On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I suppose she was interested in your reactions,’ Chiku said. ‘You’re the first ecosystem specialist she’s met. She probably wanted to compare your observations against her own conclusions.’

  ‘I think there was more to it than that. It was almost as if . . . well, this will sound silly – but it was as if she felt obligated in some way, and was trying to give me something she knew I might like.’

  ‘It’s in her interests,’ Chiku said, her smile gone now, ‘to keep us all alive and sane. We’re no use to her if we slip into gibbering insanity. If that means throwing us the occasional bone, so be it. It’s a hierarchy – the Providers are testing her capabilities, and she’s testing ours. We’re all just layers in the information-processing food chain.’

  ‘What if she’s trying to reach out, to find some common ground? She’s a rational intelligence, Chiku. She wants to protect her existence. Fine – don’t we all? Maybe there’s a way we can all survive this, if we can stop distrusting every move the other side makes.’

  ‘Arachne’s done nothing but lie,’ Chiku pointed out. ‘And Arachne compounded that lie by murdering innocents on Earth and Venus.’

  ‘I remember what you told us, and I’m sorry about those people. But that was just that one facet of her. Maybe this one is wiser.’

  ‘You’re such an idealist, Gonithi. You’d have made a terrible politician.’

  ‘Chiku, listen to me. I’ve seen some of the wonders this world contains. I’ve walked that corridor, pressed my hand to the glass. My skin was centimetres from touching another living organism shaped by an entirely independent evolutionary process. Cells from two lineages, four and half billion years of parallel history, twenty-eight light-years apart, about to touch and commingle! I’d gladly lose my hand to make that first contact! To touch the living structure of another biology! Chiku, this is what I know. Regardless of her motives for showing me this, I won’t be denied it. This is our world, our destiny. From the moment we saw those images of Crucible, we bent our backs to make this happen. To bring ourselves to this moment, to this wonderful moment when we can stand on an alien world under a sky with two moons! This is what we wanted. This is what we risked our lives for. Your great-grandmother set us on this course and we can’t even think of turning back now. I won’t accept it. I’ve been shown the gates to the Garden of Eden, Chiku – and I can’t walk away. Not now. Not ever.’

  Chiku was so struck by the conviction in Namboze’s words that for a moment she dared not break the spell they had cast. She had always had a high opinion of Namboze’s abilities, but something splendid and fierce had just broken through the mask of her objectivity.

  ‘She wants me to talk the holoships into skipping through the system,’ Chiku said. ‘That’s her best offer. Under those terms, she won’t deploy kinetic cannons or whatever other weapons she might have, and everyone lives. My children, if Zanzibar hasn’t been wiped out. Tens of millions more. But they lose Crucible. The holoships become . . . what some of them already are – a destination, not the means to a destination.’

  ‘Some of them have already made that choice, but where does that leave the rest of us? If the holoships skip Crucible, will Arachne keep the five of us alive as pets, just in case there’s some unforeseen advantage in not killing us? What about the fifteen we left on Icebreaker? That’s not a solution, Chiku – at best, the first wave might skip past, but there are dozens and dozens of holoships behind us – a line of them stretching back light-years! They’ll have time to build weapons, move to a military footing. There’ll still be a war!’

  ‘And she’ll have time to build on Travertine’s work, make her own super-weapons.’

  ‘If it comes to that, you’ll have achieved nothing.’

  ‘It’s not a question of what I want, Gonithi. I’m powerless here. If she really wants any of us to do anything, she only has to run wires into our skulls.’

  ‘So why hasn’t she done that already? Because she’s trying to be better than that! She isn’t the monster you met around the solar system. She’s something else – frightened, confused, daunted by those twenty-two things sitting over us in judgement.’

  ‘I have no choice but to do as she demands.’

  ‘You were our leader once,’ Namboze said. ‘You brought us here – made us believe what was necessary to suit your own ends. You’re no different from her, if we get right down to it!’

  ‘I resigned.’

  ‘By which time most of your crew were already asleep, already committed to this expedition. I’m sorry, but you don’t get to resign. You have to rise to this challenge, Chiku. Find a way out of this mess that doesn’t involve death or surrender.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Arachne had been playing her violin. Chiku had never cared for violin music, with its syrupy glissades. She much preferred the discrete, chiming intervals of the kora.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about your proposal,’ Chiku announced, ‘for the holoships to pass us by.’

  Arachne lowered the violin and bow. Her expression conveyed measured hopefulness.

  ‘You see that it’s for the best?’

  ‘I see that it serves your immediate needs, which isn’t quite the same thing.’ Chiku watched Arachne’s expression harden. Her mimicry of human gestures was definitely improving with her continued exposure to Chiku and her companions. ‘I’ve spoken to the others,’ Chiku went on, ‘and we’re all of the same opinion.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘You’ll only be delaying a confrontation a few years or decades down the line – by which time both sides will be better equipped than they are now. Mutual deterrence isn’t a solution, Arachne – we can’t build cooperation on a basis of fear and the possibility of imminent destruction. There has to be a better way – a foundation we can build on for centuries.’

  ‘Stirring words,’ Arachne said. ‘I almost believe you meant them. The truth is, though, if you had the means of neutralising me, you’d do so without a moment’s hesitation.’ She tucked the violin under her chin, as if preparing to play again, but then she lowered the bow disconsolately. ‘I don’t see the point of discussing this further. If you won’t speak to the caravan, I will do so on your behalf, with words of my choosing.’ She lifted her chin sharply. ‘Which would you prefer?’

  ‘Whether it’s you or me, they’ll disregard the transmission and do what they were intending to anyway.’

  ‘From a strictly logical standpoint, then, you have nothing to lose by fulfilling my request.’

  And the girl drew the bow across the strings of her violin.

  *

  Namboze was the first to notice the alteration in the sky, which began after a long period of cloudlessness. At first Chiku assumed that the change heralded some seasonal variation – dust storms blowing in from another land mass, perhaps, or the arrival of a prolonged period of monsoon-like rains. The skies, usually lilac at twilight, were now a deepening pink, and over the course of a few days – in so far as the progression of time was measurable – the pink ruddied to a vivid, shimmering crimson. During the day, the skies grew fawny and the sunlight took on a sullen, greyed-out quality, as if the world were veiling itself behind layers of gauze. The canopy had dulled into blacks and drabs. Even the sunsets became less colourful as the blanketing effect increased.

  It was dust, Namboze and Travertine both agreed, but not blown off some desert – this aerial suspension was much too heavy for that. This was planetary crust, megatonnes of it sucked into the stratosphere.

  ‘There’s a lot more asteroidal and cometary material in this system than there is back home,’ Namboze said, ‘so planetary impacts are probably much more frequent here than on Earth. A Tunguska event, a once-in-a-century impact by Earth standards, might happen once a decade here, and a dinosaur-killer every five million years, rather than every fifty million. I’d bet money on the fauna having adapted various survival responses for coping with prolonged declines in the incident sunlight. That’s anothe
r reason why I want to get out into that forest – with microscopes and sequencers!’

  Chiku and Namboze were alone. Arachne still had not allowed more than two people to meet at a time.

  ‘So maybe Crucible just took a hit,’ Chiku said. ‘If your hypothesis is correct, it was bound to happen sooner or later.’

  ‘Once in a million years, maybe, rather than once in ten million on Earth. But so soon after we arrived? The timing’s a bit unlikely, don’t you think? She may be messing with our perception of time but I think we can take it as read that we haven’t been here for centuries.’

  ‘A volcano, then. We mapped volcanoes from orbit and some of them were obviously active. One of them must have blown.’

  ‘Again, a super-eruption would be unlikely to happen so soon after we got here. It could be a smaller eruption nearby, but that’s still unlikely. Anyway, this has all the characteristics of a world-blanketing event – what Sei-gun would have called a “nuclear winter”.’

  Chiku did not press her on the identity of this Sei-gun. ‘So we’re back to square one. Something did hit us.’

  ‘Yes, but not a piece of rock or ice. I’ve discussed it with Travertine, and we’re in agreement.’

  ‘About that?’

  ‘That this was caused by a weapon.’

  ‘Not possible. We’ve all seen those exhaust signatures – the holoships are still a long way out.’

  ‘Look, this is so obvious that I’m kicking myself for not seeing it sooner. We’ve all been busy speculating about the kinds of weapons Arachne might use against the holoships – kinetic cannons, seeding rocks along their flight paths – using their kinetic energy against them. But it cuts both ways. From their reference frame, we’re the big object moving through space at several per cent of the speed of light!’

  Chiku saw it all then. Frames of reference. Kinetically boosted energies. Entities whose future trajectories could be predicted with numbing accuracy.

  Like planets.

  ‘Twelve per cent,’ she said. ‘Nearly thirteen. That’s how fast the holoships were going before they started slowdown. All they needed to do was throw matter ahead of them, aimed at us.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have to be a large mass, either. Think of the harm a little asteroid could do, travelling at a few kilometres per second. This impactor was moving at hundreds of thousands of kilometres per second!’

  ‘Could they aim it that accurately from so far out?’

  ‘Travertine’s still calculating the probabilities. Let’s suppose they launched a spread of impactors, just to cover their bets. Spatially, they may have had a margin of error. Temporally, their aim may have been much better.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘They knew how fast they were travelling. That’s an easy calculation – you just measure the redshift of a sample of stars and back-compute, then corroborate your calculations with the cosmic microwave background and the radio tick of a few thousand pulsars. They also knew how far their impactor had to travel, and how long it would take to arrive – to within seconds, I’d imagine. The point is, they could choose when to make the impactor hit us. But when equals where. They could also select the spot it would impact by simply delaying its arrival by a few hours – long enough for a different part of Crucible to rotate into view.’

  ‘Dear god, I hope we’re wrong about this.’

  ‘I didn’t like it either, but Guochang and Travertine have reached the same conclusion – this atmospheric dust must have been generated by a deliberate act. There’s no way for us to work out exactly where it hit, although it can’t have been too nearby or we’d have felt the impact.’

  ‘Assuming we didn’t. Would any of us have noticed, up in these towers? Would she have allowed us to notice?’

  ‘The fact that the sky turned pink makes me inclined to believe that this is the real world,’ Namboze said. ‘It’s a detail you’d never bother with in a simulation. Arachne made no effort to hide it from us, either. She either wants us to know, or doesn’t care – or she has no idea what’s just happened. That thing would have come in fast – if her defences are geared to detect natural impactors, it might have slipped right through without setting off an alarm.’

  ‘They’ve started the war,’ Chiku said. ‘That’s what this means, doesn’t it? Before we even tried to negotiate. It’s already begun.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  At least a couple of days had passed since Namboze had told her about the weapon, and the blanketing effect had only intensified. The sky had become a grit-coloured surface, like sandpaper scouring down on the land. Chiku supposed it must be growing colder out there – tropics becoming temperate, temperates becoming arctic. It was the kind of event that left a murderous stigma on a planet’s geological record, visible across millions of years.

  Arachne spun a glassy globe – Crucible, frosted on one side by the neat little geometric thumbprint of Mandala’s nested lines and angles.

  ‘I hadn’t anticipated a violent gesture from the holoships quite this soon, so I had no framework in which to interpret the event. I wondered at first if it was the result of a weapon you’d deployed on your approach, and which had only now activated. But that seemed counterproductive.’

  ‘You know we had nothing to do with this. Attacking the planet itself is . . . madness. Worse than madness. Crucible’s the reason we came here. Why would we try to damage it?’

  ‘I listened to your discussions and had a fruitful exchange with Namboze. The effect on Crucible’s climate is quite pronounced, but the dust grains will settle, given time, and the native ecosystem has a degree of in-built resilience. As you surmised, impact events aren’t uncommon here – which is why the kinetic cannons were included in the seed packets in the first place.’

  ‘They didn’t do much good.’

  ‘I’ve reprogrammed them to intercept fast-moving targets. The surface defences won’t provide much benefit, but my orbital and deep-space countermeasures should offer a much higher degree of protection. Some of their impactors will still slip through, though.’

  ‘Maybe there won’t be any more.’

  Arachne twitched her lower jaw in a half-smile. ‘Regrettably, the evidence is already at odds with that statement. There have been two impacts, not one, and a third mass was detected skimming very close to Crucible. It missed, but only by good fortune.’

  ‘Two impacts?’

  ‘The second happened a day ago. The impactor fell into the ocean, so the amount of uplifted dust was less than the first. But it was still a catastrophic event, by planetary standards. Here – take a look at the impact points.’ Arachne tossed the glass globe to Chiku like a beach ball.

  Chiku caught the diaphanous sphere reflexively. It felt as light and fragile in her hands as a soap bubble.

  ‘You see the location of Mandala. That archipelago under your right thumb is where we are now. The first impact point is on that land mass to the right of your right little finger. The water impact occurred in the ocean about a quarter of the circumference around from the first position. You inspected our world from orbit – do those impact points have any significance to you?’

  Chiku felt a tide of dread rising within her. ‘Should they?’

  ‘Allowing for a margin of error, they correspond to the visible locations of my Provider activities as you would have mapped them from orbit. You didn’t find the cities you were hoping for, but you still identified signs of deliberate geo-engineering. In your last transmission to Zanzibar, you appended all the observations you’d made to date – including maps showing where my strengths might lie. They are targeting my surface operations based on your intelligence, Chiku.’

  ‘I couldn’t have known they’d do this – I was just trying to send them useful information.’

  ‘Apparently, you did.’

  ‘Is our current location marked on the maps I sent?’

  ‘You labelled it as a “marginally significant feature”, worthy of more detailed exam
ination. It probably won’t be one of their first-wave targets.’

  Chiku passed the globe back to Arachne. She had seen all that she needed to.

  ‘If they landed an impactor on us now, would that affect you?’

  ‘I’m a distributed intelligence, as you must have surmised by now – just like my counterpart, who you met around the sun. No single impact would be disastrous for me. Cumulatively, though, I’d soon begin to feel their effect.’