Poseidon's Wake - Страница 64

‘I don’t think you need bother searching my memories,’ Kanu said.

A loud clunk signalled the rise of the door. It began to haul itself into the ceiling, a widening brightness at its base. Kanu and Nissa stood back in unison. His fear was all-consuming now, but to run would be futile, he knew. He allowed his hand to reach for hers. If she spurned that contact, so be it, but he could not bear to face this alone.

Her hand hesitated in his, then her fingers closed slightly. Glove to glove, barely a touch at all. But it was more than he had dared hope for.

Beyond the door was a blazing brightness that rammed around and through and between the giant forms standing on the other side. There were three of them. In the first dazzled instant of his viewing, before the door had risen fully into the ceiling, he thought he had been mistaken, that these were machines of some kind after all. They stood on massive, tree-like legs — four legs to each form. And in those first few glances, they looked mechanical, or at least shrouded in armour.

But no, these were indeed living creatures, and he recognised them for what they were.

Elephants.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

It was cold in the long, sloping corridor. It came from deeper within the camp, a whispering planetary chill that felt as if it had travelled all the way from Orison’s dead core, clawing through shivering layers of rock and crust and dusty permafrost. It cut through their clothes, through their skin, and into their bones. Goma thought she could take a few minutes of it at most.

‘Let’s get a few things straight from the outset.’ Eunice was looking back at the party as she led the way into the deeper layers of her camp, her breath visible in the cold. ‘They are Tantors and only Tantors. Never elephants — that offends them terribly.’

‘How many?’ Goma asked, excited despite the cold.

‘Six.’

‘Six!’ Ru exclaimed.

‘My dear girl, you’ll have to make allowances for me — I can’t tell if you’re elated or disappointed.’

‘We’re delighted that Tantors still live,’ Goma said, presuming to speak for both of them. ‘On Crucible, the numbers weren’t sufficient to sustain them as a distinct subspecies. They had to breed back into the baseline elephant population, and in the process we’ve slowly lost whatever it was that made them special. Six is wonderful, of course, but we were hoping for a self-sustaining breeding group.’

‘You may still have one. There are six here with me, but hundreds — thousands — more in Zanzibar.’

‘Thousands!’ Goma exclaimed.

‘You might need to dial down your hopes a little. Zanzibar is where all our problems began — where I got on the wrong side of Dakota, and why I ended up here.’

‘You said Zanzibar,’ said Dr Nhamedjo. ‘Do you seriously mean—’

‘You haven’t figured that out yet, have you? Well, we’ll come to Zanzibar in due course — that’s a whole other can of mealworms. The important point for now is that the six Tantors who live with me are what you’d call defectors. They sided with me when the others stuck with Dakota, and for that they were also banished. Actually, there were more than six, and these are the children of the original defectors. In truth, we all got off lightly. There were many who’d have been glad to see us killed, but Dakota had just enough residual respect for me to offer exile rather than execution. So they used one of their last long-range vehicles to drop us here, me and the Tantors, with sufficient equipment to build our happy little home. They stayed long enough to make sure we weren’t going to die and then abandoned us. And here we’ve been ever since.’

‘Were you here when you sent the original signal?’ Goma asked.

‘Yes — it was almost the first thing I did after setting up home. They didn’t want me to have any kind of transmitter, certainly nothing capable of squirting a signal across interstellar distances. Still, I’ve always been good at improvising — make do and mend. Eventually I patched something together that just about functioned, aimed it at Sixty-One Virginis, pressed “send” and here you are.’

‘Two centuries later,’ Goma said.

‘Yes, damn that Mr Einstein and his unreasonable insistence on causality and the inviolability of the speed of light. I still thought you’d get here a little quicker.’

‘We came as soon as we could,’ Goma answered.

‘You mentioned someone coming here ahead of us,’ Vasin said. ‘What did you mean by that?’

‘The other ship.’

‘There isn’t one,’ Vasin answered. ‘I would know. We’ve come alone, the sole expedition sent by our government. Even if Crucible launched the second starship after our departure, it could never have overtaken us.’

‘That answers one question, anyway. I tracked the point of origin of this other ship for a while before I lost a fix on it.’ Eunice was striding on, fit as a fiddle, apparently oblivious to the cold. ‘It was hard to be sure, but it didn’t look as if it came from your quadrant of the sky. Earth, maybe, although there were some other possibilities.’

‘Did you try talking to them?’ Goma asked.

‘Not until it was too late. They made me nervous, popping up in the wrong corner of the sky like that. Call it a fault of old age but I’m not fond of surprises. Anyway, I did eventually try to signal them, but by then they’d run into some trouble around Poseidon and either I wasn’t sending reliably or they weren’t listening.’

‘When was this?’ Goma asked.

‘A little over a year ago. Frankly, I was starting to think Poseidon had done us all a favour by taking that ship out of the argument.’

‘And then?’ Ru asked.

‘Six weeks ago I intercepted another burst of transmissions — short duration, low signal strength. These came from the other side of the system, close to Paladin. Did you pick up something similar?’

‘We’d still have been on deceleration thrust then,’ Vasin said, ‘which limited our sensitivity. Unless the signal was strong or kept repeating, we were more likely to miss it than hear it.’

‘You think it was the same ship?’ Goma asked.

‘Almost certainly. It must have gone dark — spent the intervening year making a very slow transfer from Poseidon. No way for me to track that. Probably damaged, too, if that second burst was an indicator of their transmitting capacity. I tried signalling again, but either they couldn’t hear me or they chose not to respond. You had a good look at Paladin on your approach — did you see any evidence of a ship?’

‘No,’ Vasin said. ‘And I don’t see how we could have missed something that big.’

‘You would if they’d hidden it inside Zanzibar while they make repairs.’

‘Mystery ship or not,’ said Karayan, ‘that rock cannot be Zanzibar. The remains of that holoship are still orbiting Crucible. End of discussion.’

‘Whatever remains you’ve seen,’ Eunice answered, ‘they’re not the whole thing. A good bit of it ended up here. It wasn’t teleported or sent down a wormhole. It came the same way you did — moving through space, through all the points between here and Crucible. It just did so very, very quickly.’

‘Faster than the speed of light?’ Goma asked.

‘No — that really is impossible. But close to the speed of light. Very close. The survivors didn’t report any subjective time interval between being in one system and the next, which means their clocks barely had time to tick.’

‘You just said survivors,’ Goma stated, hardly daring to imagine what that news would have meant to her mother, to the people who had damned her, to the loyal but ridiculed Travertine. It would not have absolved Ndege of a crime, but it would have made the magnitude of it far less — and she would have been hailed in the same breath as the discoverer of something wonderful.

Too late now.

‘Hundreds of thousands of them,’ Eunice said. ‘Adults, children — Tantors, as I’ve already mentioned. Snatched from Crucible to Paladin, bounced between two Mandalas.’

‘Then it’s no wonder that ship made contact,’ Ru said. ‘If you weren’t answering them, they must have homed in on the first signs of human habitation elsewhere in the galaxy.’

‘And that’s where we run into a little local complication. No easy way of breaking this news, but I’m afraid there aren’t any people left in Zanzibar. There were… difficulties… differences of opinion. Rather violent differences.’

‘What happened to my grandmother?’ Goma asked.

‘Something bad,’ Eunice said. ‘But understand this: you can’t blame the Tantors for any of it. It was Dakota who led them astray. But even she can’t be held to account for what became of her, what the Watchkeepers turned her into. It was never her fault that she became a monster.’

‘And these Tantors — did they play any part in what happened?’ Ru asked.

‘Blameless. As innocent as babes. But please don’t underestimate them on that basis.’

They had reached a flatter part of the corridor where an enormous door led into the sidewall. Eunice touched a control and the door heaved open. Light drenched the corridor, accompanied by a steamy warmth. She stepped into whatever room lay beyond, indicating that the party should wait before following her.

Goma felt her emotions wrenched askew — dismay and horror at what might have happened on Zanzibar, to the people in general and her own grandmother in particular; and a delicious, giddy anticipation of what she was about to experience. She felt like a traitor to herself, not fully surrendering to the sadness and anger that were the right and proper response. But what could she do? There was joy in her heart that Ndege might now, at least in death, receive a measure of forgiveness. She would have given anything to communicate this one vital fact to Crucible, back in time, so that it might ease Ndege’s burden. She could not bend time to her will; she could not bring that greater happiness to Ndege. But she had this moment, and for now she was thankful.