‘Chiku, is something wrong?’
‘No,’ she answered, just a touch too hastily. ‘Everything’s fine. I mean, as fine as it can be, given what we’ve just been through.’ But he had heard it, she knew – the false note in her voice, the forced optimism. The strained levity of the deathbed visitor.
And then an immense, oceanic calm washed over her. ‘Actually, Pedro, it’s not all fine.’
‘What are you saying, Chiku?’
‘Mecufi thinks you might be about to die.’
When he replied, she heard the slightest hint of amusement in his voice: hardly laughter, but definitely amusement. ‘I knew the bastard was hiding something. How bad is it?’
‘Your trajectory will take you near a vacuum chimney. There’s a small chance you’ll hit it. More than likely you won’t, but Mecufi thinks it’ll shoot you out of the sky before you get a chance.’
‘Nice of him to mention that.’
‘I think he was trying to be kind.’
‘He was, I suppose. And you telling me this, it isn’t very kind. But thank you.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’d rather know than not, Chiku. We’ve been together long enough for you to know that. I don’t need kindness at this point.’ He inhaled deeply, exhaled. ‘How long do I have?’
‘Mecufi said a couple of minutes.’
‘From the start of our conversation?’
‘I think so. Yes.’
‘Ever since we saw what happened to June Wing I’ve been wondering whether I’d have her strength, when the time came, to say, fine, I’ve had my life, I can’t complain. I just didn’t expect to get to find out quite so soon. I was thinking a few more decades, maybe a century, then I’ll worry about the answer to that question.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.
‘No, don’t be. I’m . . . coping. As you say, there’s a chance, so no heroic last words. I have a question, though – just one.’
‘Go on.’
‘You’ve never really asked me about my life before I met you. I know everything about you, where you were born, what you’ve done . . . almost the entire history of your life. You’re an Akinya – it’s hard to get away from that! But I’m just some man you met buying ice cream. And unless I’ve missed something, that’s all you know.’
‘It is.’
‘Just a man who makes guitars, in a little studio in Lisbon. A man who works with wood and glue and string. And it’s true – that’s me. But there’s more. Not as much of a life as yours, but still – it’s mine. Someone ought to remember all of it. If you want to.’
‘I would.’ Then, as if affirming some time-honoured vow, she said: ‘I do.’
‘I have a friend, Nicolas. You know him – he comes to the studio sometimes. Always complaining about this or that. Nicolas knows me. He’ll tell you my story, if you can stand his company for a few hours.’
‘I’ll speak to him. I promise.’
‘Thing is, I’ve had some ups and downs. Some adventures, too. Been further than you’d guess. But whatever happens, this has been fun – it’s been good knowing you.’
‘I’m really sorry I dragged you into this.’
‘Oh, don’t be. I’m still glad we chose to buy ice cream at the same time. Even if those seagulls were thieving bastards.’
‘They were,’ she said, wanting to smile, but not quite having the strength. ‘They definitely were.’
She waited for an answer.
She lay in her little bobbing glass boat, adrift from herself. There was no present, no past, no future. No sadness, no sorrow, because those were ordinary little human emotions that required a frame of reference, and she had none to cling to. She had caved in, become a measureless void, no poles, no lines of latitude or longitude. She was an emptiness bigger than galaxies, unmapped and unmappable.
The worst thing of all, the knife that would not stop twisting, the realisation that left her so utterly harrowed, was that she would do all of this again. It had all been necessary. She had worlds to consider. The lives of multitudes hung in the balance.
On the horizon now, blurred through the water-washed glass of the capsule, Providers were advancing. There were three of them – pale outlines, all joints and limbs, like the projected forms of magnified insects. They looked as tall as thunderheads. The water here must have been kilometres deep, so they could not be walking on the ocean bed – could they? – but however they travelled, they terrified her. Where were the airpods and scrambulances?
‘Mecufi,’ she said, just a word, an oath as much as a plea. Because for all his promises, Mecufi had done nothing except fail to save Pedro. Perhaps Arethusa had it wrong after all, her judgement blunted by the years in Hyperion. Perhaps Mecufi was not to be trusted.
The Providers were closer still. She thought of the ones on Venus, their trumpeting exchanges. She wondered what they would do when they arrived. Not kill her, surely. At least not in any obvious or culpable fashion. But damage her, perhaps, so that her memories could not be retrieved. Make it look accidental, another complication of the blowpipe accident. These things happened, people would say. Even in a perfect world. The Providers had done their best.
Something knocked on the glass.
It was a hand, webbed between the fingers. The shadowy form the hand belonged to vanished beneath the water and resurfaced on the other side of the capsule. She could see a body now, and a face. Mecufi was the only merperson Chiku thought herself capable of recognising, but this was not Mecufi. This was a sleeker, leaner organism, the skin tone darker, the architecture of the face different.
She knew it. It was her own face, or rather it had the same proportions, the same balance of features, but altered for aquatic life. It was her son’s face.
‘Kanu,’ she said, astonished and numb.
He planted a hand against the glass, fingers spread. The skin between his fingers was fine-veined and translucent. The only reason for that touch was to offer reassurance.
Chiku twisted in the capsule. It was difficult to move, but she struggled until she could mirror Kanu’s gesture. They were palm to palm, only glass between them. Kanu’s lips moved. She could not hear him, but she thought he was telling her not to worry.
Beyond Kanu, something much larger broke through the waters, a huge and glossy thing with a shape too complicated to comprehend in one glance. Another surfaced a little to the right. Water rode off them in cataracting rivulets as they breached into daylight. She remembered one of Uncle Geoffrey’s stories, of being rescued at sea by the merfolk, of a voyage in an ancient clanking submarine. Doubtless the details had been embroidered, but somewhere in the telling would have been a core of truth. It could not have happened very far from here.
This, though, was no ancient submarine. It was changing shape as she watched, muscular parts moving against each other as it transformed. What she had originally thought to be two or three things were in fact a single entity. As the main part of it emerged – a kind of tapering irongrey hull, plated in places and soft in others – she realised that she was staring not into a porthole but an eye, perfectly defined, wider than she was tall. The eye regarded Chiku. Kanu, interposed between the capsule and the eye, moved his arms in a kind of sign language.
Tentacles intermeshed around her bobbing coffin to form a slithering cage and closed around the capsule. Suckers pressed against glass sought and obtained traction. The glass creaked, but held.
And then Kanu and the kraken carried her under.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
She awoke with her face in grass, blades up her nose, in her eyes, regiments of mud storming the battlements of her teeth.
She heard the urgent patter of approaching feet. Shoe-squelch on grass.
‘Here,’ a voice said. ‘Let me help you back up.’
Hands took her body and eased her into an ungainly sitting position, legs still tangled on the lawn. She felt like a discarded doll. As she wiped the dirt from her face, she noticed that h
er palm was a greasy green-yellow with the pulp of grass and soil, where she must have reached out to stop her fall.
‘I tripped,’ she said, tongue moving thick and slow in her mouth, like a fat, lazy slug.
‘You had a microsleep episode – normal enough this soon after revival. Usually you’d just stumble through it and not notice, but your inner ear is still a bit wobbly.’ A person dressed in crisp electric-white medical overalls was kneeling next to her. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I think so.’ She tried to remember what was happening before she came to on the grass, but for a moment she was unshackled from everything other than the present. ‘What was I doing? Where am I?’
‘Taking a stroll. You’re in the gardens.’
‘Gardens.’ The word felt novel, unusual in her mouth.
‘Of the revival clinic. We woke you, brought you out of skipover.’
The technician was smiling gently. He was a stocky man with pleasing features and a tonsure of black curls around a gleaming bald spot. She felt certain she knew him, but no name came to mind.
‘You’ve been conscious for a day,’ the man added kindly. ‘It’s perfectly normal to have some setbacks until things settle down.’
Her addled thoughts searched for a point of reference. Where was she? She remembered being in many places lately. On Earth, in space, inside a mad, tumbling moon with a core of scratched glass. In a house of cats. In a box, falling through the sky. In the grip of a sea-monster.
No, she was in Zanzibar. In a revival clinic’s gardens, in one of the community cores.
‘I expect I’ve asked you this already—’ she began.
‘Forty years. And yes, you’ve asked a few times. But again, it’s normal.’
Her throat was wretchedly dry. She felt like a mummy, a thing stitched together from tissue and cloth.
‘I don’t remember the date. When I went under, or what it should be now.’ She was trying to work things out, but her thoughts kept running into a ditch. This, she reflected, was how it must feel to be stupid, unable to hold the simplest chain of reasoning in her head. Even that notion was difficult for her to comprehend.
‘It’s 2388 now. You went under in 2348, forty years ago to the week. Here – do you want to try standing again?’
Chiku took his outstretched hands and let him help her up. She was unsteady on her feet at first, needing the technician’s hand at her elbow for a few moments. ‘I feel like a wreck. I’ve done this before. Why doesn’t it get any easier?’
‘You’re actually doing really well. Forty’s not too bad a skip, anyway – not that the duration makes much difference to the side effects, in my experience. You were authorised for the full sixty, too – the rest of your family are still under.’
‘You’ve told me this already, haven’t you?’
‘About nine times. But don’t worry – it’s all part of the service.’
‘How’s Pedro?’
The technician’s smile tightened. ‘There isn’t a Pedro – not according to my manifest.’
‘No, not Pedro,’ she said, concentrating hard. ‘I mean Noah. And my children – Mposi, Ndege. They all went under when I did. How are they? Have I spoken to them yet?’
‘That would be difficult as they’re all still in skipover.’
‘Then why am I awake?’
‘You asked to be, Chiku.’ There was a faintly impatient edge to his voice now, as if, despite his assurances, there was a limit to how often he ought to have to explain this stuff to her. Perhaps it had been more than nine times.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just need to . . . clear my head a bit. I think I was going somewhere.’
‘There are some benches over by the fountain. Shall I help you the rest of the way?’
‘No,’ she said, deciding she would make it on her wobbly legs or not at all. ‘I can manage. I feel steadier already.’
She followed the hiss of water to the ornamental fountain. It was just around a curve in the lawn, hidden by a wall of manicured hedge twice as tall as Chiku. Somehow she had half-known the way. She must have already come to the fountain several times since her revival, forever discovering it anew.
The revival clinic had been designed to feel as little like a medical facility as possible. The building behind her was low-ceilinged and white under a wide-brimmed witch’s hat of a roof, with pavilioned walkways and many open windows and doors. It was hemmed in by trees and hedges, a century and a half’s worth of managed growth. The skipover vaults were somewhere else entirely.
Overhead blazed a ceiling of false sky. It struck Chiku that the quality of light had altered since she went under. Which, upon a moment’s reflection, was surely the case: they were adjusting the spectrum and brightness from year to year, slowly transitioning to the conditions anticipated on Crucible. 61 Virginis f, their new star, was slightly smaller and cooler than the Sun, its spectrum fractionally more orange in hue. But no one ever noticed this infinitely slow gradation except skipover sleepers, who woke feeling as if they had coloured filters on their eyes.
Next to the ornamental fountain – a comely astronaut tipping water from her space helmet as if it were a jug – sat three wooden benches of rustic design. Two of the benches were unoccupied, but a woman dressed in white was sitting on the one in the middle. Chiku made to take one of the other benches, but the woman patted the planks next to her.
‘Take a seat. We’ve got a lot to talk about.’
Chiku had given the woman no more than a sideways glance until that point, but now she had her full attention. The woman sitting on the bench was her. A ghost, like the one that had haunted her in Lisbon.
‘How are you here?’ Chiku asked, sitting down where she had been told.
‘I’m not real – I’m in your head. But you guessed that already.’
‘Have we spoken?’
‘Before now? No, this is our first time. I came up on the uplink, a messenger figment. No one else can see or detect me, although your half of the conversation will be open to eavesdropping. So please be extremely circumspect in your statements.’
‘I’m very, very confused.’
‘I understand, but there’s no need to be. I’ve sent my memories back to you, to be scripted back into your head, but you were asleep, in skipover. The memories can only be unpacked by functioning neuromachinery, and that had to wait until you began to warm up.’ The woman in white leaned forwards on the seat, hands laced between her knees. ‘The process has begun – you’re beginning to remember things about my life, things I did and saw. People I knew. Feelings I felt. It’s been tough, Chiku – much tougher than I expected. Much tougher than you expected, to be frank.’
‘I think we should be.’ And she rubbed her scalp, the hair short from skipover, as if there was something itching between her ears. ‘I feel something inside me. Like a stone. What am I carrying around?’
‘Grief,’ the other Chiku explained. ‘Pedro died. We loved him. There was an accident . . . sort of.’
‘I feel as if I knew him.’
‘You did. Once we started swapping memories, our individual identities lost coherence. That’s why we did this. That was the point – until one of us stopped communicating.’ But then she shook her head, smiling at the same time. ‘There’s no sense in complaining – I might as well blame myself. We’re the same. We made the same mistakes. We can be as stupid as each other.’
Now that the feeling inside her had a name, it hardened rather than eased. A person, a man called Pedro Braga, had been torn out of her life. It was more than just the name, the knowledge of his passing, the recognition that she had loved him. She could hear him, feel him, smell him. Whistling as he worked with wood and resins. Joking at a client’s meanness. Weeping at the sound made by a few fistfuls of air trapped in the hollow belly of a guitar, when all the stars of his craft fell into some rare alignment. Throwing back his head and laughing, the two of them on a balcony in a city she had never visited. The tang of wine in her
nostrils. The sweet cool of an evening in the company of her lover. Sea-gulls and ice cream.
She wanted to say that she was sorry, that she commiserated with the version of herself who had lost Pedro, but that was wrong. She was the version who needed solace now.
Both of them were.
‘I know,’ the other Chiku said. ‘It hurts, doesn’t it?’
She realised she was crying, tears spooling out of her, falling onto her hands, through her fingers onto the lawn.
‘He was a good man. I never wanted this. I never wanted anyone to die.’
The ghost dropped a hand onto her knee. She felt nothing of its touch. ‘You did what needed to be done. That’s the hardest part of all. Even given what you know now, you’d still need to send those memories back to me. Of course, with hindsight, we might have done a few things differently.’
For a long minute, Chiku could barely speak. But the memory of death had opened a door.
‘He wasn’t the only one who died, was he?’
‘We lost June Wing, and Imris Kwami was seriously injured. The important thing, though, is that nothing should have happened in vain. I’m going to ask you a question now, and it’s important that you think carefully about the answer.’
Chiku nodded. She was in the presence of a figment of herself, no older or cleverer, but it was difficult to shake the sense that she was being given a kind of sisterly tuition, wisdom delivered from one sibling to the next.
‘Equally,’ the figment continued, ‘I don’t want you to say anything that might compromise your position here. I’ve been drinking from the public nets, and there’ve been some changes around here. Have you kept up with the news?’
Chiku admitted that she had not.
‘Utomi’s gone,’ the figment said. ‘There was an accident, about fifteen years ago – a blowout in one of the cargo docks. Nothing as bad as Kappa, but serious enough. Of course Utomi wanted to be there, helping out – always the big, brave leader. But some kind of secondary failure took out some of the teams who were in there trying to stabilise the place. It all happened very quickly. There was nothing they could do for Utomi and the others, other than collect their bodies when the emergency was over. Sou-Chun Lo is the new Chair.’
On the Steel Breeze Page 27