Poseidon's Wake - Страница 66

‘Yes,’ she answered, and the answer was like a damburst, the first time she truly felt the knowledge of her mother’s passing.

‘Then we will speak of Ndege as well, until her true name has spoken itself.’

‘There’s a lot to talk about.’ It was all Goma could do to hold herself together. ‘Would you mind if Ru and I spent some time with you? We can tell you about Agrippa — about anything you like. And we want to hear your stories, the knowledge you have passed down.’

Sadalmelik elevated his great head to look beyond Goma. ‘Is there time, Eunice?’

‘A little,’ she said. ‘We must wait for the others to return, at any rate.’

‘Then we shall talk.’

‘Not just yet,’ Eunice said. ‘My guests are tired, and they need feeding and watering. We have some discussions of our own to attend to. But they will not be far away.’

The good news was that Eunice could offer something besides mealworms; the less good news was that the alternatives were scarcely more appetising. Today’s offering was some kind of fibrous edible fungus, lithoponically grown in one of the domes she had set aside for food production. Eunice flavoured her dishes with carefully rationed spices, some of which had been with her since the exile, some of which were the product of her own experiments in cultivation.

‘They didn’t expect me to last as long as I have, I suspect.’ Their host was pottering with plates and cutlery. ‘Equally, Dakota didn’t have the stomach to just kill me. We’d seen and done too much together for her to turn against me totally. I think she always hoped I’d change my mind, become useful to her again instead of actively unhelpful. Well, fat chance of that.’

‘Go back to the beginning,’ Vasin said. ‘Your arrival here, to start with. The three of you — the Trinity. How did it go from that to this?’

‘We were brought here by the Watchkeeper. We travelled close to the speed of light, although probably not quite as quickly as Zanzibar. Say when.’

‘When.’ The captain took her plate of processed fungus, staring at it with a measure of trepidation.

‘It won’t kill you, Gandhari.’

‘Thank you, Eunice. When you say Zanzibar, though — this was before the arrival, the translation event?’

‘Yes — long before. Think about it. The Trinity left Crucible more than twenty years before your Mandala event. We had that much time to explore this place — to begin to understand for ourselves what the Watchkeepers had in mind for us.’

‘Which was?’ Loring asked. They were all seated around Eunice’s table, squeezed together like the unexpected drop-ins they were, with Ru and Dr Nhamedjo perched on storage crates instead of chairs.

‘Exploration. To serve as their proxies. To learn things they themselves could not discover. Doctor Nhamedjo?’

‘About the same as Gandhari, please. Maybe a little less.’

‘Suit yourself.’ She deposited a generous dollop of the fungus on his plate. ‘You can always come back for seconds. Maslin?’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘How was that supposed to work, exactly?’ Goma asked. ‘What could the Watchkeepers not discover for themselves that they’d need our help with? We’re nothing to them — we’re not even the same order of intelligence.’

‘And therein lies your answer. There are facts concerning the M-builders that they would like to uncover, but they can’t because of what they are. The M-builders put up barriers. Think of them as intelligence filters, capable of deciding what is allowed access to the truth and what isn’t. Consider yourselves lucky: without my intervention you’d have likely blundered into one of the filters yourselves.’

‘The Mandala, or Poseidon?’ Loring asked.

‘Both, to a degree — although the really formidable defences are around Poseidon. Those moons aren’t to be trifled with. They’ll permit certain kinds of intelligence to pass and deny others.’

‘Machines are barred, organics allowed?’ Vasin asked.

‘More complicated than that.’

‘Is there anything about this that’s not complicated?’ Goma said.

‘Not to my knowledge. Aiyana?’

Ve lowered a hand over ver plate. ‘Not very hungry? A little for the taste?’

‘Go, you.’ Eunice served the scientist rather more than was required for a taste. ‘And my two special guests — my brave Tantor specialists? Surely all that intellectual stimulation has worked up an appetite?’

‘If you eat it, I’ll eat it,’ Goma said. ‘Even though it looks like shit.’

‘Wait until you find out how it tastes. Ru?’

‘She doesn’t get to have all the fun on her own.’

Eunice beamed. ‘I like you both already.’

‘Make sure you save some for yourself,’ Goma said.

In fact the food was not as inedible as it looked, nor even as bland, for there was a saltiness to it and a faint aftertaste of chilli powder. As a one-off, Goma could tolerate it well enough. But she had not been forced to live here for more than two centuries with only a handful of items on the menu. It was a wonder Eunice had not gone insane.

Perhaps she had.

‘Tell us about the M-builders,’ Vasin said, between tentative mouthfuls. ‘Everything you know. And the Watchkeepers, while you’re at it. Where are they now? What happened to them?’

‘Questions, questions.’

‘You can’t blame us,’ Ru said. ‘You still haven’t told us about Zanzibar, about Dakota and Chiku.’

‘Let me tell you the most important thing — the most pressing thing. Dakota is set on a very bad course. There are structures on Poseidon. You’ll have seen them — arch-like objects rising from the seas. They’re wheels, if you didn’t already guess. Dakota wishes to reach those wheels — to learn the secrets they encode. Until now, she hasn’t had the means to either reach Poseidon or penetrate its defences or atmosphere. Unfortunately the arrival of that other ship has fallen neatly into her plans. She has to be stopped. The first thing we must attempt is communication — get a signal through to that ship if they’re still listening.’

‘Haven’t you tried that already?’ Goma asked.

‘My transmitters can’t possibly reach all the way through Zanzibar, but yours might be able to. Use whatever you have, from radio to neutrinos. Send Morse code with your engine — but get through to them. Tell them that Dakota absolutely can’t be trusted, and that whatever help or reciprocity they think they’re getting from her, there’ll be a significant sting in the tail. Can you do that, Captain Vasin?’

‘I’ll see what Nasim can manage. But if they weren’t prepared to listen to you—’

‘Maybe they couldn’t, and maybe they’re dead already, but you can still try. And it’s not just the crew of the ship you’ll want to reach out to — it’s the rest of the Tantors. My bridges are burned, but you saw how Sadalmelik and the others revere Ndege’s name. That goes for the other Tantors in Zanzibar, too. They will still think twice before disregarding the advice of an Akinya. As long as it’s not me, of course.’

‘Tell us about the people,’ Vasin said. ‘The hundreds and thousands you said survived the translation. Surely they aren’t all gone?’

‘Every last one. There were difficult times after the translation. Have you noticed how much of my camp I need to set aside to provide for just six Tantors? The problems on Zanzibar were much more acute, and there was no way it could keep everyone alive, people and Tantors. But there was a way out — a solution. Most of the human survivors agreed to return to skipover, to conserve basic resources.’

‘The Tantors were already independent by that point?’ Goma asked.

‘Not quite. There was enough capacity to keep a handful of humans alive, a skeleton staff to guide and assist the Tantors as their world was remade.’

‘Then we’ll speak to them,’ Goma said.

‘You can’t. Dakota had them all killed. For thousands of years, we had the blood of elephants on our hands. Now the deed has been repaid.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Kanu had nothing to say in the face of the elephants. Nothing in his long and strange life, no experience or lesson, had prepared him for this moment. He had a million questions for the elephants, but no idea where to begin. It was all he could do to stand still, caught in the paralysing rapture of the moment.

‘Who are you?’

It was Nissa who spoke first, her voice booming out through her suit’s loudspeaker. The elephant’s answer, when it returned, was also in Swahili. It was not merely an echo of her words, for the intonation was distinctly different, questioning and with a trace of superiority.

‘Who are you?’

‘I am Nissa Mbaye,’ she answered, with a collectedness that impressed Kanu, as if she had expected to meet and speak to elephants all along. ‘Our ship was damaged, we needed a place to repair it, and we weren’t expecting to find anyone alive inside this station.’

‘Station?’

The vocal sounds were coming from the lead elephant but they were not being generated by its mouth, or at least not directly. The elephant was the tallest of the three, its skin pigmentation a dark umber offset with pinkish mottling around the eyes and mouth. It exuded an impression of powerful muscularity, a sense of enormous force just barely contained.

The sounds, insofar as Kanu could judge, emanated from a thick angled plate that the elephant wore across the front of its face, fixed between its eyes and above the top of its trunk. The voice was loud and very deep. At the lower end of its frequency range, Kanu felt certain it would be deeper than any possible human utterance, and certainly far louder.