Poseidon's Wake - Страница 108

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Ru had tried to understand. It was true that the Tantors’ lives had been threatened; true that the disease in her blood made Ru look like the automatic culprit. But she had done nothing wrong, and Eunice had only been a twitch away from killing her.

No one else saw that. And now she had trumped that with this monstrous, egomaniacal act — this act of godlike, spiteful indifference to the lives of the mere mortals around her.

Making Mandala sing just because she could.

Goma Akinya, meanwhile, could think only of the lost opportunities. They had met the Tantors on Orison. Even with the deaths of Sadalmelik and Achernar, she could not fail to find wonder in those hours she had spent in their presence. To know the minds of elephants when that possibility had been closed to her for most of her life — it had been a blessing, a bounty, a miracle. But the six Tantors who had shared Eunice’s camp could hardly be compared with the thousands more on Zanzibar. Eunice’s Tantors were companions, not servants. But they never had a chance to evolve their own social structures, to become fully independent. It would be a joy to see how elephants ran a world when that world was theirs to run.

That chance was gone now — or soon to be gone.

She had been granted a glimpse of something wonderful, promised that it would be hers, and been foolish enough to believe she would get her due.

Elsewhere, observing events from viewpoints remote and chilly, Watchkeepers gathered data and found that it did not tally with anything in their immediate experience. The Mandala had been changing for centuries — moments by their galactically slow and patient reckoning — but in these last instants the changing had accelerated asymptotically, and that acceleration had very clearly been precipitated by the actions of the organic intelligences now active around Gliese 163.

The Watchkeepers had uses for some of these intelligences; less for others. They also had their own names for things. They had never shaped a thought remotely congruent with ‘Mandala’ and the terms of reference they used for the worlds and star of this dim little solar system were simply not translatable into human terms. They were best considered as compilations, event strings with the scope of infinite extensibility. In the language of the Watchkeepers, no word was ever uttered to completion, no sentence ever finished. There was only an endless branching utterance, sagas that begat sagas, until time immemorial.

The Watchkeepers were not capable of sadness, or of self-doubt, or at least no states of being that could be flattened into such simple human terms. But much as a hypersphere is the higher-dimensional analogue of a circle, they were capable of a kind of hyper-puzzlement, a kind of profound, vexing mismatch between expectation and external reality.

It puzzled the Watchkeepers that these living intelligences were able to make use of the Mandala when they were not permitted to do so. It puzzled them that these busy, buzzing creatures were tolerated within close proximity to Poseidon. It caused them to question the reliability of their own simulations of long-term survival. If they could not understand everything happening here, now, in the space around Gliese 163, in this system where the M-builders had left their traces, then nothing else could be depended upon. The Watchkeepers were used to being right and certain about things. This intrusion of doubt troubled them.

But not much. Being troubled was a state of existence most closely associated with fully conscious infovores, and the Watchkeepers had forgotten how to be conscious. Occasionally, as if surfacing from a bad dream, they felt a dim apprehension that something within them was missing; that what had been present was now absent. They felt hollow where once they had been full. It was an odd and contradictory impression because all rational data pointed to the Watchkeepers being more powerful than at any point in their history to date. How could something have been lost?

It was not possible.

But it was at instants like this, when the universe did something they were not expecting, that the Watchkeepers were at their most introspective. They pulled their scales tight, treasuring their blue light within. They reduced their communication with neighbouring Watchkeepers, becoming isolated units.

They watched and thought and skirted the edges of a regret as old and mysterious as the gaps between the galaxies.

And then the moment was upon them all.

The Mandala reached its final configuration. Zanzibar had arrived in the space directly above it. There was a flash, an energy release — space shearing and curdling and screaming its agonies in a flare of photons across the entire spectrum from gamma to the longest of radio wavelengths.

The flash originated neither at the Mandala nor in Zanzibar, but rather from a volume of space between the two. On Crucible, it had occurred just above the atmosphere. Here there was nothing to stop the flood of radiation from lashing down on Paladin. But it was brief, lasting barely longer than the time it took for light to cross the space between the Mandala and Zanzibar.

And Zanzibar moved again.

There was no measurable acceleration, nothing that human or alien recording devices could quantify. Between one moment and the next, Zanzibar went from being in orbit to travelling at an infinitesimal fraction less than the speed of light. From mere kilometres a second, relative to Paladin’s surface, to something in the vicinity of three hundred thousand. If indeed there had been acceleration, it must have acted uniformly on every atom of Zanzibar and its occupants — or perhaps on the very space — time in which it was embedded, swept up to speed like a leaf in a current. No matter in the universe could have retained its integrity under such forces, much less a thing of rock and ice, metal and air, filled with living creatures.

Later, when the observations had been collated and examined, it would be determined that Zanzibar had shown the effects of extreme relativistic length contraction: that the potato-shaped fragment of the original holoship had been reduced to a circular pancake, massively compressed by frame contraction. Instead of a solid thing, it appeared to have become a disc, a stamped-out impression of itself.

The survivors of the original contraction had reported no experience of subjective time as they travelled between Crucible and Gliese 163. This could only mean that they were experiencing time-dilation factors of at least several billion. Such an inference had sounded doubtful before, but the new measurement of the frame contraction made it look much more probable.

The same thing had happened again. Hard as it was to credit, that paper-thin disc contained the entirety of Zanzibar. Its chambers, its cities, the Risen, the skipover vaults — all were still present, pressed against each other, ready to be unpacked like a folded-up doll’s house. Within that subjective realm, nothing would have felt out of the ordinary.

The original survivors had reported no elapsed time, but their first journey had been relatively short. Seventy light-years, after all, was a scratch against the galaxy.

Who knew where Zanzibar was headed now?

No one.

Least of all Eunice Akinya.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Mandala was quieting, cycling through an ever-slowing sequence of changes. The mirrors had withdrawn, their purpose served. Aboard Mposi, Eunice surrendered herself to the consequences of her actions. She had done something that would be hard to explain, but the right course had presented itself to her with the supreme and ecstatic clarity of a temporal-lobe vision. She knew, given the choice, that she would do it again in an instant.

‘It was the only way.’

They had bound her to a chair using its acceleration straps. She had made no effort to resist, offering herself up as compliantly as a puppet. Whatever they decided to do with her, she would accept.

‘Explain,’ Vasin said.

‘Kanu couldn’t turn around if there was a chance of the Friends being harmed. To begin with, I hoped Dakota wouldn’t go so far as to start killing them. Once she did, though, I saw no option but to initiate the translation.’

‘You worked very quickly,’ Karayan said.

‘I’d already prepared the groundwork. I’ve been thinking about the possibilities for a long time — almost as long as I was on Orison. It was always clear to me that a second Mandala event would shake things up a bit if the need ever arose. Of course, I didn’t have all the pieces until I saw Ndege’s work. And even then I didn’t have the means to make it happen. Not until we found the mirrors.’

‘But you had this plan at the back of your mind the whole time?’ Vasin said.

‘I’m all for spur-of-the-moment decisions, but sometimes you have to play the long game.’

‘Half the crew want to kill you,’ Goma said.

‘I don’t blame them.’

‘If I were you, I’d start presenting a few arguments in your defence. It looks as if you just committed mass murder.’

‘She did,’ Ru said.

‘I didn’t kill anyone. Zanzibar survived one translation; it will make it through another. The chances are better this time: there’s no debris left behind so the effect was cleaner, nothing outside the edges of the field. I think they will do perfectly well — thrive, most likely.’

‘You don’t even know where they’ve gone!’ Vasin said.

‘Where they’re going. It’s true — I don’t know. I didn’t have time to finesse anything to that degree. I couldn’t even be sure it would work! But the Mandala won’t have just sent them in a random direction. We’ll work it out — backtrack to the moment of the event, identify the candidate stars in the general angle of view. Then we’ll know.’

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