On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I am very sorry to hear the news, Imris. I didn’t believe it at first. After all this time, something as stupid as that ended June Wing? A ridiculous accident, on Venus? I mean, really.’

  ‘There is no such thing as a good way to go when you are three hundred and three years old,’ Kwami said sagely.

  ‘If she hadn’t given up her suit, Pedro or I might not be here,’ Chiku said.

  ‘Had you known her long?’ Gallicean asked.

  ‘No time at all, really, but there’s a connection with my family. June used to know my mother and father, back when they were all living on the Moon.’

  ‘Which would make you one of those Akinyas, not just any old Akinya.’

  ‘Yes,’ Chiku said. ‘But don’t hold it against me, will you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ Gallicean had a bushy black beard, which presumably served to cover up yet more blemishes, and a mop of unruly black hair. A plain gold earring pierced one cratered lobe. His clothes ran to the ostentatious. ‘Look, let’s not stand around like fools. There’s a pretty good bar at the other end of Phobos – we should drink ourselves into an absolute stupor, in her memory.’

  ‘Except I do not drink,’ Imris Kwami said.

  ‘No, but you have a remarkable tolerance for the drunkenness of others.’

  ‘This is true.’

  ‘Plus you know more June stories than any other person alive. With the possible exception of me.’

  ‘This is also true.’

  Wormlike trains burrowed through the moon. They were soon inside the bar, seated at a table with a commanding view of the lit face of Mars. The only gravity here was the feeble pull provided by Phobos itself, but the drinks arrived in exquisite squeezebulbs, and there were bracelets and epidermal patches for those unaccustomed to near-weightlessness. Pedro and Chiku ordered a couple of patches, then buckled into padded observation chairs.

  ‘He’s far too modest to brag about it,’ Kwami said, ‘but our friend Victor here is one of the very few people to have set foot on Mars in the last fifty years – on several occasions, in fact. How many is it now, Victor? Four?’

  ‘Six,’ Gallicean said, with a cough. ‘Actually, seven.’

  ‘I’m surprised anyone goes down to Mars these days,’ Chiku said.

  ‘It’s all unofficial and uninsured,’ Gallicean said. ‘We go down fast, pick our landing sites very carefully and don’t hang around to sniff the daisies – on my most recent trip, I was down there under eight minutes. My cumulative Martian surface time over my entire career as an extraction specialist is still less than an hour.’ He sniffed, scratching at his nose. ‘Never saw the place in the old days. Rather regret that now.’

  ‘I’ve heard about thrill-seekers going after an adrenalin rush,’ Pedro said.

  ‘Fools and knaves,’ Gallicean replied, his features settling into an expression of unbridled contempt. ‘They drop something on the surface, like a bone. Then, dogs that they are, they race each other to see who can get to it first, ahead of the machines, and then return to orbit. There’s money and prestige involved, of course – why else would they debase themselves?’

  ‘Victor Gallicean considers such activities beneath him,’ Kwami said, as if the subject of his statement were not sitting directly opposite him.

  ‘Yes, he does,’ Gallicean said firmly. ‘I face comparable risks, but I do so for a purpose beyond my own personal glorification.’

  It was cloudless and windless on Mars, so they could see all the way down to the surface without difficulty. By some fluke, they were looking down on the place where it all began – the Tharsis ridge, three shield volcanoes laid out in a chain like bullet-holes, and to the east the spider-web fracturing of the Valles Marineris canyon system, scarring so deep that even from orbit Chiku could see the contrasting elevations. Where the machines had been busy, their activities had left visible traces on the surface, as if Mars had been subject to a new and sudden epoch of weathering. There were bright new craters, blasted by weapons, and the notches and zigzags of trenches dug for fortification. Elsewhere, the machines’ tracks were stranger and more transient. Geometric patterns flickered across the dust, squares and clusters of squares hundreds of kilometres across. Sometimes these formations met other clusters of squares and formed battle fronts, arcing lines, continental in scale, where geometries tussled and ruptured. These patterns bloomed in a day and faded overnight, the evidence of subterranean processes beyond the reach of orbital sensors. More and more, the machines were keeping their secrets to themselves.

  Defence platforms circled Mars, nervously vigilant against any attempt the machines might make to reach space.

  ‘So what,’ Pedro said, ‘does an extraction specialist actually extract?’

  ‘Different things for different clients, and not just from Mars. I’ve worked all over the system. For our dear friend June, it has usually involved robotics.’

  ‘The whole of Mars involves robotics,’ Chiku said.

  ‘We are speaking now of a much earlier phase of robotic activity. Doubtless Imris has spoken of the museum? For years, June has been bent on collecting the surviving relics of the dawn of robotic exploration, where such recovery is feasible. Landers, probes, rovers. It’s surprising how many of these things were still lying around when she began her work.’

  ‘It’s why she came to Venus,’ Chiku said, remembering the relic they’d abandoned in the anchorpoint.

  ‘At her time of life,’ Gallicean replied, ‘she was probably unwise to take on so much of the work. But would she listen?’

  ‘I argued against it as best I could,’ Kwami said.

  Gallicean fidgeted in his chair, adjusting the restraint straps. ‘This may be indelicate, Imris, but it’s better said now than later or not at all. Are there plans for the continuation of the museum?’

  A new face of Mars was turning slowly into view as Phobos orbited. On the horizon’s bow, mysterious dust plumes curled into the high, thin reaches of the atmosphere. The night face, which would be visible soon, was often alive with patterns of lights, pastel blues and greens, shining up from the ground or floating in the air. No one really had a clue about what the machines were doing down there.

  ‘Matters are in hand,’ Kwami said.

  ‘Well, that’s as clear as mud,’ Gallicean said.

  ‘You know as well as I do that she was in no hurry to complete the project – she never set a date for the opening, and she left no instructions regarding how the museum would function once she deemed the collection ready for visitors. And there are still many artefacts around the system still to be gathered.’

  ‘Forgive my inquisitiveness,’ Gallicean said, lifting his squeezebulb in an apologetic toast. ‘It was rude of me to talk business.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Kwami said. ‘But as you raised the topic – your trip was, I trust, successful?’

  ‘I got what you sent me to find. A few dents and scratches, but nothing unexpected after so long down there. I’m just sorry she isn’t here to see it herself.’

  ‘What did you extract?’ Chiku asked.

  ‘A rover. Indian Space Agency, mid-2030s. It’s difficult to believe, I know, but there are still things wandering around on Mars that by some great good fortune have not yet been picked apart by the Evolvarium. In some cases, it appears to have allowed them to live. We’ll never know for sure, but it’s almost as if the ’varium’s taking pity on them, or showing respect to a few older, more venerable machines. The ISA rover has experienced some contamination, some degree of upgrading and evolution, but June would have been expecting that.’

  ‘She’d have been very grateful,’ Kwami said. ‘I thank you on her behalf for the risks you took.’

  ‘Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves.’ He saluted this observation with a sip from his squeezebulb, nodding in immodest self-approval.

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever go back?’ Pedro asked. ‘To Mars, I mean. Or is it gone for good?’r />
  ‘It’s not our world now. And what would be the point, anyway? I’d far rather sit things out and see what happens. The Evolvarium is moving through distinct developmental phases. It started with the blood-red Darwinian survival struggle, every creature for itself, and now we’re seeing an organisational shift to something more complex. Cooperative alliances, hints of machine altruism – the emergence, perhaps, of machine statehood, the onset of a global civilisation of competing factions. There’s no telling what Mars will be like when they start getting really clever. We may need to send down ambassadors!’

  ‘Unless they beat us to it and send up their own first,’ Chiku said.

  After that, there were many stories. Gallicean started, but Imris Kwami soon joined in, both men happily accusing the other of embellishment and exaggeration, but equally content to laugh at the other’s tales and wince at some of the more awkward moments, of which there was no small number. Listening to these accounts, funny and bracing and sad, Chiku felt something very close to vertigo, a dizzy sort of perception that she had only just begun to grasp the vertical depth of a very long life, the sense of how far it plumbed the past. A life that went down like a lift-shaft, each floor containing an ordinary life’s worth of love and loss, adventure and disappointment, dreams and ruins, joy and sorrow. There were empires and dynasties that had not endured as long as June Wing had. It was true that she was an outlier, a statistical extreme, with her three hundred and three years of mortal existence. But there were more like her all the time. Before long, a life as prolonged as hers would be considered unusual rather than exceptional, and eventually unremarkable rather than unusual.

  Very soon it was time to go. Their medical bracelets blasted them back to cold sobriety, all except Imris Kwami, of course, who had never been anything other than clearheaded. Needles of clarity pierced Chiku’s skull. For a few minutes her thoughts ran supercooled, as if her entire brain had been dipped in liquid helium. It was not entirely pleasant. The four of them returned by train to the spacedocks, where Gulliver hummed in its clamps, still refuelling. Kwami and Gallicean completed the paperwork for the handover of the Martian relic.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ Gallicean asked.

  ‘Saturn, where we hope to catch up with an old friend. Of course, there is also the small matter of disposing of June’s remains. Fortunately, she was very specific in her instructions.’

  ‘June would not be June were the instructions anything other than specific,’ Gallicean said sagely.

  ‘You are welcome to accompany us. We’ll be there and back inside of a month.’

  ‘No, but I thank you for the kindness. Work to be done, fortunes to be won and lost, et cetera. There will be some record of the event?’

  ‘I’ll see that you receive a copy. And thank you again – for everything.’

  Chiku wondered if she was still suffering some kind of residual drunkenness, as none of this exchange made sense to her. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Imris, but how can there possibly be remains? We left her on Venus.’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Imris Kwami said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When Saturn filled half the sky, Kwami called Chiku and Pedro back into the part of Gulliver that until then had been sealed behind glass doors.

  Chiku had been correct in her guess that this was some sort of medical facility. Beyond the doors were aggressively sterile rooms filled with extremely modern surgical equipment – scanners, medical pods, mantis-like robot doctors. None of this was very surprising, Chiku supposed. At three hundred and three, and given the life choices she had made in her youth, June would have needed more than a little maintenance. But there was enough medical equipment here to keep a dance troupe alive.

  When Kwami showed them the bodies, understanding began to dawn.

  They were kept in one room, preserved in glass cylinders. Knots of complex plumbing ran into the cylinders, top and bottom, and each contained a human body floating in some kind of suspension medium.

  ‘They’re not clones,’ Kwami was quick to point out. ‘They are not even living, in the technical sense. These are robots, android bodies constructed using biomimetic principles. They have bones, musculature, a circulatory system, but they are still machines.’

  ‘Sort of like ching proxies?’ Pedro asked.

  ‘The exact opposite, in fact. These forms were not engineered to be controlled from a distance via a mind located in another body. She occupied these bodies from within. She wore them. They were her.’

  ‘We saw her, Imris. On Venus,’ Chiku said. She was having trouble getting her mind around what she was hearing.

  ‘You saw another of these bodies. There were ten in all. You will notice that one is missing – that was the body she was occupying at the time of her death.’

  ‘How long had she been . . . occupying it?’ Pedro asked, swallowing hard.

  ‘The surgical integration was quite time-consuming, not to say risky. She did not normally swap bodies more than once or twice a year, and lately, less frequently than that. She had occupied the one she died in for twenty-two months. I do not think she had the fortitude to endure another integration.’

  Chiku had no appetite for the details, but they were plain enough. At the time of her death, June had been reduced to little more than a central nervous system. These bodies were vehicles for a brain and some spinal trimmings. Her mind had long been saturated with aug-mediating implants, so it would have been simple for her to send and receive the nervous signals required to drive a prosthetic body.

  Essentially, Chiku conceded, it was not so very different from chinging into a proxy or warmblood body. When Chiku had chinged aboard Zanzibar, surgeons could have entered her room in Lisbon and stripped her down to a brain. Provided the brain was kept alive, she would have known no better. The signals fed to her brain during the chinging process were persuasive – she felt herself to be elsewhere.

  All June had done was fold that illusion back onto itself, like a trick of origami.

  ‘She was not alone in this,’ Kwami said. ‘There are thousands like her, even now.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Chiku said.

  ‘The early adopters encountered considerable social revulsion. Later, when the bodies had advanced to the point of being indistinguishable from living forms, there was no need for the occupants to advertise their nature. Certainly no legal obligation to do so. Would you have treated June differently if you had known?’

  ‘No,’ Chiku said. ‘I mean, I don’t think so.’

  ‘But there is doubt,’ Kwami said, ‘and you cannot be blamed for it. It is a perfectly human reaction.’

  ‘Why so many bodies?’ Pedro asked.

  ‘They are not all the same – it suited her purposes to have a selection of bodies, rather than the complexity of a single body with configurable modes. But as I said, it had been a while since her last change. One or two of them she hardly ever used, but she could not bring herself to destroy them.’

  ‘Could she have survived . . . on the surface of Venus, when the accident happened?’ Pedro asked

  ‘No more than you could, my friend. She may not have needed air and water, but she was no more capable of surviving that atmosphere than the rest of us. But as I said, her state of mind was peaceful. This far into her life, she had faced death many times and had negotiated a kind of acceptance of it.’ Kwami laced his fingers. ‘But now there is work to be done. It was her wish that these bodies be disposed of, should she no longer need them. These are the remains I mentioned.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Imris,’ Chiku said.

  ‘Do not be. She did good work, and lived a long life.’

  They sent the nine bodies towards Saturn, spitting them out of Gulliver like seeds, each boosted far enough ahead of the next that they followed independent trajectories. From a window in the ship they watched them fall, twinkling as they tumbled, shock-frozen in seconds. In time, Kwami said, the bodies would ghost through the rin
gs. The particles of ice that circled Saturn were dispersed so tenuously that collisions were unlikely, during the first crossing, at least. But the bodies would loop around and thread the rings over and over again. Sooner or later, on the tenth or the hundredth passage, ice would meet ice, and in that meeting there would be a flash of vapour, a white gasp of kinetic energy. And there would follow a temporary unravelling of the ring’s multistranded weave, visible, perhaps, from space or one of the planet’s airless moons.

  But time and gravity would do their healing work. Entrained by the same resonant forces that had sculpted and maintained the rings in the first place, the pieces of June would take their place among the stately processional ooze of all the other icy shards. Save for a gemlike tint of chemical impurity, there would be no way to tell that these pieces had ever contained a life.

  Chiku had seen moons and asteroids before, but nothing quite like Hyperion. It was not its potato shape that distinguished the Saturnian moon, although Hyperion was very large for an object that was not spherical. What was remarkable, even beautiful, was the degree to which this little piece of ice and dirt was cratered, its surface so impacted that the walls of the craters touched and intersected, the walls forming knifeblade ridges, the pattern of these ridges suggesting nothing less than some marine growth process, as if this was a moon grown from some pearly grey variety of coral. And the walls went down so far that the deeply shadowed craters became like cave mouths, enclosing dark mysteries. Indeed, Hyperion was riddled with cavities. It was less a moon than a loosely organised swarm of rubble, moving in uneasy consort. There was room to lose cities in those fissures and voids.

  As Gulliver closed in, decelerating from thousands to hundreds and then tens of kilometres per second, there was not much to suggest that people had found a use for this place. A handful of strobe lights, a radar bounce off some metallic installation or encampment, but no cities, no landing pads, no train tubes or casino hotels. Strapped into a seat for the duration of the slowdown burns, Chiku thought they were coming in recklessly fast, and she began to wonder if Imris Kwami did in fact have it in mind to dash them all to their doom. Perhaps that had been his intention all along, from the moment he learned of June’s death.