On the Steel Breeze (2 page)

‘Whether I like it or not? Who the hell do you think you are?’

‘I am Mecufi. You have been probing our public and private history – why are you taking such an interest in the past?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘This is the Surveilled World,’ Mecufi said sternly, the way one might explain some exceedingly simple thing to a child. ‘Everything is everyone’s business in the Surveilled World. That’s the point.’

Tourists strode the distant castle battlements. Along the banks of the Tagus, cyberclippers made landfall after transatlantic crossings, elegant sleek sails ruffling in a stiff river breeze. Dirigibles and airpods slid under clouds, colourful as balloons.

‘What would you know about the Surveilled World? You’re not even part of it.’

‘Its influence extends into our realm more than we’d wish. And we’re good at detecting data searches, especially when they happen to concern us.’

The odd exchange was beginning to draw the interest of the café’s other customers. Chiku’s skin crawled at the attention. She liked it here. She enjoyed the anonymity.

‘I’m a historian. That’s all.’

‘Writing a private history of the Akinya clan? Eunice Akinya and all that stuff? Geoffrey and the elephants? The dusty goings-on of two hundred years ago? Is that what’s in this book of yours?’

‘Like I said, it’s none of your business either way.’

‘Well, that’s a ringing denial.’

The other two made froglike chuckling sounds.

‘This is harassment,’ Chiku said. ‘As a free citizen, I’m entitled to make any enquiries I wish. If you’ve got a problem with that, take it up with the Mechanism.’

Mecufi held up a placating hand. ‘We might be in a position to help you. But we’ll need some – shall we say reciprocity?’

‘What do I need your help with?’

‘The ghost, for a start – we can definitely help you with that. But we need something from you first.’ Mecufi reached into a pouch in his exo and drew out a slim wooden box, the kind that might have held a collection of pencils or drawing compasses. Mecufi worked a little catch and slid out an interior compartment. It contained a dozen felt-lined partitions, in each of which nestled a coloured marble about the size of a glass eye. His hand dithered over the marbles. They were a variety of pale colours, glittering and swirling, save for one at the back, which was either a very dark purple or a pure black.

He settled on a sphere of fire-flecked amber. He held it between his fingers, closed his eyes. It took him a few seconds to achieve a clean formulation, and to make the necessary assignment.

‘Take my mote,’ Mecufi said.

‘I don’t—’ Chiku began.

‘Take my mote.’ Mecufi pushed the amber marble into her palm and made her fingers close around the marble. ‘If it convinces you of my basic good intentions, be at the Monument to the Discoveries no later than ten o’ clock tomorrow morning. Then we shall visit the Atlantic seasteads. Only a small adventure – you’ll be back in time for tea.’

Pedro Braga was humming quietly to himself as he cleaned brushes. His studio reeked of varnishes and lacquers. Beneath that pungency lay the permanent tang of wood shavings, sawdust, expensive traditional resins.

‘Something odd happened to me today,’ Chiku said.

‘Odd in what way?’

‘To do with the ghost. Only odder than that. I met a merman. Named Mecufi.’

Guitars, in various states of assembly, hung from the ceiling’s bare
rafters by their necks. Some were only embryonic outlines, bounded in crotchet-like curves. Others were nearly done save for stringing or the final touches of decorative work. It was complicated, baffling work, but the guitars sold well. In a world in which assemblers and Providers could furnish almost any artefact at almost no cost, there was a premium in imperfection.

‘I didn’t think you wanted anything to do with them.’

‘I didn’t. Mecufi made the contact, not me – in the elevator, on the way to the café. There were three of them. They knew who I was. They also knew about the ghost.’

‘That
is
weird.’ Pedro had finished cleaning his brushes, leaving them to dry in a wooden frame. ‘Can they do something about it?’

‘I don’t know. They want me to go to the seasteads.’

‘Lucky you. There are millions who’d kill for an invitation.’

‘Good for them. I don’t happen to feel that way.’

Pedro opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses. They kissed briefly, took the glasses out onto the balcony and sat either side of a gently rusting table flaky with white paint. They could not see the sea unless they leaned out at the very end of the balcony, where it offered itself up coyly for inspection in the gap between two nearby tenements. At night, when the glow from windows and street lamps buttered the city yellow, Chiku never missed the sight of the sea.

‘You really don’t like them, do you?’

‘They took my son. That’s reason enough, isn’t it?’

They had hardly ever spoken of her life before the day they met in Belém. It was what they had both agreed on, a relationship built on a solid foundation of mutual ignorance. Pedro knew of her siblings and that Chiku had a son, and that the son had joined the seasteaders – become, in effect, a member of a new species. Chiku, in turn, knew that Pedro had travelled widely before settling in Lisbon and that he had not always been a luthier. He had money she could not quite square with the modest income from his business – the studio rental alone should have been beyond his means. But she had no desire to dig for the details.

‘Perhaps you need to get over it.’

‘Get over it?’ Feeling a flush of irritation Chiku leaned on the table, making it rock on its uneven metal legs. ‘You don’t get over something like that. Plus that’s just the start of it – they’ve been messing with my family’s business for far too long.’

‘But if they can make the ghost go away—’

‘He said “help me with that”. That might mean being able to answer the ghost. To find out what Chiku Green wants.’

‘Would you want that?’

‘I’d like the option. I think maybe . . .’ But Chiku chose not to finish her sentence. She drank some wine. A woman bellowed the same three lines of
Fado
from the open doorway of one of the bars in the street below, rehearsing for an evening performance. ‘I don’t know if I can trust them. But Mecufi gave me this.’

She placed the little marble on the table between them.

Pedro reached out and pinched it between thumb and forefinger with a faint sneer of distaste. He did not approve, Chiku knew. He thought motes somehow short-circuited an essential element of human discourse.

‘These aren’t foolproof.’

She took back the amber marble. It would not work for Pedro anyway. Motes were always keyed to a specific recipient.

‘I know. But I’m willing to try it.’

Chiku crushed the mote. The glassy orb shattered into harmless self-dissolving shards as the mote’s payload – its cargo of emotions – unfolded inside her head like a flower. The mote spoke of caution and hopefulness and a singular desire to be trusted. There were no dark notes in the chorus.

I was right about Mecufi being a he,’ Chiku decided. ‘That came through clearly.’

‘What else?’

‘He wants me to go to the seasteads very badly. They need me at least as much as I need them. And it’s not just about the ghost. There’s something else.’

The woman singing
Fado
ran through the same three phrases again and her voice cracked on the last syllable. The woman laughed.

CHAPTER TWO

Belém was where she had met Pedro. It had not been long after her arrival in Lisbon. Both of them buying ice creams from the same stand and laughing as wickedly determined seagulls dived and skimmed to scoop away their purchases.

She went up onto the roof of the Monument to the Discoveries, with its sea-gazing ranks of carved navigators. It was the only place to get a decent view of the Wind Rose. It was a map of the ancient world, laid out across a wide terrace in slabs of red and blue marble. Galleons and seamonsters patrolled its fathomless seas and oceans. A kraken was hauling a ship to the depths in its tentacles. Beyond the map, arrows delineated the cardinal compass points.

‘It’s good that you came.’

She turned around sharply. When she had arrived there had been no merfolk on the Monument’s viewing level, or at least none that she had recognised as such. It was a whisker after ten and she assumed her lateness had caused the agreement to be nullified. And yet here was Mecufi, stuffed now into an upright mobility exo.

‘You mentioned the ghost. I’ve seen it once already this morning, on the tram.’

‘Yes, it’s getting worse, isn’t it? But we’ll talk about that later. There are a couple of other things on the agenda before that. Shall we fly?’

‘Fly?’

Mecufi looked up. Chiku followed his gaze, squinting against the haze. A shape detached itself from a bright wheel of gulls and grew larger as it descended. It was a flier, about as wide across as the top of the monument.

‘We have special dispensation,’ Mecufi said. ‘They love us in Lisbon, after we installed the tsunami baffles. They’ve got long memories here – 1755 was yesterday.’ From the flier’s broad green belly came a warm downdraught. A ramp tongued down and Mecufi directed Chiku to step
aboard. ‘Why do you hesitate? There’s no need not to trust us. I gave you the mote, didn’t I?’

‘Motes can be faked.’

‘Everything can be faked. You’ll just have to trust that it wasn’t.’

‘Then we’re back to square one, aren’t we? I have to trust that you’re trustworthy?’

‘Trust is a fine and paradoxical thing. I promised I’d have you home before evening – will you take me at my word?’

‘We’re just going to the seasteads?’

‘And no further. It’s a beautiful day for it. The quality of light on water, as restless as the sea itself! What better time to be alive?’

Chiku acquiesced. They escalated aboard, taking lounge seats in a generously proportioned cabin. The cabin sealed itself and the flier gathered speed as it rose. In a few breaths they were banking away from the coast. The waters were a gorgeous mingling of hues, lakes of indigo and ultramarine ink spilt into the ocean.

‘Earth’s quite nice, isn’t it?’ Mecufi’s exo had deposited him in his seat like a large stuffed toy, then folded itself away for the duration of the flight.

‘It was working out for me.’

‘The perfect backwater to study your family history? Crumbly old Lisbon, of all places?’

‘I thought I’d find some peace and quiet there. Evidently I was wrong about that.’

The flier kept low. Occasionally they passed a cyberclipper, pleasure yacht or small wooden fishing boat with a gaily painted hull. Chiku barely glimpsed the fishermen busy on deck as the flier sped past, fussing with nets and winches. They never looked up. The aircraft was tidying up after itself, dissipating its own Mach cone so that there was no sonic boom.

Its hull would have tuned itself to the colour of sky.

‘Let me ask you about your counterparts,’ Mecufi said.

‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘And yet I must. Let’s begin with the basics. Your mother and father were Sunday Akinya and Jitendra Gupta, both still living. You were born in what used to be the Descrutinised Zone, on the Moon, about two hundred years ago. Do you dispute these facts?’

‘Why would I?’

Mecufi paused to smear some lavender-smelling oil onto himself from a small dispenser. ‘You had a carefree and prosperous childhood. You grew up in a time of tremendous peace and beneficial social and
technological change. A time free of wars and poverty and nearly all illnesses. You were extraordinarily fortunate – billions of dead souls would have traded places with you in a heartbeat. And yet as you entered adulthood you detected an emptiness inside yourself. A lack of direction, an absence of moral purpose. It was hard, growing up with that name. Your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents moved mountains. Eunice opened up the solar system for deep-space settlement and exploitation. Sunday and your other relatives opened up the stars! What could you possibly do that would compare with any of that?’

Chiku folded her arms. ‘Are you done?’

‘Not remotely. That’s the trouble with being very long-lived: there’s an awful lot of life to catch up with.’

‘So perhaps you should think about cutting to the chase.’

‘When you were fifty years old, a new technology came to fruition and you made a momentous decision. You engaged the firm Quorum Binding to produce two clones of you using rapid phenotyping. In a few months the clones were fully formed physically, but little more than semi-conscious blank canvases. They had your face but not your memories; none of your scars, none of the marks life had left on you, nothing of your developmental or immunological history. But that was also part of the plan.

‘While the clones matured, you submitted your own body to a process of structural adjustment. Medical nanomachines gorged you down to a woman-shaped core. They took apart your bones and muscles and nervous system and remade them so that they were genetically and functionally indistinguishable from those of your clone siblings. A front of neural machines tore through your brain like a wildfire. They recorded your idiosyncratic connectome – the detailed pattern of your own mental wiring. At the same time, similar machines – scriptors – wrote those same patterns into the minds of your siblings. Their minds had always been similar to your own, but now they were identical – even down to the level of memory. What you recollected, they recollected. The process was a kind of stochastic averaging. Some of the innate structures of your siblings were even transcribed back into your head. By the end of it, by the time the three of you were hauled out of the immersion vats, there was literally no way to tell you apart. You looked and thought the same. The telomeric clock of your cells had been wound back to zero. Epigenetic factors had been corrected and reversed. Since you all had access to the same memories, you could not even say for yourselves which was the original. That was precisely the point: that
there should not be a favoured sibling. And the firm that had done this to you, Quorum Binding – even they didn’t know which one of you was authentic. Their process was rigorously blind. Their customers expected nothing less.’