On the Steel Breeze (25 page)

‘Indeed. You have communicated with the robot?’

‘Yes. Only on a couple of occasions, but it was enough to get the picture.’

‘June spoke of it, but for obvious reasons I never expected to meet anyone who had actually
encountered
it. Or perhaps I should say
her.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Chiku said, ‘the construct didn’t remember much about Arachne, or indeed about June, beyond the fact that it was vitally important I speak to her as soon as possible. Well, I did that, and now I’m here, but I’m none the wiser. Did she tell you the whole story, Imris?’

‘Everything she deemed important.’

‘The stuff about Crucible, about how it might not be what we’re expecting?’

‘She shared some theories, nothing concrete.’

Chiku touched her head, echoing Kwami’s earlier gesture. ‘I have a device in my head installed by Quorum Binding. It links me to my counterparts. Or counterpart, now.’

Kwami gave a precise little nod. ‘I am aware of such practices. They were very commonplace during the early years of the holoships.’

‘I’m here now because the version of me on
Zanzibar
wanted this version to make contact with June. Chiku Green sent me her memories . . . they were scripted into my head, forcing me to act. Now I need to send my memories back to
Zanzibar,
so that Chiku Green can decide how to act on them.’

‘Can’t you simply transmit the information as a message, the normal way?’ Pedro asked.

‘No – this has to be for my ears only. For Chiku Green’s ears, I mean. If it becomes widespread knowledge, it’ll rip
Zanzibar
apart.’

‘You are right to be cautious,’ said Imris. ‘The normal message protocols between here and
Zanzibar
. . . I could not guarantee that they are immune to interception by Arachne. And that’s before we consider the possibility of human eavesdropping as the signals are relayed along the caravan.’

‘What’s to say the same won’t happen to her memories?’ Pedro asked.

‘It might, but the level of encryption will be significantly higher than for normal traffic – that’s why you needed the merfolk to unlock the memories in the first place.’

‘So you know about that,’ Chiku said.

‘The problem now is that Arachne will be paying particular attention to you, Miss Akinya, concentrating her resources against your efforts.’

‘She could have killed me when the Providers came.’

‘Yes, but such a thing would have been difficult to explain as an accidental death. Believe me, Arachne is old and wily enough to be adept at covering her tracks.’

‘But she’ll get us in the end, won’t she?’ Pedro asked. ‘If she’s so keen to protect herself, she’s bound to, right? And we can’t tell anyone about her because they’d either not believe us or there’d be mass panic and more deaths.’

‘We are in something of a bind,’ Kwami admitted, with magnificent understatement.

‘Dangerous or not, I still have to act,’ Chiku said. ‘I’ve got to tell Chiku Green about Crucible. Even if I can’t tell the people on the holoship
what’s really there, surely it’s better for them to know they’re being lied to, isn’t it?’

‘I can offer you an alternative that you might find acceptable,’ Kwami said. ‘You mentioned Arethusa.’

‘Yes,’ Chiku said. ‘June said we had to speak to her, too.’

‘Can you make that happen?’ Pedro asked.

‘I can. But first we have to collect something from Mars. We shall not be staying long, of course – or getting too close.’

‘I hope not,’ Chiku said.

Phobos and Deimos had been important staging points in the exploration of the solar system since the infancy of the space age. Outposts had been built on both moons, fuel depots and teleoperation camps offering way stations before the descent to the Martian surface. Eunice Akinya had lived on Phobos for months, trapped there until the weather changed. A century later, Chiku’s mother had set her own footprints on the misshapen little moon. By that time, one of the largest craters – Stickney – had become the infection site for a major outbreak of hotels and deep-space servicing facilities. As
Gulliver
closed in on final approach, Chiku found it difficult to believe that Phobos had ever been a
thing,
a place made by nature. The moon was gone now, smothered under a fester of human habitation. Neon-scribbled structures wrapped it from pole to pole – hotels and casinos and malls, pleasure domes and observation platforms. It was like a dream of a city, wrapped around itself.

‘How safe is it down there?’ Chiku asked. ‘If Arachne could get to us on Venus, she can easily reach us here.’

‘Faking an accident on Venus, where many things go wrong as a matter of course, is not the same as faking an accident around Mars.’

‘I hope you’re right about that, Imris.’

‘I am right about most things.’ He said this without a trace of irony. ‘One more thing, Chiku: the man we are meeting, Victor Gallicean, is someone we can trust. He has been a very good and loyal friend over the years, and has played a great part in helping June assemble the museum. But he knows nothing of Arachne, and it would be best not to mention her.’

They docked, cleared immigration and moved through bright warrens of commerce and glitz. Chiku glimpsed Mars occasionally, through a picture window, this prize that was close enough to touch. It transpired that June had already arranged this meeting long before her misadventures on Venus. They met Victor Gallicean, an ‘extraction specialist’,
in the lobby of a hotel. The structure was spun up to half a gee and the landscape scrolled past constantly outside the windows. Gallicean turned out to be an ogre of a man with a faintly piratical demeanour, his face a map of interesting scars and lesions. He embraced Imris Kwami, then shook hands with Chiku and Pedro.

‘I am very sorry to hear the news, Imris. I didn’t believe it at first. After all this time, something as stupid as that ended June Wing? A ridiculous accident, on Venus? I mean, really.’

‘There is no such thing as a good way to go when you are three hundred and three years old,’ Kwami said sagely.

‘If she hadn’t given up her suit, Pedro or I might not be here,’ Chiku said.

‘Had you known her long?’ Gallicean asked.

‘No time at all, really, but there’s a connection with my family. June used to know my mother and father, back when they were all living on the Moon.’

‘Which would make you one of
those
Akinyas, not just any old Akinya.’

‘Yes,’ Chiku said. ‘But don’t hold it against me, will you?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ Gallicean had a bushy black beard, which presumably served to cover up yet more blemishes, and a mop of unruly black hair. A plain gold earring pierced one cratered lobe. His clothes ran to the ostentatious. ‘Look, let’s not stand around like fools. There’s a pretty good bar at the other end of Phobos – we should drink ourselves into an absolute stupor, in her memory.’

‘Except I do not drink,’ Imris Kwami said.

‘No, but you have a remarkable tolerance for the drunkenness of others.’

‘This is true.’

‘Plus you know more June stories than any other person alive. With the possible exception of me.’

‘This is also true.’

Wormlike trains burrowed through the moon. They were soon inside the bar, seated at a table with a commanding view of the lit face of Mars. The only gravity here was the feeble pull provided by Phobos itself, but the drinks arrived in exquisite squeezebulbs, and there were bracelets and epidermal patches for those unaccustomed to near-weightlessness. Pedro and Chiku ordered a couple of patches, then buckled into padded observation chairs.

‘He’s far too modest to brag about it,’ Kwami said, ‘but our friend Victor here is one of the very few people to have set foot on Mars in
the last fifty years – on several occasions, in fact. How many is it now, Victor? Four?’

‘Six,’ Gallicean said, with a cough. ‘Actually, seven.’

‘I’m surprised anyone goes down to Mars these days,’ Chiku said.

‘It’s all unofficial and uninsured,’ Gallicean said. ‘We go down fast, pick our landing sites very carefully and don’t hang around to sniff the daisies – on my most recent trip, I was down there under eight minutes. My
cumulative
Martian surface time over my entire career as an extraction specialist is still less than an hour.’ He sniffed, scratching at his nose. ‘Never saw the place in the old days. Rather regret that now.’

‘I’ve heard about thrill-seekers going after an adrenalin rush,’ Pedro said.

‘Fools and knaves,’ Gallicean replied, his features settling into an expression of unbridled contempt. ‘They drop something on the surface, like a bone. Then, dogs that they are, they race each other to see who can get to it first, ahead of the machines, and then return to orbit. There’s money and prestige involved, of course – why else would they debase themselves?’

‘Victor Gallicean considers such activities beneath him,’ Kwami said, as if the subject of his statement were not sitting directly opposite him.

‘Yes, he does,’ Gallicean said firmly. ‘I face comparable risks, but I do so for a purpose beyond my own personal glorification.’

It was cloudless and windless on Mars, so they could see all the way down to the surface without difficulty. By some fluke, they were looking down on the place where it all began – the Tharsis ridge, three shield volcanoes laid out in a chain like bullet-holes, and to the east the spider-web fracturing of the Valles Marineris canyon system, scarring so deep that even from orbit Chiku could see the contrasting elevations. Where the machines had been busy, their activities had left visible traces on the surface, as if Mars had been subject to a new and sudden epoch of weathering. There were bright new craters, blasted by weapons, and the notches and zigzags of trenches dug for fortification. Elsewhere, the machines’ tracks were stranger and more transient. Geometric patterns flickered across the dust, squares and clusters of squares hundreds of kilometres across. Sometimes these formations met other clusters of squares and formed battle fronts, arcing lines, continental in scale, where geometries tussled and ruptured. These patterns bloomed in a day and faded overnight, the evidence of subterranean processes beyond the reach of orbital sensors. More and more, the machines were keeping their secrets to themselves.

Defence platforms circled Mars, nervously vigilant against any
attempt the machines might make to reach space.

‘So what,’ Pedro said, ‘does an extraction specialist actually extract?’

‘Different things for different clients, and not just from Mars. I’ve worked all over the system. For our dear friend June, it has usually involved robotics.’

‘The whole of Mars involves robotics,’ Chiku said.

‘We are speaking now of a much earlier phase of robotic activity. Doubtless Imris has spoken of the museum? For years, June has been bent on collecting the surviving relics of the dawn of robotic exploration, where such recovery is feasible. Landers, probes, rovers. It’s surprising how many of these things were still lying around when she began her work.’

‘It’s why she came to Venus,’ Chiku said, remembering the relic they’d abandoned in the anchorpoint.

‘At her time of life,’ Gallicean replied, ‘she was probably unwise to take on so much of the work. But would she listen?’

‘I argued against it as best I could,’ Kwami said.

Gallicean fidgeted in his chair, adjusting the restraint straps. ‘This may be indelicate, Imris, but it’s better said now than later or not at all. Are there plans for the continuation of the museum?’

A new face of Mars was turning slowly into view as Phobos orbited. On the horizon’s bow, mysterious dust plumes curled into the high, thin reaches of the atmosphere. The night face, which would be visible soon, was often alive with patterns of lights, pastel blues and greens, shining up from the ground or floating in the air. No one really had a clue about what the machines were doing down there.

‘Matters are in hand,’ Kwami said.

‘Well, that’s as clear as mud,’ Gallicean said.

‘You know as well as I do that she was in no hurry to complete the project – she never set a date for the opening, and she left no instructions regarding how the museum would function once she deemed the collection ready for visitors. And there are still many artefacts around the system still to be gathered.’

‘Forgive my inquisitiveness,’ Gallicean said, lifting his squeezebulb in an apologetic toast. ‘It was rude of me to talk business.’

‘Not at all,’ Kwami said. ‘But as you raised the topic – your trip was, I trust, successful?’

‘I got what you sent me to find. A few dents and scratches, but nothing unexpected after so long down there. I’m just sorry she isn’t here to see it herself.’

‘What did you extract?’ Chiku asked.

‘A rover. Indian Space Agency, mid-2030s. It’s difficult to believe, I know, but there are still things wandering around on Mars that by some great good fortune have not yet been picked apart by the Evolvarium. In some cases, it appears to have
allowed them to live.
We’ll never know for sure, but it’s almost as if the ’varium’s taking pity on them, or showing respect to a few older, more venerable machines. The ISA rover has experienced some contamination, some degree of upgrading and evolution, but June would have been expecting that.’

‘She’d have been very grateful,’ Kwami said. ‘I thank you on her behalf for the risks you took.’

‘Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves.’ He saluted this observation with a sip from his squeezebulb, nodding in immodest self-approval.

‘Do you think we’ll ever go back?’ Pedro asked. ‘To Mars, I mean. Or is it gone for good?’

‘It’s not our world now. And what would be the point, anyway? I’d far rather sit things out and see what happens. The Evolvarium is moving through distinct developmental phases. It started with the blood-red Darwinian survival struggle, every creature for itself, and now we’re seeing an organisational shift to something more complex. Cooperative alliances, hints of machine altruism – the emergence, perhaps, of machine statehood, the onset of a global civilisation of competing factions. There’s no telling what Mars will be like when they start getting
really
clever. We may need to send down ambassadors!’