you have to do is put it all together, and you can see the real picture?’

  ‘Unfortunately we could only hide the tiniest, tiniest fraction of the full Ocular data stream, but the packets are useful, and they do provide more information beyond the fact that she was lying. Put together, they form a kind of reverse filter. We can apply it to selected volumes of the public Ocular data and begin to work out which areas were tampered with.’

  ‘The relic on Venus, the thing Gallicean brought up from Mars,’ Chiku said. ‘These are all parts of the puzzle, aren’t they?’

  ‘Actually, the Venus lander was a red herring – it never held any Ocular packets. But June was very interested in the Evolvarium object, the Indian Space Agency probe. You brought it with you, didn’t you? You met Gallicean?’

  ‘We have it,’ Chiku said.

  ‘It should be with your specialists by now,’ Imris Kwami announced.

  ‘It can’t be this simple,’ Chiku said, shaking her head. ‘The final jigsaw piece can’t magically fall into place now that I’m here. Things don’t work that way.’

  ‘They do this time, Chiku. You see, you are the final piece of the jigsaw.’

  Another part of Hyperion had been spun up for the provision of gravity. They were assigned rooms there and given access to a lounge with a surfeit of turquoise carpeting. The lounge’s huge, curving walls were glass framed with bolted strips of brassy metal. Beyond the glass, receding away into murk, was a lavishly stocked aquarium. Swimmers and aquatics were navigating towering, castle-like formations of rock and coral, and slipping through banners of vivid green kelp. Chiku also saw machines and fish, and a bioengineered whale that had once been a woman. They could see her true cetacean form now, unencumbered by armour. Arethusa had divested herself of the space-suit when she returned to her preferred medium. Perhaps she felt at ease with revealing her true self now that she knew herself to be among friends.

  Gleb had brought green chai. It was just the three of them, Imris Kwami having taken his leave to check on Gulliver’s refuelling. Gleb moved easily under gravity. The pull here was not much greater than that on Mars, but he looked so strong that Chiku doubted that he would have had too much difficulty even on Earth.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Arethusa said, speaking to them from beyond the glass, ‘that it’s time to reopen negotiations with Mecufi. I may have some information he’ll consider valuable, but he’s going to have to prove himself to me first. I’ll formulate a mote and you will convey it to Mecufi. Mecufi in turn will assist in your return to Africa. Safe passage will be arranged to the household. When you arrive, you will use your Akinya identity to access the fully reconstructed Crucible imagery. Mecufi will also provide the necessary expertise required to retransmit your findings to Chiku Green. If he fails in either task, we will not speak again.’

  ‘Do we really have to go all the way back to Earth?’ Pedro asked. ‘I mean, I’ve nothing against the place, but . . .’

  ‘The Ocular control architecture will only allow Chiku access at the household. Until then, we have only this partial reconstruction. Are you ready to see it?’

  ‘I think so,’ Chiku said.

  Part of the aquarium wall clouded into opacity and an image formed on the glass, rendered in two dimensions. It was a view of Crucible, seen from space. Chiku remembered a similar picture in Ndege’s companion, the promise of that waiting world rendered with all the exacting pious clarity of some Medieval conception of heaven.

  ‘Wait,’ she said slowly. ‘This is the doctored or undoctored image? I’m confused. It looks the way I was expecting.’

  ‘At the limits of our correctional resolution, there are no significant points of deviation,’ Arethusa said.

  ‘OK. Now I’m really confused.’

  ‘Look closer. At the time this image was captured, the Providers should have already begun preparing the groundwork for the surface communities. Clearings, trenches, artificial harbours. But there’s no evidence of them.’

  ‘Maybe they’re too small to be seen from space,’ Pedro said.

  ‘Traces of the works were easily visible in the doctored imagery. I admit that there is some room for error here, but I can state with a fairly high level of confidence that there are no new cities awaiting you on Crucible. The Providers haven’t built them. That much at least is a lie.’

  ‘Dear god,’ Chiku said. ‘How are they expecting us to react when we arrive in orbit?’

  ‘There’s no guarantee that the holoships will reach orbit. The Providers will have ample opportunity to prevent your arrival. A relatively simple weapon, deployed from the cover of a planetary surface, could easily hole a holoship – the kind of thing you might use to shoot down meteors.’

  ‘Is this the worst of it?’ Chiku asked. ‘I was almost expecting Mandala to be a figment of Arachne’s imagination.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s more to tell.’

  The image zoomed out a little. Chiku frowned. Until then her view of Crucible had been unobstructed, exactly as if she were in orbit, looking down. But now there were clots of darkness around the planet, organised into a kind of equatorial ring that cut across her view. The ring was lumpy, its edges fuzzy. It was difficult to make out definite detail.

  ‘Tell me what we’re seeing,’ Chiku said.

  ‘We are looking now at the areas of the image – or more properly the three-dimensional space around Crucible – where I am certain Arachne has distorted the data. In other words, there is something in space, perhaps in orbit around the planet, that she has chosen to conceal from us.’

  ‘A ring, like around Saturn?’ Pedro asked.

  ‘It’s possible, although I cannot see why she would be motivated to hide a natural feature. More likely, and given the artificial nature of Mandala, this is also some evidence of intelligence. It could be one structure, or perhaps an assemblage of smaller structures. I can’t say more than that for certain.’

  ‘They must be huge, whatever they are,’ Chiku said.

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Bigger than anything we could ever hope to make. Even if we took all the holoships, parked them in a necklace around Crucible—’

  ‘This is frightening,’ Pedro said. ‘I’m not even on the holoship, and I’m terrified.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘I’m sorry. This is worse for you.’

  ‘It’s catastrophic for all of us,’ Arethusa said. ‘Our entire civil society is constructed on an implicit assumption that we can trust the artificial intelligences, the Mechanism, the Providers . . . We have never once questioned whether these things have our best interests at heart.’

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ Pedro said. ‘Why would Arachne create this illusion? If she was going to h
ide the existence of an alien artefact, why not go all the way and hide Mandala as well?’

  ‘She needed to give us the impetus to go to Crucible in the first place,’ Chiku said. ‘She’s an artificial intelligence, not a physical thing. But she must have known that if we sent machines to Crucible, she could transmit a part of herself along at the same time. It’s speculation, I know. But here’s the thing I really don’t have an answer for. What the hell is it that she doesn’t want us to see?’

  In another part of Hyperion, Gleb was waiting for Chiku with a small Chinese schoolgirl. The schoolgirl wore a red dress, white socks and black shoes polished to an extreme mirror-like finish. It was either a figment or a proxy of Arethusa, manifesting in her former incarnation of Lin Wei.

  ‘You can leave us for a while, Gleb,’ Lin Wei said, pleasantly enough.

  Now that the terms of their departure had been settled, Chiku was anxious to be aboard the ship and on her way back to Earth. But when Lin took her into a green-tiled room with no windows, a room that felt astringent and medical even though there were no chemicals or machines anywhere in sight, she began to have her suspicions.

  ‘Why am I here?’ Chiku asked, with a shiver of foreboding.

  ‘You know why. Mecufi showed you the remains of Memphis, the ship that came back, and the version of you he found aboard it. Beyond that, you don’t know very much. The ship was damaged, its records scrambled, your counterpart frozen beyond safe revival. You couldn’t ask her what had happened. All you knew was what Mecufi told you: that she had come home alone, without the prize.’

  ‘That just about sums it up.’

  ‘Did you think to wonder what had happened to Eunice?’

  ‘I know what happened to Eunice – she’s with the Tantors.’

  ‘I’m talking about your real, flesh-and-blood great-grandmother. The woman who was born in Tanzania, back when people still thought burning coal was a good idea.’

  ‘No one knows where she is. She was on that ship, heading into deep space. Maybe my counterpart discovered the truth out there, or maybe she didn’t. Mecufi couldn’t even tell me whether Memphis had managed to dock with Winter Queen.’

  ‘She did manage to dock. I know because I left sensors on Winter Queen after my own visit that told me when another ship approached and docked.’

  ‘Are you saying that you got there before Chiku Red?’

  ‘One ship reached Eunice’s craft. Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that another vessel got there sooner?’

  ‘For a start, we were watching. Secondly, you’re a whale.’

  ‘I didn’t need to go out there in person. I sent a probe, an uncrewed ship. We Panspermians have never liked robots, but there are times when we’ve had no choice but to use them – this was one such occasion. The ship was very swift, very clever, very dark. By the time you’d started to dream up your ambitious publicity stunt, I was already on my way. I sent my ship off in a totally different direction until it was too far out for you or anyone else to reliably track its drive flame, and only then vectored the ship onto Eunice. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the only instrument capable of detecting that kind of activity was Ocular, my very own plaything.’

  ‘So you got there first,’ Chiku said, angry but at the same time accepting that what was done was done.

  ‘My robots found her. She was still in the cryopreservation casket, which she entered not long after her departure from the solar system in 2101. She was dead.’

  ‘Frozen, you mean.’

  ‘Frozen and dead. Far beyond any hope of clinical revival. Every cell in her body had been ruptured by expanding ice crystals, her brain structure demolished. Something had gone terribly wrong. Not that she ever expected to get anywhere – just heading out aboard that ship was a good enough goad and a lure for the rest of us.’

  After a lengthy silence, Chiku said, ‘So did your robots bring her home? That was the point of sending them there, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, they brought her home. Would you like to see her?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Because you don’t think you’re ready for it? I think you are. I’ve kept her on ice since my robots returned. The cellular damage is extensive, but the visible effects . . . they’re not as severe as you might imagine. I think you should see your great-grandmother, Chiku. And then I’ll tell you about the other thing I found aboard Winter Queen.’

  ‘What other thing?’

  ‘Let me show you her body first.’

  Part of the green tiled wall slid out and extended out into the room. With it came a shock of cold, a front so sharp and sudden and merciless that it drew tears. Chiku hugged her arms around her torso. The air felt like shovel-loads of ice going down her throat.

  Lin Wei, in her red dress and stockings, looked on with lofty disregard.

  ‘Go to her. But don’t touch – you’ll hurt yourself.’

  Eunice was resting on a green platform. She was on her back, dressed in the inner layer of a spacesuit, her arms crossed over her chest, her head tilted back in serene repose. Her eyes were closed, her expression restful. The ice glittered on her skin. It was lovely, those little glinting crystals against her skin, a spray of stars in the Milky Way. She looked only a little older than the construct, but not by decades. She had been at the start of her eighth decade when she entered the casket, and assuming she had not spent long periods awake after Winter Queen’s departure, this was the age she had been at her death. There were marks on her skin, deep black bruises, and elsewhere a kind of pale, bloodless frosting. Chiku could not say how much of this was due to age and how much the fault of the cryogenic accident that had damaged her cells. Above all else, she did not appear to be beyond the hope of revival. But a wax model would look just as viable, Chiku reminded herself. The eye could not discern the gross destruction that had taken place on the microscopic level, where it really mattered.

  ‘We scanned and recorded those neural structures that were still resolvable,’ Lin Wei said. ‘Traces and ghosts of traces, really. But you are welcome to the data. And to the body, if you would like it.’

  ‘Like doesn’t sound quite the right word.’

  ‘If you feel you must return her to Africa, I won’t stop you.’

  ‘I won’t take her,’ Chiku said. ‘Not now. But I will have those neural patterns.’

  ‘For you?’

  ‘For someone I know.’

  She traced a hand along Eunice’s contours, not quite touching, but feeling in her palm the meniscus of cold clinging to the corpse. She would be warming slightly, Chiku supposed, just by being in this room. A little more damage to add to the harm already done. Lin Wei would not have exposed the body to the room’s temperature had there been any real prospect of revival.

  ‘She made fools of all of us and gave us the stars in recompense,’ said Lin Wei. ‘I suppose we can find forgiveness, if we dig deeply enough. Now, would you like to hear about the other thing I found on Winter Queen?’

  Chiku nodded. She could think of very little that would surprise her now.

  Strange marching figures appeared in the air, like regiments of little stick men. Chiku recognised them for what they were. It was essentially the same alien alphabet that Eunice had used when she engraved her memory wall.

  Symbols of the Chibesa syntax.

  ‘Let me clarify,’ Lin Wei said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  When Chiku announced her attention to ching to the Moon, Imris Kwami was extremely ambivalent at first, warning that no communications were entirely immune from Arachne’s eavesdropping.

  ‘But we won’t be talking about her, for once,’ Chiku said.

  Kwami had some inkling by then of what this conversation was going to entail. ‘But if you start discussing Chibesa physics, that will hardly sound like a normal, everyday conversation.’

  ‘You don’t know my mother.’

  ‘I will see what I can do. We have some reserved quangle paths for occasions when
we need maximum privacy. I cannot guarantee that Arachne will not intercept them, but they are much better than the normal level of civilian encryption.’

  ‘I’ll take what you’ve got, Imris. And believe me, it’s not going to be a long call.’

  In the late months of 2365, Earth and Saturn were in opposition to each other. Chiku had seen the lit face of Earth almost all the way in: first a pale-blue star, then a dot, then a circle blemished with white and green. The circle gained a bright silver coin of a companion. The Moon did not look grey at all until they were much closer. Even then it was a grey of many colours, splendidly variegated – fawn-grey, nickel-grey, ochre-grey. A chain of lights wrapped the Moon in low orbit, and there were more lights scattered across the nightside, synaptic nets of them, cities and roads and spaceports, so much light that from space the Moon looked friendlier and more inviting than Earth ever did. The zones of special historic significance, the landing sites and early moon bases, were dark puddles of vanishing regolith.

  Uncle Geoffrey had once told Chiku how he went out into the African night, somewhere near the household, and instructed the aug to overlay the Moon with territorial markers and transnational boundaries, the proud colours of the great spacefaring powers. A lovely thing to behold, in one sense, because the colonised Moon spoke of international cooperation, of differences being settled by negotiation and the rule of interplanetary law rather than the tank and the machete. But now Chiku did not need the aug to see the Moon chopped up and pacified beneath a scurf of cities. The trick now was to have the aug strip all that away and paste a ghost Moon over the real.

  When Gulliver was thirty light-seconds from Earth, Chiku placed a ching request with Jitendra Gupta.

  He could have declined it – there was at least a one-in-three chance that he would be asleep or otherwise engaged – but the acceptance came through only a minute later, and then she was there, standing next to him, in a cave on the Moon. Jitendra was as tall and skinny as ever, slightly stooped now, except when he was consciously correcting his posture, his scalp shaven or bald (she had never been quite sure which, but had never known him with hair), a broad smile and an easy, affable manner that she knew belied the considerable emotional strain he had been under these past few years. He was an old man. It was not fair on Jitendra, what Sunday had put him through, not at all.