On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

‘Why would he do this, Chiku Red?’

  ‘I have no idea, Chiku Yellow, but I think it’s time for you to find out.’

  ‘I’m frightened. I know it’s just a packet of emotions, so what harm can it do me? I keep telling myself that. But I’m still frightened.’

  ‘I am with you,’ said Chiku Red.

  ‘You have no idea what this feels like.’

  ‘You have no idea what being me feels like. Open the mote.’

  Chiku steeled herself. She took a breath, squared her shoulders, lifted her chin. She thought of Travertine, defying the Assembly. Travertine would never have quailed at a moment like this. Travertine would have opened the mote in a heartbeat.

  She pinched her fingers. The glass resisted more than usual, so she squeezed harder. The mote shattered, its white innards boiling out like smoke. The glassy pieces fell to the deck and self-annihilated.

  She waited.

  ‘Well?’ asked Chiku Red.

  ‘I’m not getting anything. Nothing I recognise, anyway.’ But she signalled her sibling into silence. Somes motes were obvious, the equivalent of cheap perfumery. Others were much more subtle. They carried a delicate and reticent emotional freight, one that needed space and silence in which to declare itself.

  She was giving it space and silence now. Still there was nothing.

  ‘I think it’s a dud,’ she said. ‘Contents must have expired, or Mecufi botched the assignation tag somehow. This is what would happen if you tried opening a mote.’

  ‘I do not think Mecufi would have made a mistake,’ Chiku Red answered, in her too-formal Portuguese. Her arms were crossed and she was watching her sister with sceptical detachment.

  ‘No, he probably wouldn’t. But why am I not—’

  A voice cut across her own.

  ‘Hello, Chiku. It’s good that we’ve found each other again.’

  It was Mecufi, of course, or rather a figment of Mecufi, floating a few paces nearer to the bow, hovering in the air as if submerged in water. He wore no exo, and his arms and tail parts moved languidly.

  ‘I can see him now,’ she said to Chiku Red. ‘I’m looking at a figment of Mecufi, and he’s talking to me.’

  ‘Then perhaps you should listen,’ Chiku Red suggested.

  It was excellent advice. This was a very unusual figment. Figments generally arrived via the aug – they were traceable, generated remotely, linked to watertight tags and hyper-secure quangled ching binds. This figment had come in via a mote – something Chiku had never heard of before.

  ‘You have broken the mote, and now we are in contact. Might I ask for your attention? As is the nature of these things, I have no interactivity. You can’t ask me anything, and I won’t be at liberty to repeat anything that you are about to hear.’

  Chiku nodded, even as she recognised that the gesture had no currency.

  ‘I had two options. I could speak to you privately while I was still alive, in a safe place of my own choosing. Or I could commit the contents of this message to a specially doctored mote and trust that it would reach you in safe order. I confess I spent some considerable time unsure how best to proceed. Here I am, though. A path has been chosen, for better or for worse.’

  ‘What is he saying?’ Chiku Red asked.

  ‘Shush,’ said Chiku Yellow.

  ‘You’ve broken the white mote, and now only the black mote remains – I trust that the black mote is also now in your possession. Like the white mote, its contents are . . . somewhat unconventional?’ Mecufi smiled. ‘Also dangerous. More dangerous than you can presently imagine. A time may come when it will be advantageous to you to break the black mote. But you should be absolutely certain that the moment is right.’

  Chiku could not contain herself. ‘And how will I know?’

  ‘By my reckoning, the holoships will arrive at Crucible somewhere around 2435. We won’t know the exact circumstances of their arrival until long after it has happened. If there is a propulsion breakthrough, they may arrive many months sooner. If there is catastrophe, they may not arrive at all. But whatever happens, we can expect some sort of news. Allowing for time lag, it should reach us somewhere around 2463 – almost half a century from now. Nearly as long again as the time since we first met! Even to those of us accustomed to the modern lifespan, it still feels like a very remote event, a date of no consequence to the here and now. But make no mistake – when news of the Providers reaches Earth, everything will change. The truth may break in instalments or in one great wave, but the consequences will be the same either way. The billions of people living in this system will learn that the Mechanism has been contaminated. That there is something inside it that should not be there. And that the thing inside the Mechanism is capable of murdering to protect itself.’

  Chiku nodded. They had spoken of this often enough, during her time away from Earth in the company of June and Kwami and Lin Wei. But to know of a fearful thing was worse than not knowing, when you had no armour against it.

  ‘It could go several ways,’ Mecufi continued. ‘Aware that her existence is about to be revealed, Arachne might take decisive pre-emptive action by attempting to neutralise and incapacitate millions via direct manipulation of the Mechanism and the aug before the information arrives. But given that she knows the news from Crucible will soon be on its way to Earth, why hasn’t she acted already? The answer, I believe, is that she’s insufficiently confident of success. Nor can she be certain of the specifics of the news from Crucible. Perhaps her existence won’t be disclosed after all. Perhaps she hopes to continue hiding, haunting the Mech. I think that is her preferred strategy. But the slightest whiff of irregularities in the Mech will have Cognition Police and Mech invigilators scrambling to verify what we already know. They will return to Ocular, as well as they are able. They will reexamine the accident on Venus. And they will conclude that a rogue artificial intelligence might be loose in the Mech. Once they have reached that conclusion, they will begin to deploy containment protocols. They will try to back Arachne into a corner. And that is when she is most likely to retaliate. It could be very bad for us all, Chiku. But until that day comes, we can’t really know for sure how this will play out. The aftershocks may be bearable for the peoples of the United Aquatic Nations – we have reduced our reliance on the Mech and the aug almost to zero. But we still share our world with the drylanders and the skylanders, and all of us are linked via interdependencies too complex to unravel in a hurry. We, too, may fall foul of Arachne’s retaliation. Which brings me to the black mote.’

  Again Chiku felt the edged presence of the wooden box against her thigh. She would have to get used to it – she had a feeling that it would not be leaving her possession any time soon.

  ‘The black mote is a counter-measure. Unlike the white mote, it’s keyed directly into the aug and the Mech. If you open it, certain events will follow in swift succession. Deep in the architecture of the Mech is a flaw. Consider it a vulnerability, or perhaps a deliberately engineered weakness. It has been there since the Mech’s inception during the Resource and Relocation years, but its existence has never been known to more than a handful of souls. We know of it.’

  Chiku shivered, sensing what was coming.

  ‘The black mote will speak to this flaw,’ Mecufi said. ‘It will cause it to fail, and in failing trigger another failure mode. And another. One after the other, the pieces will fall. The Mech will cease to function. The aug will also be taken down in the same cascade of failures. What I cannot predict is the ultimate extent or severity of these failures. In the best-case scenario, the Mech and the aug will weaken to the point where Arachne is disadvantaged, unable to act or protect herself, but not precipitate significant human inconvenience. I hardly dare speculate about the worst-case scenario. We have made some collective mistakes as a species, it’s true – invested too much power in things we can’t see, let alone control. But look at the world we have, Chiku. For all its failings, things could be a great deal worse. No one’s died in any wars
lately, or been murdered, or left to rot in a prison, or been denied the basic allocation of fresh food and drinking water. No one’s been tortured for their beliefs or made to feel like a pariah because of their sexual preferences. Yes, we’ve also put ourselves in something of a bind – and exactly how much of a bind, we’ll find out in about half a century.’ Mecufi’s figment smiled fondly, the way cherubs looked down from Medieval heavens. ‘Well, some of us will. I’m afraid I’ve rather abdicated my responsibilities in that regard, by virtue of being dead. How reckless of me! But I have every hope that you won’t fall back on the same excuse. The black mote is your responsibility, Chiku. There’s only the one, and now it’s yours. If you ever deem that the moment is right and decide to use it, that weight will be yours and yours alone to bear. I have faith in you, though. I’ve had faith in you for a very long time. Now take care of yourself, take extra care of the mote, and wait for the news from Crucible. And in the meantime, keep trying to enjoy life. You’ve done very well with Chiku Red. We all have tremendous hopes for her.’

  The figment vanished.

  She stood for long moments, unable to speak or move. The catamaran raced on, kissing the wavetops. The sails made an eager drumming sound. The box was still hard against her thigh. She thought of the black mote inside it, visualising it now not as a little glass sphere but as a kind of void, a hole into which a world could fall.

  Forty-eight years. A little more, a little less. They would have a better idea as the holoships made their final approach, or rather when news of that final approach crawled its way back to Earth. There would never be much warning.

  She thought of Chiku Green, still out there. In that moment, the last lingering traces of the resentment she had long felt towards her remote sibling evaporated, boiled away like the white smoke in Mecufi’s first mote. She wanted Chiku Green to know that she was here, that there was something she could do, if the very worst eventuality came to pass. She wanted Chiku Green to know they were in it together.

  She wanted to know how Chiku Green was doing.

  There was a presence at her side. Chiku Red, taking her hand. Steadying her, as if she had been about to topple into the waves. Which, on balance, wasn’t entirely out of the question.

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Long story,’ Chiku said, debating how much to say to her sister.

  But Kanu had said they were safe from Arachne aboard the catamaran. There would never be a better time for the telling.

  ‘I think you and I are going to have to take unusually good care of each other, at least for the next fifty years or so. Do you think we’re up to it?’

  ‘We can try,’ Chiku Red answered.

  ‘We can,’ Chiku Yellow agreed. ‘That’s all we can ever do.’

  And the sailing ship beat its way back to Estoril.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  By the time the burn ended the great fuel tanks were as vast and empty as cathedrals. One hundred hours of thrust to lift Icebreaker up to its cruising speed, arrowing ahead of Zanzibar at twenty-five per cent of the speed of light – practically double the holoship’s own velocity – and then twice as long again to whittle that speed down to zero, or at least the few hundred kilometres per second that would suffice for in-system activity. There was a breath of fuel left to achieve planetary orbit, a breath of a breath to fall from orbit into Crucible’s atmosphere, and no more. That was all they would need, Chiku had felt certain. In fact if they ever reached the point where lack of fuel was their chief concern, they would be doing very well indeed.

  The ship had been still and silent for most of its nine-year voyage from Zanzibar. A light-minute from Crucible, systems began to return to life. Hull spaces were repressurised and warmed. Life-support mechanisms rattled and clanked like old plumbing. Fans and pumps whirred and the temperature in the ship’s habitable spaces slowly reached something humans could live with. Simultaneously, the skipover caskets were bringing their charges out of deep hibernation, ascending them through layers of murky, sun-filtered dream into the daylight of consciousness.

  Chiku had arranged to be the first to wake, followed in quick succession by Travertine and Dr Aziba, and then two of her scientific specialists: Gonithi Namboze, the ecosystem specialist, and Guochang, a skilled roboticist with a background in Provider architecture.

  The remaining fifteen crewmembers would remain in skipover for the time being.

  Coming out of skipover was never a pleasant experience, but nine years was nothing compared to the forty she had spent in Zanzibar’s vaults. True, there was no team of revival staff on hand to fuss over her this time, but she could handle that. The medical robot was endearing but stupid, like a simple but willing child, and it attended to her with spectacular clumsiness. When it found nothing amiss with her, she shooed it away to deal with Travertine, who was a little behind in the revival sequence.

  By increments, the ambient temperature became more bearable and she began to shrug off insulating layers. The robot fetched her sugary chai in a zero-gravity squeezebulb. Once she had tuned out the plastic flavour of the squeezebulb’s nipple, the chai proved tolerable. Then she felt suddenly ravenous and had the robot bring her some food, also prepared for weightless consumption. They were in free fall on the slow approach to Crucible as the ship was too small to spin for gravity. They also wanted their approach to be as quiet as possible, rather than come in with the engine blazing.

  Chiku made short work of her curried chicken and rice, then headed up to the lander’s cockpit and looked out through the windows. The ship’s tail was still aimed towards Crucible, as it had been during the two hundred hours of the deceleration burn. ‘Turn us around,’ she told the ship, and the vessel complied. The movement of the gyroscopes was gentle enough that she only needed her fingertips to avoid drifting into the cabin wall. A fistful of dim stars crawled by from one side of the window arc to the other. Then, quite without fanfare, a planet loomed.

  Crucible.

  It was still very small, but recognisably a disc rather than a point of light. Off to the right were Crucible’s two moons – both as large as Earth’s and responsible for prodigious tides. Chiku voked an enlargement of the planet, projected as a figment above the console. She magnified it in factors of two until it was as large as a football, then touched her finger to the image and spun it around like a painted globe. Icebreaker’s final few hours of burn had brought it into exact alignment with the ecliptic plane of 61 Virginis f, a deliberate strategy to place the orbiting structures into maximum visibility against Crucible’s surface.

  The orbiting structures, the twenty-two dark, brindled pine cones, were still present, hard blue light ramming out in spokes from their outward-facing surfaces. She was struck again by the extreme and unforgiving alienness of these objects. What kind of intelligence could conceive of making machines on such a scale, a thousand kilometres from end to end?

  These were tools to stab and bludgeon a world.

  It was impossible to tell how long the orbiting things had been around Crucible, but Chiku had a feeling that they had not been there for ever. She thought it more likely that they had also been drawn across space by the enigma on Crucible’s surface. A structure, visible across tens of light-years, had snagged both human and alien inquisitiveness.

  Providers had left evidence of their presence. Most of their activity was meant to be concentrated on Crucible’s surface, but they had also positioned relay satellites around the planet and in orbits circling the star. These satellites were the source of the transmissions Zanzibar and the other holoships had been intercepting during the crossing, and they were still active – their existence apparently tolerated by the alien forms. Perhaps this frail and feeble human technology did not even register with them.

  Chiku mapped their positions and searched for signs of other mechanical activity. The Providers were supposed to have established way-stations around the planet to assist with the settlement process, but there was no evidence of any space
borne structures or traffic other than the relay satellites.

  She wheeled around at a noise behind her. Just the medical robot, come to inform her that Travertine was about to reach consciousness.

  Chiku followed the idiot robot back to the skipover bay. The lid on Travertine’s casket had already slid aside and the form within was breathing normally.

  ‘Bring me some more chai,’ Chiku told the robot. She remembered that Travertine preferred it unsweetened. ‘No sugar.’

  The robot scuttled off. Chiku waited by the casket for further signs of life. Eventually Travertine stirred. Chiku gave ver time to speak. Ve opened vis eyes slowly, then screwed them shut again. Travertine gave a grunt of primal displeasure. Ve angled vis head, took in Chiku.

  Travertine’s lips moved. Vis voice was a rasp, barely audible over the gentle hiss of the air circulators.

  ‘Where are we?’

  The robot returned with the squeezebulb and Chiku pressed it to Travertine’s lips.

  ‘Exactly where we wanted to be. Your engine works, Travertine.’

  ‘I always knew we’d be all right.’

  ‘Good for you. I wish I had your confidence.’

  Travertine took another suck from the squeezebulb. ‘How long have you been up? Weren’t we all supposed to wake up at the same time?’

  ‘That would have been too much work for the robot to handle, so I staggered the wake-up cycle, with Aziba’s blessing.’

  ‘Then where’s Aziba?’

  ‘Next out. You and I are the first.’

  ‘And then the others? Have you checked the caskets – did we all make it?’

  ‘No drop-outs,’ Chiku said.

  Travertine stretched vis arms and started levering verself out of the casket. Chiku moved to assist, but Travertine brushed her away. ‘You did this on your own, and so can I.’ The bracelet knocked against the side of the casket as ve eased into a weightless sitting position, legs dangling over the side. ‘It’s strange,’ ve continued, ‘but I’m not sensing the atmosphere of ecstatic jubilation I was expecting.’