Poseidon's Wake (70 page)

Kanu was there, the first time Goma had seen him since their revival. She and Ru joined him. They hugged, each thankful that they had come through the crossing.

‘I went to see the Tantors,’ Kanu said. ‘They’re doing well. It’s a fine thing you did, helping them with the skipover equipment.’

‘It wasn’t anything compared to the years Mona and her team put in,’ Ru said.

‘You all made sacrifices,’ Kanu replied.

Goma knew she could either skirt awkwardly around the Nissa question, or get it out in the open. ‘I understand there’s already been some contact between
Travertine
and the medics on Crucible. We’ve been gone a long while, Kanu. There must be a lot of options open to them.’

He nodded, like a man trying to put a brave face on things. ‘We’ll see.’

‘They’ll do the best they can,’ Ru said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

‘I’m certain they will.’ He was speaking slowly, distantly. ‘It was the best thing, keeping her in skipover. Even though she missed most of our time in the Tantors’ system.’

‘We’ll have to go back, won’t we?’ Goma said, trying to strike an optimistic note. ‘Not us, necessarily, but people. Maybe we won’t even need a starship to do it. Just crank up Mandala again, the way it worked before.’

‘Someone’s going to have to try,’ Kanu agreed.

But it would not be him, Goma thought. Or her, or Ru. Captain Vasin, perhaps, if she had not yet had her fill of cosmic exploration. But even Gandhari looked drawn, worn out by what they had gone through.

She was speaking.

‘In a little while, so I am assured, we will be met by diplomatic envoys from the present government. They are bound to seem odd to us. Perhaps a little frightening, too. It’s been a while. But you can be certain that they are just as apprehensive about meeting us. We must seem very strange to them indeed. But with good intentions in our hearts, good faith in our new hosts, good faith in ourselves, we will find a way through. Some of you will attempt to return to your old lives on Crucible. I do not wish to understate the challenges you will face – although I am quite sure you have a ready appreciation of what lies ahead. But never forget this. We are a crew now, and we will remain a crew. When you leave this ship, you do not leave behind the friendships and alliances we have forged. They remain with us. They will be our bond across all the years and challenges to come. Each and every one of you has my respect and gratitude.’

There were more words to come, not just from Vasin, but after a while they began to wash over Goma, her thoughts spinning away on their own trajectories. She was thinking of the ambassadors – how easy it was to gloss over the complicated business of introducing five new sentient beings to a world, until the time was almost upon them. She was thinking of Kanu, for whom this was no kind of homecoming, and for whom any mood of celebration must have rung cruelly false. She was thinking of Nissa, neither dead nor alive, and the hopes that had been placed on the unknown medicine of a world three centuries from their understanding. It was a kind of magical thinking, she saw now, like a child’s trust in the intervention of fairies. And she was thinking of Eunice Akinya’s heart, which had yet to reach its resting place.

Soon the envoys came. Their manner was quiet, understated, deferential. Even as they moved through the ship, she never saw more than two of them at any one time. They were doing their best to be unobtrusive, not wishing to shock their time-slipped guests. Their faces and skin tones showed a variety of ethnicities, and there were some among them who had the sleek, hairless features she associated with merfolk, but it was hard to be certain. Their clothes were dark, modest of cut, with wide white collars and puffed white cuffs. Some of them wore small skullcaps or berets over short, neatly manicured hairstyles. If they brought technology with them, Goma recognised none of it. Perhaps they were so saturated with it that carrying technology was unnecessary.

She heard them speak, shifting effortlessly from one language to another. They came equipped with Swahili, Zulu, Chinese, Punjabi, a dozen other tongues. Their diction was over-precise, their speech clotted with formalisms, including the odd phrase that was old-fashioned even when Goma was a child, but she could not fault them for that. Yet between themselves she caught them whispering sentences that hovered just beyond comprehension – not quite a foreign language to her – the cadences and rhythms were naggingly familiar -– but a dialect so far removed from her experience that it may as well have been.

There were medical tests. One by one, all the crew were brought to the non-weightless clinic. Mona Andisa’s team stood aside while the Crucible envoys performed subtle investigations. It was the one and only time Goma saw any kind of tool or instrument in their hands. They had black styluses, tipped with a small bulb, which they swept slowly over the bodies of their subjects. They spoke to Andisa’s medics, whispered agreeably between themselves. They seemed unconcerned, going through formalities. Eventually word filtered through that there were no barriers to any of the crew, passengers or ambassadors, descending to Crucible. They were free to disembark into the golden station, from which shuttles were available to take them all the way home.

Goma and Ru only took the minimum of possessions with them – the rest could be freighted down later. They walked through the vaults and atria of the golden station, gawking at cathedral-sized spaces which seemed largely deserted, as if the station had been emptied of human occupation in readiness for
Travertine
’s arrival, or even built especially for them. Perhaps it had. They’d had decades to get ready for it, after all, decades to rehearse every detail of the reception.

The shuttles turned out to be the translucent manta things Goma had seen earlier. Each was large enough to take one or two Tantors and a dozen or more human passengers. Eldasich and Atria went down in one shuttle, Mimosa and Keid in another, and Hector stayed with Goma and Ru. Kanu was there as well, together with the draped form of Nissa’s skipover casket. The envoys fussed around the interior of the shuttle making adjustments to the provisions, moulding and shaping its décor with practised, wizard-like gestures. Finally they were satisfied, the casket secured, the passengers comfortable, and the last leg of the journey home could begin. Two envoys remained aboard the shuttle, but as far as Goma could tell no one was in direct control. The vehicle seemed to know what it was meant to do.

They detached from the station over Crucible’s nightside, then arrowed down from orbit, knifing into the upper atmosphere and gradually catching up with dawn. Even as re-entry plasma flickered and curled around the shuttle, its brightness throwing highlights across their faces, the ride remained as smooth as if they were on rails.

‘Gandhari spoke well,’ Kanu said, keeping one hand on the casket secured next to his seat. ‘You couldn’t have asked for a better captain. But this world won’t hold her interest for long. She’ll want to move on. I can see it in her eyes.’

‘I’m not sure it’s our world any more,’ Goma said.

Kanu’s look was kind. ‘You’ll fit back in.’

‘Not for long, I hope. I have an obligation to discharge. It’ll mean a trip to Earth, one way or another. I gather they have more starships. Sooner or later there’ll be a ship going that way.’

‘Can you afford the passage?’

She had no answer to that. None of them did. Whatever funds they might have left behind on Crucible were now moot. Perhaps they had snowballed into vast personal fortunes, or perhaps they were worthless. Or worse, had somehow transmogrified into crippling debts. Besides, Goma did not have the least idea how much it would cost to transport herself back to Earth. It would cost twice as much again to take Ru, assuming she was deemed fit enough to tolerate another skipover episode. ‘I’ll find a way,’ she said, as if the will alone was sufficient.

‘But this is where the Risen will remain,’ Kanu said.

‘For now,’ Ru said. ‘At least until we’ve gone beyond five living members. Maybe in a couple of generations we –
they
– will feel comfortable about committing some of their number to Earth. Not just Earth, but to other solar systems.’ Her tone hardened, gaining conviction. ‘Wherever there’s a human presence, there ought to be Tantors. Risen. It’s the only way. But we’re twenty, thirty, fifty years from worrying about that. Let’s help them build up the herd, get that on a stable footing, before we start reaching for the stars again.’

‘The work of a lifetime, then. Or at least an ordinary human lifetime,’ Kanu said.

‘It’s what we started. What we were trying – failing – to do, before Eunice’s message came in.’

‘I can’t think of two better candidates to bear that work,’ Kanu said.

‘It’ll be our successors,’ Goma replied. ‘Not us. Not until we get back from Earth.’

‘You have a weight to bear.’

‘Don’t we all?’ she answered, with a chill of foreboding.

They cut down into thicker, warmer, moister air. They overflew rainforest and swept across inky lagoons and white-hemmed bays and heavy green seas. Once, when the visibility allowed, Goma made out the dark stormfront that was one of Mandala’s peripheral walls, still much as she remembered it. Then they were over the outskirts of Guochang, now a vast sprawl of a city, what had once been its satellite towns become mere suburbs. The geometry of roads and parks was confusing, almost purposefully so – she kept seeing configurations that were almost familiar, but each would twist out of recognition as the shuttle swept nearer. The city had been made and remade half a dozen times since her departure, and only the oldest, most venerated parts of it remained unaltered.

‘You were born here?’ Kanu asked, at last rising from his seat, bending to peer through the glassy hull.

‘I was,’ Goma said. ‘But I don’t feel it.’

‘You will.’ He smiled. ‘Give it time.’

Presently they came up on a twisted black pyramid that seemed to drill its way out of what had been the old government district. The pyramid was enormous, with a horizontal slit across its warped faces at about a third of its height. Elsewhere it was windowless, with an oily, shimmering lustre. The shuttles – not just their own, but the others that had come down from the station – were filing into this slot, like bees returning to the hive.

One of the envoys turned to them, touching a hand to the sweep of her collar before she spoke. ‘This is the medical complex. The tests we ran on you in the ship were quite comprehensive, but there is more that we can do here. We wish to make sure you are all as well as you can be.’

‘Will it take long?’ Ru asked.

‘No more than a couple of days. It will make things very much easier if you allow little machines to replicate in your bodies. They will help you adjust to your new surroundings.’

‘Like nanotechnology?’ Goma asked.

‘Yes,’ the envoy answered, but there was an equivocation in her answer, as if she recognised that the truth was more complicated. ‘Yes, something very like that. In your time, there was something called the Mechanism?’

‘It had gone by the time we were born,’ Ru said.

‘We made something like the Mechanism again,’ the envoy stated. ‘Better, less fallible. If we had to give a name for it, it would be something like the All. The little machines will let the All flow into you.’ Carefully, she added: ‘If this is what you wish.’

‘And if we don’t?’ Goma asked, trying not to sound too alarmed by the prospect.

‘There are enclaves where the All is not as pervasive. You would be welcome to live out your lives there.’

Kanu turned from the view, laying his hand back on Nissa’s casket. ‘It sounds as if your medicine has come a long way from ours.’

‘In some respects,’ the envoy said, her eyes lowering. ‘But there is much that we have yet to achieve, or is outside the bounds of our medical-ethical framework. We were forewarned of Nissa’s case, though. Our best . . . experts . . . have been assigned to the problem. Rest assured that we will do what we can for her.’

Kanu licked his lips and nodded. They were softening him up, Goma thought – preparing him for the news he did not want. How could they not help Nissa? she thought. And a kind of anger flashed through her, a resentment that these people were not more advanced, more godlike. What had they been doing for the past three centuries – sitting on their hands?

The slot in the pyramid contained a landing bay, spread out under a low ceiling. Dozens of craft were also parked there, and the place was already swarming with medical staff. Unlike the dark-clad envoys, the pyramid’s medics wore outfits of a blazing, superluminous white. At best, the only instruments any of them carried were the little bulb-tipped wands. But they were also accompanied by many floating white spheres about the size of footballs, and the spheres cracked open along their midlines to spill out jointed arms and sensors. Goma and her friends were asked to offer their forearms to the spheres, and the machines tickled over them in a quick sampling of blood, tissue,
DNA
. The examination was painless and left no traces.

‘What about the All?’ she asked, as the whole party – human and Tantor – was led into the main part of the pyramid.

‘It’s already within you,’ the envoy answered. ‘The idiosyncratic connectome bridges will have begun to form. You may experience some mild hypnagogic imagery. The process can be aborted and reversed at any stage, though, should you decline participation.’

‘Would you decline?’ she asked.

The envoy looked at her with a sudden, fierce frankness. ‘Decline? No. I would sooner be dead. But you must make the choice for yourself.’

They were in the complex for two days. The tests were occasionally perplexing, generally dull, but never painless, and again Goma had the sense that much of it was formality, a series of legal obstacles that had to be surmounted before any of the newcomers were allowed free roam of Crucible. They had rooms in the pyramid, which were comfortable enough but austere in their provisions, almost as if the hosts were wary of overloading their delicate constitutions with too much novelty. There was a window, looking back across Guochang. Where the city thinned out Goma saw a margin of blazing green, a stretch of veldt hemmed by trees, and between those trees she thought she might have seen the distant moving forms of elephants, tiny as pollen grains, and she wanted to be out there more than anything.