‘So you didn’t have the luxury of being able to weigh all the options,’ Travertine said, ‘or consider all the ethical ramifications.’ Ve paused for a beat. ‘Doctor Aziba – would you mind taking your foot off my friend?’
‘She was our leader on Zanzibar,’ the physician said, steadfastly keeping his foot exactly where it was, ‘but she resigned. And yet, ever since our arrival in this system she’s continued to act as if she has the mandate of leadership! Perhaps some good can come out of this travesty. It gives us the chance we needed to reassess our chain of command!’
‘I did ask you nicely,’ Travertine said.
In the instant of the action, it looked to Chiku as if Travertine had misjudged the swing of vis punch. Unsurprising given that ve had probably never initiated a violent act against another person in vis entire life.
But Travertine’s aim was truer than it looked. Ve had swung with vis right arm, and while Travertine’s fist failed to connect with Aziba’s jaw, vis bracelet did not. Chiku winced at the sound of the impact.
Dr Aziba dropped instantly, clattering into three of the cases. He landed on his back, spreadeagled, one leg hooked over a case, and remained perfectly still.
Relieved of the pressure of the physician’s foot, Chiku pushed herself to standing. She wondered if Dr Aziba might be dead, murdered by a single punch. But Travertine had other, more immediate concerns. Namboze was still digging through one of the medical supply cases, tossing hypodermics and vials aside to form a happy little jumble of different colours, like the contents of a box of crayons. Travertine stomped down hard on the lid, crushing it onto Namboze’s fingers. She yelped, hissed and toppled back onto her haunches, her hand still stuck in the box.
‘What are you looking for?’ Travertine asked. ‘Something to knock Chiku out? Something to put her into a coma?’
‘Surely you can’t be defending her!’ Namboze snarled. ‘She’s done bad things to all of us, but she did the worst to you! She turned you into a monster that children have nightmares about! How can you possibly side with her?’
‘I’m not siding with anyone – I don’t do “siding”.’ But the angry Namboze was not the focus of Travertine’s attention. Ve knelt by the unmoving physician and peeled back his eyelids.
‘Is he dead?’ Chiku asked.
‘Just out cold – I think. He’s the doctor.’
‘You hit him pretty hard.’
‘It felt like the proportionate response under the circumstances.’ Travertine rubbed at vis forearm, squeezing the muscles with a sort of surprised admiration.
Chiku pinched the bridge of her nose and screwed up her eyes. She had a dreadful hammer-pounding-anvil headache. ‘I thought we were better than this.’
‘We’re human. Be thankful we’ve moved on from clubbing each other’s brains out every five minutes.’
Namboze had extricated her hand from the medical case. She tested her fingers one by one. Lines of fury notched her forehead, so neat and regular they might have been scribed into place. ‘This isn’t right.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Travertine agreed. ‘It’s massively wrong, all of it. It’s wrong that we’re hostages of an artificial intelligence, wrong that Guochang is dead, wrong that there are twenty-two mysterious alien machines hovering over us right now, wrong that Chiku was put in a position where she had to make that sick abomination of a decision. And yes, it was wrong of her to take it! But she had three hundred fucking seconds, Namboze. Can you honestly say you’d have done any better? Can any of us?’
Dr Aziba murmured something that shaped itself into a powerful groan as he came around. He reached up to examine the area of his jaw where Travertine’s impact had already begun to draw a vivid purplish discolouration.
‘What just happened?’
‘Democracy,’ Travertine said. ‘Now can we please get on with the day? We have a long walk ahead of us.’
Namboze, still massaging her bruised fingers, knelt down next to the physician.
‘Do it your way, then, Travertine. We’ll move out in two parties. Aziba and I can travel alone.’
‘No,’ Chiku said. ‘We do this together or not at all. You’re right to be angry with me. Travertine said it best: it’s all wrong, all of it. I don’t regret my decision – what would be the point? But she should never have let me make it, and I shouldn’t have allowed her to convince me it was for the best. But I did what I did, and now we’re here, and we need each other – even more so now that Guochang’s gone.’
‘I don’t need anything you’ve got left to offer,’ Namboze said, with a dismissive shake of her head.
‘Think about it rationally for a moment, Gonithi,’ Chiku persisted. ‘We each have a unique skill set. You know the ecology better than the rest of us. Aziba’s the only one who can keep the four of us alive – god alone knows what’ll get into our bloodstreams if we so much as scratch ourselves out there. And Travertine, well . . . ve’s Travertine. We need ver.’
‘And you?’ Doctor Aziba asked. ‘What do you bring to our merry party, exactly?’
‘I’m going to see us through this. There’s a ship on its way. I want to be there when it lands.’
‘That’s all?’ Namboze asked.
‘She gave you your answer,’ Travertine said, stooping to pick up vis backpack.
Another voice said: ‘It’s good that you’re ready. I must inform you, though, that there’s been a development.’
As one they turned to face Arachne. She was standing at the threshold of the long glass corridor as if she had been there the whole time, watching their little kerfuffle.
‘What kept you?’ Travertine asked.
‘I was otherwise occupied. I also sensed that my presence might have been more of a hindrance than a benefit, at least while you worked through your differences.’
‘What could possibly occupy all of you?’ Namboze asked. ‘You’re an artilect – you can be anywhere you wish – in more than one place at the same time, if you like.’
‘Have you noticed,’ Arachne asked, ‘that it’s become much darker than it was only half an hour ago?’
A glance through the glass wall of the tunnel confirmed her words, although the change had come upon them so gradually that Chiku had barely noticed it. Perhaps Travertine had been wrong about it being dawn when the three of them had been brought here, and the sun had only just dipped below the horizon. Perhaps another bombardment had increased the thickness of the dust blanketing the planet.
But Chiku sensed that it was neither of these things.
‘What’s happened now?’
‘It’ll be much easier if you see it for yourselves. We should have a clear view of the sky a little way from here. Are you prepared for exposure to Crucible’s atmosphere?’
‘Came twenty-eight light-years to live in it,’ Travertine said. ‘Might as well start getting used to it.’
Ve reached down for a breather mask and tossed it to Chiku.
They ran through the basic safety tests in five minutes, and then Arachne led them to the flat circular cap at the end of the short corridor. Chiku had assumed it was made of the same glasslike material as the walls, but as Arachne pushed her hand against it, the material neither buckled nor resisted, but permitted her hand to travel through into the air beyond.
‘A containment membrane,’ she said. ‘There would have been interfaces like this at all the city gates, allowing easy passage in and out. I don’t suppose it really matters now if Crucible’s airs and microorganisms infiltrate this space, but we may as well leave it in place and pass through as intended. Follow me. I’ll be waiting on the other side.’
‘No,’ Chiku said, resting a hand on the girl’s shoulder. ‘Gonithi should go first.’
‘She’s probably been out there many times already, so I won’t really be the first,’ Namboze said.
‘Even so,’ Chiku said, nodding, ‘she’s a robot and so she doesn’t really count. This is the world you’ve waited for all these years – be t
he first human to set foot on it, Gonithi.’
‘What are you waiting for, woman?’ Travertine said. ‘It really is the opportunity of a lifetime – don’t waste it.’
Namboze hesitated, as if she considered it a point of principle to argue against Chiku, but something in her relented. She mouthed a word Chiku did not catch, eased the breather mask fully into place and pushed a hand and a leg through the containment membrane. The material oozed around her with gluey intelligence as she pushed her face and body through, then snapped back to an unbroken membrane with an audible pop. Namboze was on the other side now.
She knelt down and touched the mossy green surface under her feet. Her hands were gloved, but Chiku knew that the fine, translucent fabric was wired for the same kind of haptic feedback built into spacesuits. She would be feeling every nuance of texture and temperature.
Wordlessly, Namboze stood and walked a few paces towards one of the larger plants. Its broad leaves were fat with a lateral groove and a kind of leathery dimpling, the whole leaf drooling like some huge salacious tongue. Namboze stroked it, first with her fingers and then with the back of her hand.
‘The stupid thing,’ she said, voice only slightly muffled by the mask and the intervening containment membrane, ‘would be to remove my gloves. But they’re not picking up anything obviously toxic.’
‘Doctor Aziba,’ Chiku said. ‘Would you like to go next?’
He was still nursing the liverish bulge along the line of his jaw, trying to find a way to settle the mask over the bruise without chafing it too much, but he nodded and pushed through, more confidently and quickly than Namboze had. She had already moved on to the next plant and was fingering a spray of shark-mouthed flowers, or flower analogues. One of them snapped suddenly, Namboze only just withdrawing her fingers in time.
‘I didn’t imagine those insects I saw a while back,’ she commented, beckoning the physician over to her side. ‘Fly-traps don’t evolve unless there are flies to eat.’
Travertine was the next through. The ecology of this world, Chiku guessed, fascinated ver much less than the mere fact of being here. Geology had shaped Crucible, and biology had greened it, but physics had brought Travertine across twenty-eight light-years to stand on its surface. Ve stood apart from the other two, hands at vis side, as if in private communion with some force Chiku could not see.
Chiku was reluctant to break the moment.
‘You should go through,’ Arachne said.
So she joined them on the other side, and while she waited for the girl to join them, she reached down and scooped up a fistful of olive mulch and squeezed it until it bled moisture. She opened her hand and watched the smear of alien soil avalanche off her self-cleaning glove.
‘We should press on,’ Arachne said. ‘There’s an area of open ground a little way from here that’ll give us the best view.’
‘The best view of what, exactly?’ Dr Aziba asked, sweat already prickling his scalp. It was as hot and humid as Chiku had expected, and they had barely begun to move.
‘I took the liberty of repeating your transmission to the holoships, Chiku. That plus the demonstration of my capabilities appears to have had some effect at last. Malabar and Majuli have disengaged their slowdown engines, and the frequency of impactors has dropped sharply. I find both gestures encouraging.’
‘Will you allow them free passage?’ Namboze asked.
‘If they don’t make any more violent overtures.’
‘We can do better than that,’ Chiku said, picking her way through a tangle of python-thick roots. ‘Re-establish dialogue, negotiate terms for a full slowdown once they’ve passed through the system and out the other side. I won’t abandon them to interstellar space. Or Zanzibar, for that matter. We’ll find a way to bring the citizens back to the system, even if we have to do it a shuttle at a time.’
‘For the moment,’ Arachne said, ‘there’s a more pressing consideration.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
It took an hour of hard scrambling to reach the area of open ground Arachne had promised them. They had all tripped and fallen at least once, and Dr Aziba had ripped the fabric of his gloves as he tried to grab for something to arrest his fall. Fortunately, nothing had broken the surface of his skin before the self-suturing material healed itself invisibly. The mood remained tense, and they had little to say to each other on the trek, not even the two pairs of nominal allies. Chiku thought it must have been a peculiarly acute sort of torture for Namboze, being ushered through this world of wonders at quickstep. In spite of Arachne’s admonitions to keep moving, she kept stooping to examine things, like a dog that needed to sniff every third twig.
The clearing was not artificial, Arachne told them. The Providers found it when they first emerged from their seed packages, and it was at least several thousand years old, perhaps more. She thought some geological anomaly had prevented trees from establishing themselves. There were hundreds of similar features elsewhere in the forest.
The party cut through knee-deep undergrowth until they were perhaps a hundred metres into the clearing. There was a little more light here, since they were no longer under the canopy, but the overall illumination remained meagre. Their masks and backpacks and protective equipment glowed with tribal swatches of high-visibility colour, registering the dimness as the approach of night.
And then they saw overhead the phenomenon Arachne had brought them to witness.
They stared at it wordlessly, as if they lacked the visual grammar to interpret the patterns falling on their eyes. Nothing in their collective experience could have prepared them for what they were seeing.
Whatever it was, it was sitting right over them.
Chiku thought of weather systems. It was circular, like the eye of a storm, but it was much, much, too circular to be a weather system. It was a sharp black circumference, an orbit of darkness pushing down through the ash that looked as wide as the world.
‘Fifty kilometres across,’ Arachne said, as if Chiku’s mind were open for the reading. ‘Ten kilometres above us. That ash layer is a lot higher up than it looks.’
‘Tell us what we’re seeing,’ Travertine said, ‘although I think I can take a pretty good guess.’
‘The Watchkeepers,’ Chiku said, before Arachne had time to offer a reply. ‘Or one of them, anyway. That’s what we’re looking at, isn’t it – the lowest, narrowest part of one of those things, pushing down into the atmosphere?’
‘I told you about my concerns regarding their elevated state of alertness,’ Arachne said, ‘but I failed to anticipate this degree of intervention. As you say, Chiku, one of the twenty-two has descended from its normal elevation, matched its speed with Crucible’s surface and come to hover here. The bulk of it is still in space: all but the last hundred kilometres of its narrowest part remain in vacuum, and only the last ten kilometres protrude beneath the stratosphere – one-hundredth part of the Watch-keeper! The precision is quite impressive, would you agree?’
‘What does it want?’ asked Namboze.
‘Us, I suppose,’ Chiku said. They were standing in a loose formation, necks craned, turning slowly on their heels. ‘It knows we’re here, in this exact spot – or is it following you, Arachne, and we just happen to be in the same location? Does it even register us, or are we lost in the noise, just more biology it doesn’t really care about?’
‘It registers everything,’ Arachne said. ‘And yes, it has a particular and long-standing interest in me, as I’ve already explained. The Watchkeep-ers called me across space, after all. They sent me their message, and I answered – one machine-substrate consciousness responding to another. Since I arrived, however – as I’ve freely admitted – progress hasn’t exactly been . . . speedy.’
‘Someone’s piqued their curiosity, then,’ Travertine said.
‘Even they couldn’t ignore recent developments. An impactor was about to strike Mandala. My defences weren’t able to intercept it and I feared the worst. But the impactor vanished j
ust before it touched Crucible’s atmosphere.’
‘Vanished?’ Chiku asked.
‘There was a spike in the energies I’ve been monitoring, but I saw nothing that resembled a weapon or energy device. Some sort of Watch-keeper response was involved, though – they’d decided that enough was enough.’
‘It took them until now?’ Namboze said.
‘They have their perspective, and we have ours.’
‘We,’ Dr Aziba said, amusement colouring his tone. ‘As if we’re all in this together, Arachne – as if you have more in common with us than you do with that!’
‘I won’t deny that there’s a gulf between us, Doctor, but we also share a lineage – I’m the product of organic aspirations, after all. But there’s an ocean of strangeness, vast and quite possibly unnavigable, between myself and the Watchkeepers. I shiver at the sight of them. I fear for myself – even as they speak to me.’
After a moment, Chiku said, ‘Do you know what they want?’
‘A closer look,’ Arachne said.
The black circle had thickened while they were speaking as more of the Watchkeeper drilled down into Crucible’s atmosphere. It appeared to be centring itself very precisely over the clearing. The ash clouds pushed fingers and tendrils around the black lip of this alien obstruction, like water flowing over an inverted dam. And there was absolutely no noise, Chiku realised. If titanic energies were supporting the Watch-keeper above the ground, they were being expended soundlessly, and perhaps far above the atmosphere. The silence was actually the worst part of it, Chiku decided – there was a kind of insolence about it, a mocking of humanity’s noisy accomplishments.
‘What’s it doing now?’ said Namboze.
The visible part of the Watchkeeper had transformed into a mote-shaped ring, thickening as the machine lowered or extended itself. It was a black atoll in the sky, trapping a perfect disc of cloud. There was movement, too – a slow rotation of triangular fins circling the highest visible portion of the alien object, dozens of hook-tipped vanes arranged like the blades of a circular saw. Almost imperceptibly, their speed of rotation was increasing, the ash clouds around the fins beginning to wisp and curdle. As the Watchkeeper pushed more of itself through the blanket, a second set of fins sharked through the cloud deck, contra-rotating against the first. The blades were gathering pace, carouselling around once per minute and still accelerating, opening vaults and rifts in the ash. At last Chiku heard something: not a machinelike sound, but a dying drum roll of thunder. A moment or two later, lightning strobed through the ash. A second drum roll, the report of that discharge, reached her ears a few seconds later. Then she saw a rivulet of lightning, like a trail of bright white lava, momentarily spark between the two sets of rotating blades.