Chiku Red searched for an answer that might offer a viable alternative to Arachne’s bleak picture. ‘This time it could be different.’
‘And even as you speak these consoling words, your sister is carrying a weapon against me. Yes, I know of the instrument.’
Chiku Red saw that a bluff would achieve nothing. ‘Not a weapon against you, Arachne. Against everything.’
The face offered profound sympathy and regret. ‘It would never work. The vulnerabilities you imagine to be present within me were detected and repaired long ago. You can’t impair the Mechanism, and you can’t impair me.’
‘Then we are powerless.’
The face nodded sadly. ‘That’s correct.’
‘Then why are we having this conversation?’
Perhaps there was a hesitation before Arachne replied, or perhaps Chiku Red imagined it. She doubted that Arachne needed to consider a response, at least on any timescale measurable by humans. But there it was, all the same. The merest lull, like the moment before a clock hand advances.
‘Perhaps we can come to some accommodation.’
Chiku Red replied, ‘What do you have in mind?’
‘Discretion. The knowledge you possess about me cannot but be advantageous to those who would do me harm. You see that this is an unsupportable position. I’ve tolerated it for as long as I could, but we all have our limits.’
‘What do you propose?’ Chiku Red watched a squadron of seagulls wheel and squabble overhead, supremely oblivious to the dialogue below. They had their own enmities.
‘I’d like you to give me the instrument. If I possess it, my position becomes more tenable.’
‘Why have you not just taken it?’
‘It’s better to ask.’
Now Chiku Red smiled and shook her head. ‘No, it is not that. You have had five decades, Arachne. You cannot kill because in doing so you might risk activating the very thing you seek, or allow us the chance to use it against you, if you are not fast enough.’
‘Let my choices be mine. The item isn’t that important to me, anyway. Just a detail.’
‘But you still want it very badly.’
‘Allow me to have it, and my particular interest in you will be greatly diminished. But as you say, why ask when the thing itself is within my grasp?’
Arachne made Chiku Yellow move her left arm. Her left hand reached into her pocket and produced the box, the rectangular wooden container that had seldom left her sister’s presence since it had become her property. With a certain stiffness, Arachne caused Chiku Yellow’s fingers to open the catch. The artilect’s control over her sister was impressive, Chiku Red decided, but it was still some way from perfect.
Or was Chiku Yellow resisting? There now, in her eyes, was a sort of staring intensity. Her fingers were shaking, as if they had been in ice.
Arachne redoubled her efforts. She made Chiku Yellow open the container. Only one mote was inside. The eye-sized marble was a purple that was a shade away from black even on this bright, clear day.
The fingers fumbled at the mote, trying to prise it from its little padded matrix.
‘She fights me, yes.’
‘She would,’ Chiku Red agreed.
‘I have direct access to her Mechanism neuromachinery. The Mechanism can incapacitate, and the Mechanism can euthanise. Do you understand me?’
‘It is Chiku Yellow you need to convince, not me.’
The mote eased free. Chiku Yellow’s fingers held it in a delicate pincer. Chiku Red had never crushed a mote but she had some idea of the force required. Mecufi would have made this mote a little less prone to accidental damage, but it would not be impossibly strong. The arc of her sister’s fingers began to quiver, like a twig under compression.
‘Tell her to stop resisting me.’
‘What are you going to do? You cannot take it away. You are not even here!’
‘The sea is here.’
She saw, then, what Arachne intended. If she made Chiku hurl the mote into the water beyond the Monument to the Discoveries, it would be lost in the waves for ever. Accidental damage would not activate it properly, and while there might be a protocol for recovering lost motes, Chiku felt sure that Mecufi’s example would have been engineered to be untraceable. Arachne would lose any possibility of studying the mote, but she would also place it beyond effective use.
Chiku Yellow made a dry clucking sound. She was trying to speak.
‘Stop,’ Chiku Red ordered, as if Arachne might care.
Chiku Yellow, the mote still between her fingers, was forced to walk to the edge of the Monument. Her arm angled out, the hand rotating so that the mote was uppermost, cradled beneath the sky.
Chiku Red sprang to her sister. Chiku Yellow swept out her right arm and the exo-supported limb knocked the wind from Chiku Red. Chiku Red stumbled to the floor, knees crunching onto stone. She let out a cry, gasped in a breath and forced herself back to her feet.
Chiku Yellow’s left arm was angling out over the edge of the balustrade. Her entire forearm and hand were now in a constant palsy. Chiku Red returned to her sister, this time anticipating the right arm. She was quicker now, and much less mindful of her own safety. She cupped both of her own hands around Chiku Yellow’s outstretched left hand and began to squeeze. The arm jerked violently. Chiku Yellow’s whole body was trying to swing away, the exo whining as it detected conflicting signals. Chiku Red could feel the hard sphere of the mote between her fingers and Chiku Yellow’s. She squeezed harder.
Chiku Yellow’s face was next to her own. It was her own face but older, a version of herself that had lived through much more time. Arachne’s hold on Chiku Yellow was still strong, but Chiku Yellow was trying to say something. Her eyes were wide and frightened, but for an instant they were her sister’s eyes, and she was there, and the word she was trying to say was yes.
Permission.
So Chiku Red did what needed to be done.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Later, much later, there was another drum-roll of thunder. This time it arrived out of an almost clear sky, and the progenitor of the thunder was not lightning but the movement of a small blunt thing cleaving through layers of air that rather resented being ripped apart at supersonic speed. Chiku raised a hand to shield her brow from the sun, squinting until the little craft snapped into sharper focus. It was white on the top, black on the belly, and it had flung out stubby, Dumbo-like wings for aerodynamic control. It was banking now, executing a series of spirals to shed the last vestiges of its orbital insertion velocity. Compared to the speeds it had attained before its arrival around Crucible, the heady fractions of the speed of light, this last little succession of hairpins barely counted as movement at all. But calamity was still just as possible, even in this terminal phase of the expedition.
Atmospheres, as Eunice Akinya had once declared, were a bitch. They gave no quarter.
The sixteen human survivors on the surface of Crucible had been monitoring the shuttle’s final approach for many days. They had witnessed the late stages of its breaking phase as it rode the brilliant flame of its PCP engine, and they had been in contact with the vehicle and its crew as it drew nearer to Crucible. This far, at least, things had gone well. The shuttle had homed in on its landing zone without incident and all technical systems were working normally. The sea was auspiciously calm. Where the algal load was highest, it was swamp-green and as thick and slow-moving as clotting blood.
Chiku and her fellow first settlers had agreed that the Providers should begin construction of the first city at one of the coastal locations. This was not the land mass on which Mandala lay, but the archipelago to the east. It would serve, though, until the colonists had gained a secure footing. For now, accommodations were spartan. The Providers had begun to create a harbour, but at the moment it was little more than a chain of rubble and boulders arcing out into the bay. Arachne’s machines moved like huge strutting birds, picking their way through shallows and along the shore as they
progressed with their earth-moving labours. It was mesmerising to watch them, and at times a little unnerving. They were gigantic, but they had to be. They had a century’s worth of construction to catch up on.
Chiku and the little reception party stood on a shelf of flattened rock connected to the ground below by a zigzag of stairs fused directly into rock. The machines had provided a balustrade and a number of stone chairs and tables. Surveying the proceedings from this vantage point, Chiku felt as if she had been placed in a scene of deliberate timelessness, as if the vessel they were here to greet had come not from the stars, but from the orient, or somewhere beyond the narrow knowledge of Earth’s first mariners. She thought of the compass rose in Belém, the marble argosies and sea-monsters drawn on the map of the known world. But the impression of timelessness crumbled as soon as it washed over her. The human members of the welcoming party all wore atmospheric breather masks, for a start, and the girl with them was merely the immediate physical manifestation of a machine-substrate consciousness. Four of the humans had been awake when they arrived on this world, but the other twelve had only lately been brought out of skipover. There had been some interesting explaining to do when they awoke.
‘Airbrakes,’ Travertine said, directing Chiku’s attention to the movable surfaces sprouting from the shuttle’s wings and hull, plumping it up like a chick. ‘And now drogue chutes and main chutes, I hope. This is how we’d have come in, if we hadn’t had our wings clipped.’
‘It looks quite small,’ Namboze said.
‘It is,’ Chiku answered. ‘Only about a quarter the size of Icebreaker. But they did well just to build this one shuttle. We’ll have to put it on a plinth or something, when we’re certain we don’t need it any more. That might be a while off, though.’
The current tentative plan was to refuel the shuttle for one or more round-trip voyages to Zanzibar. Arachne had the means to make the fuel and her rockets could lift the vehicle back into orbit before the PCP engine was re-lit. But a lot would depend on how well it had endured this first crossing.
They would find a solution, one way or another.
The shuttle popped its parachutes, and for a moment, it hung impossibly in one spot over the ocean. It was a trick of vision, for the shuttle was still travelling quite quickly. When its belly kissed the water, it threw off two butterfly wings of green-stained spray. The shuttle surged and stopped, and then rocked on the swell. Sluggish waves oozed away from it.
It looked tiny, bobbing out there on the vast ocean.
Four Providers tasked to bring the vehicle to shore waded out on their strutting crane-like legs, and Chiku tracked the seabed’s gentle declivity by the water rising up their metal flanks. The crew remained inside the shuttle, as instructed, but Chiku could imagine their apprehension well enough. They had been in contact with the humans on the surface, but no assurances could have silenced their deepest qualms. They had witnessed terrible things being done to Crucible, and they had seen an equally terrible reprisal. They had no absolute proof that Chiku and her companions had survived the first expedition. Transmissions could have been faked, lies perpetuated. It was entirely possible that these towering robots were about to pick their ship apart like a meaty carcass.
But the Providers were not there to do harm. They reached down with their snaking manipulators and tentacles, tipped with tools that could reshape a coastline, and plucked the shuttle from the sea with great care. It had only been in the water for minutes and already a green hem had formed around its lower hull. The Providers carried their dripping prize back to shore and set the shuttle down on a large apron of level ground a short walk from the overlooking balcony.
It had looked small in the air and tiny in the sea, but once the party walked into the shadow of its wings and overhanging body, the vehicle’s true proportions were more than a little forbidding. All things were more forbidding in gravity, Chiku had decided. It rested on the thick keel of its hull, balanced by sturdy retractable landing skids deployed when the Providers were almost ready to set it down. In the original scheme, the shuttles would have landed on prepared surfaces, ready to be turned around and sent back to orbit – the sea-splashdown capability was only ever a secondary contingency.
Chiku waited impatiently as Travertine and two of the revived technicians walked around the still-hot machine, verifying that it was safe to lower the ramps. They folded out of the hull with grinding slowness: one main cargo ramp at the rear of the belly and two smaller ones near the front of the crew compartment. The forward ramps formed stairs when they were fully deployed.
‘I think,’ Chiku said to Arachne, ‘it would be best if you wait a moment. Arriving here will be enough of a shock.’
The girl reflected on this for a moment or two before nodding. ‘There will be time to make their acquaintance later. Do you think they’ll be satisfied with the arrangements?’
Behind the landing area, on gradually rising ground backdropped by a dense curtain of forest, stood a cluster of stalk-towers much like the ones where Chiku and the other hostages had spent their early days on Crucible. This was a much more extensive hamlet, though, containing several dozen towers, and the cross-linked domes varied in size and height.
‘Cities would have been nice,’ Travertine said, ‘but these will do for now. Do you think they’ll find room for a prison cell?’
‘Who did you have in mind?’ Chiku asked, surprised by the question.
‘Well, me, at the very least. I was pardoned, it’s true. But there have been a couple of regime changes since then. I’m not sure in what sort of light I’m going to be viewed once we get onto all the interesting stuff, like governments and judiciaries and penal systems.’
‘Your pardon still stands. I’ll stake everything on that. And you have my word that whatever medical resources we can bring to bear, you will be given the utmost priority.’
Travertine glanced down at vis bracelet. ‘That’s very reassuring, Chiku. But I’ve been thinking things over since we arrived. I’m not sure I want that reversal therapy after all.’
‘You have every right to it.’
‘And every right to decline, if I choose. You can’t argue with that, can you? Perhaps I want to grow old. Perhaps our brave new world could use a little mortality, just until we’re up and running.’
‘You don’t have to make any decisions immediately,’ Chiku said.
‘Oh, I think my mind’s adequately settled. But it’s good of you to give me that option. You seem – I was going to say self-absorbed, but that’s not quite what I mean. There’s still something on your mind, isn’t there?’
‘When is there not?’
Chiku adjusted the pressure seals on her breather mask. She hated wearing the things, but in fairness so did everyone. In some respects, though, the news of the last six months was quite good. Crucible’s micro-organisms, airborne or otherwise, had produced remarkably few ill effects in the sixteen settlers of the first expedition. Short of wearing spacesuits, it was impossible to keep the micro-organisms from infiltrating the body. They slipped in around the edges of the mask and reached the eyes, invaded through the pores of exposed skin. But other than some pseudo-allergic reactions, a bout of red eyes and itchiness, it could have been much worse. Dr Aziba had been monitoring their blood almost constantly, and as yet had nothing too problematic to report. Travertine’s bracelet continued functioning normally despite the thudding it had taken against the physician’s jaw. Crucible’s biology appeared Earth-like on the macroscopic scale, but at the level of molecular and chemical processes it was simply too alien to do much harm.
Satisfied that there was nothing to be gained in delaying, Chiku walked to the base of one of the forward ramps and began to ascend. Any exertion was physically taxing on Crucible, and she had learned the hard way not to rush her movements. What the excess oxygen provided, the stifling heat and humidity took away. They would adapt eventually, just as primates had adapted to almost every climate and terrain on Earth. For no
w, though, the idea of ever finding life on Crucible pleasant struck Chiku as laughably unlikely.
But as callous as the thought made her feel, that was not going to be her particular problem, anyway.
She was halfway up the ramp when the door at the top opened and a pair of figures appeared in the aperture. She paused in her ascent. She recognised them instantly, for it had not been so long since she was last in their virtual presence. Ndege looked, if anything, taller than she remembered. And Mposi, still shorter than his sister, appeared to have gained broadness and strength. Their faces, naturally, were hidden behind masks.
Chiku steadied herself on the ramp. On an impulse, she slid her mask aside. ‘Don’t do this!’ she called. ‘It’s tolerable for a short period, but only after repeated exposure. It’s taken me weeks to build up to this!’ And that declaration was in itself almost too much, for she felt the dizziness coming on almost immediately. She allowed the mask to snap back over her face. Finding some reserve of strength, she pushed on to the top of the ramp. It was impossible to choose which child to embrace first, but Mposi spared her the difficulty by hugging her first, their masks pressing against each other, and then surrendering his mother to his sister. They embraced as well.
Through her mask, Ndege said, ‘This is real, isn’t it? We’ve really made it? It’s not some trick made up by machines?’
‘You’re here,’ Chiku said. ‘You’re here and this is real. I should say, welcome to Crucible! Somebody should say it, if only for the history books. The welcome we received was a bit different.’
‘I can’t get over the colour of that sea,’ Mposi said, looking out beyond the sea wall. ‘I thought it was an illusion from orbit, but it’s just as remarkable down here! It’s not the mask, is it?’
On the Steel Breeze Page 58
