On the Steel Breeze (27 page)

They went deeper, travelling via free-fall drop shafts, elevators, escalators, even a brisk train ride through an area of Hyperion not yet hollowed out for the benefit of artists.

‘We must be a long way in by now,’ Chiku said.

‘Approaching the centre of gravity,’ Gleb said. ‘This is where Arethusa spends most of her days.’

‘I know your name – or I think I do, anyway. I’ve been doing some research into my family, writing a history. Or I was, before all this blew up.’ There was also, of course, the memory of Chiku Yellow’s conversations with Eunice, the talk of the elephants.

‘I knew your mother,’ Gleb said pleasantly. ‘And your father, and later your uncle. We were good friends.’

‘Did you meet on the Moon?’

‘Indeed. We ran a sort of underground zoo in the Descrutinised Zone. We, as in Chama and I.’

The fog was gradually lifting from her memory. ‘Chama is your husband.’

‘Was,’ Gleb corrected gently. ‘Chama died about a century ago.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s fine, Chiku.’ Gleb was smiling at her awkwardness. ‘We had a very long and happy life together. Children, everything. More memories than a head can hold. And I’ve been happy since.’

‘It’s good to meet you,’ she said. The four of them – Imris Kwami, Chiku, Pedro and their host – were the train’s only passengers. ‘You mentioned you were involved with a zoo – is that the one that had something to do with the dwarf elephants?’

‘Goodness, that really is ancient history.’

‘From what I remember, those were the first elephants to reach space.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Were you also involved in another project involving elephants?’

He gave her a polite but evasive smile. ‘You’ll have to be more specific.’

‘The creation of elephants with enhanced cognitive faculties. Elephants that can use complex tools. Elephants with language.’

The silence that followed seemed to swallow eternities. The train swerved and dived down a blue gullet. Gleb’s expression was tight, his face masklike. Chiku wondered if she had made some dire miscalculation, or whether Eunice had given her false information.

‘How do you know about that?’ he asked eventually.

‘It’s a little involved.’

‘Try me.’

‘I’ve seen them – the Tantors, if that’s the name you know them by.’

‘How can you have
seen
them?’

‘I didn’t, exactly. But there’s a version of me aboard the ship that’s carrying them.’

‘When did you see them?’

‘Feels like this version of a few days, but it was actually about twenty years ago, if you take the time lag into account.’

‘But within the last century?’

‘Yes. I saw them several times before sending my memories back to Earth.’

‘Then they’re alive. I mean, as far as you know.’

‘They’re alive and they’re magnificent. They spoke to me, Gleb. She told me their names . . . Dreadnought, Aphrodite . . . but there were more, many more. An entire self-sustaining herd.’

‘She. You said “she”.’

‘You know exactly what happened, don’t you? How Eunice and the Tantors got aboard?’

The mask slipped. There was that smile again, and a watery quality to his eyes. ‘Some of it, not all. It was a difficult business, done in a hurry, and none of us knew all the details. But they’re well? And she’s well? After all this time? You’re not lying, could you? You’d have to know about the Tantors to lie about them, and then why would you lie?’

‘They’re doing well, Gleb. Eunice was . . . damaged, I suppose, by whatever forced her into hiding, but she’s managed to compensate. She was adamant that I had to visit Arethusa. I don’t know what the future holds for Eunice and the herd – there are difficult times ahead, that’s for sure. But they’ve made it this far, which is something, don’t you think?’

‘You’re right, Chiku, that’s definitely something. You have made me very happy.’

‘I wish you could have seen them.’

‘You can tell me about them later. There will be time, I’m sure.’

‘What you and Chama did back then . . . whatever risks you took, it was worth it. And I’ll tell you everything, I promise.’

Gleb squeezed her hand. He was crying, but appeared unembarrassed by it. Then she felt tears well up in her own eyes, and she cried with him. She had so much on her mind, so many fears, but she was glad to have brought this man some good news.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Eventually the train brought them to Hyperion’s hollow heart. The moon had been cored deliberately by linking together numerous natural inclusions, and then smoothing over and armouring the walls.

The train detached from its rails and became a tiny independent spacecraft, drifting into the void.

The void contained two things. In the middle was a translucent sphere of dark-blue glass several tens of metres across. Etched on the surface of the glass and glowing with a gentle white light was a vastly complex pattern of looping lines and knots. Floating off to one side of the sphere was a darker form, elongated and metallic, which Chiku at first took to be a spaceship, imprisoned in the moon’s heart.

But it was not a ship. The form, rounded at the front, gradually broadened along its flexing, undulating length. A pair of flippers was positioned about halfway between the front and the middle, beyond which the form began to narrow and taper, culminating in what was unmistakably a fluke, shaped like the crescent moon, at the other end. As the thing adjusted its position, flippers paddling vacuum, Chiku realised that she was looking at a spacesuit designed for a whale.

‘Arethusa,’ Gleb announced. ‘Your guests have arrived, if you can bear to be drawn away from your work for a little while.’

The voice that replied was soft, feminine. It sounded as though it belonged not to a whale, but to a small Chinese girl with an aptitude for scholarship.

‘This is the one with a strange new interest in Crucible?’

‘June Wing believed her,’ Kwami said. ‘That is reason enough for me to trust her.’

‘She’s met Eunice and the Tantors,’ Gleb added.

‘Met?’

‘She has a counterpart on the holoship – they’ve exchanged memories.’

‘Fascinating. And thank you, Gleb, for taking care of them. I didn’t
mean to get so engrossed. Bring them closer, will you? But beware of the beam – we don’t want anyone getting sliced into sections.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

Following Gleb’s directions, they veered closer to Arethusa. Chiku was reminded of a piece of early space age film footage she had seen of a long-spined, round-headed spaceship disgorging a tiny spherical extravehicular module, like a bauble with claws. She felt as vulnerable near Arethusa as the astronaut in that module must have felt – so much mass, so little protection. When one of the flippers twitched, she flinched instinctively against the expected backwash as articulated armour slid over itself in an ingenious, pressure-tight configuration. But of course there was no water, just a near-vacuum salted with some noble gases.

‘You are Chiku, of course, and Pedro. Were you with her on Venus when she died?’

‘Nearby,’ Chiku said.

‘How sorry I am to learn of it, Imris. She meant a lot to both of us. I watched what you did with the bodies. When she reaches the rings, she’ll make her mark.’

‘I think she already made her mark,’ Imris said. ‘I also think she was murdered.’

‘I agree. She communicated her concerns to me on many occasions. And I shared mine with her, of course. We both had our coping strategies. This was mine . . . sanctuary, secrecy . . . immersion in my art. Do you like the sphere?’

‘It’s very pretty,’ Chiku said.

‘I’m very pleased with it. The globe’s centre is
precisely
co-aligned with Hyperion’s centre of mass. The mismatch is never more than millimetres, even with the coming and going of spaceships and people to spoil our little moon’s equilibrium. You’re aware of our chaotic dynamics. Hyperion tumbles quite unpredictably as Titan and the other moons push and pull on it. There’s a value in chaos theory, a number called the Lyapunov exponent, which tells you how to predict a chaotic system’s boundary – its knowledge horizon, if you like. Hyperion’s Lyapunov exponent is just forty days – we can’t predict this moon’s motion beyond the next forty days. That’s the maximum limit of our foreknowledge! If my life depended on this moon’s motion, I would still not be able to say a word about its state beyond forty days.’

‘What’s this beam you mentioned?’ Chiku said.

‘A laser, projecting from the wall of the enclosing chamber. You can’t
see it, of course, because we’re in vacuum. Also, its focus is very tight. Where it touches the blue sphere, it etches a pit in the glass, which shows up as a white discolouration. Except it’s never a pit, because the laser is fixed to the chamber and the chamber is always moving, always turning one way or another, because of Titan’s torque. So the laser etches a track, a memory in glass of Hyperion’s history.

Chiku studied the blue globe with renewed attention. The white lines, she understood now, were all one line – a groove that encoded Hyperion’s movements over some lengthy interval. The line looped all over the globe, like a scribble of wool. There were bands and patches where the white line had come back over and over again, almost retracing itself. And if it did indeed retrace itself, it would only be for some short distance, before the chaotic uncertainties built up and sent it off on a deviant trajectory. Less than forty days. Parts of the sphere were almost totally white. Equally, there were regions where the line had never travelled – seas and inlets of blue, untrammelled by the laser’s crossing.

‘When I’m faced with a difficult decision,’ Arethusa said, ‘I sometimes let the moon decide for me. I select an area of the sphere and let Hyperion decide whether or not it etches the line through that part. I abdicate my life to chance.’

‘Why would you do that?’ Chiku asked.

‘To outfox Arachne. Chance trumps her every time. She may be an artilect, and a very clever one, but she still can’t beat Lyapunov.’

‘She’s the reason we’re here,’ Chiku said.

‘June and I both knew that Arachne would act to protect herself if she felt threatened. June was always very careful, but she must have made some mistake and drawn too much attention to herself.’

‘Perhaps it was my fault,’ Chiku said. And the possibility of this, now that she had voiced it, sounded entirely likely to her. ‘When I got the new memories, I started making enquiries, especially aboard the loop-liner on our way to Venus. I wanted to know more about June Wing, and about Arachne. At the time they were just innocent data searches via the public nets.’

‘I’m sure you acted as prudently as you could, given what you knew at the time.’

‘That’s the problem – there’s still so much I don’t know.’

‘I can clarify the situation, perhaps, make plain the direness of our predicament, but I’m not sure a solution is within our reach. It lies beyond our Lyapunov horizon, at the very least.’

‘Tell me what you know.’

‘Tell me what
you
know, to begin with. Starting with Ocular.’

‘I don’t know much. Arachne was built . . . created . . . to run the instrument, to collate its data. It detected Crucible, and the alien structure on the surface of that planet, but June told me all that’s a mirage.’

‘Not all of it. The planet orbiting Sixty-One Virginis f is quite real, and its surface conditions are sufficiently Earthlike to support human life. All that was verified by independent observation long ago. The holoships aren’t going to arrive around a lump of radiation-blasted rubble, or no planet at all. But Mandala . . . that’s a lot more debatable.’

‘But we’ve also sent holoships to other solar systems,’ Pedro said.

‘That’s true, but the motivating impulse for this entire wave of interstellar exploration was Mandala. Without that discovery, the Chibesa Principle probably wouldn’t have been disclosed for decades to come. Mandala set this whole thing in motion.’

Chiku sighed. ‘So that’s it, then. Mandala isn’t real, and the Providers we sent to Crucible are lying to us about it.’

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ Arethusa said. ‘The Providers are transmitting false data – there’s no doubt about that – but Mandala isn’t part of the lie. Mandala exists.’

‘How can you know all this?’ Pedro cut in. ‘Chiku’s had these memories for a few days and she’s been rushing around trying to learn what she can and make sense of it all . . . but it’s as if you and June have been sitting on this knowledge all along.’

‘It’s one thing to suspect a lie, but quite another to know what is being concealed. Getting to the bottom of
that
has just cost June Wing her life.’

‘I thought she was putting together a museum,’ Chiku said.

‘That was just a cover for her activities. Racing around the solar system hunting for relics provided June with the excuse she needed to go about her real work.’

‘Which was?’ Pedro asked.

‘I’ll answer that, but you need to know a little about Ocular to begin with. Before the instrument came online, Eunice and I inserted a blind spot in its architecture. Arachne is – or was – the spider at the centre of the web, collating data sent back from the individual elements of the Ocular array. That’s all
she
knew. But we were sensible enough not to put all our faith in an artilect, and as a sanity check, once in a very great while, each of those elements was also programmed to squirt raw data packets somewhere else.’

‘Anywhere in particular?’ asked Chiku.

‘To anything Arachne wouldn’t notice that could store those data
packets. Half-forgotten networks, addressing dormant or semi-derelict archives. Anything with a memory. Moribund offshore bank accounts, floating in the asteroid belt. Deep-space network routers, still up and running. Military encryption devices. Space probes and landers with a trickle of electrical power still running through their circuits. Dead astronauts, drifting through space, but whose spacesuits still had some functionality. They weren’t our only fail-safes, but they gave June a pretext for the rest of her activities. Were we being unreasonably cautious – paranoid, even? It’s entirely possible.’