On the Steel Breeze (15 page)

The woman steered the aircraft towards what appeared to be a dead end at the valley’s limit. The chamber was bathtub-shaped: a strip of flat ground hemmed in on all sides by rising terrain. Eunice – Chiku decided she would think of her as such, for now – pushed the stick down to dip the
Sess-na
’s nose, and then banked sharply to slip between two molar-like rock formations that looked ready to gnash together on the tangle of vegetation filling the gap between them. Astonishingly, there was a hole in the wall of greenery ahead, and the aircraft slipped through this green-lipped mouth with what appeared to be mere atomic monolayers of clearance. Chiku heard the fast scissoring of foliage being torn away by the wings and the furious whirling scythe of the propeller. She sank into her neck ring. The
Sess-na
slipped down a short connecting throat of rough-hewn rock wider than it was tall, and then they were out, flying free into another space.

‘My god,’ Chiku said, straining to look around. ‘Where are we
now?’

‘It’s all the same chamber,’ Eunice said, ‘just divided into three lobes. You came out in the middle one. There’s a trail up the valley side to the connecting passage, big enough for elephants, but it’s a long trek and flying is quicker. The
Sess-na
does have its uses after all.’

Chiku saw more dense swathes of forest below, the same blue sky cross-hatched with ribbons of blackness above. Eunice banked the
Sess-na
fiercely, shedding height and speed in a tight spiral. They skimmed tree-tops, then threaded a reckless, weaving course through the canopy itself. Eunice was as calm as if she had done this a million times, working the stick and waggling the wings, correcting and recorrecting faster than Chiku could think.

Eunice finally brought the aircraft down on a stretch of level ground where the grass had been worn away to bare dry soil. They disembarked.

‘If you’re comfortable in that suit, I won’t argue with you,’ Eunice said, taking hold of the aircraft by its tail and turning the whole thing as if was folded up from paper. ‘But I’m not going to harm you. Harming you would be pointless, but most of all boring.’ She added imperiously: ‘Come.’

‘Where?’

‘If I’m going to be a gracious host, the least I can do is offer you chai. And a chance to meet the others.’

She headed off into the woods and Chiku followed, her curiosity getting the better of her fear. They walked a short way through the trees along a dusty path and soon came upon a clearing. A dwelling occupied the middle of the area, surrounded by something approximating a garden. The house was a clover-leaf of four tented domes, dun-brown in colour, sides zipped open and peeled back. Within the shady tents, Chiku saw furniture – tables and chairs, cabinets and shelves – and a tremendous assortment of tools and instruments. A proxy of ancient design stood slump-shouldered in the corner.

Eunice bid her take a seat at one of the tables. The seat was flimsy, a metal frame with canvas stretched across it. Chiku sat down carefully, still in her vacuum suit. Everything around her looked scrupulously well-maintained. There were medical kits, rations boxes, odd items of surgical equipment, vacuum-suit parts. Evidence of careful repair and ingenious improvisation.

Beyond the tents lay something that looked like a herb garden: neat arrangements of cultivated plants in wooden frames and trellises. Nothing pretty or ornamental about it – it looked too methodical for that.

Eunice boiled water and set a metal cup of tea before Chiku. ‘Drink the chai,’ she said, in a tone that brooked no argument. ‘It’ll do you no harm, and there are some potions in it to help with those cuts and bruises.’

‘Potions.’

‘Just drink. I’ve summoned the Tantors – they’ll be here shortly.’

Chiku sipped at the scalding green brew. It was not quite as foul as it looked.

‘These will be the “others” you spoke of earlier, I assume? Are they involved with the elephants?’

‘They
are
the elephants,’ Eunice said, punctuating the statement with an impish smile ‘I took a liberty while you were unconscious – a blood sample. You appeared to be Akinya, and the pod shouldn’t have brought you here unless you are, but I needed to be sure. The analysis confirmed
that you are Chiku Akinya, as you claim. Or at least, very nearly.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You’re some kind of clone – there are commercial fingerprints all over your DNA. You’re like a book that’s had all its pages torn out and put back in again. You’ve been duplicated by someone or something called Quorum Binding. Does that relate to the Chiku Red you mentioned earlier?’

‘I really feel you ought to be the one answering questions.’

‘The difficulty is that we both have interesting pasts. How about a little give and take?’

Chiku decided that she had little to lose from complete honesty, as much as it displeased her to revisit her own history. ‘You’re right about Quorum Binding. It’s no secret, in any case. When I was fifty, I became three people – me, Chiku Red and Chiku Yellow. Two of us are clones of the original, but there’s no way of knowing which is which. I’m Chiku Green to the others, but I only think of myself as Chiku.’

‘Well, of course you would. I think I heard of that sort of thing being done.’

‘You think?’

‘I did say my memory isn’t what it should be.’ She was sitting opposite Chiku, hands laced together and resting on the table-top, not drinking. ‘I suppose you think I might be something similar – some kind of genetic construct.’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No. But despite what I said earlier, I’m not
exactly
Eunice Akinya, either.’ She made an apprehensive face. ‘Oh dear. I doubt you’re going to like this.’

‘Why don’t you try me?’

‘I am a robot.’ After this utterance she looked supremely pleased with herself. ‘There. I’ve always wanted to say that, but you’d be surprised at how few opportunities have ever presented themselves. And when I say “robot” – well, I mean artilect, to be precise. Your mother made me. Or started me, anyway. I’m the final result of her project to create an interactive memorial to myself. You know about this, surely? She used posterity engines to stitch together a construct sentience capable of emulating my every response. I’m very true to myself. I look like Eunice, and I act like her, and I carry much of her life history as part of my own stored data. All that said, I’m not alive. I’m just machinery.’

While the idea repelled Chiku, she also found it plausible. Sunday had indeed been working on a construct of her grandmother, but what became of that construct – what it had grown into – was a matter of
speculation. Neither Sunday, Jitendra or Geoffrey had been forthcoming on the subject.

‘I should be surprised, but I’m not.’

‘That’s hugely encouraging.’

‘It answers some questions – starting with how someone could have survived here all this time, on their own. A human would have gone mad, or fallen ill, or starved, long ago. But a robot wouldn’t need much to keep going.’

Now Chiku was trying to find the flaw, the giveaway that her host was not flesh and blood. Perhaps there was a dryness around the eyes and lips, or a too-flawless plastic tautness to the skin, hinting at polymers and manufacture rather than biological processes of growth and healing?

No, she decided. Nothing about Eunice looked fake.

‘I thought you’d need more persuasion.’

‘I saw how easily you moved the aircraft around, and you’re obviously very strong and quick – you nearly took the wind out of me when you threw me my helmet.

‘If you want some more proof, there’s this.’ Eunice scooped up one of the medical devices lying on the table. It was a pale-grey handle with a circular hoop on one end. ‘Scanner. Pass it along your arm, then compare it with mine.’

Chiku did as she was bid. She slid the hoop over her hand, up her wrist. A palm-sized display was incorporated into the handle, just beneath the point where it joined the hoop. The scanner saw through her suit, through margins of skin and muscle, elucidating harder structures of bone and sinew beneath. Medical data fluttered over the little grey-green image, tagging anatomical landmarks.

Eunice held out her arm, stiff as a signpost. ‘Now me.’

Chiku slid the scanner over Eunice’s hand. The screen revealed armatures, universal joints, hinges, power feeds and mesh-like grids and actuators. Confronted with engineering where it expected biology, the scanner gave up trying to tag anything.

‘This could still be a trick,’ Chiku said.

‘Yes, I could have programmed the scanner to lie. Or I might be mechanical from the elbow down and flesh and blood everywhere else. Short of cutting myself open, though, you’re going to have to take my word for it. Of course, there’s
this.’

‘What?’

Chiku’s fingers were suddenly clutching at nothing. A heartbeat earlier they had been holding the scanner.

Now it was in Eunice’s hand, and she returned it to the table.

‘Party trick, for doubters and sceptics. I can move
very
quickly when the need demands.’

Chiku had felt nothing, not even a breath of air. Eunice had moved and then returned to exactly her former position, slipping through the gaps in Chiku’s perception.

‘You haven’t run away screaming. That’s a good sign.’

‘If you’re that fast, running away wouldn’t do me much good. Why are you here, Eunice?

‘I’m hiding from something that wanted to kill me.’ She jerked up in her seat, not quite rising, just enough to see over Chiku. ‘Ah – here come the Tantors.’

Chiku hardly dared look around, but once again, curiosity compelled her. Something big – several big somethings – were nearing, shouldering through overgrowth, trampling undergrowth. She squinted into the darkening gloom of trees until she made out the elephants. She could hear them now: the rolling crunch of their tread, the breathing and snorting, a deeper sound than anything humans could make. By increments, she relaxed. Elephants did not frighten Chiku. She knew their ways as well as anyone in
Zanzibar.

She wondered why Eunice called them something other than elephants.

‘As I said,’ Eunice declared, as if picking up a conversational thread only just dropped, ‘I don’t like to think of myself as their keeper. But it’s true that they need me . . . or
have
had need of me. That’s a large part of why I’m here. The Tantors needed protection and guidance, and – with no disrespect intended – a human being just wouldn’t be up to the job.’

‘We have elephants,’ Chiku reminded her. ‘Many more than the fifty or so you claim to have here, and we’ve managed very well with them.’ She looked at Eunice sharply. ‘Why is your memory faulty, anyway? Shouldn’t a machine work better than that?’

The Tantors broke through into the clearing. There were four of them, all adults, by Chiku’s estimate. But these were not just any old elephants. They were from African stock, probably not too far removed from the ancestral herds that had seeded the other elephants in
Zanzibar.
They looked well, with clean, undamaged tusks and ears. Their foreheads were broad, their eyes alert and fixed on her.

They were also wearing . . . not clothes, precisely, but harnesses – big and elephant-grey and flexible, made from articulated plates of plastic or alloy fixed around their bodies and heads but allowing ease of movement. There were things attached to the harnesses, especially around
the head: dark modules, boxes and cylinders of unguessable function, almost like trinkets and trophies the elephants had collected.

Chiku recalled the elephant she had in the other chamber for comparison, but the glimpse had been too brief for her to determine its species, never mind whether it had been wearing a similar harness.

‘They haven’t had a lot of experience with people other than myself,’ Eunice said quietly. ‘Assuming I count as such, of course. Do nothing unless I tell you.’

The Tantors approached the tents in a line, then stopped. Chiku looked to Eunice for guidance, saw her rising from her chair and did likewise. She moved slowly, turning around with hands at her sides, holding only the helmet. She wondered how strange and fierce she looked in the vacuum suit. Like a hard-skinned monster with a tiny, shrunken head.

‘What are they?’ she whispered.

‘Elephants with enhanced cognition,’ Eunice answered, her voice as low as Chiku’s. ‘Uplifted animals. The result of illegal genetic experimentation conducted before
Zanzibar
ever left the solar system. Their minds are larger than those of baseline elephants, and they have a level of modular organisation approaching that of the human brain. They have a highly developed sense of self, an advanced capacity for tool use, the rudiments of language, an understanding of time’s arrow. Some of these traits were already present in elephants, of course. They’ve just been . . . enhanced, augmented, amplified. But whatever they are, these creatures are no longer simply animals.’

Chiku was as awed and horror-struck as if the sky had parted to reveal the gears and ratchets of heaven’s own clockwork. She had spent a good measure of her life in the company of elephants. It was a family thing, a long and noble tradition.

The wrongness of the Tantors drove a hot lance into her moral core.

‘Who did this?’

‘If I ever knew, I don’t remember now. But they are what they are, Chiku. There’s no point feeling revulsion. The Tantors didn’t do this to themselves. They didn’t choose to be evolved.’

‘This should never have happened.’

‘I gather Geoffrey felt much the same way when he learned about the Lunar dwarves. They were the result of genetic manipulation, which he found profoundly distasteful.’ Eunice started walking toward the four Tantors, beckoning Chiku to accompany her. ‘But Geoffrey realised that he had to accept the reality of the dwarves, and to do what he could to make their world better. It was just the hand he’d been dealt. You’ll
come to the same accommodation with these creatures.’

Eunice’s glib self-assurance was beginning to grate on Chiku. ‘How would you know?’