Alastair Reynolds: On the Steel Breeze

Ndege cast a sceptical glance at the array of towers. ‘Is that the city?’

‘It’s a start,’ Chiku said. ‘You’ll just have to make the best of it for now.’

‘You mean “we”,’ Mposi said. ‘We’re all in this together, aren’t we?’

Chiku smiled through her breather mask. ‘Of course.’

Four other people had accompanied them from Zanzibar, and Chiku greeted and hugged these courageous newcomers as they emerged from the shuttle. It was brave, what they had done: crossing space on such long odds. Brave what they had all done, truthfully. Feeling a surge of pride, she watched as they followed her children down the ramp to the waiting reception area. A gust of air, warm as a furnace, slapped the bare skin around the sides of her mask.

The shuttle contained only two more passengers, and the first of these was waiting just inside the door. Like Arachne, she had no need of a mask, but her clothing, all pockets and pouches, did at least suggest someone preparing to test her wits against nature. She had not aged by a nanosecond since their last encounter.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Chiku said.

‘You know me – one little holoship was never going to be enough to keep me entertained. Especially when they took my Tantors away.’

‘You mean, when you allowed them to be released into Zanzibar, out of your immediate control. When you were finally forced to share your secret with other people. Did it make you jealous, not being their keeper any more?’

‘I was never their keeper, and anyway, what was there to be jealous about?’

‘Actually,’ Chiku said, ‘jealousy would mean you’d added another human tic to your repertoire.’

‘And we’re off to such a good start. For the record, though, I’m pleased that the Tantors have broken out of my control. That’s what I always wanted. And you’ve seen them, haven’t you? We owe them just about everything, Chiku. We may have saved the elephants, but the Tantors saved Zanzibar.’

‘I hope they’ll be able to live here.’

‘They’re adaptable. They’ll find a way, with or without our assistance.’

‘Whatever they become, I hope we can be part of it. Eunice, I have to ask you something. You offered yourself up to the people of Zanzibar. Ndege and Mposi told me how it happened. You must’ve known there was a chance they’d tear you limb from limb.’

‘Sooner or later they’d have found out about me. I’m good, but I’m not that good.’

‘Still, the risk you took… were you ready to die? Or whatever you want to call it?’

‘I think dying will serve very nicely. And no, I wasn’t ready. Not remotely. But when are we ever ready, Chiku? When do we ever feel that we’ve completed our plans? I had work to be getting on with. I’ve always had work to be getting on with. It’s what the universe was put there for: to give me things to do.’ The construct narrowed an eye. ‘Is there a point to this interrogation?’

‘You’re here. You’ve put yourself on the line again.’

‘This time there’s no mob.’

‘But there’s Arachne, and the Watchkeepers.’

‘She’s very interested in me, isn’t she? I’d almost be flattered if we didn’t have the history we do.’

‘A version of her tried to kill you once. I think she fears what you’re capable of now. At the same time, she’s fascinated to see what you’ve become. She knows about the neural patterns you incorporated into yourself.’

‘Been talking about me behind my back again, have you?’

‘We needed leverage,’ Chiku said. ‘I felt that my knowledge about you might extend my usefulness to Arachne, and thereby help the five of us being held hostage. Or four, after Guochang died. There was another motivation, too. The Watchkeepers say that organic and machine intelligences can’t coexist: that the organic will always attempt to destroy the machines. But you’re proof that it doesn’t have to be that way. You revealed your nature to the citizens of Zanzibar and they didn’t rip you apart. That has to count for something, doesn’t it? And then there are the Tantors. You worked to help a living intelligence become something more than it was. A machine showed kindness to animals, and the people showed forgiveness to a machine. This is proof that we don’t have to fall into the same old patterns of behaviour. We have a chance to prove the Watchkeepers wrong, and finally convince Arachne that we can all share this planet: people, Providers, Tantors. This is the only way forward.’

‘We have a few bridges to cross before we get there. I’m also sensing a complicating factor that you still haven’t mentioned.’

‘You coming here has probably saved us. It gave Arachne a reason to keep talking and the Watchkeepers a reason not to wipe us all off the face of Crucible. They were very close to doing that, I think. We’d been beneath their threshold of annoyance, and then quite suddenly we were above it. We’d become an irritation, a damaging factor. When that impactor nearly struck Mandala—’

‘They say you had an encounter with one of the Watchkeepers.’

‘Yes, Arachne and me. Machine and person. Or robot and politician, as Travertine had it. Eunice, I have almost no memory of what happened to either of us inside the Watchkeeper. I think it quite likely that I was dismantled, taken apart and examined the way Arachne dismantled our ship. I remember a blue radiance, and floating in the utmost serenity, a kind of neon womb. But then I was put back together, like a repaired watch. My identity returned to me – all my memories, my sense of self, but almost no clear knowledge of what had just happened. All I knew for sure was that there’d been a kind of negotiation, and between us, Arachne and I made a deal with the Watchkeepers.’

‘A deal,’ Eunice repeated.

‘They’ve been here for a very long time, but the important phase of their observations is now over. I suppose they’ve been marking time… waiting for some spur to push them on. Well, turns out we’re that spur. We’ve arrived – Provider and human. And they’ve decided to allow us to begin examining Mandala. I think we represent a test case: a puzzling, possibly anomalous example of human-machine cooperation. But they’re prepared to let this experiment play itself out for a little while. Say, a few thousand years. And soon we can get on with what we came here to do in the first place – examine Mandala. And we can build our cities and harbours and start to feel like this is a home, not a destination. They won’t stop us. They won’t interfere in our daily actions on any level.’

‘You have their word on that, do you?’

‘I don’t really need it. They’ll be gone. The twenty-two will be leaving Crucible soon.’ Chiku cocked her head towards the door, out to the open sky and the reception committee at the base of the ramp. ‘They don’t know that yet. No one knows, except Arachne and me. And now you, of course. That was the deal.’

‘With deals,’ Eunice said carefully, ‘there’s generally small print.’

‘The catch is that I have to travel with the Watchkeepers. Call me an ambassador, or a hostage, or a biological sample reserved for further study. I don’t suppose it really matters. The point is I’m going somewhere, and I don’t think it can fail to be interesting.’

‘When you say “no one knows”—’

‘No one, not even Ndege and Mposi. I’ll tell them, of course. But not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow. There’s no immediate rush. I have days, yet, possibly weeks or months. When the time comes, one of the Watchkeepers will penetrate the atmosphere again. There’s no point hiding – they always know where I am. I could drown myself in the sea and I suspect they’d still find me.’