On the Steel Breeze (50 page)

‘I’m all ears if you have any bright ideas you’d like to share.’

‘Take care, Noah. We’re going to light the PCP engine very soon. I hope we’ll have a chance to talk again, but there are no guarantees.’

‘Do you want me to tell Mposi and Ndege?’

‘Not until it’s done. Whatever happens.’

‘I will.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘Well, we’re here, and we’ll just have to weather it. I don’t suppose your family had the foresight to make this place defensible?’

‘I suspect not.’

‘Tell them to try harder next time. Good luck, Chiku. I’ll be waiting to hear from you. Regardless of all the stuff that’s gone on between us, I hope we speak again.’

‘So do I,’ she said.

When she was done, Travertine informed her that they were ready to push to full power.

‘I suppose it’s occurred to you,’ Travertine said, ‘that all of this could just be a form of suicidal revenge on my behalf? That I know the engine won’t work, but I’ll have the satisfaction of seeing you give the order to start it up?’

‘Actually, that had not occurred to me.’

‘As satisfaction goes, it would be pretty fleeting, I’d guess. Anyway, I’m not the avenging type – strikes me as a fairly futile use of one’s energies. Shall we do this?’

‘It will work,’ Chiku said firmly, as if her conviction alone was enough to guarantee success.

‘I know,’ Travertine agreed. ‘But it would be a kindness to you if it didn’t, wouldn’t it? Take that burden of worry off your shoulders. I’m feeling years younger, by the way. You should try it sometime: nothing puts a spring in your step like a commuted death sentence.’

They pushed the engine into uncharted physics. Even with the ballast to deaden the acceleration, the shift from one to three gees was still a shock, for there was almost no transition, just a steplike increase in power. Travertine gave very little away as ve studied the numbers and curves, matching them against vis mental predictions. Ve pursed vis lips
and squinted, and made odd little catlike noises, the meaning of which was lost on Chiku.

‘We can take it to ten,’ Travertine announced finally, but there was nothing triumphant in vis tone. ‘That’ll get us away from
Zanzibar
the fastest and out of reach of the caravan. But you’ll want to be in skipover before we disperse all the ballast. After that, there’s no going back.’

‘I’m done with second thoughts.’

‘I thought so, but best to check rather than assume. How does it feel, to be leaving everything behind?’

‘I suspect you feel much the same way. Anyway, we’re not leaving
Zanzibar
for good.’

‘You don’t strike me as someone entirely convinced she’ll ever see her home again. There’s a kind of grey deadness in your eyes, as if little shutters have come down. I hope you do get back, of course, for your children’s sake. Have you told Noah the whole story – what we’ll really be facing when we arrive at Crucible?’

‘We should sleep now,’ Chiku said bluntly, effectively ending the conversation.

Travertine could not resist having the last word. ‘Well, whenever you feel like sharing . . .’

Chiku and Travertine were the last to enter skipover. Doctor Aziba was already sleeping, so they were left in the care of the surgical robot. The robot fussed over them, blundering through its routines. Travertine had to fight to stop it removing vis bracelet. Ve was quite intent on keeping it where it was.

Even at three gees, there was no realistic prospect of the caravan’s ships catching up with
Icebreaker
– not if they wanted a chance of getting back home. So Chiku had the surgical robot delay administering the knock-out drugs until she had taken one last look at the news from
Zanzibar.
Noah had enough business to keep him occupied now, so she did not disturb him for an update. Instead she wandered the holoship’s civic spaces, tapping into public eyes, haunting the world she had once walked. The new constables were almost everywhere now and more were cycling in through the available locks by the hour. Their numbers were still small, but they would soon be able to impose effective authority. To their credit, her citizens –
her
citizens, as if she was still in charge – were handling the situation with dignity and composure. So far there had been no real trouble, but something would give in the end, she knew. Such was the way of things. Pressure had to be released.

Be wise,
she prayed, directing her wish to her own people and the
occupying force alike.
Be wise, be tolerant, be human. Because against the truth of Crucible, none of this will matter in the slightest.

And then the robot pushed the drugs into her and she fell into skipover.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

‘I’m sorry to bring bad news,’ Kanu said, one bright morning in Lisbon, ‘but Mecufi is dead. I thought you’d both like to know.’

For a while, their son had fallen into the habit of visiting his mothers once or twice a year, returning from the seasteads to spend a day or two in their company. Lately, though, the visits had become less frequent. Chiku had not minded that, for she knew that Kanu had many demands on his time, especially now that he had risen to a position of some considerable responsibility in the Panspermian hierarchy. The main thing – indeed, the only thing that really mattered – was that they were in communication again, however irregularly. And that, by some silent token of understanding, they had agreed to forgive each other for whatever transgressions and misunderstandings each might have committed. Chiku, for her unwillingness to let her son choose his own path, even if that meant surrendering his future to the inscrutable objectives of the capricious merfolk, who could veer from allies to enemies with the turning of the wind. Kanu, in turn, for failing to see how much his decision would hurt his mother, and rather than explain himself he had chosen instead absolute isolation, refusing all contact until that day when he rode his kraken to her rescue. Pride against love, stubbornness against blood and kin.

All that was behind them now, and the world was better for it. Kanu had never become the totally alien being she feared – he had stopped his transmigration long before he became fully committed to the aquatic and maintained that he had no plans to further alter his current anatomy, which allowed him to move with relative ease on dry land. Chiku, for her part, wondered exactly what it was she had always feared. He was still her son, after all, no matter the changes rendered to his anatomy. With hindsight she should have urged him forward, grateful that the Akinyas would at last have some small leverage within the merfolk.

So many regrets, she thought. They were the stitches that held her life together. She feared that if they were unpicked, her past would unravel
and reveal itself to be a single thread, not the complex knotted design she imagined. One of the downsides of a long life was the almost infinite scope it offered for reflection.

And by any measure, she was becoming a very old creature indeed.

‘Why did Mecufi die?’ she asked.

As time went by and prolongation techniques improved, there was increasingly little acceptance of death as a natural outcome of old age. When her mother died in 2380, she had been part of a slow-crashing wave of die-offs, one of what the experts predicted would be among the last statistically significant human extinction events. Almost everyone born later than Sunday Akinya – meaning almost everyone now alive – had started life with a superior suite of genetic and exosomatic prolongation options. Chiku was now two hundred and fifty – almost the same age her mother had been at the time of her death – and she had lived the full and merciless measure of those years, spending none of them in skipover.

She was not immortal. Someone born now might have every expectation of living five hundred years or more – long enough to see in the fourth millennium, if their cards fell right. As the genetically oldest of the three clones, Chiku Yellow’s options were less favourable. It would be complex and risky to submit to a second triplication process, and in any case she lacked the necessary funds. But she had no complaints, and no strong sense that she was about to die. Another century was within her grasp, and if it came to less than that, she would not complain.

It was 2415 now. Sometimes she looked at the date and thought:
That’s not right.
It’s a mistake, some weird way of saying fifteen minutes after midnight. Not a year I happen to be living in.

‘It wasn’t a bad death,’ Kanu said. ‘He didn’t suffer. But he was very old – nearly as old as June Wing, or Arethusa – and the years finally caught up with him. There was a lot they didn’t understand, back in the early days of aquatic remodelling, and they did a lot of unintentional damage to his genes.’

The three of them were down at the quayside, sitting with their legs hooked over the side of the dock, the water trembling and spangling below. Seagulls loitered and squabbled. The air smelled brine-laden and fishy. Coloured boats were bobbing a little way along the dock. The light coming off the suspension bridge was so bright that Chiku had to keep blinking. It was as if the thing had been carved out of filaments of the sun and magicked into trembling solidity.

‘I’m grateful for the things he did for us,’ Chiku said. ‘At least, I am now. I wasn’t always convinced at the time.’

Chiku Red added, ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Kanu. You knew him very well.’

Chiku Red mostly spoke Portuguese these days. Chiku Yellow had gained a halting sort of fluency – some command of a language was required to teach it, after all – and over the years Kanu had picked up a satisfactory working knowledge. They could communicate in Portuguese without the aug – Chiku Red had no access to it, anyway. Sometimes Kanu and Chiku Yellow swerved into words or phrase-fragments from Swahili or Zulu or Mandarin or Gujarati for a little colour, but seldom whole sentences. Chiku Red preferred them to confine their efforts to Portuguese, and Chiku Yellow had no difficulty understanding why. It was a good language, old and road-tested. It had been an Olympic endeavour for Chiku Red just to regain any use of one language after the damage her mind had suffered.

‘Thank you,’ Kanu acknowledged. ‘Even Arethusa has transmitted her condolences, although for obvious reasons she won’t be returning to Earth. You did a good thing, Chiku, bringing her back into contact with us.’

Arethusa, Chiku had long since gathered, was in danger of becoming the oldest living sentience in the universe. Unless, of course, anyone knew something to the contrary. It was all dumb luck, in the end. The genetic alterations she had worked on herself had turned out to be beneficial rather than detrimental. Although by all accounts, like a free-market economy, she had no option but to just keep growing. It was said that she would only leave Hyperion when the moon became too small for her and she had to discard it like a too-tight garment.

‘Mecufi had no particular reason to trust me,’ Kanu said. ‘I could have been an agent of the family, sent to undermine everything he stood for, but he never doubted me.’

‘That would have been a bit ruthless, even for us,’ Chiku said.

‘There’ll be a funeral, of sorts. Would you like to come?’

‘Both of us?’ asked Chiku Red.

Kanu gave a nod of his majestic head. ‘Both of you.’

‘We don’t leave Lisbon very often,’ Chiku said.

‘I hope you’ll make an exception. I won’t insist, of course, but I think you’ll find it worth your while.’

‘She hasn’t made a move against us in fifty years,’ Chiku said. ‘I like it this way. I wouldn’t want to do anything that might provoke her.’

‘You went to the Moon once, and to the seasteads to bring Chiku Red home,’ Kanu pointed out. ‘Neither of those things did you any harm. Nor will this.’

‘What are your funerals like?’ Chiku Red asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Kanu admitted. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever been to one.’

There was no need for haste, so they went by sailing ship. Chiku had seen the cyberclippers coming and going along the Tagus for as long as she had been in Lisbon, but this was something different. From a distance, as they approached along the quay – they had taken the tram to Estoril – nothing marked the craft as unusual. It had a sleek catamaran hull, covered in a frictionless coating that gave off odd optical effects, like a meniscus of oil in a puddle. It had an abundance of sails and sail parts of different shapes, sizes and function. The sails gathered sunlight as well as wind. They were also optically strange, capable of flicking from one extreme of reflectivity to another. There was an absurdity of rigging, too many lines and winches and pulleys to make any sense at all. The thing seemed complicated for the sake of it.

There were also people making it all work. This was what made the ship different. The cyberclippers ran with no crews at all, save for the occasional technician, and they spent months at sea following optimum path solutions, carrying cargoes that did not need to be anywhere fast. But there were dozens of merfolk on the deck of this ship, and even some up in the sails and rigging, and they were all doing something.

Chiku and Chiku Red stared in wonder and horror at the sight of it all.

‘They could fall,’ Chiku said. It was obvious to her that the merfolk had no lines or safety nets to catch themselves if something went wrong.

‘They won’t,’ Kanu said. And to prove his point, even before the ship had left the dock, he had slipped up to the top of one of the main masts, hand and foot, so fast and agile that it looked like a trick, as if he were being ascended by a hidden rope. From the top he waved and laughed and then came back down again.

Chiku felt a flush of pride and bewilderment. It felt impossible to her that this was her son, doing this impossible thing.

‘Why did you make this boat?’ Chiku Red asked, when they were at sea and Estoril was a biscuit-coloured margin on the horizon. ‘It needs too many people.’

‘It can go faster than a cyberclipper,’ Kanu explained, the wind tugging back his long roped locks. ‘Sometimes. Cyberclippers are very good at finding a reliable course, very good at getting goods from one port to another, but they don’t always make full use of the wind. With a good crew on board, this thing can really fly.’