On the Steel Breeze (30 page)

‘The machines look after her very well,’ Jitendra said, speaking softly behind Chiku. ‘Really, though, there isn’t much that needs doing. They move her sometimes, to prevent bed-sores. They maintain her muscle tone and bone density. They adjust her drips and catheters. They alert me if there’s a change in her state of consciousness.’

‘Can I be alone with her for a moment, Father?’

‘Of course, Chiku.’ He retreated. She heard the whirr of some clockwork
thing being wound up, like an insect repeating the same idiot sound.

Chiku moved to Sunday’s bedside. She thought of the frozen form of Eunice, the body she could not touch. This time she allowed her robot hand to settle onto Sunday’s brow. It was warm, furious with calculation. It was pointless being angry with her mother. She had not gone looking for this obsession. It had found her, ambushed her. Like Jitendra said, it had caught her in its coils.

But she could do something. She could struggle, fight her way back to sanity.

Why didn’t she?

‘I’ve given something to Jitendra,’ Chiku said. ‘I want you to look at it. I know you can hear me. It’s connected to this quest of yours anyway, so I doubt you’ll need much persuasion. I want to know what you think of it. I think it’s really important. Maybe you can make some sense of it. But you can only talk to Jitendra about it. Promise me that, won’t you?’

Not that she needed a promise. The miracle was Sunday Akinya speaking to anyone. Of course Jitendra would be the first to hear if she had something to say.

‘I can’t stay,’ Chiku said, withdrawing her hand. ‘I’ve got myself into some kind of trouble. It’s bigger than me, maybe bigger than the family. In a day or so I’m going to be back on Earth, going back to Africa. Wish me well, won’t you?’

Sunday stirred. Her lips moved, her eyelids fluttered. Then she was back to her repose.

As she took her leave of Jitendra, Chiku said, ‘I think she heard me.’

He smiled at her, said, ‘That’s nice,’and she understood that while he might have believed what she said, he did not for a moment think that she had had the least effect on Sunday.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

From his command seat, with no more fuss than if he was specifying the strength of his chai, Imris Kwami bent a microphone to his lips and said: ‘Civil vehicle
Gulliver,
registration KKR292G7, heavy inbound from Saturn, requesting vectors for transatmospheric insertion, entry locus East Equatorial Sector, Pan-African Union. Please authorise.’

A voice, doubtless synthesised, came back with a friendly but authoritative: ‘You have approach clearance,
Gulliver.
Proceed on appended vectors and level out for horizontal flight above twenty kilometres. Good luck and safe re-entry.’

‘Thank you,’ Kwami said, before pushing aside the microphone. Then, to his passengers: ‘Buckle up, my friends.’

The ship did clever things to itself, making wings and control surfaces appear from the seamless hull. They made a controlled descent, slowing down long before they began to feel the resistance of atmosphere. This was no fiery re-entry, for it would have been inexcusably bad manners to impart heat into an ecosystem that was doing its level best to cool down again. And then they were flying, scrolling east over day-lit Africa. Chiku eased out of her seat and wandered from one side of the ship to the other, scouting for landmarks. Her eye wandered restlessly. She had not been here often enough, she thought. She should have felt some intense genetic connection, but this landscape was as alien to her as the far side of the Moon would have been to her distant ancestors.

But there, that mirror-like glimmer – was that Lake Tanganyika or Lake Victoria? Too far north for Lake Malawi, she thought, unless her mental geography was hopelessly scrambled. Victoria, perhaps. It was huge, whatever it was. Even at altitude she could see only the nearest shore, hemmed by a scratchy margin of coastal towns and beach resorts – angular crystalline projections, domes piled upon domes, like a froth of soap bubbles. Beyond the shoreline developments, the land was a vivid irrigated green laid down in broad parallel brushstrokes.
There were towns and villages inland from the lake as well, linked by a spider-web of surface roads. Harvester dirigibles, fat as bees, bumbled between stack farms while airpods hazed the air like pollen. Thickets of green woodland, areas of tawny cultivation, the regimented shimmer of mirror arrays and the giraffe-necked spires of solar towers, taller even than the production stacks. There were easier ways of generating energy now, but some of these sun farms were family concerns going back generations. People tended them out of a sense of fond obligation.

Soon they were west of the lake, over the vast, open Serengeti. Imris Kwami had dropped them subsonic by then, which permitted much lower flight. Pedro, who had never been to Africa – as far as Chiku knew, at any rate – appeared captivated. Without using the aug or optical magnification, he had already spotted dozens of animals, many different species. The rains would come soon, but the waterholes were still quite low and those were the places to look for wildlife.

‘Lions!’ Pedro exclaimed, followed by a doubtful: ‘I think. So hard to get a sense of scale up here. Maybe they were hyenas. You have hyenas, don’t you?’

‘We have lots of things,’ Chiku said, as if she was taking personal ownership of the Serengeti.

‘I think they were lions.’

‘Then they were lions.’

Soon they could see Kilimanjaro, heat-and distance-hazed at its base, much sharper and closer at its summit, as if the mountain were leaning in, beckoning them closer. Still hundreds of kilometres away, even now. They owed so much to that mountain, the Akinyas. Eunice had used it as a fulcrum to move worlds.

‘Did you come here often as a child?’ Pedro asked.

‘Not really. Once or twice, to see Uncle Geoffrey. When I was young, it felt like the edge of civilisation out here. Growing up on the Moon, I couldn’t cope with the scale – Africa is so huge! And the spaces between things, even then . . . at night it felt like there was no one else anywhere near the household for thousands of kilometres. Just this little island of humanity surrounded by a dark, swallowing emptiness, like interstellar space. It wasn’t, of course.’ And Chiku pointed towards the far horizon. ‘There have always been other towns and communities, and of course the Masai – they’ll always be here, long after we’ve gone. Masai and elephants. The rest is dust.’

‘Morbid.’

‘Realistic.’

Kwami, who had been manually piloting, said, ‘We will overfly the household then set down nearby. I will try to find some ground where we will not start a fire or incinerate too many animals.’

‘If you could,’ Chiku said.

‘Does anyone live here now?’ Pedro asked. ‘At the household, I mean.’

‘Not sure. Haven’t been back in a long while. They won’t have let the place go to ruin, though.’

‘You hope.’

Of course they haven’t let it go to ruin,
Chiku thought. But she was misremembering again. She was thinking of the duplicate of the household aboard
Zanzibar,
the place where Chiku Green went to work.

‘There it is, I think,’ she said, pointing ahead.

Pedro craned forward. They were looking through patches of
Gullive’s
hull, which it helpfully made transparent depending on the direction of their gaze. ‘Doesn’t look like much.’

‘Never said it was the Taj Mahal.’

The household was shaped like an A, two long wings joined at their apex and a short connecting wing bridging the gap between the two. This A-shaped geometry reiterated itself at increasingly larger scales from the building out to the perimeter wall – in the lawns and formal grounds, the patios, swimming pools and tennis courts, the lay-outs of the airpod parking areas. At first, sweeping overhead, Chiku saw no obvious signs of neglect. The walls were as white as she remembered, the decorative roof tiles gleaming with a blue lustre as it if had recently rained. There was no one about, but in the heat of an African afternoon that was not in itself unusual. Indeed, during her earlier visits, the household had always had a deserted and slightly forbidding feel to it. Sometimes it had just been her, Uncle Geoffrey, one or two caretaker staff and a number of janitor robots.

As Kwami brought them around again on a second pass, she began to have misgivings. The walls were white because they were self-repairing, not because someone had taken the trouble to keep them clean. Same with the roof. Elsewhere, the evidence of decay was unignorable. Weeds had conquered the flower-beds. The swimming pools were drained down to their tiles and covered with a layer of dirt and dead leaves. Overgrowth had begun to encroach through archways and porticos. The place was not a ruin, not yet – it all looked structurally sound – but it did not appear to be lived-in or much loved.

‘I should have come back before this,’ she mouthed, more to herself than anyone else. She had always known that the upkeep of the household was the collective responsibility of all Akinyas, but with that
knowledge had come the tacit belief that the upkeep could always be trusted to someone else.

What the hell had they been up to, allowing the place to get like this?

‘I will not risk landing so close to the wall,’ Kwami said, indicating one of the airpod areas. ‘There is a suitable site a little further out. You will not object to a short walk back to the household?’

‘It’ll be good to stretch our legs,’ Chiku said, returning to her seat.

Gulliver
had settled into a hover mode, using ducted thrust to keep itself aloft. The trees around the edge of the household cowered in the downdraught. The spacecraft slid sideways, like a puck on ice, then dropped its talon-like undercarriage and began to lower itself towards the ground. Chiku wondered how long they would need to be here. She wanted to be done with all this.

Something shot them out of the sky.

It all happened stupidly quickly. First, an alarm, some kind of imminent collision alert. Then a lurch, bone-breakingly violent, as
Gulliver
tried to sidestep whatever was about to hit it. Then the impact itself, harder still than the lurch, and the spacecraft was yawing badly, losing vectored thrust on one side of its hull. Multiple alarms joined the first. Kwami, who was still on manual control, did his best to stabilise their hover but the damage had been done.
Gulliver,
wounded now, could not keep itself aloft. Something else hit them.
Gulliver
pitched again, the yaw worsened, and then there was the worst impact of all, the one between hull and ground, and they were down, crashed, fallen to Earth.

The alarms kept ringing. The hull was resting at an angle, nearly on its side. It was lucky that Pedro and Chiku had both taken to their seats again for landing or the crash would almost certainly have killed them.

‘What happened?’ Chiku managed, barely able to believe that only a few moments ago her sole concern had been getting in and out of the household.

‘We have been attacked,’ Kwami said, extricating himself from his control seat – like theirs, it had cushioned and padded him during the impact. ‘And now we must leave, because whatever attacked us is still out there.’

‘How? What?’ Pedro was asking.

‘Some kind of weapon. Please, young sir,’ Kwami was already at the nearest airlock, equalising pressure, ‘make all haste. There is no safety here, if we can be shot out of the sky.’

‘A weapon,’ Pedro repeated dutifully, as if this was some kind of memory game. ‘There are no
weapons,
Imris. Nothing like that here.’

‘Nonetheless, we have just been shot down.’

‘I think he means it,’ Chiku said, though her own head was fizzing with the frank impossibility of this. An anti-spaceship weapon, something powerful enough to disable
Gulliver
– you might find something like that out around Hyperion, but this was
Earth,
for pity’s sake. You could not raise a fist to someone on Earth, much less fire an
antispaceship weapon
at them.

The airlock gasped open, inner and outer doors sliding back simultaneously, and although she was still within the hull, the heat of the day hit Chiku with an almost belligerent forcefulness. Kwami scrambled through and hopped to the ground, keeping his long frame bent and eyeing their surroundings with sharp suspicion. ‘Something is out there,’ he said. ‘We cannot remain in the open. Perhaps we can make it to the household.’

‘Perhaps?’ asked Pedro.

Chiku hauled herself up and through the tilted airlock, hands on the rim of the outer door. The hull, still hot from hypersonic flight, burnt her fingertips. She bit down on the pain and squeezed out into blazing daylight. Kwami helped her descend – it was a longer drop than he had made it look. She hit the dust, knees buckling, and Kwami urged her to stoop lower. ‘Quickly, young sir.’

Pedro came out, face flushed, eyes wide with fear and incomprehension.

‘This can’t be happening, Imris. Venus was bad enough, but to be shot at here—’

‘We must move,’ Kwami said.

‘What do you think it is?’ Chiku asked, as the three of them began to make a stooping run in the direction of the household’s perimeter wall. ‘Didn’t anything show up as you came in?’

‘This is Earth, young miss. One cannot go jumping at every shadow.’

Chiku looked back at the downed spacecraft. Two ugly craters marred the exposed underside. Some energy pulse or projectile had punched all the way through the hull into the tender gristle of subsystems beneath its skin.

‘Gulliver
found many concealed objects in the area, buried beneath the surface. The underground workings of your household, the course of the ballistic launcher . . . many relics and items of unknown origin. People have been living here for thousands of years. Under the circumstances,
Gulliver
could not easily discriminate between the innocent and the hostile.’ He paused to catch his breath. They were still only a third
of the way to the wall. ‘Nor could it employ its own defences. We were much too close to the ground – our own counter-strike would have risked damaging us.’