On the Steel Breeze (55 page)

‘You’re right,’ Chiku said, sighing heavily. ‘It’s either complete trust or nothing at all. Wake them up and give them the good news.’ But after a pause, she said: ‘I still owe them an explanation, face to face.’

‘Go and attend to your work. I’ll call you when Namboze and Guochan have been briefed.’ Chiku opened her mouth to speak, but he raised a silencing finger. ‘I don’t like this situation at all. I’d much rather not be here, and I won’t pretend that I harbour no resentment about the manner in which I was manipulated. But I’m also a physician, and you are all within my duty of care. I believe I’m capable of putting my personal feelings aside and doing my job.’

Chiku nodded. Further talk was superfluous. She realised that she’d chosen well in this man. His ability to speak plainly about his resentment rather than pretend there was none actually made her feel more comfortable. She felt certain he would do as he promised.

‘I have an idea,’ Travertine said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Sooner or later it would have occurred to Chiku. Communications from
Zanzibar
must surely have continued until some point in their journey. Perhaps it had been only days after departure, or perhaps it been years. But what was certain was that the incoming transmissions would all have been buffered and stored in
Icebreaker
’s memories, until the moment when the transmissions were curtailed.

It did not take long to find them. They were in time-sequenced order, beginning from the departure. For a few months, the transmissions were continuous – an uninterrupted umbilical uplink, connecting
Icebreaker
back to her mother vessel. This stream consisted not merely of signals of direct relevance to the lander, but the full torrent of the ho-loship’s newsfeeds, as well as those it relayed from elsewhere in the caravan, including updates from Earth and the solar system. Later, though, the transmissions stopped being continuous and the data content dropped precipitously. Weeks might go by without a signal, then there might be two or three transmissions in close succession. Then more weeks of silence. Weeks and months, sometimes. Longer than that, as Chiku skipped forward via the time-tags. She had not yet begun to pick through the detailed contents of any of the messages. But she could already tell that a large number were headed as originating from Noah.

That changed, as time went by.

Her impulse was to jump to the final transmission, which had arrived more than two years ago, but she resisted and went right back to the start. The early transmissions were rich enough with data to allow full immersive ching. She returned to
Zanzibar,
walked its parks and avenues to see things for herself. She gently interrogated her fellow citizens, and although her interactions were merely the ching’s best guesses as to how similar encounters might have played out in real-time, the encounters were more than sufficient to give her a feel for the atmosphere aboard the holoship.

During the month following their departure, ships had continued to arrive from the local caravan, bringing huge numbers of incomers. Many of them were constables, redeployed from their duties elsewhere, along with an increasing number of political agents: the observers and bureaucrats of the new regime, tiers of functionaries, supervisors and analysts. Even while normal Assembly business continued, the newcomers began to manoeuvre themselves into positions of influence. Rules and ordinances were redrafted, and the citizens –
her
citizens – chafed against stifling new restrictions. Movements between holo-ships were now tightly regulated, dividing families and friends. There were even some constraints on movement within
Zanzibar
– access to the transit pods was now under direct government control. Families were relocated to better utilise
Zanzibar
’s community cores, and other holoships, bulging under population pressure, were sending citizens into
Zanzibar.
The integration of these newcomers inevitably caused friction. Chiku decided that the relocations were not really about population management, but rather aimed to erode whatever social cohesion had existed within
Zanzibar
before
Icebreaker
’s departure. Chiku bore the newcomers no ill will – they were pawns in a much bigger game.

Noah’s private communications confirmed her suspicions, as they walked together in Anticipation Park.

‘I know you won’t access any of this until you wake,’ he told her, ‘but recounting the events as they happen helps me to get my thoughts in order. Is that ridiculous?’

‘I’d do the same thing,’ she told Noah’s figment, this bloodless but plausible notion of how Noah might interact with her.

‘Things are moving much faster than any of us anticipated – they keep sending more constables, as if there’s a limitless supply of them. Our airlocks have never been busier. Pretty good rehearsal for Crucible, I guess.’

She asked about Ndege and Mposi.

‘They’re all right,’ Noah said, after giving the question due consideration. ‘The first few weeks were very hard on them, but a month’s a very long time in their world.’

She skipped that same span of time and toured her world again. As she wandered the cores, bodyless,
Zanzibar
felt strangely hollow, as if it had already shed its burden of humanity. The public spaces were mostly empty, and there was a kind of prevailing twilight gloom, as if the skies had been dimmed. She realised with a jolt that this was exactly what had happened. The external powers had declared some kind of curfew,
apparently in response to an act of public disobedience against the new constables.

She met Noah at the Assembly. Technically, he was still a functioning member of
Zanzibar
’s government, but its decision-making powers had been all but eliminated, he told her, and worse was to come. There were prosecutors at large who were trying to identify those members of the Assembly with direct knowledge of
Icebreaker.
A number of preliminary hearings had already been held, and Noah had been called to testify on two occasions regarding fellow members. It was only a matter of time before they turned their attention to him personally.

‘There’s talk of execution,’ he said.

She shuddered. ‘We didn’t execute Travertine, and ve killed two hundred people!’

‘They want to make an example the rest of the caravan can’t ignore.’

‘It can’t come to executions, Noah – we agreed to submit to a peaceful takeover, not a fucking bloodbath. We’re a democratic society! There hasn’t even been a single
murder
during the entire voyage, and we’ve managed that without the Mechanism mothering us into submission!’

‘I’m sorry,’ Noah offered, as if she was holding him personally accountable.

She had not been able to ching into Chamber Thirty-Seven. ‘Have you spoken to . . . ?’ she began.

‘Yes – once. But it’s very difficult now – my movements are monitored constantly, and I can’t risk someone backtracking the ching bind. Even
speaking
about it in these messages—’

‘I’m not blaming you for any of this,’ she said. ‘Please never think that. I just want you to be safe, and to do everything you can for our children.’

She asked him what he knew regarding efforts to scale up the PCP engine, but that taxed the immersive simulation to its limits and Noah could not offer anything concrete. But Chiku thought it likely that someone, somewhere, would be trying to build on Travertine’s work, perhaps even aboard the very holoships currently imposing the tough new regime on
Zanzibar.
The new engine was tactically decisive technology, whether it was used for slowdown or not. Absurd that it had come to this, after all: strategic balances, superpowers, super-weapons, as if history was a kind of machine with only a limited number of permutations. At one time, she had dared to believe that history could break free of its patterns. Nature was not hidebound, tied into endless, dull reiteration. It produced marvels and monsters with equal
fecundity. So why did people have so much trouble breaking free of old patterns?

She was about to skip ahead when Travertine tapped her out of the ching bind.

‘They’re awake.’

Chiku summoned them all to the cockpit. She nodded at Namboze and Guochang, fresh out of skipover. They were clutching squeeze-bulbs, both of them looking as if they had been repeatedly slapped in the face, like drunkards or hysterics. Gonithi Namboze had also spent time in skipover since the Kappa incident, and she was still essentially the same person Chiku had known back then: an extremely thin woman with long fingernails and complexly braided hair. Guochang, whom she knew less well, was a squat, muscular man with the core body strength of a Cossack.

‘I understand if you want to punish me,’ Chiku said, ‘but could you wait until we’ve completed our mission?’

‘If,’ Namboze said, drawing a nod from Guochang.

‘I know,’ Chiku said. ‘I won’t downplay the danger – I’ve got too much respect for the pair of you. But it’s not a suicide mission. Guochang: we must make contact with the Providers, and establish a negotiating position. Something, anything. You know them as well as anyone. Namboze: there’s a planet down there that we
might
end up having to live on, if we’re lucky, but not in the way most of us were expecting. We’ll likely be starting from scratch, with the tools and materials we bring from space. You’ve spent most of your life studying the adaptations and measures we’ll need to make a living on Crucible. Now your insights are going to matter more than ever.’

Eventually she said: ‘Those black things. What if they don’t want us there?’

‘We don’t know what they do or don’t want – if anything,’ Chiku answered. ‘Maybe all they do is observe. Witness. They may not care. It’s the Providers that are our concern. But we must find a solution, a way that benefits us all – machine and human.’

Namboze sneered. ‘A truce with machines, after they’ve lied to us? We should be destroying them, not negotiating with them!’

‘We don’t know their strengths or capabilities,’ Travertine said. ‘If we had the full caravan behind us, we might stand a chance in a fight. But we’re a single ship, almost powerless. We have to negotiate.’

‘With what?’ Namboze asked.

‘Our best intentions?’ Chiku said. ‘Good will? We’re almost certainly dealing with artilect-level cognition – machines, or an assemblage
of machines, with a collective intelligence equalling or exceeding our own. I’ve met one, and we can’t assume we’ll have mental and military superiority on our side.’

‘I’d like access to
Icebreaker
’s communications systems,’ Guochang said. ‘There are some channels you may not have tried – command-level paths, that kind of thing.’

‘Good start,’ Chiku said.

‘It’ll give me something to take my mind off everything else. May I?’

‘Yes, but keep one antenna sweeping behind us for signals from the caravan. Namboze: the closer we get, the better our view of the surface conditions. I want you to start updating the maps. I want to know immediately if you find any significant points of deviation between the data in our files and the real Crucible. And if you find any sign of Provider activity on the surface or in space, bring it to our immediate attention.’

‘Are we taking orders from you now?’ Namboze asked.

‘No,’ Travertine said. ‘We’re dividing responsibility.’

Namboze turned her attention to the physicist. ‘What about you? I thought you were supposed to be dying, rotting like a corpse. I thought that was supposed to be your punishment for nearly killing us all.’

‘Travertine’s sentence was formally commuted,’ Chiku said. ‘Ve broke our laws, it’s true. But Travertine’s paid a steep price for that. We also owe ver a debt of gratitude for the risks ve took. If by some miracle any of us ever set foot on Crucible, we’ll have Travertine to thank.’

‘I wouldn’t start planning any monuments to me just yet,’ Travertine said.

Chiku was also glad to have something to take her mind off things, but she could not say for sure which was the more unpleasant source of anxiety: the news from home, or their immediate prospects on Crucible. On one hand, while Noah’s reports spoke of a steady deterioration in the conditions on
Zanzibar,
and she was worried for Ndege, Mposi and Noah because of that, the fact was that the news was old. She could not change the past, and she was basically engaged in the excavation of history. She could treat Noah’s reportage as a kind of fiction, a narrative in which she had only theoretical involvement. This was in contrast to the alien things, which – although they had done nothing as yet to provoke this fear – might reach out and annihilate the little ship without warning.

She decided, for the sake of her sanity, not to choose between the
two, or dwell on one to the exclusion of the other. When her immersion in
Zanzibar
’s woes threatened to overwhelm her, it was almost a relief to snap back to the present, where her fate rested on the whims of machines, in a place where politics and human frailty had no traction. There was nothing to second-guess here and no one to worry about but herself. It was as clean and ethically neutral as a game of chess.

Some instinct compelled her not to take
Icebreaker
across the path of any of the spokes of blue light, as if breaking or interrupting that flow of photons would be like stepping on a dry twig – a crass announcement of their presence. Travertine was confident that the light would not harm the ship, but agreed with Chiku’s decision to err on the side of caution.

‘Of course, on one level,’ Chiku said, ‘I’d like to see some sign that those things know we’re here. Perhaps then they wouldn’t be so enigmatic, floating there like Easter Island statues.’

‘On the other hand, you wouldn’t want to piss them off.’

Against her mood, Chiku forced herself to laugh. ‘Arethusa had this theory that the blue light carries a signal, something that worked its way into Ocular – it might even have turned Arachne into the thing she became. A set of instructions, perhaps, in mutually comprehensible machine-code, that told her to hide herself and the real Crucible data from her organic masters.’