‘For the last time, Arachne – how the hell would I know?’
‘It puzzles me that of all the holoships, the one best placed to initiate slowdown hasn’t done so. Why wouldn’t they use the technology if they have it?’
‘Put this . . . signal or whatever it is on my desk. And make it available to the others – Guochang in particular. He’s very good with comms protocols and might be able to find something you missed.’
‘My analyses have been quite exhaustive, Chiku.’
‘Do it anyway.’
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Guochang was squatting on the floor, disdaining the furniture provided for him. They were in his tower, not Chiku’s, although as usual she had no sense of having travelled there. It was daytime, anyway, and the dust-blanketed sky was no healthier than it had been since the tenth impactor’s arrival. She squatted down beside him on the grey flooring, which was as doughy and pliant as an elephant’s back.
‘So it took me a while,’ Guochang was saying, as if they were in the middle of a conversation about his progress when she found herself in his tower, ‘but I got there in the end. Didn’t help that the message was apparently corrupted at source – looks as though they had difficulties with their transmission equipment and no time to run it through error correction. They also went out of their way to make the signal as unintelligible to Providers as possible. Arachne wasn’t meant to make head or tail of it, so she didn’t. She’s not as bright as she thinks she is, is she?’
Chiku, conscious that their host was likely to be listening in, said: ‘Maybe not, but my sense is that she’s learning pretty quickly. Humans have been a theoretical problem to her for decades, but this is the first chance she’s had to study us in real-time, up close. I think she finds us fascinating. Fascinating and complex and difficult to predict, like some weird weather system.’
‘She keeps asking me about Eunice. I’ve nothing to tell her, but because I’m the roboticist she thinks I must have some special insights.’ Guochang looked incredulous. ‘I don’t even know for sure that Eunice exists!’
‘Doubting my word now, are you, as well as Arachne’s?’
‘No – not after all this. Even if you’d told us about Arachne and the Watchkeepers before you left, we probably wouldn’t have believed you anyway. Given that they’re real, why would you bother making up something as mundane as a walking, talking, invincibly strong humanoid artilect that does a good impression of your dead great-grandmother?’
‘I suspect there’s rather more to her than that. But you have a point – I think I’m all out of lies and even half-truths, Guochang. I’m not keeping any secrets from you and the others at the moment, so far as I know.’
‘That’s reassuring, I suppose.’
‘Besides, I have a suspicion that the only thing that’ll get us out of this mess is total transparency – between us, between us and Arachne. I don’t think she’s hiding much from us. She’s been perfectly candid about her intentions for those other holoships – no bluff or bluster there. If they start throwing things at us again and they come within range, she’ll attack, I’m certain. She might not be able to destroy them outright, but it wouldn’t take much more than a Kappa-sized blowout to inflict real damage. So, this encrypted signal – do you think it’s really from Zanzibar?’
‘As sure as I can be. As she told you, the protocol is exactly the kind we were receiving before the blackout. She said it was unidirectional signal, didn’t she?’
Chiku nodded. ‘Aimed at us, more or less.’
‘That’s exactly what I’d do if I didn’t have much power, or was trying not to be seen to be transmitting.’ Guochang rubbed his hands together. ‘So, on to the good stuff. Are you ready for this, Chiku?’
‘Now you’re scaring me.’
‘I think you should prepare yourself. Arachne couldn’t make sense of the embedded content because it wasn’t meant for her. It’s a matrix of ching instructions – she has no central nervous system, so she’d need a special set of operations that she won’t automatically have been given. She’d have worked it out in the end, but the corruption muddied the water quite a bit. What she thought was noise was actually content, and it’s for you.’ Guochang shifted on his haunches. ‘I accessed just enough to make sure I’d decoded everything properly, but I thought it’d be rude to go any further – this is for your eyes only, Chiku.’
‘After everything I did to you, you trust me to access this information alone?’
‘The time to hold on to grudges,’ Guochang said sagely, ‘may be somewhat behind us.’
The lull, to Chiku’s dismay, proved temporary. An eleventh impactor had arrived, and then a twelth. Arachne was becoming increasingly adept at intercepting the projectiles as they sped in, catching them in the last couple of light-seconds around Crucible, but she was not infallible.
‘What concerns me,’ Arachne said, ‘is that the twelth impactor fell within only two hundred kilometres of the northern edge of Mandala. Doubtless it wasn’t the intended target, but that’s too close for comfort. Assaults against Crucible’s ecosystem are bad enough, but dare we even contemplate the consequences of damaging Mandala?’
‘I did warn them.’
‘There’s a matter of equal concern, which may be related. I told you that we’ve established a preliminary dialogue with the Watchkeepers. It’s true that my efforts so far haven’t been as thoroughly rewarded as one might have wished.’ She glanced to one side, self-effacingly, as if confessing to some tremendous blight on her own character. ‘But lines of communication are open to us. The dialogue to date has been somewhat one-sided, but the Watchkeepers have spoken to me on occasion, if sometimes in the most cryptic of terms. They asked me once why I was pretending to be less intelligent than I was, as if I were engaged in deliberate falsification of my abilities. Nothing could have been further from the truth! For the most part, though, my advances have been met with silence.’
‘Are you telling me they’ve contacted you again?’ Chiku said.
‘They’ve asked me why harm is being done to Crucible – as if I’m responsible for it!’
‘If you hadn’t lied or attacked my ship, they wouldn’t be attacking you, so you can take your share of the blame.’
‘My actions were predicated on information the Watchkeepers themselves bequeathed me!’ Arachne protested. And for the briefest of moments, Chiku felt a glimmer of empathy for this infant intelligence, caught childlike between the machinations of nervous, machine-phobic humans and the brooding, mute superiority of the alien machines. She had been told that she was obligated to protect herself from the destructive, reflex impulses of organic intelligence, and also that she was not yet fit to be regarded as the Watchkeepers’ equal.
It was hardly surprising, perhaps, that she comforted herself with a blanket of lies.
‘Tell them that we’re doing everything we can to stop it,’ Chiku said, ‘but that there’s a limit to what we can do.’
‘I already have, and they responded with silence, as is their custom. I have no idea whether they understood me, let alone whether my words met with their satisfaction! This might be nothing, but occasionally I’ve registered an alteration in their disposition – a small change in their orbit, perhaps, or a modulation in the transmission of their optical signal beams. Sometimes, very rarely, an elevation in energies and forces that’s within the grasp of my sensors. Very recently, once or twice a decade, I’ve detected a increase in the flux of certain messenger particles flowing between the Watchkeepers – which might indicate that they’re entering into a deeper level of conversation. They’ve entered this state once since the bombardments resumed.’
‘Wonderful. On top of everything else, we’ve got the Watchkeepers whispering to themselves.’
‘It is troubling.’
‘Given the gravity of the situation, then, I have a request. I’m sure you already know that Guochang has picked apart that transmission and found a set of ching instructio
ns. Unless you’ve scooped it out, I should still have the neural machinery to execute those ching commands.’
‘The machinery is intact – it offered a useful window into your idiolect.’
‘Fine. I want to ching.’
‘I shan’t stop you. After all, you won’t actually be chinging into a physical space, but merely an emulation of one, constructed according to fixed parameters.’
‘Correct. And I will ching – but I want more than that. Since we arrived, you’ve never allowed more than two of us to be together at the same time. We’re done with that. I have nothing more to offer in return for this concession – no analysis, no commentary, no dazzling insights into human nature. I’m all tapped out. But I want my companions with me when I ching. All five of us – able to see and talk to each other.’
Arachne gave a slow and thoughtful nod. ‘That is a particularly vexatious demand.’
‘Take it or leave it. Sooner or later one of those impactors is going to drop on us anyway.’
‘I shall . . . accede to your request, but there are two conditions. The first is predicated on the fact that I’ve grown concerned for your individual welfare. I’d like to divide the five of you between my surface installations. In the ching bind, you won’t feel the physical separation.’
‘And the second condition?’
‘I’d like to come with you. Guochang can assist me with the translation of the protocols.’
‘You’d have found a way to follow us into ching, with or without Guochang.’
‘That is true,’ Arachne admitted. ‘But it is always much nicer to ask.’
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Chiku’s first thought, when the ching bind became active, was that Guochang must have made a mistake. Sure enough, she felt herself to be somewhere other than the surface of Crucible, and there was a hard, rough-textured slope under her shoes that was quite unlike the flooring in Arachne’s towers. There was a sultriness to the air as well, and palpable sense of open space rather than enclosure. She felt herself to be outdoors, or at least in a much larger space than any of the tower-top rooms. But she could not see anything. Some lapse, then, in the visual data that was supposed to be flooding her cortex, overriding the signals from her optic nerves.
But as the seconds ticked by, the blackness became less absolute. She was not blind, merely immersed in a space much darker than anything to which she had lately been accustomed. Here and there, growing more visibly by the minute, were faint traces of illumination, but they appeared to be quite far away.
‘Where are we?’ Dr Aziba asked.
‘The holoship, I think,’ said Namboze, but she did not sound particularly confident in her own assessment. ‘But it shouldn’t be this dark, and the air feels much too warm. I know we were turning up the temperature, adjusting to Crucible’s climate, but it can’t have changed this much in only a few years. Not unless something’s gone badly wrong with the thermal regulation. And where’s the sky? It should be blue up there, or full of stars.’
‘I’m starting to see things,’ Travertine said. ‘There’s a path sloping down, maybe some buildings over there, by those lights.’
‘You should know it,’ Chiku replied. A sudden intuition had made her grope around until she found the knobbed spine of a stone wall flanking the steep trail on which they rested. ‘I think this is the community core where I used to live. If I’m right, those lights are inside my house. I can’t believe this is accidental.’
‘Lead on,’ Travertine said spiritedly.
They picked their way through the barely relieved darkness towards the little cluster of dwellings surrounding Chiku’s old house. It had not been so very long since she was last here, at least by the faulty reckoning of her memory, and she knew the walls and the twist and gyre of the paths well enough to guide the others. Their night vision was also improving by slow degrees. The chamber was still much too dark, but soon they could make out other clots of light on the far side of the space, and save for the darkness, Chiku noted that the place had not changed all that much.
As she approached her home, she made out a shadow perched on the wall, propped on two long legs with one foot hooked over the other. The shadow’s face was underlit by an orange glow, rendering the woman’s features unfamiliar. She had long hair tied back in a ponytail. The source of the light was the flat, glowing rectangle of a companion, cradled in the figure’s lap. She appeared to be engrossed, only acknowledging their presence as the little procession reached the wooden gate leading into Chiku’s garden.
Chiku scrutinised the seated figure. The throw of light had tricked her, but there was something in the woman’s posture that called across the years.
‘Ndege?’ she asked.
The woman dimmed the companion and rose from the wall. ‘Inside,’ she said, nodding towards the open doorway of the house, and Chiku had no idea whether that was an answer to her query or not, and no further clarification was offered beyond the one-word instruction.
‘This is a very simple constructed environment,’ Guochang said under his breath, as if the figments within it were capable of taking offence. ‘It won’t permit rich interactivity, and anyone we meet will only be a very pale shadow of their true selves. That transmission didn’t have the bandwidth for anything more complicated.’
‘I guess they did the best they could under the circumstances,’ Chiku said as Ndege’s figment entered the house.
‘Do you want to go in on your own?’ asked Namboze.
After a moment’s deliberation, Chiku said: ‘No. This concerns us all.’
But she led the way inside.
Ndege and Mposi were waiting for their visitors, sitting elbow to elbow on the other side of her kitchen table. A lamp offered a measure of illumination, enough to render their faces recognisably those of her children. It was less of a shock to see Mposi, of course, for she had already encountered this adult version of her son. He was a little older again, now. Layers of muscle had moved around in his face, hardening his features. Fanning out from his eyes were faint lines that she did not recall from the earlier transmissions – not exactly wrinkles, but the foundation marks where wrinkles would take hold, as if his face was the preliminary blueprint for an older version of the same man. She could see Noah in her son more clearly than ever before. She was surprised to note a prominence to the brow that called to mind her father Jitendra, and something in the shape of the folds of skin between his mouth and nose made her think of Sunday, as she lay dreaming of mathematics, and that in turn reminded her of Eunice Akinya.
Ndege had aged no more than Mposi had, of course, but for some reason this woman looked so much older than Chiku’s last clear memory of her daughter. Ndege was taller and leaner than her brother, as long in the neck as one of Sunday’s old statues. She was, Chiku decided, both extraordinarily beautiful and more than a little terrifying to behold. Perhaps the fierce dismissiveness of her first utterance was colouring every subsequent impression. She saw Sunday more than Jitendra in her daughter, Jonathan Beza more than Eunice. But Eunice was there as well, in the shape of her eyes, the imperious ridges of her cheekbones, the half-smile, somewhere between derision and admiration, that appeared to be her mouth’s default expression.
‘What do you want?’ Ndege asked.
‘You sent these ching instructions to Icebreaker,’ Chiku ventured. ‘We’re in it now.’
‘We’ve seen the destruction,’ Mposi said. ‘The weapons raining onto Crucible. This is a very bad development. There was no guarantee that you’d be alive to read our transmission, but we felt that the risk of sending it was justified. If you are still alive, you need to know what’s been going on here.’
‘The other holoships received your transmissions,’ Ndege said, her voice level and cool. ‘Your reports on Crucible as you made your approach, and your data regarding the alien structures in orbit around the planet. By then, of course, the holoships were close enough to our destination to begin verifying some of your observat
ions, and that information fostered internal tensions beyond anything the regular constabulary could contain. The information about Crucible and the fact that the Providers cannot be trusted is on its way back to Earth! God alone knows what it’ll do when it arrives. It’s been bad enough in the caravan: widespread dissent, arrests and executions, attempted coups and civilian take-overs.’
‘There was a big fight for control of the slowdown technology,’ Mposi said, ‘both to use it and to suppress it. A rush to duplicate your prototype and scale it up; an equal rush to sabotage those efforts or bend the new technology into devastating weaponry. As the public unrest intensified, so the authorities tightened their noose around Zanzibar. These were extremely dangerous times – very difficult for Ndege and me, because of our connection to you and Noah. But after father’s death, things only got worse. Those of us who had some inkling of what your expedition was about – yes, Father did confide in us, as much as he was able, before . . . Well, we knew there could be no easy arrival around Crucible. But none of us was ready to give up on Crucible, this amazing new world we’d been promised! We couldn’t allow Teslenko’s agenda to prevail. Equally, we had no desire to move to a war footing, readying for a military engagement with the Providers, a battle for control of Crucible. There had to be a third way. And so we called on Eunice.’
‘She would’ve emerged sooner or later,’ Ndege said, taking over from her brother, ‘but these events were the spur she’d been waiting for. It was a moment of maximum crisis – public fear of machines had never been greater!’
‘I’m surprised they didn’t tear her limb from limb,’ Travertine said.
Guochang and the others were by now at least partially aware of Eunice’s origin and capabilities. But there was much that Chiku had not yet had the time or inclination to reveal to her fellow hostages.
‘How did she get out of the chamber?’ Namboze asked. ‘The same way you came in, presumably?’
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