Poseidon's Wake (34 page)
‘Ndege,’ said Eldasich. ‘You were known to her?’
‘Yes. I had to leave her behind.’
‘We remember Ndege. She was kind to us. It is good to remember such things,’ said Achernar.
‘You can’t possibly have known her,’ Ru said.
‘Our kind knew her,’ Achernar, the smaller male said. ‘We remember. We pass down the knowing of things. Is this strange to you?’
‘No,’ Goma answered. ‘Not at all. And my mother would have loved to meet you. She knew Tantors on the holoship, and then for a little while after we reached Crucible. But it wasn’t to last.’
‘Then you have not known Tantors?’ asked Sadalmelik.
Goma looked to Eunice for guidance, but their host had evidently decided to let them deal with this on their own.
‘You are special,’ she ventured. ‘Very special and rare. After we lost
Zanzibar
, there were not enough of you left to carry on your line. Ru and I – our work on Crucible concerned you. We were trying to find ways to return Tantors to the world.’
‘Did you succeed?’ Achernar asked.
‘No. We failed. There are none of your kind left now. There was a wise one . . . her name was Agrippa. She was strong and clever. We loved her very much, but she grew old.’
‘Were you there at her end?’ asked Eldasich.
‘Yes,’ Goma said. ‘Both of us were.’
‘It is good that you were there,’ Sadalmelik said. ‘Speak of her to us. We will remember her. We will find her true name and pass down the knowing of her. Then she will always be known.’
‘Thank you,’ Goma said.
Ru asked, ‘Can we come nearer?’
‘Do you wish to touch?’ asked Sadalmelik.
‘To touch. And be touched. If you’re fine with that.’
‘We are fine with that,’ Eldasich said.
Remembering Eunice’s instruction not to make sudden or threatening movements, they approached with the utmost care. Behind Eunice, Vasin, Nhamedjo, Loring and Karayan watched the proceedings with a sort of nervous encouragement, like spectators at a circus.
‘You mentioned Agrippa’s “true name”,’ Goma said.
‘Yes,’ answered Sadalmelik.
‘What did you mean by that? The names you just told us – are these your true names?’
‘Those are our short names, the names for people to use. They help you separate us. But they are not our true names. Our true names are too hard for you, and too long. We never speak our true names.’
‘I understand,’ Goma said, although she was not sure that she did. Better that the Tantors had their secrets and mysteries, though, than be too transparent, too easily understood.
She approached to within touching distance of Sadalmelik, reached out slowly and raised her hand to touch his shoulder. She felt the warm, bristly roughness of his skin as it moved with the great tidal surge of his breathing. She shifted her hand, maintaining the gentlest of contacts, from shoulder to neck, from neck to the side of his face. Ru, meanwhile, had stationed herself next to Eldasich and was stroking the upper part of her trunk. Goma moved a hand to one of Sadalmelik’s tusks, warm to cold, soft to hard. His eye regarded her steadily, and despite every instinct she could not bring herself to avoid contact with his gaze. Far from repelling such contact, the eye’s intelligence appeared to demand it. She stared into its liquid depths, trying to imagine the sharp and curious intelligence within.
Sadalmelik moved his trunk and touched her other hand with the tip, then traced its way to her face. An elephant’s trunk was a marvel of elastofluidic engineering – a tool both supple and strong, sensitive and expressive. Goma was used to being examined by elephants but this was a different order of intimacy – guided and methodical. She held her ground fearlessly, even as the trunk moved from her nose to her brow, mapping her like an instrument.
‘You are like Eunice.’
‘I should be.’
‘You are also like Ndege. She stands where you stand. She sees what you see. Did she pass into the Remembering, Goma?’
‘Yes,’ she answered, and the answer was like a damburst, the first time she truly felt the knowledge of her mother’s passing.
‘Then we will speak of Ndege as well, until her true name has spoken itself.’
‘There’s a lot to talk about.’ It was all Goma could do to hold herself together. ‘Would you mind if Ru and I spent some time with you? We can tell you about Agrippa – about anything you like. And we want to hear your stories, the knowledge you have passed down.’
Sadalmelik elevated his great head to look beyond Goma. ‘Is there time, Eunice?’
‘A little,’ she said. ‘We must wait for the others to return, at any rate.’
‘Then we shall talk.’
‘Not just yet,’ Eunice said. ‘My guests are tired, and they need feeding and watering. We have some discussions of our own to attend to. But they will not be far away.’
The good news was that Eunice could offer something besides mealworms; the less good news was that the alternatives were scarcely more appetising. Today’s offering was some kind of fibrous edible fungus, lithoponically grown in one of the domes she had set aside for food production. Eunice flavoured her dishes with carefully rationed spices, some of which had been with her since the exile, some of which were the product of her own experiments in cultivation.
‘They didn’t expect me to last as long as I have, I suspect.’ Their host was pottering with plates and cutlery. ‘Equally, Dakota didn’t have the stomach to just kill me. We’d seen and done too much together for her to turn against me totally. I think she always hoped I’d change my mind, become useful to her again instead of actively unhelpful. Well, fat chance of that.’
‘Go back to the beginning,’ Vasin said. ‘Your arrival here, to start with. The three of you – the Trinity. How did it go from that to this?’
‘We were brought here by the Watchkeeper. We travelled close to the speed of light, although probably not quite as quickly as
Zanzibar
. Say when.’
‘When.’ The captain took her plate of processed fungus, staring at it with a measure of trepidation.
‘It won’t kill you, Gandhari.’
‘Thank you, Eunice. When you say
Zanzibar
, though – this was before the arrival, the translation event?’
‘Yes – long before. Think about it. The Trinity left Crucible more than twenty years before your Mandala event. We had that much time to explore this place – to begin to understand for ourselves what the Watchkeepers had in mind for us.’
‘Which was?’ Loring asked. They were all seated around Eunice’s table, squeezed together like the unexpected drop-ins they were, with Ru and Dr Nhamedjo perched on storage crates instead of chairs.
‘Exploration. To serve as their proxies. To learn things they themselves could not discover. Doctor Nhamedjo?’
‘About the same as Gandhari, please. Maybe a little less.’
‘Suit yourself.’ She deposited a generous dollop of the fungus on his plate. ‘You can always come back for seconds. Maslin?’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘How was that supposed to work, exactly?’ Goma asked. ‘What could the Watchkeepers not discover for themselves that they’d need our help with? We’re nothing to them – we’re not even the same order of intelligence.’
‘And therein lies your answer. There are facts concerning the M-builders that they would like to uncover, but they can’t because of what they are. The M-builders put up barriers. Think of them as intelligence filters, capable of deciding what is allowed access to the truth and what isn’t. Consider yourselves lucky: without my intervention you’d have likely blundered into one of the filters yourselves.’
‘The Mandala, or Poseidon?’ Loring asked.
‘Both, to a degree – although the really formidable defences are around Poseidon. Those moons aren’t to be trifled with. They’ll permit certain kinds of intelligence to pass and deny others.’
‘Machines are barred, organics allowed?’ Vasin asked.
‘More complicated than that.’
‘Is there anything about this that’s
not
complicated?’ Goma said.
‘Not to my knowledge. Aiyana?’
Ve lowered a hand over ver plate. ‘Not very hungry? A little for the taste?’
‘Go, you.’ Eunice served the scientist rather more than was required for a taste. ‘And my two special guests – my brave Tantor specialists? Surely all that intellectual stimulation has worked up an appetite?’
‘If you eat it, I’ll eat it,’ Goma said. ‘Even though it looks like shit.’
‘Wait until you find out how it tastes. Ru?’
‘She doesn’t get to have all the fun on her own.’
Eunice beamed. ‘I like you both already.’
‘Make sure you save some for yourself,’ Goma said.
In fact the food was not as inedible as it looked, nor even as bland, for there was a saltiness to it and a faint aftertaste of chilli powder. As a one-off, Goma could tolerate it well enough. But she had not been forced to live here for more than two centuries with only a handful of items on the menu. It was a wonder Eunice had not gone insane.
Perhaps she had.
‘Tell us about the M-builders,’ Vasin said, between tentative mouthfuls. ‘Everything you know. And the Watchkeepers, while you’re at it. Where are they now? What happened to them?’
‘Questions, questions.’
‘You can’t blame us,’ Ru said. ‘You still haven’t told us about
Zanzibar
, about Dakota and Chiku.’
‘Let me tell you the most important thing – the most pressing thing. Dakota is set on a very bad course. There are structures on Poseidon. You’ll have seen them – arch-like objects rising from the seas. They’re wheels, if you didn’t already guess. Dakota wishes to reach those wheels – to learn the secrets they encode. Until now, she hasn’t had the means to either reach Poseidon or penetrate its defences or atmosphere. Unfortunately the arrival of that other ship has fallen neatly into her plans. She has to be stopped. The first thing we must attempt is communication – get a signal through to that ship if they’re still listening.’
‘Haven’t you tried that already?’ Goma asked.
‘My transmitters can’t possibly reach all the way through
Zanzibar
, but yours might be able to. Use whatever you have, from radio to neutrinos. Send Morse code with your engine – but get through to them. Tell them that Dakota absolutely can’t be trusted, and that whatever help or reciprocity they think they’re getting from her, there’ll be a significant sting in the tail. Can you do that, Captain Vasin?’
‘I’ll see what Nasim can manage. But if they weren’t prepared to listen to you—’
‘Maybe they couldn’t, and maybe they’re dead already, but you can still try. And it’s not just the crew of the ship you’ll want to reach out to – it’s the rest of the Tantors. My bridges are burned, but you saw how Sadalmelik and the others revere Ndege’s name. That goes for the other Tantors in
Zanzibar
, too. They will still think twice before disregarding the advice of an Akinya. As long as it’s not me, of course.’
‘Tell us about the people,’ Vasin said. ‘The hundreds and thousands you said survived the translation. Surely they aren’t all gone?’
‘Every last one. There were difficult times after the translation. Have you noticed how much of my camp I need to set aside to provide for just six Tantors? The problems on
Zanzibar
were much more acute, and there was no way it could keep everyone alive, people and Tantors. But there was a way out – a solution. Most of the human survivors agreed to return to skipover, to conserve basic resources.’
‘The Tantors were already independent by that point?’ Goma asked.
‘Not quite. There was enough capacity to keep a handful of humans alive, a skeleton staff to guide and assist the Tantors as their world was remade.’
‘Then we’ll speak to them,’ Goma said.
‘You can’t. Dakota had them all killed. For thousands of years, we had the blood of elephants on our hands. Now the deed has been repaid.’
Kanu had nothing to say in the face of the elephants. Nothing in his long and strange life, no experience or lesson, had prepared him for this moment. He had a million questions for the elephants, but no idea where to begin. It was all he could do to stand still, caught in the paralysing rapture of the moment.
‘Who are you?’
It was Nissa who spoke first, her voice booming out through her suit’s loudspeaker. The elephant’s answer, when it returned, was also in Swahili. It was not merely an echo of her words, for the intonation was distinctly different, questioning and with a trace of superiority.
‘Who are
you
?’
‘I am Nissa Mbaye,’ she answered, with a collectedness that impressed Kanu, as if she had expected to meet and speak to elephants all along. ‘Our ship was damaged, we needed a place to repair it, and we weren’t expecting to find anyone alive inside this station.’
‘Station?’
The vocal sounds were coming from the lead elephant but they were not being generated by its mouth, or at least not directly. The elephant was the tallest of the three, its skin pigmentation a dark umber offset with pinkish mottling around the eyes and mouth. It exuded an impression of powerful muscularity, a sense of enormous force just barely contained.
The sounds, insofar as Kanu could judge, emanated from a thick angled plate that the elephant wore across the front of its face, fixed between its eyes and above the top of its trunk. The voice was loud and very deep. At the lower end of its frequency range, Kanu felt certain it would be deeper than any possible human utterance, and certainly far louder.
‘We thought this was a station, a base,’ Kanu said, finding his voice at last. ‘We were expecting people – humans, like ourselves. We were not expecting you.’
‘Take off your helmets. We will see your faces.’
Nissa glanced at Kanu through the side of her visor, then the two of them consulted their wrist readouts.
‘It’s safe enough,’ Kanu whispered. ‘If there’s enough oxygen to keep them alive, we should be fine.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Nissa said.
‘Nor do I, but when in Rome . . .’
They eased their helmets off, then tucked them under their arms. Kanu breathed in the air. There was a mustiness to it, but he had inhaled worse.
‘Speak your name.’
‘Kanu,’ he said levelly, hoping he sounded as matter-of-fact as Nissa had. ‘My name is Kanu Akinya.’
‘Akinya?’
‘Yes.’
He was talking to an elephant, and the elephant was replying. The strangeness of this situation was almost too much to bear. It felt dreamlike, and yet he had a clear sense of the events that had led up to it, the chain of contingencies, each of which had felt logical and inevitable in isolation. It was entirely likely that this was happening. Astonishing, absurd, wonderful, but not beyond the realms of the possible.
‘You look the same to us. Are you brothers?’
He glanced at Nissa, tried to imagine a point of view from which they were indistinguishable. They were both nearly hairless now, but as far as Kanu was concerned, that was where the similarities ended.
‘No, we’re not brothers. I am a man, Nissa is a woman. We aren’t related.’
‘You are the man Kanu Akinya?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you are the woman Nissa Mbaye?’
‘Yes,’ she answered.
‘Do you know the name of this place, Kanu Akinya and Nissa Mbaye?’
‘The planet is Paladin,’ Kanu said. ‘That’s what we call it, anyway. We found this shard of rock orbiting it and hoped it could help us fix our ship. That’s all we know.’
‘Then you do not know the name of this place.’
‘Do you?’ Nissa asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What do you call it?’ she asked.
‘
Zan-zi-bar
,’ said the elephant, each syllable a distinct, booming thing unto itself.
Nissa looked at him. Kanu shrugged within the collar of his suit. The temptation was to dismiss the name out of hand. Anyone with an education, anyone with the slightest interest in history knew what happened to the holoship. But here was a talking elephant, claiming otherwise.
It felt only fair and reasonable that he should listen to what the elephant had to say on the matter.
‘We thought
Zanzibar
was destroyed,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘But people saw it happen,’ Kanu persisted. ‘It was a terrible event, one of the worst in recent history.’
‘Were you there?’
‘No . . . we’ve come from Earth, not Crucible. Neither of us has ever been there.’
The elephant was looking at him, sometimes directly, sometimes by angling its huge head to favour one eye over the other. The eyes were a pale amber under a cowling of dark lashes.
‘But you know of
Zanzibar
.’
‘Everyone does,’ Kanu said. ‘Something terrible happened – an accident with the Mandala on Crucible.’
‘Speak of this accident.’
‘
Zanzibar
was passing overhead and there was an energy burst, a discharge – a massive explosion. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed – I’m not sure of the exact number. The holoship was turned into rubble and the debris formed a ring system that’s still orbiting Crucible. Are you saying that’s not what happened?’
‘There was an accident. But
Zanzibar
came here. We were on it. We survived. We have been here ever since.’
‘Do you have a name?’ Kanu asked.
‘I have two names. A true name and a short name. You cannot hear my true name. That will not pass into your knowing.’
‘What is your short name?’ Nissa asked.
‘I am Memphis. I speak for these Risen. You will speak to them through me.’
‘A name with a connection to the family,’ he whispered to Nissa. ‘It proves a link to the elephants that came to Crucible.’
They were led out of the chamber into a corridor easily high enough for the elephants and wide enough for two of them to walk abreast with room to spare. Memphis went ahead of Kanu and Nissa, the other two slightly smaller elephants bringing up the rear. Kanu was uncomfortably aware of their lumbering presence behind him, the ease with which he might be injured or even killed were he to stumble under their feet. Memphis’s massive hindquarters loomed ahead, muscular and baggy at the same time, as if the skin were a size too big for the meat and bones beneath. The elephant’s tiny afterthought of a tail pendulumed with each stride, as if setting the rhythm. Once, without any pause in his progress, Memphis released a sackful of steaming dung, forcing the humans to step around it.
‘This is a development,’ Swift said.
‘Is that your idea of understatement?’ Kanu answered, speaking subvocally.
‘It’s my idea of bewilderment. How can this be
Zanzibar
if the records say that it was destroyed?’
‘It’s hard to square with what we know. But then again, why would they make up something so unlikely?’
‘They need to explain how it got here,’ Nissa said, speaking through the same subvocal channel. ‘I may not be an expert on Akinya history, but I know how long it took the holoships to crawl their way to Crucible. This is even further from Earth.’
‘Then it got here faster,’ Kanu said.
‘This isn’t even all of
Zanzibar
,’ Nissa replied. ‘We’d have recognised a holoship immediately. Where’s the rest of it?’
‘You heard the elephant. A large part of it survived – not all.’
‘Speaking of elephants – what the hell is going on? What do you mean by “family connection”?’
‘You mean he never told you?’ Swift said.
‘There’s a history of involvement with elephants in my family,’ Kanu said, feeling like a man called upon to defend himself. ‘It goes back a long, long way – to academic studies in Africa, but also genetic experiments on the Moon and elsewhere, shaping an elephant daughter species with the resilience to survive in space.’
‘And this is the result?’ Nissa said.
‘I don’t know! Some elephants travelled aboard the holoships, and there have always been rumours about the emergence of a strain with enhanced intelligence. More than rumours, apparently. But those elephants didn’t use machinery and speak Swahili. These are something else – yet another strain.’
‘Does their name mean anything to you?’ Nissa asked.
‘Risen? No. I don’t think I’ve heard that before. Risen from what? By whose hand?’ Kanu’s pace must have slowed, for he felt a gentle shove from behind, a nudge against his backpack. ‘Where are you taking us, Memphis?’
‘To see Dakota.’
*
The corridor went on and on, following an almost imperceptibly rising curve. It must cut, Kanu decided, through the rocky shell of
Zanzibar
itself, defining in its curvature the rough outline of the former holoship.
Clearly the corridor had not always been as wide as its present state. Here and there he could tell where it had been blasted or excavated open from some narrower configuration, and some of the remodelling was far from neatly done. Parts of the corridor were clad; other areas were bare rock, crudely furnished with illumination. At intervals, various corridors and passageways branched off it, angling away to mysterious destinations. Some of these were large enough to admit an elephant, but not all of them. A juvenile elephant might still be able to get down them, but not one of these hulking, armoured adults. Either there were still people around, or there were parts of this place that the elephants could not access.
So it had not been built for them, but adapted – in haste, perhaps, and imperfectly. They had language and the evident ability to control doors and perhaps use tools, but he wondered how capable they were of modifying their larger environment. Had they made these makeshift changes, or had they received assistance? More pertinently: were they now the only tenants?
‘Look,’ Nissa whispered.
He followed her gaze to the error readout on her cuff which meant that her suit was no longer in contact with
Fall of Night
. Kanu checked his own suit. It was the same story. He tried a wider search, hoping to pick up a contact from
Icebreaker
, but both ships were silent.
‘We have gone too far into the rock,’ Swift said. ‘The intervening material is blocking an already weak signal. I am afraid there is nothing to be done.’
Presently they reached a branching corridor which climbed steeply up through a number of turns, until at last they arrived in a much larger enclosed space than any they had seen so far. They were at the base of it, with a vaulted ceiling soaring several hundred metres overhead, its rocky underside pinpricked by hundreds of bright blue lights. The chamber was large but – Kanu reminded himself – still small compared to the original size of the holoship. Waiting in the chamber was an impressive vehicle, easily as big as anything he had seen on Earth. It consisted of a platform flanked by three pairs of huge balloon-tyred wheels, with a steep access ramp leading up to the platform.
The elephants and their guests went up the platform. There were no seats or amenities aboard the vehicle, just protective railings around the outside edges. Memphis moved to a control pedestal near the front and started touching things with his trunk. The vehicle rolled into life, giving off no more than a rumble of tyres against the chamber’s rough flooring. Up at the front, beyond the control pedestal, Kanu saw what looked like a conventional cockpit of some kind, encased in a pressurised canopy.
‘Did you make this?’ he asked, one hand on the nearest railing, the other arm still cradling his helmet. He had been breathing
Zanzibar
’s air for many minutes now without obvious ill-effect.
‘No, we did not make it.’
‘Then who did?’
‘It was made for Crucible. Now it is for us.’
The pedestal had been welded to the deck, and wires and cables ran in crude fashion down its length.
‘Did you adapt it?’ Nissa said.
‘No.’
‘Then who did?’
‘The Friends. You will see them soon, once you have seen Dakota.’
They were rolling out of the chamber now, having gathered a respectable turn of speed – easily faster than an elephant’s stampede charge. Once again they were travelling down a corridor, but the course of this one was much more erratic than before, suggesting that it been bored anew rather than converted from an earlier element of
Zanzibar
. It twisted and turned, climbed and descended. The vehicle rolled on, Memphis keeping the very tip of his trunk in contact with the steering controls. He produced more dung and one of the other elephants used a kind of broom to sweep it into a hopper on the side of the vehicle, leaving only a greasy smear. They must eventually collect their waste wherever it falls, Kanu thought, or else the world would have been full of dung.
‘This vehicle was meant for the colony, surely,’ he said, addressing Nissa, keeping his voice low while not yet subvocalising. ‘Manufactured up here, I suppose. They would have kept most of the factories and fabricators in orbit, sending finished goods down to Crucible. This one never made it, and now it’s been altered so
he
can drive it. But no matter how smart they’ve become, I don’t see this being within their capabilities. Someone must have helped.’
‘Were there people on this thing when the accident happened?’
‘Hundreds of thousands. Most were presumed dead, wiped out in an instant. But if the elephants survived, then I suppose some people must have, too.’
‘Strange that they weren’t in the welcome party, isn’t it?’
‘Memphis,’ Kanu said, ‘who are these Friends you mention? Is Eunice among them?’
The great head turned to regard him. ‘No.’
Kanu said, ‘Do you know what happened to her?’
‘Why do you speak of Eunice?’
‘Then you’ve heard of her.’
Memphis flapped his ears – a gesture that Kanu could not help but interpret as one of irritation. He was still driving, but his attention was now on them, not the way ahead. Still the vehicle trundled on. ‘Eunice did not like us. Eunice is gone.’
‘What do you mean, gone?’