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Poseidon's Wake

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The remaining Tantors could not come with them — there was simply no means of providing for them aboard Travertine — but neither could they be expected to maintain the camp on their own during Eunice’s absence. Consequently, out of the remaining crew in orbit, a small delegation of technical specialists would be brought down and trained to care for the Tantors, instructed in the rudiments of life-support maintenance and briefed in the newly developing field of human — Tantor diplomatic relations. After an overlap period of a few days, the initial landing party would depart for Zanzibar.

They would not be gone for long — weeks at most.

First, though, there was the business of two Tantor funerals.

During the long years of her exile, Eunice had faced numerous times perhaps the hardest of all the decisions forced upon her by time and circumstance: what to do with the dead.

Nothing burned on the surface of Orison, nothing decayed.

The encampment was a closed-cycle ecosystem, its own life-support bubble, but no such system was entirely efficient. The dead were significant reservoirs of stored chemical wealth, demanding — by all considerations of logic and wise management — to be recycled back into the matrix, broken down into their useful constituents. Planetary ecologies did it all the time — the endless conveyor belt of birth, growth and predation. There was nothing unnatural or distasteful about it, and she ought to have felt no qualms about employing the corpses of her friends for the betterment of the camp.

But she could not bring herself to do it, even though — as she was fully aware — in this act of refusal she was only storing up problems for the future.

But they had been her friends, her allies, her companions. It was the least she could do for them.

Fortunately the deaths came infrequently and she had never needed to contend with two in close succession before. There was another consideration. She hated the idea of all four of them being outside at once. They were as precious as jewels, more vulnerable than they knew. She could not bear the thought of something happening to all four of them at once. When the earlier deaths had occurred, she had persuaded her friends to take turns going outside.

But now the four of them went out together, Atria, Mimosa, Keid, Eldasich, bearing the wrapped corpse of Sadalmelik, a burden that would have been impossible even for Tantors to move without the power augmentation of their suits. They carried him between them, Sadalmelik laid on a bower formed from a heavy-duty cargo sled, their armoured trunks wrapped around the handles at each corner. They took him beyond the lander, out along one of the trails, until at last they reached a rocky elevation where they set him down.

The humans followed behind, but when the Tantors surmounted the burial spot, Eunice directed the people to remain where they were.

The Tantors removed Sadalmelik from the bower, set him on the raised ground and brought the bower back down to the level plain. Decorously, without haste, the Tantors loaded the bower with an assortment of boulders and pebbles. They hauled the bower back up to Sadalmelik and began to construct a cairn around his reposed form. This took quite some while and entailed many trips back and forth with the sled. They worked in silence, no word or vocalisation breaking across the humans’ suit channels — only the slow, patient bellowing of furnace-sized lungs. Finally — after much deliberation and careful rearrangement of stones — the Tantors completed their cairn. It enclosed Sadalmelik completely, an igloo of interlocking rocks.

Then they returned to fetch Achernar.

Eunice signalled the human party. They proceeded up the slope and placed their own small stones and pebbles onto the cairn, taking care not to disrupt those already in place.

‘For the Tantors,’ Eunice said, confiding in a low voice, ‘these stones are anchors of memory.’ She placed a rock of her own onto the cairn. ‘Let the memory of Chiku Green find the memory of Sadalmelik, and both be stronger for it.’

‘For Ndege and Mposi,’ Goma said, placing two similar pebbles into the cairn.

Ru stepped to her side and set her own piece down. ‘For Agrippa, and everyone we left behind on Crucible.’

Soon, the Tantors returned with Achernar’s bower and set his body a short distance from the first cairn. As before, the human party watched the Tantors assemble a stone mound around the remains, and then they joined them and made their own offerings to the cairn.

‘For all the dead of Zanzibar,’ Goma said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Kanu hammered the metal staff against the floor, summoning Memphis in the agreed manner. He felt sick, literally on the verge of vomiting, but he knew his only choice was to confront the matriarch directly. It was no good continuing in this state of ignorance, accepting that answers would be provided in the fullness of time.

‘Kanu,’ Swift said, ‘might I suggest a period of reflection before you engage in rash action?’

‘You can suggest whatever you like.’

‘You will have to account for your knowledge of these supposed events. How will you do that without revealing my presence?’

‘I’ll just ask the obvious questions I should have asked all along.’

‘With respect, you did ask those questions — and answers were forthcoming, regardless of their veracity. The construct broke down and was dismantled; Chiku and the others succumbed to gradual systematic life-support failures. Might I remind you that we have precisely no evidence to the contrary?’

‘Except Chiku’s testimony.’

‘We have Chiku’s expressed concerns relating to events which had not only failed to happen at the time of her recording, but which may never have happened.’

‘Shut up, Swift.’

‘Seconded,’ Nissa said.

They had never requested Memphis’s presence until now, and this was an hour when they might have been expected to be resting. But Kanu was not prepared to sleep on his fears. He kept hammering on the floor.

‘If nothing happens, I’m going to walk there. I think I can find my way out of this place if I try hard enough.’

Before long they heard the thudding footfalls and deep vocal rumblings of the Risen. The main doors opened and a pair of elephants entered the central hallway.

‘Is Memphis here?’ Kanu asked.

‘Memphis is outside. You asked for the Risen.’

‘Take us to Memphis,’ Nissa said.

These subordinate Risen were clearly content to do exactly as they were told — to a point. Kanu and Nissa were allowed out of the household. On the level ground before the main entrance waited Memphis and the wheeled vehicle.

‘You called,’ Memphis said.

‘We want to speak to Dakota,’ Nissa answered.

After a short silence, the huge bull said, ‘Now is not the time.’

Kanu shook his head, anger overcoming his instinctive wariness of the larger creature. ‘I don’t care whether it’s the time or not. We have something to say — it’s very important. Take us to see her. Now.’

‘You have asked many things already.’

‘Not nearly enough,’ Nissa said.

Memphis eventually relented, and they were soon on their way. As they travelled, Kanu turned the same thoughts over again and again, trying to find some sense in them. There had been people here once, coexisting with elephants, and now — by the evidence of his eyes — there were none. Had these slow and gentle creatures committed the worst of crimes, a kind of genocide? He could not begin to imagine how it might have happened, nor did he wish to dwell too long on the possibilities. There had to be some other explanation — one that absolved the Risen of any wrongdoing. He did not want to think of his hosts as murderers.

And yet, Chiku must have thought it possible. And she had known elephants as well as anyone.

He had no idea of Dakota’s sleeping habits — if indeed she slept — and was not surprised therefore to find her awake and alert when they were finally admitted into her presence. They were in the grand lobby of the civic building where only a little while earlier they had viewed the recording.

‘You may wait outside, Memphis.’

Soon they were alone — just Kanu, Nissa and the matriarch.

‘Something has troubled you,’ she said, after a long silence.

‘It’s time to tell us what really happened,’ Kanu said.

‘Have I not been open and honest with you thus far?’

‘Where are all the people, Dakota?’ Nissa said. ‘What happened after Chiku made that recording?’

‘I gather from Memphis that you requested a second viewing.’

‘Answer my question,’ Nissa said.

‘I do not care for your tone. What answers have I not already provided? I told you what became of the construct, and of Chiku. These were tragedies, and they left us weakened. Yet we recovered. What more is there to say?’

Kanu asked bluntly, ‘Did you kill them? Not just Chiku, not just Eunice, but all of the people who agreed to stay awake?’

‘Why would we have killed them? What purpose would that have served?’

‘Maybe they started to turn against you,’ Nissa said. ‘Is that what happened? Did the people try to check your rise to power? Did they start to realise that you were something more than the other Risen — that you were really acting for the Watchkeepers?’

‘Walk with me,’ Dakota said, after a moment’s consideration. ‘We shall visit the skipover vault. I have something to tell you about the Friends. I believe you will find it interesting.’