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Poseidon's Wake

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‘Such as?’ Goma asked.

‘The gifts — the bestowings.’ She touched a finger to her chest. ‘Making me human. They thought they could bribe me into doing their will. But it wasn’t sufficient inducement.’

Goma nodded. ‘What did the others get?’

‘Dakota was already clever. They made her much cleverer — and almost immortal.’

‘And Chiku?’

‘Dear Chiku. In hindsight, she was the only shrewd one among us. There was nothing they could offer her — no carrot, no stick. She wasn’t interested in being smarter, or living longer, and she certainly didn’t want to become anything she already wasn’t. Blame it on my grandson — that boy Geoffrey put some distinctly odd ideas into her head.’

‘They sound healthy enough to me,’ Ru said.

‘Then you’re as odd as he was.’

‘Carry on, please,’ Goma said, a knot of foreboding tightening in her stomach.

‘Chiku’s defiance put her on a path against the Watchkeepers. When Zanzibar arrived, we all did what we could to help. But the Watchkeepers already had plans for Dakota. If they couldn’t use humans, why not elephants instead? It’s not that they understood us, that they had deep insights into our psychology. They just saw another group of vertebrate animals and knew what needed to be done to get what they wanted. Dakota was to be the new matriarch — the new ruler of the Tantors. The homecoming queen. They shuffled her genes, mixed in some new ones and let her breed — allowing her offspring to become the dominant order.’

‘Beyond the Tantors?’ Ru asked.

‘The Risen, they call themselves. In reality, they’re just another instrument of the Watchkeepers — all being groomed for an expedition.’

‘Tell me more about Chiku,’ Goma said.

‘She died. It was near the end of the human presence in Zanzibar. I was there, I saw it. They killed her.’

‘No,’ Goma said, preferring to believe anything but that.

‘It was a dark time. Bad things were done by both parties. The humans began to realise that the Risen were slipping from their control, so of course some of them overreacted — tried to use Zanzibar’s systems to contain the elephants. Pumped inert gases into the life-support network — that sort of thing. Humans could easily squeeze into suits or airlocks, but the elephants couldn’t hide. But it was too clumsy, and not fast enough. There were reprisals. Then the humans switched to lethal weapons — it’s really not that hard to kill an elephant if you’ve the will. But the elephants, especially the Risen, were quick and smart enough to respond in kind. After that it was war.’

‘Please let this be a lie,’ Ru said, and Goma breathed out hard and held her hand, together finding the mutual strength to face this awful truth.

‘Chiku tried to broker a peace. She had friends among the Tantors — even among the Risen. But blood was running too hot on both sides. She was bludgeoned and killed. It was fast. She wouldn’t have felt anything.’

‘Couldn’t you have stopped them?’ Goma asked, barely holding back her rage.

‘You think I didn’t try? You think I wouldn’t have bloodied my hands against them if I could have made a difference? I’m not on the side of elephants or people, Goma. I’m on the side against stupidity.’ She looked down at herself, giving a little shiver of disgust. ‘But I wasn’t strong enough. Not strong enough, not fast enough, not bold enough. Look at what I’ve allowed myself to become.’

‘One of us,’ Goma said. ‘In which case, pity poor you.’

‘Whatever happened on Zanzibar, Eunice can’t be held accountable for it,’ Ru said.

‘No, I can’t,’ Eunice said. ‘But that doesn’t get us out of the mess. I’ve been stuck here without a ship ever since my exile. But you’ve changed all that.’

‘And the other ship?’ Vasin asked.

‘It’s a worry — and another reason for making contact with Zanzibar as quickly as possible. I doubt very much that your arrival has gone unnoticed — especially with all the electromagnetic noise you were putting out.’

‘Your fault for asking us to come in the first place,’ Goma said.

‘Yes, that hasn’t escaped my attention — nor the possibility that I may have inadvertently caused the arrival of the other ship. But I had no choice. I could not sit back and do nothing, not knowing what the Watchkeepers want of Dakota.’

‘You must have known we’d take more than a century to get here,’ Vasin said. ‘Who the hell plans on that kind of timescale?’

‘I do. It’s the habit of a lifetime. And look — you’re here.’

‘So what’s next?’ Goma asked.

‘The other three will be here shortly. I should very much like to take them all with me, but I doubt your ship is geared up to accommodate Tantors. They’ll just have to sit tight here on Orison until I get back.’ She gave an unconcerned shrug. ‘They’re clever. They can run the camp on their own, provided nothing major breaks down.’

‘You have a lot of faith in them,’ Karayan said.

‘Someone needs to. It might as well be me.’

Their arrival had interrupted her work, and Eunice said she could not leave until she had set down in stone the thread of her most recent insight. Goma wondered why she did not just write it down on paper, or record herself for posterity.

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘I could try.’

Eunice put on her spacesuit, the one with the heavy utility belt, and Goma followed her out through the lock, although she had not been specifically invited to do so. Wordlessly, Eunice set off for the cliff where they had first encountered her. She picked her way around one of the high stone cairns, then stopped at the base of the cliff. She inspected it for a moment, hand shading her helmet like a visor, and then chose a confident route up through the cracks and shelves of the face.

Goma watched from below. Eunice took out the cutting tool, made its tip flare bright and then began cutting meticulous angular marks into the rock.

Feeling herself on the brink of some momentous, life-changing disclosure, Goma swallowed hard and said: ‘I’ve seen these symbols before.’

Eunice carried on working in silence. She completed a section, then traversed gingerly to the right, her toes resting on the merest wrinkle of out-jutting rock. She cut another series of markings.

‘I very much doubt it.’

‘And I’m pretty sure I have. It’s the Mandala grammar — the same pattern as the one cut into Mandala’s sides, like long chains of dominoes, zigzagging and branching. Only there’s something more, isn’t there? You’re mixing in other types of symbol.’

‘You are very clever. Now why don’t you run along and play?’

‘That’s the Chibesa syntax. You’re combining statements from the Chibesa syntax with the Mandala grammar, as if they’re part of the same hierarchical language, or at least deeply connected.’

Eunice stopped what she was doing. She turned off the cutting tool and returned it to her pouch, then shimmied back down to the ground.

‘And you’d know that how, exactly?’

‘Because my mother showed me. After you left us, Ndege spent thirty years finding connections between the two forms. Eventually she used her knowledge of the Chibesa syntax as a key to unlock the Mandala grammar. That was how she learned to talk to Mandala.’

‘I always knew Ndege had promise.’

‘Never mind my mother — how can you be coming up with the same connections? I know what you are. Your memories aren’t Eunice’s actual memories — you’re made up from her public utterances, the outside facts of her life. Mother said these connections were a deep family secret — too deep for you to know about.’

‘Your mother was correct. She also does me a modest injustice — there is more to me than the posterity engines ever provided — but the essential truth is beyond dispute. I know that the Chibesa syntax is a mathematical formalism, a gateway into new physics, and I also know — or suspect, at least — that it has its origin in the rock scratchings of a passing alien tourist. I also have access to the entire public corpus of academic work on the Mandala grammar, at least as it stood at the time of my departure. But the notion that the two might be connected? I had to figure that out for myself.’

‘How?’

‘The Terror. Whatever you make of it, it was a form of intimate contact with the M-builders’ technology, and of course it changed us all. In my case it left me with glimmerings, a sense of larger insights just out of reach. All that stuff about the vacuum rip… the end of time? That came through. Like I said, leakage. Contamination. More of their nature was revealed than perhaps they intended. Ever since then, I’ve had an odd sense of connections waiting to be made. My dreams—’

‘Then you do dream.’

‘Yes. Now, if you’d allow me to continue?’

‘By all means.’

‘My dreams were great fevered battles between armies of symbols, regiments of logic and formal structure. They would not leave me alone. They chased me for years, decades, grinding away at my sanity until I began to exorcise them by way of these rock carvings. That appears to help. I still only have glimpses most of the time. I can’t see how the syntax and the grammar fit together at all levels… just little pieces, phrases in a larger argument. But that’s enough. It’s as if the glimpses want to be carved into rock — as if they crave permanence. And with each breakthrough — each new carving that appears to lock into the whole — I see that my initial insight must have been real. There is a link.’