On the Steel Breeze (68 page)

They were walking down the slope to the level ground in front of the main building. ‘It took a while to gain total control,’ Mposi said. ‘The constables were here in large numbers and they had their robots. We had command of the Assembly and the public will to coordinate a takeover, but the citizens simply couldn’t overcome the constables and their machines by themselves. We needed something more.’

‘It’s time for the sky,’ Ndege said.

It was not the gradual transition from night to dawn that Chiku remembered, nor the slow dimming of skyfade. The sky came alive in patches, flickering before settling into blocks and ribbons of blue in a larger expanse of black, like a negative version of the damaged sky in Eunice’s chamber. Gradually, the areas of brightness cross-hatched and linked up, the sky colouring itself the way a child would, with a furious lack of organisation.

‘We allow ourselves an hour a day,’ Mposi said. ‘It takes a lot of energy to light a holoship. We have limited resources and don’t want to risk being detectable from outside.’

‘We live for this hour,’ Ndege said.

Chiku had been so fixated on the sky that it took an effort of will to lower her gaze to the surrounding landscape of the core. Much was as she remembered it – of course, she had spent much less time aboard
Icebreaker
and on Crucible than she had slept away in skipover on
Zanzibar
, and there simply were not the resources aboard the holoship to engage in sweeping alterations.

But there had been changes. Now that she had a proper view of it, she could see that the Assembly Building, the replica of the Akinya household, was visibly damaged. The rightmost wing of the ‘A’-shaped structure had suffered some kind of collapse. An entire storey had slumped into ruin, the blue-tiled roof peeled off and discarded like a
scaly scab. The formerly white walls were now predominantly black and grey, scorched by fire or weapons, punctured and penetrated in many places, reefed with knee-deep rubble piles where the wall’s outer cladding had crumbled away.

The other wing and the connecting spar between the two angled flanks had suffered less. It must have been a kind of siege, Chiku supposed – Eunice and her band of conspirators holed up in that part of the building while they fought to gain decisive control of the rest of the holoship. Eunice had a technical reach far beyond her body and the ability to infiltrate and manipulate data systems, but she could not apply physical force against the constables and their autonomous enforcement robots.

But Chiku’s eye had lingered on the ruined household long enough. It was sad, to see it like that. She thought of the building’s counterpart in Africa, also crumbling, overgrown and cat-haunted. Chiku Yellow had been inside that building with Pedro.

She had spent her last good hours with Noah inside this replica of it.

Her attention tracked over the intervening ground, surveying the flat terrain where her own constables had come to arrest Sou-Chun Lo. Huge squat-bodied things were moving over the ground. There were three of them that she could see. They were bigger than vehicles and by her recollection of things much bigger than the enforcement robots. They seemed partially armoured. Removed from their usual context, there was a moment when her mind struggled to identify these slow-moving, house-sized forms.

But only a moment.

‘Tantors,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Tantors! She brought the Tantors into
Zanzibar
!’

‘It was the only way the citizenry could ever hope to overcome the occupiers,’ Ndege said. ‘The Tantors gave them the advantage they needed.’ She was speaking with the flat objectivity of someone recounting age-old dramas.

‘What are they?’ Namboze asked, and Chiku realised that there were still some things she had not told her companions after all.

‘Elephants, I think,’ Dr Aziba stated drily.

‘More than elephants,’ Chiku said. ‘A daughter species – elephants with enhanced cognitive capabilities and the rudiments of language, and the ability to make and use sophisticated tools. They’ve been with us the whole time, an entire breeding group of them, hidden away in a part of
Zanzibar
most of us never even knew existed. Eunice was put aboard to shepherd them.’

‘And to escape me,’ Arachne pointed out, as if the omission of this fact was a slur on her capabilities.

‘To escape the
other
you,’ Chiku said.

‘They’re huge,’ Travertine said. ‘I saw the shaft, under Kappa. A person could have climbed up and down it, but not an elephant. How did they get out of their chamber?’

‘Mother,’ Mposi said, ‘do you remember the size of that transit pod you used to travel between Kappa and Chamber Thirty-Seven? It was easily large enough to carry a Tantor.’

‘That still doesn’t answer Travertine’s question,’ Chiku observed.

‘There were also larger exits points than the one in Kappa,’ Ndege said, ‘ramps and spirals big enough for a Tantor to use. They weren’t documented either, but Eunice showed us where to find them. There was one right under the assembly building, very close to her own exit point. It’d been filled in with rubble, probably at the time of
Zanzibar
’s launch. It took a while, but eventually we cleared it all the way down to the transit tube and Eunice started moving the Tantors out of Chamber Thirty-Seven!’

Chiku took a deep breath and reminded herself – and not for the first time – that none of this was actually happening
now
. She was not on
Zanzibar
, and these figments were not her children. It
felt
real, of course – the ching protocol cut to the very marrow of the brain’s sense of physical immersion – but she had no proof that what she was being shown had any connection with historical fact. Except, paradoxically, for the presence of the Tantors. When she was on
Zanzibar
, her episodes among them had felt dreamlike and unverifiable. Here, now, they were tokens of an objective reality – elements of
Zanzibar
that no one could have known about unless they had had contact with Eunice.

With a dark thrill she wondered if this all might be true after all.

‘How many were there?’ she asked, trying to remember the size of the population during her last visit.

‘About a hundred,’ Mposi said. ‘The herd had grown a lot in the last couple of generations – Eunice had been forcing a breeding programme on them to swell their numbers. By the time of the breakout, about half of their number were fully grown adults.’

‘Fifty doesn’t sound like enough to take a holoship,’ Chiku said.

‘On their own, probably not, but they had the citizens on their side, and there was – how shall I put it – a certain psychological shock value that counted for more than numbers.’ Mposi smiled. ‘A talking, tool-using bull elephant will do that to you.’

‘Besides, we also had the other elephants,’ Ndege said. ‘The normal
population you were so concerned about way back when. It turns out that elephants are more than happy to follow Tantors. Herd dynamics still count for something, and a talking matriarch trumps a mute one. With Tantors and baseline elephants acting in coordinated herds, our effective force was hundreds strong – easily sufficient to evict the constables from the thirty-six public cores.’

‘I hope you treated them decently,’ Chiku said, without much conviction. ‘They were just normal people, doing the wrong job.’

‘There were deaths on both sides,’ Mposi said, ‘but we tried to be decent. Once they’d been neutralised and disarmed, the occupiers were given a choice. They could join our citizenry, under certain probationary conditions, or risk being packed into shuttles and sent back home. About a third of them decided to join us. Most of them have managed to integrate without too much trouble.’

‘We needed more hands and minds,’ Ndege said. ‘It’s been difficult, the way things have gone.’

Chiku had barely been able to tear her eyes from the Tantors. ‘I’d like to see them properly,’ she said. ‘Walk with them, touch them. There was one called Dakota, the cleverest of them all. Eunice said she was a true evolutionary leap. Do you know if she’s still alive?’

‘It’s possible,’ Mposi said.

‘What he means,’ Guochang whispered, ‘is that you’ve exhausted the limits of his knowledge. Remember, you can only go so deep with these things.’

‘I’d still like to take a closer look at the Tantors,’ Chiku said.

Ndege nodded at the patchwork sky. ‘There’s still time. They see much better than us in the dark, of course, so the night doesn’t really matter to them. Deep down, they’re still elephants.’

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

It was good, even for the space of a few hours, to be somewhere other than Crucible. Mposi and Ndege led the party to the level ground where the Tantors were parading back and forth, and Chiku circled the huge, slow-stomping creatures with something close to awe. Like the Tantors she had met in Chamber Thirty-Seven, their bodies were augmented with tools and communication attachments affixed to an arrangement of girdles and straps. Much of it looked improvised or second-hand. Not all the Tantors, Ndege said, were capable of generating written syntax, but this was mostly because the herd’s expansion had outstripped the pace at which the textual equipment could be manufactured. It was optimal to fit the Tantors with the machines when they were young, so some of these adults might never have the easy linguistic faculty Dakota had demonstrated.

But they were still more intelligent than the baseline elephants, demonstrably superior at abstract reasoning and able to follow complex spoken instructions. These Tantors, in common with the others elsewhere in
Zanzibar
, worked in close harmony with constables and peacekeepers. It was, Ndege stressed, as close to a partnership as circumstances allowed. Eunice had stipulated that the Tantors were to be treated as equals, and her assistance in ridding
Zanzibar
of its enemies had been scrupulously contingent on that understanding.

‘It was never going to be easy,’ Mposi said, his sister nodding in agreement. ‘But then, nothing worthwhile ever is. We’re still making mistakes, on both sides, and there’s plenty of room for misunderstandings. But Tantors saved
Zanzibar
. Tantors and an artificial intelligence most of us would have sooner smashed to pieces than trust with our lives.’

‘When did she disclose her true nature?’ Arachne asked.

‘Only when we’d regained a good measure of control,’ Ndege answered. ‘Until then, all but a few of us still believed she was human. She probably could have kept up the illusion, but I think she wanted to put us to the ultimate test.’

‘There was a public gathering,’ Mposi said, ‘about a week or so after most of the constables had been rounded up. Things were still edgy, and one of the Tantors had caused a death. That was her moment. She walked out of the building and into the crowd, until she was surrounded by citizens. She stood on a little box, this tiny woman in a sea of people.’

‘None of them knew what she was about to say or do,’ Ndege said. ‘She just raises her arms, waits for the crowd to quieten down – they all have questions and demands, of course – and she says: “I have a truth for you. Two truths, in fact, both of them equally difficult to accept. The first is that we’ve been lied to about Crucible. The Provider machines we sent there ahead of us, the servants we expected to make our new world fit for living, have failed us. Worse, they’ve deliberately falsified their transmissions. They’ve lied and manipulated and none of us can say for sure what we’ll find when we arrive. A trap, perhaps. They’re powerful, clever machines and you’re right to be afraid of them. Which brings me to the second truth I mentioned: I am also a powerful, clever machine.”‘

‘She let that sink in,’ Mposi said, the memory of it curving her lips in a smile. ‘She didn’t need to say it twice. And the silence – I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like it. They couldn’t make up their minds whether she was mad or suicidal, and I think the mob could have gone either way at that moment. As strong as she was, they’d have torn her apart like a paper soldier! But when she’d stretched out the moment as long as she dared, she added: “You have two choices. I could prove it to you, or you could find out for yourselves – tear the skin from my metal bones and break me like a doll. But option two will gain you nothing except my destruction or my undying suspicion that none of you can ever be totally trusted. It’s much simpler just to ask yourselves why I’d lie about such a thing given what I’ve just told you about the Providers on Crucible. It’s much simpler just to
accept
.”’

‘The crowd went berserk,’ Ndege said. ‘They were yelling and screaming at her like a witch on a bonfire. But no one actually touched her. I think that was what saved us – and her. After a few moments, as the shouting ebbed, she said: “If you can find a way to live with me, then maybe I can find a way for us to all to live with the Providers. A friend of mine, Chiku Akinya, went ahead of
Zanzibar
to make contact with them. It’s possible that she failed, but there’s no way to know for sure one way or the other. What we do know is that Chiku and her friends had nothing to offer the Providers beyond their humanity. I have something more. It’s not simply the fact that I’m also a machine, although
that will surely help matters. I’m a machine that remembers being born. I carry the memories of a human woman inside me – not just the dry, documented facts of her existence, but the actual organisation of her brain, mirrored in my own informational architecture. I’m tainted with Eunice Akinya. Her blood is my blood. She haunts me. I believe I’ve earned the right to use her name.’

‘It was all-or-nothing in that moment,’ Ndege said. ‘Our past and our future, hinging on whether we agreed to let this . . .
thing
be our guide. I won’t say it was easy, or that the decision was reached without rancour. Typically, we had to put it to the vote. It was the first democratic act of our reconstituted Legislative Assembly: do we allow ourselves to be governed by a robot?’