On the Steel Breeze (3 page)

‘And this would be your business, exactly, because . . .?’

‘You have
always
been our business, Chiku, whether you like it or not. Tell me how you selected your individual paths.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s the one part of your history I can’t get at.’

Six months after the procedure, the three of them had reconvened in Equatorial East Africa. It was a warm day; they decided on a picnic away from the household. They had gone out in three airpods, skimming low and fast until they found a suitable spot. She remembered the airpods resting on the ground and a table set beneath the drowsy shade of a candelabra tree. Upon some impulse they had agreed to select their individual fates by breaking bread. The loaves contained coloured paper lots, the nature of which they had agreed on beforehand. Two of the siblings would embark on different enterprises which entailed a measure of risk. The third sibling would remain in the solar system as a kind of insurance policy, the only requirement being that she live a life of relative safety. With the family’s investments still growing exponentially, the third sibling would not need to work unless she wanted to.

Each secretly desired to be the third sibling. There was no dishonour in that.

Chiku remembered breaking bread three times, from the simultaneous perspective of each woman. After the breaking of the bread they had all undergone the periodic sharing of each other’s memories, and of course those memories all contained the recollection of that day under the tree, seen from a different perspective. The mixture of emotions was in each case distinct, like three photographs that had been tinted in varying hues

For the sibling who broke her bread to reveal a pale-green lot, the expedition to Crucible beckoned. She experienced a sort of dizzy and delighted apprehension, like the sensation of approaching the first peak of a roller coaster. She would be leaving Earth behind and committing to a century and a half within the stone bowels of a holoship. The risks were difficult to assess: the holoships were new, untested, and such a thing had never been attempted before. But the reward at the end of that crossing – the right to set foot on a new world, orbiting a new sun – was incalculable.

For the sibling choosing to travel out into space and find the drifting hulk of the
Winter Queen
– her lot was a pinkish red – the apprehension was sharper and arrived with oboe-like undertones of dread. The risks of this expedition were much more immediately quantifiable. She would be going out alone, pushing a little spacecraft to the outer envelope of its performance. On the other hand, when she returned home with the prize, her debt to posterity would be paid. This was high risk, but maximum reward. And whereas the sibling on the holoship would share her achievement with millions, this triumph would be hers alone.

For the sibling who had to stay at home, the sibling who drew the yellow lot, the feeling was one of relief. She had drawn the easy duty. But at the same time she felt a sharp, brassy stab of resentment that she would be denied the individual glories of Crucible or the reaching of
Winter Queen.
Nonetheless, this was what they had agreed. She had no need to feel ashamed of herself. Any of them could have drawn this lot.

There was a wooden box on the table. As one, their hands moved to open it. They laughed at the awkwardness of this moment, its betrayal of their fixed behaviour. Then by some silent consensus, two of them moved their hands back into their laps and allowed the third – Chiku Yellow – to open the lid.

The box contained an assortment of Akinya heirlooms, which were few in number. There were some pencils that had belonged to Uncle Geoffrey and a pair of scuffed Ray-Ban sunglasses. There was a print of a digital photograph taken of Eunice when she was little, by her own mother Soya, when the two of them had been climate refugees in some kind of transit camp. There was a rare Samsung mobile telephone, a Swiss Army knife, a compass and a thumb-sized digital memory device in the form of a key ring. There was a tattered copy of
Gulliver’s Travels
which appeared to be missing some pages. There were six wooden elephants, each fixed onto a coal-coloured plinth – bull, matriarch, two young adults and two calves. The elephants were divided between the two siblings venturing into space. This was what they had agreed.

After they had divided up the other items, the only thing remaining in the box was a simple wooden charm. It hung from a thin leather strap, a circular talisman of unguessable age. They all knew it had belonged to their great-grandmother, and that it had passed from Eunice to Soya: not the Soya who was Eunice’s mother, but the daughter of Eunice’s former husband Jonathan Beza. Soya had in turn gifted the charm
to Sunday, during her time on Mars, and Sunday had passed the charm on to her daughter, Chiku Akinya.

Now they were three.

‘It should remain here,’ said Chiku Green, the version of Chiku travelling to Crucible.

‘I agree,’ said Chiku Red, the version of Chiku pursuing
Winter Queen.

‘We could cut it into three,’ Chiku Yellow ventured, but that was an idea they had already raised and dismissed on a dozen occasions. The simple fact was that the charm belonged on Earth or near to it. It had no business leaving the solar system.

Chiku Yellow took the charm and slipped the cord around her neck. They were all riding the tramlines of different fates now, but for the first time since the drawing of the lots, she had some tangible sense of her own diminished future. She was not going out there.

‘It began well,’ Mecufi said.

‘Most things do.’

Mecufi popped the oil dispenser back into its pouch next to his seat and picked up his potted narrative of Chiku’s life. ‘The idea was that the three of you would have different experiences but remain essentially the same individual. You would go off and live independent lives, but the readers and scriptors in your heads would hold your memories in strict congruence, like bookkeepers maintaining identical sets of accounts. What one of you experienced, so would the other two. It was meant to be a process of periodic realignment rather than constant synchronisation, but for one reason or another you gradually drifted apart. You remained in contact with each other, but the relationships grew distant, strained. You stopped feeling as if you had much in common. There was a catalysing event, of course—’

‘I thought you had something to tell me,’ Chiku said. That was how she thought of herself, not as Chiku Yellow. The colours were for keeping tabs on her siblings, not herself. She added: ‘If this is all you’ve got, I think we need to go back to Lisbon.’

‘We haven’t got to the ghost yet.’

‘What about it?’

‘One of you is trying to re-establish contact. You have disavowed the readers and scriptors from touching your memories, so your sibling is attempting to reach you by other means. Of course, we know which one of you it has to be.’

‘No prizes for that – there are only two of us left.’

‘I understand why you drifted apart from Chiku Green. The further away she travelled, the longer the time lag became. Weeks and months were almost manageable. But years? Decades? We’re not wired for that. We’re not built to maintain any kind of empathic connection with someone that far from home. Especially when they begin to feel like a rival, someone living a better, more adventurous life. A life with a purpose. When you both had children, you felt a kinship – a sense of shared achievement. Chiku Green had Ndege and Mposi. You had Kanu. But when your own son turned from you—’

‘He didn’t turn from me. You turned him from everything he knew and loved – his family, his world, even his species.’

‘Regardless, his turning brought sorrow. After that, you couldn’t stand to share any part of Chiku Green’s existence. It wasn’t that you hated her – how could you? That would be like hating yourself. But you hated the idea that there was a version of you living a better life. As for your son – I would ask you not to blame us for the choices Kanu made.’

‘I’ll blame you for whatever I feel like.’

Mecufi twisted in his seat. Like a hyperactive child, he appeared easily distracted. ‘Look, we’re coming up on our islands!’

They were somewhere near the Azores. This, though, was no natural island chain. These were vast floating platelets, hexagonal platforms ten kilometres wide, jigsawed together in rafts and archipelagos, forming larger islands with their own angular coastlines, peninsulas, atolls and bays.

There were hundreds of distinct island aggregations in the United Aquatic Nations. The smallest were nimble microstates, formed from only a few linked platelets. Others were supercolonies composed of thousands or tens of thousands of platelets, but always in flux – platelets breaking away, reshuffling, honeycombing into new polities and federations and alliances. There were also breakaway states, independencies, fractious alliances between rogue seasteaders and the land powers. No maps existed for these nervous, jostling territories.

‘Where does he live now?’ she asked. ‘You’d know that, wouldn’t you? Even if Kanu doesn’t want to talk to me?’

‘Your son is still on Earth, but on the other side of Africa, in the Indian Ocean, working with krakens.’

‘You’ve met him, then.’

‘Not personally, no. But I have it on good authority that he leads
a very happy and productive life. There would have been no ill will, Chiku, had you not tried to steer him from us. But you cannot blame him for shunning you now.’

‘And you can’t blame me for wanting to know how my son is doing.’

‘Then you are equal in your blamelessness.’

They were flying lower and slower now. No two of the platelets were exactly alike. Some had been turned over to agriculture, spawning cloud-piercing vertical farms. Others were frogspawned with sealed biomes, replicating specific terrestrial ecosystems. Some were dense with dwellings, tier after tier of them, air-breathing arcologies as thriving and urban as any landbound conurbation. They hauled their own little weather systems. Others were gridded with elegant sun-tracking mirror. Some had become leisure complexes, gravid with casinos and resort hotels. Near the equator, Chiku knew, a few served as the anchorpoints for space elevators. But that was the wave of the past now, yesterday’s technology. From their seasteads, the merfolk were building daunting chimney-like structures that pushed all the way out of the atmosphere, enclosing a column of vacuum. She could see one of those towers now, a glassy chimney that was all but invisible except when she looked directly at it. It rose up and up, into the zenith, never ending. A ship was rising in silence: a tiny ascending spark of solar brightness.

‘Tell me what you know about the ghost.’

‘Chiku Green sent her, after the normal communication channel was blocked. She’s a flock of data, circling the globe, looking for somewhere to land, and such phenomena attract our attention. Do you regret what you did, with the blocking?’

‘I assumed it would be reversible.’

‘And now?’

‘What’s done is done.’

She had asked Quorum Binding to exclude her from the memory synchronisations, effectively isolating herself from her siblings. But then Quorum Binding had gone into administration during the fall of the Descrutinised Zone, and when their creditors stepped in and examined Quorum’s records, they could find no way of undoing Chiku’s request. A vital numeric code had been lost.

‘You’d burnt your last mental bridge.’

‘And your point is?’

‘There’s a chance we can unburn it – allow you to receive and transmit memories again, to resume contact with Chiku Green. And find out exactly what it is she so very desperately wants you to know.’

‘Define “chance”.’

‘Let’s just say that the omens are propitious. But we’ll need a favour from you in return. We’ve lost touch with an old friend, and we think you can help us re-establish contact.’

CHAPTER THREE

An island rose to a false mountaintop with a snowcap of terraced white buildings that lapped over the edge of its hollow summit – balconied hotels and transformation clinics for those preparing to join the merfolk. Between the hotels and clinics, forcing through cracks and crevices like some kind of industrial foam, was a dense eruption of rainforest. Throngs of skittish vermillion birds – parrots or parakeets – swept through the burgeoning canopy. Rainbowed cataracts thundered from beneath the hotels, tonguing out into space, raining down onto rimmed ledges, lakes and lagoons, the foundations for still more hotels and clinics, malls and restaurant districts within the mountain’s hollow core. The flier sank into the false mountain, turning slowly on its axis. It was blazing bright much of the way down the shaft, sunlight tossed from mirror to mirror and splintered off where it was needed. Veils of mist rose from the bases of the cataracts.

‘They keep saying demand for our services will peak,’ Mecufi said. ‘The truth is there’s no end to it. Returning to the seas is the oldest human aspiration – much older, much less easily sated, than the simple and rather childish aspiration to fly. We were never
meant
to fly – that’s the preserve of other species. But we all came from the seas.’

‘Go back a bit further,’ Chiku said, ‘and we all came from primordial slime.’

‘They tell me your great-grandmother was just as cynical when she dealt with our founder. Lin Wei was driven by a vision of human possibility, a grand dream of Panspermianism and the Green Efflorescence. Eunice was driven by no higher calling than the need to plant flags on things.’

‘Your point being?’

‘Let me add another name to the mix. June Wing was an old friend of your family’s, wasn’t she?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Then you’re not much of a historian. June Wing was – is – one of
your father Jitendra’s friends. They worked together on cybernetics problems. Like your father, June Wing is still alive. She’s busy beetling around the solar system, collecting junk for a museum.’

‘And this is relevant because?’

‘June Wing, we believe, has a line of contact with Lin Wei – or Arethusa, as she’s taken to calling herself. We would very much like to speak with Arethusa, our founder. But Arethusa won’t return our calls and June Wing isn’t exactly in a hurry to speak to us, either. But at least we know where June Wing is and what she’s doing. Now all we need is for someone June trusts to speak to her on our behalf. That’s where you come in.’