CHAPTER ELEVEN

She waited in the shattered building, as motionless as the pieces of jagged rubble around her. No one appeared to have been here since her last visit. She had given Noah clear directions, but he was late. Their agreement had been clear: if Noah got caught up in something that would make it difficult for him to come to her alone, he was to abandon the rendezvous. Chiku would visit Eunice by herself.

But then she saw him, Noah’s suit turning him into a neon skeleton, approaching along one of the cleared thoroughfares. Some distance away, a pair of yellow machines toiled in the demolition of one of the larger domes. The pair squabbled over a big piece of shredded building, tearing it apart between them.

Noah dimmed his suit’s markings as he entered the ruined dome where Chiku was waiting.

He spoke on the private channel. ‘I wondered if your meeting with Utomi would run too long for you to get here on time.’

‘No, I managed to escape. It’s not good news, though. He more or less said that if I don’t vote against Travertine, we can forget about skipover.’

‘That’s blackmail!’

‘Call it targeted persuasion. All off the record, though, and totally unaccountable. But there’s no way I’m compromising my principles over this. We have a legitimate right to skipover, whether or not I go with the majority verdict.’

‘I suppose.’ Noah picked his way over debris. ‘Any sign that someone’s been poking around since last time you were here?’

‘Looks the way I left it, but it won’t be long before the clean-up machines arrive. There’s a chance they’ll find the shaft, but I think it’s much more likely they’ll just seal it over without anyone noticing.’

She showed him to the basement. Noah had always been good with heights, much better than Chiku, and he did not hesitate to follow her into the shaft. Chiku led the way, and with every step she felt a piece of her sanity clicking back into place. No, she was not going mad. Here was the shaft, and the tunnel it led to. Next, they came to the junction marked on Travertine’s plan. And finally they arrived at the pod, squatting in the embrace of its three guidance rails, exactly as she had left it.

‘It’s huge,’ Noah said.

Chiku smiled. ‘Big enough for elephants.’

She showed Noah to the pod’s forward-facing compartment. As soon as the door sealed, air flooded the interior. Chiku removed her glove and urged the pod into motion. Soon the red hoops were sliding by at increasing speed.

‘Here’s the route we’re on,’ she said, sketching a finger along one glowing thread on the map within the console. ‘I think we end up somewhere near the front of Zanzibar. That makes sense, doesn’t it?’

‘There’s no room anywhere else,’ Noah said. ‘Not for a chamber as big as you described. But there’s a lot of solid rock at the leading cone, to absorb collisions.’

‘Yes – plenty of raw mass to soak up particles and high-speed impacts, which is why there are no accommodations there, or any critical infrastructure. If you absolutely had to find room for a hidden chamber, that’s where you’d put it.’

‘One some level,’ Noah said, ‘Zanzibar itself must have known about this extra hole inside it. That much missing mass, a mountain’s worth of rock not where it’s meant to be – it must have altered the dynamics of the holoship by some measurable amount. But we never noticed!’

‘Whoever did this cooked the books at a very deep level,’ Chiku said. ‘Designed the chamber in from the outset, then made sure it wasn’t going to show up at any level, no matter how carefully we looked.’

The journey to Eunice’s chamber felt quicker than before, a commonplace trick of perception that Chiku should have anticipated. Once the pod had halted and equalised pressure, they disembarked into vacuum and reviewed suit functionality before proceeding. All was well.

‘It’s not far now,’ Chiku said, feeling a blush of pride in the fact that she had some familiarity with this place, compared with Noah.

There was only room for one person at a time in the airlock at the top of the ladder. ‘I’ll go through first—’ Chiku began.

‘No, I’ll have that honour, if you don’t mind,’ Noah said. ‘This time at least.’

He was waiting for her on the other side, and had already slipped off his helmet, cradling it under his right arm. He had heard her account, of course, and his suit readouts would have confirmed that the air was breathable, but Noah’s haste unnerved her, for some reason. She wished he had waited for her permission before taking off his helmet.

‘It’s good air,’ he said, between indulgent gulps. ‘Different, somehow. This chamber’s not connected to the rest of Zanzibar, is it? None of these molecules has been through my lungs before.’

Chiku shrugged, wondering how he expected her to know these things.

It was daytime in Chamber Thirty-Seven, the sky bright except for the strips of black where the ceiling elements had broken down. Chiku pointed down the valley towards the rising bank of dense vegetation that appeared to mark the chamber’s limit. ‘It doesn’t end there. There’s a connection, a throat bored through to a sub-chamber. Same at the other end. Eunice uses an aircraft to get about.’

‘Does she know we’re here?’

‘It’s likely. She learned of my arrival pretty quickly.’

Still cradling his helmet, Noah set off down the path, heels kicking up billowing scuds of ochre dust. Chiku removed her own helmet and followed, keeping an eye on her footing and the activity at the base of the valley. She had met the Tantors in Eunice’s presence, and Eunice had assured her friends that Chiku was no threat. It was difficult to guess what would have happened if she had blundered into them on her own, but she doubted that it would have ended well for her.

‘This is amazing,’ Noah cried out, sweeping his free arm around. ‘This whole place, all of it – it’s been here with us all this time, and we had absolutely no idea. Imagine what we could have done with it!’

‘Turned it into another chamber just like the other thirty-six,’ Chiku said dolefully. ‘Houses and parks and schools. We’d still be complaining about lack of room! And what would we have done with the elephants already here?’

‘There,’ Noah said, grinning. ‘Our host, if I’m not mistaken.’

Chiku followed the line of his arm. There was the aircraft, the Sess-na. It was approaching from the opposite end of the chamber than on her first visit. ‘That’s her.’

‘It makes no sense, flying around in that thing.’

‘I think that’s why she does it.’

Noah laughed.

The aircraft buzzed them. Chiku stood her ground this time and waved at the figure in the cockpit. Eunice gave them a wing-waggle, then spiralled down towards the valley floor. The tiny white machine found a strip of open ground and kissed land as daintily as a dragonfly. When it had rolled to a stop, the even tinier figure of Eunice emerged from beneath the white swoop of the high-set wing.

Noah, gripped by what was obviously an intense intellectual curiosity, broke into a headlong, stumbling run that never quite ended in disaster. Chiku followed at a somewhat less breakneck pace. Soon they entered the cover of thick growth hemming the valley’s lower margins. They had lost sight of the aircraft by then, but the sky’s false constellations offered a reliable compass.

‘How much does she know about the outside world?’ Noah asked when Chiku caught up with him, their suits sunlight-dappled through the fine-fretted canopy.

‘She hasn’t forgotten what Zanzibar is, and she knows a bit about my family having something to do with this place. Beyond that, it’s sketchy.’

‘She’s in for the shock of her life if she thinks the world is ready for artilects and talking elephants.’

Eventually the tree cover thinned out, and there, gratifyingly, was the Sess-na, tail-fin glinting back at them across an expanse of whiskery, wheat-coloured grass as tall as their thighs. They quickened their pace, Chiku hearing the faint whine as Noah’s suit assisted his movements. The suits were too cumbersome. Chiku wanted to climb out of hers and feel that grass whisking against her skin.

‘Hello,’ Eunice called, raising a hand. ‘You came back, Chiku. I confess, I had my doubts. Oh me of little faith! And who is your handsome companion?’

‘I’m Noah,’ he said, with an abashed smile ‘Chiku’s husband and a fellow member of Zanzibar’s Legislative Assembly.’

‘Welcome, both of you. Company’s one of those things you learn to do without until you get a taste of it again.’

‘I wanted Noah to see this before it’s too late. I hope I haven’t disappointed you by bringing him here.’

Eunice was sitting on one of the Sess-na’s big rubber wheels. ‘Did I forbid you to tell anyone?’ She stood as they approached and offered her hand. Noah was the first to shake, holding on a little longer than politeness dictated, as if he was seeking some indication – even through the glove – that this was not a real human being.

Chiku said, ‘Things are moving pretty quickly in Kappa – it won’t be long before the entrance is sealed over.’

‘Then we mustn’t delay. Shall we take a ride? I expect Noah will be keen to meet the Tantors.’

Noah glanced at his wife. She nodded.

Trust me.

Soon they were airborne. There were four seats in the Sess-na, and this time she opted to sit in the rear and let Noah take the seat to Eunice’s right. It was Chiku’s third time in the aircraft, and she was expecting the lurching swoops and surges as it hit air pockets and thermals. She reached over from behind and put a hand on Noah’s shoulder, but after a moment he gently removed it and nodded to her that he was all right with the journey. This time they only flew a couple of kilometres along the valley and were soon spiralling down again towards a semicircular clearing. Chiku recognised the place: it was the clearing near the sheer stone wall that crawled with painstaking inscriptions.

There was a moment during the descent when they were almost in free-fall – Eunice, she suspected, was pushing the machine far beyond its intended performance envelope – and then they were down, bumping and bouncing along a dusty smudge of ground at the centre of the clearing. A curtain of tall, dark trees bordered the semicircle’s curved edge, while the stone face defined its straight side. The aircraft rolled to halt.

They left their helmets on the seats. Noah peered up at the wall, his jaw lolling open. The wall rose tens of metres, beguiling to the eye.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Memory,’ Eunice said. ‘I’m sure Chiku’s told you about the cybernetic dementia I’ve been infected with. It’s slow acting but utterly remorseless. I wasn’t able to stop its progress, so I preserved as much information as I could in stone, while I still remembered.’

‘It looks like hieroglyphs,’ Chiku said, but when she got closer, she realised that the symbols were in fact unlike anything she had seen before. There were numerous stick-figures, or things that were fleetingly evocative of stick-figures, lots of lines and spirals and squiggles.

‘Something I picked up on Phobos that I knew could be used for efficient storage and encoding. Fortunately, the syntax was buried in a part of my memory she couldn’t touch.’

‘So you can just… read all this, and it’s as if you never forgot anything?’ Chiku asked, sweeping her hand up the vaulting edifice’s dense patterning. She imagined Eunice, this tiny woman, monkeying up and down that rock face. Carving her past into stone even as her memory rotted.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t begin to store my entire knowledge base in stone. It’s mainly just pointers, signposts, like the filing system in a library.’ She gave a little cluck of self-disgust. ‘It didn’t really work. The dementia touched parts of me I thought would be safe. By the time it had done its worst, I’d lost the capacity to make sense of more than a tiny fraction of these inscriptions.’

‘So the dementia isn’t progressing still?’ Noah asked.

‘I’m not getting worse, but I’m not recovering, either. I’ve been on the verge of understanding myself for decades but the moment never comes.’

‘Then all this effort was wasted,’ Chiku said.

‘Not quite. Being shrewd, I established multiple-redundancy pathways to the most vital knowledge areas. Like the name Arachne, and something of what she was. There’s another name I made a point of remembering.’

‘And that would be… ?’ Chiku said.

‘Her name is… or was… June Wing.’

Chiku smiled. ‘I’ve heard that name before. She had some connection with the family, didn’t she?’

‘She was a friend, an ally. When I ceased to have routine contact with your mother, I still had a line of communication to June Wing. She helped me get here, helped me live. I’m hoping she might still be alive.’

‘I could check the public records,’ Chiku said. ‘See if she’s still alive in the old system. The information might not be altogether reliable, given the timelag, but that’s the best I can do.’

‘I’d appreciate it.’

Just then, the Tantors broke through the trees.

Chiku’s extensive experience with elephants enabled her to differentiate individuals. She knew the tell-tales that shed light on age and vigour, and those that distinguished one animal from another and revealed familial bonds. The process took time, however, and she had spent nowhere near enough of it in Dreadnought’s presence to fix his image in her mind. Besides, the four Tantors had been devoid of the common injuries – the missing tusks, the bitten ears – that were part of her arsenal of recognition techniques. Now she was looking at six well-preserved Tantors and she could not be certain whether or not she had seen any of them before.

‘Is that Dreadnought?’ she asked, nodding towards the biggest elephant in the group.

‘No – Dreadnought’s still in Lobe One. That’s Aphrodite, Dreadnought’s younger sister.’

‘You’d better tell her I’m not a threat.’

‘Oh, she’ll know that by now. What Dreadnought sees and experiences, she sees and experiences.’

Chiku found herself grinning. ‘So what else can they do? Move trees just by thinking about it?’

‘In the Surveilled World,’ Eunice said, ‘there was hardly an animal bigger than a flea that didn’t have machines in its central nervous system. Humankind put them there, to prevent Mother Nature from getting ideas above her station. A lion wants to eat you? You look at the lion and whisper an oath and the lion drops dead, every cell in its brain fried before it can blink. The neuromachines were self-replicating, and they passed from generation to generation without human interference. The phyletic dwarves had the same neuromachinery. The Tantors are distant descendants of the dwarves, and the machines have accompanied them across the generations. With some upgrades along the way, of course.’

‘Shaped by you?’ Chiku asked.

‘I can’t help myself. Always was an inveterate tinkerer.’

Chiku asked Noah to join her to introduce themselves to Aphrodite. Like the Tantors Chiku had already met, these creatures wore harnesses and communications systems around their heads and bodies. Chiku guessed that the population was stable enough that there was little need to manufacture new equipment.

On Aphrodite’s screen appeared the words:

WELCOME CHIKU

‘This is my husband, Noah.’ Catching herself, remembering Eunice’s injunction to keep things simple, she added: ‘My friend, Noah.’

WELCOME NOAH

Noah raised a hand. ‘Hello, Aphrodite. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Where are we?’

Chiku nudged him. ‘You know exactly where we are.’

‘I want to hear what she thinks, not you.’

Aphrodite flapped her ears. They were like sheets of stiffened canvas. Chiku wondered what the flapping signified. Was it concentration, irritation or something so intrinsic to elephants as to be beyond her conceptual horizon?

After a few moments, Aphrodite said:

IN CHAMBER

‘And outside the chamber?’ Noah probed.

OUTSIDE = NOTHING

‘That’s true enough,’ Chiku whispered. ‘Vacuum. The void between the stars.’

‘They don’t know about the other chambers in Zanzibar, let alone other worlds.’

SPEAK LOUD

Chiku smiled at this rebuff. ‘They’re elephants,’ she whispered. ‘That they’re capable of grasping anything is pretty astonishing.’ Then, to Aphrodite: ‘Noah has a lot to ask you.’

‘You’re leaving me to make small talk with elephants?’

For all his protestations, Noah clearly relished the chance to interact with the Tantors. Chiku left him trying to get Aphrodite to name the other five animals and walked over to Eunice. She had been watching over them from the partial shade of the aircraft’s wing. The Sess-na generated odd little clicking sounds, as if it, too, had things on its mind.

‘Do you have some information for me?’ Eunice asked.

Chiku nodded. ‘For what it’s worth, I found out what I could about that name you mentioned.’

Eunice looked at her with sharp interest. ‘Was it difficult?’

‘No, incredibly easy.’ Chiku felt the need to sit down and perched on the wheel where Eunice had been resting when they arrived. ‘I searched the public files. I know there was a risk in that, but I put in other names, as well – made it look as if I might be thinking of names for a child, something like that. There are lots of people and things called Arachne, of course, but it didn’t take me long to narrow it down. Arachne is – or was – the controlling intelligence behind Ocular.’

‘Ocular,’ Eunice repeated. ‘I almost know what that means. It’s there, somewhere.’

‘It’s the name of the array of space telescopes that detected Mandala, and the Akinyas were involved in its construction. Mandala is the alien structure on Crucible. Ocular found it, and that’s why we’re here, seventeen light-years from Earth, heading to Crucible.’

‘But there are other holoships, other caravans, headed for other extrasolar planets.’

‘Yes,’ said Chiku, ‘but Crucible was the first destination to be chosen. It’s the closest truly Earth-like world, and the only one with an alien artefact crying out for closer examination.’

Eunice shook her head. ‘I really don’t think this can be the connection.’

‘It has to be.’

‘Even if Arachne was another artilect, what harm was I doing her? What harm could she possibly have done me? Why did I need to flee the system?’

‘I’m afraid there are still more questions than answers, but perhaps this will help you.’ Chiku dug into the suit’s cargo pouch and slid something from a plastic sheath. She offered it to Eunice.

The robot took it in both hands, examining it dubiously.

‘It looks like something made for chimpanzees.’

‘It’s for children,’ Chiku explained. ‘I don’t know how it was in your day, but we don’t put implants into children until their tenth birthday. Until then, they make do with things like this. It was Ndege’s – my daughter’s. It’s called a companion. It’s a diary, a story-book, an encyclopedia, all in one. It also functions as a portal, a way into the public files.’

‘Then it’s useless to me – I already told you there are no data links between here and the rest of Zanzibar.’

‘You’re wrong.’ Chiku took the companion back to demonstrate her point with a simple query. ‘Some change in Zanzibar must have damaged the original links, but the companion isn’t affected. It must be utilising a different protocol.’ She returned the book to Eunice.

‘If I use this,’ Eunice said, ‘will my doing so come to anyone’s attention?’

‘It’s a thing made for children, and it only has a limited search capability. For that reason, it’s not the sort of thing that would be routinely monitored. Provided you’re careful with your queries, nothing untoward should happen.’

‘And your daughter won’t miss it?’

‘If Ndege being cross is the worst thing we have to deal with…’ Chiku said. She shook her head firmly. ‘She’ll understand. One day.’

‘I shall take very good care of it.’

Chiku stood up. ‘I don’t know when we’re next going to see each other, but it could be a while. What you’ve told me, about Arachne… I think I have to do something quite difficult. I think I have to call on Chiku Yellow for help. I’ll see if she can reach June Wing – assuming either of them is still alive.’

‘Will she listen?’

‘She’d better. But I can’t promise anything – we’ve been out of touch for so long.’

‘I must warn you – if Arachne still has influence, she may not take kindly to anyone making enquiries about her. You’ll be putting this other version of you at considerable risk.’

‘Believe me,’ Chiku said, with an edge of steel in her voice. ‘She could use some excitement in her life.’

Загрузка...