Poseidon's Wake (33 page)

A set of stairs led up and away from the service area alongside a heavy-duty elevator. They opted for the stairs – their suits lacked power-assist, but in half a gee, Kanu did not think the ascent would be too arduous.

‘Why haven’t we heard about this place before?’ Nissa asked as they began their ascent, walking side by side up the short flight of stairs before reversing direction. ‘To organise and fund an interstellar expedition of this size – there’s no way it wouldn’t be in the public record. No matter how secretive you wanted to be, you couldn’t hide the departure of a starship.’

‘We haven’t even seen a starship. Maybe this rock is the starship.’

‘Like a holoship?’

‘Perhaps,’ Kanu said, ‘but they were slower than anything we have now, and they needed the economy of an entire solar system to build them. Whichever way you cut it, it’s hard to see how anyone did this. And why come here in the first place?’

‘Maybe they discovered the second Mandala ahead of everyone else and wanted to exploit it?’

‘To what end, though?’ said Kanu. ‘If there was something about the Mandalas you could exploit, wouldn’t the people on Crucible already have a head start?’

They must have ascended a hundred metres, doubling back over and over again, before the stairwell reached another room. It was larger than the one they had passed through below and more sparsely provisioned. Low-level illumination picked out the edges of its walls and ceiling. No control panels or lockers here, no windows – but there was a door, set into the wall opposite the stairwell. Twice as tall as Kanu, it was impressively braced and armoured, doubtless designed for emergency pressure containment. It looked as if it was meant to slide up into the ceiling, but there were no controls on this side.

Kanu walked to it, grasped one of the brace pieces and tried forcing the entire door to slide up. The gesture was as futile as he had expected. It must have weighed several tonnes.

‘Any ideas, Swift?’ he asked. ‘We have cutting gear aboard
Icebreaker
, if need be.’

Swift was conversing with them now but had still not manifested as a visible figment. ‘We could undock and scout around for another airlock, perhaps? There was no shortage of options.’

Nissa was standing next to Kanu, hands on her hips. ‘Hello?’ she called, using her suit’s speaker. ‘Is there anyone here?’

‘I worry that the place is dead after all,’ Kanu said, his earlier enthusiasm beginning to ebb.

‘I don’t know,’ Nissa said. ‘It feels a little less dead the further inside we go. It would take life-support systems to keep air warm and breathable. I swear I can hear something, too.’

All Kanu could hear was his own breathing, too fast and ragged for his liking. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Try increasing your auditory pickup. Shall I show you how to do it?’

‘No, I’m fine.’

But he followed her lead, amplifying the suit’s pickup as far as it would go. There it was: a distant mechanical process, the hum of mechanisms. It could have been anything – generators, pumps, air scrubbers – but it meant there was more than stored power providing the signs of animation they had already witnessed. Machines were running; had perhaps been running since long before their arrival.

‘There’s something else,’ Nissa said. ‘Do you hear it?’

A steadily rising component now overlaid the low-level hum, as if some heavy thing were advancing slowly towards the room. It consisted of a repeating series of bass thuds, falling into a sort of haphazard rhythm – like the slow, ominous beating, Kanu thought, of some tremendous war drum. The slight irregularity of it contrasted with the continuous drone of the background machines. This was not something mechanical, and on a primal level he found it invoked a specific but nameless dread. If only they could see what was coming. But that huge door was windowless.

They had only just entered the shard, and now Kanu’s sole instinct was to return the way they had come, back down the staircase. But he could not turn. It was not simply the fear of running from one threat only to stumble into another. If they could not negotiate with the occupants of the shard, they were as good as dead anyway.

‘Do you know what that sound is, Swift?’

‘I’ve never encountered anything like it. You may have, but it will take some time to search your memories.’

The thudding slowed and stopped. Kanu had the impression that the origin of the sounds was now only a few metres from him on the other side of the huge door. An ominous reverberation, so low as to be almost subsonic, throbbed through the armour plating. It was a living sound, not the product of something mechanical.

‘I don’t think you need bother searching my memories,’ Kanu said.

A loud clunk signalled the rise of the door. It began to haul itself into the ceiling, a widening brightness at its base. Kanu and Nissa stood back in unison. His fear was all-consuming now, but to run would be futile, he knew. He allowed his hand to reach for hers. If she spurned that contact, so be it, but he could not bear to face this alone.

Her hand hesitated in his, then her fingers closed slightly. Glove to glove, barely a touch at all. But it was more than he had dared hope for.

Beyond the door was a blazing brightness that rammed around and through and between the giant forms standing on the other side. There were three of them. In the first dazzled instant of his viewing, before the door had risen fully into the ceiling, he thought he had been mistaken, that these were machines of some kind after all. They stood on massive, tree-like legs – four legs to each form. And in those first few glances, they looked mechanical, or at least shrouded in armour.

But no, these were indeed living creatures, and he recognised them for what they were.

Elephants.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

It was cold in the long, sloping corridor. It came from deeper within the camp, a whispering planetary chill that felt as if it had travelled all the way from Orison’s dead core, clawing through shivering layers of rock and crust and dusty permafrost. It cut through their clothes, through their skin, and into their bones. Goma thought she could take a few minutes of it at most.

‘Let’s get a few things straight from the outset.’ Eunice was looking back at the party as she led the way into the deeper layers of her camp, her breath visible in the cold. ‘They are Tantors and only Tantors. Never elephants – that offends them terribly.’

‘How many?’ Goma asked, excited despite the cold.

‘Six.’

‘Six!’ Ru exclaimed.

‘My dear girl, you’ll have to make allowances for me – I can’t tell if you’re elated or disappointed.’

‘We’re delighted that Tantors still live,’ Goma said, presuming to speak for both of them. ‘On Crucible, the numbers weren’t sufficient to sustain them as a distinct subspecies. They had to breed back into the baseline elephant population, and in the process we’ve slowly lost whatever it was that made them special. Six is wonderful, of course, but we were hoping for a self-sustaining breeding group.’

‘You may still have one. There are six here with me, but hundreds – thousands – more in
Zanzibar
.’

‘Thousands!’ Goma exclaimed.

‘You might need to dial down your hopes a little.
Zanzibar
is where all our problems began – where I got on the wrong side of Dakota, and why I ended up here.’

‘You said
Zanzibar
,’ said Dr Nhamedjo. ‘Do you seriously mean—’

‘You haven’t figured that out yet, have you? Well, we’ll come to
Zanzibar
in due course – that’s a whole other can of mealworms. The important point for now is that the six Tantors who live with me are what you’d call defectors. They sided with me when the others stuck with Dakota, and for that they were also banished. Actually, there were more than six, and these are the children of the original defectors. In truth, we all got off lightly. There were many who’d have been glad to see us killed, but Dakota had just enough residual respect for me to offer exile rather than execution. So they used one of their last long-range vehicles to drop us here, me and the Tantors, with sufficient equipment to build our happy little home. They stayed long enough to make sure we weren’t going to die and then abandoned us. And here we’ve been ever since.’

‘Were you here when you sent the original signal?’ Goma asked.

‘Yes – it was almost the first thing I did after setting up home. They didn’t want me to have any kind of transmitter, certainly nothing capable of squirting a signal across interstellar distances. Still, I’ve always been good at improvising – make do and mend. Eventually I patched something together that just about functioned, aimed it at Sixty-One Virginis, pressed “send” and here you are.’

‘Two centuries later,’ Goma said.

‘Yes, damn that Mr Einstein and his unreasonable insistence on causality and the inviolability of the speed of light. I still thought you’d get here a little quicker.’

‘We came as soon as we could,’ Goma answered.

‘You mentioned someone coming here ahead of us,’ Vasin said. ‘What did you mean by that?’

‘The other ship.’

‘There isn’t one,’ Vasin answered. ‘I would know. We’ve come alone, the sole expedition sent by our government. Even if Crucible launched the second starship after our departure, it could never have overtaken us.’

‘That answers one question, anyway. I tracked the point of origin of this other ship for a while before I lost a fix on it.’ Eunice was striding on, fit as a fiddle, apparently oblivious to the cold. ‘It was hard to be sure, but it didn’t look as if it came from your quadrant of the sky. Earth, maybe, although there were some other possibilities.’

‘Did you try talking to them?’ Goma asked.

‘Not until it was too late. They made me nervous, popping up in the wrong corner of the sky like that. Call it a fault of old age but I’m not fond of surprises. Anyway, I did eventually try to signal them, but by then they’d run into some trouble around Poseidon and either I wasn’t sending reliably or they weren’t listening.’

‘When was this?’ Goma asked.

‘A little over a year ago. Frankly, I was starting to think Poseidon had done us all a favour by taking that ship out of the argument.’

‘And then?’ Ru asked.

‘Six weeks ago I intercepted another burst of transmissions – short duration, low signal strength. These came from the other side of the system, close to Paladin. Did you pick up something similar?’

‘We’d still have been on deceleration thrust then,’ Vasin said, ‘which limited our sensitivity. Unless the signal was strong or kept repeating, we were more likely to miss it than hear it.’

‘You think it was the same ship?’ Goma asked.

‘Almost certainly. It must have gone dark – spent the intervening year making a very slow transfer from Poseidon. No way for me to track that. Probably damaged, too, if that second burst was an indicator of their transmitting capacity. I tried signalling again, but either they couldn’t hear me or they chose not to respond. You had a good look at Paladin on your approach – did you see any evidence of a ship?’

‘No,’ Vasin said. ‘And I don’t see how we could have missed something that big.’

‘You would if they’d hidden it inside
Zanzibar
while they make repairs.’

‘Mystery ship or not,’ said Karayan, ‘that rock cannot be
Zanzibar
. The remains of that holoship are still orbiting Crucible. End of discussion.’

‘Whatever remains you’ve seen,’ Eunice answered, ‘they’re not the whole thing. A good bit of it ended up here. It wasn’t teleported or sent down a wormhole. It came the same way you did – moving through space, through all the points between here and Crucible. It just did so very, very quickly.’

‘Faster than the speed of light?’ Goma asked.

‘No – that really is impossible. But close to the speed of light.
Very
close. The survivors didn’t report any subjective time interval between being in one system and the next, which means their clocks barely had time to tick.’

‘You just said survivors,’ Goma stated, hardly daring to imagine what that news would have meant to her mother, to the people who had damned her, to the loyal but ridiculed Travertine. It would not have absolved Ndege of a crime, but it would have made the magnitude of it far less – and she would have been hailed in the same breath as the discoverer of something wonderful.

Too late now.

‘Hundreds of thousands of them,’ Eunice said. ‘Adults, children – Tantors, as I’ve already mentioned. Snatched from Crucible to Paladin, bounced between two Mandalas.’

‘Then it’s no wonder that ship made contact,’ Ru said. ‘If you weren’t answering them, they must have homed in on the first signs of human habitation elsewhere in the galaxy.’

‘And that’s where we run into a little local complication. No easy way of breaking this news, but I’m afraid there aren’t any people left in
Zanzibar
. There were . . . difficulties . . . differences of opinion. Rather violent differences.’

‘What happened to my grandmother?’ Goma asked.

‘Something bad,’ Eunice said. ‘But understand this: you can’t blame the Tantors for any of it. It was Dakota who led them astray. But even she can’t be held to account for what became of her, what the Watchkeepers turned her into. It was never her fault that she became a monster.’

‘And these Tantors – did they play any part in what happened?’ Ru asked.

‘Blameless. As innocent as babes. But please don’t underestimate them on that basis.’

They had reached a flatter part of the corridor where an enormous door led into the sidewall. Eunice touched a control and the door heaved open. Light drenched the corridor, accompanied by a steamy warmth. She stepped into whatever room lay beyond, indicating that the party should wait before following her.

Goma felt her emotions wrenched askew – dismay and horror at what might have happened on
Zanzibar
, to the people in general and her own grandmother in particular; and a delicious, giddy anticipation of what she was about to experience. She felt like a traitor to herself, not fully surrendering to the sadness and anger that were the right and proper response. But what could she do? There was joy in her heart that Ndege might now, at least in death, receive a measure of forgiveness. She would have given anything to communicate this one vital fact to Crucible, back in time, so that it might ease Ndege’s burden. She could not bend time to her will; she could not bring that greater happiness to Ndege. But she had this moment, and for now she was thankful.

And she was about to meet Tantors.

She heard Eunice speaking. She heard answering voices. She felt as if all the arrows of her life pointed to this moment.

Eunice came back into the corridor. ‘All right, they’re ready for you. These Tantors are my friends and they mean well, but aside from me, they’ve never seen another human being. So please – no sudden movements, no shouting, nothing that could be construed as a threatening gesture.’

‘We won’t scare them,’ Goma said.

‘It’s not them I worry about, dear.’

‘The two of you should go first,’ Vasin said, beckoning Goma and Ru to step through the doorway. ‘You’ve earned this. May it be everything you’ve hoped for.’

‘Thank you,’ Goma said with genuine gratitude.

They entered with Eunice next to them, and for a moment all they could do was squint against the brightness of this underground room. It was warm – much warmer and more humid than the corridor – and Goma felt the blood returning to her fingertips.

Under their feet was dirt. The chamber had a huge vaulted roof, with a dome-shaped skylight set into it. The floor was stepped, with different levels.

‘It was a natural bubble,’ Eunice was saying. ‘Ours for the taking. We roofed it over, sealed it against pressure loss, pumped it full of atmosphere. We’ve dug out some adjoining chambers, but this is still the biggest.’

She might as well have been talking gibberish for all Goma cared. It was the Tantors that had her absolute and binding attention. In that instant, nothing else in the universe mattered.

‘They’re glorious,’ she said.

Ru was holding her hand. Goma squeezed back. The moment was theirs and theirs alone, as precious as any they had shared. ‘Yes.’

The cold of the corridor had already brought water to her eyes; now the water became tears of joy. It was only three of them, yes – nothing compared to the multitude she had dared hope for. But still: to be here now, to be standing in this room and beholding three living Tantors – there would always be her life before this moment, and her life after it, the one a dim reflection of the other, and nothing would ever be the same.

The universe had given them a gift. She was light-headed with the thrill of it all, delirious with gratitude and wonder and a sense that beautiful possibilities still lay ahead of them all.

‘Say something,’ Eunice said. ‘It generally helps.’

Goma opened her mouth and found her throat was dry. She coughed, swallowed, tried to gather some tatters of composure. It was hard to speak, grinning the way she was. Mposi and Ndege – if only they could be here, seeing what she was seeing.

But they were, if she wanted them to be.

‘I am Goma Akinya,’ she said. ‘This is Ru Munyaneza. We’ve come a long way to find you. You are magnificent – a wonder to us. Thank you for allowing us to see you.’

Three Tantors stood before them on a slightly raised part of the floor, adults or near-adults by her estimation. They were elephants, of course – the physiological differences between Tantors and baseline elephants were not dramatic – but everything about the way they stood, the intense, unwavering scrutiny of their gaze, spoke of something beyond animal intelligence. It was in their deportment, in the lowering of their heads – not subservience, but more a kind of greeting, displaying the boulder-like prominence of their skulls, crammed with intellect.

Tools and equipment hung from belts and harnesses fastened around them, and above the trunk and between the eyes, their brows were covered by a curving metal plate that fastened in place like a horse’s bridle. The black plate contained a screen and a grille, and it was from these grilles that their voices emerged. The middle of three, the largest and most mature, spoke first.

‘Welcome, Goma Akinya – and Ru Munyaneza. I am Sadalmelik.’

‘I am Eldasich,’ said the one to Sadalmelik’s left.

‘I am Achernar,’ said the third Tantor.

‘Are there more of you?’ Goma asked.

‘Outside,’ Sadalmelik answered. ‘Atria, Mimosa and Keid. They have gone outside to make repairs to one of the distant antennae. It is more than a day’s walk from here. But they will soon return.’

Their voices were machine-generated and sounded with no corresponding movement of the Tantors’ mouths – a kind of ventriloquism. Each had been assigned a different pitch and timbre. Goma had already decided on the basis of body morphology and tusk thickness that Eldasich was the female of the three, and her voice was slightly higher and purer than the two males’. It was a concession to human anthropomorphism, but it accorded with what she knew of the original Tantor populations. The language-generating equipment was familiar, too – long after Crucible’s Tantors had died out, the augmentation gear had remained, dusty and unused but too valuable to throw away. The black plates read neural signals, translating subvocal impulses into sound, which left the Tantors free to continue using the entire normal repertoire of elephant vocalisations and rumbles.

‘Eunice tells us that you’ve never seen other people before,’ Ru said.

‘No,’ said Sadalmelik. ‘But we have studied images and recordings, and heard many accounts. You are new to us, but not unfamiliar. Have you come from Crucible?’

‘Yes,’ Goma said, still grinning. ‘By starship. Eunice sent for us. For my mother, actually.’