Poseidon's Wake - Страница 138

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‘In some respects,’ the envoy said, her eyes lowering. ‘But there is much that we have yet to achieve, or is outside the bounds of our medical-ethical framework. We were forewarned of Nissa’s case, though. Our best… experts… have been assigned to the problem. Rest assured that we will do what we can for her.’

Kanu licked his lips and nodded. They were softening him up, Goma thought — preparing him for the news he did not want. How could they not help Nissa? she thought. And a kind of anger flashed through her, a resentment that these people were not more advanced, more godlike. What had they been doing for the past three centuries — sitting on their hands?

The slot in the pyramid contained a landing bay, spread out under a low ceiling. Dozens of craft were also parked there, and the place was already swarming with medical staff. Unlike the dark-clad envoys, the pyramid’s medics wore outfits of a blazing, superluminous white. At best, the only instruments any of them carried were the little bulb-tipped wands. But they were also accompanied by many floating white spheres about the size of footballs, and the spheres cracked open along their midlines to spill out jointed arms and sensors. Goma and her friends were asked to offer their forearms to the spheres, and the machines tickled over them in a quick sampling of blood, tissue, DNA. The examination was painless and left no traces.

‘What about the All?’ she asked, as the whole party — human and Tantor — was led into the main part of the pyramid.

‘It’s already within you,’ the envoy answered. ‘The idiosyncratic connectome bridges will have begun to form. You may experience some mild hypnagogic imagery. The process can be aborted and reversed at any stage, though, should you decline participation.’

‘Would you decline?’ she asked.

The envoy looked at her with a sudden, fierce frankness. ‘Decline? No. I would sooner be dead. But you must make the choice for yourself.’

They were in the complex for two days. The tests were occasionally perplexing, generally dull, but never painless, and again Goma had the sense that much of it was formality, a series of legal obstacles that had to be surmounted before any of the newcomers were allowed free roam of Crucible. They had rooms in the pyramid, which were comfortable enough but austere in their provisions, almost as if the hosts were wary of overloading their delicate constitutions with too much novelty. There was a window, looking back across Guochang. Where the city thinned out Goma saw a margin of blazing green, a stretch of veldt hemmed by trees, and between those trees she thought she might have seen the distant moving forms of elephants, tiny as pollen grains, and she wanted to be out there more than anything.

Although the newcomers were being kept in a state of soft quarantine from the rest of Crucible, they were free to associate with one another and use lounges and public areas on one level of the complex. There was plenty of time between the tests, and Goma and her companions made use of it as they chose. Ru had her nose deep in the elephant literature, trying to catch up on three hundred years of scholarship. They had all been provided with antique data consoles, roughly comparable to their own technology. Through these consoles, and via extra layers of translation and mediation, it was possible to access public record and news channels.

Goma was restless. The elephants meant everything to her, but she could not simply return to her old role of researcher as if nothing had happened. What was the point, when she had no intention of remaining on Crucible?

Even Ru, she thought, was going through the motions.

She visited Grave, Vasin, the others. Everyone had the same slightly shell-shocked look about them, as if they had just been slapped hard in the face. They had been treated as well as one could hope, but still it was a jolt, to be back on Crucible. They had all known there was no going back to their old world, the one they had lived on before departure, but until now it had been an intellectual understanding, ungrounded in real experience. Now they were living it from moment to moment, seeing it with their own eyes.

Only Kanu seemed uninterested in what had happened on Crucible, what had changed and what had remained.

When she came to his room he had used his console to project an image up on one of the walls.

‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ he said, nodding at the image. It was the face of a planet, all reds and emeralds and little dabs of blue. Not Earth, she was fairly certain.

‘Is that Mars?’

Kanu looked pleased that she had recognised the place. ‘Yes. But not as I knew it. When I left Mars, the only humans anywhere on the planet were the ambassadors, cooped up in our embassy on Olympus Mons. We’d been in a stand-off for years. There were defence satellites in orbit, terrorists agitating for human takeover, endless tension… I didn’t have high hopes. Swift came with me because between us we thought there had to be a better way; a mode of existence where machines and people might be able to work together, not against each other.’

‘And now?’

Kanu beamed, as if showing off a newborn child. ‘Just look at it. Those green swatches, those lakes — those are areas of renewed human settlement! Finally there was a recolonisation treaty. Strict boundaries, strict borders — but it’s a start, isn’t it? They’ve even begun to terraform the old place. Domes for now, atmospheric tents, but the air’s thickening up, warming, gaining moisture. That’s not a job for people alone! Human-Evolvarium cooperation — a joint venture.’

Goma wanted to share his enthusiasm, but from where she was standing it looked like a capitulation for the machines.

‘What did Swift’s friends get out of it?’

‘Earth,’ he said. ‘Or parts of it. That was the other half of the treaty. Machine enclaves on Earth! In the oceans, on the land masses. And it’s working! Brokered largely by the Pans, I have to say. But what a thing to see.’ Excited, he worked the console’s settings, almost fumbling over himself in his eagerness. ‘Wait, though. Wait until you see this! Wait until you see what the machines have been making on Mars…’

The face turned, bringing a new part of the planet into view. It was still daylit, but the shadows were fierce, cutting in from the right, projecting long strokes across the landscape.

Kanu magnified the image. He zoomed in on one area of Mars. Something swelled into focus. A mountain, or perhaps a very large boulder, on an otherwise flat and featureless terrain.

There was a face on it, chiselled into the boulder’s upper surface, so that it looked back out to space. It was a minimalist portrait — eyes, nose, mouth, the merest suggestion of a personality. But she recognised it.

Her face. Or rather, Eunice’s.

‘One strain of them did this,’ Kanu was saying. ‘A faction among the machines. Call it a cult, if you will.’

‘Why have they done it?’

‘I’ll ask them, when I get a chance.’

‘I’ll save you the trouble,’ Goma replied. ‘I’m the one who has to go to Earth. Mars will only be a skip away.’

She asked him how things were progressing with Nissa. Kanu’s answers were guarded, and she wondered how much he in turn had been told by the medical staff.

‘There are some complications. The stuff that they have put inside us — those little machines? I gather there’s little they can’t do, in terms of microscopic tissue engineering. They could rebuild a damaged brain synapse by synapse.’

‘Isn’t that what she needs?’

‘The difficulty is knowing which pattern to reinstate.’ Kanu’s speech was supremely collected, but Goma sensed the force of the emotions he must be holding back. ‘Even if the medics have the technical means to rebuild her damaged cortex — which is by no means simple — there is still an ethical issue.’

‘An ethical issue in bringing someone back to life?’

‘Their law makes a careful distinction between the restoration of damaged neural structure, and the wholesale substitution of one set of structures for another. If they could satisfy themselves that they were rebuilding a personality, rather than inventing one from scratch, I gather they would consent to the procedure. Or at least consent to an attempt. But the ethicists are slow to make up their minds, and in the meantime…’

‘Nissa isn’t going to get any worse, is she?’

‘No,’ he admitted with a nod. ‘She is safe. But if these people cannot help her, I must look elsewhere.’

‘Earth?’

‘Perhaps.’

She touched a hand to his forearm. ‘I want the best for both of you, uncle.’

He clasped his own hand around hers. ‘Don’t worry about me, Goma Akinya. You have enough to think about.’

On the morning of their release from the medical complex, a ground vehicle, a wheel-less block with fluted sides and sharply angled ends, was waiting for them at a loading area in front of the lobby.

Kanu and Ru were with her, and two government officials: a dark-clad administrative envoy, and a white-clad medical representative. Both were women; their names — or at least the names that they were ready to share with their guests — were Malhi and Yefing.

Goma knew where they were going. She had asked if it might be possible, knowing that the longer she delayed matters, the less enthusiasm she would have to face them. Not that she had much enthusiasm now.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she told Kanu, as they settled into their seats.

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