On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER EIGHT

The following day, work took Chiku beyond Zanzibar. She was summoned to accompany a delegation of Assembly members and constables to escort Travertine to the Council of Worlds. She wanted to tell Travertine that this outing had not been her idea, but she could think of no way of saying it that would not sound as if she were shifting the blame onto her colleagues.

They went out in a high-capacity shuttle and made a slow orbit around their own holoship before powering up for deeper space. The breach slid into view: a gash on the holoship’s side that widened to a yawning void. Construction teams hemmed the wound’s edge, defining it with the blue-white blaze of floodlights and the yellow glow of temporary living modules and equipment shacks. Small ships and robots hovered ‘below’ the wound from Chiku’s perspective, holding station with thrust or impact-tethers. More evidence of consolidation and repair was visible through the rupture itself. False stars spangled back from the distant concavity of Kappa’s sky.

Zanzibar was huge, but at a steady half-gee of thrust it diminished rapidly to the size of a pebble. Holoships only felt big when you were inside them, Chiku reflected. Viewed from outside, it was quite absurd to imagine ten million busy lives squeezed into the interstices of that little rock, infiltrating it like some kind of endolithic bacteria.

She had been to Malabar recently, but this time the destination was New Tiamaat. From the outside, it resembled the other holoships. It had the same rocky hide, barnacled with human industry; the same docking ports studding the surface, with wider apertures at the leading and trailing poles. Fat bumble-bee ships and transports congested its airspace. Congregations of drones and suited people flitted around them like tiny golden sparks. There were many people outside Zanzibar at the moment, but only because of the accident. New Tiamaat was always like this. Blisters and domes bulged from the surface as the citizens sought new habitable space. They had slowed their world’s rotation and hollowed out most of its interior.

Chiku did not quite trust the inhabitants of New Tiamaat. They were Panspermians, to begin with, and Panspermians had decidedly odd ideas about lots of things. They had set their holoship on a course for Crucible, but lately there was talk of not making landfall when they arrived. They would continue to live in New Tiamaat, orbiting Crucible. Or they might even carry on into deeper space, having already achieved perfect adaptation to interstellar conditions. They liked it out here, sliding between stars. When the terms of the Pemba Accord were drafted, the people of New Tiamaat had pushed for the strictest legislation. They had no real interest in solving the slowdown problem.

Lacking spin and no longer under thrust, there was no sense of up and down in New Tiamaat. When they demolished their connecting walls, the rubble – a portion of it, anyway – had been fused into fantastic spires and outcroppings, spirals and arcs and buttresses, jutting from the floor, ceiling, walls – projecting into open space, providing the foundation and bedrock for dreamlike sky palaces and aerial citadels. Buildings, towers erupted out in every direction, growing like crystal or coral. Jagged promontories of glass, blocky extrusions of windowed stone, nets and nests, like traps or filters, and frogspawn clumps of pastel spheres. Tiny flying things – citizens of New Tiamaat, air-swimming through the weightless spaces – came and went in all directions. It was an explosion of possibility, an architectural expression of the Pans’ cherished Green Efflorescence.

But in embracing one set of possibilities, another was denied. These structures were as lacy as sugar sculptures. Slowdown – the application of even a hundredth of a gee of thrust – would court disaster. The citizens knew that, of course. They had sanctioned these marvellous palaces and cities in precisely that knowledge.

The Zanzibar delegation was escorted to the core of one of the city complexes. Flute-shaped towers burst in all directions from an anchoring foundation of green-matted rock. Some way inside was spherical courtroom. It was white and bony, like a monstrous hollowed-out skull. Airy light seeped in through cunning ducts and channels. Functionaries and delegates stationed themselves around the incurving walls, clinging to studs and handholds, gargoyling from warty outgrowths.

Chalky struts buttressed a central platform to the walls. Upon the platform, big as a throne and rife with carved ornamentation, was a strap-in chair in which constables and New Tiamaat functionaries secured Travertine. A ring of smaller and less impressive seats than Travertine’s surrounded the platform and accommodated the representatives of the eleven democratic Assemblies of the local caravan, together with the empty chairs that would have been occupied by the Pemba delegation.

The Council of Worlds was brought to session by New Tiamaat’s senior representative, Chair Teslenko. An aquatic born in one of Earth’s seastead communities, the stern Teslenko had long ago forsaken oceans for space. The whiskered, seal-like representative wheezed a lot and his skin needed to be moisturised with oils at regular intervals.

Chiku knew Teslenko well enough. He had never made much secret of his dislike for the way they did things on Zanzibar, with its lax approach to public scrutiny. Travertine would have had to work very hard to find a worse foe.

The preliminary business proceeded rapidly, motes formulated and exchanged as tokens of good intent. Chiku was required to do very little except witness and nod. Travertine’s identity was formally established with evidence offered to prove that ve was who Zanzibar’s delegation claimed ver to be. Travertine disputed neither the delegation’s identification nor their accusation that ve was responsible for what had happened in Kappa.

‘I know what I did, and I’d take the same risks a second time, and a third. Can I go now?’

‘Of course not,’ Teslenko rumbled through his whiskers.

‘It was actually a rhetorical question.’

‘You offered no defence in your earlier account,’ said another of the New Tiamaat delegates. ‘Do you wish to amend your statement?’

‘I’ve said everything that needs to be said.’

‘You display no contrition, no hint of remorse,’ commented Representative Endozo, the Malabar politician Chiku had recently liaised with regarding the matter of elephants.

‘When you permit someone to do something,’ Travertine said, ‘when you secretly want them to do it, contrition’s not required.’

‘Are you saying that this work of yours had tacit approval from Zanzibar’s Assembly?’ enquired one of the delegates from the holoship Cheju, with sharp, sceptical interest. ‘That’s an astonishing claim, Travertine.’

‘And one we refute, absolutely,’ said Utomi, glancing at Chiku and her fellow delegates for support. ‘We most certainly did not authorise this work. Travertine went to great pains to make sure none of us was aware of it. There was no “tacit approval”.’

Chiku spoke up. ‘I know Travertine at least as well as anyone else in this room. We were friends, once – I won’t deny that. Ve certainly has a streak of intellectual vanity a mile wide. I recognise it because I’ve seen it in many of us, myself included. That’s not a crime, and neither is honesty. I believe Travertine states vis position accurately. Ve won’t admit to making a simple blunder because that would be a lie. But I also know this: Travertine would never have done anything unless ve believed it was for the best, for all of us.’

‘This isn’t the time to debate the Pemba Accord,’ Teslenko said, to murmurs of agreement from around the chamber.

Chiku forged on. ‘But we can’t discuss Travertine’s actions as if they occurred in a vacuum. Time and again, good people have attempted to use legitimate political channels to challenge the Accord. Time and again, they’ve been rebuffed. But Travertine’s conscience wouldn’t let ver just stand by and do nothing.’

‘Are you trying to justify what happened?’ Endozo asked.

Chiku shook her head forcefully. ‘Travertine’s actions were wrong – but that doesn’t make them inhuman.’

Teslenko turned to face Chair Utomi. ‘No one has offered a plausible defence of Travertine’s actions. Under your internal system of governance, what would be the appropriate response?’

Of course, Teslenko knew exactly the range of penalties available in Zanzibar, and the limits of their severity.

‘We have no death penalty,’ Utomi said.

‘Regardless, Travertine’s crime must be among the worst you’ve faced,’ Teslenko said.

‘Ve didn’t set out to commit murder,’ Utomi answered.

‘And you have no form of punishment more severe than incarceration, yet less severe than execution?’ Teslenko asked.

‘You know we do,’ Utomi said, ‘but it’s one we’re disinclined to use. Historically, it’s only ever been a tool of absolute last resort. It has come to acquire a stigma worse than execution itself.’

Teslenko settled his gaze on Travertine. His eyes were liquid, dark, like black gems pushed into the mottled clay of his face. ‘You are aware of this punishment – the denial of prolongation?’

‘Of course,’ Travertine replied.

‘And would you not regard it as a kindness, if the alternative were execution?’ Teslenko asked.

‘The alternative isn’t execution,’ Chiku protested, in as firm a tone as she dared. ‘It’s house arrest, or a hundred other disciplinary measures.’

‘Under Zanzibar law, perhaps,’ Teslenko said. ‘But this is a Council matter, and we have a range of options open to us. If Zanzibar exercises responsible judgement, the Council will have no need to impose a sentence of execution. The Council would also be inclined to adopt a sympathetic position with regard to any further sanctions, such as the imposition of external administration. And Travertine’s… condition would serve as a continued reminder to those who might contemplate challenging the Pemba Accord in the future.’

Chiku saw it then, with acid clarity. There would be the illusion of debate, a façade of procedural give and take. But Travertine’s fate was already determined. Zanzibar would snatch at this chance to close the whole sorry business at the earliest opportunity. No escalation to higher levels of justice, no reprisals, no threat of takeover by another holoship.

‘The decision need not be made immediately,’ Teslenko said. ‘Shall we say… three days?’

Three seconds would have been enough, Chiku thought.