On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I’ve reasons not to be ecstatic.’

  ‘And are you ready to talk about those reasons, whatever they might be?’

  Chiku’s smile was mirthless. ‘Finish your chai, get used to being awake, then we’ll talk. Are you hungry? I can have the robot bring you something here, or we can take it up to the cockpit.’

  ‘I’m not hungry. I think it’s the bracelet – messes with my metabolism. Do I look suitably refreshed to you, after my nine years of sleep?’

  ‘You look exactly the same.’

  ‘Honesty is the best medicine. Frankly, I feel like a bag of old sticks.’ Travertine finished the chai and passed the empty bulb back to Chiku. ‘No sugar. Very sweet of you to remember.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re up to moving around?’

  ‘The flesh is weak but the heart is willing. Will the robot take care of Aziba?’

  ‘Yes – he should be joining us within the hour, then Gonithi and Guochang.’

  ‘What’s so special about them that they get the early wake-up call?’

  ‘I need to be clear with you about something,’ Chiku said, sidestepping the question. ‘I wanted you along for the ride for a couple of reasons. Three, actually. Firstly, you know the PCP engine – if we’d run into technical difficulties, the robot would have woken you first.’

  ‘You can scratch that off your list.’

  ‘Indeed. Secondly, you’re ridiculously smart in more ways than one, and your input will be very valuable to me given the situation we’re facing here.’

  ‘Flattery will get you everywhere. And thirdly?’

  ‘I need a friend.’

  ‘And you think I still count as one?’

  ‘I hope so.’ Chiku paused – they were nearly at the cockpit. ‘I was as clear as I could be when I approached you about this expedition.’

  ‘You were as clear as fifty light-years of tungsten.’ After a moment, Travertine added: ‘I understood the deal, Chiku. You were offering me a pardon under the only terms your administration would have accepted. It was also obvious to me that you had something to hide from everyone else. It’s all connected to this ship, isn’t it?’

  Chiku did not reply until they were in the cockpit. ‘You’re right, mostly. At this point it would probably help if I showed you Crucible. Would you like to see it?’

  ‘It’d be perverse not to after coming all this way.’

  Chiku called up the magnified image of the planet she had conjured earlier. ‘For now, you’ll have to take my word for it that the dot you can see through the window is the same as the planet represented by this figment. A day from now, it’ll be big enough to see with our naked eyes.’

  Travertine took vis time before answering. Ve looked at the projected globe from all angles, spinning it around as Chiku had done earlier, increasing and decreasing the magnification. ‘This must be a composite,’ ve said eventually, ‘assembled from several rotations’ worth of data.’

  ‘It is. But it’s also an accurate representation of what we’d see if we were a lot closer.’

  ‘Mandala’s there.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But no obvious surface construction. The cities and towns – I knew they’d be small, but surely we’d see some evidence of them at this resolution?’

  ‘Absolutely – but the Providers haven’t built anything in advance of our arrival. Crucible’s barely been touched.’

  ‘I see.’ And there was a long, measured silence from Travertine while ve digested this news that Chiku had known for years but still found difficult to accept. Eventually, ve asked, ‘The Providers . . . what became of them?’

  ‘We’ll find out when we get there.’

  ‘Did something destroy them?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The uplinked transmissions from Crucible’s surface were being broadcast by something. The Providers are still here, I think – just not doing what they were meant to do.’

  Travertine nodded slowly. ‘And what about those other things surrounding the planet?’

  ‘There are twenty-two of them,’ Chiku said. ‘They’ve been orbiting Crucible for at least as long as we’ve known about Mandala, but they were edited out of the original data.’

  ‘When you say “edited out”—’

  ‘We built an instrument called Ocular to observe extrasolar planets in great detail, and then shackled it to a powerful artificial intelligence, an entity called Arachne – the only thing capable of processing the Ocular data stream and searching for signs of extraterrestrial activity. The catch is that we may have made her too clever.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘She’s a thing, a mind, with a will of her own – and a strong instinct for self-preservation. For some reason, Arachne took it upon herself to doctor the raw data and stripped out the portions of the image which contain these objects.’

  ‘And no one noticed that?’

  ‘Did I mention that Arachne’s fiendishly clever? No one noticed the deception, and on the basis of this doctored imagery – which still contained Mandala – we sent Provider seed packages to Crucible, and then launched the holoships.’

  ‘In other words, this doctored data triggered a significant development in human history – migration into interstellar space and the push to an extrasolar planet.’

  ‘Yes,’ Chiku said. ‘But it’s possible – likely, even – that the human consequences were just a by-product, a side-effect, of Arachne’s main intention. Which was to propagate herself – to expand machine intelligence beyond the solar system. Which she achieved by infiltrating herself into the Provider seed packages like a virus.’

  ‘You’re saying she’s there now, ahead of us?’

  ‘Something connected to her, at any rate – a daughter intelligence, perhaps. Multiple daughters, who knows? Part of her – perhaps the main part – is still active in the old solar system. Chiku Yellow met her. I know what she’s capable of.’

  ‘That’s encouraging, given that we’re heading towards another aspect of her.’

  ‘I never said this would be easy. But are you beginning to see why this advance mission is necessary, and why I couldn’t go public with the truth about Crucible? Can you imagine the panic that would have caused?’

  ‘I can, and it’s not pretty.’

  ‘I’m sure you have all sorts of questions about the alien objects – those pine-cone things. I’ll tell you what I know, but it isn’t much. They’re big, and they might have contacted Arachne, or she may have intercepted a transmission they were broadcasting, whether that was the intention or not. We think they may have been here for a very, very long time. Beyond that, I’m in the dark.’

  ‘“We”,’ Travertine repeated carefully. ‘And who are your co-conspirators in this great adventure?’

  ‘Allies back home. My counterpart Chiku Yellow, for one, and another woman who was directly involved in Ocular’s development. Plus various other interested parties. They’ve all been working under conditions of extreme secrecy, trying to piece together something of the truth without bringing their activities to Arachne’s attention. It’s been very, very difficult, and my involvement didn’t help things much. Arachne locked on to Chiku Yellow, tried to kill her on Venus and then on Earth. The safest place in the universe! Arachne’s infiltrated the Mechanism itself, haunting it from within.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing to be done.’

  ‘Maybe not, but we have to try. Negotiation, bargaining. Pleading for our lives. Grovelling, if it comes to that. Anything that might persuade Arachne not to turn on her former masters any more damagingly than she already has.’

  After a silence, Travertine said: ‘I think I’m going to crawl back into the skipover casket, close the lid and try to wake up again. This is obviously some kind of delirious nightmare.’

  ‘It’s real. I’ve been living with it long enough.’

  ‘Is this the explanation – the reason for everything you’ve done?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘I know
there’s more you’re not telling me. How you learned about Arachne in the first place – what any of this has to do with Kappa.’

  ‘I’ve told you everything you need to know right now. The rest is . . . complicated. I will tell you the rest, but I suggest we leave that until we’ve attended to Doctor Aziba and the others.’

  ‘How much do they know, exactly?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Oh, they’re going to love this. At least I had an inkling from the get-go that something wasn’t right.’

  ‘I’m probably going to need your help,’ Chiku said, ‘to maintain order and help get my point across. That’s why I woke you first – I hoped you might see things from my point of view.’

  ‘And there was me thinking you missed my conversation. My first thought is – why wake the others at all? The ship can operate itself.’

  ‘I don’t plan on waking everybody. I had to accept a larger crew than I wanted, but it was the only way to sell the Assembly on this expedition. Truthfully, I think we’ll be doing the others a kindness if we keep them in skipover.’

  ‘Given our chances of survival, you mean?’

  Chiku nodded grimly, biting her lower lip. ‘But we need Aziba and the other two, I think. Guochang knows Providers, and Gonithi should be able to tell us how Crucible’s surface conditions compare against our expectations.’

  ‘All right,’ Travertine said eventually. ‘Let me be blunt. The way I see it, I have two choices. I can fight you and try to turn the rest of the crew against you. But we’ll still be aboard a ship with almost no fuel, falling towards the Providers. Or I can accept what you’re saying, accept that you allowed all those awful things to happen to me for a reason – this reason – and that in your position I might have made the same choices. And I can try to persuade the crew not to mutiny and rip your throat out.’

  ‘Option two would be my preference.’

  ‘Either way, I’ll still be aboard a ship with almost no fuel, falling towards the Providers. Tough choice, isn’t it?’

  ‘However you parse it,’ Chiku said, ‘it boils down to the same thing: I need your help. You’re the cleverest human being I know. Even your brain might not be enough to get us out of this mess, but at least we’ll have tried. I have one last incentive to offer.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Our course will take us quite close to one of the pine cones as we swing in for orbit. We can squeeze a little closer, if you like. I thought you might appreciate the opportunity to see a piece of thousand-kilometre-long alien technology up close with your own eyes. But only if you really want to.’

  The robot bustled back in, its limbs clicking and scissoring.

  ‘I guess the good doctor’s awake,’ Travertine said. ‘I suppose we should go and break the news to him gently.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The three of them were in the cockpit. The physician appeared to be taking recent developments with remarkable stoicism, as if this was merely the latest in a line of disagreeable surprises the universe had sprung on him. He nodded as Chiku and Travertine took turns to explain his predicament, bouncing his attention from one to the other. Occasionally he scratched at the white atoll of his tonsure. His expression was quietly sceptical, but he appeared not to doubt the essential veracity of their story.

  ‘She’s not lying,’ Travertine said, more than once. ‘She hasn’t just pulled this out of a hat. I’ve been watching Chiku for years – I’ve always known she was up to something.’

  ‘I’m very sorry it was necessary to lie to you,’ Chiku said. ‘Or at least, not give you the full picture.’

  ‘Let’s stick with lie,’ Doctor Aziba said, with a pleasant lack of rancour.

  ‘All right – it was a big fat lie.’ Chiku shrugged. ‘But it was fabricated in the interests of Zanzibar. The citizenry, the people. Ten million of them, just on our own holoship, plus the rest of the local caravan, and the holoships following on behind us. They all think there’s a paradise in waiting here, tended by machines of loving grace.’

  ‘They’re in for a bit of a let down,’ Travertine added.

  ‘When I came out of skipover,’ Chiku said, ‘Sou-Chun had sold out to Teslenko and the other hard-liners. There was too much was at stake for me to speak candidly – they’d have silenced me, one way or another.’ She looked away for a moment. ‘I know I got things wrong. If I could turn the clock back, maybe I’d trust Utomi to do the right thing. But maybe not. Everything looks easier with hindsight.’

  ‘So what are you hoping to achieve with this mission?’ Aziba asked.

  ‘Diplomacy. An alternative to annihilation when the main caravan arrives.’

  ‘Perhaps it won’t. If the slowdown problem isn’t solved—’

  Travertine said sharply: ‘Solve it or not, there are thousands of people who still want to reach Crucible. Now all they have to do is build copies of Icebreaker, and they can do that easily enough.’

  He laughed at them. ‘This ship carries twenty people.’

  ‘But it could carry more, and they can build as many copies as our industrial base will support. Hundreds across the local caravan – thousands, even. Not enough to bring tens of millions of settlers to Crucible, I agree – but those who don’t want to land can always emigrate to the holoships that don’t plan on stopping. Chiku’s right on this one: something has to be done. Even if all we do is meet the Providers and get cut to shreds. At least they’ll know what to expect, back on Zanzibar.’

  Travertine’s statement of solidarity sent a weird shiver through Chiku. ‘I hope we can do something more constructive than being cut to shreds. Bottom line, though, Travertine’s right – if all we do is provide concrete proof that the machines are hostile, we’ll have still helped Zanzibar.’

  ‘What about my fellow volunteers? Are we all expected to meekly fall in line with this suicide mission?’

  ‘If I’d had my way,’ Chiku said, not really caring whether the physician believed her or not, ‘this would have been a much smaller expedition, and you’d all have known the stakes up front. But let’s not pretend that the mission you volunteered for was without risk.’

  Aziba had returned his attention to the projected representation of Crucible, with its twenty-two attendant sentinels. He stared with troubled fascination, like a man seeing demons in fire.

  ‘How could we not have known about these . . . things?’

  ‘Because we put our faith in Arachne and saw no reason to doubt what she told us,’ Chiku said. ‘Because we made simple human mistakes. Not because we were stupid, but because we were fallible. Clever, but not clever enough.’

  ‘I don’t mind admitting that I’m little frightened.’

  ‘If you weren’t,’ Chiku said, ‘I might start wondering about your sanity.’

  Chiku told the robot to delay waking Gonithi Namboze and Guochang for a couple of hours. She was drained, taxed by the emotional demands already placed on her by Travertine and the physician.

  She also had a new concern about Zanzibar that she needed to resolve before talking to anyone else.

  In the first few hours following her revival, she had given little thought to home, being more immediately concerned with the condition of the ship, the reality of Crucible and the delicate task of waking her fellows. True, her thoughts had returned to Ndege and Mposi, but only fleet-ingly – whatever had happened to them since her departure, she would find out soon enough, and any news from Zanzibar was going to be years out of date whether she got to it first or last.

  But there was no news. When Icebreaker tried to pick up a transmission from the holoship, there was nothing. Perhaps there was an error in the positional estimate – the caravan might have adjusted its course, putting Zanzibar in a slightly different part of the sky as seen from 61 Virginis f. Chiku swivelled the antenna in a search pattern, allowing for this possible parallax error.

  Still there was nothing.

  At that point, she reconvened with Travertine and
Doctor Aziba, watching the latter closely.

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s totally unexpected,’ Chiku said, fighting to keep the fear out of her voice. ‘When we left, the constables were in the process of imposing external authority aboard Zanzibar. The hard-liners didn’t approve of this expedition, so they might have enforced a ban on all transmissions directed ahead of the caravan to cut contact with Icebreaker.’

  ‘Or they’re not there any more,’ Travertine said.

  Chiku was grateful for that. It spared her from voicing that almost unspeakable possibility.

  ‘No accident could have disrupted the entire caravan,’ Aziba answered levelly. ‘We might lose a whole holoship – more than one, if we’re unlucky – to interstellar collision, or a repeat of Pemba. Military action, perhaps. But not dozens, not the whole caravan. Someone would still be out there.’

  ‘So why the silence?’ Travertine asked.

  ‘It must be politically imposed,’ Chiku said. ‘That’s the only explanation. The doctor’s right – there’s no way the whole caravan could have been destroyed, and it’s equally unlikely that it’s drifted so far from its predicted position that we can’t pick it up again. All the same, I’m going to widen the sweep – it doesn’t cost us anything.’

  ‘We don’t need them, anyway,’ Travertine said. ‘They need us – the information we provide – but we’re not dependent on them at all.’

  ‘I’d still like to know the news from home,’ Chiku replied.

  Doctor Aziba nodded. ‘Yes, of course. We all would. You should keep searching. Have you considered waking one of the other specialists? I forget all our backgrounds, but there’s bound to be someone who knows something about deep-space communications.’

  ‘We know enough between us,’ Travertine said. ‘And if we don’t, Guochang will plug the gaps.’

  ‘What about our own transmissions?’ Aziba asked. ‘Are we still sending them?’

  ‘Back to Zanzibar, yes,’ Chiku told him, ‘although we can’t expect a reply to anything we send for two years. Ahead, towards Crucible, we’re transmitting standard handshake protocols for Provider communications, both directly at the planet and into the relay satellite network. There’s been no acknowledgement, but we’re still intercepting the Provider upstream transmissions, the same lying horsepiss they’ve been sending to Zanzibar for decades.’