‘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 pl
anet 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.