Alastair Reynolds: On the Steel Breeze

‘That’s an excellent question – we wondered at first whether someone was playing a hoax on us. We brought the ship back here and examined it, piece by piece, performed every test we could devise and finally concluded that this is indeed Memphis, returned from deep space. It was a time-consuming process and we saw no need to rush it.’

‘How long have you had this?’

‘Not very long. A few years.’

Mecufi slipped back into the water and began to swim in the chamber’s pool. Chiku followed him, moving carefully around the ledge.

‘How many, exactly?’

‘Twelve. Since we returned her to Earth. Fifteen since we found her. Scarcely any time at all compared to the hundred and twenty-two she was out there.’

‘There’ll be hell to pay for this.’

‘I very much doubt it, once you’ve heard the rest. I’m afraid Chiku Red was beyond medical revival – but you always knew her voyage was a high-stakes gamble.’

Chiku studied the hanging ship, wondering if it could possibly be what Mecufi claimed. It was the right shape, and the overall design looked sufficiently antiquated. Memphis had been the best that money could buy, at the time of its departure – equipped with the highest-rated engine, the most modern and efficient steering, navigation and life-support systems. But all of it stripped down to the ruthless essentials, until the ship was all lean muscle and nervous system, not a surplus molecule anywhere on the thing. The life-support module was tiny, like a vestigial organ, while the engine and fuel tank assembly was hypertrophied, swollen to ugly disproportion.

It was damaged, too. Bits of the ship had been shot or blown away. There were fist-sized holes all over it. Scorch marks and buckling. It had taken a beating, and not just from the usual rigours of spaceflight.

‘What about my great-grandmother?’

‘No trace of her. I’ll prepare a mote if you’d find that more convincing than my words.’

‘How could there be no trace?’

‘We found two caskets aboard Memphis – one for Chiku Red, the other presumably to bring Eunice home if Chiku found her. But when we recovered the ship, the second casket had never been used.’

Chiku’s mind reeled again. First her sister’s ship, now the news that her great-grandmother had vanished from the vessel Chiku Red had been sent to find.

‘Then where is she?’

‘No idea. From the damage the ship’s sustained, we’re fairly sure that Memphis made it to the vicinity of Winter Queen – those holes and scorch marks suggest anti-collision defences set at too twitchy a threshold. Beyond that, it’s guesswork. Comms systems were damaged and there were no backup systems or spare parts aboard – when the attack took out her antenna, she had no way of replacing it.’

‘You don’t know for sure that Memphis ever docked with Winter Queen. Maybe it backed off as soon as the attack started and she never got to look inside.’

‘That’s one possibility, of course,’ Mecufi said, ‘but it wouldn’t be very Akinya of her, would it – to come so far, and not go the last mile? I mean, be honest with yourself.’

‘I don’t know what to think beyond your outrageous interference with Akinya affairs. And what does any of this have to do with the reason you dragged me here in the first place? The ghost was sent by Chiku Green, not Chiku Red.’

‘In my experience,’ Mecufi said, ‘most things turn out to be connected in the end.’

Not far from the ship was a white-walled, brightly lit and aggressively sterile chamber that made Chiku think of operating theatres and morgues. A handful of exo-clad aquatic technicians were on duty at a bank of upright consoles surrounding a hibernation casket like a ring of standing stones. The angular coffin was an early twenty-third-century design, raised on a plinth and plumbed via a gristle of tubes and cables into a temporary support chassis. On the slanted faces of the consoles were physical screens and arrays of old-fashioned tactile controls, grouped like an accordion’s buttons. Merfolk were like babies in that they liked pushing and pressing things.

Chiku watched graphs and images flit across the screens, accompanied by webs of analysis. Temperature profiles, chemical gradients, neural cross-sections, zoom-ins of detailed brain anatomy, down to the synapse level.

Visible through the smoked glass lid of the casket was a sleeping form.

She bore a face Chiku knew as well as her own.

‘You told me she was dead.’

‘I told you she couldn’t be revived,’ Mecufi answered carefully. ‘Not quite the same thing. The casket kept her in this state all the way home. She’s on the edge of life or the edge of death, depending on your proclivities.’

‘Why haven’t you woken her?’

‘She’s too fragile. These neural scans… they’re only at the resolution allowed by the casket’s own instruments, most of which are broken. We can’t get any closer to her head without risking irreversible damage.’

‘Then open the casket. Get into her head with nano. Readers and scriptors. Stabilise the structure and revive. This is child’s play, Mecufi. Machines have already taken my head apart – it’s how we became three.’

‘Under controlled conditions, with an undamaged mind as the starting point. That’s not the case here. She’s an ice sculpture, Chiku – the slightest intervention would be like blasting her with a blowtorch.’

‘She belongs to me – she is me. I want her back. I want custody of myself.’

‘Of course she’s yours, always has been. You can preserve her like this for ever, if your luck holds out. Or hers. Or you can risk bringing her back to life, when you feel confident enough.’

‘That’ll be for the family to decide. You’ve taken this way too far, you know – keeping her here like this, all this time, without telling any of us… that’s got to be a crime under someone’s legislation.’

‘So ask yourself why we’d tell you about her now, if doing so risks putting ourselves in legal difficulty. There has to be a reason.’

‘Now would be a very good time to give me one.’

‘There’s a device in her head, an implant inserted by Quorum Binding that governs the readers and scriptors. It’s identical to the one in your head, except the numeric key in hers is still intact. She hasn’t chosen to forget it.’

Slowly, a shivery sort of understanding prickled over Chiku.

‘Her key would have been the same as mine.’

‘My point exactly. The ghost is a message from Chiku Green, but you can’t talk to her. Chiku Red could – but she’s frozen. Intervention might well kill her… but if we were able to open her up and extract the implant, and do so quickly, we would stand a good chance of recovering its numeric key. Then we could transfer it to your implant and you could address the ghost from Chiku Green. It must have something very important to tell you – don’t you want to know what that is?’

Chiku returned her attention to the sleeping form. ‘At her expense.’

‘She’s not alive. You wouldn’t be taking anything from her.’

‘Except the possibility of ever living again.’

‘She had a life. No one forced her to risk it.’

Chiku narrowed her eyes. ‘Wait – you said “do so quickly”. Why? Why does it have to be done in a rush?’

‘The implants – hers, yours – they were installed with anti-tamper measures. If the implants think they’re being extracted or interfered with, the codes will be deleted. We think we understand the protocols well enough to get in and out in time – but you need to understand that this won’t be much like brain surgery. It’ll be closer to mining.’