Poseidon's Wake

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‘Ndege agreed.’

‘And did she… theorise?’

‘My mother wasn’t allowed to talk about her ideas — not even to me. But she did. And yes, she theorised. The grammar is an evolution of the syntax — a later, more elegant form. The syntax is a useful shorthand, but it’s hard to use it to talk about anything other than physics. The grammar goes beyond that — it’s richer, more complex, like a language with lots of tenses and genders.’

‘And she understood the formal relationships?’

‘No,’ Goma answered. ‘She had many deep ideas and worked out a lot of the details, but that was already a lifetime’s work. I know my mother didn’t feel as if she was done with it, only that she’d made inroads, seen further than anyone else. If they’d allowed her continued access to Mandala…’

‘And to the Mandala here.’

‘Yes — she’d have wept to have known about that. To know that some part of Zanzibar survived — that she wasn’t the monster they thought she was.’

‘Do not think ill of me, Goma. It has taken courage for you to come here, and I know you are at least as bright as the rest of your expedition.’

‘Thank you,’ she said doubtfully.

‘But you are not Ndege. I asked for her, and hoped fervently she would be the one who came. I was thinking of the help — the guidance — she could offer to the Tantors, but I see now that she could have been of incalculable value in other respects. How I would have benefitted from her insights. How much I could have learned, just by showing her this wall.’

‘I’m as sorry as you are that she can’t be here now.’

‘Sorry won’t get us very far.’

‘But I have her notebooks. I brought then with me — all of them. Do they interest you?’

Eunice looked at her through her faceplate. She had adjusted the reflectivity, offering Goma a chance to see her expression. She was smiling, and the smile was as genuine and beautiful as any Goma had seen.

‘I correct myself. I am not sorry you came, Goma Akinya. Not sorry at all.’

They could have left directly — the lander was ready for immediate take-off — but the other three Tantors still had not returned. In any case, Eunice needed a day to make the necessary housekeeping arrangements, placing the camp in a state of semi-dormancy so that it could be easily maintained by Sadalmelik and the others.

Goma saw this enforced delay as a blessing, offering further opportunity for interaction with the Tantors. She had to sleep and eat, but if not for those necessities she would have gladly spent every hour in their presence. Ru shared her excitement. Together, though, they realised they had an obligation to shift into a more structured methodology, using this opportunity to gather data rather than anecdote. The free-flowing exchanges of the early hours were all very well, but now it was time for discipline and rigor. Many of the cognitive tests they had performed on Crucible could be duplicated here, and these stood a real chance of answering questions only hinted at through dialogue. Language projected a bluff of intelligence, but no fakery could circumvent some of the more challenging tests in their arsenal. So they went down to the Tantors, excited and daunted by what lay ahead. Both knew that a few careful hours here could supplant the work of a lifetime back on Crucible.

But when Goma entered their domain, she immediately saw that something was terribly wrong.

Sadalmelik was on the ground.

CHAPTER THIRTY

It took Kanu a moment to realise he was mistaken — that the woman speaking from the glass was not in fact his mother. The error was forgivable: Chiku Yellow, Chiku Red and Chiku Green had once been a single individual, and their likenesses remained very similar despite vastly different personal histories.

‘You know her,’ Nissa said, studying his reaction.

‘She’s one of my mother’s three embodiments,’ Kanu replied in a near-whisper. ‘Chiku Green, who came to Crucible on the holoship. But I wasn’t her son — that was Mposi.’

‘This must be strange for you.’

‘Just a little,’ Kanu said, smiling at his own understatement, the exquisite sadness of the moment.

Nissa took his hand as the figure continued speaking.

‘None of this is easy to explain,’ she said. ‘My story is complicated — so much so that even I am not sure of all its parts. But what matters now is only recent history. A number of very odd and surprising things have happened to me lately, and now they bring me to this place, and this recording.’

Her voice was familiar — intensely, personally familiar — but as she spoke it phased in and out of clarity, like something recorded onto wax or cellulose and played back too many times.

‘Is it really her?’

‘I think so.’

‘Our Covenant with the Watchkeepers,’ she said, ‘was for three individuals to travel into interstellar space with the machines. In return, the rest were allowed to settle and colonise Crucible, and to explore the Mandala.’ Chiku nodded and smiled. ‘It was a perfect Trinity: a synthesis of the born, the made and the evolved.’

She paused and glanced down at her hands before raising her eyes back to her future audience. ‘They brought us here. We didn’t know where we were at first. Another solar system, one not so far away that we couldn’t recognise some of the constellations. It all happened very quickly. We must have travelled close to the speed of light because the journey did not appear to take more than a few days in our reference frame. Eventually we learned that this system is Gliese 163 — that we had travelled seventy light-years. And, just as slowly, we began to understand why the Watchkeepers had brought us here.’

The image glitched, remained frozen for a second or two, then jumped back to life. ‘By now, I’m guessing you already know about the second Mandala and the structures on Poseidon. You have probably wondered how they relate to the Watchkeepers, and the reason for their deeper interest in them. You must exercise extreme caution in relation to these structures.’

‘Thank you for the timely warning,’ Nissa said.

But the image had frozen again. It jumped, the recording of Chiku shifting her posture as if frames had been skipped over.

Skipped over, Kanu wondered, or deliberately edited?

‘We did what we could for the survivors of Zanzibar. They were in a bad way, and there was only so much help we could offer given the limited tools at our disposal. It was a huge challenge. This little fragment of our old holoship had to keep alive not just people, but also the Tantors still aboard. The early days were incredibly hard. It was a constant battle just to survive. Finding ways to return to Crucible, even generating enough power to send a transmission — those were luxuries we couldn’t begin to think about. It was tomorrow that counted, and the day after, not some possible rescue hundreds of years in the future. The—’

Again the image jumped.

Kanu glanced at Nissa. Privately, he was sure she was thinking the same thing. The recording might have suffered some natural breakdown, but it was more likely that it had been doctored. He wondered what Swift, who had been silent throughout, would make of it all.

‘In the end,’ Chiku continued, ‘the resource load was too great to support the entire population of survivors. We had the skipover vaults, but there was no hope of converting them to take elephants. So we reached a compromise. The Tantors would remain awake, but most of the human survivors would go into skipover. Some of us volunteered to stay with the Tantors to guide them through the difficulties of the coming years. Together — human and Tantor — we planned to work to expand Zanzibar’s life-support capability, to turn it into a world we could all begin to share. Once that was achieved, we could turn our collective efforts to the greater problem of getting home — if that was still what we wanted. Given my experience with Tantors, you’ll hardly be surprised to hear that I chose to stay with the living.’ She smiled. ‘Don’t think too highly of me. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice — I’d far rather be up and about, doing something, no matter the odds against us. With most of the colonists back in skipover, it was easier for the rest of us. Of course we always knew there would be difficult times ahead—’

The image jumped again.

‘Still, let us hope for the best, not the worst. If the Risen and the people have endured, something beautiful will have happened. And should you find it of interest to wake those of us who sleep, I do not think you will find it too taxing a proposition. By the time you reach this system, you’ll have decades or centuries of advancement over us. But because I want to maximise our chances, I’m appending all the relevant information I can think of which may be useful to you. You’ll find it at the end of this recording. There is more to say — much more — but this will have—’

The image made a deferential bow.

‘I am Chiku Akinya. I was born on the Moon, within a light-second of Earth. My great-grandmother was Eunice Akinya — Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one. She opened a door to the future, and some of us had the nerve to follow her through it. Whoever you are, wherever you have come from, whether blood or electrons run through your veins — I wish you the best of luck. May wisdom and humility guide your actions.’

This part of the recording had finished playing. A sequence of schematics followed, flickering past too quickly for the eye to absorb. Kanu had just enough grasp on them to tell that the data was medical in nature, presumably referring to the functioning of skipover technology.