Poseidon's Wake - Страница 139

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‘My diary’s not exactly full,’ he replied.

‘Have the ethicists…?’ she began.

‘Still deliberating, and there’s nothing I can say or do which will make any difference.’ He added quickly: ‘Not that it isn’t a pleasure to accompany you.’

‘We understand,’ Ru said.

They sped through Guochang, winding their way between tall offices, through business and commercial districts, around parks and residential zones. Goma recognised nothing, although she was certain some of the older buildings had been around before her departure. If she squinted, and forgot about trying to recognise specific landmarks, none of it was too odd or unsettling. There were traffic jams, pedestrians, roadworks. People walking their pets, groups of schoolchildren were being led to school, fast-striding business types were deep in conversation. There were pavement cafés and areas that looked more run-down than others. But that was only if she squinted. With eyes wide and sharp, she was assaulted by the unfamiliar. The signs and banners above the shops and businesses were hard to read, as if there had been a specific lesion to the part of her brain that handled written script. There were colours that seemed wrong or improbable — reddish greens, blueish yellows. And a haze of subliminal texture, a kind of glimmering organised mist, floating between things.

Yefing, the medic, must have seen something in her face.

‘The All will be reaching integration now. If you start seeing things, you should not be too alarmed.’

‘We won’t,’ Kanu said. Then: ‘Is it like this everywhere else? In the other systems? Do they all have an All?’

‘Variations of it,’ Malhi answered, twisting around to answer. ‘But each system chooses its own path, its own approach. And of course our knowledge is never complete. We have good ties with Earth. There’s always been information exchange, but since the Watchkeepers left us alone, there’s been a much increased flow of ships.’

‘Do those ties extend to legal agreements?’ Kanu asked. ‘Extradition treaties, that sort of thing?’

‘No,’ Malhi said. ‘Our relationship is much looser than that. Necessarily. How could we ever enforce treaties with a time lag of nearly sixty years?’

‘You must barely remember how it was, with those things hanging over us,’ Goma said.

‘They were here when I was a child,’ Yefing answered. ‘But it has been seventy years. Times have changed. It’s hard to remember how it made us feel.’

Swift’s effect on the Watchkeepers in the Gliese 163 system had propagated to all the known Watchkeeper groupings in human space, and perhaps beyond. The influence had spread at the speed of light, so the disappearance of the Watchkeepers was old news by the time Travertine arrived back in Crucible space.

‘No one really knows what happened,’ Malhi said. ‘Clearly your intervention around Gliese 163 played a part in it. From a causal standpoint, no other explanation is possible. But until we have your own accounting of events…’

‘Don’t expect answers to every question,’ Kanu said, in a tone of friendly warning. ‘We may not have one.’

‘Not even you, Kanu?’ Yefing queried, a notch of doubt pushing into her forehead. ‘Our understanding was that no one had a closer contact than you.’

‘It was Swift, not me,’ Kanu said.

‘But you were there,’ Yefing persisted. ‘The Watchkeeper took you… the Watchkeeper returned you. It was why our medical examination of you had to be unusually thorough.’

‘I was a bystander, that’s all.’

Malhi cleared her throat with a cough. ‘But you do think we are free of them? For ever?’

Kanu smiled at that. ‘Ever’s a long time. I suppose the real test will be when we return to Gliese 163, or when we start making active use of the Mandala network. Perhaps that will draw them back to us. But they won’t necessarily return as our foes.’

‘You are an optimist,’ Yefing said.

‘So I’ve been told.’

‘You could a play a part in these grand adventures,’ Malhi said, as if she wished to brighten his mood. ‘Our rejuvenation methods are the equal of anything from the Age of Babel — superior in some respects. You could be made as strong or young as you desire.’ And she turned to Ru: ‘And your AOTS. It’s curable. Easily done. There’s barely a mention of it in the medical literature these days.’

‘I don’t need it cured,’ Ru said. ‘Unless it’s to help me through another skipover episode.’

Yefing pinched her lips. ‘We use a different process now. There are fewer complications.’

‘Then I’ll be fine. Goma and I only need to live on Crucible until there’s a ship to take us to Earth. Or are you going to tell us we couldn’t afford passage?’

‘You are… celebrities,’ Malhi answered, with a touch of awkwardness. ‘There would be few impediments, if you were determined to leave us. But please make no decisions in haste — you’ve barely arrived.’

The vehicle sped on. They had been passing through residential districts for a while now, sprawling suburbs and precincts, thatches of woodlands, recreational lakes, new building developments. Eventually the houses thinned out into continuous parkland. They passed some kind of sports stadium, a pagoda garden, more woods. Then the vehicle turned onto a tree-lined side road and Goma recognised where they were.

Ndege’s house.

They had kept the area around it undeveloped, and the dwelling itself appeared serenely untouched by the centuries. The walls of the old secured compound were still present, but there was nothing to stop anyone going through the gate — no checkpoint or guards any more. The vehicle slipped through unchallenged and parked between the compound and the house.

They got out, all five of them. Goma studied the house again, searching for traces of time’s hand.

‘You hated her,’ she said quietly, speaking not to Malhi or Yefing as individuals, but in their roles as government operatives. ‘Why didn’t you tear the place down once she was gone?’

‘That was a long time ago,’ Malhi said. ‘Things changed. You should go inside.’

Goma looked at Ru and Kanu, nodding that they should accompany her.

But Kanu raised a hand. ‘I don’t want to intrude.’

‘You came all this way,’ Goma said.

‘And I’ll enter the house shortly. But not until you’ve had a moment or two to yourself.’

He had not spoken for Ru, but after only the slightest hesitation she nodded. ‘Kanu’s right. We’ll be right outside, until you need us.’

‘I need you now.’

‘No,’ Ru said. ‘You only think you do. But you’re stronger than you realise, Goma Akinya. If I didn’t know that before we left Crucible, I know it now. Go on in.’

So she walked to the front door, pushed it open and went on in.

And a thought flashed through her head: Mposi always used to bring her greenbread. I should have brought greenbread.

No one else was in the house, and Malhi and Yefing had remained outside with Ru and Kanu. Inside it was cool and shadowed, with no illumination beyond that which the windows provided. They threw oblongs of brightness across the rooms’ pale surfaces, the walls, the bookcases and furniture and such sparse ornamentation as Ndege had allowed herself. Goma touched a window sill, testing it for dust. She held her fingertip up for inspection. It was immaculate, harbouring not a trace of dirt. Someone had taken pains to keep this place both pristine and exactly undisturbed, as if it were a hallowed public shrine.

Goma moved between rooms. She had never been here without Ndege. Some part of her mind kept trying to impose her on the scene: a suggestion of human presence at the corner of Goma’s vision, dissolving when she turned her gaze upon it. Not a haunting, but the power of memory, the forcefulness of its influence on the present moment.

Nothing was kinder or crueller than memory.

She went to take a book from one of the shelves. But as her hand neared the shelf, a glowing rectangle lit up on a portion of the ajoining wall. Text and images appeared in the rectangle. To her surprise, the text was in a familiar form of Swahili, the wording easily comprehensible. The images were of Ndege, and of things to do with her life. The holoship, her mother Chiku, the early days of the settlement, the Mandala, her experiments in direct communication with it… the ring of rubble that was all that was left of Zanzibar.

Trial, censure, imprisonment.

It was a familiar story, even though the tone of it was not quite what Goma would have expected. Not so much damning and judgemental, as sympathetic: framing her mistakes as understandable errors, rather than as crimes of hubris. Miscalculations, not misdeeds.

This rectangle told only part of the story. As she wandered the rooms, similar patterns of text and image appeared. Sometimes there were moving images and audio recordings, with her mother’s voice whispering softly from the walls of her house.

Goma traced the arc of a life. Ndege had lived for another thirty years after the expedition’s departure. It had not been long enough for her to learn the truth about Zanzibar, but then Goma had never really thought she would. Ndege had been dead long before the expedition reached Gliese 163, and still more years had passed before any news of their findings made its way back to Crucible. There had been no death-bed pardon for her, no easing of her conscience in those final years.

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