On the Steel Breeze (21 page)

The suiting area was down one long, sloping tunnel, then up another. When they arrived, someone else was being helped into their suit, which was assembled around them like some contraption of Medieval torture. The process involved robots and winches and complex power tools. Chiku had never seen anything quite as barbaric as a Venus surface suit.

‘Why would anyone bother with these things?’ Pedro asked. ‘Aren’t they happy going out in a rover, with some nice seats and a bar?’

‘It’s for the bragging rights, mainly,’ Chiku said. ‘So they can say they’ve done something more dangerous and real than their friends.’

‘Even if they run a real risk of dying?’

‘That’s the downside.’

‘I can think of another. Would now be the right time to mention that I’m very slightly claustrophobic?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so. It’s all right for you, though – you’ve had plenty of time in spacesuits.’

‘Not like these, Noah. Even the junk we had to wear in Kappa were more comfortable than these look.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Pedro said, a certain terseness colouring his tone.
‘And for the record, I’m not Noah. Noah is not your husband. Noah is the husband of Chiku Green, this
other
woman I’ve never met, and never want to meet.’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Never mind,’ he said, with obviously forced magnanimity. ‘I suppose it’s to be expected, when you go around swapping memories like pairs of gloves.’

Chiku thought better of responding.

The suits were essentially ambulatory tanks. They were gloss white, like lobsters dipped in milk. They had no faceplates, just camera apertures. Instead of hands they had claws. Their cooling systems were multiply redundant. That was the critical safety measure, Chiku learned in the briefing. Death by pressure was so rare that it had only happened a few times in the entire history of Venus exploration. But hundreds, thousands, had died of heat shock when their coolers overloaded.

Once they were installed in the suits, they spent a few minutes learning basic skills such as walking and object manipulation. Chiku kept flashing back to her time in Kappa, how easy it had been compared to these hulking contraptions. On the other hand, she now felt invulnerable.

That confidence faded as soon as the airlock doors slammed shut behind them and the atmosphere roared in. As temperature and pressure climbed to surface norms, the suit told her how much work it was having to do to keep her comfortable. Like the elevator, it issued noises of protestation. Systems pushed from green into amber. There was very little cooling capacity to spare once the suit was running at normal workload.

The outer doors opened and they waddled across a parking area to their waiting rover, which was essentially a chassis on wheels. They climbed aboard and assumed standing position within railed enclosures. The vehicle appeared to know where to take them. They rolled up a ramp into the searing, overcast oppression of noon on Venus. The terrain was not alien to Chiku’s eyes – she had seen mountain areas just as arid as this on Earth, with a similar undramatic topography. The ground was rocky, broken, strewn with boulders and the fragments of boulder. No vegetation, of course, and no evidence that any liquids had ever flowed here. The colours, relayed through the suit’s camera systems, were muted, greys and ochres and off-whites, a smear of paling yellow dusting everything, like a layer of old varnish that had begun to discolour.

The rover traversed a winding track, rocks and debris bulldozed into
loose flanks along either side. Chiku swivelled around, still nervous of damaging the suit, and spied the anchorpoint from which they had emerged. She watched the bobbin of the elevator slide up the taut whip line of the tether until it was lost in the murk of a low cloud deck. These conditions were optimal on Venus: low clouds, no sky, visibility down to a couple of kilometres.

At length, the rover steered off the main track onto a rougher trail that wound around the side of a dormant volcano, and then they came downslope into a broad depression hemmed on all sides by cracked terrain, fissured in concentric and radial patterns like the wrinkled skin around an elephant’s eye. This spider-web feature, according to the terrain overlay, was called an arachnoid, caused by the deformation and relaxation of the surface under the strain of upwelling magma. Aside from the road itself and the odd transponder pole or piece of broken rover, there was scant evidence of human presence beyond the compound. Near the base of the depression, gleaming in the perpetual half-light, was another vehicle. Like their own rover, it was an open chassis on wheels. It had parked on a gentle slope. Not far from it, further down the slope, was another figure in a Venus suit, attending to something on the ground, almost in the shade of an overhanging cliff a few tens of metres high, formed where one part of the arachnoid had sunk or elevated itself relative to the other.

‘June,’ Chiku said, excited and apprehensive at the same time. ‘It’s her. There’s even an aug tag.’

‘Open the general channel, see if she’ll talk,’ Pedro said.

‘Of course she’ll talk. We came all the way here, didn’t we?’ But she opened the channel anyway. ‘June Wing? It’s Chiku Akinya. I think you’re expecting us.’

A voice said: ‘Park by my rover, then get out and walk over to me, very carefully. I don’t want you stomping all over this site like a couple of gorillas.’

‘Thrilled to meet you, too,’ Pedro said under his breath, but doubtless loud enough that June would have heard it.

Chiku took manual control and halted the rover by the other vehicle. They stepped out of their enclosures and lowered carefully down onto the Venusian surface. The atmosphere of Venus laid siege to her suit, probing its defences for a weakness.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see us,’ Chiku said as they made their way downslope.

‘I agreed to nothing.’

‘But Mister Kwami said—’

‘Unless Imris Kwami was failing in his responsibilities, which after a century of employment seems highly unlikely, he made no promises on my behalf. I told him to make it clear that if you didn’t visit me here, you’d have no hope of speaking to me when I returned to the gondola.’

‘I opened your mote.’

‘Good for you. What you chose to read into it is your business, not mine.’

‘We’re here, aren’t we?’ Pedro asked.

‘Evidently.’

‘Mister Kwami told me that you were aware of my dealings with the seasteaders,’ Chiku said. ‘If that’s the case, then you’ll also have a shrewd idea what Mecufi and his friends want from you.’

‘The Panspermians, or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, burnt their bridges with Arethusa two hundred years ago,’ June declared. ‘It’s a little late now to be seeking rapprochement.’

Chiku said, ‘Regardless, they’d like to make contact again, if they can. Are you still in touch with her?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I’m guessing it’s highly likely, if Arethusa’s still alive. And you should definitely speak to me. You knew my mother and father. You helped them.’

‘That was a long time ago.’

Chiku and Pedro had come within a few paces of the other suited figure. June was examining something on the ground. The suits’ articulation did not allow kneeling, but by bowing at the waist and extending the telescopic forearms, the wearer could handle rocks and other objects. June was busy with a piece of buckled metal about the size of a beach ball, partially dug into the ground as if it had rammed into it at speed.

‘The thing is—’ Chiku started saying.

‘Do you want to help, or are you just going to stand there gawping?’

Chiku moved around to the side, keeping her distance from June’s backpack. The glowing exhaust vents were rimmed cherry red, a heat haze boiling off them.

‘What is it?’ Chiku asked doubtfully, not sure she wanted the answer.

‘Remains of a Russian probe. Been here the thick end of four centuries, just waiting to be found. I’ve been coming back to this area for years, convinced it had to be around here somewhere.’

‘Pretty lucky to find it like that,’ Pedro said.

‘Luck had nothing to do with it, just years of thorough searching and patient elimination. The radar reflection is very poor due to this
overhang – reason everyone else missed it. Here, Chiku – help me lever it out.’

‘Is it worth anything?’

‘It’s a priceless piece of early space-age history.’

‘And you just happened to find it now?’ Pedro asked sceptically.

‘I
found
it eighteen months ago, but my competitors were breathing down my neck. I had to bluff, let them think there was nothing here. Continued searching somewhere else, drawing them away from this search area. Appeared to abandon my efforts – I’ve been on Mars lately, or as near as anyone dares get these days. Then I pounced back here, quicker than they can react. And now I have my prize.’

‘Nearly,’ Chiku said.

The thing began to loosen. It was as heavy as a boulder; she could sense as much even through the suit’s amplification. And then it pulled free, a buckled sphere, scorched and dented, scabbed with corrosion, like a cannonball that had been at the bottom of the ocean since the middle ages. On its side, in lettering so faded it was barely legible, was the inscription
CCCP.

Chiku wondered what it meant.

‘Well done,’ June said. ‘Now help me get it aboard the truck.’

She meant the other rover. Between them they carried the mangled thing to the vehicle’s rear cargo platform. June lowered it into a sturdy white box with a padded interior, then closed the lid. ‘I’ll hold it at Venus surface pressure until I know there are no air pockets inside it. A hundred atmospheres can really put a dent in your day.’

‘Mecufi said something about you gathering pieces for a collection,’ Chiku said, hoping that some small talk might break the ice. ‘When we spoke to Imris Kwami, he said it was to do with robot relics or something?’

‘My museum, yes.’ June was tapping commands into the box’s external panel. ‘I’m assembling artefacts of the early robotic space age before they fall through the chinks in history. You’d be amazed how much stuff is still out here, waiting to be forgotten. Not much in the inner solar system, it’s true – although there are still spent booster stages on Sun-circling orbits, if you know where to look. But I’m not really interested in dumb rocketry. I want robots, probes, things with a rudimentary intelligence.
Very
rudimentary, in this case. But you can’t make sharp distinctions. It’s like poking through the bones of early hominids. There’s no one point at which we stopped being monkeys and started being human.’ She patted the box with one of her suit’s claws. ‘And
this
unprepossessing thing is still part of the lineage. It has some circuitry,
some crude decision-action branching. That puts it on the path to intelligence, albeit rather a long way from artilects and Providers.’

‘You’ve led a long and interesting life,’ Chiku said. ‘Is this something you’ve always wanted to do?’

‘Someone has to organise and document this stuff, so it may as well be me. Your great-grandmother wasn’t exactly one for sitting around when there was work to be done, was she?’

Chiku chose her words with great care. ‘Actually, it’s funny you should mention Eunice.’

‘I thought you came to ask me about Arethusa.’

‘We did,’ Pedro said.

‘Well, you’ve done what the Pans asked. You can tell them that if Arethusa wanted to speak to them, she’d have already done so.’

‘I’m not just here because of the merfolk,’ Chiku said.

June walked around to the rover’s control platform, and prepared to step aboard. ‘What, then? The scenery? The balmy airs?’

‘I’ve made contact with my great-grandmother.’

‘Nice. No, really – I’m very pleased. And what did she have to say? That Saint Peter sends his best regards and everything’s lovely on the other side? I’ve got the right religion, haven’t I?’

‘I met the Tantors.’

There was a silence. June did not move. She looked frozen there, locked into geologic stillness, destined to merge back into the landscape. Chiku glanced at Pedro. She wondered if she had made a terrible miscalculation.

Finally, June said: ‘Repeat what you just said to me.’

‘I’ve met the Tantors. And I’ve spoken to the construct aboard the holoship.’

‘I have an interest in
Zanzibar.
I monitor the feeds. I keep up with events. No one knows about the Tantors. They are not public knowledge. They are not even on the edge of being a rumour.’

‘There was an accident, a blow-out in one of our chambers. I mean, one of theirs. I made some investigations . . . I mean Chiku Green, the version of me on the holoship.’ She gave up. It was just too difficult to separate the two versions of herself. ‘I found my way to Chamber Thirty-Seven, at the front of
Zanzibar
– the chamber no one knows about. I met the construct, the artilect simulation of my great-grandmother. The one
you
helped to come into being and helped smuggle aboard the holoship, to look after the Tantors. She’s been there ever since, waiting. You can’t ignore me now, can you? There’s only one way I could have learned all this.’

After a moment. June asked, ‘How is she?’

‘Still alive, obviously, but damaged. Her memory’s totally screwed up and she barely remembers anything that happened before
Zanzibar
beyond the fact that you helped her when she was in trouble – when she was hiding, running from something.’

‘The Cognition Police, most likely – she was an unlicensed artilect.’

‘More than that,’ Chiku said. ‘She gave me a name, and—’

‘Not here,’ June said before Chiku could utter another word.

‘I’m asking for your help. If not for me, then for my mother. You helped Sunday and Jitendra, all those years ago.’

‘Did your mother tell you about the Tantors? She was at least theoretically aware of their existence.’

‘No. I haven’t spoken to her in years. No one has.’

‘What an exceedingly odd family you come from.’

‘Thanks. If I could have chosen another one, I would have. But this isn’t about me. It’s about what you and your friends set in motion. These are the consequences; now you have to deal with them.’