On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘She hasn’t forgotten what Zanzibar is, and she knows a bit about my family having something to do with this place. Beyond that, it’s sketchy.’

  ‘She’s in for the shock of her life if she thinks the world is ready for artilects and talking elephants.’

  Eventually the tree cover thinned out, and there, gratifyingly, was the Sess-na, tail-fin glinting back at them across an expanse of whiskery, wheat-coloured grass as tall as their thighs. They quickened their pace, Chiku hearing the faint whine as Noah’s suit assisted his movements. The suits were too cumbersome. Chiku wanted to climb out of hers and feel that grass whisking against her skin.

  ‘Hello,’ Eunice called, raising a hand. ‘You came back, Chiku. I confess, I had my doubts. Oh me of little faith! And who is your handsome companion?’

  ‘I’m Noah,’ he said, with an abashed smile ‘Chiku’s husband and a fellow member of Zanzibar’s Legislative Assembly.’

  ‘Welcome, both of you. Company’s one of those things you learn to do without until you get a taste of it again.’

  ‘I wanted Noah to see this before it’s too late. I hope I haven’t disappointed you by bringing him here.’

  Eunice was sitting on one of the Sess-na’s big rubber wheels. ‘Did I forbid you to tell anyone?’ She stood as they approached and offered her hand. Noah was the first to shake, holding on a little longer than politeness dictated, as if he was seeking some indication – even through the glove – that this was not a real human being.

  Chiku said, ‘Things are moving pretty quickly in Kappa – it won’t be long before the entrance is sealed over.’

  ‘Then we mustn’t delay. Shall we take a ride? I expect Noah will be keen to meet the Tantors.’

  Noah glanced at his wife. She nodded.

  Trust me.

  Soon they were airborne. There were four seats in the Sess-na, and this time she opted to sit in the rear and let Noah take the seat to Eunice’s right. It was Chiku’s third time in the aircraft, and she was expecting the lurching swoops and surges as it hit air pockets and thermals. She reached over from behind and put a hand on Noah’s shoulder, but after a moment he gently removed it and nodded to her that he was all right with the journey. This time they only flew a couple of kilometres along the valley and were soon spiralling down again towards a semicircular clearing. Chiku recognised the place: it was the clearing near the sheer stone wall that crawled with painstaking inscriptions.

  There was a moment during the descent when they were almost in free-fall – Eunice, she suspected, was pushing the machine far beyond its intended performance envelope – and then they were down, bumping and bouncing along a dusty smudge of ground at the centre of the clearing. A curtain of tall, dark trees bordered the semicircle’s curved edge, while the stone face defined its straight side. The aircraft rolled to halt.

  They left their helmets on the seats. Noah peered up at the wall, his jaw lolling open. The wall rose tens of metres, beguiling to the eye.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Memory,’ Eunice said. ‘I’m sure Chiku’s told you about the cybernetic dementia I’ve been infected with. It’s slow acting but utterly remorseless. I wasn’t able to stop its progress, so I preserved as much information as I could in stone, while I still remembered.’

  ‘It looks like hieroglyphs,’ Chiku said, but when she got closer, she realised that the symbols were in fact unlike anything she had seen before. There were numerous stick-figures, or things that were fleetingly evocative of stick-figures, lots of lines and spirals and squiggles.

  ‘Something I picked up on Phobos that I knew could be used for efficient storage and encoding. Fortunately, the syntax was buried in a part of my memory she couldn’t touch.’

  ‘So you can just . . . read all this, and it’s as if you never forgot anything?’ Chiku asked, sweeping her hand up the vaulting edifice’s dense patterning. She imagined Eunice, this tiny woman, monkeying up and down that rock face. Carving her past into stone even as her memory rotted.

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t begin to store my entire knowledge base in stone. It’s mainly just pointers, signposts, like the filing system in a library.’ She gave a little cluck of self-disgust. ‘It didn’t really work. The dementia touched parts of me I thought would be safe. By the time it had done its worst, I’d lost the capacity to make sense of more than a tiny fraction of these inscriptions.’

  ‘So the dementia isn’t progressing still?’ Noah asked.

  ‘I’m not getting worse, but I’m not recovering, either. I’ve been on the verge of understanding myself for decades but the moment never comes.’

  ‘Then all this effort was wasted,’ Chiku said.

  ‘Not quite. Being shrewd, I established multiple-redundancy pathways to the most vital knowledge areas. Like the name Arachne, and something of what she was. There’s another name I made a point of remembering.’

  ‘And that would be . . . ?’ Chiku said.

  ‘Her name is . . . or was . . . June Wing.’

  Chiku smiled. ‘I’ve heard that name before. She had some connection with the family, didn’t she?’

  ‘She was a friend, an ally. When I ceased to have routine contact with your mother, I still had a line of communication to June Wing. She helped me get here, helped me live. I’m hoping she might still be alive.’

  ‘I could check the public records,’ Chiku said. ‘See if she’s still alive in the old system. The information might not be altogether reliable, given the timelag, but that’s the best I can do.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it.’

  Just then, the Tantors broke through the trees.

  Chiku’s extensive experience with elephants enabled her to differentiate individuals. She knew the tell-tales that shed light on age and vigour, and those that distinguished one animal from another and revealed familial bonds. The process took time, however, and she had spent nowhere near enough of it in Dreadnought’s presence to fix his image in her mind. Besides, the four Tantors had been devoid of the common injuries – the missing tusks, the bitten ears – that were part of her arsenal of recognition techniques. Now she was looking at six well-preserved Tantors and she could not be certain whether or not she had seen any of them before.

  ‘Is that Dreadnought?’ she asked, nodding towards the biggest elephant in the group.

  ‘No – Dreadnought’s still in Lobe One. That’s Aphrodite, Dreadnought’s younger sister.’

  ‘You’d better tell her I’m not a threat.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll know that by now. What Dreadnought sees and experiences, she sees and experiences.’

  Chiku found herself grinning. ‘So what else can they do? Move trees just by thinking about it?’

  ‘In the Surveilled World,’ Eunice said, ‘there was hardly an animal bigger than a flea that didn’t have machines in its central nervous system. Humankind put them there, to prevent Mother Nature from getting ideas above her station. A lion wants to eat you? You look at the lion and whisper an oath and the lion drops dead, every cell in its brain fried before it can blink. The neuromachines were self-replicating, and they passed from generation to generation without human interference. The phyletic dwarves had the same neuromachinery. The Tantors are distant descendants of the dwarves, and the machines have accompanied them across the generations. With some upgrades along the way, of course.’

  ‘Shaped by you?’ Chiku asked.

  ‘I can’t help myself. Always was an inveterate tinkerer.’

  Chiku asked Noah to join her to introduce themselves to Aphrodite. Like the Tantors Chiku had already met, these creatures wore harnesses and communications systems around their heads and bodies. Chiku guessed that the population was stable enough that there was little need to manufacture new equipment.

  On Aphrodite’s screen appeared the words:

  WELCOME CHIKU

  ‘This is my husband, Noah.’ Catching herself, remembering Eunice’s injunction to keep things simple, she added: ‘My fr
iend, Noah.’

  WELCOME NOAH

  Noah raised a hand. ‘Hello, Aphrodite. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Where are we?’

  Chiku nudged him. ‘You know exactly where we are.’

  ‘I want to hear what she thinks, not you.’

  Aphrodite flapped her ears. They were like sheets of stiffened canvas. Chiku wondered what the flapping signified. Was it concentration, irritation or something so intrinsic to elephants as to be beyond her conceptual horizon?

  After a few moments, Aphrodite said:

  IN CHAMBER

  ‘And outside the chamber?’ Noah probed.

  OUTSIDE = NOTHING

  ‘That’s true enough,’ Chiku whispered. ‘Vacuum. The void between the stars.’

  ‘They don’t know about the other chambers in Zanzibar, let alone other worlds.’

  SPEAK LOUD

  Chiku smiled at this rebuff. ‘They’re elephants,’ she whispered. ‘That they’re capable of grasping anything is pretty astonishing.’ Then, to Aphrodite: ‘Noah has a lot to ask you.’

  ‘You’re leaving me to make small talk with elephants?’

  For all his protestations, Noah clearly relished the chance to interact with the Tantors. Chiku left him trying to get Aphrodite to name the other five animals and walked over to Eunice. She had been watching over them from the partial shade of the aircraft’s wing. The Sess-na generated odd little clicking sounds, as if it, too, had things on its mind.

  ‘Do you have some information for me?’ Eunice asked.

  Chiku nodded. ‘For what it’s worth, I found out what I could about that name you mentioned.’

  Eunice looked at her with sharp interest. ‘Was it difficult?’

  ‘No, incredibly easy.’ Chiku felt the need to sit down and perched on the wheel where Eunice had been resting when they arrived. ‘I searched the public files. I know there was a risk in that, but I put in other names, as well – made it look as if I might be thinking of names for a child, something like that. There are lots of people and things called Arachne, of course, but it didn’t take me long to narrow it down. Arachne is – or was – the controlling intelligence behind Ocular.’

  ‘Ocular,’ Eunice repeated. ‘I almost know what that means. It’s there, somewhere.’

  ‘It’s the name of the array of space telescopes that detected Mandala, and the Akinyas were involved in its construction. Mandala is the alien structure on Crucible. Ocular found it, and that’s why we’re here, seventeen light-years from Earth, heading to Crucible.’

  ‘But there are other holoships, other caravans, headed for other extrasolar planets.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chiku, ‘but Crucible was the first destination to be chosen. It’s the closest truly Earth-like world, and the only one with an alien artefact crying out for closer examination.’

  Eunice shook her head. ‘I really don’t think this can be the connection.’

  ‘It has to be.’

  ‘Even if Arachne was another artilect, what harm was I doing her? What harm could she possibly have done me? Why did I need to flee the system?’

  ‘I’m afraid there are still more questions than answers, but perhaps this will help you.’ Chiku dug into the suit’s cargo pouch and slid something from a plastic sheath. She offered it to Eunice.

  The robot took it in both hands, examining it dubiously.

  ‘It looks like something made for chimpanzees.’

  ‘It’s for children,’ Chiku explained. ‘I don’t know how it was in your day, but we don’t put implants into children until their tenth birthday. Until then, they make do with things like this. It was Ndege’s – my daughter’s. It’s called a companion. It’s a diary, a story-book, an encyclopedia, all in one. It also functions as a portal, a way into the public files.’

  ‘Then it’s useless to me – I already told you there are no data links between here and the rest of Zanzibar.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’ Chiku took the companion back to demonstrate her point with a simple query. ‘Some change in Zanzibar must have damaged the original links, but the companion isn’t affected. It must be utilising a different protocol.’ She returned the book to Eunice.

  ‘If I use this,’ Eunice said, ‘will my doing so come to anyone’s attention?’

  ‘It’s a thing made for children, and it only has a limited search capability. For that reason, it’s not the sort of thing that would be routinely monitored. Provided you’re careful with your queries, nothing untoward should happen.’

  ‘And your daughter won’t miss it?’

  ‘If Ndege being cross is the worst thing we have to deal with . . .’ Chiku said. She shook her head firmly. ‘She’ll understand. One day.’

  ‘I shall take very good care of it.’

  Chiku stood up. ‘I don’t know when we’re next going to see each other, but it could be a while. What you’ve told me, about Arachne . . . I think I have to do something quite difficult. I think I have to call on Chiku Yellow for help. I’ll see if she can reach June Wing – assuming either of them is still alive.’

  ‘Will she listen?’

  ‘She’d better. But I can’t promise anything – we’ve been out of touch for so long.’

  ‘I must warn you – if Arachne still has influence, she may not take kindly to anyone making enquiries about her. You’ll be putting this other version of you at considerable risk.’

  ‘Believe me,’ Chiku said, with an edge of steel in her voice. ‘She could use some excitement in her life.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The room was lightless except for the glowing coloured threads stretching from floor to ceiling in a bundle, braided into a thick, multicoloured column as wide as Chiku’s fist. The column maintained the same width until it reached eye level, where it fanned out in an explosion of threads, taut as harp-strings, which arrowed towards the ceiling at many different angles. The individual threads, which had been linear from the point where they came out of the floor, now branched and rebranched in countless bifurcations. By the time the pattern of lines brushed the ceiling, it was all but impossible to distinguish individual strands.

  Mecufi was with her, upright in his mobility exo. He had been present since the scriptors started work and her memories began to unpack themselves.

  ‘We really are remarkably fortunate,’ he said.

  He was engaging her in conversation, exploring her responses to a spectrum of stimuli, to gauge how well the scriptors had functioned.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘We nearly ended ourselves,’ he said, gesturing towards the threads with an upsweep of his arm. ‘It was only by some great grace of fortune that we made it into the present, tunnelled through the bottleneck, exploded into what we are today.’

  ‘A squabbling mess,’ Chiku said.

  ‘Better a squabbling mess than non-existence. You can always improve a mess. That bottleneck is the point where we nearly became extinct. There were tens of thousands of us before this happened, one hundred and ninety-five thousand years ago. Then something brought a terrible winnowing. The climate shifted, turning cold and arid. Fortunately, a handful of us survived – emerging from some corner of Africa where conditions hadn’t become quite as unendurable as they were elsewhere. We were smart by then – we know this from the remains we left behind – but intelligence played only a very small part in getting us through the bottleneck. Mostly we owe our success to blind luck, being in the right place at the right time, and then following the shoreline as it rose and retreated, over and again. It was the sea that saved us, Chiku. When the world cooled, the oceans gave us sustenance. Shellfish prefer the cold. And so we foraged, never far from water, along beaches and intertidal zones, and lived in caves, and spent our days wading in the shallows. The lap of waves, the roar of breakers, the tang of ozone, the mew of a seagull – there’s a reason we’re comforted by these sounds. And here we are, a genetic heartbeat later. Returning a debt, giving back to the oceans what the oceans gave us. The seas saved us once. Now
we’re saving the seas, and taking them with us to the stars.’

  ‘It’s a very nice sculpture.’

  ‘By the time it touches the ceiling, there are twelve billion threads. Spiderfibre whiskers, just a few carbon atoms wide – the same stuff they used to make the cables for space elevators – one for every person now alive, on Earth, orbiting the sun, in the Oort communities and the holoship migrations. I can identify your thread, if you’d like . . . you can watch it glow brighter than the others, follow its path all the way into history, see where three became one. See where you fit into the bottleneck.’

  ‘There’s a point to all this, I’m presuming?’

  ‘Arethusa liked to call us Poseidon’s Children. Orphans of the storm. We’d endured the worst the world could throw at us, the worst consequences of our own stupidity, and came through, like the survivors on The Raft of the Medusa, ready to face the dawn. But there are always more storms, Chiku. Arethusa knew that better than most. The question we need to face now is: have we weathered the worst? Or is there something we haven’t anticipated coming down the line?’

  She thought back to the freight of feelings Mecufi had packed into his mote, on the night before she went to the seasteads. Less than a week ago, although that seemed impossible to square with the huge new freight of memories now burdening her head.

  ‘Something’s got you worried, hasn’t it? That’s why you’re in such a rush all of a sudden to contact Arethusa. That’s why you need me.’

  ‘We saw an opportunity to do good. That it happens to coincide with a need of our own . . . let’s just call it a happy accident, shall we?’

  They were in one of the Atlantic seasteads, not far from the Azores. Chiku’s progress was being assessed from hour to hour as the new memories branched and rebranched. The Merfolk had considered this a wise precaution. Many years had passed since the Quorum technology had last been allowed to work as intended, and the presence of anti-tamper countermeasures beneath the ones they had already identified and neutralised could not be eliminated. Some glitches in mnemonic transcription, harmless or malign, were also possible.