On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Sooner or later it would have occurred to Chiku. Communications from Zanzibar must surely have continued until some point in their journey. Perhaps it had been only days after departure, or perhaps it been years. But what was certain was that the incoming transmissions would all have been buffered and stored in Icebreaker’s memories, until the moment when the transmissions were curtailed.

It did not take long to find them. They were in time-sequenced order, beginning from the departure. For a few months, the transmissions were continuous – an uninterrupted umbilical uplink, connecting Icebreaker back to her mother vessel. This stream consisted not merely of signals of direct relevance to the lander, but the full torrent of the ho-loship’s newsfeeds, as well as those it relayed from elsewhere in the caravan, including updates from Earth and the solar system. Later, though, the transmissions stopped being continuous and the data content dropped precipitously. Weeks might go by without a signal, then there might be two or three transmissions in close succession. Then more weeks of silence. Weeks and months, sometimes. Longer than that, as Chiku skipped forward via the time-tags. She had not yet begun to pick through the detailed contents of any of the messages. But she could already tell that a large number were headed as originating from Noah.

That changed, as time went by.

Her impulse was to jump to the final transmission, which had arrived more than two years ago, but she resisted and went right back to the start. The early transmissions were rich enough with data to allow full immersive ching. She returned to Zanzibar, walked its parks and avenues to see things for herself. She gently interrogated her fellow citizens, and although her interactions were merely the ching’s best guesses as to how similar encounters might have played out in real-time, the encounters were more than sufficient to give her a feel for the atmosphere aboard the holoship.

During the month following their departure, ships had continued to arrive from the local caravan, bringing huge numbers of incomers. Many of them were constables, redeployed from their duties elsewhere, along with an increasing number of political agents: the observers and bureaucrats of the new regime, tiers of functionaries, supervisors and analysts. Even while normal Assembly business continued, the newcomers began to manoeuvre themselves into positions of influence. Rules and ordinances were redrafted, and the citizens – her citizens – chafed against stifling new restrictions. Movements between holo-ships were now tightly regulated, dividing families and friends. There were even some constraints on movement within Zanzibar – access to the transit pods was now under direct government control. Families were relocated to better utilise Zanzibar’s community cores, and other holoships, bulging under population pressure, were sending citizens into Zanzibar. The integration of these newcomers inevitably caused friction. Chiku decided that the relocations were not really about population management, but rather aimed to erode whatever social cohesion had existed within Zanzibar before Icebreaker’s departure. Chiku bore the newcomers no ill will – they were pawns in a much bigger game.

Noah’s private communications confirmed her suspicions, as they walked together in Anticipation Park.

‘I know you won’t access any of this until you wake,’ he told her, ‘but recounting the events as they happen helps me to get my thoughts in order. Is that ridiculous?’

‘I’d do the same thing,’ she told Noah’s figment, this bloodless but plausible notion of how Noah might interact with her.

‘Things are moving much faster than any of us anticipated – they keep sending more constables, as if there’s a limitless supply of them. Our airlocks have never been busier. Pretty good rehearsal for Crucible, I guess.’

She asked about Ndege and Mposi.

‘They’re all right,’ Noah said, after giving the question due consideration. ‘The first few weeks were very hard on them, but a month’s a very long time in their world.’

She skipped that same span of time and toured her world again. As she wandered the cores, bodyless, Zanzibar felt strangely hollow, as if it had already shed its burden of humanity. The public spaces were mostly empty, and there was a kind of prevailing twilight gloom, as if the skies had been dimmed. She realised with a jolt that this was exactly what had happened. The external powers had declared some kind of curfew, apparently in response to an act of public disobedience against the new constables.

She met Noah at the Assembly. Technically, he was still a functioning member of Zanzibar’s government, but its decision-making powers had been all but eliminated, he told her, and worse was to come. There were prosecutors at large who were trying to identify those members of the Assembly with direct knowledge of Icebreaker. A number of preliminary hearings had already been held, and Noah had been called to testify on two occasions regarding fellow members. It was only a matter of time before they turned their attention to him personally.

‘There’s talk of execution,’ he said.

She shuddered. ‘We didn’t execute Travertine, and ve killed two hundred people!’

‘They want to make an example the rest of the caravan can’t ignore.’

‘It can’t come to executions, Noah – we agreed to submit to a peaceful takeover, not a fucking bloodbath. We’re a democratic society! There hasn’t even been a single murder during the entire voyage, and we’ve managed that without the Mechanism mothering us into submission!’

‘I’m sorry,’ Noah offered, as if she was holding him personally accountable.

She had not been able to ching into Chamber Thirty-Seven. ‘Have you spoken to… ?’ she began.

‘Yes – once. But it’s very difficult now – my movements are monitored constantly, and I can’t risk someone backtracking the ching bind. Even speaking about it in these messages—’

‘I’m not blaming you for any of this,’ she said. ‘Please never think that. I just want you to be safe, and to do everything you can for our children.’

She asked him what he knew regarding efforts to scale up the PCP engine, but that taxed the immersive simulation to its limits and Noah could not offer anything concrete. But Chiku thought it likely that someone, somewhere, would be trying to build on Travertine’s work, perhaps even aboard the very holoships currently imposing the tough new regime on Zanzibar. The new engine was tactically decisive technology, whether it was used for slowdown or not. Absurd that it had come to this, after all: strategic balances, superpowers, super-weapons, as if history was a kind of machine with only a limited number of permutations. At one time, she had dared to believe that history could break free of its patterns. Nature was not hidebound, tied into endless, dull reiteration. It produced marvels and monsters with equal fecundity. So why did people have so much trouble breaking free of old patterns?

She was about to skip ahead when Travertine tapped her out of the ching bind.

‘They’re awake.’

Chiku summoned them all to the cockpit. She nodded at Namboze and Guochang, fresh out of skipover. They were clutching squeeze-bulbs, both of them looking as if they had been repeatedly slapped in the face, like drunkards or hysterics. Gonithi Namboze had also spent time in skipover since the Kappa incident, and she was still essentially the same person Chiku had known back then: an extremely thin woman with long fingernails and complexly braided hair. Guochang, whom she knew less well, was a squat, muscular man with the core body strength of a Cossack.

‘I understand if you want to punish me,’ Chiku said, ‘but could you wait until we’ve completed our mission?’

‘If,’ Namboze said, drawing a nod from Guochang.

‘I know,’ Chiku said. ‘I won’t downplay the danger – I’ve got too much respect for the pair of you. But it’s not a suicide mission. Guochang: we must make contact with the Providers, and establish a negotiating position. Something, anything. You know them as well as anyone. Namboze: there’s a planet down there that we might end up having to live on, if we’re lucky, but not in the way most of us were expecting. We’ll likely be starting from scratch, with the tools and materials we bring from space. You’ve spent most of your life studying the adaptations and measures we’ll need to make a living on Crucible. Now your insights are going to matter more than ever.’

Eventually she said: ‘Those black things. What if they don’t want us there?’

‘We don’t know what they do or don’t want – if anything,’ Chiku answered. ‘Maybe all they do is observe. Witness. They may not care. It’s the Providers that are our concern. But we must find a solution, a way that benefits us all – machine and human.’

Namboze sneered. ‘A truce with machines, after they’ve lied to us? We should be destroying them, not negotiating with them!’

‘We don’t know their strengths or capabilities,’ Travertine said. ‘If we had the full caravan behind us, we might stand a chance in a fight. But we’re a single ship, almost powerless. We have to negotiate.’

‘With what?’ Namboze asked.

‘Our best intentions?’ Chiku said. ‘Good will? We’re almost certainly dealing with artilect-level cognition – machines, or an assemblage of machines, with a collective intelligence equalling or exceeding our own. I’ve met one, and we can’t assume we’ll have mental and military superiority on our side.’

‘I’d like access to Icebreaker’s communications systems,’ Guochang said. ‘There are some channels you may not have tried – command-level paths, that kind of thing.’

‘Good start,’ Chiku said.

‘It’ll give me something to take my mind off everything else. May I?’

‘Yes, but keep one antenna sweeping behind us for signals from the caravan. Namboze: the closer we get, the better our view of the surface conditions. I want you to start updating the maps. I want to know immediately if you find any significant points of deviation between the data in our files and the real Crucible. And if you find any sign of Provider activity on the surface or in space, bring it to our immediate attention.’

‘Are we taking orders from you now?’ Namboze asked.

‘No,’ Travertine said. ‘We’re dividing responsibility.’

Namboze turned her attention to the physicist. ‘What about you? I thought you were supposed to be dying, rotting like a corpse. I thought that was supposed to be your punishment for nearly killing us all.’

‘Travertine’s sentence was formally commuted,’ Chiku said. ‘Ve broke our laws, it’s true. But Travertine’s paid a steep price for that. We also owe ver a debt of gratitude for the risks ve took. If by some miracle any of us ever set foot on Crucible, we’ll have Travertine to thank.’

‘I wouldn’t start planning any monuments to me just yet,’ Travertine said.

Chiku was also glad to have something to take her mind off things, but she could not say for sure which was the more unpleasant source of anxiety: the news from home, or their immediate prospects on Crucible. On one hand, while Noah’s reports spoke of a steady deterioration in the conditions on Zanzibar, and she was worried for Ndege, Mposi and Noah because of that, the fact was that the news was old. She could not change the past, and she was basically engaged in the excavation of history. She could treat Noah’s reportage as a kind of fiction, a narrative in which she had only theoretical involvement. This was in contrast to the alien things, which – although they had done nothing as yet to provoke this fear – might reach out and annihilate the little ship without warning.

She decided, for the sake of her sanity, not to choose between the two, or dwell on one to the exclusion of the other. When her immersion in Zanzibar’s woes threatened to overwhelm her, it was almost a relief to snap back to the present, where her fate rested on the whims of machines, in a place where politics and human frailty had no traction. There was nothing to second-guess here and no one to worry about but herself. It was as clean and ethically neutral as a game of chess.

Some instinct compelled her not to take Icebreaker across the path of any of the spokes of blue light, as if breaking or interrupting that flow of photons would be like stepping on a dry twig – a crass announcement of their presence. Travertine was confident that the light would not harm the ship, but agreed with Chiku’s decision to err on the side of caution.

‘Of course, on one level,’ Chiku said, ‘I’d like to see some sign that those things know we’re here. Perhaps then they wouldn’t be so enigmatic, floating there like Easter Island statues.’

‘On the other hand, you wouldn’t want to piss them off.’

Against her mood, Chiku forced herself to laugh. ‘Arethusa had this theory that the blue light carries a signal, something that worked its way into Ocular – it might even have turned Arachne into the thing she became. A set of instructions, perhaps, in mutually comprehensible machine-code, that told her to hide herself and the real Crucible data from her organic masters.’

‘A machine telling another machine to conceal its existence? Artificial intelligences whispering to each other across interstellar space, carrying on a conversation we humans can’t intercept or understand?’

‘Frightening, isn’t it?’

‘That’s one word for it.’

It was one thing to know that the pine cones were a thousand kilometres from end to end, but quite another to be approaching such a thing, appreciating its size at first hand. She thought of Hyperion, the riddled little moon tumbling around Saturn – Hyperion with its tunnels and vaults, it endless worming galleries, festering with artists and anarchists. Chiku Yellow and her friends had flown Gulliver into that moon. But Hyperion was a third as large as one of these alien objects, and besides, these were demonstrably made things, matter shaped and organised by vast cool intelligence. They must have come here, too, so they could move, and that was almost harder to take than the mere existence of these objects. Nothing this huge should be capable of movement, let alone across interstellar space. It was an affront to natural order.

The orbital insertion brought them no closer than five hundred kilometres to the nearest object, but that was quite close enough for Chiku’s nerves. Although the objects were circling Crucible, technically they were not in orbit: their motion was resolutely non-Keplerian. For the height at which they sat, they should have been moving about twice as fast as they were. Another slap to human hubris, Chiku thought, as if gravity was a law the alien objects had quietly decided to ignore. They did not even register a mass that Icebreaker’s sensors were capable of detecting, for all that they must have contained billions of tonnes of matter. And so they hovered, and wheeled in slow formation, their spokes cutting across the ecliptic and lighthousing into space. She thought of all the stars, all the worlds the light of those spokes would eventually graze. This simple arc across the sky must still have encompassed thousands of suns in this little corner of the spiral arm alone. She wondered about the other civilisations, human and artilect, that had fallen under the sweep of the spokes.

She shuddered at the magnitude of the endeavour, whatever it might hope to achieve.

The pine cones were so named because of their shape, and also because of their many overlapping plates, which were organised according to elegant and simple growth patterns. The smallest of the plates, where the pine cones tapered to a point – the end nearest Crucible – were only kilometres across, no wider than the average iceberg. The largest of them, up near the fatter end, were nearly a hundred kilometres across and tens of kilometres thick. They were all perfectly black, impervious to Icebreaker’s passive and active sensor systems. They fitted together ingeniously, but there were also gaps between the overlapping layers through which hints of deeper structure were visible: blue mysteries of internal machinery, glimpsed in frustrating haziness as if some blurring medium were interposed between the machinery and Icebreaker. Radiation spilled out, smudged across the spectrum and modulated in odd ways, with absorption and emission spikes that did not correspond to known nuclear transitions. The radiation was puzzling, sufficient – Travertine said – to fuel a thousand doctorates, perhaps an entire academic discipline. But no part of it was powerful enough to pose a threat – at least, not in the bands they were capable of registering.

As they fell below the level of the structures, Travertine speculated that the fluxes had risen in consort with their passage – risen, then gradually lowered back down to the level they had shown before. But it was hard to know for sure. They had obtained no good data until they were very close, and since Icebreaker did not have the resources to disperse sensors after itself, this was all they were going to learn for now.

But they had not been destroyed. Chiku was glad of that, of course. But she had been hoping for something concrete, and the rise/fade of the blue glow did not count. What she had wanted, she decided, was for the alien machines to trump the problem of the Providers – to do something, hostile or otherwise, which pushed the Providers into secondary importance. But there had been no such overture, and she could not help but feel a twinge of disappointment.

So they fell lower. Thrust bursts modified Icebreaker’s trajectory, further depleting the tiny amount of fuel still available. Once the lander achieved orbit a few hundred kilometres above Crucible’s surface, they would not need fuel to land – they would only maintain altitude if they used the engines to counteract friction – but they had sufficient to land at a suitable touchdown point of their choosing.

Namboze had been busy updating their maps, stitching fresh data over old. The resolution of the new data was not as good as that of the old, but it had the virtue of being true and verifiable. They were not relying on machine eyes now: they could see the landscape for themselves through the windows.

In some respects the news was good. Crucible itself was the world they had expected – the planet’s geology, atmospheric and surface conditions were exactly as promised. Plants had colonised the land, and in their detailed biochemistry had duplicated something that was very close to the terrestrial photosynthetic process. But people had known this long before Ocular’s detailed observations of the surface. Crucible’s atmosphere contained molecular oxygen and methane at volume mixing ratios more than a hundred orders of magnitude greater than thermodynamic equilibrium alone could explain. Furthermore, much of the surface of Crucible was covered by something that very strongly absorbed red light, hinting at the abundant presence of the chlorophyll pigment. If there was one truth that had become clear in four centuries of space exploration, it was that there were precious few inorganic mechanisms that made things look green, and none at all that could paint a whole planet in dazzling emerald.

Life was the sole explanation.

All of this proved to be correct, which was a consolation if not a relief. They could live here, with some careful measures. But they had come expecting towns and cities, harbours and jetties, roads and landing zones, and there was none of that at all. Some hints of possible Provider activity, it was true – regular areas of cleared terrain, reflection signatures that hinted at artificial structures – but all much too small to be of use to waves of migrants. Crucible’s thick, warm, oxygen-rich atmosphere would need some getting used to. It had been intended to live in pressurised facilities, fed by atmosphere scrubbers, while the colonists gradually increased their exposure to Crucible’s native airs – tolerating it first with filtration masks, then in short episodes of direct breathing – and always under close medical supervision, alert for microorganisms or airborne toxins. If it took decades before the citizens could walk unprotected on Crucible, that had always seemed an acceptable part of the bargain – the patient unparcelling of a world-sized gift.

They continued orbiting. Regardless of their specialisation, all of them were fascinated by Mandala. They had seen the Ocular data and strolled the scaled-down reconstructions in the Anticipation Parks. They had skimmed oceans of analysis and speculation, some of it now so old that it had gained dense layers of its own scholarship. But here was the real thing, and it was real – not a fiction, not a distortion. And very bit as astonishing and alien as they had been led to believe. Even with her own eyes, looking down from space, Chiku could not quite process the scale of the artefact. Here was nothing to compare with the thousand kilometre long hovering machines, but this was an entirely different order of intelligent handiwork, fashioned not from machinery floating in vacuum, but branded into the skin of a planet. The complicated, symmetric form of Mandala was familiar to her from countless visualisations – it could have been the groundwork for some grand imperial garden, all mazes and borders and intersecting promenades, except that Mandala was as wide as equatorial Africa, its sharp-edged trenches so broad and deep that they coralled whole weather systems, chiselling clouds into lines and angles. It stretched from one seaboard of a continent to the next, bent around the world’s curvature. When it was night on one edge of Mandala, it was still day on the other. Shadows pushed through its channels and runnels with sudden surging intent. By some mechanism still obscure, the seas flowed in and out of the channels with the tidal phases of Crucible’s two moons, forming a shallow meniscus that altered the channels’ usual reflective albedo. It was possible, but as yet unproven, that parts of Mandala closed off or opened or altered their slope according to the rhythms of the sea. It was also considered likely that Mandala had the capacity to renew itself against the centuries-long assault of weather and planetary geology, maintaining the improbable sharpness of its angles and edges. If it could repair itself, it could also evolve and, perhaps, respond.

Humans would have visited this world sooner or later, but Mandala had elevated the exploration of Crucible to a species-level priority that could not be left to machines. How wonderful it would be, Chiku thought, to walk those iron-sided canyons. She imagined swimming along the flooded channels, or hang-gliding the gusty thermals stirred by the progression and retreat of shadows and water.

There was work there for a thousand lifetimes – work and joy and wonder.

We have to find a way through this, Chiku thought. No matter our difficulties, we cannot let this opportunity slip by.

She had been awake for nearly twenty hours now, Travertine a few hours less. They decided to take turns sleeping, so that they could all be at maximum alertness should something happen. Chiku had never felt less like sleeping in her life, but she concurred with the idea. There was no room for bunks on Icebreaker, so when it was their turn they crawled back into skipover caskets, now padded with blankets and pillows. Chiku had the first rest shift. After three hours of shallow, fitful sleep, she awoke feeling alert but also brittle and itchy.

She crawled to a private corner and continued working through Noah’s transmissions. With every message, a deep foreboding took ever greater hold of her. Again and again she had to fight the impulse to skip forwards in the time sequence. But Noah had gone to a great deal of trouble and personal risk to send these transmissions, and it would have been a disservice not to review them in the order in which they had been sent. Besides, she almost could not bear hearing confirmation of the news she feared.

Three years had passed since her departure and conditions had only worsened on Zanzibar. The imposition of external authority had gone from severe to harsh, and finally become a kind of martial rule with extraordinarily severe penalties for the slightest infractions against the new order. Citizens’ rights had been rescinded. The old Assembly had been almost entirely dismantled, its members dispersed back into the citizenry or subjected to interrogation and trial. Noah had managed to cling on to his freedom for the time being, but he was under increasing scrutiny from Teslenko’s prosecutors and appeared resigned to his eventual detention and trial. It was becoming increasingly problematic to send transmissions to Icebreaker, and Noah had been forced to use ever more byzantine measures to avoid his messages being intercepted and silenced before they ever reached Chiku.

‘I don’t know what’s going to happen here – either with my ability to contact you or the status quo on Zanzibar, but we can’t go on like this indefinitely. It’s almost as if the new regime wants to provoke a violent counter-reaction to justify finally crushing us. There’ve been deaths – actual deaths – caused by violent action.’ He shook his head at the horror of that, and for all that she had witnessed violence herself, she shared his repugnance. Human beings were better than this – or thought themselves to be, anyway.

‘A few of their constables, but mostly our citizens,’ Noah said. ‘It doesn’t take much to set things off now, not with all the new restrictions on movement. The constables would be bad enough by themselves – there’re enough of them – but they’ve also deployed those robots, and we wouldn’t stand a chance in a fight with them even if we thought it was worth a try.’

Chiku had decided, on balance, that she would rather let Noah speak than imbue his figment with the illusion of an interactive persona. So she kept her silence, though she had many questions.

‘A few of us – mostly former Assembly members – are still in some kind of contact,’ he continued, ‘and we’ve debated the idea of resistance. If we could kick them out peacefully, we’d do it, then sever all political and economic ties with the rest of the caravan. At this point we could go it alone. There’d be hardships, of course, but we’re hardly living in the lap of luxury now. And we have Travertine’s blueprints – we could piece a slowdown engine together from the parts of the one we already dismantled without asking the convoy for anything. But there’s no peaceful way to end this, Chiku – they’d cut us down.’

She knew it was true, and she nodded.

‘The worst part of all this, beyond the indignity and the deaths, is that it’s just a front! Some of our top engineers have already been moved to other holoships – people who had direct contact with Travertine’s research. They’re not being taken away to be executed or locked in a cell for the rest of the voyage. They’re being subjected to coercive collaboration, to try to duplicate Travertine’s breakthrough. And I’m not just talking about one clandestine research programmeme here, but several – some of them working independently of each other. Teslenko’s people might not want to land on Crucible any more, but they still want that technology. And they’ll get it, one way or another. Sooner or later, they’ll have stolen so many of our scientific minds that we won’t be able to reproduce Travertine’s engine ourselves!’ Noah’s expression was pained, and he drew his hand from his brow to his chin and tried to soften his worried scowl. ‘I’m sorry – you must have worries of your own. For all our differences, I’d love to be with you now. Mposi and Ndege feel the same way – they’re very proud of you’

‘Thank you,’ Chiku whispered.

‘Immediately after the crackdown, your name was mud on Zanzibar – almost as reviled as Travertine’s! The citizens felt you’d brought this trouble on us. But when the constables started tightening the thumbscrews, the citizens began to appreciate your point of view – that the Pemba Accord had become a noose around our necks. They still don’t know the whole of it, and most of them probably aren’t ready for that yet. But if they did, I suspect you’d shoot even higher in their estimation.’ Noah managed to produce a weary smile, something of his old self to lift her spirits. ‘Well, what else? Your house is still where you left it, and Mposi and Ndege take care of your flowers. They’re doing well in school – or what passes for school in the new regime. They ask after you a lot – Ndege’s always on the public nets, looking for news, and Mposi’s said more than once that he’d like to have gone with you aboard Icebreaker! I’m not sure he really understands what that would entail, but now that you’ve gained a certain notoriety, it’s as if they miss you more than they did immediately after you left. I think they’re very pleased to be Akinyas. And I’m very happy to have known one.’

She skipped to the next message in the time sequence – four years into her expedition.

It was very brief. Noah was sending it from a darkened room, leaning in close to an eye, his face diamonded with sweat. Even in the half-light, he appeared to have aged a decade rather than the year that had passed since the last transmission.

‘I can’t speak for long. The prosecutors came to my home this morning with a delegation of constables. They’re going to arrest me this time – and it won’t be some quick detention and slap-around to put me in my place. They’re organising a whole new series of trials, to be held before the full Council. I wasn’t home when they came and my friends gave them the run-around long enough for me to get here. But they’ll find me soon enough, and then I don’t know what will happen.’ He took a deep breath – he sounded as if he had been running flat out. ‘Mposi and Ndege are with Sou-Chun Lo now. I know she’ll look after them, whatever happens to me.’ Anticipating her doubts, he added: ‘Sou-Chun’s always been our friend, and she’s been good to the children since you left us. Please don’t think ill of her – or of me for placing my trust in her.’

The message ended abruptly – no sign-off, no expression of his concern for her well-being. Perhaps he was simply being pragmatic – if she could read the transmission, then she was still alive.

Heart in her throat, she skipped to the next communication. More than eighteen months had elapsed since Noah’s last communication – five and half years into the expedition. This time the header informed her that the message had been sent by Mposi.

But there was some mistake, obviously, because the assured young man who presented by figment could not possibly be her son, the boy she had left behind in Zanzibar. Mposi was twenty-three. He had slipped from boy to adult like the passing of day into night.

‘I don’t know if you’ll receive this, or when,’ he said, lifting his chin the way she had seen him do a thousand times when he was about to say something she was not going to like. ‘I wish you didn’t have to find out this way, but you need to know. They’ve killed our father. There was a trial, which didn’t go well for him, then a series of public executions of the men and women implicated in breaking the Pemba Accord.’ He took a moment to compose himself, squaring that proud jaw again – it was cleft, she noticed, just like Noah’s. ‘It was painless – they didn’t make Father suffer… not at the moment of his execution, anyway. And he bore it well, in the end – with great courage and self-control. His last public words, before they took him to Anticipation Park, were that we shouldn’t turn against the new authority – that there should be no more deaths, no more bloodshed…’ Mposi fell silent, but she sensed he still had something more to say. ‘You might be thinking that Ndege and I hold you accountable for this. It’s true that we were angry, to begin with. Perhaps we still are, in some ways. But what they did to Father wasn’t your fault – he made us understand that. You only did what was necessary, and we can’t blame you for that. In our own way, we’re proud of what you did, and we hope you’re still out there somewhere, doing good work for the caravan. We hope you’re well. It’d be good to hear from you again, one day.’

There was no way to verify his news, but given the grave tone of his delivery, she did not doubt a word of it. So Noah was gone, the way he always feared it might happen. She had to admit that she was very grateful she had not been present for the public executions. She wondered if they would have forced her to watch her husband die – probably as a prelude to her own execution – or whether they would have kept her away, which would have been equally intolerable.

So here she was, wrenched out of time, hearing this dreadful news from a son she almost had not recognised, a son who could not be sure she would still be alive to hear his words.

She felt herself starting to cry.

‘Chiku,’ said Guochang, ‘you’d best come to the cockpit.’

His interruption felt like an affront, but Guochang sounded every bit as shocked as she felt.

She wiped her eyes and turned towards him.

‘What is it?’

‘Something’s rising from Crucible.’ The stocky roboticist was almost tongue-tied. ‘Multiple launch vehicles, coming straight for us.’