On the Steel Breeze (20 page)

‘Let’s be honest,’ he said on the third evening of their crossing. ‘There’s a lot we don’t know about each other.’

‘A lot we don’t want to know,’ Chiku said.

‘Speak for yourself. But I hope we can be more open when this is all over and done.’

‘When I’m ready to talk about June, you’ll be the first to know. But it cuts both ways. Who are you, really? How did you end up with that studio, all those connections? You’re not from Lisbon – or if you are, you’ve travelled widely. You speak Swahili and Zulu and who knows
what, with or without the aug. You make a big song and dance about me going to Venus, but it turns out that you’re not in the least bit bothered by space travel or weightlessness.’

‘I’ve been around. Done some stuff.’

‘I’d like to know about it.’

‘You could query the aug and find out most of it before I’ve had time to finish this drink.’

‘But that wouldn’t be the same as having you share it with me.’

Pedro smiled and looked away for a moment. ‘I’ve done . . . things.’

‘Well, that narrows it down.’

‘Quite interesting things, which we’ll speak of eventually, but not here and definitely not now. You will tell me about June, though, won’t you?’

‘Assuming there’s anything to tell.’

And so they circled around what could or would not be said, and as the Earth and Moon receded, so Earth’s sweltering, cloud-garbed sister grew larger.

First a pale dot, crescented by shadow, then a milky marble, like an eyeball with major cataracts.

From the loop-liner a shuttle took them to one of the orbiting stations necklacing Venus. They would not be staying long. Subtle enquiries had already established that June Wing was still down in the clouds. Not on Venus, exactly, but in one of the many floating gondolas tethered against the endless cycling winds. Chiku and Pedro were offered the option of chinging into receptacle bodies, organic or mechanical, but Mecufi had cautioned them against visiting June in anything other than full fleshly embodiment. She was particular about that. So they went down by Maersk Intersolar shuttle, an arrowheaded transatmospheric vehicle built like a bathyscaphe.

The shuttle slid into the dayside atmosphere like a syringe, then flicked its hull to transparency. Gradually their angle of flight levelled out. It was all sleighride smooth. Chiku got up and walked around, leaving Pedro snoozing. They were still a long way up from the surface – forty hellish kilometres – but the pressure outside was already a frankly absurd two atmospheres. It was stormy, too, although the shuttle was smoothing out the turbulence long before it had a chance to upset the passengers. Venus was a machine for making bad weather. It took eight months to rotate on its axis, a planet with a day longer than its own year, but these wind-whipped clouds chased their tails around the planet in mere dozens of hours.

The gondola – the place where June was supposed to be – was called
Tekarohi High. They saw very little of it until the last few moments of the approach, the clouds thinning rather than parting, Tekarohi High looming like some gothic castle in a thunderstorm. It was a chubby cylinder the size of several skyscrapers lumped together. This habitable volume was only part of the structure. From the base, beneath a fringe of docking ledges and platforms, extended a tremendously strong guyline that vanished into the underlying clouds, forty kilometres of cable anchoring the station to Venus’s crust. Above, just as invisibly distant, were the monstrous balloons that held the platform aloft. Bracketed out from the main body of the platform were numerous turbines drawing power from the unending blast of the winds. Clearly they had more than enough for their purposes. Tekarohi High’s hundreds of floors of windows were great flickering acres of neon.

They docked near the base, clamps securing the hovering shuttle, and then there was the usual tedium and delay before they could actually exit the shuttle and walk into the gondola. Beneath Chiku’s feet, the floor felt as solid as if there was a planet right underneath, rather than forty kilometres of scalding, crushing carbon dioxide, delicately laced with sulphuric acid.

At odd intervals, wherever the internal architecture of the platform made it practical, the builders had set glass plates into the floor. Elsewhere, along corridors and viewing decks, stupendous armoured windows curved to horizontal near their bases, offering a view straight down. Outside was a shifting grey migraine. Views of the surface were occasionally possible at this altitude, apparently, but Chiku never saw anything she could definitively identify as something other than a figment of her own imagination. She kept thinking about that old caution against staring into the abyss.

‘I think that’s her,’ Chiku said in a low voice.

They were drinking coffee in one of the observation lounges, clouds of sackcloth grey testing themselves against the windows, lightning storms pulsing somewhere deeper inside the weather system. Pedro followed her gaze to a small and exceedingly old-looking woman, impeccably dressed, in the company of two expensively groomed younger people. They were gathered around a low table, pointing into some invisible abstraction occupying the space between them, negotiating some fine point of business that might have had nothing at all to do with Venus.

‘I don’t know . . .’ Pedro said.

Chiku called up an aug query. This woman was not June Wing, according to the identifiers. But June had been a wily cyberneticist, exactly
the sort of person who might have been able to move around under a false signifier.

‘It must be her. The aug isn’t placing her anywhere else in the station, so who else can that be?’

‘The aug said she was here when we were on our way,’ Pedro pointed out. ‘Why would it change its mind?’

Eventually the woman stood, rising with the smooth motion that suggested she might be wearing an exo, and left the two younger people. Chiku considered following her, but she had not got very far with that thought when a tall gowned man in a fez loomed over their table.

‘Chiku Akinya? I am Imris Kwami.’

Chiku tried to think of something clever to say, something that would give her the upper hand, but the moment failed her.

‘Hello.’

‘I doubt you’ve heard my name before,’ Kwami said, easing his lengthy frame onto a vacant stool. He smiled at Pedro with a nod. ‘If it had, you would probably have run an aug search on me as well as my employer.’

‘You work for June?’ Chiku asked.

‘Yes. And I believe you were just about to approach that woman and ask her if she might be June?’

Chiku frowned. ‘How did you know?’

‘A hundred years of practice yields a certain level of competence in such matters.’

Chiku did not feel good about being this transparent, this open to interpretation. ‘Then if that woman isn’t June, what is she?’

‘Nobody – and I mean that in the kindest possible sense. I am certain that she is actually a very nice lady. I would gladly say that she was a decoy we had employed for exactly that purpose, but if you had got a little nearer you would have seen that she really does not resemble June to any large degree.’

Pedro leaned in. ‘Then where is she?’

‘Downstairs,’ Kwami said, as if this explained everything.

‘I thought we were on the lowest level,’ Chiku said, glancing down at the floor.

‘That’s a colloquialism, I think,’ Pedro said.

‘Correct, my young sir. June went down to the surface of Venus about twelve hours ago. I do not suppose you thought to confirm her whereabouts more recently than that?’

‘She isn’t in one of the domes, we know that much,’ Chiku said.

‘When I say surface, that is precisely my meaning. She is in a surface
suit, on one of her scouting expeditions. This is why we have come to Venus. When she is done, we will leave.’

‘I’m totally confused now,’ Pedro said.

‘I did some background reading on the way over,’ Chiku said. ‘She’s collecting things, gathering them up for a museum or something.’

‘Robotic relics of the early space age,’ Kwami said, sweeping his hands overhead as if a banner floated above him. ‘This is her mission in life, the latest of many. Perhaps the last and greatest of them all.’

‘How long will she be down there?’ Chiku asked.

‘It could be many tens of hours. It is a very tedious business, travelling to and from the surface. You do not simply pop down there for a five-minute stroll.’

Pedro gave an easy shrug. ‘We can easily wait a day or two, longer if necessary.’

‘I am very happy for you, but I am afraid that is not how it works with my employer. She has left me with certain instructions, you see.’ This strange, thin, jovial man of indeterminate age touched his nose and winked. ‘You must understand that she is fully aware of your interest, your intentions, your approach on the loop-liner. She knows that there is more than one of you. She knows also that you have lately had contact with the merfolk.’

‘I see,’ Chiku said, with a small private shiver.

‘June is very good at detecting interest in herself. You should not be surprised by this. You only have to
think
her name and she will know it. I exaggerate, of course, but only a little. A moment, please.’ Kwami reached into a pocket and withdrew a small pale-green box. He popped the lid and extracted a lilac mote, which he then passed to Chiku. ‘This was formulated by June. You may open it, if you wish.’

‘We don’t want much of her time,’ Pedro said. ‘If she knows as much about us as you say, then she also knows that. Also that we’re not up to any funny business.’

‘Of course, sir,’ Kwami said, smiling. ‘But I am afraid June was very particular in her wishes. If you wish to speak to her, you must join her down there. She may speak to you, or she may not, depending on her mood. But there is no other way.’

‘We do need to speak,’ Chiku said. She fingered the mote, unsure of the specific etiquette in this situation.

‘Please,’ Kwami encouraged.

She cracked the mote. As always, there was an instant before the cargo of emotions began to unpack itself. There was no warmth here, only a stern and forbidding prickliness. She sensed a provisional willingness
to be approached, but only on June Wing’s very specific terms. There would be no negotiation and she made no promises. There was also a continuous, low-level drone of constant background dread. It was not that June Wing was frightened, Chiku understood, but that she herself ought to be. The mote was a final warning, a chance to stop now before she went any deeper.

Know what you are getting into.

‘Well, that’s brightened my day,’ Chiku said grimly.

‘Your suits are already reserved, as well as an elevator slot,’ Kwami replied. ‘You can be on the surface in a jiffy.’

‘People die down there, don’t they?’ Pedro asked.

‘Only now and then,’ Kwami said cheerfully.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The elevator was a black bobbin that travelled up and down Tekarohi’s tethering cable.
Embarking for Cythera,
Chiku thought as they stepped aboard along with a small gaggle of fellow travellers. They were not wearing the surface suits yet, and the forty-kilometre descent would take long enough that the elevator came equipped with a small bar, lounge area and toilet facilities. There were two tiny windows, more like inspection ports than anything that would provide a view. Imris Kwami had waved them off with assurances that everything had been taken care of on the surface, and that the two suits would know where to go.

‘Can we trust him?’ she asked once they were under way, sliding down the cable at about two kilometres a minute. A display above the door showed increments of altitude, temperature, pressure.

‘Bit late to be worrying about that now!’ Pedro was fingering the table top, perhaps pondering a veneer or lamination that might be suitable for his purposes. His way of coping with the situation, Chiku thought.

It was not hers.

Yet down they went, the elevator made ominous little ticking sounds as it transitioned into denser and hotter atmosphere, like a submarine sinking into some acidic boiling trench of the deepest, blackest ocean. Everyone made a great show of not being fazed by these little structural complaints, not even when they amplified to clangs and thuds, as if some very angry thing, presently outside, was trying to break in.

Ten atmospheres . . . fifty . . . The elevator shook as they passed through some horsetail of wind shear. Then deeper still. Seventy atmospheres, eighty. Smoother now, heavier, as if the atmosphere itself was entirely too sluggish to bother with anything as frivolous as weather. There was only this one car shuttling up and down the tether, day in and day out, year after year. Chiku supposed it had become quite adept at handling these pressure changes by now. There was no boat as safe as an old boat, or so the saying went. Perhaps this rule could be safely ascribed to elevators as well, like the one in Santa Justa.

Eventually the car reached zero altitude. The view through the windows went dark as they slid into the anchorpoint compound on the surface. They were at ninety-five atmospheres, seven hundred and fifty kelvins of temperature.

The elevator halted and something clamped it tight. More clangs and clattering followed, and then the door opened. Chiku and Pedro followed the passengers out into the anchorpoint’s receiving area. It was a starkly unwelcoming place, a little too warm, with dim industrial lighting, scabbed grey walls and a persistent rhythmic throb of air circulators. A musician sat cross-legged on carpets in one corner, attempting to tune a kora. Or perhaps, Chiku decided, this was his actual playing style.

Some passengers with expensive luggage were haranguing a tourist official, complaining that the bus to take them to the nearest domed community was running hours late. Their items of luggage, as eager to be moving as their owners, squabbled among themselves. Some other passengers were waiting to go back up the tether, sitting on metal benches or hovering around one or other of the food concessions. Someone was asleep, stretched out on a bench with their coat over their head. Their snoring, Chiku realised, was the source of the annoying rhythmic throb. It had nothing to do with air circulators.