On the Steel Breeze (22 page)

‘You think I don’t know about consequences?’

‘If we shouldn’t talk here,’ Pedro said, ‘where would you suggest?’

‘Wait.’ A pause, then: ‘Imris? It’s me. Yes, very well. Yes, I met both of them – they’re with me right now, along with the find. Yes, packed and loaded – we can be on our way back immediately.’ To Chiku, she said: ‘How did you get here? Your own ship?’

‘We’re not that flash,’ Chiku said. ‘We came by shuttle, off the loop-liner.’

‘Imris, prep
Gulliver
for immediate dust-off. We’ll be back at the anchorpoint in an hour, aboard the gondola inside two.’

‘We’re leaving?’ Chiku asked.

‘I think it’s best if we talk aboard my ship. We’ll worry about getting you back to Earth later. Oh, and about being flash: you’ve owned more ships than I’ve owned shoes.’

‘I mean lately.’

‘Then say what you mean.’

The rovers could only carry two passengers, so Chiku and Pedro returned to their own vehicle and let it trundle on behind June’s, retracing the route they had taken from the anchorpoint.

‘What was it like on the holoship?’ June asked once they had climbed out of the arachnoid depression, back onto the highlands. ‘I came very close to moving aboard, when
Zanzibar
set off, but I felt that my talents would be put to better use back here.’

‘Collecting old space junk?’ Pedro asked.

‘You have a very blunt turn of phrase, don’t you?’

Chiku threw Pedro a warning glance and said, ‘They have some difficult times ahead of them. Resource allocation, tensions within the local caravan, that whole stupid slowdown thing.’

‘I heard about
Pemba,’
June said. ‘But then, who didn’t? Something that bad, it makes the headlines. They were idiots to bet against physics.’

‘Physics looked like it was on their side, for a little while, at least,’ Chiku said.

‘Physics couldn’t care less.’

‘It was a terrible accident, but no reason to close down all the research programmemes. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem at all fair that we’re having to do all this on our own. The holoships were a project for the whole solar civilisation, a gesture for the ages. And there used to be research programmemes going on back here, not just in the caravan – labs and facilities all working on the Chibesa problem. But back home, you’ve given up, left us to solve the problem on our own. Essentially, we’ve been hung out to dry.’

‘You and
us.
That’s an interesting perspective. As if your moral reference frame was that of the Chiku on the holoship, not the one I am speaking to.’

‘She gets confused,’ Pedro said. ‘You should hear what she called me earlier.’

‘The physics programmes here were expensive, dangerous and getting nowhere,’ June said. ‘That’s the
only
reason they were shut down. You mentioned Sunday, Chiku – are things really that bad with her?’

‘She’s made her own choices.’

‘Mathematics is a terrible calling. It’s as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There’s a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That’s what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit. It must be terribly hard on your father.’

‘They were happy together.’ But she had seen Jitendra’s awesome, oceanic sadness. Yes, there were good days, when Sunday’s mind returned to the shallows, but far more when she was not there at all.

‘Perhaps she’ll surface again, one day,’ said June. ‘We must wish the best for your mother. Ah, wait. What’s this?’

‘I don’t know.’

An alarm tone had begun to sound in Chiku’s helmet and a red status sigil had begun to throb angrily in her visual field, but the suit’s life-support and locomotive functions were not registering any problems.
‘There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with me or my suit.’

‘We’re all getting it,’ Pedro said. ‘It’s not our suits.’

‘They’re sending it to everyone outside,’ June said.

A voice, maybe a recording, was saying: ‘General surface order, Tekarohi Sector. Emergency measures are in force. Return immediately to anchorpoint. Repeat, return immediately to anchorpoint. Observe all environmental precautions. This is
not
a drill. Repeat,
this is not a drill.’

‘What’s happening?’ Pedro asked.

‘Something less than optimal,’ June said. ‘Seismic activity, maybe. Although they usually have days of warning before anything big.’

‘Is that likely?’ Chiku asked. She remembered something about the surface of Venus being constantly renewed by upwellings, scrubbed clean of craters. Stand still long enough and eventually the ground you were on would be resurfaced, smothered under a cooling blanket of ash and magma. This had been going on for mindless aeons.

‘It’s been hundreds of years since there were any eruptions or lava flows in Tekarohi Sector,’ June said, ‘so it’s not
likely
that something would happen just as we show up.’

Pedro asked. ‘Can you raise Imris?’

‘I’m trying, but all local comms are blocked for the moment. They’re pushing that warning through on all channels.
That’s
odd in itself – there should still be ample capacity. You know what? I’m starting not to like this.’

The message was repeating, reiterating the injunction to return to the anchorpoint. It would be safe in there, Chiku thought – whatever was happening, or was about to happen. Certainly there were few places
less
safe than being out on the surface of Venus, in a suit that had to work itself into a frenzy just to stop her from cooking. Some animal instinct was driving her back to the burrow. She wanted to be indoors, underground, where it was cool and dark and the world was not trying to turn her into a pancake.

‘Your competitors,’ she said. ‘Could they be trying to mess things up?’

‘Not really their style. Getting a jump on me, yes. Putting out fake emergency warnings? That would be new territory for them. Not to mention massively illegal and likely to cause loss of life.’

‘What should we do?’ Pedro asked.

‘I think we should do as we’re told. We were going back to the anchorpoint anyway, and if there really is a problem . . . well, we don’t want to be stuck outside in these suits.’

‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ Chiku said.

‘The suits’ active cooling systems draw a lot of power and I don’t
know how long we’d have before the cells need replenishing. You can’t count on rescue coming quickly around here.’

‘I hate this planet,’ Chiku decided.

‘Welcome to Venus. She’s a real bitch.’

‘You sound like my great-grandmother.’

‘We must have had a similar outlook on life. Oh, wait – comms appear to be loosening up. It’s Imris. Do you mind if we go private for a few seconds?’

‘Be our guest,’ Chiku said.

When she was done, June said, ‘There’s a problem with the gondola. As a precaution, they’re evacuating everyone from the surface back to orbit.’

‘Wouldn’t they be safer down here?’ Chiku asked.

‘Depends. If things really do go wrong up there, they won’t be able to send help down to us if we run into trouble. Getting up and out while we can may be the sensible option.’

‘What about Imris – is he going to be all right?’

‘He’s taking as many people with him as he can squeeze aboard
Gulliver.
I’ve told him not to wait for us – we’ll take our chances with the regular evacuees.’

‘What kind of problem are we talking about?’ Chiku asked.

‘Supply shuttle came in at a bad angle, hit some turbulence, managed to sever or tangle part of the rigging. That’s the official picture, anyway. The lift is compromised, but they’re dropping ballast to stabilise the gondola. Should be able to hold altitude for some while.’

‘And that would be how long, exactly?’ Chiku asked.

‘Hours, easily. Plenty of time for the elevator to go up and down a few times, while shuttles ferry people from the gondola back to the orbital stations.’

‘There’s the anchorpoint,’ Pedro said. ‘We’re practically home and dry.’

‘I love the sound of a man tempting fate,’ June said.

Nothing about the anchorpoint hinted that there might be problems at the other end of the tether, forty kilometres overhead. The cable was as taut as when they had descended, the elevator sliding smoothly back up into the flat underbelly of cloud, an ochre mattress pressing down from the sky, stuffed with poison. They were not the only tourists scuttling back to cover, Chiku saw – other rovers and suits were converging on the anchorpoint facility from several directions.

Chiku felt as if her world had slipped a gear. ‘Is this . . . normal?’

‘Is what normal?’ June said.

‘Shuttles crashing into things. Gondolas being evacuated. Particularly right now, just when we happen to be on Venus.’

‘Does it
sound
normal to you?’

‘You said it can’t be your competitors, so is it something to do with us, with the reason we came to Venus?’

‘That would attach rather a lot of significance to your actions, wouldn’t it?’ But June’s tone suggested to Chiku that she had not ruled out that scenario.

There was a queue to enter the rover parking area, suits and vehicles jostling down the ramp, and then they had to wait their turn for the airlocks. Chiku counted the minutes. Years of her life had passed more swiftly. From her perspective, the elevator looked as if it had begun to shoot up the thread faster than before. She wondered how many passengers it could take at a time, how many round trips would be needed. Under normal circumstances, the surface of a planet was the safest place you could be. But these were far from normal circumstances, Chiku reflected.

‘Imris again,’ June said as they eased their machines into the disembarkation point. ‘Evacuation’s proceeding smoothly. They’ve lost a little altitude, but they’re still a long way above crush depth. Be happy that they built that thing with a lot of safety margins.’

‘Any more information on what happened?’ Pedro asked.

‘Picture’s still fuzzy. They’re sending robots out to examine the rigging. They may be able to disentangle things, clear away the shuttle’s wreckage, maybe deploy an emergency balloon to restore optimum buoyancy.’

June asked Chiku to help her unload the storage box from the back of her rover and they carried it into the airlock between them.

It was the biggest airlock Chiku had ever seen, but it could still only handle three Venus suits at a time. The process of atmosphere exchange felt like some over-elaborate ritual. Expelling one hundred atmospheres, initiating toxin purge and temperature cool-down all took time. It had not taken anywhere near as long when they went out.

At last, robots and support staff bustled in to scrub them down and help them out of the suits. It turned out that they were the last to return. No one else was out there now, at least not within range of the anchorpoint. Chiku was the first out of her armour, keeping an eye on the storage box as the robots and technicians fussed over June.

Chiku was still wondering what their new companion was going to look like in the flesh. She might only be half as old again as Chiku, but that extra century was crucial. Chiku had been born into a time when
all the big blunders in prolongation therapy had already been made. The lives of June Wing and Eunice Akinya were expeditions into unmapped territory. All they had had was blind luck and a dogged faith in their own medical intuition, and they had done well to make it this far. Chiku had seen a couple of extremely old persons, somewhere in the solar system, or perhaps on the holoship. One had been all hunched and wispy-haired, and at first she had mistaken them for a tame orangutan. The other, cocooned inside some kind of life-support pram, she had assumed was a baby with some unfortunate congenital affliction. She half-expected June to be even more decrepit. Three hundred and three years – that was a good age for trees.

But here was June, being extracted from her suit, and there had been some mistake, obviously, some mix-up outside, because this was not a three-hundred-year-old organism. This was a normal-looking woman, grey-haired and visibly older than Chiku, but not by so much that she looked as if she had climbed out of a gerontology textbook. This was no relic from the dawn of history who just happened to have lucked her way into the present.

June hopped down from the suiting platform. She wore black trousers, a black blouse with a high collar, a jewelled clasp at her throat her only ornamentation. Her skin was tanned, wrinkled and mottled in mildly interesting ways. Her reflexes looked sharp, and her bones showed no sign of shattering as she touched down in nine-tenths of a gee.

‘So – where were we?’ said June.

‘I was expecting . . .’ But Chiku could think of no way to end that sentence that would not make her sound fatuous. ‘What do you want to do with the box?’

‘I doubt they’ll let us take up valuable space in the elevator, unless we’re the last to go.’ June smoothed down her hair where the helmet had mussed it. She wore it in a short bob that covered her ears. ‘Anyway, it’s locked and tagged,’ she went on. ‘I can come back for it, if the worst happens.’

‘I’m curious what scenario would be “the worst” from your perspective.’

Pedro stepped up before June could reply. ‘We should go through, see how long we have to wait.’ He was focused on working stiffness out of his shoulder and did not see June at first, standing behind Chiku. ‘Oh, hello, June – I mean, Ms Wing. It feels as if we haven’t really met until now.’

‘We haven’t, but I think we can dispense with the pleasantries for now.’

They returned to the main holding area, which was a lot less busy
than it had been earlier. Other than Chiku, Pedro, June and the three service staff who had accompanied them from the suiting area, there were only six other people present. They were watching the elevator’s progress on the panel over the door, tracking its return to the gondola. The emergency system was still repeating the message they had heard earlier, and red bars and panels were flashing in the walls, floor and ceiling.