Poseidon's Wake

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‘We will make every effort in our power to help you,’ Dakota said when he had outlined what was needed on an immediate basis. ‘I will assign a number of trusted Risen to you. You may direct them as you wish. I will instruct them to do everything they can to assist you with setting up the supply chains.’

‘It’ll take a while to get the ship running again,’ Kanu said.

‘Provided you find your lodging arrangements to your satisfaction, I do not see any great difficulty accommodating you. Besides, I have a selfish desire to enjoy your company for as long as I may.’

‘I think we’ll be around for a little while,’ Nissa said. ‘Would you like us to look at the skipover vault now?’

‘You are tired and there is no tremendous urgency. I would not wish you to feel beholden to me. Get the repair effort up and running, and then we may turn our thoughts to the Friends. Does that sound like a sensible course of action?’

‘Very,’ Kanu said.

The next day was similar, and the next, and the one after that. Slowly the supply lines were established. When the requirements were simple, everything went smoothly. When Kanu had more complicated requests, however, he found it difficult to communicate his needs to the Risen. There were inevitable misunderstandings, some of which required careful unravelling. Slowly, though, he could see the glimmerings of progress. There would be setbacks, the odd calamity or two — such things were inevitable. Equally, he could see no insurmountable barriers. The ship was fully capable of repairing itself. They would be able to leave.

Dakota always made sure she was appraised of their progress. During their audiences with her, they spoke of technical matters for an hour or so before turning to more general topics of conversation. No subject was obviously out of bounds, but Kanu had noticed a disinclination on Dakota’s part to speak in detailed terms about the history of Zanzibar. Even so, they did their best to coax information out of her while trying not to make it sound as if they had specific concerns.

‘It all looks idyllic,’ Nissa said offhandedly during one conversation. ‘Tantors thriving, living independently of human support. You’ve got it all organised — heat, air, power, water, food, waste management — even education! Chiku would have been glad to see you doing so well.’

‘She would recognise our difficulties, too — that we still recovering from the resource crisis. She would agree that we must not allow ourselves to become complacent. But at least we are laying the foundations for better times.’ Dakota closed the heavy volume she had been consulting. She had asked Kanu and Nissa for help with a difficult, ambiguous passage. ‘Yes, I am sure she would have been very pleased for us.’

‘And the construct,’ Kanu said. ‘Eunice had a stake in your future, too.’

‘That is very true.’

‘What happened to them?’ Nissa asked.

There was a silence, and Kanu began to fear that the question had been too direct, Nissa’s suspicions too overt. But when Dakota replied, she appeared unfazed.

‘It was all a tremendous sadness. The construct was the first to leave us. Gradually, she began to cease to function properly. It was very upsetting, after everything Eunice had done for our kind during the crossing. Like all machines, though, she began to wear out. Is it wrong of me to speak of her as a person? I know she wasn’t human, but the force of her adopted personality was striking, even to myself — she felt like a person to us.’

‘I understand,’ Kanu said.

‘Over time — years rather than months — she became progressively more unreliable and confused. She lost the thread of herself. We did what we could, but given the failing state of our own systems and the difficulties we already faced, our efforts were destined to meet with little reward. Truly, we could have benefited much from the construct’s guidance had she remained to help us. But in the end she stopped working.’

‘She died, you mean?’ Kanu asked.

‘As I said, it is a sadness.’

Swift, who was standing in silent observation to Kanu’s right, made a sceptical frown. He shook his head, touched a finger to the tip of his nose, looked on the verge of making a significant observation.

‘What happened to her remains?’ Nissa asked. ‘May we see them?’

‘They were dismantled and destroyed. It was one of her last coherent requests. It troubled us, but we had no choice but to honour her wish. Doubtless you have some sense of our loss. But that is as nothing compared to our feelings about Chiku. As you know from the recording, she remained awake to help the rest of us — a typically selfless gesture. Unfortunately, there was a gradual collapse of the closed-cycle life-support system, and conditions deteriorated over time. It became very hard for the humans, even the small number who had remained awake to assist us. In desperation, most of them joined the others in skipover. I’m afraid Chiku was among that number.’

‘Why was that a bad thing?’ Nissa asked.

‘Because those last few did not survive. There was a systematic failure of an entire bank of skipover caskets. I am sorry, Kanu — I can only imagine how upsetting this must be to you. Truly she gave us more than could ever be repaid. And we wept for the deaths of these martyrs — wept and scolded ourselves for not having done more. That was when we realised how far we still had to go before becoming your equals.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us all this sooner?’ Kanu asked.

‘For exactly the same reason I am sorry to have told you now — because it is a terrible thing, and a particular cruelty in light of your family connection. If I might offer one consolation, it is that the Risen cherish her memory — everything she did for us, everything she planned to do. And it is an honour to have another Akinya among us.’

Eventually Kanu felt it was safe to ask for a second viewing of the Chiku recording. They had been aboard Zanzibar for more than six weeks; the repair work was proceeding satisfactorily — it was perfectly reasonable that he should wish to begin fulfilling his side of the arrangement.

‘If you insist,’ Dakota said. ‘But please be assured that I have every confidence in your abilities, and that you will keep your word. Still, as you say, the repair process demands less of your time than it did originally.’

So Memphis took them back to the skipover vault beneath the civic building, and they were allowed to conduct as thorough an examination of the equipment as they desired. It was cold in the layered depths of the vault, and silent, and since they were surrounded by the sleeping dead it was hard not to think of ghosts, of lives in abeyance, of collective dreams of an unending winter.

‘I don’t like it in here,’ Nissa confided.

‘Neither do I.’ Kanu blew on the tips of his fingers, already numb. ‘But we have an agreement.’

There were thousands of caskets, but as most of them were of a similar design, they only needed to inspect a sample of the sleepers. At first, the technology looked dauntingly unfamiliar compared to the skipover caskets aboard their own spacecraft. But upon closer study, the fundamentals proved to be similar, with only the overlying control and observation systems being of a markedly different design. Here there was no need for extreme automation since the presumption was that there would always be human caretakers to watch over the sleepers and intervene as needed.

Nonetheless, it was soon apparent that not all of the sleepers could be brought back to life. A fraction of the caskets had malfunctioned in one way or another, and some of the occupants must have been dead or gravely unwell before they were committed to skipover. Kanu and Nissa did not have the resources or expertise to assist with these difficult marginal cases.

Encouragingly, though, the majority of the sleepers appeared revivable. It would need to be done gradually, in small enough numbers that individual problems could be addressed as they arose. Once they were thawed, well and adjusted to their surroundings, the newly awoken could begin to help with the effort of waking the others. The work would get faster as they progressed.

Still, Kanu dared not guess how long the whole process would take. It felt optimistic to think in terms of months. Where would these people live once they were up and about, in a world remade for the convenience of elephants? It was one thing to keep a couple of human guests fed and watered — what of thousands, or even tens of thousands?

They were on their way back to Dakota, already inside the civic building, when Kanu said, ‘Memphis — might I have another look at the recording? It won’t take a moment.’

‘Why, Kanu?’

It helped that their hair had begun to grow back since their arrival on Zanzibar, enabling Memphis to distinguish more easily between human man and human woman. Kanu’s hair was still short and appeared to be growing back whiter than when he had shaved it, and it bristled out from his scalp in all directions. Nissa’s was darker and she had made an effort to tame its growth, which resulted in her looking younger rather than older, despite their travails.

‘Your leader has asked us to help with the sleepers,’ Kanu said. ‘Chiku left some information that we need to bring them out of skipover. You’ll be saving us a great deal of time if we could review the recording again now. I’m sure Dakota would approve.’

‘You are not Dakota. You do not know her.’

‘But you do, Memphis.’ It was Nissa speaking now, confidently adding her voice to Kanu’s. ‘She told us how much she admires you — your loyalty, your strength of character. She said you were one of the few she could talk to as an equal.’