Poseidon's Wake (37 page)

Goma nodded. ‘What did the others get?’

‘Dakota was already clever. They made her much cleverer – and almost immortal.’

‘And Chiku?’

‘Dear Chiku. In hindsight, she was the only shrewd one among us. There was nothing they could offer her – no carrot, no stick. She wasn’t interested in being smarter, or living longer, and she certainly didn’t want to become anything she already wasn’t. Blame it on my grandson – that boy Geoffrey put some distinctly odd ideas into her head.’

‘They sound healthy enough to me,’ Ru said.

‘Then you’re as odd as he was.’

‘Carry on, please,’ Goma said, a knot of foreboding tightening in her stomach.

‘Chiku’s defiance put her on a path against the Watchkeepers. When
Zanzibar
arrived, we all did what we could to help. But the Watchkeepers already had plans for Dakota. If they couldn’t use humans, why not elephants instead? It’s not that they understood us, that they had deep insights into our psychology. They just saw another group of vertebrate animals and knew what needed to be done to get what they wanted. Dakota was to be the new matriarch – the new ruler of the Tantors. The homecoming queen. They shuffled her genes, mixed in some new ones and let her breed – allowing her offspring to become the dominant order.’

‘Beyond the Tantors?’ Ru asked.

‘The Risen, they call themselves. In reality, they’re just another instrument of the Watchkeepers – all being groomed for an expedition.’

‘Tell me more about Chiku,’ Goma said.

‘She died. It was near the end of the human presence in
Zanzibar
. I was there, I saw it. They killed her.’

‘No,’ Goma said, preferring to believe anything but that.

‘It was a dark time. Bad things were done by both parties. The humans began to realise that the Risen were slipping from their control, so of course some of them overreacted – tried to use
Zanzibar
’s systems to contain the elephants. Pumped inert gases into the life-support network – that sort of thing. Humans could easily squeeze into suits or airlocks, but the elephants couldn’t hide. But it was too clumsy, and not fast enough. There were reprisals. Then the humans switched to lethal weapons – it’s really not that hard to kill an elephant if you’ve the will. But the elephants, especially the Risen, were quick and smart enough to respond in kind. After that it was war.’

‘Please let this be a lie,’ Ru said, and Goma breathed out hard and held her hand, together finding the mutual strength to face this awful truth.

‘Chiku tried to broker a peace. She had friends among the Tantors – even among the Risen. But blood was running too hot on both sides. She was bludgeoned and killed. It was fast. She wouldn’t have felt anything.’

‘Couldn’t you have stopped them?’ Goma asked, barely holding back her rage.

‘You think I didn’t try? You think I wouldn’t have bloodied my hands against them if I could have made a difference? I’m not on the side of elephants or people, Goma. I’m on the side against stupidity.’ She looked down at herself, giving a little shiver of disgust. ‘But I wasn’t strong enough. Not strong enough, not fast enough, not bold enough. Look at what I’ve allowed myself to become.’

‘One of us,’ Goma said. ‘In which case, pity poor you.’

‘Whatever happened on
Zanzibar
, Eunice can’t be held accountable for it,’ Ru said.

‘No, I can’t,’ Eunice said. ‘But that doesn’t get us out of the mess. I’ve been stuck here without a ship ever since my exile. But you’ve changed all that.’

‘And the other ship?’ Vasin asked.

‘It’s a worry – and another reason for making contact with
Zanzibar
as quickly as possible. I doubt very much that your arrival has gone unnoticed – especially with all the electromagnetic noise you were putting out.’

‘Your fault for asking us to come in the first place,’ Goma said.

‘Yes, that hasn’t escaped my attention – nor the possibility that I may have inadvertently caused the arrival of the other ship. But I had no choice. I could not sit back and do nothing, not knowing what the Watchkeepers want of Dakota.’

‘You must have known we’d take more than a century to get here,’ Vasin said. ‘Who the hell plans on that kind of timescale?’

‘I do. It’s the habit of a lifetime. And look – you’re here.’

‘So what’s next?’ Goma asked.

‘The other three will be here shortly. I should very much like to take them all with me, but I doubt your ship is geared up to accommodate Tantors. They’ll just have to sit tight here on Orison until I get back.’ She gave an unconcerned shrug. ‘They’re clever. They can run the camp on their own, provided nothing major breaks down.’

‘You have a lot of faith in them,’ Karayan said.

‘Someone needs to. It might as well be me.’

Their arrival had interrupted her work, and Eunice said she could not leave until she had set down in stone the thread of her most recent insight. Goma wondered why she did not just write it down on paper, or record herself for posterity.

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘I could try.’

Eunice put on her spacesuit, the one with the heavy utility belt, and Goma followed her out through the lock, although she had not been specifically invited to do so. Wordlessly, Eunice set off for the cliff where they had first encountered her. She picked her way around one of the high stone cairns, then stopped at the base of the cliff. She inspected it for a moment, hand shading her helmet like a visor, and then chose a confident route up through the cracks and shelves of the face.

Goma watched from below. Eunice took out the cutting tool, made its tip flare bright and then began cutting meticulous angular marks into the rock.

Feeling herself on the brink of some momentous, life-changing disclosure, Goma swallowed hard and said: ‘I’ve seen these symbols before.’

Eunice carried on working in silence. She completed a section, then traversed gingerly to the right, her toes resting on the merest wrinkle of out-jutting rock. She cut another series of markings.

‘I very much doubt it.’

‘And I’m pretty sure I have. It’s the Mandala grammar – the same pattern as the one cut into Mandala’s sides, like long chains of dominoes, zigzagging and branching. Only there’s something more, isn’t there? You’re mixing in other types of symbol.’

‘You are very clever. Now why don’t you run along and play?’

‘That’s the Chibesa syntax. You’re combining statements from the Chibesa syntax with the Mandala grammar, as if they’re part of the same hierarchical language, or at least deeply connected.’

Eunice stopped what she was doing. She turned off the cutting tool and returned it to her pouch, then shimmied back down to the ground.

‘And you’d know that how, exactly?’

‘Because my mother showed me. After you left us, Ndege spent thirty years finding connections between the two forms. Eventually she used her knowledge of the Chibesa syntax as a key to unlock the Mandala grammar. That was how she learned to talk to Mandala.’

‘I always knew Ndege had promise.’

‘Never mind my mother – how can you be coming up with the same connections? I know what you are. Your memories aren’t Eunice’s actual memories – you’re made up from her public utterances, the outside facts of her life. Mother said these connections were a deep family secret – too deep for you to know about.’

‘Your mother was correct. She also does me a modest injustice – there is more to me than the posterity engines ever provided – but the essential truth is beyond dispute. I know that the Chibesa syntax is a mathematical formalism, a gateway into new physics, and I also know – or suspect, at least – that it has its origin in the rock scratchings of a passing alien tourist. I also have access to the entire public corpus of academic work on the Mandala grammar, at least as it stood at the time of my departure. But the notion that the two might be connected? I had to figure that out for myself.’

‘How?’

‘The Terror. Whatever you make of it, it was a form of intimate contact with the M-builders’ technology, and of course it changed us all. In my case it left me with glimmerings, a sense of larger insights just out of reach. All that stuff about the vacuum rip . . . the end of time? That came through. Like I said, leakage. Contamination. More of their nature was revealed than perhaps they intended. Ever since then, I’ve had an odd sense of connections waiting to be made. My dreams—’

‘Then you do dream.’

‘Yes. Now, if you’d allow me to continue?’

‘By all means.’

‘My dreams were great fevered battles between armies of symbols, regiments of logic and formal structure. They would not leave me alone. They chased me for years, decades, grinding away at my sanity until I began to exorcise them by way of these rock carvings.
That
appears to help. I still only have glimpses most of the time. I can’t see how the syntax and the grammar fit together at all levels . . . just little pieces, phrases in a larger argument. But that’s enough. It’s as if the glimpses want to be carved into rock – as if they crave permanence. And with each breakthrough – each new carving that appears to lock into the whole – I see that my initial insight must have been real. There is a link.’

‘Ndege agreed.’

‘And did she . . . theorise?’

‘My mother wasn’t allowed to talk about her ideas – not even to me. But she did. And yes, she theorised. The grammar is an evolution of the syntax – a later, more elegant form. The syntax is a useful shorthand, but it’s hard to use it to talk about anything other than physics. The grammar goes beyond that – it’s richer, more complex, like a language with lots of tenses and genders.’

‘And she understood the formal relationships?’

‘No,’ Goma answered. ‘She had many deep ideas and worked out a lot of the details, but that was already a lifetime’s work. I know my mother didn’t feel as if she was done with it, only that she’d made inroads, seen further than anyone else. If they’d allowed her continued access to Mandala . . .’

‘And to the Mandala here.’

‘Yes – she’d have wept to have known about that. To know that some part of
Zanzibar
survived – that she wasn’t the monster they thought she was.’

‘Do not think ill of me, Goma. It has taken courage for you to come here, and I know you are at least as bright as the rest of your expedition.’

‘Thank you,’ she said doubtfully.

‘But you are not Ndege. I asked for her, and hoped fervently she would be the one who came. I was thinking of the help – the guidance
–
she could offer to the Tantors, but I see now that she could have been of incalculable value in other respects. How I would have benefitted from her insights. How much I could have learned, just by showing her this wall.’

‘I’m as sorry as you are that she can’t be here now.’

‘Sorry won’t get us very far.’

‘But I have her notebooks. I brought then with me – all of them. Do they interest you?’

Eunice looked at her through her faceplate. She had adjusted the reflectivity, offering Goma a chance to see her expression. She was smiling, and the smile was as genuine and beautiful as any Goma had seen.

‘I correct myself. I am not sorry you came, Goma Akinya. Not sorry at all.’

They could have left directly – the lander was ready for immediate take-off – but the other three Tantors still had not returned. In any case, Eunice needed a day to make the necessary housekeeping arrangements, placing the camp in a state of semi-dormancy so that it could be easily maintained by Sadalmelik and the others.

Goma saw this enforced delay as a blessing, offering further opportunity for interaction with the Tantors. She had to sleep and eat, but if not for those necessities she would have gladly spent every hour in their presence. Ru shared her excitement. Together, though, they realised they had an obligation to shift into a more structured methodology, using this opportunity to gather data rather than anecdote. The free-flowing exchanges of the early hours were all very well, but now it was time for discipline and rigor. Many of the cognitive tests they had performed on Crucible could be duplicated here, and these stood a real chance of answering questions only hinted at through dialogue. Language projected a bluff of intelligence, but no fakery could circumvent some of the more challenging tests in their arsenal. So they went down to the Tantors, excited and daunted by what lay ahead. Both knew that a few careful hours here could supplant the work of a lifetime back on Crucible.

But when Goma entered their domain, she immediately saw that something was terribly wrong.

Sadalmelik was on the ground.

CHAPTER THIRTY

It took Kanu a moment to realise he was mistaken – that the woman speaking from the glass was not in fact his mother. The error was forgivable: Chiku Yellow, Chiku Red and Chiku Green had once been a single individual, and their likenesses remained very similar despite vastly different personal histories.

‘You know her,’ Nissa said, studying his reaction.

‘She’s one of my mother’s three embodiments,’ Kanu replied in a near-whisper. ‘Chiku Green, who came to Crucible on the holoship. But I wasn’t her son – that was Mposi.’

‘This must be strange for you.’

‘Just a little,’ Kanu said, smiling at his own understatement, the exquisite sadness of the moment.

Nissa took his hand as the figure continued speaking.

‘None of this is easy to explain,’ she said. ‘My story is complicated – so much so that even I am not sure of all its parts. But what matters now is only recent history. A number of very odd and surprising things have happened to me lately, and now they bring me to this place, and this recording.’

Her voice was familiar – intensely, personally familiar – but as she spoke it phased in and out of clarity, like something recorded onto wax or cellulose and played back too many times.

‘Is it really her?’

‘I think so.’

‘Our Covenant with the Watchkeepers,’ she said, ‘was for three individuals to travel into interstellar space with the machines. In return, the rest were allowed to settle and colonise Crucible, and to explore the Mandala.’ Chiku nodded and smiled. ‘It was a perfect Trinity: a synthesis of the born, the made and the evolved.’

She paused and glanced down at her hands before raising her eyes back to her future audience. ‘They brought us here. We didn’t know where we were at first. Another solar system, one not so far away that we couldn’t recognise some of the constellations. It all happened very quickly. We must have travelled close to the speed of light because the journey did not appear to take more than a few days in our reference frame. Eventually we learned that this system is Gliese 163 – that we had travelled seventy light-years. And, just as slowly, we began to understand why the Watchkeepers had brought us here.’

The image glitched, remained frozen for a second or two, then jumped back to life. ‘By now, I’m guessing you already know about the second Mandala and the structures on Poseidon. You have probably wondered how they relate to the Watchkeepers, and the reason for their deeper interest in them. You must exercise extreme caution in relation to these structures.’

‘Thank you for the timely warning,’ Nissa said.

But the image had frozen again. It jumped, the recording of Chiku shifting her posture as if frames had been skipped over.

Skipped over, Kanu wondered, or deliberately edited?

‘We did what we could for the survivors of
Zanzibar
. They were in a bad way, and there was only so much help we could offer given the limited tools at our disposal. It was a huge challenge. This little fragment of our old holoship had to keep alive not just people, but also the Tantors still aboard. The early days were incredibly hard. It was a constant battle just to survive. Finding ways to return to Crucible, even generating enough power to send a transmission – those were luxuries we couldn’t begin to think about. It was tomorrow that counted, and the day after, not some possible rescue hundreds of years in the future. The—’

Again the image jumped.

Kanu glanced at Nissa. Privately, he was sure she was thinking the same thing. The recording might have suffered some natural breakdown, but it was more likely that it had been doctored. He wondered what Swift, who had been silent throughout, would make of it all.

‘In the end,’ Chiku continued, ‘the resource load was too great to support the entire population of survivors. We had the skipover vaults, but there was no hope of converting them to take elephants. So we reached a compromise. The Tantors would remain awake, but most of the human survivors would go into skipover. Some of us volunteered to stay with the Tantors to guide them through the difficulties of the coming years. Together – human and Tantor – we planned to work to expand
Zanzibar
’s life-support capability, to turn it into a world we could all begin to share. Once that was achieved, we could turn our collective efforts to the greater problem of getting home – if that was still what we wanted. Given my experience with Tantors, you’ll hardly be surprised to hear that I chose to stay with the living.’ She smiled. ‘Don’t think too highly of me. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice – I’d far rather be up and about, doing something, no matter the odds against us. With most of the colonists back in skipover, it was easier for the rest of us. Of course we always knew there would be difficult times ahead—’

The image jumped again.

‘Still, let us hope for the best, not the worst. If the Risen and the people have endured, something beautiful will have happened. And should you find it of interest to wake those of us who sleep, I do not think you will find it too taxing a proposition. By the time you reach this system, you’ll have decades or centuries of advancement over us. But because I want to maximise our chances, I’m appending all the relevant information I can think of which may be useful to you. You’ll find it at the end of this recording. There is more to say – much more – but this will have—’

The image made a deferential bow.

‘I am Chiku Akinya. I was born on the Moon, within a light-second of Earth. My great-grandmother was Eunice Akinya – Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one. She opened a door to the future, and some of us had the nerve to follow her through it. Whoever you are, wherever you have come from, whether blood or electrons run through your veins –– I wish you the best of luck. May wisdom and humility guide your actions.’

This part of the recording had finished playing. A sequence of schematics followed, flickering past too quickly for the eye to absorb. Kanu had just enough grasp on them to tell that the data was medical in nature, presumably referring to the functioning of skipover technology.

‘Interesting,’ Swift said, in the quietest of voices.

‘What do you mean,
“
interesting
”
?’ Kanu asked.

But the glass slab darkened, and for now Swift had nothing more to add.

They docked
Fall of Night
with
Icebreaker
, disembarked, made some system checks. They had been gone for a short enough time that the ship had made the barest progress in repairing itself. Equally, nothing untoward had happened.

Kanu remained on
Icebreaker
, while Nissa returned to
Fall of Night
, continuing to use it as a tug to shift the larger craft nearer to
Zanzibar
. The nearer they got, the more fraught and delicate the operation became – it would be so easy to lose control, and send
Icebreaker
battering into the elephants’ home.

When they first scouted
Zanzibar
, not knowing its true nature, they had noticed the depression at one end, like a dimple pushed into its skin. Kanu understood now that this was the vestigial remains of the holoship’s original Chibesa engine, the monstrous drive that had pushed it up to a fraction of the speed of light. Slow by the standards of his own ship – but then again, this was a thing the size of a mountain. The wonder was that it could be moved at all.

The holoships’ Chibesa engines had not been needed during most of the crossing. Some had even been temporarily dismantled, freeing up an enormous amount of interior space, before the engines were reintegrated for slowdown. After the holoships reached Crucible, though, there had been no need for the engines any more. They were stripped down completely, reforged into a thousand bright new things for the young colony.
Zanzibar
was no different, and the space vacated by the gutted engine had been turned over to spacecraft berthing – a walled dock for handling much larger vehicles than the usual landers and shuttles.

Now the sheer wall at the base of the depression was sliding aside, offering access to the interior. It was a cylindrical space equipped with many docking clamps, holdfasts and airlocks, but there were only a handful of spacecraft visible, and none of them was a tenth the size of
Icebreaker
. The designs of the other vehicles were unfamiliar, but he could guess their capabilities and functions well enough. These were short-range ships, the sort that might have been used to venture down to Crucible or hop from one holoship to another, but none of them looked large enough to be capable of deep-system operations. They were also all built for human passengers – an elephant could not board most of them, let alone operate them.

The docking bay rotated along with the rest of
Zanzibar
, and Nissa had to perform some deft piloting to nudge
Icebreaker
into position against one of the holdfasts. Any damage done now would just have to be added to the ledger.

Icebreaker
lurched, followed by a groan of structural complaint from somewhere beneath Kanu’s feet. Then the holdfast’s multiple clamps locked against the hull and all was silent.

Nissa redocked with
Icebreaker
, then moved through the ship until she had rejoined Kanu.

‘Nice work,’ he said.

‘I hope you’re right about this.’

‘So do I.’

‘You mean,’ she said, ‘so do both of you.’

*

Memphis was waiting for them on the other side of the airlock. They were taken to another vehicle, perhaps the same one they had ridden originally, and conveyed swiftly through a succession of tunnels and chambers until at last they returned to the civic building where their audience with Dakota had taken place. Only a few hours had passed, but Kanu nonetheless had the sense that his previous encounter with the matriarch belonged to another part of his life – one that preceded a momentous and irreversible decision.

‘Memphis showed you the sleepers,’ Dakota said as she walked slowly around the four walls of the lobby. ‘In his way, I imagine he tried to explain our predicament. The humans gave up their conscious lives so that the rest of us might survive, submitting themselves to the uncertainty of skipover. It was a great sacrifice – a truly noble and courageous act. They were as mothers to us. But as you may have judged for yourselves, our circumstances are now much improved.
Zanzibar
is hardy, and in a thousand small ways it has begun to heal itself. Now there is no question of it being able to support the Risen. Beyond that, there is also capacity for Risen and people to share the same resources.’

‘All of them?’ Kanu asked, thinking of the multitudes he had seen in the vaults.

‘To begin with, no – that would be too dramatic a change. But a forerunner population, a small cohort of woken humans woken to assist and put right what the Risen cannot do for themselves? That is entirely achievable. Or rather, it has become so.’

‘You mean since our arrival,’ Nissa said.

‘With the best will, we are limited in what we may achieve. Intellect is only part of the difficulty. We are also hampered by our very natures – our physical size. These tools and prosthetic enhancements you will have noticed upon us – they allow us a measure of control over
Zanzibar
’s functioning systems. But there have always been areas we cannot reach; control or sensory systems that are simply too delicate or complicated for us to operate. I may be able to read books, but even I would be daunted by the challenge of bringing sleepers out of skipover. I am sure the systems aboard your ship are highly automated.’

‘Of course,’ Kanu said.

‘It was not the case here. When the designers installed the skipover vaults, it was always with the presumption that there would be living caretakers on hand. Their concern was to provide for a great number of sleepers, with automation being a secondary concern. They succeeded, of course – the skipover vaults literally saved our lives. But we cannot simply rouse the sleepers at the touch of a button. For that we need human assistance.’

‘Even then it’ll be tricky,’ Nissa said.

‘But you will have as much time as you need, and all the resources of
Zanzibar
at your disposal. If at first you fail, none of us will think ill of you.’

‘Even if lives are lost?’ Kanu asked. ‘At least those people are frozen now, beyond any immediate threat.’

‘Of course there will be a chance of deaths,’ Dakota said. ‘But just as the settlers of Crucible made their Covenant with the Watchkeeper, so we have our solemn Covenant with these sleepers. They surrendered their conscious lives so that we might live – and for that they have our eternal gratitude. But the debt cannot go unpaid.’

‘You feel an obligation to bring them back,’ Nissa said.

‘It is long past time – the duty weighs heavy on us. Your arrival is a great stroke of fortune.’

Kanu gave a half-smile. ‘It didn’t feel so fortunate to us.’

‘Nonetheless, I could not be happier to have you among us. Your ship will be repaired. Once the work is under way, please feel perfectly free to make use of your own skipover facilities. But with your permission, and when the time suits you, I should very much enjoy continuing our conversations. I have not often found my mental equal among my fellow Risen, but I think the pair of you will provide suitable stimulus.’

‘Of course,’ Kanu said, putting aside whatever misgivings he presently felt.

‘But all that is for the future. Tomorrow, if you are suitably rested, I should like you to make an examination of the sleeper vaults – as thorough as you feel it needs to be. In turn, we will discuss the detailed arrangements for the repair work – the supply of materials, the use of our manufacturing systems. In the meantime, we will do our level best to make you feel at home. I believe you will find the arrangements exemplary, but you must not hesitate to speak up if some aspect of it may be improved.’

‘We will,’ Nissa said. ‘Might I ask a question, though?’