Poseidon's Wake - Страница 107

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Kanu spoke up. ‘Memphis — hear what I have to say. You’re going to another solar system, probably, into orbit around another star with a Mandala on one of its planets. Everything’s going to be strange. You’ll have to fend for yourselves to begin with, but I promise you won’t be forgotten. We’ll come — no matter how long it takes. We won’t rest until we’ve found you.’

‘None of us shall,’ Dakota said. ‘But answer me this, Kanu — who is this “we” you speak of?’

‘Whatever we make of ourselves, Dakota. Humans, merfolk. Tantors. Machines. Whatever we manage to salvage from this. We’re all orphans of the storm now, all Poseidon’s children. We either find a way to live with what we are, with all our differences, or we face oblivion. I know which I’d rather.’

Few had been in a position to witness the first Mandala event, mostly only those caught up in its immediate and devastating effects. For excellent reasons, their testimonies had never entered the public record: the majority of them were now part of the cloud of gas and debris circling Crucible — a monument to their own destruction.

It was different this time. There were multiple spectators both within Zanzibar and beyond, and to a degree all had been forewarned. On Paladin itself, no living thing stirred. But the changes to the second Mandala, quickened by Eunice’s play of light, had now become convulsive. Patterns shifted and shifted again becoming hypnotic, beguiling. Once, it had been a thing of wonder to witness changes on a timescale of hours or days. Now the Mandala adapted from second to second, moving matter around with a careless disdain for the ordinary limitations of inertia and rigidity. Indeed, since something odd was clearly happening to space in the vicinity of the second Mandala — or was about to happen when the translation event initiated — perhaps that was also true of time. Clocks might be running strangely down there — who could say? It was beyond any conceivable human physics — an invocation of alien science and engineering that might as well have been the work of mages, for all that it corresponded to any theory or hypothesis.

On Zanzibar, Memphis and the Risen watched as their orbit brought them closer and closer to the edge of the changing Mandala, and then they were over it. They saw this through cameras, through portholes and observation bubbles — faces pressed against the glass, filled with apprehension and terror, wondering what new fate the universe now had in store for them.

On Travertine, long-range sensors captured the same spectacle. By some dark fortune, the Mandala and Zanzibar were both visible to them. Zanzibar was a pollen-like smudge, bright and tiny, the Mandala a shivering labyrinth of intersecting circles and radials foreshortened by their angle of view. Nasim Caspari was reminded of ripples on a pond, of the interference patterns where they met and interacted. This pond was governed by weird, restless symmetries. He yearned to reach a deeper understanding of the fundamentals.

They had been warned. From the data on the first Mandala event, some sort of energy release could be anticipated. Caspari ordered Travertine on high alert, its Chibesa core quenched as a precaution. The crew rushed to their emergency stations and braced for the unknowable.

There wasn’t much time left.

On Icebreaker, Kanu, Nissa and Dakota observed the same changes. They were also tracking Zanzibar, although from a different viewing angle — Paladin’s spin had brought Mandala into nearly perfect alignment with their sensor array, and Zanzibar was about to transit across it like a planet sliding over the face of its sun.

Dakota had sent her warning in a spirit of precaution, but now there could be no doubt that it had been a wise decision. There had been no time for Memphis to organise a return transmission, but she was inclined to look on that as a favourable indicator. It meant he was busy, rushing to prepare Zanzibar for the moment of translation. He was doing everything she had ever counted on him to do.

Much had changed for Dakota since she first arrived in the system as a guest of the Watchkeepers. She had felt the Terror and come to regard it as a challenge rather than an impediment. She had seen the arrival of Zanzibar, flicking into existence around Paladin, and she had helped steward the Tantors — the Risen — through the immense and testing hardships of those first days. Over time, she had diverged from her companions in the Trinity — come to see them as adversaries rather than allies. The Watchkeepers had bestowed gifts upon her, and in turn she had become their instrument, their willing servant. She accepted this role with equanimity. They had made her more than she had been or ever could be by herself, and it was an honour to be chosen, to be considered worthwhile. But she had not entirely discarded the bonds of love and loyalty, even though these things were now vastly diminished among her greater concerns. Memphis had always been dutiful and she had come to think fondly of him, even as the Watchkeepers’ changes pushed her further and further from the ranks of the ordinary Risen. Even now, she felt empathy for the old bull. She could do nothing for him, not at this distance. But whatever happened, she hoped he would rise to the challenge, and that the challenge would not be too testing for him — indeed for all of them, and if his plans found a use for the Friends, she would also wish them well.

Nissa Mbaye, who was not an Akinya but whose life had been snared in their concerns, wondered what part, small or otherwise, she had played in this development. It seemed probable that Kanu’s arrival had precipitated much of what was now taking place — the expedition, the deaths, the coming translation. She accepted no moral blame for any of that — those forces had been in motion long before she had any conception of their purpose. But had it not been for her desire to reach Sunday’s artworks, she would never have provided Kanu with his ride to Europa. Could a meeting in an art gallery in distant Lisbon really have led to this? She told herself that Kanu would always have found a way to reach his ship, but there was no guarantee of that.

So she had also played her role, whether consciously or otherwise.

Kanu Akinya looked on with a sort of horrified bemusement, grasping as he did that the larger narrative of his family — the things they had made, the events they had caused, the web of responsibilities they had inherited — had just taken a new and unexpected swerve. There were no Akinyas on Zanzibar, but the lives of the Risen and the Friends were an inseparable part of the flow of events Eunice had set in motion. Someone would have to follow up on this. Someone would have to take ownership of this event.

Swift, who occupied the same physical space as Kanu and observed events using co-opted neural networks within the same central nervous system, felt something close to surprise. Swift was used to modelling future events, and over the course of his existence he liked to think he had gained some modest proficiency in that art. The likelihood of a terrorist attack on Mars, the chances of Kanu suffering injury… these were events Swift had considered to be well within the bounds of statistical probability. He had even taken it as read that the expedition to Gliese 163 was likely to run into local complications. Encountering the Tantors — especially Dakota — had been a surprise for Swift. But he had not been surprised to be surprised.

This, though, was an event far outside the scope of even his wildest conjectures. Not one of his iterative forecasts had come close to predicting a second Mandala event. He was off the map now; a chess piece sliding over the edge of the board. The moment had come to discard all his earlier exercises in future-casting — they had failed him totally.

Not for the first time, Swift would have given half of Mars not to be imprisoned in this cage of bone and meat, with its narrow, shuttered perception of the world. But he had done what he could. In the interests of information-gathering, he had already tasked every available sensor channel aboard the ship to record the Mandala event.

The humans and elephants around him had not the slightest clue that his control of Icebreaker was so comprehensive.

He had seen no need to inform them.

Not yet.

In the lander Mposi, Eunice Akinya considered the imminent consequences of her handiwork. It had been one thing to formulate her own ideas of the Mandala grammar, to hew them into the rock of Orison as if they had integrity and self-consistency. It had been quite another to find those connections confirmed and amplified in the patient handwriting of Ndege Akinya, in the black books that her great-great-granddaughter had in turn bequeathed to Goma. Quite another thing still to go beyond those symbols and connections and understand that she had the means to duplicate Ndege’s original command sequence.

Not to whisper it, as Ndege had done, in the muted sotto voce of screens and shadows, but to proclaim it in the fierce, focused light of Paladin’s own star.

To speak the words of truth to the Mandala, in the form of address it expected.

To make it sing.

Ru, for her part, wondered why no one had found the good sense to kill the old hag. She had cheated them all — lied about her control of the mirrors, lied about her intentions. And now the Mandala was changing so fast that the moment must be nearly upon them.

She remembered the impression Eunice’s hands had left in her flesh as she was dragged into quarantine, fingers and nails pressing into her as if she were human clay. Only Ru had been near enough to see the hate in the old woman’s eyes; only Ru knew how close Eunice had come to murdering her there and then in a spasm of fury and recrimination. None of the others had seen it, not even Goma.

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