On the Steel Breeze (36 page)

‘Will you be coming back?’

‘I don’t think so. You’d bore of me very quickly – I’m an empty vessel. There’s really not much more in my head.’

‘Then I should say thanks.’

‘For what?’

‘Everything, I suppose. For answering me, in the end. For going to Venus, Saturn and so on. I’m sorry it cost us so much.’

‘So am I,’ the figment said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

By the following morning she was able to leave, but it took some persuasion. The staff at the revival clinic, concerned for her mental welfare, had summoned Dr Aziba, a specialist in skipover complications. Older now than when they had last spoken, Chiku still recognised the soft-spoken physician. He had a long, handsome face and a carefully maintained tonsure of snowy hair circling his crown like a white atoll. His fingers were very long, like those of a highly adapted prosimian. He ran some tests, not as exhaustive as she had expected, and then decreed her fit for the world.

‘But you will return to us soon?’ Dr Aziba asked, mindful that she had used up only a portion of her skipover allowance.

‘Yes, of course. But I have work to do first.’

‘Waking so early is somewhat . . . unprecedented.’

‘Is it illegal, Doctor Aziba?’ she asked brightly.

‘Not in the slightest. Just uncommon.’

‘Then all I’ve done is exercise my right, wouldn’t you say?’

Aziba was not the only one troubled by her premature emergence. The other staff found it puzzling enough that they kept coming back to her with new questions. It was as if, on some level, they recognised her as a potentially disruptive influence, a troublesome agent best put back to sleep. It bothered them, also, that she had made this arrangement to wake in advance of her family.

Forty years was time enough for a world to change in ways both trifling and substantial. She had verified the figment’s account of the political changes – Utomi’s death and the shift to a more authoritarian regime under Sou-Chun Lo.
Zanzibar
’s government still maintained the illusion of autonomy, but in all significant respects it was being externally administered by those hard-liners who felt the terms of the
Pemba
Accord had not been nearly strict enough. Public research projects had been suspended indefinitely and scientists reassigned to projects
concerned with issues that might arise subsequent to their arrival at Crucible.

While the political changes had been sweeping, in other respects surprisingly little had altered. They had repaired Kappa, of course, plugged the hole and pushed air and warmth back into the chamber, and now people were working in that space again. But not huge numbers, she gathered, and very few of them chose to live there even though they’d been offered larger dwellings and gardens if they relocated. People still found Kappa troubling. It had poked a hole in the fiction of their safe and snug environment and reminded them that there was space beyond the skin of the world. Everyone had always known that, but Kappa had made them feel it in their bones.

In her own community core, there were a few more groups of houses, a few more roads and pathways. But the crippling resource bottleneck that had consumed years of her political life, appeared never to have arrived. Or had been blunted, perhaps, deflected by a thousand small contingencies.

She made her way home. No tenants had been allowed to move in while her family slept, and there were no obvious signs of neglect. She broke through the transparent membrane stretched across the doors and windows, peeling pieces of it from her skin where it sought to cling. The door opened easily and she let herself into the little kitchen where Travertine had come to talk. On the table, imperfectly erased, was the red circle left by vis wine glass. They would never get rid of that now.

Chiku drew out a chair and sat at the table, elbows on the wood, fingers laced together. She wanted it to feel strange, returning to this place, but there was no sense that she had been away more than a few days. She could have walked the rooms blindfolded and found nothing out of place.

When she wearied of the silence and the stillness, she rose from the table and moved into the study she shared with Noah. At the old desk she called open her private files, barely surprised when the desk acceded to her request without complaint. The house and its furniture had barely registered her absence.

The private files contained the two items the figment had promised. She opened the first and stared at the chains of scratchy stick-men and cave-drawing symbols that supposedly constituted some axioms of Post-Chibesa theory. It meant nothing to her, but that did not make it invalid.

She thought of Jitendra, giddy with happiness at his wife’s return. It had been a kind of anti-bereavement. Her mother had dived into her
obsession and her father had believed her drowned. And then she had come back to him from the depths. Chiku remembered the bitterness she had begun to feel towards Sunday for doing what she did, even though there had been no real choice for her. Such was the nature of obsessions: no quarter given for the human cost. Now she tried to snuff out her bitterness, as if it was a cold flame that it was in her gift to extinguish. But she could not. Sunday had returned, and that was a joyous thing, but her mother had only come back because she had found her solution, not because she had suddenly remembered Jitendra. And that Chiku could not forgive.

She opened the second file. The desk found numbers, vectors of neural connectivity, and attempted to offer graphic visualisation. Broken structures, vague as phantoms, snaked and branched through the cloudy outline of a mind. It resembled a half-mapped cave system – baroquely complex, wormholed by passages that went nowhere and connected to nothing obvious. The visualisation offered stabs at landmarks, territories:
anterior cingulate cortex, left basal ganglia, caudate nucleus.
Elsewhere the system appeared unsure as to what it was attempting to map. Are-thusa’s assesment had been correct: there was nowhere near enough coherence to attempt a revival. But that did not mean this information was valueless.

She was about to close the desk when she noticed something else – a message on her private channel. Her involvement in Assembly business was suspended while she was in skipover, and her wider family – distant members of the Akinya line, Noah’s own relatives – as well as colleagues and friends all knew she was asleep. A message welcoming her on her return to wakefulness, perhaps? But no – the appended time tag showed that the message had been sitting there for nearly as long as the two new files.

She opened it with a measure of trepidation.

It said:
Ching here,
followed by an alphanumeric code, otherwise meaningless, which she nonetheless committed to memory. She thought about voking it immediately – it would only prey on her mind if she did not – but as her resolve to do so strengthened, she heard footsteps on the path outside, a single peremptory knock on the door, the door opening. She locked the desk and returned to the kitchen. A slant of daylight cut across the floor. Travertine had already let verself into the house.

Chiku stared at ver rudely, unable for a moment to find anything to say.

‘I’m not
that
much of a horror, am I? Or are you upset that I just let myself in?’

‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ Chiku said.

‘But you knew our paths were bound to cross eventually. It’s a small world, after all. I’ve just short-circuited the inevitable.’ Ve came further into the kitchen and eased the door shut behind ver. ‘I heard you came out of skipover early.’

‘I suppose you were spying on me, waiting for me to come home?’

Travertine gave an uninterested shrug. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on things while you were away. Do you mind if I sit? These knees of mine aren’t what they used to be.’

‘Be my guest.’

Travertine took the seat Chiku had been using only a few minutes earlier. Ve rested vis arms on the table and the heavy black bracelet around vis right wrist clunked on the wood. Every few seconds, a little red light pulsed, telling Chiku it was still interfering with Travertine’s metabolism at a profound level, circumventing genetic and exosomatic prolongation factors.

It showed in vis face. Forty years had etched grooves around vis mouth and lines around vis eyes, accompanied by a general slackening of facial tone. There were marks and blemishes she did not recall from their last meeting, and a loose, leathery texture to the skin under Travertine’s chin. Flecks of grey nestled among vis black curls.

Chiku, still standing, said: ‘I won’t apologise for what happened to you, if that’s what you’ve come for.’

‘I haven’t come for any other reason than to see an old friend.’

‘Our friendship crashed and burned sometime around Kappa.’

‘Promises were certainly broken.’

‘I did what I could,’ Chiku said, nodding at the bracelet as it gave off another red pulse. ‘Count your lucky stars they didn’t execute you.’

‘Still, you’d be hard pushed to call this a kindness. Shall I tell you something?’

‘I’m sure you’re going to whether I want you to or not.’

‘They don’t want me to die. Not before my time, anyway. They were worried at the beginning that I might take my own life rather than see this through to the bitter end, so they had someone shadowing me for a while. Later, they brought in a robot from
Malabar
to do the job. They’ve realised now, though, that I’m not going to do it.’

‘You’re not the sort.’

‘Not really. Plus I wouldn’t want to spare them.’

‘Spare
them?’

‘If I commit suicide, they won’t be forced to watch me decay. No,
they’re going to get their money’s worth out of me. I’ll walk their nightmares.’

‘So the only reason you’re still alive is spite?’

‘You know me better than that, Chiku. I’m naturally curious, and no one really knows how long I’ve got before I finally fall to pieces. Decades, easily. A century, maybe. I’m taking care of myself.’ Travertine clunked the bracelet against the wood. ‘This thing isn’t perfect. Every now and again I hurt myself, accidentally or otherwise.’ By way of illustration, ve picked at an old scar on vis wrist. ‘It’s been interesting to track my repair processes. I still heal pretty well, so some of the prolongation pathways are still operating. I’m dying, but not as quickly as you’d imagine.’

Chiku wondered if she was meant to take this as good news.

‘Maybe you’ll get clemency.’

‘Under Sou-Chun? I never thought I’d say this, but it almost makes me wish Utomi was still in charge.’

‘I hear Sou-Chun doesn’t want to talk about slowdown.’

‘That’s an understatement. We’re only a whisker away from it becoming a crime to even mention it. Actions contrary to the public good, stoking fears, dissemination of irresponsible ideology and so on. An idea so dangerous it can’t be discussed. I thought we buried all that nonsense back in the Dark Ages.’

‘So did I,’ Chiku said. ‘But we’re a long away from home now.’

‘Do you want to hear the funny part, though? Whatever Sou-Chun says in public, whatever statutes she implements, there’s always something going on behind the scenes.’

‘Like what?’

‘Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another. Here’s an example. Sou-Chun is suppressing all public debate regarding slowdown, terminating research programmemes left, right and centre – even some that were entirely legal under the
Pemba
rulings. At the same time, there’s a very obvious clandestine research effort into exactly those areas banned by Sou-Chun’s legislation.’

‘That doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense.’

‘Welcome to politics.’

‘But why would she do that? We already had the research lines – why would she outlaw them, then start them up again in secret?’

‘To curry favour with the other holoships, obviously. To be seen to be doing the right thing while conducting business as usual behind the scenes. Because secretly, deep down in her soul, Sou-Chun Lo is scared shitless. As well she should be.’

‘This is just speculation.’

‘I wish it was. From time to time, I receive these . . . visitors. They’re always civilians, never anyone claiming to act on the Assembly’s behalf. They say they’re lawyers or journalists, working to build a case in my defence. In order to help me, they need more details about what happened in Kappa. So of course I oblige. Slowly, though, the conversations begin to take peculiar turns. Odd non sequiturs lead to detailed questions regarding physics or mathematics, as if that was the point of their visit all along.
And would you say your problems stemmed from a miscalculation of the capture cross-section, in failing to allow for all third-order terms?
That kind of thing.’

‘I don’t understand. Why would they do that?’

‘Because there’s something going on and they don’t have all the answers. Or any of them, truth be told. And of course I play along, because even though I’m being used, it amuses me intellectually.’ Travertine shifted vis weight on the chair. ‘The ruse is utterly transparent – they’re not trying to build a case for my defence. They’re trying to repeat my experiment.’

Chiku absorbed that. Even allowing for Travertine’s cynical predisposition, it had the nasty taint of plausibility.

‘It’s possible you’re reading too much into a few innocent questions.’

‘I’m not. And it explains why they’re so keen to prevent me from committing suicide – I’m still useful to them.’

‘All right. Suppose you’re not making this up or imagining it and there really is something going on, with or without Sou-Chun’s authorisation – is that really so terrible? You might not like being lied to, but at least it means that someone’s finally taking this stuff seriously.’

‘We might still be too late.’

‘But surely it’s better to be doing something rather than nothing, even if it’s clandestine. Who knows – they might find a practical application for whatever they discover long before we figure out how to slow down something as massive as
Zanzibar.’