Poseidon's Wake - Страница 68

‘Did you make this?’ he asked, one hand on the nearest railing, the other arm still cradling his helmet. He had been breathing Zanzibar’s air for many minutes now without obvious ill-effect.

‘No, we did not make it.’

‘Then who did?’

‘It was made for Crucible. Now it is for us.’

The pedestal had been welded to the deck, and wires and cables ran in crude fashion down its length.

‘Did you adapt it?’ Nissa said.

‘No.’

‘Then who did?’

‘The Friends. You will see them soon, once you have seen Dakota.’

They were rolling out of the chamber now, having gathered a respectable turn of speed — easily faster than an elephant’s stampede charge. Once again they were travelling down a corridor, but the course of this one was much more erratic than before, suggesting that it been bored anew rather than converted from an earlier element of Zanzibar. It twisted and turned, climbed and descended. The vehicle rolled on, Memphis keeping the very tip of his trunk in contact with the steering controls. He produced more dung and one of the other elephants used a kind of broom to sweep it into a hopper on the side of the vehicle, leaving only a greasy smear. They must eventually collect their waste wherever it falls, Kanu thought, or else the world would have been full of dung.

‘This vehicle was meant for the colony, surely,’ he said, addressing Nissa, keeping his voice low while not yet subvocalising. ‘Manufactured up here, I suppose. They would have kept most of the factories and fabricators in orbit, sending finished goods down to Crucible. This one never made it, and now it’s been altered so he can drive it. But no matter how smart they’ve become, I don’t see this being within their capabilities. Someone must have helped.’

‘Were there people on this thing when the accident happened?’

‘Hundreds of thousands. Most were presumed dead, wiped out in an instant. But if the elephants survived, then I suppose some people must have, too.’

‘Strange that they weren’t in the welcome party, isn’t it?’

‘Memphis,’ Kanu said, ‘who are these Friends you mention? Is Eunice among them?’

The great head turned to regard him. ‘No.’

Kanu said, ‘Do you know what happened to her?’

‘Why do you speak of Eunice?’

‘Then you’ve heard of her.’

Memphis flapped his ears — a gesture that Kanu could not help but interpret as one of irritation. He was still driving, but his attention was now on them, not the way ahead. Still the vehicle trundled on. ‘Eunice did not like us. Eunice is gone.’

‘What do you mean, gone?’

‘Dead.’

Presently they arrived in a significantly larger space — what Kanu guessed must be one of the holoship’s original pressure caverns. It was kilometres across in all dimensions — dizzying after the confinement of spacecraft and airlocks and corridors. He forgot how many chambers the holoships had carried, but he was sure it was more than a dozen. Still, this one chamber would suffice for tens of thousands of survivors, if they were prepared to put up with a measure of crowding.

But there were no people to be seen.

There were elephants, or Risen, if that was the name they now preferred. They were standing around in groups or moving in ones and twos — elephants both large and small, though Kanu was no expert in such matters. All but the smallest wore similar equipment to the three with them now, allowing for differences in detail. They stood in the open areas between buildings, or walked along wide, dusty pathways linking those same structures. There were many buildings, none of them more than a few stories high, and all had clearly been designed for human occupation. Enlarged doors and windows had been cut into the sides of some, but others were still as they must have been built. The buildings nestled in and around squares of open grassland, small lakes and woods. The chamber’s floor curved gradually upwards, the more distant buildings built on rising terrain and appearing to tilt inwards as if their foundations had subsided. But the chamber did not encompass more than a small fraction of Zanzibar’s circumference, the ground on either side eventually shrugging off vegetation and assuming a sheer, clifflike steepness before curving over again to form the ceiling. A honeycomb of blue panels covered the ceiling, glowing with the brightness of sky. The honeycomb was interrupted by patches of darkness where many of the individual panels had broken away or stopped working. But the overall effect was still sufficient to suggest the muted light of an overcast day.

The vehicle was slowing now as Memphis steered them along a dirt track passing between two of the buildings. Elephants turned to study them, lifting their trunks in a kind of salute. The elephants were talking to each other, or expressing some shared emotional response.

‘I hope that means they’re pleased to see us,’ Nissa said.

‘I can’t tell.’

They stopped at one of the larger buildings — it had a forbidding, civic look to it, with a frontage of grey pillars like a mouthful of teeth. The ramp lowered and Nissa and Kanu were encouraged to disembark.

‘Follow,’ Memphis said. ‘Dakota will see you.’

They entered the civic building through an open doorway twice as tall as an elephant. Beyond the entrance was an equally impressive lobby, at least a hundred metres wide and perhaps three times as long. For all its size, it was a gloomy place. Shafts of light shone down through windows in the ceiling and upper walls, but all they did was push the darkness into the corners. Kanu and Nissa’s boots clacked on the marble floor. Only Memphis accompanied them. Kanu guessed that the elephants were wise enough to know their guests would not attempt an escape now, when they were so far from their point of entry.

There was a kind of ramp in the middle of the floor leading down to lower levels, but Memphis steered them around this and brought them to a halt at the far end of the chamber. Next to a set of doors was an upright glass rectangle set on a stone plinth, and next to this was a huge metal staff. Memphis wrapped his trunk around the staff, lifted it effortlessly from the ground and hammered its blunt end against the floor.

The sound — a dull, atonal dong — echoed and echoed around the empty chamber. Kanu noticed now that the place where Memphis had struck the ground was spiderwebbed by myriad cracks, as if this ceremonial summoning had been conducted many times before.

A moment passed. Then a large pair of doors swung open in the chamber’s wall.

‘We found two people,’ Memphis said, addressing the form that waited in the red-lit space beyond.

‘Only these two?’

‘Yes. The man Kanu Akinya and the woman Nissa Mbaye.’

‘Where is their ship?’

‘We have it.’

‘You mean the smaller ship, of course.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then where is the larger ship?’

‘It is still where it was. We brought them straight here from the lock.’

‘Have they seen the Friends yet?’

‘No.’

‘But they shall. Bring them to me, Memphis. Let me see what they are. Let me see what time and tide have washed up for us.’

The voice was as deep as Memphis’s but the intonation was recognisably distinct — older, slower in its utterances, but at the same time conveying a sly and calculating capacity that Kanu had not sensed in the first animal. If it had been a surprise to find himself in the presence of a talking elephant, now he had the first disquieting sense that this intellect was superior to the first, and perhaps even to his own.

He wondered how Swift felt.

‘I am searching your memory, Kanu. There was an elephant by the name of Dakota, who may have been the product of genetic cognition enhancement. But it is quite impossible that particular Dakota could still be alive after all this time.’

Kanu could have sworn he felt Swift rummaging through his memories, travelling from one part of his skull to another like a slowly moving itch.

‘We’ll see about that. What happened to Dakota?’

‘Dakota was one of the three Watchkeeper ambassadors — the three intelligences that left Crucible shortly after settlement. The first was Chiku Green, the second Eunice—’

‘And the third an elephant. I should feel as if I’m getting answers to questions, Swift — why don’t I?’

‘Conceivably they are not quite the answers you were hoping for.’

Memphis encouraged them into the red-lit space beyond the doors and then retreated — his own head lowered, adopting a posture that Kanu could not help but interpret as submissive.

He thought about elephant power structures, the singular importance of the matriarch. No matter how much intelligence had been grafted onto elephant minds, the hard, strong bones of those ancient hierarchies would still push through.

But could this really be the same Dakota, after all these years?

The doors closed behind them. The room was a library, or part of one. Its shelf-lined walls were two storeys tall, with a narrow wooden balcony running around the upper level. The shelves were occupied by hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of heavy physical books. Their spines were mostly black, occasionally a dark academic red or an equally sombre blue or green. Their titles were printed in metal leaf, embossed into the leather of the spines.

The floor level contained an arrangement of study tables set with slightly sloping tops. Many books littered the tables in various states of organisation, some in loose piles, others spread open. Hooded reading lamps were scattered about, some of which cast a muted red light. These and equally muted lights set between the shelves were the only sources of illumination in the room. Kanu had the impression that the books must be too fragile to be exposed to anything brighter.