Poseidon's Wake - Страница 65

And she was about to meet Tantors.

She heard Eunice speaking. She heard answering voices. She felt as if all the arrows of her life pointed to this moment.

Eunice came back into the corridor. ‘All right, they’re ready for you. These Tantors are my friends and they mean well, but aside from me, they’ve never seen another human being. So please — no sudden movements, no shouting, nothing that could be construed as a threatening gesture.’

‘We won’t scare them,’ Goma said.

‘It’s not them I worry about, dear.’

‘The two of you should go first,’ Vasin said, beckoning Goma and Ru to step through the doorway. ‘You’ve earned this. May it be everything you’ve hoped for.’

‘Thank you,’ Goma said with genuine gratitude.

They entered with Eunice next to them, and for a moment all they could do was squint against the brightness of this underground room. It was warm — much warmer and more humid than the corridor — and Goma felt the blood returning to her fingertips.

Under their feet was dirt. The chamber had a huge vaulted roof, with a dome-shaped skylight set into it. The floor was stepped, with different levels.

‘It was a natural bubble,’ Eunice was saying. ‘Ours for the taking. We roofed it over, sealed it against pressure loss, pumped it full of atmosphere. We’ve dug out some adjoining chambers, but this is still the biggest.’

She might as well have been talking gibberish for all Goma cared. It was the Tantors that had her absolute and binding attention. In that instant, nothing else in the universe mattered.

‘They’re glorious,’ she said.

Ru was holding her hand. Goma squeezed back. The moment was theirs and theirs alone, as precious as any they had shared. ‘Yes.’

The cold of the corridor had already brought water to her eyes; now the water became tears of joy. It was only three of them, yes — nothing compared to the multitude she had dared hope for. But still: to be here now, to be standing in this room and beholding three living Tantors — there would always be her life before this moment, and her life after it, the one a dim reflection of the other, and nothing would ever be the same.

The universe had given them a gift. She was light-headed with the thrill of it all, delirious with gratitude and wonder and a sense that beautiful possibilities still lay ahead of them all.

‘Say something,’ Eunice said. ‘It generally helps.’

Goma opened her mouth and found her throat was dry. She coughed, swallowed, tried to gather some tatters of composure. It was hard to speak, grinning the way she was. Mposi and Ndege — if only they could be here, seeing what she was seeing.

But they were, if she wanted them to be.

‘I am Goma Akinya,’ she said. ‘This is Ru Munyaneza. We’ve come a long way to find you. You are magnificent — a wonder to us. Thank you for allowing us to see you.’

Three Tantors stood before them on a slightly raised part of the floor, adults or near-adults by her estimation. They were elephants, of course — the physiological differences between Tantors and baseline elephants were not dramatic — but everything about the way they stood, the intense, unwavering scrutiny of their gaze, spoke of something beyond animal intelligence. It was in their deportment, in the lowering of their heads — not subservience, but more a kind of greeting, displaying the boulder-like prominence of their skulls, crammed with intellect.

Tools and equipment hung from belts and harnesses fastened around them, and above the trunk and between the eyes, their brows were covered by a curving metal plate that fastened in place like a horse’s bridle. The black plate contained a screen and a grille, and it was from these grilles that their voices emerged. The middle of three, the largest and most mature, spoke first.

‘Welcome, Goma Akinya — and Ru Munyaneza. I am Sadalmelik.’

‘I am Eldasich,’ said the one to Sadalmelik’s left.

‘I am Achernar,’ said the third Tantor.

‘Are there more of you?’ Goma asked.

‘Outside,’ Sadalmelik answered. ‘Atria, Mimosa and Keid. They have gone outside to make repairs to one of the distant antennae. It is more than a day’s walk from here. But they will soon return.’

Their voices were machine-generated and sounded with no corresponding movement of the Tantors’ mouths — a kind of ventriloquism. Each had been assigned a different pitch and timbre. Goma had already decided on the basis of body morphology and tusk thickness that Eldasich was the female of the three, and her voice was slightly higher and purer than the two males’. It was a concession to human anthropomorphism, but it accorded with what she knew of the original Tantor populations. The language-generating equipment was familiar, too — long after Crucible’s Tantors had died out, the augmentation gear had remained, dusty and unused but too valuable to throw away. The black plates read neural signals, translating subvocal impulses into sound, which left the Tantors free to continue using the entire normal repertoire of elephant vocalisations and rumbles.

‘Eunice tells us that you’ve never seen other people before,’ Ru said.

‘No,’ said Sadalmelik. ‘But we have studied images and recordings, and heard many accounts. You are new to us, but not unfamiliar. Have you come from Crucible?’

‘Yes,’ Goma said, still grinning. ‘By starship. Eunice sent for us. For my mother, actually.’

‘Ndege,’ said Eldasich. ‘You were known to her?’

‘Yes. I had to leave her behind.’

‘We remember Ndege. She was kind to us. It is good to remember such things,’ said Achernar.

‘You can’t possibly have known her,’ Ru said.

‘Our kind knew her,’ Achernar, the smaller male said. ‘We remember. We pass down the knowing of things. Is this strange to you?’

‘No,’ Goma answered. ‘Not at all. And my mother would have loved to meet you. She knew Tantors on the holoship, and then for a little while after we reached Crucible. But it wasn’t to last.’

‘Then you have not known Tantors?’ asked Sadalmelik.

Goma looked to Eunice for guidance, but their host had evidently decided to let them deal with this on their own.

‘You are special,’ she ventured. ‘Very special and rare. After we lost Zanzibar, there were not enough of you left to carry on your line. Ru and I — our work on Crucible concerned you. We were trying to find ways to return Tantors to the world.’

‘Did you succeed?’ Achernar asked.

‘No. We failed. There are none of your kind left now. There was a wise one… her name was Agrippa. She was strong and clever. We loved her very much, but she grew old.’

‘Were you there at her end?’ asked Eldasich.

‘Yes,’ Goma said. ‘Both of us were.’

‘It is good that you were there,’ Sadalmelik said. ‘Speak of her to us. We will remember her. We will find her true name and pass down the knowing of her. Then she will always be known.’

‘Thank you,’ Goma said.

Ru asked, ‘Can we come nearer?’

‘Do you wish to touch?’ asked Sadalmelik.

‘To touch. And be touched. If you’re fine with that.’

‘We are fine with that,’ Eldasich said.

Remembering Eunice’s instruction not to make sudden or threatening movements, they approached with the utmost care. Behind Eunice, Vasin, Nhamedjo, Loring and Karayan watched the proceedings with a sort of nervous encouragement, like spectators at a circus.

‘You mentioned Agrippa’s “true name”,’ Goma said.

‘Yes,’ answered Sadalmelik.

‘What did you mean by that? The names you just told us — are these your true names?’

‘Those are our short names, the names for people to use. They help you separate us. But they are not our true names. Our true names are too hard for you, and too long. We never speak our true names.’

‘I understand,’ Goma said, although she was not sure that she did. Better that the Tantors had their secrets and mysteries, though, than be too transparent, too easily understood.

She approached to within touching distance of Sadalmelik, reached out slowly and raised her hand to touch his shoulder. She felt the warm, bristly roughness of his skin as it moved with the great tidal surge of his breathing. She shifted her hand, maintaining the gentlest of contacts, from shoulder to neck, from neck to the side of his face. Ru, meanwhile, had stationed herself next to Eldasich and was stroking the upper part of her trunk. Goma moved a hand to one of Sadalmelik’s tusks, warm to cold, soft to hard. His eye regarded her steadily, and despite every instinct she could not bring herself to avoid contact with his gaze. Far from repelling such contact, the eye’s intelligence appeared to demand it. She stared into its liquid depths, trying to imagine the sharp and curious intelligence within.

Sadalmelik moved his trunk and touched her other hand with the tip, then traced its way to her face. An elephant’s trunk was a marvel of elastofluidic engineering — a tool both supple and strong, sensitive and expressive. Goma was used to being examined by elephants but this was a different order of intimacy — guided and methodical. She held her ground fearlessly, even as the trunk moved from her nose to her brow, mapping her like an instrument.

‘You are like Eunice.’

‘I should be.’

‘You are also like Ndege. She stands where you stand. She sees what you see. Did she pass into the Remembering, Goma?’