On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The elevator was a black bobbin that travelled up and down Tekarohi’s tethering cable. Embarking for Cythera, Chiku thought as they stepped aboard along with a small gaggle of fellow travellers. They were not wearing the surface suits yet, and the forty-kilometre descent would take long enough that the elevator came equipped with a small bar, lounge area and toilet facilities. There were two tiny windows, more like inspection ports than anything that would provide a view. Imris Kwami had waved them off with assurances that everything had been taken care of on the surface, and that the two suits would know where to go.

‘Can we trust him?’ she asked once they were under way, sliding down the cable at about two kilometres a minute. A display above the door showed increments of altitude, temperature, pressure.

‘Bit late to be worrying about that now!’ Pedro was fingering the table top, perhaps pondering a veneer or lamination that might be suitable for his purposes. His way of coping with the situation, Chiku thought.

It was not hers.

Yet down they went, the elevator made ominous little ticking sounds as it transitioned into denser and hotter atmosphere, like a submarine sinking into some acidic boiling trench of the deepest, blackest ocean. Everyone made a great show of not being fazed by these little structural complaints, not even when they amplified to clangs and thuds, as if some very angry thing, presently outside, was trying to break in.

Ten atmospheres… fifty… The elevator shook as they passed through some horsetail of wind shear. Then deeper still. Seventy atmospheres, eighty. Smoother now, heavier, as if the atmosphere itself was entirely too sluggish to bother with anything as frivolous as weather. There was only this one car shuttling up and down the tether, day in and day out, year after year. Chiku supposed it had become quite adept at handling these pressure changes by now. There was no boat as safe as an old boat, or so the saying went. Perhaps this rule could be safely ascribed to elevators as well, like the one in Santa Justa.

Eventually the car reached zero altitude. The view through the windows went dark as they slid into the anchorpoint compound on the surface. They were at ninety-five atmospheres, seven hundred and fifty kelvins of temperature.

The elevator halted and something clamped it tight. More clangs and clattering followed, and then the door opened. Chiku and Pedro followed the passengers out into the anchorpoint’s receiving area. It was a starkly unwelcoming place, a little too warm, with dim industrial lighting, scabbed grey walls and a persistent rhythmic throb of air circulators. A musician sat cross-legged on carpets in one corner, attempting to tune a kora. Or perhaps, Chiku decided, this was his actual playing style.

Some passengers with expensive luggage were haranguing a tourist official, complaining that the bus to take them to the nearest domed community was running hours late. Their items of luggage, as eager to be moving as their owners, squabbled among themselves. Some other passengers were waiting to go back up the tether, sitting on metal benches or hovering around one or other of the food concessions. Someone was asleep, stretched out on a bench with their coat over their head. Their snoring, Chiku realised, was the source of the annoying rhythmic throb. It had nothing to do with air circulators.

The suiting area was down one long, sloping tunnel, then up another. When they arrived, someone else was being helped into their suit, which was assembled around them like some contraption of Medieval torture. The process involved robots and winches and complex power tools. Chiku had never seen anything quite as barbaric as a Venus surface suit.

‘Why would anyone bother with these things?’ Pedro asked. ‘Aren’t they happy going out in a rover, with some nice seats and a bar?’

‘It’s for the bragging rights, mainly,’ Chiku said. ‘So they can say they’ve done something more dangerous and real than their friends.’

‘Even if they run a real risk of dying?’

‘That’s the downside.’

‘I can think of another. Would now be the right time to mention that I’m very slightly claustrophobic?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so. It’s all right for you, though – you’ve had plenty of time in spacesuits.’

‘Not like these, Noah. Even the junk we had to wear in Kappa were more comfortable than these look.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Pedro said, a certain terseness colouring his tone. ‘And for the record, I’m not Noah. Noah is not your husband. Noah is the husband of Chiku Green, this other woman I’ve never met, and never want to meet.’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Never mind,’ he said, with obviously forced magnanimity. ‘I suppose it’s to be expected, when you go around swapping memories like pairs of gloves.’

Chiku thought better of responding.

The suits were essentially ambulatory tanks. They were gloss white, like lobsters dipped in milk. They had no faceplates, just camera apertures. Instead of hands they had claws. Their cooling systems were multiply redundant. That was the critical safety measure, Chiku learned in the briefing. Death by pressure was so rare that it had only happened a few times in the entire history of Venus exploration. But hundreds, thousands, had died of heat shock when their coolers overloaded.

Once they were installed in the suits, they spent a few minutes learning basic skills such as walking and object manipulation. Chiku kept flashing back to her time in Kappa, how easy it had been compared to these hulking contraptions. On the other hand, she now felt invulnerable.

That confidence faded as soon as the airlock doors slammed shut behind them and the atmosphere roared in. As temperature and pressure climbed to surface norms, the suit told her how much work it was having to do to keep her comfortable. Like the elevator, it issued noises of protestation. Systems pushed from green into amber. There was very little cooling capacity to spare once the suit was running at normal workload.

The outer doors opened and they waddled across a parking area to their waiting rover, which was essentially a chassis on wheels. They climbed aboard and assumed standing position within railed enclosures. The vehicle appeared to know where to take them. They rolled up a ramp into the searing, overcast oppression of noon on Venus. The terrain was not alien to Chiku’s eyes – she had seen mountain areas just as arid as this on Earth, with a similar undramatic topography. The ground was rocky, broken, strewn with boulders and the fragments of boulder. No vegetation, of course, and no evidence that any liquids had ever flowed here. The colours, relayed through the suit’s camera systems, were muted, greys and ochres and off-whites, a smear of paling yellow dusting everything, like a layer of old varnish that had begun to discolour.

The rover traversed a winding track, rocks and debris bulldozed into loose flanks along either side. Chiku swivelled around, still nervous of damaging the suit, and spied the anchorpoint from which they had emerged. She watched the bobbin of the elevator slide up the taut whip line of the tether until it was lost in the murk of a low cloud deck. These conditions were optimal on Venus: low clouds, no sky, visibility down to a couple of kilometres.

At length, the rover steered off the main track onto a rougher trail that wound around the side of a dormant volcano, and then they came downslope into a broad depression hemmed on all sides by cracked terrain, fissured in concentric and radial patterns like the wrinkled skin around an elephant’s eye. This spider-web feature, according to the terrain overlay, was called an arachnoid, caused by the deformation and relaxation of the surface under the strain of upwelling magma. Aside from the road itself and the odd transponder pole or piece of broken rover, there was scant evidence of human presence beyond the compound. Near the base of the depression, gleaming in the perpetual half-light, was another vehicle. Like their own rover, it was an open chassis on wheels. It had parked on a gentle slope. Not far from it, further down the slope, was another figure in a Venus suit, attending to something on the ground, almost in the shade of an overhanging cliff a few tens of metres high, formed where one part of the arachnoid had sunk or elevated itself relative to the other.

‘June,’ Chiku said, excited and apprehensive at the same time. ‘It’s her. There’s even an aug tag.’

‘Open the general channel, see if she’ll talk,’ Pedro said.

‘Of course she’ll talk. We came all the way here, didn’t we?’ But she opened the channel anyway. ‘June Wing? It’s Chiku Akinya. I think you’re expecting us.’

A voice said: ‘Park by my rover, then get out and walk over to me, very carefully. I don’t want you stomping all over this site like a couple of gorillas.’

‘Thrilled to meet you, too,’ Pedro said under his breath, but doubtless loud enough that June would have heard it.

Chiku took manual control and halted the rover by the other vehicle. They stepped out of their enclosures and lowered carefully down onto the Venusian surface. The atmosphere of Venus laid siege to her suit, probing its defences for a weakness.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see us,’ Chiku said as they made their way downslope.

‘I agreed to nothing.’

‘But Mister Kwami said—’

‘Unless Imris Kwami was failing in his responsibilities, which after a century of employment seems highly unlikely, he made no promises on my behalf. I told him to make it clear that if you didn’t visit me here, you’d have no hope of speaking to me when I returned to the gondola.’

‘I opened your mote.’

‘Good for you. What you chose to read into it is your business, not mine.’

‘We’re here, aren’t we?’ Pedro asked.

‘Evidently.’

‘Mister Kwami told me that you were aware of my dealings with the seasteaders,’ Chiku said. ‘If that’s the case, then you’ll also have a shrewd idea what Mecufi and his friends want from you.’

‘The Panspermians, or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, burnt their bridges with Arethusa two hundred years ago,’ June declared. ‘It’s a little late now to be seeking rapprochement.’

Chiku said, ‘Regardless, they’d like to make contact again, if they can. Are you still in touch with her?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I’m guessing it’s highly likely, if Arethusa’s still alive. And you should definitely speak to me. You knew my mother and father. You helped them.’

‘That was a long time ago.’

Chiku and Pedro had come within a few paces of the other suited figure. June was examining something on the ground. The suits’ articulation did not allow kneeling, but by bowing at the waist and extending the telescopic forearms, the wearer could handle rocks and other objects. June was busy with a piece of buckled metal about the size of a beach ball, partially dug into the ground as if it had rammed into it at speed.

‘The thing is—’ Chiku started saying.

‘Do you want to help, or are you just going to stand there gawping?’

Chiku moved around to the side, keeping her distance from June’s backpack. The glowing exhaust vents were rimmed cherry red, a heat haze boiling off them.

‘What is it?’ Chiku asked doubtfully, not sure she wanted the answer.

‘Remains of a Russian probe. Been here the thick end of four centuries, just waiting to be found. I’ve been coming back to this area for years, convinced it had to be around here somewhere.’

‘Pretty lucky to find it like that,’ Pedro said.

‘Luck had nothing to do with it, just years of thorough searching and patient elimination. The radar reflection is very poor due to this overhang – reason everyone else missed it. Here, Chiku – help me lever it out.’

‘Is it worth anything?’

‘It’s a priceless piece of early space-age history.’

‘And you just happened to find it now?’ Pedro asked sceptically.

‘I found it eighteen months ago, but my competitors were breathing down my neck. I had to bluff, let them think there was nothing here. Continued searching somewhere else, drawing them away from this search area. Appeared to abandon my efforts – I’ve been on Mars lately, or as near as anyone dares get these days. Then I pounced back here, quicker than they can react. And now I have my prize.’

‘Nearly,’ Chiku said.

The thing began to loosen. It was as heavy as a boulder; she could sense as much even through the suit’s amplification. And then it pulled free, a buckled sphere, scorched and dented, scabbed with corrosion, like a cannonball that had been at the bottom of the ocean since the middle ages. On its side, in lettering so faded it was barely legible, was the inscription CCCP.

Chiku wondered what it meant.

‘Well done,’ June said. ‘Now help me get it aboard the truck.’

She meant the other rover. Between them they carried the mangled thing to the vehicle’s rear cargo platform. June lowered it into a sturdy white box with a padded interior, then closed the lid. ‘I’ll hold it at Venus surface pressure until I know there are no air pockets inside it. A hundred atmospheres can really put a dent in your day.’

‘Mecufi said something about you gathering pieces for a collection,’ Chiku said, hoping that some small talk might break the ice. ‘When we spoke to Imris Kwami, he said it was to do with robot relics or something?’

‘My museum, yes.’ June was tapping commands into the box’s external panel. ‘I’m assembling artefacts of the early robotic space age before they fall through the chinks in history. You’d be amazed how much stuff is still out here, waiting to be forgotten. Not much in the inner solar system, it’s true – although there are still spent booster stages on Sun-circling orbits, if you know where to look. But I’m not really interested in dumb rocketry. I want robots, probes, things with a rudimentary intelligence. Very rudimentary, in this case. But you can’t make sharp distinctions. It’s like poking through the bones of early hominids. There’s no one point at which we stopped being monkeys and started being human.’ She patted the box with one of her suit’s claws. ‘And this unprepossessing thing is still part of the lineage. It has some circuitry, some crude decision-action branching. That puts it on the path to intelligence, albeit rather a long way from artilects and Providers.’

‘You’ve led a long and interesting life,’ Chiku said. ‘Is this something you’ve always wanted to do?’

‘Someone has to organise and document this stuff, so it may as well be me. Your great-grandmother wasn’t exactly one for sitting around when there was work to be done, was she?’

Chiku chose her words with great care. ‘Actually, it’s funny you should mention Eunice.’

‘I thought you came to ask me about Arethusa.’

‘We did,’ Pedro said.

‘Well, you’ve done what the Pans asked. You can tell them that if Arethusa wanted to speak to them, she’d have already done so.’

‘I’m not just here because of the merfolk,’ Chiku said.

June walked around to the rover’s control platform, and prepared to step aboard. ‘What, then? The scenery? The balmy airs?’

‘I’ve made contact with my great-grandmother.’

‘Nice. No, really – I’m very pleased. And what did she have to say? That Saint Peter sends his best regards and everything’s lovely on the other side? I’ve got the right religion, haven’t I?’

‘I met the Tantors.’

There was a silence. June did not move. She looked frozen there, locked into geologic stillness, destined to merge back into the landscape. Chiku glanced at Pedro. She wondered if she had made a terrible miscalculation.

Finally, June said: ‘Repeat what you just said to me.’

‘I’ve met the Tantors. And I’ve spoken to the construct aboard the holoship.’

‘I have an interest in Zanzibar. I monitor the feeds. I keep up with events. No one knows about the Tantors. They are not public knowledge. They are not even on the edge of being a rumour.’

‘There was an accident, a blow-out in one of our chambers. I mean, one of theirs. I made some investigations… I mean Chiku Green, the version of me on the holoship.’ She gave up. It was just too difficult to separate the two versions of herself. ‘I found my way to Chamber Thirty-Seven, at the front of Zanzibar – the chamber no one knows about. I met the construct, the artilect simulation of my great-grandmother. The one you helped to come into being and helped smuggle aboard the holoship, to look after the Tantors. She’s been there ever since, waiting. You can’t ignore me now, can you? There’s only one way I could have learned all this.’

After a moment. June asked, ‘How is she?’

‘Still alive, obviously, but damaged. Her memory’s totally screwed up and she barely remembers anything that happened before Zanzibar beyond the fact that you helped her when she was in trouble – when she was hiding, running from something.’

‘The Cognition Police, most likely – she was an unlicensed artilect.’

‘More than that,’ Chiku said. ‘She gave me a name, and—’

‘Not here,’ June said before Chiku could utter another word.

‘I’m asking for your help. If not for me, then for my mother. You helped Sunday and Jitendra, all those years ago.’

‘Did your mother tell you about the Tantors? She was at least theoretically aware of their existence.’

‘No. I haven’t spoken to her in years. No one has.’

‘What an exceedingly odd family you come from.’

‘Thanks. If I could have chosen another one, I would have. But this isn’t about me. It’s about what you and your friends set in motion. These are the consequences; now you have to deal with them.’

‘You think I don’t know about consequences?’

‘If we shouldn’t talk here,’ Pedro said, ‘where would you suggest?’

‘Wait.’ A pause, then: ‘Imris? It’s me. Yes, very well. Yes, I met both of them – they’re with me right now, along with the find. Yes, packed and loaded – we can be on our way back immediately.’ To Chiku, she said: ‘How did you get here? Your own ship?’

‘We’re not that flash,’ Chiku said. ‘We came by shuttle, off the loop-liner.’

‘Imris, prep Gulliver for immediate dust-off. We’ll be back at the anchorpoint in an hour, aboard the gondola inside two.’

‘We’re leaving?’ Chiku asked.

‘I think it’s best if we talk aboard my ship. We’ll worry about getting you back to Earth later. Oh, and about being flash: you’ve owned more ships than I’ve owned shoes.’

‘I mean lately.’

‘Then say what you mean.’

The rovers could only carry two passengers, so Chiku and Pedro returned to their own vehicle and let it trundle on behind June’s, retracing the route they had taken from the anchorpoint.

‘What was it like on the holoship?’ June asked once they had climbed out of the arachnoid depression, back onto the highlands. ‘I came very close to moving aboard, when Zanzibar set off, but I felt that my talents would be put to better use back here.’

‘Collecting old space junk?’ Pedro asked.

‘You have a very blunt turn of phrase, don’t you?’

Chiku threw Pedro a warning glance and said, ‘They have some difficult times ahead of them. Resource allocation, tensions within the local caravan, that whole stupid slowdown thing.’

‘I heard about Pemba,’ June said. ‘But then, who didn’t? Something that bad, it makes the headlines. They were idiots to bet against physics.’

‘Physics looked like it was on their side, for a little while, at least,’ Chiku said.

‘Physics couldn’t care less.’

‘It was a terrible accident, but no reason to close down all the research programmemes. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem at all fair that we’re having to do all this on our own. The holoships were a project for the whole solar civilisation, a gesture for the ages. And there used to be research programmemes going on back here, not just in the caravan – labs and facilities all working on the Chibesa problem. But back home, you’ve given up, left us to solve the problem on our own. Essentially, we’ve been hung out to dry.’

‘You and us. That’s an interesting perspective. As if your moral reference frame was that of the Chiku on the holoship, not the one I am speaking to.’

‘She gets confused,’ Pedro said. ‘You should hear what she called me earlier.’

‘The physics programmes here were expensive, dangerous and getting nowhere,’ June said. ‘That’s the only reason they were shut down. You mentioned Sunday, Chiku – are things really that bad with her?’

‘She’s made her own choices.’

‘Mathematics is a terrible calling. It’s as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There’s a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That’s what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit. It must be terribly hard on your father.’

‘They were happy together.’ But she had seen Jitendra’s awesome, oceanic sadness. Yes, there were good days, when Sunday’s mind returned to the shallows, but far more when she was not there at all.

‘Perhaps she’ll surface again, one day,’ said June. ‘We must wish the best for your mother. Ah, wait. What’s this?’

‘I don’t know.’

An alarm tone had begun to sound in Chiku’s helmet and a red status sigil had begun to throb angrily in her visual field, but the suit’s life-support and locomotive functions were not registering any problems. ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with me or my suit.’

‘We’re all getting it,’ Pedro said. ‘It’s not our suits.’

‘They’re sending it to everyone outside,’ June said.

A voice, maybe a recording, was saying: ‘General surface order, Tekarohi Sector. Emergency measures are in force. Return immediately to anchorpoint. Repeat, return immediately to anchorpoint. Observe all environmental precautions. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.’

‘What’s happening?’ Pedro asked.

‘Something less than optimal,’ June said. ‘Seismic activity, maybe. Although they usually have days of warning before anything big.’

‘Is that likely?’ Chiku asked. She remembered something about the surface of Venus being constantly renewed by upwellings, scrubbed clean of craters. Stand still long enough and eventually the ground you were on would be resurfaced, smothered under a cooling blanket of ash and magma. This had been going on for mindless aeons.

‘It’s been hundreds of years since there were any eruptions or lava flows in Tekarohi Sector,’ June said, ‘so it’s not likely that something would happen just as we show up.’

Pedro asked. ‘Can you raise Imris?’

‘I’m trying, but all local comms are blocked for the moment. They’re pushing that warning through on all channels. That’s odd in itself – there should still be ample capacity. You know what? I’m starting not to like this.’

The message was repeating, reiterating the injunction to return to the anchorpoint. It would be safe in there, Chiku thought – whatever was happening, or was about to happen. Certainly there were few places less safe than being out on the surface of Venus, in a suit that had to work itself into a frenzy just to stop her from cooking. Some animal instinct was driving her back to the burrow. She wanted to be indoors, underground, where it was cool and dark and the world was not trying to turn her into a pancake.

‘Your competitors,’ she said. ‘Could they be trying to mess things up?’

‘Not really their style. Getting a jump on me, yes. Putting out fake emergency warnings? That would be new territory for them. Not to mention massively illegal and likely to cause loss of life.’

‘What should we do?’ Pedro asked.

‘I think we should do as we’re told. We were going back to the anchorpoint anyway, and if there really is a problem… well, we don’t want to be stuck outside in these suits.’

‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ Chiku said.

‘The suits’ active cooling systems draw a lot of power and I don’t know how long we’d have before the cells need replenishing. You can’t count on rescue coming quickly around here.’

‘I hate this planet,’ Chiku decided.

‘Welcome to Venus. She’s a real bitch.’

‘You sound like my great-grandmother.’

‘We must have had a similar outlook on life. Oh, wait – comms appear to be loosening up. It’s Imris. Do you mind if we go private for a few seconds?’

‘Be our guest,’ Chiku said.

When she was done, June said, ‘There’s a problem with the gondola. As a precaution, they’re evacuating everyone from the surface back to orbit.’

‘Wouldn’t they be safer down here?’ Chiku asked.

‘Depends. If things really do go wrong up there, they won’t be able to send help down to us if we run into trouble. Getting up and out while we can may be the sensible option.’

‘What about Imris – is he going to be all right?’

‘He’s taking as many people with him as he can squeeze aboard Gulliver. I’ve told him not to wait for us – we’ll take our chances with the regular evacuees.’

‘What kind of problem are we talking about?’ Chiku asked.

‘Supply shuttle came in at a bad angle, hit some turbulence, managed to sever or tangle part of the rigging. That’s the official picture, anyway. The lift is compromised, but they’re dropping ballast to stabilise the gondola. Should be able to hold altitude for some while.’

‘And that would be how long, exactly?’ Chiku asked.

‘Hours, easily. Plenty of time for the elevator to go up and down a few times, while shuttles ferry people from the gondola back to the orbital stations.’

‘There’s the anchorpoint,’ Pedro said. ‘We’re practically home and dry.’

‘I love the sound of a man tempting fate,’ June said.

Nothing about the anchorpoint hinted that there might be problems at the other end of the tether, forty kilometres overhead. The cable was as taut as when they had descended, the elevator sliding smoothly back up into the flat underbelly of cloud, an ochre mattress pressing down from the sky, stuffed with poison. They were not the only tourists scuttling back to cover, Chiku saw – other rovers and suits were converging on the anchorpoint facility from several directions.

Chiku felt as if her world had slipped a gear. ‘Is this… normal?’

‘Is what normal?’ June said.

‘Shuttles crashing into things. Gondolas being evacuated. Particularly right now, just when we happen to be on Venus.’

‘Does it sound normal to you?’

‘You said it can’t be your competitors, so is it something to do with us, with the reason we came to Venus?’

‘That would attach rather a lot of significance to your actions, wouldn’t it?’ But June’s tone suggested to Chiku that she had not ruled out that scenario.

There was a queue to enter the rover parking area, suits and vehicles jostling down the ramp, and then they had to wait their turn for the airlocks. Chiku counted the minutes. Years of her life had passed more swiftly. From her perspective, the elevator looked as if it had begun to shoot up the thread faster than before. She wondered how many passengers it could take at a time, how many round trips would be needed. Under normal circumstances, the surface of a planet was the safest place you could be. But these were far from normal circumstances, Chiku reflected.

‘Imris again,’ June said as they eased their machines into the disembarkation point. ‘Evacuation’s proceeding smoothly. They’ve lost a little altitude, but they’re still a long way above crush depth. Be happy that they built that thing with a lot of safety margins.’

‘Any more information on what happened?’ Pedro asked.

‘Picture’s still fuzzy. They’re sending robots out to examine the rigging. They may be able to disentangle things, clear away the shuttle’s wreckage, maybe deploy an emergency balloon to restore optimum buoyancy.’

June asked Chiku to help her unload the storage box from the back of her rover and they carried it into the airlock between them.

It was the biggest airlock Chiku had ever seen, but it could still only handle three Venus suits at a time. The process of atmosphere exchange felt like some over-elaborate ritual. Expelling one hundred atmospheres, initiating toxin purge and temperature cool-down all took time. It had not taken anywhere near as long when they went out.

At last, robots and support staff bustled in to scrub them down and help them out of the suits. It turned out that they were the last to return. No one else was out there now, at least not within range of the anchorpoint. Chiku was the first out of her armour, keeping an eye on the storage box as the robots and technicians fussed over June.

Chiku was still wondering what their new companion was going to look like in the flesh. She might only be half as old again as Chiku, but that extra century was crucial. Chiku had been born into a time when all the big blunders in prolongation therapy had already been made. The lives of June Wing and Eunice Akinya were expeditions into unmapped territory. All they had had was blind luck and a dogged faith in their own medical intuition, and they had done well to make it this far. Chiku had seen a couple of extremely old persons, somewhere in the solar system, or perhaps on the holoship. One had been all hunched and wispy-haired, and at first she had mistaken them for a tame orangutan. The other, cocooned inside some kind of life-support pram, she had assumed was a baby with some unfortunate congenital affliction. She half-expected June to be even more decrepit. Three hundred and three years – that was a good age for trees.

But here was June, being extracted from her suit, and there had been some mistake, obviously, some mix-up outside, because this was not a three-hundred-year-old organism. This was a normal-looking woman, grey-haired and visibly older than Chiku, but not by so much that she looked as if she had climbed out of a gerontology textbook. This was no relic from the dawn of history who just happened to have lucked her way into the present.

June hopped down from the suiting platform. She wore black trousers, a black blouse with a high collar, a jewelled clasp at her throat her only ornamentation. Her skin was tanned, wrinkled and mottled in mildly interesting ways. Her reflexes looked sharp, and her bones showed no sign of shattering as she touched down in nine-tenths of a gee.

‘So – where were we?’ said June.

‘I was expecting…’ But Chiku could think of no way to end that sentence that would not make her sound fatuous. ‘What do you want to do with the box?’

‘I doubt they’ll let us take up valuable space in the elevator, unless we’re the last to go.’ June smoothed down her hair where the helmet had mussed it. She wore it in a short bob that covered her ears. ‘Anyway, it’s locked and tagged,’ she went on. ‘I can come back for it, if the worst happens.’

‘I’m curious what scenario would be “the worst” from your perspective.’

Pedro stepped up before June could reply. ‘We should go through, see how long we have to wait.’ He was focused on working stiffness out of his shoulder and did not see June at first, standing behind Chiku. ‘Oh, hello, June – I mean, Ms Wing. It feels as if we haven’t really met until now.’

‘We haven’t, but I think we can dispense with the pleasantries for now.’

They returned to the main holding area, which was a lot less busy than it had been earlier. Other than Chiku, Pedro, June and the three service staff who had accompanied them from the suiting area, there were only six other people present. They were watching the elevator’s progress on the panel over the door, tracking its return to the gondola. The emergency system was still repeating the message they had heard earlier, and red bars and panels were flashing in the walls, floor and ceiling.

‘Not far to go,’ Chiku said.

‘They’ll unload quickly,’ one of the service staff told her, perhaps thinking she needed reassurance. ‘Empty, they drop like a stone – shouldn’t take more than ten minutes to get back to us, and then we’re out of here.’

‘Evacuation status?’ June queried.

‘Proceeding smoothly. There’ll be a shuttle docked and ready by the time we’re topside. Any luck, in a few hours this is all going to look like a massive over-reaction. If the ’bots can stabilise the flotation, we’ll be able to stand down from emergency condition.’

June held up a hand. ‘Wait. I’m hearing from Imris again.’ Her face assumed the slack composure of aug trance, as if someone had just snipped all the nerves under her skin. After a minute she nodded gravely, took a deep breath. ‘Well, that puts a different sheen on things. I don’t think we’ll be needing that elevator now, thanks.’

‘What’s going on?’ Pedro asked.

‘They haven’t managed to stabilise the gondola. Apparently, the robots they sent out to fix the rigging have managed to make things worse, not better. According to Imris, the gondola is sinking faster than before. There’s no chance of stabilising it now. It’s coming down.’

‘How deep can they go?’ Pedro asked.

The technician said, ‘Twenty, thirty atmospheres shouldn’t be a problem. But fifty’s pushing it, and it’s definitely not engineered to survive surface pressure.’

Chiku shook her head. ‘This is too much of a coincidence for it to be an accident. It’s connected to Arethusa, or the construct, or something, isn’t it?’

‘It’s not about us,’ Pedro said. ‘We’re not the ones on that thing, sinking down into the atmosphere.’

‘We’re not,’ June said, ‘but if something up there wanted to hurt us indirectly, that’s one excellent way of going about it.’

‘Something wants to hurt us?’ the technician asked, frowning.

‘Private conversation,’ she said, creasing out a smile. And then she clapped her hands and raised her voice. ‘Everyone – minor change of plan! In light of recent information, we probably don’t want to be under the drop zone for much longer.’

‘It’s got forty kilometres to fall,’ said one of the other passengers, a burly European with a thatch of coppery hair. ‘What are the odds of it landing right on top of us, with the winds and everything?’

‘Very low odds indeed,’ June said brightly. ‘But wherever that gondola falls, the tether’s still anchored to this facility. Now, do you really want to take a chance that there aren’t going to be complications when that thing comes hammering down, like god’s own bullwhip?’

‘It won’t be that bad,’ one of the technicians said. ‘It’s just a cable—’

‘Fine,’ said June. ‘Anyone who doesn’t want to play physics roulette – there are Venus suits waiting for us. There are enough for all of us, aren’t there?’

‘I think so,’ the technician said. ‘I mean, yes, there should be.’

‘Should be?’

‘We have twenty suits, but there’s a mandatory maintenance cycle. They won’t all be available.’

‘There are twelve of us,’ June said, looking around at the party. ‘I’m pretty sure I saw more than twelve suits out there earlier, when we were waiting to come back in.’

‘It’s got to be worth a try,’ Pedro said.

‘Imris again,’ June said, after slipping into aug trance for a moment. ‘Gulliver is detached, he has evacuees aboard and is monitoring the gondola’s descent. Sounds like they’ve lost another balloon… we’re looking at fifteen minutes, twenty if we’re lucky. Shall we adjourn? Venus is so lovely at this time of year.’

The others needed little persuasion. By then even the anchorpoint staff had given up on any hope of using the elevator. The tether was screaming anxious error conditions as the stress loadings went off the scale. As they made their way to the suiting area, Chiku’s thoughts flashed back to when they were waiting their turn to come back inside. She had definitely seen other people besides them in suits, but she could not swear she had seen twelve altogether. Had June just been saying that to hurry them along?

There were several independent suiting rooms, each of which contained three or four suits. It was not immediately clear, to Chiku’s eyes, which units were ready to use and which were off-line for overhaul. Prior to being worn, they were partly dismantled anyway, broken down into huge white eggshell sections.

‘Impact in… somewhere somewhere between sixteen and twenty minutes,’ June reported. ‘Imris would like to be more precise, but there are a lot of variables.’

‘Can’t he bring that ship down here and let us board from the airlock?’ asked one of the other tourists, hands on her hips.

‘Not unless you fancy squeezing inside a lump of buckled metal the diameter of a drainpipe,’ June said.

‘We have a problem,’ said one of the technicians.

June smiled tightly. ‘And my day just keeps on improving.’

‘Suit availability is… less than optimal.’

‘Don’t sugar the pill.’ Her tone was ferociously sweet. ‘What are we looking at? Quick – we need five minutes just to suit up, then we still have to clear the airlock.’

‘We need twelve functioning suits,’ said the technician. ‘We have six good to go. Three more are marginal: they came in with faults, which would normally send them straight into maintenance, but in an emergency we can override those errors and force the suits outside. The rest are… too far into the tear-down-and-rebuild cycle. Except for one, maybe, but even that—’

June said, ‘So we have nine suits, which is three fewer than we need. And the clock’s still ticking.’

‘Staying here isn’t an automatic death sentence!’ said the passenger with the coppery hair. ‘It’s a question of risk-management, that’s all. I’ll take my chances indoors.’

‘So that’s two suits fewer than we need,’ said the technician. ‘Fine – I’ll take my chances here as well. Now we’re only short one unit. Anyone up for drawing straws?’

‘I’ll remain here,’ June said, with an easy little shrug, as if nothing much was at stake. ‘Now we’re good. Nine suits, nine happy campers.’

‘Nine what?’ Chiku asked.

‘You can’t stay here,’ said the woman who had asked about Imris. ‘Not after you made such a big song and dance about how important it is for us to use the suits.’

‘I still think the best odds involve going outside,’ June said, with magnificent equanimity. ‘However, it’s your decision, not mine. I choose to sacrifice my position. I’m three hundred and three years old – at this point, every breath’s a blessing.’

‘I don’t believe you. This is some kind of—’

‘Trick? Yes, I’ve tricked you into an increased chance of survival – how utterly, utterly thoughtless and reprehensible of me. Look, we’re probably down to six minutes by now, maybe less. Do you really want to waste more of them arguing the finer points of personal morality?’

‘This isn’t right,’ Chiku said. ‘We need you… I need you. I came here to find you. We can’t just leave you here.’

‘Chiku, will you come here for a moment? The rest of you – decide among yourselves who’s staying and who isn’t, but make it snappy.’

Chiku was breathing hard. She wanted to be outside now, getting as far away as possible from this place. She couldn’t imagine herself making June’s awesome abdication. ‘It might not be too bad—’ she started saying.

‘We’ll know soon enough. Regardless, you need to listen to me very carefully. I’m glad you came to Venus, and that you told me about Eunice and the Tantors. But now we have a problem.’

‘Yes,’ Chiku said, looking at the ceiling, imagining the gondola dropping down on them like a million-tonne chandelier. Sliding down through the clouds of Venus, gathering speed by the second.

‘A much bigger problem than this little debacle,’ June said sternly. ‘The thing you were about to mention out there – I’m pretty sure it knows what you’ve learned from your clone-sister. This is Arachne’s doing – she’s protecting herself the only way she can.’

Chiku thought back to her conversations on the holoship, to Eunice’s dark conviction that an artilect called Arachne had infected her with a wasting virus and pursued her into hiding.

‘Then you know what’s going on.’

‘I know parts of the story, maybe enough to fill in some of the missing pieces. But we don’t have time to swap anecdotes now. You must survive this, Chiku, then make contact with Imris. It shouldn’t be too difficult – he’ll be looking for us, one way or another. And when you see him, you give him a message from me.’

‘What message?’

‘A code. Pleistocene, grapefruit, rococo. Can you remember those three words? Pleistocene, grapefruit, rococo.’

Chiki repeated the words. ‘What do they mean?’

‘Authorisation.’ She held up a finger before Chiku could interrupt. ‘Imris will understand. Then tell him that you must make contact with Arethusa, and Imris will take care of the rest. You can trust her implicitly, tell her everything you know about this business. But be careful, Chiku – more careful than you’ve ever been in your life.’

‘What about Crucible?’

‘Crucible is a lie. What we think is there… it’s not the truth, or at least not all of it. The data arriving from that world is false. Whatever Zanzibar and the other holoships think they’re going to find when they arrive… it isn’t real.’

Chiku shook her head. ‘You can’t know this for certain. And if it’s true, why haven’t you told anyone?’

‘To know that something is a lie… that’s not enough. I needed to find the truth Arachne has concealed behind the lie, whatever it might be. That’s what I’ve been doing all these years – patiently, quietly, beneath the radar of her scrutiny. Obviously, I’ve been managing fairly well until now. But it’s not your fault. I always guessed she’d find me eventually.’

‘This is too much. I can’t just leave you here, knowing all this.’

‘You can and you will. And perhaps I’ll survive. But those three words, Chiku – don’t forget them.’

Chiku swallowed. ‘Pleistocene, grapefruit, rococo.’

‘Very good. Now run along and get into your suit. There can’t be much time left now.’

‘I’m sorry, June.’

‘Don’t be. I’m extremely glad we finally met. Now go.’

Chiku nodded, took June’s hands in hers for a moment, then returned to the suiting area. Her head was ringing with the implications of what she had just been told. But there was no time right now to think any of it through, not until they were safe.

The others had agreed to draw lots for the suits. Someone had fetched nine coffee stirrers from one of the concessions, of which three had been shortened to represent the defective suits. Chiku drew her stirrer and ended up with one of the good suits. Pedro chose one of the compromised units, an arrangement he accepted with cheery indifference. There was no arguing, no swapping of suits. They had all agreed to accept the verdict of the draw.

June and the two other stay-behinds helped with the final phase of suiting. Chiku and Pedro were among the last to leave. June gave Chiku’s suited arm an encouraging pat, sending her toward the airlock. They were running an emergency protocol this time, flooding the lock with Venus atmosphere instantly without first withdrawing the breathable air. They were finally on their way up and out, into the dismal brightness of high noon on Venus.

The technicians knew the prevailing winds and estimated that the gondola would fall somewhere along a forty-kilometre track dictated by the wind vector. So they steered the rovers away from the vector, driving hard, maintaining a straight line as well as the terrain permitted. By now Chiku had lost all sense of how much time was likely remaining, whether they had seconds or minutes. She glanced back and saw that the tether was still angling away from the top of the anchorpoint at forty-five degrees to vertical, maybe fifty. That was good, she told herself. It was an arrow pointing through the clouds, telling them where the gondola had to be. They were already well out of danger, provided the winds held. Even June ought to be safe, if the gondola fell as far downwind as it appeared to be heading.

Then the angle of the tether increased, fifty, five-five degrees, as fast as the second-hand on a watch. Chiku watched it with mesmerised fascination. If the tether was tens of kilometres long, then the object at the end of it was now falling a lot faster than before – not just descending, but plummeting. Something catastrophic must have happened to the gondola, the final failure of its balloons, or perhaps the collapse of the entire structure in the inexorable iron crush of the atmosphere. Or perhaps the tether had simply snapped and was now lashing down under its own weight, while the winds tore the gondola even further away.

A moment later, the tether appeared to vanish, as if it had been ripped free from the ground. It was an illusion. The tether was still plugged into the anchorpoint, but it had whipcracked, blurring like a plucked guitar string, and the energy contained in the tether now had nowhere to go but back into the anchorpoint.

The end ripped free. The tether was gone. Chiku watched nuggets of metal and carbon and concrete smear the sky. And then something as horrible as it was transient – a thing like a whirlpool, carved out of air, corkscrewing in the sky above the anchorpoint. It was glass-edged, betrayed by its own turbulence. It lived for a second, maybe two, then snapped out of existence. Venus, reclaiming the little pocket of Earth the humans had dug into its crust.

It was June dying.

A moment later, Chiku felt an impact shudder through the rover’s floor – the seismic record of the gondola ramming down, the heaviest thing to hit Venus in recorded history. The crust here was a thin scurf of rock over restless oceans of magma. It tremored, wobbled, the roiling magma beneath it poised to burst through at any moment. Across the planet’s single tectonic plate, measuring devices spiked alarmingly. Nothing like this had been registered in decades.

Gradually the ground vibrations abated and Venus returned to stillness. No magma had broken through anywhere near them. The air above the anchorpoint had quietened, the tether lying slack on the ground. Chiku did not want to think about what it had been like for June and the others. Quick, she hoped. But sooner or later, rescuers would need to send suits or robots into the remains of the anchorpoint to extract the dead.

Chiku, Pedro and the seven other survivors were barely out of harm’s way themselves. The rovers had carried them ten kilometres from the anchorpoint along another bulldozed trail before emergency advisories told them that rescue was on the way. People and machines were travelling to them overland from surface settlements, but the nearest of those were more than eight hundred kilometres away. At the same time, hardened shuttles were preparing to drop suited rescuers and proxies nearer to the disaster site. The closest gondolas were sending assistance down their tethers, but again, the overland distances between their anchorpoints and the survivors were as immense and incomprehensible as the gaps between galaxies. The odds were against them surviving until help reached them.

But it transpired that a different sort of help was on its way. Providers had been tasked with a construction project only a couple of hundred kilometres from the anchorpoint and the huge armoured robots were approaching in seven-league strides.

Chiku thought of the Providers she had seen on Earth, like the pair supervising the renewal of the bridge over the Tagus. Machines so huge and slow that sometimes they became part of the landscape, a background feature the eye edited out. There were thousands of them on Earth, assisting with the most arduous projects – new cities, aqueducts, roads and spaceports. Tens of thousands more were spread throughout the solar system – machines big enough to move mountains, almost literally.

And they were on Crucible, too, she reflected. As soon as their seed packages reached the ground, they had erupted from them like a busy silver putrescence. The putrescence organised itself into rudimentary machinery, and the machinery gorged on matter and fashioned bigger and more complicated versions of itself. So the process continued until giants strode the new Earth. These juggernauts had begun to tame Crucible, laying the foundations for new cities and towns. They had initiated remote study of the Mandala object, transmitting better images than could ever be obtained across interstellar distances. The robots’ mission was to observe and record. Detailed scans and physical examination of the Mandala would be left to the humans.

Chiku had seen the images herself. She had sat with Ndege and Mposi, explaining these distant wonders. She had chinged into simulations of the Mandala rendered with microscopic fussiness. She had strolled the open boulevards and plazas of the coming cities. She had marvelled at a world in waiting.

But June Wing had just told her that this brave new world was a lie.

Eight of them made it; one did not.

By some fluke, it turned out not to be one of the three problematic suits that eventually developed a fault, but one of the six that were supposedly good to go. Or perhaps, in the haste of evacuation, there had been some mix-up. Either way, eight hours out from the anchorpoint, a fault developed in the cooling system of one of the passengers’ suits. It began with a warning, recommending that he seek immediate assistance, but soon after the fault developed into a total refrigeration systems failure. The Providers were close, but not close enough, and the other rescuers were still hours away.

The party gathered around the unfortunate man, arguing over the best solution. One of the two technicians believed it was possible to connect the cooling systems of two suits together, but she was not sure of the procedure. The other reckoned that would be too risky anyway, when they were already in an emergency situation. The man started panicking, some flight-or-fight reflex kicking in, making him anxious to leave the rover. The others did their best to restrain him. The rovers trundled on, the route becoming increasingly ill-defined. Remote technicians chinged in from orbit, co-opting the other survivors’ suits as they struggled to repair the compromised unit. But there was nothing to be done. Locking the man out of the communications channel, the others debated how best to ease his suffering. Perhaps it would be better to die quickly, like June and the other two who had stayed behind probably had. They could damage his suit further, make it fail more quickly. But when they brought the man back into the conversation, he sensed the drift of their intentions and protested vigorously.

The Providers were still not close enough. The man was starting to make noises that would haunt Chiku for the rest of her days.

A neuropractor chinged in from orbit. He did not need to co-opt any of their bodies since he was not going to be making any physical interventions. They saw him as a figment, dressed in an electric-white surgical smock, a pleasant young man with Polynesian features. He used a private channel to reach into the distressed man’s head and adjusted some of his neural parameters. ‘He will die,’ the neuropractor explained to the others when he had finished his work. ‘There’s nothing I can do to prevent that. But I’ve blocked pain and anxiety, and given him the option to ching out of this situation.’

Normally this kind of deep-level intervention could only be authorised by the subject. Occasionally, sensing distress, the Mechanism itself could act to alleviate the worst suffering as it would to prevent criminality, violence and accidental misfortune. But the Mechanism’s interventions were seldom administered with a particular individual’s needs in mind. The neuropractor had never encountered this man before, but he was another human being, attempting to do the dying man a kindness, and this mattered.

‘He’s gone,’ the neuropractor announced. Then, sensing that his words might be misunderstood, added: ‘I mean, he’s chinged out of his body. He’s still alive, just not aware of his surroundings any more.’

‘Do you know where he’s gone?’ Chiku asked.

‘I could resolve the bind, but that would be an invasion of privacy I’m not comfortable with. I’m monitoring brain function, and he’s not in any pain or emotional distress now. Wherever he is, he won’t be there long.’ The neuropractor clasped his hands and bowed. ‘I’m sorry I could not do more for him. May I wish you all the best of luck with your rescue?’ Then the figment vanished.

Soon the man was dead, boiled alive in his ailing suit. Chiku hoped the neuropractor had not lied to them just to ease their own discomfort.

They carried on, winding through the highlands under clouds of bile and ash, until the Providers came. Visibility by then was low enough that they did not see the machines until they were almost underneath them. Suddenly they loomed out of the poisonous mist, striding on legs as thick as redwoods. The Providers Chiku watched in Lisbon had looked spindly and mantis-like from a distance. Up close they were huge and powerful, shaking the ground with each stomp of their feet. Only when the mist thinned could Chiku see the Providers in their entirety. Their bodies loomed high above, keeled over like galleons. Their heads were tiny, swivelling, anvil-shaped sensor arrays, and their bodies bristled with articulated limbs, cranelike appendages and swaying segmented tentacles. They communicated their proximity with foghorn blasts, like some bellowing saurian language.

In their tentacles they carried the pressure modules they had brought from the construction site. Up in the air they looked the size of beer cans, but when they thumped onto the ground, they were larger than any of the rovers. The modules were powered up, airlocks ready to cycle. Each lock could only accommodate one person at a time, so those with the damaged or compromised suits were the first to cycle, Pedro going ahead of Chiku. But at last they were all inside, out of their armour, breathing clean, cool air.

‘I thought they might try to kill us,’ Chiku whispered, squeezed into one corner, holding hands with Pedro.

‘Who?’

‘Them,’ she said, not daring to say their name aloud. ‘The machines.’

‘They’ve never hurt a fly.’ But he must have seen something in her face. ‘What did June say, back there? What did she tell you?’