Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘The Mandala, or Poseidon?’ Loring asked.

  ‘Both, to a degree – although the really formidable defences are around Poseidon. Those moons aren’t to be trifled with. They’ll permit certain kinds of intelligence to pass and deny others.’

  ‘Machines are barred, organics allowed?’ Vasin asked.

  ‘More complicated than that.’

  ‘Is there anything about this that’s not complicated?’ Goma said.

  ‘Not to my knowledge. Aiyana?’

  Ve lowered a hand over ver plate. ‘Not very hungry? A little for the taste?’

  ‘Go, you.’ Eunice served the scientist rather more than was required for a taste. ‘And my two special guests – my brave Tantor specialists? Surely all that intellectual stimulation has worked up an appetite?’

  ‘If you eat it, I’ll eat it,’ Goma said. ‘Even though it looks like shit.’

  ‘Wait until you find out how it tastes. Ru?’

  ‘She doesn’t get to have all the fun on her own.’

  Eunice beamed. ‘I like you both already.’

  ‘Make sure you save some for yourself,’ Goma said.

  In fact the food was not as inedible as it looked, nor even as bland, for there was a saltiness to it and a faint aftertaste of chilli powder. As a one-off, Goma could tolerate it well enough. But she had not been forced to live here for more than two centuries with only a handful of items on the menu. It was a wonder Eunice had not gone insane.

  Perhaps she had.

  ‘Tell us about the M-builders,’ Vasin said, between tentative mouthfuls. ‘Everything you know. And the Watchkeepers, while you’re at it. Where are they now? What happened to them?’

  ‘Questions, questions.’

  ‘You can’t blame us,’ Ru said. ‘You still haven’t told us about Zanzibar, about Dakota and Chiku.’

  ‘Let me tell you the most important thing – the most pressing thing. Dakota is set on a very bad course. There are structures on Poseidon. You’ll have seen them – arch-like objects rising from the seas. They’re wheels, if you didn’t already guess. Dakota wishes to reach those wheels – to learn the secrets they encode. Until now, she hasn’t had the means to either reach Poseidon or penetrate its defences or atmosphere. Unfortunately the arrival of that other ship has fallen neatly into her plans. She has to be stopped. The first thing we must attempt is communication – get a signal through to that ship if they’re still listening.’

  ‘Haven’t you tried that already?’ Goma asked.

  ‘My transmitters can’t possibly reach all the way through Zanzibar, but yours might be able to. Use whatever you have, from radio to neutrinos. Send Morse code with your engine – but get through to them. Tell them that Dakota absolutely can’t be trusted, and that whatever help or reciprocity they think they’re getting from her, there’ll be a significant sting in the tail. Can you do that, Captain Vasin?’

  ‘I’ll see what Nasim can manage. But if they weren’t prepared to listen to you—’

  ‘Maybe they couldn’t, and maybe they’re dead already, but you can still try. And it’s not just the crew of the ship you’ll want to reach out to – it’s the rest of the Tantors. My bridges are burned, but you saw how Sadalmelik and the others revere Ndege’s name. That goes for the other Tantors in Zanzibar, too. They will still think twice before disregarding the advice of an Akinya. As long as it’s not me, of course.’

  ‘Tell us about the people,’ Vasin said. ‘The hundreds and thousands you said survived the translation. Surely they aren’t all gone?’

  ‘Every last one. There were difficult times after the translation. Have you noticed how much of my camp I need to set aside to provide for just six Tantors? The problems on Zanzibar were much more acute, and there was no way it could keep everyone alive, people and Tantors. But there was a way out – a solution. Most of the human survivors agreed to return to skipover, to conserve basic resources.’

  ‘The Tantors were already independent by that point?’ Goma asked.

  ‘Not quite. There was enough capacity to keep a handful of humans alive, a skeleton staff to guide and assist the Tantors as their world was remade.’

  ‘Then we’ll speak to them,’ Goma said.

  ‘You can’t. Dakota had them all killed. For thousands of years, we had the blood of elephants on our hands. Now the deed has been repaid.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Kanu had nothing to say in the face of the elephants. Nothing in his long and strange life, no experience or lesson, had prepared him for this moment. He had a million questions for the elephants, but no idea where to begin. It was all he could do to stand still, caught in the paralysing rapture of the moment.

  ‘Who are you?’

  It was Nissa who spoke first, her voice booming out through her suit’s loudspeaker. The elephant’s answer, when it returned, was also in Swahili. It was not merely an echo of her words, for the intonation was distinctly different, questioning and with a trace of superiority.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Nissa Mbaye,’ she answered, with a collectedness that impressed Kanu, as if she had expected to meet and speak to elephants all along. ‘Our ship was damaged, we needed a place to repair it, and we weren’t expecting to find anyone alive inside this station.’

  ‘Station?’

  The vocal sounds were coming from the lead elephant but they were not being generated by its mouth, or at least not directly. The elephant was the tallest of the three, its skin pigmentation a dark umber offset with pinkish mottling around the eyes and mouth. It exuded an impression of powerful muscularity, a sense of enormous force just barely contained.

  The sounds, insofar as Kanu could judge, emanated from a thick angled plate that the elephant wore across the front of its face, fixed between its eyes and above the top of its trunk. The voice was loud and very deep. At the lower end of its frequency range, Kanu felt certain it would be deeper than any possible human utterance, and certainly far louder.

  ‘We thought this was a station, a base,’ Kanu said, finding his voice at last. ‘We were expecting people – humans, like ourselves. We were not expecting you.’

  ‘Take off your helmets. We will see your faces.’

  Nissa glanced at Kanu through the side of her visor, then the two of them consulted their wrist readouts.

  ‘It’s safe enough,’ Kanu whispered. ‘If there’s enough oxygen to keep them alive, we should be fine.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Nissa said.

  ‘Nor do I, but when in Rome . . .’

  They eased their helmets off, then tucked them under their arms. Kanu breathed in the air. There was a mustiness to it, but he had inhaled worse.

  ‘Speak your name.’

  ‘Kanu,’ he said levelly, hoping he sounded as matter-of-fact as Nissa had. ‘My name is Kanu Akinya.’

  ‘Akinya?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He was talking to an elephant, and the elephant was replying. The strangeness of this situation was almost too much to bear. It felt dreamlike, and yet he had a clear sense of the events that had led up to it, the chain of contingencies, each of which had felt logical and inevitable in isolation. It was entirely likely that this was happening. Astonishing, absurd, wonderful, but not beyond the realms of the possible.

  ‘You look the same to us. Are you brothers?’

  He glanced at Nissa, tried to imagine a point of view from which they were indistinguishable. They were both nearly hairless now, but as far as Kanu was concerned, that was where the similarities ended.

  ‘No, we’re not brothers. I am a man, Nissa is a woman. We aren’t related.’

  ‘You are the man Kanu Akinya?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you are the woman Nissa Mbaye?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  ‘Do you know t
he name of this place, Kanu Akinya and Nissa Mbaye?’

  ‘The planet is Paladin,’ Kanu said. ‘That’s what we call it, anyway. We found this shard of rock orbiting it and hoped it could help us fix our ship. That’s all we know.’

  ‘Then you do not know the name of this place.’

  ‘Do you?’ Nissa asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you call it?’ she asked.

  ‘Zan-zi-bar,’ said the elephant, each syllable a distinct, booming thing unto itself.

  Nissa looked at him. Kanu shrugged within the collar of his suit. The temptation was to dismiss the name out of hand. Anyone with an education, anyone with the slightest interest in history knew what happened to the holoship. But here was a talking elephant, claiming otherwise.

  It felt only fair and reasonable that he should listen to what the elephant had to say on the matter.

  ‘We thought Zanzibar was destroyed,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But people saw it happen,’ Kanu persisted. ‘It was a terrible event, one of the worst in recent history.’

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘No . . . we’ve come from Earth, not Crucible. Neither of us has ever been there.’

  The elephant was looking at him, sometimes directly, sometimes by angling its huge head to favour one eye over the other. The eyes were a pale amber under a cowling of dark lashes.

  ‘But you know of Zanzibar.’

  ‘Everyone does,’ Kanu said. ‘Something terrible happened – an accident with the Mandala on Crucible.’

  ‘Speak of this accident.’

  ‘Zanzibar was passing overhead and there was an energy burst, a discharge – a massive explosion. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed – I’m not sure of the exact number. The holoship was turned into rubble and the debris formed a ring system that’s still orbiting Crucible. Are you saying that’s not what happened?’

  ‘There was an accident. But Zanzibar came here. We were on it. We survived. We have been here ever since.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’ Kanu asked.

  ‘I have two names. A true name and a short name. You cannot hear my true name. That will not pass into your knowing.’

  ‘What is your short name?’ Nissa asked.

  ‘I am Memphis. I speak for these Risen. You will speak to them through me.’

  ‘A name with a connection to the family,’ he whispered to Nissa. ‘It proves a link to the elephants that came to Crucible.’

  They were led out of the chamber into a corridor easily high enough for the elephants and wide enough for two of them to walk abreast with room to spare. Memphis went ahead of Kanu and Nissa, the other two slightly smaller elephants bringing up the rear. Kanu was uncomfortably aware of their lumbering presence behind him, the ease with which he might be injured or even killed were he to stumble under their feet. Memphis’s massive hindquarters loomed ahead, muscular and baggy at the same time, as if the skin were a size too big for the meat and bones beneath. The elephant’s tiny afterthought of a tail pendulumed with each stride, as if setting the rhythm. Once, without any pause in his progress, Memphis released a sackful of steaming dung, forcing the humans to step around it.

  ‘This is a development,’ Swift said.

  ‘Is that your idea of understatement?’ Kanu answered, speaking subvocally.

  ‘It’s my idea of bewilderment. How can this be Zanzibar if the records say that it was destroyed?’

  ‘It’s hard to square with what we know. But then again, why would they make up something so unlikely?’

  ‘They need to explain how it got here,’ Nissa said, speaking through the same subvocal channel. ‘I may not be an expert on Akinya history, but I know how long it took the holoships to crawl their way to Crucible. This is even further from Earth.’

  ‘Then it got here faster,’ Kanu said.

  ‘This isn’t even all of Zanzibar,’ Nissa replied. ‘We’d have recognised a holoship immediately. Where’s the rest of it?’

  ‘You heard the elephant. A large part of it survived – not all.’

  ‘Speaking of elephants – what the hell is going on? What do you mean by “family connection”?’

  ‘You mean he never told you?’ Swift said.

  ‘There’s a history of involvement with elephants in my family,’ Kanu said, feeling like a man called upon to defend himself. ‘It goes back a long, long way – to academic studies in Africa, but also genetic experiments on the Moon and elsewhere, shaping an elephant daughter species with the resilience to survive in space.’

  ‘And this is the result?’ Nissa said.

  ‘I don’t know! Some elephants travelled aboard the holoships, and there have always been rumours about the emergence of a strain with enhanced intelligence. More than rumours, apparently. But those elephants didn’t use machinery and speak Swahili. These are something else – yet another strain.’

  ‘Does their name mean anything to you?’ Nissa asked.

  ‘Risen? No. I don’t think I’ve heard that before. Risen from what? By whose hand?’ Kanu’s pace must have slowed, for he felt a gentle shove from behind, a nudge against his backpack. ‘Where are you taking us, Memphis?’

  ‘To see Dakota.’

  *

  The corridor went on and on, following an almost imperceptibly rising curve. It must cut, Kanu decided, through the rocky shell of Zanzibar itself, defining in its curvature the rough outline of the former holoship.

  Clearly the corridor had not always been as wide as its present state. Here and there he could tell where it had been blasted or excavated open from some narrower configuration, and some of the remodelling was far from neatly done. Parts of the corridor were clad; other areas were bare rock, crudely furnished with illumination. At intervals, various corridors and passageways branched off it, angling away to mysterious destinations. Some of these were large enough to admit an elephant, but not all of them. A juvenile elephant might still be able to get down them, but not one of these hulking, armoured adults. Either there were still people around, or there were parts of this place that the elephants could not access.

  So it had not been built for them, but adapted – in haste, perhaps, and imperfectly. They had language and the evident ability to control doors and perhaps use tools, but he wondered how capable they were of modifying their larger environment. Had they made these makeshift changes, or had they received assistance? More pertinently: were they now the only tenants?

  ‘Look,’ Nissa whispered.

  He followed her gaze to the error readout on her cuff which meant that her suit was no longer in contact with Fall of Night. Kanu checked his own suit. It was the same story. He tried a wider search, hoping to pick up a contact from Icebreaker, but both ships were silent.

  ‘We have gone too far into the rock,’ Swift said. ‘The intervening material is blocking an already weak signal. I am afraid there is nothing to be done.’

  Presently they reached a branching corridor which climbed steeply up through a number of turns, until at last they arrived in a much larger enclosed space than any they had seen so far. They were at the base of it, with a vaulted ceiling soaring several hundred metres overhead, its rocky underside pinpricked by hundreds of bright blue lights. The chamber was large but – Kanu reminded himself – still small compared to the original size of the holoship. Waiting in the chamber was an impressive vehicle, easily as big as anything he had seen on Earth. It consisted of a platform flanked by three pairs of huge balloon-tyred wheels, with a steep access ramp leading up to the platform.

  The elephants and their guests went up the platform. There were no seats or amenities aboard the vehicle, just protective railings around the outside edges. Memphis moved to a control pedestal near the front and started touching things with his trunk. The vehicle rolled into life, giving off no more than a rumble of t
yres against the chamber’s rough flooring. Up at the front, beyond the control pedestal, Kanu saw what looked like a conventional cockpit of some kind, encased in a pressurised canopy.

  ‘Did you make this?’ he asked, one hand on the nearest railing, the other arm still cradling his helmet. He had been breathing Zanzibar’s air for many minutes now without obvious ill-effect.

  ‘No, we did not make it.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  ‘It was made for Crucible. Now it is for us.’

  The pedestal had been welded to the deck, and wires and cables ran in crude fashion down its length.

  ‘Did you adapt it?’ Nissa said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  ‘The Friends. You will see them soon, once you have seen Dakota.’

  They were rolling out of the chamber now, having gathered a respectable turn of speed – easily faster than an elephant’s stampede charge. Once again they were travelling down a corridor, but the course of this one was much more erratic than before, suggesting that it been bored anew rather than converted from an earlier element of Zanzibar. It twisted and turned, climbed and descended. The vehicle rolled on, Memphis keeping the very tip of his trunk in contact with the steering controls. He produced more dung and one of the other elephants used a kind of broom to sweep it into a hopper on the side of the vehicle, leaving only a greasy smear. They must eventually collect their waste wherever it falls, Kanu thought, or else the world would have been full of dung.

  ‘This vehicle was meant for the colony, surely,’ he said, addressing Nissa, keeping his voice low while not yet subvocalising. ‘Manufactured up here, I suppose. They would have kept most of the factories and fabricators in orbit, sending finished goods down to Crucible. This one never made it, and now it’s been altered so he can drive it. But no matter how smart they’ve become, I don’t see this being within their capabilities. Someone must have helped.’