Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Are the Friends the Watchkeepers?’ Kanu asked.

  ‘No – nothing so strange as that. In fact, the Friends are like yourselves – people, human beings. They were with us when we first arrived in this system. Would you like to see them?’

  ‘We didn’t think there were any people here,’ Nissa said.

  ‘You will not have seen them, but there is an excellent reason for that. In fact, the Friends are very near. I shall have Memphis show them to you – unless you would rather begin the repair work immediately?’

  ‘That might not be a bad thing,’ Nissa said.

  ‘It will not take long to see the Friends. And then you will have a better grasp of our situation.’ Dakota stomped a foot on the floor, three times. After a moment, the library doors reopened.

  ‘Take our guests to see the Friends, Memphis. I should like them to watch the recording, too – I think it may be of great interest to them.’

  The larger elephant led them from the library back into the main part of the civic building. In the very middle of the grand space was the gently sloping ramp Kanu had noticed before, angling down into the building’s lower levels. It looked old enough to be part of the original architecture, but it was easily large enough for Memphis. Perhaps vehicles had used it to come and go from the basement levels. Kanu wished he knew more of Zanzibar’s history during its flight and the years spent orbiting Crucible. Mposi would know, he thought, and wondered what his distant half-brother would make of this place now.

  The ramp reached a landing, reversed direction and descended again. Then it levelled out and reached a T-junction. It was almost totally dark now. Ahead was not a wall but rather a dimly sensed emptiness. Kanu moved to the railed barrier facing them. They had reached the upper part of a vault, presumably extending deeper into the lower levels.

  ‘See the Friends,’ Memphis said, standing at their backs, the slow in-and-out of his breathing like the movement of air through a house-sized bellows.

  ‘We can’t see anything,’ Nissa said. ‘Your eyesight must be better than ours. If we put our helmets back on—’

  ‘Wait.’

  Memphis stepped forward, extending his trunk to touch a panel set into the nearside wall. Lights came on, banks of them in sequence, illuminating deeper parts of the vault. Kanu saw now that the pathway continued to either side of the T-junction, enclosing the length of the vault before joining up again at the far end. More ramps led down to the lower levels.

  It was a skipover vault.

  ‘Amazing,’ Kanu said, taking in layer after layer of sleeper caskets, more than he could begin to count. ‘I’ve never seen anything on this scale. Must be hundreds, thousands of sleepers here.’

  ‘No one would have done anything like this since the holoships,’ Nissa said. ‘But why are they here?’

  ‘There must have been lots of people still in skipover when the holoships reached Crucible,’ Kanu guessed, ‘many vaults just like this, crammed full of the frozen. Remember how the cities weren’t ready for the colonists? They couldn’t move everyone down in one go. They’d have held them in skipover until the surface settlements were finished – and that was going to take decades. Even when they started waking everyone up, they’d have kept the vaults as an emergency resource.’

  ‘At least we know where the people are now. Why aren’t they awake, though? And what happened during the accident – were they already in skipover, or did that happen afterwards?’

  Kanu turned to their elephant host. ‘Are there more than these, Memphis?’

  ‘These are all the Friends. There are no other Friends.’

  ‘They’re all asleep now,’ Nissa said. ‘Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was there ever a time when they were awake?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked at Kanu before answering. ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘A time of troubles. I will show you the recording. Then you will understand.’

  They returned to the lobby entrance where Memphis had first struck the floor with the metal staff. Kanu noticed again the upright rectangle of glass set into a stone plinth. He had taken it to be a piece of interior decoration, but now he realised there was rather more to it.

  Memphis waved his trunk in front of the glass. At first nothing happened, but after a few passes the glass brightened. A standing human form appeared in the upright material, a woman with whom Kanu felt an instant and visceral bond of recognition. He knew the shape of that face, the cheekbones, the brow, the curve of the lips.

  She was his mother.

  She nodded once, bowed and began to speak. ‘I am Chiku Akinya. Chiku Green, for anyone who might take interest in such things. And I am here to tell you what happened to us.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The days on Orison could never be long enough for Goma and Ru. There were too few hours and too many things they wished to ask of both the Tantors and their host. Goma could hardly believe that there were another three Tantors still out there, on their way back to the camp. In her limited time with the first trio, she had already formed an appreciation of Sadalmelik, Eldasich and Achernar as distinct individuals, each with their own past, their own place in the Tantor hierarchy. All were interested in the world beyond Orison, in the stories of Agrippa and the other elephants on Crucible, and all appeared willing to learn about Ndege and the wider Akinya clan. But in the case of Eldasich and Achernar, the latter interest was more polite than insatiable. They were mildly curious, but human business clearly sounded less important to them than news of other Tantors.

  Goma offered the most truthful account she could. It was hard to skirt around the issue of the Tantor decline, the gradual weakening of their intelligence, without alluding to their similarity to baseline elephants. She did the best she could, with Ru’s assistance, and if offence were taken, it was not obvious to either of them.

  The Tantors, for their part, appeared to relish dialogue with someone other than Eunice. It was clear from their surroundings that they required constant intellectual stimulation. In the main bubble and the sub-chambers excavated around it, they had been provided with many tools and toys – or perhaps they were better thought of as puzzles, for toys sounded demeaning for creatures of such evident cognitive gifts. There was an upright rack, divided into black and white squares, with movable symbols – some kind of game or logic exercise. There was a horizontal flat panel bisected by a central net of recovered insulation material with two racket-like paddles suggestive of table tennis. There was a fist-sized cube made of many smaller coloured cubes which could be twisted into different permutations, but only via cooperative action between two or more elephants. There were tall sculptural objects made of interchangeable networks of transparent plumbing, through which the Tantors liked to roll little polished marbles. There were data screens arranged in stereo pairs for the convenience of animals with broad skulls and opposed eyes. There was a socklike tool which could be worn over a trunk and came equipped with a variety of plug-in micromanipulators, allowing the Tantors to perform the deftest tasks. There were cave paintings, splashed on the walls in bright primary colours. There was a wire-frame wind chime which the Tantors liked to set in motion as they passed, and a thing like an alpine horn which they enjoyed blowing into that produced a note so deep it made Goma’s guts throb.

  But the Tantors also had work to do, sharing the business of survival. They each placed a much higher demand on the camp’s life-support capabilities than one human. One of the sub-chambers led into a lithoponic glasshouse, while another accessed the nutrient troughs where the mealworms were grown and harvested. Another chamber contained the lavish waste-treatment beds – the smell of elephant dung brought Goma and Ru back to Crucible in an instant. Elsewhere they were shown the elephant-sized spacesuits, with their goggled helmets and accordioned trunk sheaths like antique gas masks. Eunice sai
d it generally took three Tantors to prepare another three for the outside, so they seldom went out at the same time.

  They shared the camp on equal terms with Eunice. She had expertise and insight but she was not their master. She had been exiled, and the Tantors’ ancestors had agreed to defect with her. But their relationship was based on loyalty, not blind subservience. They needed each other to survive, the partnership built on friendship and mutual dependence.

  Goma and Ru had as many questions for Eunice as they did for the Tantors. She was obliging, up to a point – willing to go over the same details, to repeat or re-examine that which was not immediately clear. But it was not like asking things of a robot.

  ‘I knew a Finnish astronaut,’ she said, launching off on a sudden tangent. ‘Hannu. It was on Phobos, when we were cooped up there waiting for that big Martian storm to die down. Nerves were starting to fray – the slightest thing set us off. Someone sneezes the wrong way, someone rubs their nose or keeps saying they miss Earth. “All guests stink on the third day,” said my Finnish colleague. He was right.’

  ‘Give us a break,’ Goma said. ‘We’ve barely been here two days, let alone three.’

  ‘It feels like longer. I have opened my home to you, offered you sanctuary and the essentials of life-support. How many times do we need to keep going over the same basic facts?’

  ‘You’ll have to excuse us,’ Vasin said, with the manner of one who minded very little whether or not she was excused. ‘We’ve arrived in the middle of a situation we don’t understand with next to no prior information. You’re our only reference point, and you shouldn’t even be alive. I mean that in the literal sense. If we were expecting anything, it was a robot.’

  ‘I must be a disappointment to you all.’

  ‘No,’ said Dr Nhamedjo, moving his hands in a magnanimous flourish. ‘You’re a wonder of the age! But you’re also human. As recording systems go, memories are fallible. And by your own account, all this happened such a long time ago.’

  ‘You’ve been on your own here,’ Goma said soothingly. ‘Nothing but you and the Tantors and a totally deserted, barely hospitable planet.’

  ‘And you think I went mad without the benefit of your sparkling conversation?’

  ‘I think we need to be sure that you’re as sane as you think you are,’ Vasin said. ‘Hence our questions. You’ll admit it’s an unlikely set of circumstances – you becoming flesh and blood, Zanzibar reappearing . . . Tantors turning against people. It’s not that I doubt these things, but I’m still trying to understand how they fit together.’

  ‘You told us the Watchkeepers needed you,’ Goma said, ‘something to do with Poseidon not letting them near, but I still don’t really get what that means.’

  They were in Eunice’s kitchen. She wet her finger and drew a watery circle on the table, then another circle surrounding it. ‘Poseidon prohibits examination by purely machine intelligences. But the Trinity was able to bypass that prohibition.’

  ‘One of you was a machine,’ Ru said.

  ‘And one of us was human, and one of us had a trunk. It was the totality of us that counted. Collectively, we were more than our individual selves – we were a distinct information-gathering entity.’

  ‘Then you’ve been there,’ Goma said.

  ‘We got close but turned back. Something touched us. The Terror, Chiku called it.’ She smiled at their uneasy reactions. ‘There was nothing occult about it. The Terror was just a form of deep understanding – information being drilled into our heads. A vast, precise, intuitive grasp of the probable consequences of our actions. That to know the truth of the M-builders was to grasp the most dangerous knowledge of all.’

  ‘All right,’ Goma said. ‘We’ve skirted around this long enough – what’s the big deal about the M-builders? What’s so important that they have to put the Terror into you? What secret is worth protecting that badly? And if it’s such a big, bad secret, why not just erase it, or hide it away for ever?’

  ‘I don’t know what it is. I didn’t get close enough to find out.’

  ‘But you got close enough to experience the Terror. And you’ve had all this time since then to think about it, to put it into perspective. Don’t tell me you didn’t come up with something – you’re Eunice Akinya.’

  ‘At least someone has faith in me.’

  ‘I’m trying very hard,’ Goma said.

  After a while, she said, ‘The M-builders discovered something. A fundamental truth about the universe, about the fate of things – what happens to the universe, what happens to all the matter, and all the life in it, in the future. This much I understood. The rest is . . . harder. It’s like telling a child about death. There’s no nice way to break the news.’

  ‘They let you know this fundamental truth?’ Ru asked.

  ‘It came through.’

  ‘And the secret itself?’ Goma probed. ‘If you got a glimpse of it, you need to share it with us. You can’t expect us to get worked up about Dakota if we don’t know exactly what’s at stake.’

  ‘It’s a lot for you to take in.’

  ‘Then give us your best stab. You can’t expect us to get worked up about Dakota when we only have a clue what it’s all about.’

  ‘I can expect whatever I like.’

  ‘Eunice . . . please.’

  ‘Persistent little upstart, aren’t you. Annoying. Annoying and cocksure and full of your own insufferable self-belief.’

  Goma lifted her chin in defiance, displaying more boldness than she felt. ‘Coming from you? You made a career out of insufferable self-belief. You built an empire on the back of it.’

  This drew the tiniest grudging smile from Eunice. ‘Very well. At least you and I can speak plainly. You can take this, I think. You’ve got the steel for it. I can’t speak for your companions – they’re your business. The M-builders . . . are you sure of this?’

  ‘Yes, we’re damned well sure,’ Goma said.

  ‘They arrived at this truth. It’s a bitter pill. None more bitter. The universe ends. It has a built-in expiration clause. It’s going to stop – and not at some remote cosmological time from now, when the galaxies crash together or the suns fizzle out, but sooner . . . much sooner.’

  ‘When you say sooner . . .’ Vasin said. ‘What are we talking? Thousands of years, millions?’

  ‘It can’t be quantified. It’s a fluctuation event, a vacuum instability, a random but inevitable process like the flipping of an atomic nucleus, the decay of a neutron. It could happen tomorrow or a hundred billion years from now. Statistically speaking? Probably won’t happen for hundreds of millions of years . . . a good few billion, most likely.’

  Goma could not help but let out a gasp of relief. ‘Then it’s so far off as to not matter.’

  Eunice looked at her with scorn. ‘Try, just for a second, not to think like a thing made out of cells, with a lifespan shorter than some planetary weather systems. You’re a human being. You have limited horizons. Thinking beyond next week is a reach for you. That’s fine, it’s what you are.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Goma said.

  ‘You’re welcome. But it wasn’t like that for the M-builders. They’d already been around for tens of millions of years when they made this discovery. They’d accepted the idea of being an immortal super-civilisation. It suited them down to the ground. Masters of creation? Lords of all they surveyed? Architects of eternity? Why not? Bring it on. But there’s always a catch – they needed the universe not to die on them in the meantime. When they worked out that the end state was not just probable but inevitable . . . let’s just say it didn’t feel quite so far off to them. Not when they’d already been around for aeon upon aeon and were making plans for the rest of time.’

  ‘Then the truth is . . . what?’ Vasin said. ‘The confirmation of all this? Then we don’t need it. I’ve seen those theories, too. We already kno
w about vacuum fluctuations.’

  ‘So do the Watchkeepers,’ Eunice answered. ‘So does every galactic intelligence with the ability to count up to three. But it’s always been a theory . . . a dragon in the mathematics. Something nasty, but which you aren’t required to take seriously. The M-builders did, though. Their mathematics was watertight, and they’d excluded all competing theories. They knew the end was coming. And Poseidon is their answer.’

  ‘A solution?’ Ru asked.

  ‘An answer,’ Eunice repeated.

  Ru began, ‘I’m not sure—’

  ‘Did something go wrong on your ship’s life-support when you were on the way here? Some catastrophic lowering of your overall intelligence baseline? I’ll spell it out to you slowly. Poseidon is a species-level response. Information, yes. A requiem, if you like – although we’d have to read it to be sure. Whatever Poseidon is, it encodes their response to the knowledge that life, existence itself, has a finite duration. That it cannot last for ever.’

  ‘And that’s what the Watchkeepers want to know – how the M-builders responded to that information?’ Goma asked.

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’

  Goma shrugged. There was a certain formality or protocol to dealing with Eunice, and she felt as if some of the rules were becoming clearer. ‘If I were a machine civilisation instead of a bag of cells – maybe. But I’m not sure I’d go to all this trouble to get it.’

  ‘You would if you were them. The Watchkeepers are also ancient, and just like the M-builders, they’re keen on the idea of long-term survival, of enduring deep-time, burrowing into the extreme future of the universe. They know that vacuum fluctuation is real – they can see it in their physics, and in the physics of all the other cultures they’ve encountered or unearthed. So inasmuch as worry is an emotion they’re capable of, they worry. They fret in their dim little machine minds and wish they knew what the M-builders knew. But to find that out, they have to enlist proxy intelligences like ourselves. The trouble with that, though, is that we have to know the Terror. We have to allow our souls to be ripped open while they look on. We’re disposable instruments to them, that’s all. Doesn’t matter if we’re blunted or damaged or burned in the process so long as we function long enough to extract information. Well, fuck that.’