On the Steel Breeze (12 page)

Another phrase followed, pulsing gently.

Submit for familial genetic verification.

This, Chiku surmised, was as far as Travertine had come. Ve had found
the pod but it was beyond vis ability to make it move. By intuition or investigation, Travertine had concluded that it was waiting to taste an Akinya’s blood.

That might have been nothing more than an inspired guess on Travertine’s part – a gambit to buy Chiku’s sympathy and support in the trial, before it could be put to the test.

There was a very simple way to tell.

Chiku’s finger hovered above the panel for a moment before she lowered it to within a skin’s breadth of the surface. She thought it unlikely that the machine would be able to sample her DNA through the fabric of her glove, but it was not a chance she was prepared take. She lifted her hand away from the panel without touching it, warily, like a saboteur stepping back from a primed bomb.

And then stepped out of the cabin, back onto the tunnel floor. After a few seconds, sensing her egress, the door slid back into place. The outline pulsed purple and then faded into seamlessness.

Chiku remained intrigued. It would be an interesting exercise to see where the pod ended up, if it was in fact capable of moving. But one thing was clear. Wherever the pod thought it was supposed to go, it could not possibly be Chamber Thirty-Seven.

Because there was and never had been any such place. There had only ever been thirty-six chambers aboard
Zanzibar.

Even a child knew that.

‘You had me worried sick,’ Noah said. He was at the school gates, leaning on the low white wall with his arms folded on top of it.

‘I promised I wouldn’t do anything foolish.’

‘Foolish or not, you took a big risk. Was it worth it?’

‘I think so.’ Chiku paused for a moment, then added, ‘Actually, I’m not certain. Part of me thinks I should go back, but a bigger part is telling me that might be a bad idea.’

They had arrived separately, before Ndege and Mposi were allowed out of their lessons. Chiku watched a teacher walk along a covered passage between two of the school blocks. Ve carried a potted plant, cradling the bowl while the plant tickled vis chin.

‘It’d be a really bad idea to keep this a secret,’ Noah said.

‘I haven’t decided one way or the other yet – I need to do a bit more digging before I decide. I want all the facts at my disposal before I bring this to the Assembly’s attention. It’s not that I don’t trust them, but they don’t always make the right decisions.’

‘That sounds exactly like not trusting the Assembly to me.’

‘You know what I mean. And in my position, you’d be doing exactly the same things.’

Noah made the low, equivocal noise she had come to recognise as grudging agreement. ‘So tell me what you found.’

‘Are you sure you want to know?’

‘You started this, wife. The time for keeping me in the dark has passed.’

‘I found a hole under one of the buildings I searched yesterday. It’s actually a shaft, but it’s not on any of the construction documents.’

‘So you did what any normal, cautious-minded person with family and responsibilities would have done. You definitely did not climb down this shaft to see what was at the bottom of it.’

‘I only went down a little way. It looked safe and I made sure I’d be able to climb out again. And at the bottom I found . . . well, more tunnels, for a start. And a pod.’

‘A pod.’

‘Just sitting there on rails, all powered up and ready to go somewhere. Travertine told me there was something down there I’d find interesting.’

‘Travertine’s mixed up in this as well?’ Noah tried to make light of it, but the dismay behind his smile was obvious to Chiku. ‘I can’t tell you how much that gladdens my heart.’

‘Travertine’s a minor detail in this. Ve never got further than the pod. It wouldn’t work for ver – it’s got a genetic lock.’

‘Couldn’t Travertine have walked down the tunnel?’

‘Ve lost interest in the pod when ve couldn’t activate it. At that point it became a distraction, only useful as a potential bargaining chip.’

‘What did ve put you up to?’

‘I didn’t make any promises to Travertine, and Travertine didn’t tell me much beyond that. So on balance, I think I’ve got to go back.’

‘This genetic lock won’t be a problem?’

‘Not if it’s waiting for someone like me. An Akinya, I mean.’

‘Not everything in the known universe has to revolve around that name of yours.’

‘Given the significant role my family played in making the holoships, we were in a good position to put something inside
Zanzibar
that isn’t on the maps.’

Chiku wasn’t sure whether Noah was humouring her, or whether his own curiosity had got the better of him. ‘Have you any idea where the pod might go?’

‘Somewhere that doesn’t exist – Chamber Thirty-Seven. Obviously, there’s no such place.’

‘Obviously,’ Noah affirmed.

‘But I’d still like to find out where it goes.’

‘Surely this is a matter for the Assembly now, Chiku.’

She took her time answering. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘It’s simple,’ Noah said. ‘You’ve made your preliminary investigation and found something much more significant than a hole in the ground. You can’t keep this to yourself any longer.’

She forced a conciliatory smile, hoping it would placate him. ‘I’m sharing it with you, aren’t I?’

Children were coming out of the school. Normally they would have spilt out in an exuberant mass, tripping over themselves in their eagerness to leave the classrooms. Today they were earnest in their solemnity, as if they had all suffered a collective scolding. They would have been told more about what had happened yesterday, including the fact that more than two hundred people had died in the accident.

It was probably the first time most of these children had been confronted with the notion of human mortality. Animals died, machines very occasionally malfunctioned or broke down – this they understood. But most of the time, people just kept on living. Of the citizens aboard
Zanzibar
upon departure, remarkably few had died, and over such a long span of time that most of these children would have missed it.

Today, though, they had been touched by death, and it would take up permanent residence in their psyches. Chiku did not envy the teachers the supremely difficult questions they would have been faced with. It was not as if the teachers had much experience of death themselves.

She spotted their children near the back of the exodus.

‘You’re not going down there again,’ Noah said. He paused a beat before adding, ‘Not without me, anyway.’

She shook her head in flat refusal. ‘Out of the question.’

‘And that response tells me it might not be as safe as you’re implying. The truth, now, Chiku – is it risky or not?’

‘I can’t guess what’s at the end of the tunnel, so yes, there is risk involved – but it’s a small one. Plus in spite of all your misgivings, I know you’re almost as curious as I am to find out where the pod wants to take me.’ She glanced over the wall and lowered her voice when she saw that Ndege and Mposi were almost within earshot. ‘For their sakes, we can’t both go down there. It has to be one or the other. And since I’m the Akinya—’

‘When?’ he asked quietly.

‘Tomorrow, if I can.’

‘Then promise me something. When you come back, you either hand this over to the Assembly, or we never speak of it again. And you never go back to the shaft. Not now, not in a hundred years.’

‘That sounds reasonable,’ Chiku said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The following day, work took Chiku beyond
Zanzibar.
She was summoned to accompany a delegation of Assembly members and constables to escort Travertine to the Council of Worlds. She wanted to tell Travertine that this outing had not been her idea, but she could think of no way of saying it that would not sound as if she were shifting the blame onto her colleagues.

They went out in a high-capacity shuttle and made a slow orbit around their own holoship before powering up for deeper space. The breach slid into view: a gash on the holoship’s side that widened to a yawning void. Construction teams hemmed the wound’s edge, defining it with the blue-white blaze of floodlights and the yellow glow of temporary living modules and equipment shacks. Small ships and robots hovered ‘below’ the wound from Chiku’s perspective, holding station with thrust or impact-tethers. More evidence of consolidation and repair was visible through the rupture itself. False stars spangled back from the distant concavity of Kappa’s sky.

Zanzibar
was huge, but at a steady half-gee of thrust it diminished rapidly to the size of a pebble. Holoships only felt big when you were inside them, Chiku reflected. Viewed from outside, it was quite absurd to imagine ten million busy lives squeezed into the interstices of that little rock, infiltrating it like some kind of endolithic bacteria.

She had been to
Malabar
recently, but this time the destination was
New Tiamaat.
From the outside, it resembled the other holoships. It had the same rocky hide, barnacled with human industry; the same docking ports studding the surface, with wider apertures at the leading and trailing poles. Fat bumble-bee ships and transports congested its airspace. Congregations of drones and suited people flitted around them like tiny golden sparks. There were many people outside
Zanzibar
at the moment, but only because of the accident.
New Tiamaat
was always like this. Blisters and domes bulged from the surface as the citizens sought
new habitable space. They had slowed their world’s rotation and hollowed out most of its interior.

Chiku did not quite trust the inhabitants of
New Tiamaat.
They were Panspermians, to begin with, and Panspermians had decidedly odd ideas about lots of things. They had set their holoship on a course for Crucible, but lately there was talk of not making landfall when they arrived. They would continue to live in
New Tiamaat,
orbiting Crucible. Or they might even carry on into deeper space, having already achieved perfect adaptation to interstellar conditions. They liked it out here, sliding between stars. When the terms of the
Pemba
Accord were drafted, the people of
New Tiamaat
had pushed for the strictest legislation. They had no real interest in solving the slowdown problem.

Lacking spin and no longer under thrust, there was no sense of up and down in New Tiamaat. When they demolished their connecting walls, the rubble – a portion of it, anyway – had been fused into fantastic spires and outcroppings, spirals and arcs and buttresses, jutting from the floor, ceiling, walls – projecting into open space, providing the foundation and bedrock for dreamlike sky palaces and aerial citadels. Buildings, towers erupted out in every direction, growing like crystal or coral. Jagged promontories of glass, blocky extrusions of windowed stone, nets and nests, like traps or filters, and frogspawn clumps of pastel spheres. Tiny flying things – citizens of
New Tiamaat,
air-swimming through the weightless spaces – came and went in all directions. It was an explosion of possibility, an architectural expression of the Pans’ cherished Green Efflorescence.

But in embracing one set of possibilities, another was denied. These structures were as lacy as sugar sculptures. Slowdown – the application of even a hundredth of a gee of thrust – would court disaster. The citizens knew that, of course. They had sanctioned these marvellous palaces and cities in precisely that knowledge.

The
Zanzibar
delegation was escorted to the core of one of the city complexes. Flute-shaped towers burst in all directions from an anchoring foundation of green-matted rock. Some way inside was spherical courtroom. It was white and bony, like a monstrous hollowed-out skull. Airy light seeped in through cunning ducts and channels. Functionaries and delegates stationed themselves around the incurving walls, clinging to studs and handholds, gargoyling from warty outgrowths.

Chalky struts buttressed a central platform to the walls. Upon the platform, big as a throne and rife with carved ornamentation, was a strap-in chair in which constables and
New Tiamaat
functionaries secured Travertine. A ring of smaller and less impressive seats than Travertine’s
surrounded the platform and accommodated the representatives of the eleven democratic Assemblies of the local caravan, together with the empty chairs that would have been occupied by the
Pemba
delegation.

The Council of Worlds was brought to session by
New Tiamaat
’s senior representative, Chair Teslenko. An aquatic born in one of Earth’s seastead communities, the stern Teslenko had long ago forsaken oceans for space. The whiskered, seal-like representative wheezed a lot and his skin needed to be moisturised with oils at regular intervals.

Chiku knew Teslenko well enough. He had never made much secret of his dislike for the way they did things on
Zanzibar,
with its lax approach to public scrutiny. Travertine would have had to work very hard to find a worse foe.

The preliminary business proceeded rapidly, motes formulated and exchanged as tokens of good intent. Chiku was required to do very little except witness and nod. Travertine’s identity was formally established with evidence offered to prove that ve was who
Zanzibar
’s delegation claimed ver to be. Travertine disputed neither the delegation’s identification nor their accusation that ve was responsible for what had happened in Kappa.

‘I know what I did, and I’d take the same risks a second time, and a third. Can I go now?’

‘Of course not,’ Teslenko rumbled through his whiskers.

‘It was actually a rhetorical question.’

‘You offered no defence in your earlier account,’ said another of the
New Tiamaat
delegates. ‘Do you wish to amend your statement?’

‘I’ve said everything that needs to be said.’