Alastair Reynolds: On the Steel Breeze

‘Did you ever meet him?’

‘Once or twice.’

‘In Africa?’

‘In the East African Federation. That’s where we lived, where we all came from. Near the old border between Tanzania and Kenya.’

‘My family were from a lot further south,’ Namboze said.

‘Gonithi’s a Zulu name, isn’t it?’ Chiku was hoping to change the subject. ‘It’s very beautiful.’

During their exchange, the holoship Malabar had diminished to a blue-green thumbprint, blurred at the extremities, slightly out of focus. Light spilt from the sprawl of communities and service structures wrapping the holoship’s skin from pole to pole. The great asteroid vessel bristled with a fine peach-like fuzz of docking spines and service towers. Hundreds of smaller ships were in constant attendance.

Beyond Malabar, Chiku could make out the lights of half a dozen other holoships, most so faint they could have been mistaken for planets or stars. Other members of the local caravan were too remote to see at all. Floating labels identified them all, and the larger taxis and shuttles moving from one to the other.

Chiku had no need of these embellishments. This far into the crossing, with old rivalries and alliances long since settled, the formation of the local caravan had not shifted in decades. Nothing much would change between here and Crucible.

Only Pemba was absent.

They were on the deceleration phase for Zanzibar when Namboze decided to reopen the conversation.

‘They say your uncle refused prolongation.’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘That’s quite an unusual decision, isn’t it?’

‘Geoffrey still lived a long life by any reasonable human measure,’ Chiku answered. ‘He felt that to extend his time would be excessive, a kind of greediness.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

Chiku thought, I don’t give a damn whether you understand or not.

Relenting, she said, ‘I didn’t either, at least not to begin with. Geoffrey was only born about thirty years before me, so he could have lived for hundreds of years, if he’d wanted to.’

‘Why didn’t he?’

Chiku could tell she was not going to get out of this until Namboze’s curiosity had been satisfied. ‘Geoffrey tried to explain it to me on one of our visits. If you’ve looked up his biography, you’ll know he was a scientist, an expert in animal cognition. That’s how he ended up working with the elephants. Later in life, though, he gave all that up and became an artist instead. It’s the reverse of what happened to his sister, Sunday – my mother. Geoffrey took to painting elephants instead of studying them, and Sunday became so involved in the family business that she felt she needed to understand some of the physics that had made our name – the Chibesa Principle and all that. Turned out she had a weird aptitude for it, even started coming up with this new mathematics no one had seen before. Sculpting numbers like clay. Isn’t it wonderful, that a life can contain so much?’

Namboze smiled in polite acknowledgement. ‘I suppose it is.’

‘Anyway, Geoffrey had a little studio at the household, tucked away at the back of one of the wings. He had two paintings in particular that he wanted to show me, both of elephants from a distance, with Kilimanjaro rising beyond them. One was just a canvas, all ragged and torn around the edges, the brush-marks messy. The other was one he’d done earlier; finished and framed. Uncle Geoffrey asked me which one I preferred. I said I liked the one in the frame best, although I didn’t really know why. The other one, I suppose, looked ragged and uncontained. It didn’t have a definite beginning and end. It was a thing which might never be complete.’

‘Like a life.’

‘That was Geoffrey’s point. Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre.’

‘Did you agree with him?’

‘To begin with, no.’ Chiku said.

‘And now?’

‘I suppose you could say I have a bit more perspective.’

After a while, Namboze said, ‘It must have been wonderful to see the elephants in their natural habitat. I can understand why you’re so keen to push this through. It’ll make a great deal of difference to our resource allocation if we can move some of our elephants to Malabar.’

‘It’s not just about elephants,’ Chiku said. ‘If it began and ended with them, I’d still be pleading our case for assistance. But my ancestors – people like Geoffrey – understood something important. We don’t do this for the elephants because it benefits us, or because they’ll be useful to us when we land on Crucible. It’s because we owe them. We did terrible things to their kind, over many centuries. Drove them to the edge of extinction. Butchered and mutilated them for a profit. But we can be better than we were. By taking the elephants with us into space, even if it costs us, even if it forces us to make sacrifices elsewhere, we’re showing that we can rise above what we once were.’

‘If times turn really bad,’ Namboze said, ‘do you think we’ll still put the elephants’ well-being ahead of our own?’

‘It won’t come to that,’ Chiku said, after a few moments’ reflection on the unusually direct question. ‘We’ll find a way through, no matter how hard things become. That’s what we’ve always done. Make do and mend. Muddle through. Ask for outside assistance, if we have to. We’re part of a community. That’s the point of travelling with a caravan.’

Chiku was done, drained of words, drained of responsibility. The day had finally taken its toll. She did not mind Namboze’s curiosity, but all she wanted right now was to be back in her home, with Noah and Mposi and Ndege.

Namboze seemed on the point of answering – her mouth opened fractionally, then froze. Her face brightened. It became, for an instant, a striking negative of itself. The shuttle was flooded with hard, bleaching light that attained, at its edges, a purity beyond white.

The light snapped off. Chiku blinked at after-images.

Namboze had screwed her eyes into knots. She had been facing forward, with Noah and Chiku in the reverse-facing seats.

‘Something’s happened,’ Namboze said.

Chiku could barely bring herself to turn around, to see what the young politician had witnessed directly.

Zanzibar was still there. It had not been ripped out of existence, the way Pemba had. Of course, they were too close for a Pemba event to be survivable. This had been nothing comparable, nothing of the same magnitude.

Nonetheless, something terrible had happened.

‘Hold approach,’ Noah called. ‘Assume fixed station at this distance, until I say otherwise.’

The taxi obeyed Noah, as it would have obeyed Chiku or Namboze. Seat restraints and foot stirrups tightened.

‘Holding station,’ the taxi informed Noah.

‘Are you all right, Gonithi?’ Chiku asked Namboze. ‘You caught whatever that blast was full on.’

‘I’m all right.’ She had managed to open her eyes again. ‘I think the filters dropped just before it reached full brightness. What do you think it was?’

Noah had unhooked himself from the taxi’s stirrups to float closer to the observation window. ‘Something pretty bad.’

There was a wound, still livid, in Zanzibar ’s skin. It was a third of the way between the trailing pole and the holoship’s fat equator. The wound was weeping gases, spiralling out in a slow-winding corkscrew. Chiku lacked a clear view of the damaged area, but she guessed that it spanned several hundred metres, perhaps as much as half a kilometre. A hole in the hull wide enough to fly a shuttle through, with elbow room.