Alastair Reynolds - On the Steel Breeze

‘We should get moving,’ Travertine said. But even as ve spoke, ve dropped the backpack. ‘Something’s not right, is it? What is it you know, Chiku?’

‘We need to talk.’

‘Fine, but let’s not make it a long conversation.’

‘I don’t want it to be, but we still need to talk. I think it’s important. Can we sit down for a minute?’

Reluctantly at first, the party convened some of the packing cases into a quartet of makeshift stools.

‘How did you get here?’ Chiku asked, perching on two of the cases.

‘We weren’t here, and then we were,’ Dr Aziba said, ‘just like every other time Arachne’s moved us around.’

‘Have you seen her?’

‘No, but the intention looks pretty self-explanatory,’ Namboze said. ‘These supplies were recovered from Icebreaker …’ She stopped speaking and stared at Chiku. ‘Why are you looking like that? What’s bothering you?’

‘I don’t know, Gonithi.’

‘You could start by telling us what happened,’ Travertine said.

‘Three of the holoships are gone.’ Chiku had to swallow hard before continuing. ‘Ukerewe, Netrani and Sriharikota. She used her weapons against them. As far as I can tell, they were totally destroyed.’

The others absorbed this news with the weary resignation she had been expecting, their expressions grim, but fully accepting the truth of what she was saying. They looked at each other, nodded in mutual understanding.

‘I can’t condone it,’ Dr Aziba said finally. ‘The loss of a single life must always be regretted. But they were given a chance to act differently. After what they started doing to this planet – to us! – I’m afraid my loyalties are with Zanzibar.’

‘They were prepared to poison an entire world,’ Namboze said. ‘The punishment’s harsh, true, but if one of those rocks had landed on Mandala… that would’ve been the single most irresponsible act in the entire history of our species! They had to be stopped.’

‘Stockholm syndrome,’ Travertine said. ‘That’s what this is. We’ve been her hostages for so long, we’ve begun to sympathise with her viewpoint. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t change my opinion. Namboze and Doctor Aziba are right – the bombardment had to be stopped. If it took this appalling act to stop it, that’s still less of a crime than allowing it to continue.’

Chiku could barely look at their faces. ‘You don’t know the whole story yet. She deliberately destroyed only three of the five – she’d run her calculations and concluded that blowing up three ships would be enough to make her point.’

‘And?’ Travertine asked, leaning in to meet Chiku’s gaze.

‘She asked me which two should be saved. She said that if I didn’t give her two names, she’d make the decision herself.’

Dr Aziba said, ‘You can’t blame yourself for her actions, Chiku. She put you in an impossible position – that’s a choice no one should ever be asked to make.’

‘How was she expecting you to choose, anyway?’ Namboze asked. ‘You’re not the machine. You can’t make that sort of decision – none of us could. The holoships were our homes! We might have travelled in Zanzibar, but all of us felt affection for the other ships. Even when they started making life hard for us, we still had friends and loved ones spread across the caravan.’

‘It shows how little she really understands us,’ Dr Aziba said, shaking his head sadly.

‘No,’ Chiku said. ‘It’s you who don’t understand.’ She lifted her chin and met each of her companions’ gazes in turn. ‘She gave me the power to make that choice and I took it. I told her to spare Malabar and Majuli. I made that decision.’

‘You did what?’ Namboze asked.

‘It was the right thing to do. I didn’t want a fucking machine to decide who lived and died. If it’s a crime, let it be my crime.’

‘You had no right to make that decision,’ Namboze said.

Chiku pushed herself up from the cases. ‘I was there. You weren’t. She asked me to choose, and I chose. I couldn’t leave that decision to her, so I told her that Malabar and Majuli could live. And you know what? I’d make that choice again. There are elephants on those holoships. I put them there. They’re depending on me for their survival.’

‘Elephants,’ Dr Aziba repeated, as if he had not heard her correctly the first time.

‘Independent populations split off from Zanzibar ’s herds. Majuli took the first group, and I was negotiating for Malabar to take some more when Kappa happened…’ Her voice was on the point of breaking. ‘When all this began.’

‘Elephants,’ Dr Aziba said again. ‘Just to be clear – because I hope very much that I’m misunderstanding something here – you chose elephants over human lives? You didn’t consider saving the holoships with the largest populations, or the ones carrying the greatest quantities of the specialised technologies that we’ll need to live on this world? You based your decision on the fate of some elephants?’

‘You’ve seen the Tantors,’ Chiku said.

‘But these weren’t Tantors,’ Namboze said. ‘That’s the point, isn’t it? These were just animals.’

‘We can’t pick and choose. The Tantors came from elephants. I owed them—’

‘You owed them nothing!’ Dr Aziba said, spitting through his teeth. ‘What did she do to you, Chiku?’ And then he was up and grabbing Chiku’s forearms, hard enough that she felt his nails dig into her skin through the fabric of her clothing. ‘You should never have gone along with this! From the moment you woke me on Icebreaker and told me I’d been lied to, I made a decision to trust you, believing that you’d been forced by circumstance into making hard choices for the good of the caravan.’ Aziba shoved her, hard. Chiku lost her balance and fell backwards, legs buckling over the supply cases she had been sitting on. She thumped hard on the upper part of her back, snapping her neck and jarring the air from her lungs.

Physical violence had never been part of her world. For a moment, it was more than she could process.

‘You should have refused,’ Namboze said, looming over Chiku. ‘Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you demand our help in making the decision?’

‘Would that have made it more acceptable to you both?’ Travertine asked.

Chiku tried to push herself from the ground.

‘We should have been party to it,’ the doctor said, planting a foot squarely on Chiku’s belly to keep her on the floor. ‘We should have been consulted!’

‘And what if we all came up with different pairs of names?’ Travertine asked. ‘Would voting on it democratically have made the decision any less repugnant?’

Namboze dived aside – she was kneeling by one of the boxes, digging into it as if looking for something. Chiku tried to get up again, but Aziba increased the pressure of his foot.

‘You agree with us then, Travertine – it was repugnant.’

‘What was repugnant is that she was asked to choose – that was the crime, not the fact that she did as she was asked.’ Ue leaned over and met Chiku’s gaze again. ‘How long did she give you to think about it?’

Chiku coughed. Aziba’s foot pressing on her belly was making it difficult for her winded lungs to recover. ‘Five… five minutes. Three hundred seconds.’

‘So you didn’t have the luxury of being able to weigh all the options,’ Travertine said, ‘or consider all the ethical ramifications.’ Ve paused for a beat. ‘Doctor Aziba – would you mind taking your foot off my friend?’

‘She was our leader on Zanzibar,’ the physician said, steadfastly keeping his foot exactly where it was, ‘but she resigned. And yet, ever since our arrival in this system she’s continued to act as if she has the mandate of leadership! Perhaps some good can come out of this travesty. It gives us the chance we needed to reassess our chain of command!’