On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Mecufi had no particular reason to trust me,’ Kanu said. ‘I could have been an agent of the family, sent to undermine everything he stood for, but he never doubted me.’

  ‘That would have been a bit ruthless, even for us,’ Chiku said.

  ‘There’ll be a funeral, of sorts. Would you like to come?’

  ‘Both of us?’ asked Chiku Red.

  Kanu gave a nod of his majestic head. ‘Both of you.’

  ‘We don’t leave Lisbon very often,’ Chiku said.

  ‘I hope you’ll make an exception. I won’t insist, of course, but I think you’ll find it worth your while.’

  ‘She hasn’t made a move against us in fifty years,’ Chiku said. ‘I like it this way. I wouldn’t want to do anything that might provoke her.’

  ‘You went to the Moon once, and to the seasteads to bring Chiku Red home,’ Kanu pointed out. ‘Neither of those things did you any harm. Nor will this.’

  ‘What are your funerals like?’ Chiku Red asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kanu admitted. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever been to one.’

  There was no need for haste, so they went by sailing ship. Chiku had seen the cyberclippers coming and going along the Tagus for as long as she had been in Lisbon, but this was something different. From a distance, as they approached along the quay – they had taken the tram to Estoril – nothing marked the craft as unusual. It had a sleek catamaran hull, covered in a frictionless coating that gave off odd optical effects, like a meniscus of oil in a puddle. It had an abundance of sails and sail parts of different shapes, sizes and function. The sails gathered sunlight as well as wind. They were also optically strange, capable of flicking from one extreme of reflectivity to another. There was an absurdity of rigging, too many lines and winches and pulleys to make any sense at all. The thing seemed complicated for the sake of it.

  There were also people making it all work. This was what made the ship different. The cyberclippers ran with no crews at all, save for the occasional technician, and they spent months at sea following optimum path solutions, carrying cargoes that did not need to be anywhere fast. But there were dozens of merfolk on the deck of this ship, and even some up in the sails and rigging, and they were all doing something.

  Chiku and Chiku Red stared in wonder and horror at the sight of it all.

  ‘They could fall,’ Chiku said. It was obvious to her that the merfolk had no lines or safety nets to catch themselves if something went wrong.

  ‘They won’t,’ Kanu said. And to prove his point, even before the ship had left the dock, he had slipped up to the top of one of the main masts, hand and foot, so fast and agile that it looked like a trick, as if he were being ascended by a hidden rope. From the top he waved and laughed and then came back down again.

  Chiku felt a flush of pride and bewilderment. It felt impossible to her that this was her son, doing this impossible thing.

  ‘Why did you make this boat?’ Chiku Red asked, when they were at sea and Estoril was a biscuit-coloured margin on the horizon. ‘It needs too many people.’

  ‘It can go faster than a cyberclipper,’ Kanu explained, the wind tugging back his long roped locks. ‘Sometimes. Cyberclippers are very good at finding a reliable course, very good at getting goods from one port to another, but they don’t always make full use of the wind. With a good crew on board, this thing can really fly.’

  It was true. Chiku had been to the stern of the catamaran and watched two troughs of water close up behind the two keels of the fast-rushing hull. The troughs looked so sharp edged it was easy to think they had been chiselled into ice. Of course, there was a stiff breeze today. But it was astonishing to think that this was all that was making them go through the water: just that breeze, hardly enough to be called a wind, acting against a sufficient acreage of sail. Even the solar energy was only there to operate the electrical winches and steering systems. They banked some of it into fuel cells, Kanu said (actually very efficient gyroscopic flywheel storage units) but it was a matter of pride not to use that stored power for locomotion. There were other ships like this, Chiku gathered, and other crews. They were extremely competitive.

  But her fundamental question still remained: so what if the sailing ship went a little faster than a cyberclipper, on average? Why not use airpods, or fliers, or maglevs, or even the hulking nuclear submarine Uncle Geoffrey had told her about way back when?

  ‘It’s just for the fun of it, I suppose,’ she suggested to Kanu.

  Her son gave her a stern but forgiving look. ‘It’s much more than that. The cyberclippers are very elegant, but they’re totally dependent on the Surveilled World. Without the aug, they don’t know where they are, and without the Mech, they don’t know what to do next.’

  ‘And this is a problem how, exactly?’

  ‘You’ve swum in the Surveilled world from the moment you took your very first breath. I suspect you probably find it quite difficult to imagine any other way of living.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. Anyway, you’ve grown up with it as well.’

  ‘But I joined the Pans,’ Kanu said, ‘and the Pans have their own way of doing things, disdaining the easy solutions. To begin with, these were aesthetic and philosophical choices as much as anything else. We didn’t care for the idea of telepresence and virtual spaces, thinking that these tools would discourage us from actually going out there, into space, when we could send robots or figments instead. And we were right! But that’s almost beside the point now. For philosophical and spiritual reasons, we set ourselves on a path that took us away from the excesses of the Surveilled World. And now we hear that the Surveilled World is poisoned!’

  Perhaps it was just the breeze, but Chiku’s neck hairs bristled at his words. It felt impetuous to be discussing Arachne so openly. She sent Kanu a silencing glare.

  ‘It’s all right, Mother,’ he said, smiling. ‘We’re safe enough here. That’s the point of this creaky old thing – she can’t touch it, or get herself aboard it, or know what we’re saying or thinking.’ Kanu patted one of the wooden handrails running the length of the catamaran. ‘It’s a sort of insurance, if you like. If the world stops working tomorrow, if the Mech crashes and burns and takes the aug down with it, we’ll still have the wind and we’ll still know how to rig up these sails. We could still go anywhere in the world.’

  ‘The Mech isn’t going to crash,’ Chiku said. ‘It’s been around too long. We need it too much.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Chiku Red.

  They sailed to the seasteads. What had taken an hour by flier took most of the day by catamaran. At twilight they ate on deck, watching the sky shade through russets and pinks and gentle lilacs, and the sea darken to wine. Some dolphins provided company. Chiku and Chiku Red raced from one side of the hull to the other, watching the water glimmer and glow where the dolphins had torn it open. It was amazing and wonderful, a moment to justify a life. Chiku and Chiku Red could not stop laughing, giddy with the thrill of it all. Even Kanu, who must have seen this spectacle a thousand times before, watched on with fond amusement. He seemed more delighted by the reactions of his mothers than the dolphins themselves.

  Not long before midnight, lights pushed above the horizon. The catamaran docked at a floating pontoon and the passengers were conveyed by electric car into the main mass of the seastead. The air was warmer than it had been in Lisbon, the stars so near and bright it was as if they had been lowered down on threads. Along the dock the rigging of many boats whipped and rattled impatiently.

  ‘The funeral is tomorrow,’ Kanu reported, before they were taken to their underwater rooms, barnacled down from the seastead’s underside.

  ‘Is there anything we need to know? Chiku asked.

  ‘Not really. It’s actually going to be quite a modest ceremony. Mecufi wasn’t one for dramas.’

  Chiku thought of the melodramatic way in which Mecufi had first intruded on her life, but she was careful not to contradict her son. And indeed, when the fune
ral came around, it was much less ostentatious than she had begun to fear. They went out shortly before dawn, in a great procession of small, lantern-lit boats. They were all either saildriven or propelled by oars. Though the wind snatched at the sails, the muscle-powered craft had no difficulty keeping pace. The oars were worked by heroically strong aquatics, creatures shaped for the sea. Many aquatics simply swam alongside in the water, as effortlessly as the dolphins they had watched the night before. Chiku saw all sorts of anatomies, from the almost human to the barely identifiable.

  One boat, propelled by both sail and oar, was twice as large as any of the others. This craft carried Mecufi’s body, covered in a shroud and resting on a raised platform beneath a pennanted awning. Chiku and Chiku Red watched Kanu move around on the larger boat, supervising the rowers and the merfolk working the sails. Chiku was rather glad that she and her sibling had not been expected to travel on Mecufi’s vessel. It would have felt like an intrusion to share the funeral boat with these strange and lovely creatures. It was enough of a privilege for any drylander to see such a ceremony.

  Presently the boats arrived at some designated area of sea that looked like everywhere else to Chiku. The sun had not yet risen and there were still a few stars overhead. The lanterns, hundreds of them, cast coloured reflections on the waters. The seas were still now and the air nearly motionless.

  In response to some unheard command, the boats arranged themselves into a ring around the largest craft, enclosing it within a circle of water. The aquatics who had swum out with the procession scrambled and slithered onto the encircling boats. Many of them were standing now, holding lanterns and candles. Chiku and Chiku Red glanced at each other, neither knowing quite what to expect. There was no sound but the occasional slap of water against a hull. She watched the aquatics on the main boat as they moved in silent ceremony around the shrouded body on its platform.

  If there was a signal, a voiced or silent command, Chiku missed it. But from one of the boats came a sudden and sustained keening sound. It was deeply foreign to her ears, pitched too high to be anything she would have called music. But music was exactly what it was. An aquatic had started singing, generating a powerful ululation. Soon another joined in, and then a third. Colouration had entered the tone. It began to shift in frequency. Two more voices joined the song, and then two more. It was, she would later learn, a motet for forty voices, divided into eight five-part choirs: forty aquatic voices, a sound to stir the oceans to their beds. The contributions of the choirs began to chase each other, phasing in and out of harmony – contrapuntal passages shifting into broad chordal phrases of heart-stopping intensity.

  As the voices soared and swooped, lights began to appear in the circle of enclosed water – darting blue and green phosphorescent stabs, cometstreaks of opal and aquamarine that danced and dervished. They organised themselves into wheels and flourishing progressions, galaxies and flowers of ever-opening light. Chiku realised that it was some clever orchestration of living matter; just as the Mechanism could turn a panther into a weapon, so the Pans had the means to bend the sea’s living biomass to their will. Here they persuaded it to exalt the memory of one of their own as forty voices moved the air. Another marvel, as lovely as it was sad, and she wished that Pedro Braga was here to witness this astonishing thing, to add it to his life’s store of wonders.

  But there was Chiku Red, at least, and as the music surged through them both – it was, she thought, what the siren choirs of the ancient mariners must have sounded like – she knew that her sibling was feeling it just as profoundly.

  The sky was brightening, the wheels and flowers fading, the lanterns losing their radiance. But before the spell was broken she watched Kanu and eleven other aquatics lift the shrouded body from its platform and allow it to slip into the paling water.

  The motet reached its climax. Forty voices sustained a note for longer than seemed possible, and then when the silence fell it was as if silence itself was a kind of song.

  The boats began to break their circle.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Kanu swam over to them when they were on their way back to the seastead. He found them seated on benches inside a little wooden cabin at the back of Chiku’s boat, which offered shelter from the sun.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  Chiku Red added: ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘I’m glad you came to the funeral,’ Kanu said. ‘We’ve never needed our friends more than we do now. Besides, Mecufi was very insistent that you be invited.’

  ‘It was good of him to think of us,’ Chiku said.

  ‘He wanted you to attend the funeral, but that’s not the only reason you were invited here.’ Kanu closed the door behind him and sat down on the bench opposite the two Chikus. His clothes were already dry, even though he had only left the water a few moments earlier.

  ‘What now?’ Chiku asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Chiku Red. ‘Why are we here?’

  ‘Let me make some chai,’ Kanu declared.

  Kanu produced a tea service from a wooden drawer at the back of the cabin, all the necessary provisions neatly laid out on a high-edged tray. He poured the water, which was already boiling, into three kelppatterned cups. Chiku saw there was no point pressing him – he would speak when he was ready. But there was something on the tray that prickled Chiku’s memory. It was a slim wooden box, like a pencil case.

  ‘I’ve seen that before,’ she said.

  She glanced at Chiku Red, but there was no recognition in her eyes.

  ‘We drew lots from a box,’ she said finally. ‘It had the elephants in it, and the Samsung and the Ray-Bans. But it wasn’t this box.’

  ‘No,’ Chiku said, agreeing. ‘But I’ve seen it before.’

  Kanu passed around the cups of chai. ‘It belonged to Mecufi, Chiku. He wanted you to have it.’

  ‘Did he bequeath it to me in his will?’

  ‘Something like that. He thought about giving it to you much sooner than this, but the time was never right.’

  ‘Do you mind?’ Chiku reached for the box but refrained from touching it.

  ‘Go ahead – it’s yours to do with as you wish.’

  The box felt empty in her hands. She opened a little brass catch at one end and eased out a container, felt-lined with a dozen square partitions. She could imagine keeping eggs in those partitions. Or eyeballs.

  She remembered now. It was a long time ago – a ridiculously long time ago – but she remembered.

  ‘When Mecufi first came to me in the café at the top of the Santa Justa elevator, he had this with him.’

  ‘What is it?’ Chiku Red asked.

  ‘There were motes in it. Twelve of them, I suppose. He took out one and gave it to me.’

  Chiku Red, lacking access to the aug, had no recent experience of the emotional transfer of a mote, but she understood the concept well enough. She knew that each mote contained a cargo of pre-packaged emotions, formulated in a state of zenlike concentration by the sender and tagged for a specific recipient, then locked away in glass perpetuity until the moment of their release. She wondered why the world needed motes – surely words and faces were enough.

  There were two motes left in the box, nestled within the final pair of compartments and only visible when the compartment had been slid to the limit of its travel. One was a milky, featureless white. The other was a kind of purple-flecked black.

  ‘My memory might be playing tricks,’ she said, ‘but I could swear the black one was in the box that day. It stood out – it was the only black one. What does it mean?’

  ‘Mecufi gave me one other instruction in addition to ensuring that you acquired the box.’

  She gave her son a sharper look than she had intended. ‘Which was?’

  ‘The white mote is for you. Do nothing with the black mote until you’ve experienced the white. He was most insistent.’

  ‘Mecufi formulated this before he died?’

  ‘A long time before. I think he ren
ewed the formulation several times over the years, but as I said, the time was never quite right for him to give it to you.’

  ‘And him dying makes it right?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Kanu said. ‘Look, I’m just the messenger here. I really don’t know what this is all about.’

  ‘Really?’ Chiku asked, hoping that her son detected her scepticism.

  ‘I suppose I can make an educated guess – especially in light of our conversation yesterday, what you were saying about . . .’ But Kanu caught himself, and they both smiled at his nearly having mentioned Arachne. ‘Look, and the business at the household as well. Anything more specific that that, though, is between you and the late Mecufi.’

  Chiku pinched the white mote between her fingers. She held it for a few moments then put it back in its compartment. She did not touch the black mote at all.

  She closed the box.

  ‘Did he say when I was supposed to open the white mote?’

  ‘No, just that it’s vital you open the white one first.’

  ‘You should open it now,’ Chiku Red told her.

  Now that she knew what was inside the box, it felt heavier in her hand somehow, gravid with latent possibility. It was fifty years since she first met Mecufi in the Santa Justa elevator. If she was right about the black mote, it was at least that old. If it was meant for her, why had he not just given it to her at the time?

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said to her sibling.

  ‘You should open it now,’ Chiku Red repeated. ‘I cannot open it for you.’

  The two women went out on deck. They were on the sailing ship now, bound for Lisbon. The wind was stiffer, the waves an iron grey. The novelty of sailing had worn off some time ago and Chiku wanted to be back home.

  She had the box in her pocket – she could feel its hard wooden edges against her thigh. The black mote was still inside it, but the white was in her hand again. She held it up to the horizon’s grey indeterminacy. Its milky interior offered hints of structure. It reminded her of the clouds of Venus.