On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

It was only in the weeks and months that followed that she realised how unhappy she had really been before Nicolas came to visit. The fifteen years since Pedro died had been like swimming in water, surrounded by something so transparent and omnipresent that it offered no point of comparison, no means of getting beyond it to see how it affected her. But after that night in Lisbon, her spirits slowly began to improve. It was not a dramatic transformation, not a landslide or earthquake, but rather a kind of deep tectonic easing that played out over seasons, like the weather. She had always felt bad about dragging Pedro into her affairs, tearing him away from his quiet artisanal work in the studio, as if she was in some way responsible for his death. Which was ridiculous, of course, as Pedro would doubtless have told her. She had barely known what she was getting into herself, and by the time she did, it was much too late to do anything about it.

But she knew now that there had been far more to Pedro than met the eye; that he had secrets of his own, and had welcomed risk into his life long before they met. A master forger. A criminal. The mere thought of it was enough to have her laughing in public. And he was no amateur – he had successfully duped people for decades. Nicolas had told her that, to the best of his knowledge, none of their forgeries had yet been exposed. It was what got him out of bed in the morning, he said – checking the newsfeeds, keeping an eye on the fates of all their children, as he called them.

So Pedro had been no innocent, not even when she first met him, and she therefore had no need to blame herself for dragging him into a second adventure. And Nicolas himself told her that whatever guilt she was carrying, she couldn’t allow it to crush her. It was time to let go, and move on.

Nicolas remained a friend. They met once or twice a year, and they did the rounds of the bars, and drank, and spoke of old friends and older times. On one occasion she sensed a diffidence in him, and it transpired that Nicolas was troubled by recent developments concerning one of their forged violins – it had caught the doubting eye of some expert or other and was being subjected to more than the usual battery of tests. But the next time they met, he was back to normal: the violin had vindicated itself, and the hated expert had moved on.

‘One day,’ he said, ‘they will find me. It’s bound to happen.’

While prisons were a thing of the past, Nicolas would not go unpunished if his crimes were discovered, or escape the attentions of Mech neuropractors. Criminal tendencies were supposed to be eradicated during the early stages of brain development.

Chiku pointed out that Nicolas and Pedro’s actions were not the result of antisocial impulses, but Nicolas did not think that argument would hold any water if he was caught.

‘That won’t stop them. They’ll open my head like a puzzle, move bits of it around until they find out what went wrong. Good luck to them!’

If he was truly resigned to eventually being found, his spirits remained undamped. Chiku found him good company, and he had drawn her back out into the world. It was a friendship, not a romance, but she was glad of it.

One day she was struck by an odd impulse to continue her family history. She dug out the old book, stroked its marbled covers, gazed at her own side-sloping handwriting – as foreign and antique to her now as the inscriptions chiselled on the Rosetta stone. She did not feel like the same Chiku who had written these words. But someone ought to finish what her former self had started. Her funds would expire eventually, but if she could complete the history she might be able to sell it. As if anyone cared about Akinyas these days. But then again, the world was marvellously full of people who cared about odd, irrelevant things, and there was a limitless appetite for the past. She made faltering progress to begin with, but after a while she found a rhythm. The pages began to fill, and soon she fell back into her old and pleasant routine: work in the morning, followed by reflection in the afternoon, in the café at the top of Santa Justa.

Since Pedro’s death, she had maintained much more regular contact with her mother and father. She still did most of the talking with Jitendra, but that was too old a habit to break, and she made the most of Sunday’s renewed ability to engage in ordinary human interactions again. They were both tremendously old, of course, and frail enough that neither was in any rush to risk a visit to Earth. Jitendra could never quite understand why his daughter was so reluctant to come up to see them, when the journey would obviously be much easier for her to make. Every time the subject came up, his response was the same: ‘If it is a question of funds…’

But it was not a matter of funds, and in any case, her parents were by no means wealthy any more. Jitendra had always been a terrible businessman, and while Sunday was off chasing mathematics inside her head, he had maintained a singularly ineffectual grasp on their household finances. They were lucky to be able to afford the upkeep on their home.

But one October, they pooled what they had and came down to Earth for a month. Chiku was shocked when she met them at the terminal – it was as if the ching had been lying to her all those years, making them appear more robust than they really were. The sudden, dreadful clarity made her gasp – her parents were two very old organisms who had done exceedingly well to last as long as they had. They should be studied by teams of biologists, she thought, and introduced to parties of schoolchildren as living history lessons. But while their age and frailty were a concern to Chiku, they were not in any sense remarkable in this old, old world.

They both needed exos to get around. Unlike Jitendra, Sunday had not been born on the Moon, but she had lived there so long that her bones and muscles had fully adapted to Lunar gravity. For the first few days, she also had trouble with Earth’s sunlight, needing sunglasses and parasols even when the day was overcast. And this was only pale, watery Lisbon, not the roasting-hot Africa of her youth. Sunday appeared bewildered, unsure why she had been dragged down into this pointlessly punishing gravity well. Had she done something wrong? Had she offended someone? Would it have killed her daughter to come up to see them instead?

But after the first week, things improved. Jitendra turned down his exo’s support margin and even risked a few steps without it – grinning like a fool and holding his arms out for balance as if he was halfway across Niagara Falls on a tight-rope. ‘Look at me,’ he boomed to anyone willing to listen. ‘I am walking on Planet Earth!’

Sunday also began to settle in. The sunlight stopped bothering her as much and at last she was able to eat the local cuisine without obvious complaint. She shrugged off her resentment and started being happy, as if she had flicked some sort of switch in her brain. The three of them visited all the local sights in Lisbon. They walked the promenades and rode the trams, enjoyed the salt air by the riverside and marvelled at the renovated suspension bridge, a lucid mathematical argument sketched from shore to shore, like a theorem in chrome. They laughed at the seagulls and Chiku told them how she had met Pedro buying ice cream at Belém. In the evenings, they enjoyed wine on her balcony and dined in neighbourhood restaurants. They met Nicolas for lunch in a rambling quarter of the Chiado district.

‘It’s a good place, this,’ Sunday said one evening, perhaps meaning Lisbon, or Europe, maybe even Earth in general. ‘It suits you well. I’m not surprised we’ve had such a hard time tearing you away.’

That was as deep as the conversation went. Sunday alluded to the time she had spent lost inside her mind, but never spoke of it directly. She appeared to regard the whole thing as an isolated episode, a regrettable lapse they could all agree to forget. But it had swallowed years of her life and exacted a draining toll on Jitendra. Chiku tried not to be cross with her mother for making so little of it. Perhaps Jitendra was happier that way, too, colluding in a lie they could both live with.

One squally afternoon, stuck for anything better to do, they visited an art gallery. Jitendra’s exo had developed an intermittent fault that caused it to whine, drawing annoyed glances from the other patrons. In the end, unable to stop giggling, the three of them had to leave the museum. But the paintings had stirred something in Sunday. On the way back to Chiku’s apartment, they bought some cheap student-quality paints, brushes and paper. The next day, Sunday composed two narrow, slot-like pictures of the view from the balcony, executed in poster-bright yellows and blues. It was an effort just to hold the brush steadily, the exo jerking her wrist like a clumsy instructor, but she battled on undaunted.

‘I can’t remember the last time I even thought about art,’ she said. ‘It used to be my life, what I lived for. Not that I was ever any good, but…’

True to her nature, Sunday was dissatisfied with the pictures, but Jitendra could hardly contain his delight that she had picked up a brush again after all that time. They decided that Chiku should keep one of the paintings and that the other would return with them to the Moon. Sunday attempted another painting the following day, but the moment had passed, and this second piece remained uncompleted. But for all her self-deprecation and discontent, even Sunday seemed quietly pleased that she had taken up her art again, even if it was only for a day.

The rest of their stay passed pleasantly enough until the final week, when Sunday caught some local infection, developed a mild fever and began feeling too unwell to do much tourism. Chiku thought nothing of it – Sunday began to rally over the last few days before their departure – but the infection turned out to have taken a dogged hold. Back on the Moon, her health continued to deteriorate over the following weeks. Doctors were called in, options discussed, but there were no easy solutions. Her ancient immune system had fought too many battles, and some of the rejuvenation treatments she had undergone earlier in her life were revealing unintended side-effects many decades later, constraining the range of possible prolongation interventions. She could not be dismantled and remade, as Chiku had in the triplication process. In any case, neither Sunday nor Jitendra had the energy for a drawn-out campaign. She had lived a good and long life, seen and done many things. She would have more of it, gladly, but not at any cost.

Inexorably, the infection worsened, and like an obliging host it quietly opened doors for other illnesses. Sunday Akinya slipped deeper into infirmity, then coma, and finally death. She died peacefully on the Moon, with her husband at her side, in December 2380. She was a quarter of a thousand years old. Her daughter, Chiku, was there in proxy.

Of course there was a funeral. Chiku hoped it might be on Earth, but various legal and financial factors conspired to determine that she had to be interred on the Moon. A date was settled, and friends and Akinyas began making plans to show their faces.

At first, Chiku decided not to attend in person – it was much too dangerous. She would ching as she had when Sunday was ill. But as the date of the funeral drew closer, something in her snapped. She could not – would not – live like this for ever. Venturing beyond Lisbon entailed risk, but she resolved to accept it – embrace it, even. Let Arachne do with her as she wished, provided no one else got caught up in it.

So she went to the Moon, and attended the funeral, and though her heart was full of sadness and remorse for not keeping in better contact with Jitendra and her mother, she was glad to be there in person. Jitendra was also very pleased that she had finally made the visit, and wise enough not to ask what had prompted her last-minute change of heart.

The funeral came and went, but Arachne never made her presence felt. On Chiku’s last full day, when she finally had some time to herself, she decided to put Arachne to the test. She rented a surface suit and rover and took them as far from civilisation as she could in the allotted time. It was no easy thing, finding a corner of the Moon not yet encompassed by cities and parks, but she did her best to deliberately put herself in a position of vulnerability, inviting Arachne to intervene. ‘Come and get me, then,’ she said to the sky. ‘You’re creative. I’ve seen what you can do – on Venus, in Africa. Either end this now, or get out of my life.’

She wondered how it might happen. But given that Arachne was everywhere, a part of her threaded through every complex, interconnected system devised by humanity, the possibilities were endless. Her suit could malfunction, as could its supposedly fail-safe back-up systems. Some robot cargo drone, skimming low around the Moon for gravitational assistance, might dip a fraction too close to the surface and wipe her out in a soundless flash. Some belligerent, dumb mining machine, buried under Lunar top-soil for centuries, could stir into life and drag her down in its chewing blades. Her rover might develop a will of its own and run her down.

None of this would occur unwitnessed, for there were machine eyes everywhere, sprinkled like glitter. But Arachne also controlled the feeds from those massively distributed surveillance devices, and Chiku’s death could easily go unrecorded, unmemorialised.

But nothing happened.

She returned to the surface lock feeling oddly betrayed, like some millennial cultist crushed that the world had opted not to end. When the lock was almost in sight, she did something exceedingly rash, a final acid test – she attempted to break the seal on her helmet and release the locking mechanism. If Arachne was hovering, waiting for her moment, one simple command would do it. But the suit’s safeguards remained inviolable, and Chiku was unable to kill herself.

‘I made it easy for you,’ she said, as if something out there was still listening.

After that, she had no idea what do with herself. She felt no sense of liberation, because the absence of an intervention from Arachne did not in and of itself prove that the artilect had moved on, or lost interest in her, or not existed in the first place. The Moon might not have been a suitable killing ground. Perhaps Arachne had made splendidly elaborate plans to murder her somewhere else. Whatever the case, though, she could not imagine returning to Lisbon under the old conditions, locking the city around herself like a prison cell. There had been comfort in that, she was forced to admit. It was daunting to think that she might not have to be a prisoner now. The corollary – that she might not have needed to spend fifteen years in the same city – was almost too much to consider.

In truth, she felt just as paralysed as before. Her actions on the Moon had only reinforced her fears. Her routines crumbled, and she ceased work on the family history. Gradually, she confined herself to narrower and narrower orbits of the city – first to a single district, then an evertightening locus of streets. Eventually she could barely persuade herself to leave her apartment. Her worries chased each other along spiralling pathways. Perhaps she had not taunted Arachne enough – should she return to the Moon and try again? Would that set her free or just deepen her uncertainties?

She did not care for this state of being, but she was trapped inside her fears. Her thoughts rattled along on tramlines, travelling the same pointless circuits over and over. A year passed, then five.

And then one day the merman came to her again.