On the Steel Breeze (67 page)

‘I guess they did the best they could under the circumstances,’ Chiku said as Ndege’s figment entered the house.

‘Do you want to go in on your own?’ asked Namboze.

After a moment’s deliberation, Chiku said: ‘No. This concerns us all.’

But she led the way inside.

Ndege and Mposi were waiting for their visitors, sitting elbow to elbow on the other side of her kitchen table. A lamp offered a measure of illumination, enough to render their faces recognisably those of her children. It was less of a shock to see Mposi, of course, for she had already encountered this adult version of her son. He was a little older again, now. Layers of muscle had moved around in his face, hardening
his features. Fanning out from his eyes were faint lines that she did not recall from the earlier transmissions – not exactly wrinkles, but the foundation marks where wrinkles would take hold, as if his face was the preliminary blueprint for an older version of the same man. She could see Noah in her son more clearly than ever before. She was surprised to note a prominence to the brow that called to mind her father Jitendra, and something in the shape of the folds of skin between his mouth and nose made her think of Sunday, as she lay dreaming of mathematics, and that in turn reminded her of Eunice Akinya.

Ndege had aged no more than Mposi had, of course, but for some reason this woman looked so much older than Chiku’s last clear memory of her daughter. Ndege was taller and leaner than her brother, as long in the neck as one of Sunday’s old statues. She was, Chiku decided, both extraordinarily beautiful and more than a little terrifying to behold. Perhaps the fierce dismissiveness of her first utterance was colouring every subsequent impression. She saw Sunday more than Jitendra in her daughter, Jonathan Beza more than Eunice. But Eunice was there as well, in the shape of her eyes, the imperious ridges of her cheekbones, the half-smile, somewhere between derision and admiration, that appeared to be her mouth’s default expression.

‘What do you want?’ Ndege asked.

‘You sent these ching instructions to
Icebreaker
,’ Chiku ventured. ‘We’re in it now.’

‘We’ve seen the destruction,’ Mposi said. ‘The weapons raining onto Crucible. This is a very bad development. There was no guarantee that you’d be alive to read our transmission, but we felt that the risk of sending it was justified. If you
are
still alive, you need to know what’s been going on here.’

‘The other holoships received your transmissions,’ Ndege said, her voice level and cool. ‘Your reports on Crucible as you made your approach, and your data regarding the alien structures in orbit around the planet. By then, of course, the holoships were close enough to our destination to begin verifying some of your observations, and that information fostered internal tensions beyond anything the regular constabulary could contain. The information about Crucible and the fact that the Providers cannot be trusted is on its way back to Earth! God alone knows what it’ll do when it arrives. It’s been bad enough in the caravan: widespread dissent, arrests and executions, attempted coups and civilian take-overs.’

‘There was a big fight for control of the slowdown technology,’ Mposi said, ‘both to use it and to suppress it. A rush to duplicate your prototype
and scale it up; an equal rush to sabotage those efforts or bend the new technology into devastating weaponry. As the public unrest intensified, so the authorities tightened their noose around
Zanzibar
. These were extremely dangerous times – very difficult for Ndege and me, because of our connection to you and Noah. But after father’s death, things only got worse. Those of us who had some inkling of what your expedition was about – yes, Father did confide in us, as much as he was able, before . . . Well, we knew there could be no easy arrival around Crucible. But none of us was ready to give up on Crucible, this amazing new world we’d been promised! We couldn’t allow Teslenko’s agenda to prevail. Equally, we had no desire to move to a war footing, readying for a military engagement with the Providers, a battle for control of Crucible. There had to be a third way. And so we called on Eunice.’

‘She would’ve emerged sooner or later,’ Ndege said, taking over from her brother, ‘but these events were the spur she’d been waiting for. It was a moment of maximum crisis – public fear of machines had never been greater!’

‘I’m surprised they didn’t tear her limb from limb,’ Travertine said.

Guochang and the others were by now at least partially aware of Eunice’s origin and capabilities. But there was much that Chiku had not yet had the time or inclination to reveal to her fellow hostages.

‘How did she get out of the chamber?’ Namboze asked. ‘The same way you came in, presumably?’

‘No,’ Chiku said. ‘Not unless she had earth-moving equipment. That route was blocked off when they repaired Kappa – they sealed it up thinking it was just some abandoned service duct.’

‘She’s a robot,’ Dr Aziba said. ‘Did she even need to physically leave? Couldn’t she simply gain control of another machine somewhere else on the ship, as one might ching into a proxy?’

‘I suppose she could,’ Chiku said, ‘but there were never many machines like that in
Zanzibar
, and anyway, she’s something special. She . . . inhabited her robotic form as comfortably as if it was her own skin. I think being in that body, being strong and vulnerable in equal measure, had defined her personality, how she thought of herself – a contained being, a soul in a bottle, like one of us.’

‘Like one of you, you mean,’ Arachne said patiently.

‘She used to be like you,’ Chiku said, ‘ghosting around the solar system, not tied to any single physical location, a bodiless intelligence running on ambient processing resources. That was how Sunday designed her – an idea of Eunice, not a walking, talking emulation. But you forced her to become smaller, more real – you gave your enemy
flesh! When you made her run, you turned her into what she is now. She crashed an aircraft once, just because she felt reckless! I doubt she’d have wanted to leave her body even if it was an option.’

‘It’s moot, anyway,’ Mposi said. ‘There was another way out of the chamber – the pod line has branches running to multiple exit points.’

‘She told me that,’ Chiku said, remembering, ‘but she never said where they came out.’

‘We shall show you one of them,’ Ndege said. ‘You will find it surprising, I think.’

So they went out into the night again, into the oven-warm air of this overcooked world, and made their way to the transit terminal where they boarded a pod, eight of them between two compartments. Speeding through cores and connecting tunnels, the pod passed through many iterations of darkness. Occasionally distant lights were visible, defining huddles and hamlets of buildings, sometimes a larger community, but never the blue blaze of day or the splendour of a simulated starscape.

Chiku’s head bubbled with questions, but she decided to allow Ndege and Mposi to parcel out the answers as they saw fit. She would save any unanswered questions until she had some sense of what had happened during the unrecorded years since Ndege’s last communication.

‘Eunice didn’t need to reveal her true nature as a construct,’ Ndege said as they tunnelled through the darkness. ‘She simply appeared and declared that she was Eunice Akinya. We’d all seen the statue of her, before they pulled it down, so she was instantly recognisable to a lot of people.’

‘And those who knew their history remembered the tale of
Winter Queen
, of course.’ Mposi said. ‘They knew she’d never returned to Earth, so it was at least conceivable that she might be the real woman, somehow stowed away on
Zanzibar
all these years. After all, they had the evidence of their senses – she looked totally real, totally plausible. She claimed to be Eunice Akinya, risen to save us – and she’d become very good at being human.’

‘I know,’ Chiku said.

‘I saw her breathe on a mirror once,’ Ndege added. ‘She could even do that.’

‘We have an attachment to myths,’ Mposi said, ‘of sleeping kings, and sleeping queens, slumbering until the moment of need, when they are summoned to save the living. The queen we needed was Senge Dongma, the lion-faced messiah. Mother of us all.’

The pod was slowing, and Chiku concluded from what little she could see outside that they were arriving in the administrative core. She remembered the last time she was in this space, on the day of
Icebreaker
’s departure – rushing through her resignation as her plans collapsed around her. In some ways it felt like yesterday, just another part of her personal life, but in other respects it felt like a documented historical event that belonged in someone else’s political history. This couldn’t be the same holoship she had left.

‘Why is it so warm, and so dark?’ Namboze asked.

‘During the troubles,’ Ndege said, ‘we broke from the local caravan. That was after Eunice’s appearance – she said we’d be much better off travelling independently.’

‘I guess she was right,’ Chiku replied.

‘We survived,’ Mposi said, ‘but it’s not been easy. You might have seen the explosions – we lost two holoships,
Bazaruto
and
Fogo
, and
New Tiamaat
was fatally damaged. We still don’t know how much of that was due to accident, stupidity or deliberate military action. Perhaps a little of each. It was good that we’d already broken away by the time that happened, but we weren’t remotely ready for total independence.
Zanzibar
never had a strong industrial capability – we always relied on the rest of the caravan for imported technologies. Building
Icebreaker
stretched our capabilities to the limit, and at that time we were still able to call on external assistance.’

Chiku knew from memory that they were walking down the paths leading from the transit terminal to the flat ground fronting the administration building, but could see almost nothing of her surroundings. The building itself appeared to be totally unlit, defined only as a wedge of darkness lodged in the slightly paler margin of its grounds.

‘Many of our technical systems have already failed or are close to collapse,’ Ndege said. ‘We’ve done our best, but our capacity to repair and renew is very limited, and we’re hampered by the additional constraint of having to work covertly.’

‘The rest of the holoships – certainly the local caravan – consider us dead or dying,’ Mposi said. He was walking alongside his sister, who was easily a head taller than her stocky, broad-shouldered brother. ‘It was touch and go for a while. There was contagion, possibly deliberately introduced, and the sabotage or accidental breach of two community cores – thousands of people died. We also created the illusion of more widespread systems failures to discourage our enemies from taking any further interest in us. All operations beyond
Zanzibar
’s skin were suspended and we allowed our external structures to fall dark. Total
communications silence, of course. We run our world on a trickle of energy, using just enough to get by, which is why the skies are dark and the thermal regulation’s barely effective. If we used more, they’d detect it. They might simply not care about
Zanzibar
any more, but we can’t afford to risk attracting their attention.’

‘Besides,’ Ndege said, ‘it’s not always dark. If it were, we’d all have gone mad years ago.’

‘Tell me what happened to Eunice,’ Chiku said.

Her daughter swept a hand towards the wedge of darkness. ‘She made her first appearance from beneath the administrative building – there was a shaft leading right up to the basement level that no one ever knew was there! It was well concealed, of course, with false walls that only she could open from her side. So she emerged in the heart of government itself!’

Mposi said, ‘By the time she appeared, a number of Father’s friends and allies had prepared the ground for a coup against the occupying constabulary. Sou-Chun was involved, too – she still had political connections even after years of house arrest. We were ready for Eunice, and we timed our strike to coincide with her appearance. We didn’t need her superhuman speed and strength to prevail – her face, her bearing, her aura of authority paralysed our enemies when they saw this relic of the past walking around – and we quickly gained control of the administrative building. Eunice had already reached much further than that. She could push her face wherever she wanted, reach any data system or archive in the holoship, and there was nothing the constables could do.’

‘That was how she destroyed Sou-Chun’s career,’ Chiku said.

‘Sou-Chun was never totally innocent,’ Ndege said. ‘She made political mistakes. But her downfall was the best thing that happened to her – it kept her out of Teslenko’s machinations. She never spoke badly of you.’

‘What happened to Sou-Chun?’

‘The coup took many of us,’ Mposi said.

Chiku walked in silence for a few more steps, thinking of her friend and the damage done to their relationship by events beyond their control. She wanted to thank Sou-Chun for taking care of her children in spite of everything that had happened between them.

‘The coup was a success, though,’ Chiku said. ‘You gained control and moved
Zanzibar
to safety.’

‘If you can call this safe,’ Ndege answered. ‘We were fighting for the right to arrive at Crucible under our own terms, but we lost everything.
Our enemies stole our technology.
Zanzibar
can’t be slowed! Inside, we grub around in darkness. Soon we’ll be travelling away from Crucible, not towards it! Some people argue that things would’ve been no worse if we’d sided with Teslenko and committed our holoship to continued interstellar flight.’

‘Not a view you share, I hope,’ Chiku said to her daughter. ‘You had dreams, Ndege. You spent so many hours with your head buried in the companion, imagining what we’d find on Crucible. You mustn’t lose sight of that. I’ve been there – all of us have. It’s a real world, ours for the sharing, if we can find a way.’

‘You still haven’t told us what happened to Eunice, after the occupation of the government building,’ said Namboze.