Grave had come to the window while Goma and Ru were caught up in the spectacle. His presence was uninvited, but Goma struggled to find much resentment. Whatever differences they had once had, she felt certain that she and Grave now had infinitely more in common with each other than they did with the new citizens of Crucible. Ru, Goma and Grave were creatures out of time, unmoored from their rightful place in history. This was what interstellar travel did to people, and as yet no one had much experience coping with it.
‘Kanu is awake now,’ Grave said. ‘I’ve spoken to him, and he seems to have handled the crossing as well as any of us. I just wish there were better news about Nissa – some good development we could bring to his attention immediately.’
Goma understood that there had already been communication between Vasin, Mona Andisa, and the governing authorities of the system. At least part of that exchange had concerned the fate of Nissa, preserved in skipover since her death at Poseidon.
‘Maybe they have something,’ Ru said. ‘Better medicine than us, at any rate. How could they not have better medicine, after all this time?’
‘We don’t really know how far they’ve come,’ Goma said, her tone cautious, refusing to indulge in wishful thinking. Historical progress was not linear. She reminded herself that the medicine of the Age of Babel had been superior to the medicine after the Fall of the Mechanism. It was anyone’s guess as to the leaps and reversals that had happened since their departure. At some point she would have to sit down and catch up on all that skipped history.
For now she had no appetite for it.
‘If not here, then Earth,’ Grave said.
‘Assuming Earth isn’t even further behind,’ Goma said. ‘And even if we find out what the situation’s like now, Crucible’s best knowledge of Earth is still thirty years old. Just going on to Earth will still be a gamble, a leap into the dark.’
‘Would you consider it?’ he asked.
‘I promised I’d take her heart back home.’ Goma swallowed and nodded. ‘Yes. I mean to do that.’
But it was so much harder now that she was home. The vow had been easy when even Crucible lay at an unimaginable distance, and she had barely dared count on seeing it again. Yet to be here now, looking down on her old home, knowing its airs and waters were almost close enough to touch – and soon would be – made her wonder if she really had the resolve to deliver on that pledge.
But a vow was a vow.
‘You have my admiration,’ Grave said. ‘Both of you, because I do not believe for a moment that Goma will make this crossing alone.’
It had been meant as a kindness, but having his admiration only left her feeling more beleaguered, as if the task ahead of her had become even more daunting. She held her nerve, though. And Ru closed her hand around Goma’s.
‘Of course,’ Ru said, as if nothing could have been less contentious. ‘I’m her wife. We do this together.’
A little later, Goma went to see how their five most vulnerable passengers had coped with the crossing.
The surviving Risen had returned to Crucible along with the human members of the expedition. For the first ten years of the voyage, Hector and the others had remained awake aboard Travertine, accompanied by a small and dwindling support team, working with the Tantors to overcome the biological impediments to putting them into skipover. Goma and Ru had remained awake for a good portion of that time as well, and even after entering skipover Goma had come out again when the Tantors were ready for their own immersion. By then, all but a handful of doubts had been settled . . . but there would be no guarantee of success until the Tantors were revived. There had even been talk of keeping the Tantors awake for the entire crossing, down through generations of offspring. Nothing was without risk, though, and in the end Mona Andisa had declared herself confident that the Tantors had at least a better than average chance of surviving skipover.
So it was agreed, and the Risen had been drugged and drip-fed and intubated, and finally placed in immersion vessels converted from expended fuel tanks, each now a giant, makeshift skipover casket. Periodically – once every decade or so – a waking technician would peer through dark windows into the murky interior of the caskets, make readouts, slide a stethoscope across the curving alloy, perform some tiny, precise adjustment of the life-support systems.
All of this seemed risky and perhaps unnecessary, given that some or all of the Risen could have remained back in the Gliese 163 system. But if the Risen were left to themselves, they would have to fend alone for another three centuries. Without Zanzibar, without thousands of their fellow beings, without the stewardship of Eunice, that would have been another risk again. Transporting them to Crucible was the least worst option.
Or so Goma tried to convince herself. She had been a strong advocate of exactly this outcome. But then again, she had been thinking of her own elephants, and of the genetic bounty now carried by the Risen. Agrippa’s death had extinguished the signal of intelligence in the Crucible herds. But a signal could be pulled back out of the noise, with the right encouragement. It was her profound hope that the Risen would provide the means of amplifying that trace, no matter how uselessly faint it had now become.
A forlorn hope?
Perhaps. But she had entertained wilder fantasies, and some of them had become real.
‘Goma,’ said Mona Andisa – her face carrying the lines and shadows of the years she had spent awake, ministering to the Tantors. ‘You’ve arrived just in time. Hector is rousing.’ And she nodded at a display, the cross section of a mighty skull, fortified with bone the way a castle armoured itself with walls and ramparts. ‘The signs are good,’ she added. ‘I think they all made it.’
‘We made it,’ Goma said. ‘All of us. And we all owe you our thanks, Mona. Have you seen Crucible?’
Andisa flashed a quick smile, as if she had something to apologise for. ‘Not yet. Too busy with the ambassadors.’
‘You should. It’s still beautiful.’
Ambassadors. The word had stuck, when speaking of the Risen. But ambassadors to whom, and representing what, exactly? All the rest of their kind now lay somewhere off in deep space, wherever Zanzibar was now. If indeed Zanzibar were still not travelling, still hurtling along the path the Mandala had ordained for it, at a breath below the speed of light, so fast that the Risen aboard would not yet have had the time to formulate a single thought, let alone ponder their fate. . .
Less than a century and half had passed since the second Zanzibar translation, thought Goma, with a shivering insight into the scale of things. At best, Zanzibar was now one hundred and fifty light-years from Paladin . . . a distance to shrivel the soul, but still nothing, not even a scratch, on galactic terms.
Wherever they’re going, they may not even be a tenth of the way there yet . . . or a hundredth part.
Andisa brought her to Hector. He had been taken from the skipover tank and placed on a support hammock. His forelegs were angled over the hammock’s front, the boulder-like mass of his head resting on his knees, his trunk brushing the floor. There was gravity in this section of the ship, and although her bones and muscles still ached from the adjustment after skipover, Goma was glad of it. She would soon be walking on Crucible.
So would the ambassadors.
Hector breathed. She touched a hand to the upper part of his trunk, feeling the leathery, bristly roughness of it against her palm. At the contact, Hector opened one weary, sleep-gummed eye. It was the pink of a sunset, like a pale jewel jammed into grey flesh.
‘We made it,’ she said softly. ‘All of us. There’s a world down there. You can walk in the open air, under the sky, without suits or domes. For as far as you like.’
Andisa nodded at the neural display. Colours were blooming in tight knots of activity. ‘He wishes to respond. Those are vocalisation impulses. But I don’t want to hook up the voice apparatus until he’s up and about.’
/>
‘Take your time,’ Goma said, still stroking his trunk. ‘You need to be strong, Ambassador Hector. All of you. Your work’s barely begun.’
Nor, for that matter, had hers.
Travertine’s orbit gradually brought it within range of a station. It was a golden structure, with a dozen curving docking arms flung out from a bulbous glowing core. Beautiful and strange, it made Goma think of a chandelier, or perhaps an octopus. Along the arms were numerous studlike docking ports, many of which were occupied by ships of various sizes. Some were like the cylinder they had seen earlier, but there were also spheres and darts and translucent, barb-tailed things shaped like manta rays. The spacecraft glowed gently with different colours – there were no lights or markings as such.
Travertine had obviously been assigned a docking port. They nudged home and a small swarm of mothlike service craft was soon in attendance. Goma and Ru watched the colourful display, mesmerised, until a summons drew them to the main commons area. Grave had already gone on to speak with the other members of the Second Chance delegation, and Vasin was calling the entire ship to a meeting.
Kanu was there, the first time Goma had seen him since their revival. She and Ru joined him. They hugged, each thankful that they had come through the crossing.
‘I went to see the Tantors,’ Kanu said. ‘They’re doing well. It’s a fine thing you did, helping them with the skipover equipment.’
‘It wasn’t anything compared to the years Mona and her team put in,’ Ru said.
‘You all made sacrifices,’ Kanu replied.
Goma knew she could either skirt awkwardly around the Nissa question, or get it out in the open. ‘I understand there’s already been some contact between Travertine and the medics on Crucible. We’ve been gone a long while, Kanu. There must be a lot of options open to them.’
He nodded, like a man trying to put a brave face on things. ‘We’ll see.’
‘They’ll do the best they can,’ Ru said. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘I’m certain they will.’ He was speaking slowly, distantly. ‘It was the best thing, keeping her in skipover. Even though she missed most of our time in the Tantors’ system.’
‘We’ll have to go back, won’t we?’ Goma said, trying to strike an optimistic note. ‘Not us, necessarily, but people. Maybe we won’t even need a starship to do it. Just crank up Mandala again, the way it worked before.’
‘Someone’s going to have to try,’ Kanu agreed.
But it would not be him, Goma thought. Or her, or Ru. Captain Vasin, perhaps, if she had not yet had her fill of cosmic exploration. But even Gandhari looked drawn, worn out by what they had gone through.
She was speaking.
‘In a little while, so I am assured, we will be met by diplomatic envoys from the present government. They are bound to seem odd to us. Perhaps a little frightening, too. It’s been a while. But you can be certain that they are just as apprehensive about meeting us. We must seem very strange to them indeed. But with good intentions in our hearts, good faith in our new hosts, good faith in ourselves, we will find a way through. Some of you will attempt to return to your old lives on Crucible. I do not wish to understate the challenges you will face – although I am quite sure you have a ready appreciation of what lies ahead. But never forget this. We are a crew now, and we will remain a crew. When you leave this ship, you do not leave behind the friendships and alliances we have forged. They remain with us. They will be our bond across all the years and challenges to come. Each and every one of you has my respect and gratitude.’
There were more words to come, not just from Vasin, but after a while they began to wash over Goma, her thoughts spinning away on their own trajectories. She was thinking of the ambassadors – how easy it was to gloss over the complicated business of introducing five new sentient beings to a world, until the time was almost upon them. She was thinking of Kanu, for whom this was no kind of homecoming, and for whom any mood of celebration must have rung cruelly false. She was thinking of Nissa, neither dead nor alive, and the hopes that had been placed on the unknown medicine of a world three centuries from their understanding. It was a kind of magical thinking, she saw now, like a child’s trust in the intervention of fairies. And she was thinking of Eunice Akinya’s heart, which had yet to reach its resting place.
Soon the envoys came. Their manner was quiet, understated, deferential. Even as they moved through the ship, she never saw more than two of them at any one time. They were doing their best to be unobtrusive, not wishing to shock their time-slipped guests. Their faces and skin tones showed a variety of ethnicities, and there were some among them who had the sleek, hairless features she associated with merfolk, but it was hard to be certain. Their clothes were dark, modest of cut, with wide white collars and puffed white cuffs. Some of them wore small skullcaps or berets over short, neatly manicured hairstyles. If they brought technology with them, Goma recognised none of it. Perhaps they were so saturated with it that carrying technology was unnecessary.
She heard them speak, shifting effortlessly from one language to another. They came equipped with Swahili, Zulu, Chinese, Punjabi, a dozen other tongues. Their diction was over-precise, their speech clotted with formalisms, including the odd phrase that was old-fashioned even when Goma was a child, but she could not fault them for that. Yet between themselves she caught them whispering sentences that hovered just beyond comprehension – not quite a foreign language to her – the cadences and rhythms were naggingly familiar -– but a dialect so far removed from her experience that it may as well have been.
There were medical tests. One by one, all the crew were brought to the non-weightless clinic. Mona Andisa’s team stood aside while the Crucible envoys performed subtle investigations. It was the one and only time Goma saw any kind of tool or instrument in their hands. They had black styluses, tipped with a small bulb, which they swept slowly over the bodies of their subjects. They spoke to Andisa’s medics, whispered agreeably between themselves. They seemed unconcerned, going through formalities. Eventually word filtered through that there were no barriers to any of the crew, passengers or ambassadors, descending to Crucible. They were free to disembark into the golden station, from which shuttles were available to take them all the way home.
Goma and Ru only took the minimum of possessions with them – the rest could be freighted down later. They walked through the vaults and atria of the golden station, gawking at cathedral-sized spaces which seemed largely deserted, as if the station had been emptied of human occupation in readiness for Travertine’s arrival, or even built especially for them. Perhaps it had. They’d had decades to get ready for it, after all, decades to rehearse every detail of the reception.
The shuttles turned out to be the translucent manta things Goma had seen earlier. Each was large enough to take one or two Tantors and a dozen or more human passengers. Eldasich and Atria went down in one shuttle, Mimosa and Keid in another, and Hector stayed with Goma and Ru. Kanu was there as well, together with the draped form of Nissa’s skipover casket. The envoys fussed around the interior of the shuttle making adjustments to the provisions, moulding and shaping its décor with practised, wizard-like gestures. Finally they were satisfied, the casket secured, the passengers comfortable, and the last leg of the journey home could begin. Two envoys remained aboard the shuttle, but as far as Goma could tell no one was in direct control. The vehicle seemed to know what it was meant to do.
They detached from the station over Crucible’s nightside, then arrowed down from orbit, knifing into the upper atmosphere and gradually catching up with dawn. Even as re-entry plasma flickered and curled around the shuttle, its brightness throwing highlights across their faces, the ride remained as smooth as if they were on rails.
‘Gandhari spoke well,’ Kanu said, keeping one hand on the casket secured next to his seat. ‘You couldn’t have asked for a better captain. But this world won’t hold her intere
st for long. She’ll want to move on. I can see it in her eyes.’
‘I’m not sure it’s our world any more,’ Goma said.
Kanu’s look was kind. ‘You’ll fit back in.’
‘Not for long, I hope. I have an obligation to discharge. It’ll mean a trip to Earth, one way or another. I gather they have more starships. Sooner or later there’ll be a ship going that way.’
‘Can you afford the passage?’
She had no answer to that. None of them did. Whatever funds they might have left behind on Crucible were now moot. Perhaps they had snowballed into vast personal fortunes, or perhaps they were worthless. Or worse, had somehow transmogrified into crippling debts. Besides, Goma did not have the least idea how much it would cost to transport herself back to Earth. It would cost twice as much again to take Ru, assuming she was deemed fit enough to tolerate another skipover episode. ‘I’ll find a way,’ she said, as if the will alone was sufficient.
‘But this is where the Risen will remain,’ Kanu said.
‘For now,’ Ru said. ‘At least until we’ve gone beyond five living members. Maybe in a couple of generations we – they – will feel comfortable about committing some of their number to Earth. Not just Earth, but to other solar systems.’ Her tone hardened, gaining conviction. ‘Wherever there’s a human presence, there ought to be Tantors. Risen. It’s the only way. But we’re twenty, thirty, fifty years from worrying about that. Let’s help them build up the herd, get that on a stable footing, before we start reaching for the stars again.’
‘The work of a lifetime, then. Or at least an ordinary human lifetime,’ Kanu said.
‘It’s what we started. What we were trying – failing – to do, before Eunice’s message came in.’
‘I can’t think of two better candidates to bear that work,’ Kanu said.
‘It’ll be our successors,’ Goma replied. ‘Not us. Not until we get back from Earth.’
‘You have a weight to bear.’
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