Poseidon's Wake

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101

‘Mandala is at a fixed latitude,’ Dakota said, ‘and Paladin’s angular tilt only changes on timescales of tens of thousands of years. At best, this eye can only ever sweep a narrow track.’

‘That’s true, to a point. But the state changes appear to be related to an alteration in the direction of the eye’s gaze. It’s like a radio telescope built into the bowl of a valley. You can’t move the primary mirror, but you can adjust the position of the antenna. We think that’s how the Mandala works. It can sweep a broader swathe of sky, direct its gaze onto objects that aren’t along its precise line of sight.’

‘That’s supposition,’ Dakota said.

‘I had two of Travertine’s technical experts take a close look at the timing of the state changes and their corresponding angular projection onto the sky. Within a fixed error margin, the focus is always another star of a broadly similar spectral type to Gliese 163, within a distance of a few hundred light-years.’

‘What does that prove?’ Nissa asked. ‘Look hard enough, you’ll find any alignment you want. It’s like drawing lines between pyramids.’

‘But the statistical odds against these alignments being chance is actually rather high according to our experts — about one in twenty thousand, if I understand the analysis. Shall I tell you what I think is happening?’ But she glanced quickly at Goma. ‘What we think?’

‘We may as well hear it, as you’re here,’ Kanu said.

‘The Mandala on Paladin is communicating with other Mandalas in other solar systems. It is sending them wake-up signals — telling them to begin rebooting.’

‘Rebooting,’ Nissa said. ‘I don’t know that term.’

‘Old spacefaring terminology. It means to put your boots on — to start getting ready for business.’

‘I see,’ she said, nodding doubtfully. ‘And what exactly is it that is “rebooting”?’

‘It’s a machine,’ Goma said. ‘A machine hundreds, maybe thousands of light-years across. It’s been dead, dormant, for longer than we can imagine, thousands, millions of years, at least. But my mother restarted it. Crucible was a peripheral branch of the Mandala network — an outlying system, a dead end. Ndege’s Mandala sent its wake-up signal to this one and transported Zanzibar here during the same event, probably because Zanzibar just happened to get caught up in the initial reactivation process. But this system isn’t a dead end. It’s a node, a hub, in some wider network. There may be others, but this must be the closest one to our part of the galaxy. It’s what the Watchkeepers have been drawn to all this time. They know it’s significant — they just can’t advance their knowledge beyond that.’

‘A machine wouldn’t take this long to start up,’ Kanu said.

‘It could if its basic components are still light-limited,’ Eunice replied. ‘Depending on how far out the furthest parts of the network are, it might take tens of thousands of years for the whole thing to come back online. Signals whispering across the void — start-up instructions, error correction, status reporting. A process longer than the span of recorded history. But that’s what’s happening. And on a local scale, it may already be partly operable.’

‘Operable,’ Kanu said, almost laughing. ‘As if it’s a thing we might use?’

‘Why not?’ Eunice said. ‘The Risen are here because of it. Instead of barging to Poseidon, we should be consolidating our efforts, trying to understand how to make safe use of the Mandala network. We know from the survivors that the Zanzibar translation was instantaneous within their reference frame, which means they must have been travelling at only a whisker below the speed of light. Consequently, any other part of the network is also only a blink away in subjective terms. Deep exploration of the galaxy is within our grasp — and you’re risking all that for the agenda of a bunch of mindless alien robots?’

‘Why do you say mindless?’ Dakota asked.

‘We all felt it,’ Eunice replied, ‘from the moment the Trinity made direct contact with the Watchkeepers. There’s nothing inside them. They’re hollow — scooped out like an ice-cream cone. They’ve forgotten how to be conscious. Or are you in some sort of denial about this? Does it not worry you that you might be the willing servant of a zombie machine intelligence?’

‘They’ve passed the Gupta — Wing threshold,’ Nissa said. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘At least one of you has a grasp on things,’ Eunice said, miming applause. ‘Perhaps I should be addressing you, Nissa — are you the one I should be reaching out to?’

‘I am afraid we must curtail this discussion,’ Dakota said, rising from her seat — more nimble than any elephant had a right to be. ‘The time lag has consumed valuable hours.’

‘We’ve barely begun!’ Goma said.

‘It’s been six hours,’ Kanu said. ‘I’m sorry, but I think we’ve said all we can. We’re not adversaries, any of us, but we are on different paths. You have your concerns, we have ours — but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together when we returned from Poseidon.’

‘It’s going to kill you,’ Eunice said. ‘Dakota knows that — whether she admits it to herself or not. If you have a chance of turning away from this, I strongly recommend that you do so.’

She might have been on the point of saying something else, but before she had a chance her figment vanished from the environment. Goma was gone as well, their stone seats vacated.

Kanu expected to be snapped back into the normal time-flow of Icebreaker, no longer in ching. But Dakota turned her huge broad forehead to face him. ‘We have a measure of privacy here so we might as well use it. The younger human — Goma. What did she mean when she spoke of your “earlier message”?’

‘You’ve monitored all the transmissions between the two ships,’ Nissa said.

‘But she appeared to be referring to a conversation I do not know about. The mention of coercion, of lives being at stake — how could she know about the Friends, Kanu, unless you told her?’

‘Eunice would have told them.’

‘Eunice knows nothing of what has happened in any part of Zanzibar since her departure. This was specific, directed knowledge. How could either of them make such a deductive leap?’

‘It’s what we do,’ Nissa said. ‘Being humans.’

‘You think highly of your faculties. I don’t blame you for that. But it would be a mistake to underestimate me. If there was communication between Icebreaker and Travertine ahead of the exchanges I know about — or in parallel with them — I would very much like to know. What was discussed? What was considered, then abandoned?’

‘Nothing,’ Kanu said. ‘There was no communication.’

The Watchkeeper came in so swiftly that they had only a couple of hours to prepare for its arrival. It must have been among the gathering of alien machines on the system’s edge, waiting beyond the orbit of Paladin until Icebreaker’s movement snared its interest. For a little while, as it closed in with disdainful swiftness, it looked inevitable to Kanu that there would be a collision, or something just as catastrophic. This was nothing at all like the patient, inscrutable comings and goings of the Watchkeepers in the old system.

‘It’s not been damaged like the others,’ he said as they studied the sharpening images on the bridge — the Watchkeeper rendered as a stubby cone sidling in at a definite angle to its velocity vector.

‘Of course not,’ Dakota chided. ‘The corpses are as old as your hominid forebears. It has been aeons since a Watchkeeper was unwise enough to chance a close encounter with Poseidon; aeons since one of them was harmed. They learn slowly, but they do learn. You are quite wrong about the alien consciousness, by the way. It may be slower than you can perceive, but that does not mean it is absent. The machines have learned that the endurance of cosmological time demands no swift actions, no hasty measures.’

‘This looks pretty hasty to me,’ Nissa said.

‘An exception, because human activity is itself exceptional, especially when such activity is directed towards Poseidon. You would have drawn their attention sooner or later, even without that unfortunate accident. This movement, though, must be of particular interest to them — it originates with Zanzibar.’

‘They think you’re involved,’ Nissa said.

‘And that pleases them. These centuries are long to us. They swallow our lives as a whale swallows water. But they are merely a breath to the Watchkeepers — a moment between their great, slow thoughts. From their perspective, Zanzibar arrived a few busy instants ago.’

The image shivered, gaining a new layer of detail.

‘What should we do?’ Kanu asked.

‘Maintain our heading. Make no change. If it meant to stop us, it would already have done so. This is curiosity, concern, encouragement. It shares our desire to unravel the secrets of Poseidon.’

‘Oh, I’m just bursting with curiosity,’ Nissa said.

Kanu acknowledged that with a thin smile.

It came in closer still, slowly adjusting the angle of its course until its body was both parallel to Icebreaker and moving in the same direction. They were halfway along its length, with hundreds of kilometres of it to bow and stern. The nearest point was two hundred kilometres away, but in the airlessness of space where cues of distance and perspective were elusive, the Watchkeeper appeared to be dismayingly near. They had been closer to the corpse, but this one was very much alive. Blue radiance fought its way out between the close-layered scales of the Watchkeeper’s pine-cone armour.