On the Steel Breeze (16 page)

‘Because you remind me a little of Geoffrey. The second one from the left – that’s Dreadnought.’

Chiku studied the elephant, drawing on years of learning. ‘He’s a bull.’

‘Yes he is – well done you. The one on the far left? That’s Juggernaut – she’s the closest this group has to a matriarch. The other two, Castor and Pollux, are brothers. You think it’s odd that a bull should remain with this group, long after puberty?’ Eunice nodded, anticipating Chiku’s answer. ‘The old rules, the old hierarchies and patterns, don’t apply here. In terms of social organisation, Tantors are as far beyond baseline elephants as we are beyond chimpanzees. They don’t have herds. They have community.’ Eunice raised her voice a notch. ‘Dreadnought! This woman is Chiku. Chiku is a friend.’ Then, to Chiku, ‘Give me the helmet and step forward. Let Dreadnought examine you. Don’t be afraid.’

‘I’m not.’

But that was not quite true. Her suit would protect her to a point, but a charging elephant could easily run her down, pick her up and fling her around like a doll.

‘The helmet,’ Eunice repeated.

Chiku passed it to her, then slowly crossed sun-dappled ground towards the waiting flank of Tantors. She kept her gaze on Dreadnought the whole time. Dreadnought stared right back at her, eyes dark and heavy-lidded and alert with an uncanny intelligence. As Chiku drew nearer, she saw that the elephant’s harness sported a flat black rectangle across the broad battering ram of his forehead. The rectangle contained an armoured, flexible screen, which was presently showing an image of Chiku as she must have appeared to Dreadnought.

Dreadnought extended his trunk. Chiku stopped and stood her ground. She let the trunk examine her suit, probing its way up her body, lingering over the joints and the batteries of controls. Hairy bristles tickled Chiku’s chin as the trunk felt around the neck ring. Warm, humid air blasted her and she resisted the urge to flinch with difficulty. Dreadnought moved on to her face, mapping it with surprising gentleness. The trunk traced the contours of her scalp, then retreated.

‘Dreadnought, say the name of this woman.’

Text appeared on Dreadnought’s screen.

CHIKU

CHIKU

CHIKU

She looked at Eunice. ‘He spells pretty well, given that we’ve only just been introduced.’

Eunice touched the side of her head. ‘I just added the word to his lexicon. I could make them speak, if I wished – all I’d need to do is hook a voice synthesiser into the circuit. But they don’t need that, and nor do I. The system lets them exchange symbolic patterns even when they’re not in each other’s line of sight, or when they’re too far apart for vocal communication.’

‘So we have talking elephants now. Even if they don’t actually talk.’

The text changed. Now it said:

TANTOR ≠ ELEPHANT

TANTOR >> ELEPHANT

‘Tantor does not equal elephant,’ Eunice interpreted. ‘Tantor greater than, or superior to, elephant. Why don’t you introduce yourself? Tell him you’re a friend?’

Chiku did not know whether to look into his eyes or the screen. Her gaze switched between them.

‘I’m a friend. I mean you no harm.’

‘What are you, a Martian? Talk to him the way you’d talk to a three year old.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ve had surprisingly little experience with talking elephants.’

The screen changed again.

TANTOR

TANTOR

TANTOR

TANTOR >> ELEPHANT

‘I get the message. They’re a bit touchy about the elephant thing, aren’t they? What have you been telling them? That they’re better than elephants?’

‘That they can be more than elephants.’

‘Have they even seen an unaugmented elephant?’

‘No, but I’ve shown them pictures, described the place they came from. Tell Dreadnought you’re sorry.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Chiku said.

DREADNOUGHT ≠ ANGRY

CHIKU FRIEND DREADNOUGHT

‘Well, you appear to have been accepted. Word of you will spread. The Tantors know that any friend of mine is a friend of theirs.’

‘Easy when you don’t have many friends,’ Chiku said.

‘Cutting.’

Chiku took a cautious step back from Dreadnought. The other Tantors watched her with guarded interest. One of the brothers – Castor or Pollux, she could not be sure which – nudged a piece of dirt with his trunk. Chiku heard a low rumble, impossible to localise to any single animal. They all had screens fixed to their foreheads, but only Dreadnought had communicated.

‘Do you think it’s time yet?’ Eunice asked.

‘For what?’

‘For all of us to leave the chamber and enter
Zanzibar
proper.’

‘Are you serious? You’re a robot with superhuman speed and strength. These are talking elephants.’

‘I was hoping attitudes would be more accepting after all this time.’ She raised a hand. ‘Dreadnought – you can go. Juggernaut, Castor, Pollux – thank you for checking on me. I’ll see you before skyfade.’

The Tantors turned and walked out of the clearing.

‘Who knew about this place?’ Chiku asked.

‘As few people as possible. Geoffrey and Lucas, certainly, and your mother knew about me, of course, at least to begin with.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘In the nicest possible way, Chiku, I escaped your mother’s control. After that, we had less to do with each other. It was a matter of mutual self-interest. The less she knew about me, the less she had to conceal from the authorities. I was, remember, totally illegal. And the less contact I had with the family, the less risk there was of my own existence being exposed. I suppose it upsets you that all this happened without you being in any way aware?’

‘Should it?’

‘Oh, I think so. It would certainly upset me.’ But after a moment Eunice went on: ‘Don’t feel too bad about your lack of knowledge, though. You were protected from consequences, that was all. Even the family knew very little about the Tantors. They were the responsibility of Chama and Gleb, friends of your mother and Jitendra. In fact Chama and Gleb oversaw the Tantors’ development from the original elephant genestocks on the Moon. They knew to keep
that
nicely under wraps – they knew exactly how well the Tantors would be received back then.’

‘Not well, for sure.’

‘Having created these cognitively enhanced creatures, the safest option at the time appeared to be to launch them into interstellar space. The idea was that I’d protect them, give them guidance and medical
assistance, until such time as it was safe to reveal ourselves.’

‘You said you were hiding,’ Chiku said.

‘Remarkably, I can do two things at once. I can hide and also do some good for the Tantors. Chama, Gleb and the others envisaged a time, a century or two into the crossing, when the Tantors might be able to emerge into the holoship on equal terms with the humans. And that I, too, would be able to walk safely among them.’

‘I think you’re in for a bit of wait.’

‘So much for the tolerant acceptance of the other. We’re forging out into deep space – who knows what we’ll meet out there? If we can’t even accept a robot and some talking elephants, what good are we going to be when we meet something
really
strange?’

Chiku spread her hands in a gesture of profound hopelessness. ‘You’re used to waiting, Eunice. You may have to wait a while longer. Me coming here, finding my way into this chamber . . . it’s all accidental. If not for Kappa, I wouldn’t be standing here. Who knows how long you’d have had to wait before someone found you?’ Then she remembered something that Eunice had already told her. ‘You’ve been outside, though.’

‘I’d forgotten too much, and it began to worry me. There were supposed to be secure data connections between this chamber and the rest of
Zanzibar,
so that I could tap into the public nets without leaving this chamber. Also, that proxy – it doesn’t work now, but it was left here so that someone like you, an Akinya with inside knowledge, could visit me without being physically present. But without the data links or the proxy, I had no choice but to leave the chamber if I wanted to fill the gaps in my memories.’

The thought that this machine, this artilect, had on occasion walked in the public spaces of
Zanzibar
left Chiku profoundly unnerved.

‘And did you manage to fill those gaps?’

‘To some extent, but there are still absences. I was damaged, you see. I was powerful for a very long time. Scarily powerful. Then things changed.’

‘In what way?’

‘I met something. Crossed paths with . . . whatever it was. Another artilect, almost certainly. Just as powerful as me, just as furtive.’

‘Something like you?’

‘Similar, but disembodied, the way I used to be. Spread across the networks, haunting their vulnerabilities. Whatever she was, she must have been there for a long while. Lurking in the solar system, quietly aware of me.’

‘You say “she”—’ Chiku said.

‘I told you I was damaged. It reached me, tried to kill me. It stabbed me with mathematics. Infected me with viruses and malware that spread like a disease, causing progressive failure of my core systems. Even after I’d consolidated myself into a single body and become small enough to move unnoticed among people, the disease progressed. When I ventured back into
Zanzibar,
I was trying to put right what had gone wrong. Trying to plug the holes in my soul.’

‘Why do you think it locked on to you? What did you mean to it?’

‘I don’t know, and I’d very much
like
to. What was it? Who made it, and for what purpose? How extensive was its reach in our home solar system? Might it still be there now, or did it manage to infiltrate
Zanzibar
? Is it still looking for me?’

Chiku sighed. ‘You don’t have much to go on.’

‘I have a name. The thing that tried to kill me calls herself Arachne.’

Chiku was glad to return home, to Noah and the children. The pod returned her to Kappa and she climbed out of the shaft without incident. When she returned her suit, she was almost disappointed when no one demanded an account of her actions. It turned out that she had only been gone an unremarkable five hours, no cause for alarm. Her casually proffered explanation for the dents and scratches on the suit – that they had been occasioned by a minor collapse when she was exploring one of the basements – was accepted without question. Eunice had cleaned up her minor head wounds well enough that they were not obvious. Only a clump of mud and grass caught in the articulation between knee and thigh threatened to undermine Chiku’s account. But if anyone noticed it, it was assumed to have been contamination from inside Kappa.

That night, when Ndege and Mposi were asleep, when their neighbours’ lights had gone out, she and Noah discussed what she had found.

‘Before we begin,’ Chiku said, ‘I need you to accept what I’m about to tell you without question.’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘You’ll understand in a minute. All I’m saying is, if you stop me to quibble over every tiny little detail, we’ll be here until next week. Are you willing to listen first and ask questions later?’

Noah poured wine. ‘Talk away.’

So she talked, and Noah, to his credit, did not quibble. He interrupted once or twice, but only for the sake of amplification or clarification, never because he doubted the essential veracity of her story. She told
him all of it, from the pod, to the aircraft, to Eunice and the Tantors. She told him what she had learned of Eunice’s nature, and why she had no reason to doubt that she had been talking to a machine. She told him of Eunice’s amnesia, and the thing called Arachne.

‘I know I made you a promise at the start of all this,’ she said, when she was done with the account. ‘I said I’d either go to the Assembly with my findings or never mention the matter again. But you see now why I can’t keep that promise, don’t you?’

‘This is too big for you to handle, Chiku.’

‘I agree. But I know this for a fact – we absolutely cannot risk invoking the Assembly.’

‘Sooner or later,’ Noah said, ‘they’ll start rebuilding Kappa, and someone else will find that shaft.’

‘Eunice knows that. But she also knows the time isn’t right for full disclosure.’

‘Can you trust her? Given what you told me about her memory, is she totally sane?’

‘I don’t know. I’m going to see what I can find out about Arachne, at least. Beyond that, though, one thing’s very clear to me. I’ve established that we can enter and leave the chamber in relative safety – for the moment, at least.’ She paused, knitting her fingers over and over. ‘When I go back, you have to come with me, Noah. You need to see this, too.’

‘It still sounds too risky to me – what about the children if we’re harmed?’

‘I know what to expect now and I don’t think we’re in any danger from anything in that chamber. But we don’t have long – once the reconstruction work gets under way, we’ll lose access.’

‘I could go on my own,’ Noah said.

‘The transit pod wouldn’t work for you. But even if it did, I promised to go back. I trust her, Noah. She’s Akinya, too. She may not be flesh and blood, but
we made her.
That makes her a family problem.’

‘Your family’s past has an annoying habit of intruding on the present,’ Noah said.

‘You’re not the only one who wishes it would stop,’ Chiku said.

In the morning she found herself called to the Assembly Building for a private meeting with Chair Utomi. They took coffee in Utomi’s office, while the Chair made troubling smalltalk. This was in disquieting contrast to his usual directness. It was quite obvious to Chiku that he was building up to something she was unlikely to find pleasant.

‘You seem tired,’ he observed, as if that was supposed to improve her mood. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Well, aside from this business with Travertine, the accident that could easily have killed us all, not to mention the political fall-out we can expect from the rest of the local caravan and then slowdown rearing its head . . . no, everything’s fine.’

‘Sarcasm will be the death of you,’ Utomi said, peering at her over the rim of his coffee cup with owlish regard. In his sturdy fingers the cup looked like something made for a doll. ‘But your point is well made. These are difficult times, and this Travertine mess hasn’t improved things. So, would you like some good news, for a change?’