Alastair Reynolds - On the Steel Breeze

‘You are the authorities, Chiku. That’s rather the point.’ But Travertine sighed, then. ‘I am going to turn myself in – it’s not as if I’d have a hope in hell of evading justice.’

‘So why have you come here instead of going straight to the constables?’

‘There’s something we need to discuss.’

‘I’ve heard enough of your justifications over the years. You just blew a hole in the skin of the holoship.’

‘True. But you know what? It proves there’s something we don’t understand. Pemba proved it, too, but that time there was no wreckage to comb through, and no survivors to question. We had no idea what they’d been doing in there before it all went pop.’

‘The same as you – meddling.’

‘Meddling is what we do. It’s what defines us. Meddling gave us fire and tools and civilisation and the keys to the universe. Fingers will get burnt along the way, yes. That’s the way of it.’ Travertine examined vis fingers. They were strong and elaborately wrinkled around the knuckles. Unlike Chiku’s, they looked like they had done honest work.

‘Well?’ she prompted, after Travertine fell silent and appeared to be in no hurry to speak again.

‘I found something. A hint of a breakthrough, a door into Post-Chibesa physics. A glimpse of the energies we’ll need to decelerate, when we approach Crucible. I decided to investigate further with a simple experiment. In secret, of course – underneath my lab.’

‘I think you should save all this for the hearing.’

‘When you dig under something, Chiku, you often make discoveries.’

‘What the hell are you talking about, Travertine?’

‘I have some information that I think might interest you, both as a respected member of the Assembly and as someone with influence in the Council of Worlds.’

‘And exactly how long have you had this “information”?’

‘I always knew the time might come when I would need your support, so when I made my discovery, I decided not to act on it immediately.’

‘You kept it back as a bargaining chip.’

Travertine pulled a face as if ve had just sucked on something sour. ‘It sounds terribly cynical, doesn’t it? I prefer to think of it as a wise investment. I wasn’t endangering the community. Whatever I’d found had been there for years and years and done no harm. I had no reason to believe that situation would change.’

‘And what, exactly, did you discover?’

‘Well, now, that brings us right to the nub of things, doesn’t it? As I said, I’m going to turn myself in, and I have no doubt that dreadful things are going to happen to me. Even I have to acknowledge that they’ll be well within their rights to push for the death penalty.’

‘You might want to get to the point, then.’

‘I’m going to need someone on my side. I want you to state my case, put my side of the argument to the authorities – even if that makes you unpopular at committee level. There’ll be plenty of voices ready to condemn me. I need one person prepared to state that I’m not a monster. Someone who’s endured the same nightmares I have.’

Chiku shook her head slowly. ‘I’ll tell the truth – you didn’t need to bargain that out of me.’

‘But I want more than neutrality. I want you to be my advocate, when no one else will stand by me.’

‘You can’t ask that of me.’

‘I can and I will. This matters more than anything in the world, Chiku. I know you and Noah have been working very hard lately, and that you’re hoping to call in some favours – four cosy skipover slots for you and your family, a one-way ticket to the future, an escape from these problems.’

Chiku stared down her friend. All this was true, but she despised Travertine for stating it so bluntly.

‘What the committee makes of your request is their business – I can’t influence them one way or the other.’

‘Perhaps you can, perhaps you can’t. Here’s the thing, though – I absolutely must be allowed to continue my work. And if not me, then a team of people I’ll appoint and supervise. If that doesn’t happen, we’re all finished.’

‘And this… information you’ve been hoarding?’

‘When I excavated underneath my laboratory, I found tunnels in Zanzibar ’s skin that aren’t supposed to be there.’

‘I know.’

Travertine’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘That’s easy to say.’

‘I saw a shaft under one of the buildings while I was searching Kappa for survivors. It goes down deep, and it isn’t documented.’

‘Then that’s all you know?’

‘The shaft I saw was some distance from your complex. There’s no reason to assume they’re connected.’

‘They are. I explored. I’m a scientist – what else was I going to do? I mapped a network of tunnels and shafts radiating away from the entry point under my lab. Most of them were dead ends, sealed off with fused rubble or concrete. None of them show up in the official documents, but they’re obviously as old as Zanzibar itself. That means someone put them in deliberately, for a reason, and then decided not to tell anyone about it.’

‘That’s all you’ve got?’ Chiku shook her head. ‘I already knew this, Travertine. I’ll be making an official report as soon as this mess is behind us.’

‘Then the existence of these features isn’t common knowledge yet?’

‘Whether it is or not, it doesn’t give you anything to bargain with.’

‘Then a map of the tunnel system wouldn’t be of any interest to you?’

‘I can make my own map.’

‘I could save you the bother. And save you the trouble of learning something else the hard way, too. I found one tunnel that leads out of Kappa altogether. But I couldn’t explore that one.’

‘Too scared?’

‘Exploring the tunnels was a distraction, remember – I had my official work to be getting on with. Regardless, curious as I was, and even if I’d found the time, I couldn’t have explored it if I’d wanted to. Not easily. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t.’

‘What’s so special about me?’

‘You have the right name.’

‘You’ve lost me, Travertine.’

‘Then I’ll make it very simple for you. There’s a sort of… sphinxware preventing access to the deeper tunnel. My guess – and my guesses tend to be reliable – is that it’s waiting for a blood Akinya to show up. Someone of that ancient and holy lineage. Given time, I could have fooled the sphinxware, but as I said, I had other fish to fry. And I was satisfied that what I’d already learned would be useful enough, when the time came.’

‘Like now, for instance?’

‘Your family and its network of allies played a large role in the building and launching of the holoships, Chiku. Someone connected to the family decided to smuggle a secret aboard this ship.’

‘Impossible. I was alive back then, remember? I saw the holoships being assembled, I saw the first of them leaving.’

‘Then maybe you weren’t as close to the bosom of the family as you liked to think. Maybe there are dark secrets no one involved was quite willing to share with the young and feckless Chiku Akinya.’ Travertine smiled for the first time. ‘Now, shall we discuss my hearing again?’

‘I want your map,’ Chiku said.

‘Is that a promise of assistance?’

Chiku said nothing. She went to Ndege’s room and found a sheet of paper and some wax crayons. She brought them back to the table and set them down before Travertine.

Noah coughed gently as he entered the kitchen.

‘This can’t go on for much longer,’ he said.

Travertine turned to look at him. ‘You can call the constables whenever you like. Say I arrived in a state of distress and confusion. It’ll take them a little while to get here – there’ll be no suggestion that you were harbouring me.’