Poseidon's Wake (42 page)

‘Each death makes it harder.’ She squeezed out a sponge, moistening the area around Sadalmelik’s sightless, gummed-over eye. ‘All our crimes against them have been senseless, but there’s a special idiocy about this one. Your doctor must have planned this before you even left Crucible.’

‘He probably did,’ Goma said, thinking of the demolition charges smuggled aboard
Travertine
. ‘I think he meant to get close enough to the Tantors to hurt them by destroying the ship – literally blowing it up in their faces. Suicide, obviously, unless he planned to put those charges aboard the lander. That failed – Mposi flushed out the threat – so he fell back on the virus. But even that wasn’t straightforward since he didn’t know that the majority of the Tantors were still aboard
Zanzibar
.’

‘He didn’t even know about the six here until he landed.’

‘That’s true. But if they were anywhere, the odds were pretty good that they’d be near you. He was wrong – thankfully.’

‘Not that it did Sadalmelik any good.’ After a silence, she added, ‘What put so much hate into someone, Goma?’

‘Not hate, exactly – I mean, how could he hate something he’d never known? More likely fear, I suspect.’

‘Fear of sharing the universe with another thinking species?’

‘Fear that the Tantors will always be something . . . wrong, I suppose – a mistake born from a mistake.’

‘Fucking stupidity. Is there any part of this universe that didn’t start out as a mistake?’

‘Not everyone has your perspective. And right now, I wish more of us did.’

‘Sadalmelik never knew
Zanzibar
– only ever this world, these closed-in spaces, these airlocks and spacesuits. Me for company. Me as his sole living example of a human being. And yet when we talked, I had to remind myself that he had never walked in those places, never known how they smelled, how they sounded. That’s what the Remembering is like, Goma – it’s more than recollection, passed-down stories, oral history. They feel it. It’s deep within them – a bridge of blood between the present and the past. He remembered Earth. He spoke of it not as something he’d been told about, but as a world he knew in his bones. As if he ached for blue skies, hard sunlight, the promise of the long rains. Life as an elephant – simple as breathing, hard as death, the joy and the sadness of being alive. Nothing was ever easy for them. But nothing was ever as strong, either. They were born knowing they were the kings of creation. They took the worst that the world could throw at them, including humanity.’

‘You weren’t such a bad companion,’ Goma said.

‘I tried to be what I could for them.’

‘And you succeeded. If there are debts to be repaid, yours is done. Whatever you are, whatever you were, you’ve achieved one human thing – you’ve been kind to the Tantors.’

Eunice touched Sadalmelik’s trunk, now quite cool and still. ‘He is passing.’

‘I know.’

‘I never speak of death in their presence. It’s not that they don’t understand, or need protecting from the truth. They understand perfectly well. They just find our view of it somewhat simplistic – limited, even. You won’t speak of death, will you?’

‘I promise,’ Goma said.

Eldasich rallied; Achernar worsened. On the fourth day he entered a coma. On the fifth, as Sadalmelik had done before him, he passed. It turned out they were brothers, born to a mother who had lived with Eunice in the earlier years of her exile.

The deaths were harrowing but by the time Achernar succumbed it was clear that the remaining four Tantors were now out of danger. The lander had made a return trip to
Travertine
, bringing better medicines from the well-equipped suites in orbit. These were administered to both people and Tantors, and after some adjustment of the relative dosages, the virus was in retreat. It had been studied, understood, its vulnerabilities pinpointed. It was clever, and engineered to hurt Tantors much more than humans, but it was not infallible. They were far from Crucible now, but their government had equipped the ship with the best tools at hand, and unlike Dr Nhamedjo they were not obliged to work in secrecy.

Ru, now also recovering from the infection, was released from quarantine. The experience had been harrowing, and it was clear to Goma that it was going to take more than her reassurances to rebuild her trust in Eunice.

‘I saw it in her eyes,’ Ru said. ‘The naked hate. And felt her strength. She might be skin and bones now, but she’s still a machine. She was only a twitch away from killing me.’

‘She’s human.’

‘And that’s meant to set my mind at ease?’

‘She regrets what she did to you. It was a heat-of-the-moment thing – you saw how much the Tantors mean to her. She knew that someone had tried to hurt them and you were the nearest thing to a suspect.’

‘I never want to be around her again. No, I’ll qualify that – around that
thing
shaped like your ancestor.’

It pained Goma, but she could hardly blame Ru.

‘She likes you.’

‘You mean she’s saying whatever she needs to, to keep you on her side.’

Goma had not thought of it in those terms, but now Ru had put the idea into her mind, it established itself with a nasty tenacity. Perhaps it was true. But then she thought back to Eunice’s tenderness with the dying Sadalmelik, the genuine and touching empathy she had shown. Yes, she had treated Ru badly. But it was a human thing to err, and a human thing to feel remorse afterwards.

In any case, Ru would have to accept sharing a ship with Eunice whether she cared to or not. They were leaving soon. Complicated arrangements were already in hand.

The remaining Tantors could not come with them – there was simply no means of providing for them aboard
Travertine
– but neither could they be expected to maintain the camp on their own during Eunice’s absence. Consequently, out of the remaining crew in orbit, a small delegation of technical specialists would be brought down and trained to care for the Tantors, instructed in the rudiments of life-support maintenance and briefed in the newly developing field of human
–
Tantor diplomatic relations. After an overlap period of a few days, the initial landing party would depart for
Zanzibar
.

They would not be gone for long – weeks at most.

First, though, there was the business of two Tantor funerals.

During the long years of her exile, Eunice had faced numerous times perhaps the hardest of all the decisions forced upon her by time and circumstance: what to do with the dead.

Nothing burned on the surface of Orison, nothing decayed.

The encampment was a closed-cycle ecosystem, its own life-support bubble, but no such system was entirely efficient. The dead were significant reservoirs of stored chemical wealth, demanding – by all considerations of logic and wise management – to be recycled back into the matrix, broken down into their useful constituents. Planetary ecologies did it all the time – the endless conveyor belt of birth, growth and predation. There was nothing unnatural or distasteful about it, and she ought to have felt no qualms about employing the corpses of her friends for the betterment of the camp.

But she could not bring herself to do it, even though – as she was fully aware – in this act of refusal she was only storing up problems for the future.

But they had been her friends, her allies, her companions. It was the least she could do for them.

Fortunately the deaths came infrequently and she had never needed to contend with two in close succession before. There was another consideration. She hated the idea of all four of them being outside at once. They were as precious as jewels, more vulnerable than they knew. She could not bear the thought of something happening to all four of them at once. When the earlier deaths had occurred, she had persuaded her friends to take turns going outside.

But now the four of them went out together, Atria, Mimosa, Keid, Eldasich, bearing the wrapped corpse of Sadalmelik, a burden that would have been impossible even for Tantors to move without the power augmentation of their suits. They carried him between them, Sadalmelik laid on a bower formed from a heavy-duty cargo sled, their armoured trunks wrapped around the handles at each corner. They took him beyond the lander, out along one of the trails, until at last they reached a rocky elevation where they set him down.

The humans followed behind, but when the Tantors surmounted the burial spot, Eunice directed the people to remain where they were.

The Tantors removed Sadalmelik from the bower, set him on the raised ground and brought the bower back down to the level plain. Decorously, without haste, the Tantors loaded the bower with an assortment of boulders and pebbles. They hauled the bower back up to Sadalmelik and began to construct a cairn around his reposed form. This took quite some while and entailed many trips back and forth with the sled. They worked in silence, no word or vocalisation breaking across the humans’ suit channels – only the slow, patient bellowing of furnace-sized lungs. Finally – after much deliberation and careful rearrangement of stones – the Tantors completed their cairn. It enclosed Sadalmelik completely, an igloo of interlocking rocks.

Then they returned to fetch Achernar.

Eunice signalled the human party. They proceeded up the slope and placed their own small stones and pebbles onto the cairn, taking care not to disrupt those already in place.

‘For the Tantors,’ Eunice said, confiding in a low voice, ‘these stones are anchors of memory.’ She placed a rock of her own onto the cairn. ‘Let the memory of Chiku Green find the memory of Sadalmelik, and both be stronger for it.’

‘For Ndege and Mposi,’ Goma said, placing two similar pebbles into the cairn.

Ru stepped to her side and set her own piece down. ‘For Agrippa, and everyone we left behind on Crucible.’

Soon, the Tantors returned with Achernar’s bower and set his body a short distance from the first cairn. As before, the human party watched the Tantors assemble a stone mound around the remains, and then they joined them and made their own offerings to the cairn.

‘For all the dead of
Zanzibar
,’ Goma said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Kanu hammered the metal staff against the floor, summoning Memphis in the agreed manner. He felt sick, literally on the verge of vomiting, but he knew his only choice was to confront the matriarch directly. It was no good continuing in this state of ignorance, accepting that answers would be provided in the fullness of time.

‘Kanu,’ Swift said, ‘might I suggest a period of reflection before you engage in rash action?’

‘You can suggest whatever you like.’

‘You will have to account for your knowledge of these supposed events. How will you do that without revealing my presence?’

‘I’ll just ask the obvious questions I should have asked all along.’

‘With respect, you
did
ask those questions – and answers were forthcoming, regardless of their veracity. The construct broke down and was dismantled; Chiku and the others succumbed to gradual systematic life-support failures. Might I remind you that we have precisely no evidence to the contrary?’

‘Except Chiku’s testimony.’

‘We have Chiku’s expressed concerns relating to events which had not only failed to happen at the time of her recording, but which may never have happened.’

‘Shut up, Swift.’

‘Seconded,’ Nissa said.

They had never requested Memphis’s presence until now, and this was an hour when they might have been expected to be resting. But Kanu was not prepared to sleep on his fears. He kept hammering on the floor.

‘If nothing happens, I’m going to walk there. I think I can find my way out of this place if I try hard enough.’

Before long they heard the thudding footfalls and deep vocal rumblings of the Risen. The main doors opened and a pair of elephants entered the central hallway.

‘Is Memphis here?’ Kanu asked.

‘Memphis is outside. You asked for the Risen.’

‘Take us to Memphis,’ Nissa said.

These subordinate Risen were clearly content to do exactly as they were told – to a point. Kanu and Nissa were allowed out of the household. On the level ground before the main entrance waited Memphis and the wheeled vehicle.

‘You called,’ Memphis said.

‘We want to speak to Dakota,’ Nissa answered.

After a short silence, the huge bull said, ‘Now is not the time.’

Kanu shook his head, anger overcoming his instinctive wariness of the larger creature. ‘I don’t care whether it’s the time or not. We have something to say – it’s very important. Take us to see her. Now.’

‘You have asked many things already.’

‘Not nearly enough,’ Nissa said.

Memphis eventually relented, and they were soon on their way. As they travelled, Kanu turned the same thoughts over again and again, trying to find some sense in them. There had been people here once, coexisting with elephants, and now – by the evidence of his eyes – there were none. Had these slow and gentle creatures committed the worst of crimes, a kind of genocide? He could not begin to imagine how it might have happened, nor did he wish to dwell too long on the possibilities. There had to be some other explanation – one that absolved the Risen of any wrongdoing. He did not want to think of his hosts as murderers.

And yet, Chiku must have thought it possible. And she had known elephants as well as anyone.

He had no idea of Dakota’s sleeping habits – if indeed she slept – and was not surprised therefore to find her awake and alert when they were finally admitted into her presence. They were in the grand lobby of the civic building where only a little while earlier they had viewed the recording.

‘You may wait outside, Memphis.’

Soon they were alone – just Kanu, Nissa and the matriarch.

‘Something has troubled you,’ she said, after a long silence.

‘It’s time to tell us what really happened,’ Kanu said.

‘Have I not been open and honest with you thus far?’

‘Where are all the people, Dakota?’ Nissa said. ‘What happened after Chiku made that recording?’

‘I gather from Memphis that you requested a second viewing.’

‘Answer my question,’ Nissa said.

‘I do not care for your tone. What answers have I not already provided? I told you what became of the construct, and of Chiku. These were tragedies, and they left us weakened. Yet we recovered. What more is there to say?’

Kanu asked bluntly, ‘Did you kill them? Not just Chiku, not just Eunice, but all of the people who agreed to stay awake?’

‘Why would we have killed them? What purpose would that have served?’

‘Maybe they started to turn against you,’ Nissa said. ‘Is that what happened? Did the people try to check your rise to power? Did they start to realise that you were something more than the other Risen – that you were really acting for the Watchkeepers?’

‘Walk with me,’ Dakota said, after a moment’s consideration. ‘We shall visit the skipover vault. I have something to tell you about the Friends. I believe you will find it interesting.’

Kanu and Nissa looked at each other.

‘We’ll stay here, thanks.’ Nissa said.

‘No, you will accompany me. And no harm shall come to you – that is my promise. Believe me, my own self-interests are served by your not coming to harm. But I have something to say, and I think my point will be best illustrated directly.’

They followed Dakota down the sloping ramps, first one way then the other, until they arrived at the observation gallery where Memphis had first shown them the sleepers. Dakota moved to the same control panel and performed some deft input with the tip of her trunk, bringing on the lights in ascending stages, illuminating each layer of sleepers in turn.

‘They were Friends to us then and are Friends to us now. One day, when the time is right, they will rejoin us. I wished you to be fully satisfied in your own minds that these sleepers can be revived. I wished there to be no doubt in your minds. Now that you have conducted a thorough examination of the technology, there is none – am I correct?’

‘Yes,’ Nissa said, with an edge of doubt in her voice echoing Kanu’s own growing qualms.

‘Then we are in agreement. These are not frozen corpses but potential lives. With a few exceptions, there is no barrier to their being brought back to consciousness. Allow me illustrate my point.’

Dakota touched the panel again. One block of sleepers a couple of levels below their vantage point turned dark.

‘Let me be clear. I have not simply removed the illumination from that section of the vault. I have removed the power entirely. Their units are no longer functioning. Insofar as the Friends have the capacity to live again, that capacity is now being slowly removed. Their cells are warming, but in an uncontrolled, disruptive fashion. They are dying. If the process continues, there will be nothing worth reviving.’

‘Stop,’ Kanu said, as the full horror of what she meant to do became clear.

Dakota touched the same control and the sleepers were again illuminated. ‘I have restored the power. The caskets will resume functioning and no lasting harm will have been done. It was only a few seconds. But it could have been longer.’

‘Then you never needed us,’ Nissa said. ‘You’ve always known how to operate this technology.’

‘That is not quite true. Achieving full revivification would still be a challenge for us. Your help would be beneficial – essential, even. But I do not need complete control or understanding of the technology to make it stop working. That is much simpler.’

‘Why would you do that?’ Kanu asked.

‘Because it is necessary to explain my position. I had hoped that the terms of our relationship would be cordial, but . . . you have put an end to that. The Friends will be our bond now. You have provided us with a ship, and you will see to it that the damage is repaired. In addition, I will now request some minor structural modifications to enable it to carry a small expeditionary crew of the Risen. Then we will use the ship, but only for a short journey.’

‘Poseidon,’ Nissa said.

Dakota tilted the ram of her brow in a great, slow nod. ‘We will learn many things, and then our debt will be satisfied. The ship will be returned to you. I will allow you to leave, or to remain, whichever you prefer. But until you have helped me, the fate of the Friends lies in your hands.’

‘You can’t do this to us,’ Kanu said, doubting that anything he now said would make a difference.

‘You have done it to yourselves by doubting my good intentions. I hoped that we might stay friends, and perhaps our trust can be reestablished, given time. But the ship will be repaired, and it will be made ready. Nothing will stand in the way of that.’

‘So what does that make us – your slaves?’ Nissa asked.

‘Elephants were the instruments of human will for centuries. We were strong when you were weak. We did your bidding. We crushed your enemies for you, moved your mountains – tore down your forests. In your gratitude, you offered us only death and mutilation. We are better than that – more generous, more forgiving. Is it so wrong of the Risen to ask this one thing of you?’

‘The Risen?’ Kanu asked. ‘Or the Watchkeepers?’

‘What does it matter? Why not serve us, as we serve another?’

Kanu looked at the sleepers again, thinking of the patterns of identity still enshrined in those countless frozen brain cells. The good memories and the bad, the joys and the sorrows, the wisdom and the foolishness, life’s accumulated bounty of kindness and cruelty. Those things made people what they were. Those things had made him, too. And he thought of the warmth stealing into those cold skulls, the patterns losing coherence, the hard-forged connections of a lifetime surrendering to heat and chaos.

That could not be on him. He would not murder these people.

So their work continued. From the outside, there was no essential difference in their daily activities. They spent their nights at the household, treated like human royalty, and by day they were either aboard
Icebreaker
, nursing it back to health, or dealing with the Risen who had been tasked to assist them. The supply lines ran efficiently; the manufactories spat out the parts they needed, materials and components which slotted together with ominous precision, as if the ship were willing itself back to life. Even the communicational difficulties with the Risen were behind them now as both parties learned to better understand each other. Each day brought fewer problems, less to go wrong before completion. Also, now that they knew the goal of the repairs, Dakota could communicate her requirements openly.
Icebreaker
had to accommodate the Risen now as well as humans and needed to be adjusted accordingly – its airlocks modified, its interior spaces enlarged, provision made for the Risen to use its control systems and data interfaces. The
Noah
, one of the short-range winged shuttles from the original settlement of Crucible, was to be attached to
Icebreaker
’s hull so that the Risen could travel within Poseidon’s atmosphere, perhaps even all the way down to its sea.

Kanu was torn. He could think of nothing worse than succeeding – with the sole exception of failure. If he gave her the ship, in the condition she dictated, she would commit herself to folly on behalf of the Watchkeepers – and take Kanu and Nissa with her. It was not just their own lives at stake, but the collective security of the entire human species. But if he failed in the repairs, she would exact her revenge on the sleepers.

The equation was trivial, he knew. Against the possible consequences of her expedition, the lives of the Friends barely registered. In rational terms, there was only one sensible course of action open to him. But to admit such thoughts was poison.

Their meetings continued. On the surface, there was a sort of lingering cordiality. She made her pleasantries and flattered Kanu and Nissa that she found their company stimulating. Even after showing them what would happen if they let her down, she still acted as if they were her honoured guests. Chai was always served, and if some urgent business needed discussing, she would always take her time getting around to it. Kanu wondered if she was in a state of denial, a kind of conscious forgetting of the unpleasant matter of the Friends.

But one day she was unusually direct.

‘Another ship has entered the system,’ she said, without preamble. ‘Do you know about this?’

Kanu did not need to put on a front of feigned ignorance. ‘No. What ship? Where?’

‘That is an excellent question. Since your arrival, the Watchkeepers have raised their level of vigilance, alert to any other intruders. But perhaps they need not have bothered – it was a Watchkeeper that heralded the arrival of this new ship.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It accompanied this ship across interstellar space – that’s my inference, at least. Now the Watchkeeper has removed itself to the edge of the system – they feel safest the further they are from Poseidon – and there has been a great deal of interest in this new ship. They whisper to each other – a chatter of blue lights across light-minutes, light-hours. Sometimes I have been allowed a glimpse of these thoughts of theirs.’

Kanu thought back to the message from Chiku. ‘They’re hollow. They’ve forgotten how to be conscious. You’re listening to the whispering of zombie machines.’

‘Be that as it may, I can’t help but be intrigued by this new arrival. It has come from Crucible, of all places.’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised by that.’

‘No?’

‘When we first met, I mentioned a signal – the reason we came here in the first place. You claimed to know nothing about it. But the signal originated in this system, and it was aimed at the people of Crucible. It was only a matter of time before they responded.’

‘Is this true, Nissa?’

‘As far as I know,’ she answered.

‘Then how did it come to your attention, Kanu?’

‘I am – or was – a diplomat,’ Kanu said. ‘I had ready access to many information channels. This signal was never public knowledge, not even in the Crucible system. But I learned of it, and decided I needed to make an independent investigation.’

‘Were you planning to arrive before the ship from Crucible?’