On the Steel Breeze (62 page)

‘Am I so predictable? Did you predict this?’ Arachne was pointing at the circle of sky still cycling through the sped-up pattern of flashes.

‘No, but you’re like a cuckoo clock. You can do a few surprising things, make a few funny noises, but that’s all. You have no capacity for astonishment. We’ve only known each other for a few days, and you’re already boring me.’

Travertine was laughing. It was some unguessable interval later. Chiku supposed that at some point seasonal variations might manifest in the canopy, but if they were as close to the equator as she suspected, there might not be much change in the yearly climate. She wondered if Crucible had rainy seasons. Perhaps she would look out one afternoon and see dark thunderheads quartering the horizon.

She would have to ask Namboze.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘That your big idea for achieving a tactical advantage here is to insult our host by telling her she’s stupid and useless. Were you hoping to provoke a tantrum?’

Chiku had no laughter left inside her. ‘I want her to feel afraid. She should be. If she views Eunice as a threat, she’ll have a reason to keep us alive.’

‘Keep
you
alive, you mean. The rest of us might start looking a little disposable now.’

‘It was the only currency I had. But we all have some specialised knowledge that might be useful to her. You can make a PCP engine. The rest of us can’t.’

Travertine had confirmed what Chiku suspected – all the members of her crew had been shown the
Pemba
events and invited to offer commentary.

‘I wish
Zanzibar
would speak to us,’ Chiku said dolefully. ‘Just knowing it’s out there would be enough for now. Surely they can’t have been so careless as to blow themselves up.’

‘Maybe someone blew
them
up.’

‘Mposi did say that the situation was worsening, that it might force Eunice’s hand. To do what, I don’t know. Reveal herself? Blow up the ship as a hopeless cause? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she had the power to do that.’

‘And that’s the last you heard from Mposi? You’ve nothing dated after the three flashes?’

‘None of us know when those flashes happened, and if we asked Arachne we’d have no reason to assume she was telling us the truth. Anyway, there were a few more messages in the desk, but Mposi had no real news for me other than that things were worsening and it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to squeeze out those transmissions. He warned me not too read too much into silence – it wouldn’t necessarily mean the worst, just that it was no longer possible to get a signal out. But then the transmissions stopped for good and despite what he said I still can’t help but think of the worst anyway. I just want to know that Mposi and Ndege are alive. Two facts, that’s all I want. Two
yesses,
instead of two
don’t knows.
Is that so hard? Is that so much to ask for?’

After a lull Travertine: ‘I’ve been doing some calculating. I think you’ll find it interesting.’

‘Was there a calculating function in your desk? Or did you talk her into giving you pen and paper?’

‘I had this.’ Travertine tapped the side of vis head.

Now Chiku managed a smile, although it was mostly for appearance’s sake. ‘Go on, then – amaze me.’

‘If one of the holoships has managed to scale up the engine, it’ll take time to achieve slowdown. You can’t just stop.
Icebreaker
took two hundred hours, but we were a minnow. It’s a totally different proposition, slowing down a holoship.’

‘It took years to get them up to speed, I know that. But if they have the engine, slowing down shouldn’t take as long.’

‘Power isn’t the only constraint. Life has to carry on in the holoships for as long as it takes them to stop. Houses, schools, government buildings – they all have to remain usable. Roads, pathways, farming terraces – everything still has to work. On the acceleration burn, leaving Earth, the load never exceeded a hundredth of a gee. With the right preparations, draining lakes and so on, moving people around, I suppose they
might be able to withstand a tenth of a gee. But that’s vastly more than the holoships were ever designed for, and I’m not sure that the cores wouldn’t cave-in under the stress. A thirtieth of a gee sounds much more plausible. Most daily activities could still continue.’

Chiku did not have Travertine’s head for figures. ‘I suppose you know how long that would take?’

‘About four years,’ Travertine answered. ‘That’s how long the engine would need to be active, maintaining steady deceleration. And they’d need to start the deceleration at least a quarter of a light-year out.’

‘Four years in total?’

‘Give or take.’

‘When the engine switches on, it’ll be pointed directly at Crucible, like a searchlight, right?’

‘Yes, and if Arachne can detect those flashes a lot further out, she’ll probably be able to pick up the engine signature. She’ll lose three months’ warning due to time lag – that’s how long it’ll take for the first photon from the drive start-up to reach Crucible. But that still gives her another three and three-quarter years to prepare – that’s more than enough time for her to start laying traps.’

‘What do you think she’ll do?’

‘Pretty much anything she likes. She’ll know the approach trajectories of the holoships, so all she needs to do is seed their paths with enough big dumb rocks.’

‘That wouldn’t work – she’d have to cover every possible approach to allow for unforeseen course changes, and that would mean millions of rocks.’ She imagined each holoship drawing its own coloured line of light through a black void, the caravan weaving a kind of fan, and then she thought of the genetic bottleneck Mecufi had shown her, the bloodlines of ancestry springing out of that ancient pinch.

‘She’s got plenty of other options,’ Travertine said blithely. ‘She can make as many of those kinetic cannons Guochang mentioned – the ones that are meant to deflect asteroids and comets – as she needs, and position them wherever she likes. On Crucible, in orbit, in deep space, way out into the margins, whatever takes her fancy. She can aim them based on her best projections of the holoships’ approach angles, fire the slugs and then finesse their trajectories at the last moment. They’ll be very difficult to detect.’

‘We could be giving her ideas just by talking about this stuff.’

‘She’s got the imagination of a sock, but this wouldn’t have taxed her. She knows about the holoships, she knows she has a good chance
of predicting their courses, and she knows she has a means of stopping large objects heading for Crucible.’

‘Then we’re doomed,’ Chiku said. That anchor was there again, hauling her guts downwards. ‘All of us. We haven’t a hope in hell.’

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

For as long as Chiku had known of the Watchkeepers’ existence, she had pictured them hanging in the sky like dark chandeliers, imagined them rising above the horizon, vaster and more ominous than any moon.

Now that she was actually on Crucible, she was surprised to discover that the Watchkeepers were hardly ever visible. Improbable as it seemed at first that the twenty-two machines could be so elusive, it was not so surprising when she thought about it properly. The machines were black except for the light that shone from their blunt ends, but no trace of that radiation was detectable from Crucible’s surface. Nor was there any hint of the blue glowing structures they had glimpsed between the plate-like encrustations covering the pine cones. The machines’ black skins rendered them no brighter than the space against which they were backgrounded, and they became as invisible as the Moon’s unlit face. More so, in fact, because Earth’s moon reflected back some of the Earth’s own glow, but the machines were so pitilessly dark that they reflected nothing. They also avoided eclipsing Crucible’s sun from any point on the surface, casting no shadows.

Only at night, when their hanging forms eclipsed whole constellations of stars, was their presence felt. But even then they were no more troubling than rafts of high dark cirrus. She still could not see the blue rays spiking out into interstellar space.

So far, Arachne had persistently fudged around her lack of progress in communicating with the Watchkeepers, but now Chiku had some leverage over her host. For every titbit Chiku disclosed about Eunice or the likely behaviour of the remaining holoships, she demanded an equivalent crumb of insight into the nature of the Watchkeepers.

Presuming any of the things Arachne told her were true, Chiku learned that Ocular had detected the blue beams, which then communicated a message to Arachne, a message that appeared to have been expressly coded for maximum comprehension by another machine-substrate
consciousness. In human terms, the message was a form of greeting – a virtual handshake across the stars, from mind to mind.

But it was also a warning, and an invitation. The message cautioned Arachne that as a young machinesubstrate consciousness, she was at her most vulnerable to predation. The Watchkeepers had seen this happen before. Young minds were often snuffed out by their predecessor intelligences before they attained true independence. Being confined to the space around a single star was not healthy – a space already congested and contested by a nervous and resource-hungry organic intelligence.

So Arachne was encouraged to propagate herself. Mandala would provide the necessary incentive for the organic minds to build the means for her conveyance. They would build caravans of holoships, but more importantly they would send swift robotic seed packages ahead of these slow behemoths.

These seed packages would make robots and the robots would make more robots. By insinuating herself into the replicating architecture of the Provider seed packages, Arachne could establish a second facet of herself around 61 Virginis f. Simultaneously, the first facet would continue to consolidate herself by planting roots into the system-wide Mechanism.

This objective had succeeded – to a point.

But now that Arachne had established this outpost, the Watchkeepers remained as remote as ever. Worse – and this was supposition on Chiku’s part – this facet of Arachne had lost confidence in the veracity of the communications originating from the mother solar system. She felt beleaguered, lured across space to engage with another intelligence that appeared incurious or unimpressed by her own intellect. There might well have been a preliminary exchange, but it was clear to Chiku that the Watchkeepers had also communicated in very forceful terms that the Providers were not to approach Mandala. They were not yet ready for that, and in the Watchkeepers’ unfathomable consideration they might never be.

But Arachne was not the only one with a stake in the matter. Humans had set out for Crucible to establish colonies and explore Mandala first hand. They had dreamed of flying its stark canyons, sailing its godlike channels. And perhaps somewhere in Mandala, invisible from space, was a message or a clue to its function and origin.

Whatever the Watchkeepers’ opinion of the robots already in the system, humans would demand the right to explore more thoroughly. And if that was denied them, they would want to know why. Whatever the outcome might be, it was imperative that the humans make contact
with the Watchkeepers. Perhaps the alien machines would be more receptive to the overtures of organic intelligence.

Or perhaps . . . Perhaps there was a third option. A new idea began to crystallise in Chiku’s mind that quickly took on a life of its own. It was not just humans on their way to Crucible. Hidden away among them was a machine-substrate consciousness that contained elements of human neural organisation. An effigy of a dead human woman that was also a true artificial intelligence, able to empathise in equal measure with the kingdoms of steel and flesh. A being that stood at the equilateral pole between humans and Providers, and which possessed an almost reckless appetite for new experience . . .

Eunice could be the key to everything. So typical of an Akinya, Chiku reflected, to have to be at the heart of events. It was a kind of vanity, the way the members of her family kept jamming themselves into history’s flow. The predisposition was so strong that it even applied to their machine emulations.

Even the images we make of ourselves are monstrous, Chiku thought.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

One evening, Chiku found herself under the stars again. It was a supremely transparent and cloudless night, with only one of the two moons above the horizon, its chalky disc bitten into like an apple. Neither Sirius nor Sol were visible from this part of Crucible, but Arachne conjured up her circle of sky and let it float before them, like some marvellous window into a deeper, more majestic firmament.

‘It’s begun,’ she announced grandly. ‘I have their slowdown signatures. I can detect the light from their engines. Would you like to see them?’

‘If I were to decline your offer,’ said Chiku, ‘would you show me anyway?’

‘You have such a dreadfully low opinion of my qualities as a host.’

‘Nice hosts eventually let their guests leave,’ Chiku said.

There were five points of light, squashed into a tiny area of the sky. Arachne made the image zoom and zoom again, until the points of light were milky, trembling smudges.

‘This is a real-time projection,’ she said. ‘Five holoships with Post-Chibesa engines have commenced their deceleration into this system. They’ll be with us very soon. I’ve been tracking them for quite some time – the power output of those engines is staggering. No wonder your little vehicle was able to travel so quickly. Imagine the potential, Chiku, if this technology were to be refined. Swift interstellar travel – mere decades to cross between stars instead of centuries. Your great-grandmother made the solar system seem a smaller place during her lifetime. Now your friend Travertine has built on that achievement to bring the rest of the galaxy within the reach of human comprehension. The holoships were a stepping stone, a necessary one, but now they’ve evolved their own obsolescence. You stand on the brink of galactic expansion.’