On the Steel Breeze Read Free Page A

tongued down and Mecufi directed Chiku to stepaboard. ‘Why do you hesitate? There’s no need not to trust us. I gave you the mote, didn’t I?’
    ‘Motes can be faked.’
    ‘Everything can be faked. You’ll just have to trust that it wasn’t.’
    ‘Then we’re back to square one, aren’t we? I have to trust that you’re trustworthy?’
    ‘Trust is a fine and paradoxical thing. I promised I’d have you home before evening – will you take me at my word?’
    ‘We’re just going to the seasteads?’
    ‘And no further. It’s a beautiful day for it. The quality of light on water, as restless as the sea itself! What better time to be alive?’
    Chiku acquiesced. They escalated aboard, taking lounge seats in a generously proportioned cabin. The cabin sealed itself and the flier gathered speed as it rose. In a few breaths they were banking away from the coast. The waters were a gorgeous mingling of hues, lakes of indigo and ultramarine ink spilt into the ocean.
    ‘Earth’s quite nice, isn’t it?’ Mecufi’s exo had deposited him in his seat like a large stuffed toy, then folded itself away for the duration of the flight.
    ‘It was working out for me.’
    ‘The perfect backwater to study your family history? Crumbly old Lisbon, of all places?’
    ‘I thought I’d find some peace and quiet there. Evidently I was wrong about that.’
    The flier kept low. Occasionally they passed a cyberclipper, pleasure yacht or small wooden fishing boat with a gaily painted hull. Chiku barely glimpsed the fishermen busy on deck as the flier sped past, fussing with nets and winches. They never looked up. The aircraft was tidying up after itself, dissipating its own Mach cone so that there was no sonic boom.
    Its hull would have tuned itself to the colour of sky.
    ‘Let me ask you about your counterparts,’ Mecufi said.
    ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
    ‘And yet I must. Let’s begin with the basics. Your mother and father were Sunday Akinya and Jitendra Gupta, both still living. You were born in what used to be the Descrutinised Zone, on the Moon, about two hundred years ago. Do you dispute these facts?’
    ‘Why would I?’
    Mecufi paused to smear some lavender-smelling oil onto himself from a small dispenser. ‘You had a carefree and prosperous childhood. You grew up in a time of tremendous peace and beneficial social andtechnological change. A time free of wars and poverty and nearly all illnesses. You were extraordinarily fortunate – billions of dead souls would have traded places with you in a heartbeat. And yet as you entered adulthood you detected an emptiness inside yourself. A lack of direction, an absence of moral purpose. It was hard, growing up with that name. Your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents moved mountains. Eunice opened up the solar system for deep-space settlement and exploitation. Sunday and your other relatives opened up the stars! What could you possibly do that would compare with any of that?’
    Chiku folded her arms. ‘Are you done?’
    ‘Not remotely. That’s the trouble with being very long-lived: there’s an awful lot of life to catch up with.’
    ‘So perhaps you should think about cutting to the chase.’
    ‘When you were fifty years old, a new technology came to fruition and you made a momentous decision. You engaged the firm Quorum Binding to produce two clones of you using rapid phenotyping. In a few months the clones were fully formed physically, but little more than semi-conscious blank canvases. They had your face but not your memories; none of your scars, none of the marks life had left on you, nothing of your developmental or immunological history. But that was also part of the plan.
    ‘While the clones matured, you submitted your own body to a process of structural adjustment. Medical nanomachines gorged you down to a woman-shaped core. They took apart your bones and muscles and nervous system and remade them so that they were genetically and functionally