Poseidon's Wake (63 page)

It took thirty minutes to get all the emergency supplies unloaded and organised – during which time Kanu’s party rose another five hundred metres. Goma was supremely conscious that each second counted against Kanu. Equally distressing was the fear that they would make some miscalculation or omission now, and really damn their hopes.

The immediate task was to set up the tether and the grapple. The grapple was a thousand kilograms of heavy-duty engineering designed to bear the load of a spacecraft under adverse thrust. It would certainly not fail on them, which was one consolation, but it took two of them to move it, and even in its retracted configuration it only just squeezed through the secondary lock. It looked like a mechanical starfish, two metres across with five independent arms, each of which ended in a complex multifunctional gripping appendage. They wedged the grapple into the back of the groove, cleared to a safe distance, then ordered it to lock itself into place. The arms pushed out with explosive speed, the tips adapting to the sensed surface to provide the maximum locking force. Since the inner walls of the groove were smooth, there was nothing for the grapple to hook on to. But it was also designed to couple with the smooth hulls of other spacecraft, using high-friction pads. Its appendages angled to bring their pads into optimum contact. They slipped a little initially, then held. The three humans approached the grapple again and hooked on the tether. Using the power winch, they tested the grapple up to five thousand and sixty newtons of instantaneous force, at which point it slipped and then regripped. Five tonnes – not much.

They would never strain it that severely, though, because the tether was going to run over the lip of the groove, which would function as a bearing surface. From
Mposi
’s repair inventory they found a piece of spare hull cladding which had approximately the right profile to slip under the tether at that point of contact. They fixed it into place with vacuum epoxy, trusting that the bond would hold against the alien material of the wheel, and that the tether would not cut through it.

They buckled what they could onto the utility belts of their suits, but the emergency oxygen and power supplies were too bulky for that. These items were packed into a zip-up bag which they would lower down ahead of them, strung out like a plumb-bob on a few metres of standard safety line. They used the same line to tie themselves together, again with a safety margin of a few metres.

Eunice would lead, Goma second, Ru third. Ru was the only one coupled to the tether itself and she had direct control of the power winch, which was connected to the front of her belt by a sturdy clasp. The winch did not look like much to Goma, just a squat yellow cylinder with some hazard stripes and a few simple operating controls chunky enough to be worked with spacesuit gloves. It was hard to believe that most of the fifty kilometres of the tether were still spooled up in the winch’s casing. But then the tether itself was almost invisibly fine, and Vasin had warned them that it could easily slice open their suits if they touched it under tension.

Or worse.

Still, doing it this way rather than spooling out from the grapple at least meant there was no moving contact between the tether and the corner piece. Eunice would be their lookout as they approached and traversed each successive groove on their way down. And to stand a chance of helping the others, they would need to be moving quickly.

Eunice was the first over the lip, with the supply bag dangling under her. She braced her legs against the nearly sheer side and signalled for Goma to join her. Ru spooled out the line, no more than tens of centimetres at a time, until all three of them were over the lip and their weight was borne by the tether. It was easy for Goma – she was coupled to Ru by a stretch of line obviously thick enough to bear her weight. But Ru was barely able to see the tether.

‘I’m near the top of the next groove down,’ Eunice said. ‘Start lowering us. I’ll kick off and rejoin the surface under the groove. You’ll have to do the same. Once we get into a rhythm, we should be able to make good speed.’

It took them a while to get the rhythm of it. They were strung out far enough that Eunice and Ru were both passing grooves while Goma was descending the flat section between them. If they did not time their kicks correctly, there was a risk of Goma being torn from the wall just in time to swing back into the mouth of a groove. At low speeds, little harm could come to her. But to be of use to Kanu’s party, they would need to reach them in under ten hours, and that meant an average descent speed of five kilometres an hour. That was fine in spurts, not even a brisk stroll, but they could not allow themselves to fall behind. Every error counted, and if they had to go faster to make up time, any resulting accident could have serious consequences.

Thirty or forty minutes into the descent, though, they settled into a pattern. The tether was reeling out smoothly, the grapple holding. Goma stopped concentrating and just allowed her muscles to find the right pace, trusting in the women above and below her. The grooves passed one after another, punctuated by the icily smooth and pristine material between then. The angle of the tread was steepening towards vertical with every metre they descended, but it would be a long while before that became obvious to Goma’s senses. The wheel’s rotation brought Kanu’s party higher with each second, but that same rotation was also working to push Goma’s team higher as well. They could not afford to stop until they had closed the gap to Kanu, and to do so in a useful time they needed to outpace the wheel’s counter-rotation.

‘Kanu? This is Goma. We’re descending. How are you coping? Looks pretty dark down there.’

She had to wait a little longer for his reply than she cared to, as if she had pulled Kanu from the edge of sleep. ‘Dark, but we’re looking forward to company. Swift says we’re at six kilometres now. I won’t pretend it isn’t cold, but the suits are holding out, and there appears to be some heat radiating from the walls of the groove – it’s definitely not cooling down as quickly as the surrounding air.’

‘Stay with us, Kanu.’

‘I have no plans not to. Having come this far, I’d very much like to finish the job properly and return with a full expedition – human, Risen, machine – whatever it takes. Did you know there are monsters in that ocean?’

‘Nothing would surprise me,’ Goma said.

‘I say monsters – one of them ate our ship, which didn’t strike me as very gracious behaviour – but I suppose we should reserve judgement. For all I know, that was the M-builders making contact.’

‘I think they’re long gone, Kanu.’

‘So do I, but it’s a nice thought that we might meet them, isn’t it? At the very least, I’d enjoy telling them they were mistaken.’

‘About what?’

‘The futility of existence. Ask Eunice – she’s been through the Terror.’

She told him to sign off until they were nearer, wanting him to conserve energy and oxygen.

They carried on down, the grooves passing like the stepped-out balconies of an endless hotel. They were only seeing a part of each groove from their line of descent – each one extended to either side for hundreds of metres – but that was still enough for Goma to convince herself that each groove was unique in its detailed form, not just a horizontal slot but a wavering, wandering trench with right angles and zigzags, branches and interruptions. Statements in a language her mother had expected her to be able to read by now, but of which she was still ignorant.

‘Look,’ Ru said.

They slowed instinctively. Above them, a bright flame was rising beyond the convex surface of the tread, cut across by a converging density of grooves like the absorption lines in an atomic spectrum. Captain Vasin had waited until they were this far down before detaching the ship.

‘Think she’ll come back for us?’ Eunice asked. ‘The way her hands were shaking on that descent, I thought she was having some sort of brainstem seizure.’

‘Give her some credit.’ Goma said. ‘She put that ship down under impossible conditions. Admit it – even you were impressed by that landing.’

They carried on down a groove or three.

‘I’ve seen worse.’

‘Such generous praise,’ Ru muttered.

It had been like that since they left the first groove – Goma caught between the two of them, Ru still needling, Eunice not exactly going out of her way to ease things. It bothered her not to be liked by Ru, Goma decided, but only because Ru was special to Goma. Had Ru been anyone else on the expedition, Eunice would not have cared less. She had spent her whole life being entirely unconcerned about the opinions of others; she was not about to change overnight, even in this latest and strangest incarnation of herself.

Goma liked it when they had something else to talk about, and when Ru just got on with working the power winch.

‘I wouldn’t say I’m starting to see the bigger picture just yet,’ Eunice said, ‘but maybe the tiniest corner of it. This is almost a different syntax again, you know? It’s like all the work I had to do to make sense of the Mandala script needs to be thrown out and done over.’

‘How can you read anything when we’re only seeing a tiny part of each groove?’ Goma asked. ‘Isn’t it like running your finger down the page of a book and only reading one word from each line?’

‘No, it’s worse – because this is more like one word from a page, not one word per line. But before we landed I had Gandhari transmit
Mposi
’s scans into my suit. Granted, it’s only the top of the wheel – a tiny fraction of its total content – but I’m starting to understand.’

‘What did Kanu mean – about the futility of existence?’ Goma asked.

‘You remember we spoke about the vacuum fluctuations?’

‘Barely.’

But those easy conversations on Orison – before the deaths of the Tantors, before the second Mandala event, before this – felt as if they had happened to a younger, more naive version of herself. It was like reaching back into her childhood.

Eunice’s kitchen. Mealworms. The joy of knowing Sadalmelik and Achernar.

‘The M-builders were too clever for their own good,’ Eunice said. ‘They dug too far into physics and it bit them. Physics will do that. It’s an ungrateful piece of shit. It’s a fickle lover that will always betray you. It courts you, gives you rewards, coughs up little treats like fire and the wheel, telescopes and the secret of starflight, makes you think you’re worth it, that you’re the special one, that you really, really matter to it.’ She paused as she kicked off from the wall, swung out and thumped back into contact. ‘All the while it’s saving up this nasty little truth: that every thought, every deed, every hope you’ve ever held is futile. That the universe will end, and forget itself. That there is no such thing as meaning. That you might as well kill yourself now, because in the end your existence won’t count for anything. That there is no posterity. There is no Remembering. That nothing passes into anything – even for Tantors.’

‘Do you believe it?’ Goma asked.

‘Of course I believe it. Physics doesn’t give a damn about how we feel. It doesn’t give a damn about us sleeping soundly in our beds, thinking we matter.’

‘Just because the M-builders accepted it, we don’t have to,’ Goma said.

‘You mean . . . maybe they were wrong?’

‘Why not?’

‘No . . . you’re right. It’s a possibility. They were only millions of years ahead of us, after all. They’d only achieved a mastery of physics sufficient to build these wheels and moons, to move entire mountains around at the speed of light.’

‘Sarcastic bitch,’ Ru said.

‘You’ll have to excuse me. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s how I process stupid questions.’

‘I meant it seriously,’ Goma said, not giving in that easily. ‘Fine, they came up with a theory. But what if it isn’t self-consistent? What if they just didn’t look hard enough for the flaw? Building these things – these wheels, the Mandalas – doesn’t that speak to you of a certain . . . arrrogance?’

‘It speaks to me of beings we’d be very, very wise not to underestimate.’

‘But being wrong can’t have been beyond them. Anyway – what have you learned from the grooves?’

‘Yes, do share your dazzling wisdom with us,’ Ru said.

‘She’s really starting to have issues with me, isn’t she?’

‘Probably has something to do with you nearly killing her.’

‘I thought we were over that.’

‘She isn’t.’

‘I can tell. I keep picking up on these subtle undercurrents of animosity. Anyway – the grooves. Yes. They’re very interesting.’

‘That’s all you’ve got – very interesting?’ Goma asked.

‘They’re either an obituary or a recipe, I’m not sure which. Let’s start with obituary. What the wheels appear to encode – or this wheel, anyway – is a kind of final statement from the M-builders. It’s not their cultural history. It doesn’t tell us what they looked like, where they came from, what side they buttered their toast on. But it does appear to relate to the Terror – recapitulating the same basic theme of cosmic futility, the vacuum fluctuation, the end of everything. I’d need to spend more time with it, but – going by this wheel – they’ve left us with a complete description of their final physical theory. Their ultimate understanding of nature – packaged in the mathematics of the Mandala grammar. Chibesa theory is just a tiny, low-energy approximation buried somewhere in the margins – almost a footnote! As I said, I’m only seeing glimpses, fragments of the whole, but they’re enough to tell me what I’m looking at.’

‘That doesn’t sound like an obituary.’

‘Hold your horses – there’s more. The theory’s only part of it – it wouldn’t need the entire wheel for its expression. The rest is . . . more complicated. Like I said, I’m only catching glimpses, but it feels as if I’m seeing a response to that theory – how the M-builders came to terms with their own ultimate description of nature.’

While they were talking, Goma had begun to notice the wall becoming ever steeper. It was still night – even the top of the wheel was now in shadow – and they were still above most of the atmosphere, but already she felt a long, uncomfortable distance from their starting point. With the descent came a kind of reverse vertigo, a sense of being too low rather than too high.