On the Steel Breeze (42 page)

Since Pedro’s death, she had maintained much more regular contact with her mother and father. She still did most of the talking with Jitendra, but that was too old a habit to break, and she made the most of Sunday’s renewed ability to engage in ordinary human interactions again. They were both tremendously old, of course, and frail enough that neither was in any rush to risk a visit to Earth. Jitendra could never quite understand why his daughter was so reluctant to come up to see them, when the journey would obviously be much easier for her to
make. Every time the subject came up, his response was the same: ‘If it is a question of funds . . .’

But it was not a matter of funds, and in any case, her parents were by no means wealthy any more. Jitendra had always been a terrible businessman, and while Sunday was off chasing mathematics inside her head, he had maintained a singularly ineffectual grasp on their household finances. They were lucky to be able to afford the upkeep on their home.

But one October, they pooled what they had and came down to Earth for a month. Chiku was shocked when she met them at the terminal – it was as if the ching had been lying to her all those years, making them appear more robust than they really were. The sudden, dreadful clarity made her gasp – her parents were two very old organisms who had done exceedingly well to last as long as they had. They should be studied by teams of biologists, she thought, and introduced to parties of schoolchildren as living history lessons. But while their age and frailty were a concern to Chiku, they were not in any sense remarkable in this old, old world.

They both needed exos to get around. Unlike Jitendra, Sunday had not been born on the Moon, but she had lived there so long that her bones and muscles had fully adapted to Lunar gravity. For the first few days, she also had trouble with Earth’s sunlight, needing sunglasses and parasols even when the day was overcast. And this was only pale, watery Lisbon, not the roasting-hot Africa of her youth. Sunday appeared bewildered, unsure why she had been dragged down into this pointlessly punishing gravity well. Had she done something wrong? Had she offended someone? Would it have killed her daughter to come up to see them instead?

But after the first week, things improved. Jitendra turned down his exo’s support margin and even risked a few steps without it – grinning like a fool and holding his arms out for balance as if he was halfway across Niagara Falls on a tight-rope. ‘Look at me,’ he boomed to anyone willing to listen. ‘I am walking on Planet Earth!’

Sunday also began to settle in. The sunlight stopped bothering her as much and at last she was able to eat the local cuisine without obvious complaint. She shrugged off her resentment and started being happy, as if she had flicked some sort of switch in her brain. The three of them visited all the local sights in Lisbon. They walked the promenades and rode the trams, enjoyed the salt air by the riverside and marvelled at the renovated suspension bridge, a lucid mathematical argument sketched from shore to shore, like a theorem in chrome. They laughed at the
seagulls and Chiku told them how she had met Pedro buying ice cream at Belém. In the evenings, they enjoyed wine on her balcony and dined in neighbourhood restaurants. They met Nicolas for lunch in a rambling quarter of the Chiado district.

‘It’s a good place, this,’ Sunday said one evening, perhaps meaning Lisbon, or Europe, maybe even Earth in general. ‘It suits you well. I’m not surprised we’ve had such a hard time tearing you away.’

That was as deep as the conversation went. Sunday alluded to the time she had spent lost inside her mind, but never spoke of it directly. She appeared to regard the whole thing as an isolated episode, a regrettable lapse they could all agree to forget. But it had swallowed years of her life and exacted a draining toll on Jitendra. Chiku tried not to be cross with her mother for making so little of it. Perhaps Jitendra was happier that way, too, colluding in a lie they could both live with.

One squally afternoon, stuck for anything better to do, they visited an art gallery. Jitendra’s exo had developed an intermittent fault that caused it to whine, drawing annoyed glances from the other patrons. In the end, unable to stop giggling, the three of them had to leave the museum. But the paintings had stirred something in Sunday. On the way back to Chiku’s apartment, they bought some cheap student-quality paints, brushes and paper. The next day, Sunday composed two narrow, slot-like pictures of the view from the balcony, executed in poster-bright yellows and blues. It was an effort just to hold the brush steadily, the exo jerking her wrist like a clumsy instructor, but she battled on undaunted.

‘I can’t remember the last time I even thought about art,’ she said. ‘It used to be my life, what I lived for. Not that I was ever any
good,
but . . .’

True to her nature, Sunday was dissatisfied with the pictures, but Jitendra could hardly contain his delight that she had picked up a brush again after all that time. They decided that Chiku should keep one of the paintings and that the other would return with them to the Moon. Sunday attempted another painting the following day, but the moment had passed, and this second piece remained uncompleted. But for all her self-deprecation and discontent, even Sunday seemed quietly pleased that she had taken up her art again, even if it was only for a day.

The rest of their stay passed pleasantly enough until the final week, when Sunday caught some local infection, developed a mild fever and began feeling too unwell to do much tourism. Chiku thought nothing of it – Sunday began to rally over the last few days before their departure – but the infection turned out to have taken a dogged hold. Back on the Moon, her health continued to deteriorate over the following
weeks. Doctors were called in, options discussed, but there were no easy solutions. Her ancient immune system had fought too many battles, and some of the rejuvenation treatments she had undergone earlier in her life were revealing unintended side-effects many decades later, constraining the range of possible prolongation interventions. She could not be dismantled and remade, as Chiku had in the triplication process. In any case, neither Sunday nor Jitendra had the energy for a drawn-out campaign. She had lived a good and long life, seen and done many things. She would have more of it, gladly, but not at any cost.

Inexorably, the infection worsened, and like an obliging host it quietly opened doors for other illnesses. Sunday Akinya slipped deeper into infirmity, then coma, and finally death. She died peacefully on the Moon, with her husband at her side, in December 2380. She was a quarter of a thousand years old. Her daughter, Chiku, was there in proxy.

Of course there was a funeral. Chiku hoped it might be on Earth, but various legal and financial factors conspired to determine that she had to be interred on the Moon. A date was settled, and friends and Akinyas began making plans to show their faces.

At first, Chiku decided not to attend in person – it was much too dangerous. She would ching as she had when Sunday was ill. But as the date of the funeral drew closer, something in her snapped. She could not –
would
not – live like this for ever. Venturing beyond Lisbon entailed risk, but she resolved to accept it – embrace it, even. Let Arachne do with her as she wished, provided no one else got caught up in it.

So she went to the Moon, and attended the funeral, and though her heart was full of sadness and remorse for not keeping in better contact with Jitendra and her mother, she was glad to be there in person. Jitendra was also very pleased that she had finally made the visit, and wise enough not to ask what had prompted her last-minute change of heart.

The funeral came and went, but Arachne never made her presence felt. On Chiku’s last full day, when she finally had some time to herself, she decided to put Arachne to the test. She rented a surface suit and rover and took them as far from civilisation as she could in the allotted time. It was no easy thing, finding a corner of the Moon not yet encompassed by cities and parks, but she did her best to deliberately put herself in a position of vulnerability, inviting Arachne to intervene. ‘Come and get me, then,’ she said to the sky. ‘You’re creative. I’ve seen what you can do – on Venus, in Africa. Either end this now, or get out of my life.’

She wondered how it might happen. But given that Arachne was everywhere, a part of her threaded through every complex, interconnected
system devised by humanity, the possibilities were endless. Her suit could malfunction, as could its supposedly fail-safe back-up systems. Some robot cargo drone, skimming low around the Moon for gravitational assistance, might dip a fraction too close to the surface and wipe her out in a soundless flash. Some belligerent, dumb mining machine, buried under Lunar top-soil for centuries, could stir into life and drag her down in its chewing blades. Her rover might develop a will of its own and run her down.

None of this would occur unwitnessed, for there were machine eyes everywhere, sprinkled like glitter. But Arachne also controlled the feeds from those massively distributed surveillance devices, and Chiku’s death could easily go unrecorded, unmemorialised.

But nothing happened.

She returned to the surface lock feeling oddly betrayed, like some millennial cultist crushed that the world had opted not to end. When the lock was almost in sight, she did something exceedingly rash, a final acid test – she attempted to break the seal on her helmet and release the locking mechanism. If Arachne was hovering, waiting for her moment, one simple command would do it. But the suit’s safeguards remained inviolable, and Chiku was unable to kill herself.

‘I made it easy for you,’ she said, as if something out there was still listening.

After that, she had no idea what do with herself. She felt no sense of liberation, because the absence of an intervention from Arachne did not in and of itself prove that the artilect had moved on, or lost interest in her, or not existed in the first place. The Moon might not have been a suitable killing ground. Perhaps Arachne had made splendidly elaborate plans to murder her somewhere else. Whatever the case, though, she could not imagine returning to Lisbon under the old conditions, locking the city around herself like a prison cell. There had been comfort in that, she was forced to admit. It was daunting to think that she might not have to be a prisoner now. The corollary – that she might not have needed to spend fifteen years in the same city – was almost too much to consider.

In truth, she felt just as paralysed as before. Her actions on the Moon had only reinforced her fears. Her routines crumbled, and she ceased work on the family history. Gradually, she confined herself to narrower and narrower orbits of the city – first to a single district, then an evertightening locus of streets. Eventually she could barely persuade herself to leave her apartment. Her worries chased each other along spiralling pathways. Perhaps she had not taunted Arachne enough – should she
return to the Moon and try again? Would that set her free or just deepen her uncertainties?

She did not care for this state of being, but she was trapped inside her fears. Her thoughts rattled along on tramlines, travelling the same pointless circuits over and over. A year passed, then five.

And then one day the merman came to her again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

‘I’m sorry we have not been a great deal of help to you,’ Mecufi said, standing there in the hallway in his mobility exo, still reeking of the Atlantic, as if a little bit of it had come with him. ‘For both our sakes, it seemed wise to limit contact to the absolute essentials.’

‘Why are you here?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure yet. It came to my attention that a certain . . . purpose-lessness has entered your life. But then, what business of mine is that?’

‘Exactly,’ she said, about to turn him away before he stank up the place.

‘I’m told that you don’t get out very much, but I wonder if you’d risk a visit to the seasteads?’

‘I’ve already seen your cities.’

‘Indeed,’ he nodded, blubbery flesh creasing under his chin. ‘Nevertheless, there’s something you definitely haven’t seen, not in a great while, and I think you should.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘She’s come back to us,’ Mecufi said. ‘I never thought it would happen, but it has, and you should be there for her. She’s you, after all.’

In the morning, Chiku boarded a sleek, translucent boat at the quayside near the Avenida da India, not far from Belém. Open-topped at first, as the boat gathered speed it drew fluted swanlike wings about itself, enclosing a cockpit. As soon as the cockpit became watertight, the now-watertight submersible dipped beneath the waves. They harpooned through the ocean for hours. Chiku did not bother tracking her whereabouts – if they meant to return her home, they would.

‘Why now,’ she said, ‘after all this time?’

‘It’s only been twenty years,’ Mecufi replied, as if they were speaking of weeks, not years.

Chiku had lost track of time herself, she reflected. Fifteen years until she had the courage to speak to Nicolas, and then five listless years since
that evening. Five years during which her life had almost restarted, then fallen into a deeper stasis than before.

Perhaps it was not such a long time after all.

‘You should have told me what you were up to,’ Chiku said.

‘We saw no reason to raise false hopes,’ Mecufi replied. ‘After that first intervention, we were doubtful anything more could be done.’

‘I should have been informed.’

‘If you had been, would you have given consent?’

‘If I’d told you she’d been through enough, would you have listened?’

‘And that’s why we didn’t ask for your permission.’

Chiku was staring through a bottle-green porthole as bottle-green sea sped by outside. ‘You said accessing the implant would kill her.’

‘I said it would
probably
kill her. More like mining than brain surgery – wasn’t that the phrase I used? We knew there was a device in her head which could be of help to you and promised we’d do our best to extract it, but the device’s own anti-tamper safeguards necessitated a fairly . . . quick and dirty approach, for want of a better expression. Removing a bullet from a frozen brain would have been difficult – we had to remove a time bomb!’ He laced his webbed fingers together, as if concluding a sermon. ‘We gave you all the facts. The final decision was yours.’