Poseidon's Wake

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‘I don’t know what to say,’ Kanu said.

‘Who are the Friends?’ Nissa asked.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You mentioned them to Memphis, when we arrived. He said we hadn’t seen them yet.’

‘You must forgive me — I’d quite forgotten. Perhaps old age is taking its toll after all. I find myself quite easily able to forget the thread of a conversation after only a few minutes, yet I can remember things that happened a century ago as if they were playing out before my eyes.’

‘Are the Friends the Watchkeepers?’ Kanu asked.

‘No — nothing so strange as that. In fact, the Friends are like yourselves — people, human beings. They were with us when we first arrived in this system. Would you like to see them?’

‘We didn’t think there were any people here,’ Nissa said.

‘You will not have seen them, but there is an excellent reason for that. In fact, the Friends are very near. I shall have Memphis show them to you — unless you would rather begin the repair work immediately?’

‘That might not be a bad thing,’ Nissa said.

‘It will not take long to see the Friends. And then you will have a better grasp of our situation.’ Dakota stomped a foot on the floor, three times. After a moment, the library doors reopened.

‘Take our guests to see the Friends, Memphis. I should like them to watch the recording, too — I think it may be of great interest to them.’

The larger elephant led them from the library back into the main part of the civic building. In the very middle of the grand space was the gently sloping ramp Kanu had noticed before, angling down into the building’s lower levels. It looked old enough to be part of the original architecture, but it was easily large enough for Memphis. Perhaps vehicles had used it to come and go from the basement levels. Kanu wished he knew more of Zanzibar’s history during its flight and the years spent orbiting Crucible. Mposi would know, he thought, and wondered what his distant half-brother would make of this place now.

The ramp reached a landing, reversed direction and descended again. Then it levelled out and reached a T-junction. It was almost totally dark now. Ahead was not a wall but rather a dimly sensed emptiness. Kanu moved to the railed barrier facing them. They had reached the upper part of a vault, presumably extending deeper into the lower levels.

‘See the Friends,’ Memphis said, standing at their backs, the slow in-and-out of his breathing like the movement of air through a house-sized bellows.

‘We can’t see anything,’ Nissa said. ‘Your eyesight must be better than ours. If we put our helmets back on—’

‘Wait.’

Memphis stepped forward, extending his trunk to touch a panel set into the nearside wall. Lights came on, banks of them in sequence, illuminating deeper parts of the vault. Kanu saw now that the pathway continued to either side of the T-junction, enclosing the length of the vault before joining up again at the far end. More ramps led down to the lower levels.

It was a skipover vault.

‘Amazing,’ Kanu said, taking in layer after layer of sleeper caskets, more than he could begin to count. ‘I’ve never seen anything on this scale. Must be hundreds, thousands of sleepers here.’

‘No one would have done anything like this since the holoships,’ Nissa said. ‘But why are they here?’

‘There must have been lots of people still in skipover when the holoships reached Crucible,’ Kanu guessed, ‘many vaults just like this, crammed full of the frozen. Remember how the cities weren’t ready for the colonists? They couldn’t move everyone down in one go. They’d have held them in skipover until the surface settlements were finished — and that was going to take decades. Even when they started waking everyone up, they’d have kept the vaults as an emergency resource.’

‘At least we know where the people are now. Why aren’t they awake, though? And what happened during the accident — were they already in skipover, or did that happen afterwards?’

Kanu turned to their elephant host. ‘Are there more than these, Memphis?’

‘These are all the Friends. There are no other Friends.’

‘They’re all asleep now,’ Nissa said. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was there ever a time when they were awake?’

‘Yes.’

She looked at Kanu before answering. ‘Then what happened?’

‘A time of troubles. I will show you the recording. Then you will understand.’

They returned to the lobby entrance where Memphis had first struck the floor with the metal staff. Kanu noticed again the upright rectangle of glass set into a stone plinth. He had taken it to be a piece of interior decoration, but now he realised there was rather more to it.

Memphis waved his trunk in front of the glass. At first nothing happened, but after a few passes the glass brightened. A standing human form appeared in the upright material, a woman with whom Kanu felt an instant and visceral bond of recognition. He knew the shape of that face, the cheekbones, the brow, the curve of the lips.

She was his mother.

She nodded once, bowed and began to speak. ‘I am Chiku Akinya. Chiku Green, for anyone who might take interest in such things. And I am here to tell you what happened to us.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The days on Orison could never be long enough for Goma and Ru. There were too few hours and too many things they wished to ask of both the Tantors and their host. Goma could hardly believe that there were another three Tantors still out there, on their way back to the camp. In her limited time with the first trio, she had already formed an appreciation of Sadalmelik, Eldasich and Achernar as distinct individuals, each with their own past, their own place in the Tantor hierarchy. All were interested in the world beyond Orison, in the stories of Agrippa and the other elephants on Crucible, and all appeared willing to learn about Ndege and the wider Akinya clan. But in the case of Eldasich and Achernar, the latter interest was more polite than insatiable. They were mildly curious, but human business clearly sounded less important to them than news of other Tantors.

Goma offered the most truthful account she could. It was hard to skirt around the issue of the Tantor decline, the gradual weakening of their intelligence, without alluding to their similarity to baseline elephants. She did the best she could, with Ru’s assistance, and if offence were taken, it was not obvious to either of them.

The Tantors, for their part, appeared to relish dialogue with someone other than Eunice. It was clear from their surroundings that they required constant intellectual stimulation. In the main bubble and the sub-chambers excavated around it, they had been provided with many tools and toys — or perhaps they were better thought of as puzzles, for toys sounded demeaning for creatures of such evident cognitive gifts. There was an upright rack, divided into black and white squares, with movable symbols — some kind of game or logic exercise. There was a horizontal flat panel bisected by a central net of recovered insulation material with two racket-like paddles suggestive of table tennis. There was a fist-sized cube made of many smaller coloured cubes which could be twisted into different permutations, but only via cooperative action between two or more elephants. There were tall sculptural objects made of interchangeable networks of transparent plumbing, through which the Tantors liked to roll little polished marbles. There were data screens arranged in stereo pairs for the convenience of animals with broad skulls and opposed eyes. There was a socklike tool which could be worn over a trunk and came equipped with a variety of plug-in micromanipulators, allowing the Tantors to perform the deftest tasks. There were cave paintings, splashed on the walls in bright primary colours. There was a wire-frame wind chime which the Tantors liked to set in motion as they passed, and a thing like an alpine horn which they enjoyed blowing into that produced a note so deep it made Goma’s guts throb.

But the Tantors also had work to do, sharing the business of survival. They each placed a much higher demand on the camp’s life-support capabilities than one human. One of the sub-chambers led into a lithoponic glasshouse, while another accessed the nutrient troughs where the mealworms were grown and harvested. Another chamber contained the lavish waste-treatment beds — the smell of elephant dung brought Goma and Ru back to Crucible in an instant. Elsewhere they were shown the elephant-sized spacesuits, with their goggled helmets and accordioned trunk sheaths like antique gas masks. Eunice said it generally took three Tantors to prepare another three for the outside, so they seldom went out at the same time.

They shared the camp on equal terms with Eunice. She had expertise and insight but she was not their master. She had been exiled, and the Tantors’ ancestors had agreed to defect with her. But their relationship was based on loyalty, not blind subservience. They needed each other to survive, the partnership built on friendship and mutual dependence.

Goma and Ru had as many questions for Eunice as they did for the Tantors. She was obliging, up to a point — willing to go over the same details, to repeat or re-examine that which was not immediately clear. But it was not like asking things of a robot.

‘I knew a Finnish astronaut,’ she said, launching off on a sudden tangent. ‘Hannu. It was on Phobos, when we were cooped up there waiting for that big Martian storm to die down. Nerves were starting to fray — the slightest thing set us off. Someone sneezes the wrong way, someone rubs their nose or keeps saying they miss Earth. “All guests stink on the third day,” said my Finnish colleague. He was right.’