Alastair Reynolds: On the Steel Breeze

‘Leave me alone.’

The doors opened. Chiku shuffled out alongside the tourists and headed straight to the café, taking her usual seat near the window. She watched seagulls raucously, recklessly helter-skeltering on the updraught of a thermal. The clouds had begun to break, sunlight splintering off the tumble of wet red rooftops that ferried the eye down to the platinum ribbon of the Tagus.

She ordered coffee. She had been considering a pastry, but the ghost and the strange conversation in the elevator had taken the edge off her appetite. She wondered if she was starting to dislike Lisbon.

She had brought her book with her. It was an old looking thing, cased in marbled covers. Inside were pages and pages of handwritten text. Her letters all sloped to the right like windblown trees. Chiku saw an omission on one page and touched the nib of her fountain pen to the vellum. The inked words budged up, forming a space in which she could insert the missing word. Elsewhere she struck through two superflous lines and the text on either side of the deleted passage married itself together.

Feeling eyes on her, she glanced up.

The merfolk had entered the café, forcing the proprietor to move tables and chairs to accommodate their exos. They were sitting in a loose triangle around a small, low circular table, a big pot of tea steaming between them.

One of the merfolk met her gaze. She thought it might have been the one who had spoken to her in the elevator. The aquatic – she thought it likely now that it was a male – held a teacup in his blubbery grey fingers and elevated it to the lipless gash of his mouth. His eyes were unblinking black voids. From the cup the aquatic sipped a watery preparation. He lowered the cup to the table then employed the back of his hand to wipe a green smear from his mouth. His skin had the gleam of wet pebbles. On land they were forever rubbing oils and perfumes into themselves.

The aquatic’s eyes never left hers.

Fed up, Chiku voked payment and prepared to leave. The ghost had ruined her afternoon and now the merfolk had ruined her day. She thought about walking out without saying a word. That would have been the dignified thing.

‘I have no interest in you or your seasteads, and I don’t care a damn about your stupid plans for colonising the universe. And you don’t know me or my family.’

‘Are you certain of that fact?’ Definitely the one who had spoken to her before. ‘Truth be told, you’ve been taking a definite interest in us – the United Aquatic Nations, the Panspermian Initiative. That makes us take an interest in you. Whether you like it or not.’

Beyond the merfolk, through another window, the suspension bridge glittered like a piece of brand-new jewellery. A silver spitball of reconstructive machinery had been inching its way along the ancient structure for weeks, digesting and renewing metal parts that were nearly as old as Santa Justa herself. Supervising this delicate work, towering over the bridge on their preposterous stilt-legs, were a pair of mantis-like Providers.

‘Whether I like it or not? Who the hell do you think you are?’

‘I am Mecufi. You have been probing our public and private history – why are you taking such an interest in the past?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘This is the Surveilled World,’ Mecufi said sternly, the way one might explain some exceedingly simple thing to a child. ‘Everything is everyone’s business in the Surveilled World. That’s the point.’

Tourists strode the distant castle battlements. Along the banks of the Tagus, cyberclippers made landfall after transatlantic crossings, elegant sleek sails ruffling in a stiff river breeze. Dirigibles and airpods slid under clouds, colourful as balloons.

‘What would you know about the Surveilled World? You’re not even part of it.’

‘Its influence extends into our realm more than we’d wish. And we’re good at detecting data searches, especially when they happen to concern us.’

The odd exchange was beginning to draw the interest of the café’s other customers. Chiku’s skin crawled at the attention. She liked it here. She enjoyed the anonymity.

‘I’m a historian. That’s all.’

‘Writing a private history of the Akinya clan? Eunice Akinya and all that stuff? Geoffrey and the elephants? The dusty goings-on of two hundred years ago? Is that what’s in this book of yours?’

‘Like I said, it’s none of your business either way.’

‘Well, that’s a ringing denial.’

The other two made froglike chuckling sounds.

‘This is harassment,’ Chiku said. ‘As a free citizen, I’m entitled to make any enquiries I wish. If you’ve got a problem with that, take it up with the Mechanism.’

Mecufi held up a placating hand. ‘We might be in a position to help you. But we’ll need some – shall we say reciprocity?’

‘What do I need your help with?’

‘The ghost, for a start – we can definitely help you with that. But we need something from you first.’ Mecufi reached into a pouch in his exo and drew out a slim wooden box, the kind that might have held a collection of pencils or drawing compasses. Mecufi worked a little catch and slid out an interior compartment. It contained a dozen felt-lined partitions, in each of which nestled a coloured marble about the size of a glass eye. His hand dithered over the marbles. They were a variety of pale colours, glittering and swirling, save for one at the back, which was either a very dark purple or a pure black.

He settled on a sphere of fire-flecked amber. He held it between his fingers, closed his eyes. It took him a few seconds to achieve a clean formulation, and to make the necessary assignment.

‘Take my mote,’ Mecufi said.

‘I don’t—’ Chiku began.

‘Take my mote.’ Mecufi pushed the amber marble into her palm and made her fingers close around the marble. ‘If it convinces you of my basic good intentions, be at the Monument to the Discoveries no later than ten o’ clock tomorrow morning. Then we shall visit the Atlantic seasteads. Only a small adventure – you’ll be back in time for tea.’

Pedro Braga was humming quietly to himself as he cleaned brushes. His studio reeked of varnishes and lacquers. Beneath that pungency lay the permanent tang of wood shavings, sawdust, expensive traditional resins.

‘Something odd happened to me today,’ Chiku said.

‘Odd in what way?’

‘To do with the ghost. Only odder than that. I met a merman. Named Mecufi.’

Guitars, in various states of assembly, hung from the ceiling’s bare rafters by their necks. Some were only embryonic outlines, bounded in crotchet-like curves. Others were nearly done save for stringing or the final touches of decorative work. It was complicated, baffling work, but the guitars sold well. In a world in which assemblers and Providers could furnish almost any artefact at almost no cost, there was a premium in imperfection.

‘I didn’t think you wanted anything to do with them.’

‘I didn’t. Mecufi made the contact, not me – in the elevator, on the way to the café. There were three of them. They knew who I was. They also knew about the ghost.’

‘That is weird.’ Pedro had finished cleaning his brushes, leaving them to dry in a wooden frame. ‘Can they do something about it?’

‘I don’t know. They want me to go to the seasteads.’

‘Lucky you. There are millions who’d kill for an invitation.’

‘Good for them. I don’t happen to feel that way.’

Pedro opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses. They kissed briefly, took the glasses out onto the balcony and sat either side of a gently rusting table flaky with white paint. They could not see the sea unless they leaned out at the very end of the balcony, where it offered itself up coyly for inspection in the gap between two nearby tenements. At night, when the glow from windows and street lamps buttered the city yellow, Chiku never missed the sight of the sea.