On the Steel Breeze (56 page)

‘A machine telling another machine to conceal its existence? Artificial intelligences whispering to each other across interstellar space, carrying on a conversation we humans can’t intercept or understand?’

‘Frightening, isn’t it?’

‘That’s one word for it.’

It was one thing to know that the pine cones were a thousand kilometres from end to end, but quite another to be approaching such a thing, appreciating its size at first hand. She thought of Hyperion, the riddled little moon tumbling around Saturn – Hyperion with its tunnels and vaults, it endless worming galleries, festering with artists and anarchists. Chiku Yellow and her friends had flown
Gulliver
into that moon. But Hyperion was a third as large as one of these alien objects, and besides, these were demonstrably made things, matter shaped and organised by vast cool intelligence. They must have come here, too, so they could move, and that was almost harder to take than the mere existence of these objects. Nothing this huge should be capable of movement, let alone across interstellar space. It was an affront to natural order.

The orbital insertion brought them no closer than five hundred kilometres to the nearest object, but that was quite close enough for Chiku’s nerves. Although the objects were circling Crucible, technically they were not in orbit: their motion was resolutely non-Keplerian. For the height at which they sat, they should have been moving about twice as fast as they were.
Another slap to human hubris,
Chiku thought, as if gravity was a law the alien objects had quietly decided to ignore. They did not even register a mass that
Icebreaker
’s sensors were capable of detecting, for all that they must have contained billions of tonnes of matter. And so they hovered, and wheeled in slow formation, their spokes cutting across the ecliptic and lighthousing into space. She thought of all the stars, all the worlds the light of those spokes would eventually graze. This simple arc across the sky must still have encompassed thousands of suns in this little corner of the spiral arm alone. She wondered about the other civilisations, human and artilect, that had fallen under the sweep of the spokes.

She shuddered at the magnitude of the endeavour, whatever it might hope to achieve.

The pine cones were so named because of their shape, and also because of their many overlapping plates, which were organised according to elegant and simple growth patterns. The smallest of the plates, where the pine cones tapered to a point – the end nearest Crucible – were only kilometres across, no wider than the average iceberg. The largest of them, up near the fatter end, were nearly a hundred kilometres across and tens of kilometres thick. They were all perfectly black, impervious to
Icebreaker
’s passive and active sensor systems. They fitted together ingeniously, but there were also gaps between the overlapping layers through which hints of deeper structure were visible: blue mysteries of internal machinery, glimpsed in frustrating haziness as if some blurring medium were interposed between the machinery and
Icebreaker.
Radiation spilled out, smudged across the spectrum and modulated in odd ways, with absorption and emission spikes that did not correspond to known nuclear transitions. The radiation was puzzling, sufficient – Travertine said – to fuel a thousand doctorates, perhaps an entire academic discipline. But no part of it was powerful enough to pose a threat – at least, not in the bands they were capable of registering.

As they fell below the level of the structures, Travertine speculated that the fluxes had risen in consort with their passage – risen, then gradually lowered back down to the level they had shown before. But it was hard to know for sure. They had obtained no good data until they were
very close, and since
Icebreaker
did not have the resources to disperse sensors after itself, this was all they were going to learn for now.

But they had not been destroyed. Chiku was glad of that, of course. But she had been hoping for something concrete, and the rise/fade of the blue glow did not count. What she had wanted, she decided, was for the alien machines to trump the problem of the Providers – to do something, hostile or otherwise, which pushed the Providers into secondary importance. But there had been no such overture, and she could not help but feel a twinge of disappointment.

So they fell lower. Thrust bursts modified
Icebreaker
’s trajectory, further depleting the tiny amount of fuel still available. Once the lander achieved orbit a few hundred kilometres above Crucible’s surface, they would not need fuel to land – they would only maintain altitude if they used the engines to counteract friction – but they had sufficient to land at a suitable touchdown point of their choosing.

Namboze had been busy updating their maps, stitching fresh data over old. The resolution of the new data was not as good as that of the old, but it had the virtue of being true and verifiable. They were not relying on machine eyes now: they could see the landscape for themselves through the windows.

In some respects the news was good. Crucible itself was the world they had expected – the planet’s geology, atmospheric and surface conditions were exactly as promised. Plants had colonised the land, and in their detailed biochemistry had duplicated something that was very close to the terrestrial photosynthetic process. But people had known this long before Ocular’s detailed observations of the surface. Crucible’s atmosphere contained molecular oxygen and methane at volume mixing ratios more than a hundred orders of magnitude greater than thermodynamic equilibrium alone could explain. Furthermore, much of the surface of Crucible was covered by something that very strongly absorbed red light, hinting at the abundant presence of the chlorophyll pigment. If there was one truth that had become clear in four centuries of space exploration, it was that there were precious few inorganic mechanisms that made things look green, and none at all that could paint a whole planet in dazzling emerald.

Life was the sole explanation.

All of this proved to be correct, which was a consolation if not a relief. They could live here, with some careful measures. But they had come expecting towns and cities, harbours and jetties, roads and landing zones, and there was none of that at all. Some hints of possible Provider activity, it was true – regular areas of cleared terrain, reflection
signatures that hinted at artificial structures – but all much too small to be of use to waves of migrants. Crucible’s thick, warm, oxygen-rich atmosphere would need some getting used to. It had been intended to live in pressurised facilities, fed by atmosphere scrubbers, while the colonists gradually increased their exposure to Crucible’s native airs – tolerating it first with filtration masks, then in short episodes of direct breathing – and always under close medical supervision, alert for microorganisms or airborne toxins. If it took decades before the citizens could walk unprotected on Crucible, that had always seemed an acceptable part of the bargain – the patient unparcelling of a world-sized gift.

They continued orbiting. Regardless of their specialisation, all of them were fascinated by Mandala. They had seen the Ocular data and strolled the scaled-down reconstructions in the Anticipation Parks. They had skimmed oceans of analysis and speculation, some of it now so old that it had gained dense layers of its own scholarship. But here was the real thing, and it
was
real – not a fiction, not a distortion. And very bit as astonishing and alien as they had been led to believe. Even with her own eyes, looking down from space, Chiku could not quite process the scale of the artefact. Here was nothing to compare with the thousand kilometre long hovering machines, but this was an entirely different order of intelligent handiwork, fashioned not from machinery floating in vacuum, but branded into the skin of a planet. The complicated, symmetric form of Mandala was familiar to her from countless visualisations – it could have been the groundwork for some grand imperial garden, all mazes and borders and intersecting promenades, except that Mandala was as wide as equatorial Africa, its sharp-edged trenches so broad and deep that they coralled whole weather systems, chiselling clouds into lines and angles. It stretched from one seaboard of a continent to the next, bent around the world’s curvature. When it was night on one edge of Mandala, it was still day on the other. Shadows pushed through its channels and runnels with sudden surging intent. By some mechanism still obscure, the seas flowed in and out of the channels with the tidal phases of Crucible’s two moons, forming a shallow meniscus that altered the channels’ usual reflective albedo. It was possible, but as yet unproven, that parts of Mandala closed off or opened or altered their slope according to the rhythms of the sea. It was also considered likely that Mandala had the capacity to renew itself against the centuries-long assault of weather and planetary geology, maintaining the improbable sharpness of its angles and edges. If it could repair itself, it could also evolve and, perhaps, respond.

Humans would have visited this world sooner or later, but Mandala had elevated the exploration of Crucible to a species-level priority that could not be left to machines. How wonderful it would be, Chiku thought, to walk those iron-sided canyons. She imagined swimming along the flooded channels, or hang-gliding the gusty thermals stirred by the progression and retreat of shadows and water.

There was work there for a thousand lifetimes – work and joy and wonder.

We have to find a way through this
, Chiku thought.
No matter our difficulties, we cannot let this opportunity slip by.

She had been awake for nearly twenty hours now, Travertine a few hours less. They decided to take turns sleeping, so that they could all be at maximum alertness should something happen. Chiku had never felt less like sleeping in her life, but she concurred with the idea. There was no room for bunks on
Icebreaker,
so when it was their turn they crawled back into skipover caskets, now padded with blankets and pillows. Chiku had the first rest shift. After three hours of shallow, fitful sleep, she awoke feeling alert but also brittle and itchy.

She crawled to a private corner and continued working through Noah’s transmissions. With every message, a deep foreboding took ever greater hold of her. Again and again she had to fight the impulse to skip forwards in the time sequence. But Noah had gone to a great deal of trouble and personal risk to send these transmissions, and it would have been a disservice not to review them in the order in which they had been sent. Besides, she almost could not bear hearing confirmation of the news she feared.

Three years had passed since her departure and conditions had only worsened on
Zanzibar.
The imposition of external authority had gone from severe to harsh, and finally become a kind of martial rule with extraordinarily severe penalties for the slightest infractions against the new order. Citizens’ rights had been rescinded. The old Assembly had been almost entirely dismantled, its members dispersed back into the citizenry or subjected to interrogation and trial. Noah had managed to cling on to his freedom for the time being, but he was under increasing scrutiny from Teslenko’s prosecutors and appeared resigned to his eventual detention and trial. It was becoming increasingly problematic to send transmissions to
Icebreaker,
and Noah had been forced to use ever more byzantine measures to avoid his messages being intercepted and silenced before they ever reached Chiku.

‘I don’t know what’s going to happen here – either with my ability to contact you or the status quo on
Zanzibar,
but we can’t go on like
this indefinitely. It’s almost as if the new regime wants to provoke a violent counter-reaction to justify finally crushing us. There’ve been deaths – actual deaths – caused by violent action.’ He shook his head at the horror of that, and for all that she had witnessed violence herself, she shared his repugnance. Human beings were better than this – or thought themselves to be, anyway.

‘A few of their constables, but mostly our citizens,’ Noah said. ‘It doesn’t take much to set things off now, not with all the new restrictions on movement. The constables would be bad enough by themselves – there’re enough of them – but they’ve also deployed those robots, and we wouldn’t stand a chance in a fight with them even if we thought it was worth a try.’

Chiku had decided, on balance, that she would rather let Noah speak than imbue his figment with the illusion of an interactive persona. So she kept her silence, though she had many questions.

‘A few of us – mostly former Assembly members – are still in some kind of contact,’ he continued, ‘and we’ve debated the idea of resistance. If we could kick them out peacefully, we’d do it, then sever all political and economic ties with the rest of the caravan. At this point we could go it alone. There’d be hardships, of course, but we’re hardly living in the lap of luxury now. And we have Travertine’s blueprints – we could piece a slowdown engine together from the parts of the one we already dismantled without asking the convoy for anything. But there’s no peaceful way to end this, Chiku – they’d cut us down.’

She knew it was true, and she nodded.

‘The worst part of all this, beyond the indignity and the deaths, is that it’s just a front! Some of our top engineers have already been moved to other holoships – people who had direct contact with Travertine’s research. They’re not being taken away to be executed or locked in a cell for the rest of the voyage. They’re being subjected to coercive collaboration, to try to duplicate Travertine’s breakthrough. And I’m not just talking about one clandestine research programmeme here, but several – some of them working independently of each other. Teslenko’s people might not want to land on Crucible any more, but they still want that technology. And they’ll get it, one way or another. Sooner or later, they’ll have stolen so many of our scientific minds that we won’t be able to reproduce Travertine’s engine ourselves!’ Noah’s expression was pained, and he drew his hand from his brow to his chin and tried to soften his worried scowl. ‘I’m sorry – you must have worries of your own. For all our differences, I’d love to be with
you now. Mposi and Ndege feel the same way – they’re very proud of you’