Poseidon's Wake - Страница 71

‘Give us a break,’ Goma said. ‘We’ve barely been here two days, let alone three.’

‘It feels like longer. I have opened my home to you, offered you sanctuary and the essentials of life-support. How many times do we need to keep going over the same basic facts?’

‘You’ll have to excuse us,’ Vasin said, with the manner of one who minded very little whether or not she was excused. ‘We’ve arrived in the middle of a situation we don’t understand with next to no prior information. You’re our only reference point, and you shouldn’t even be alive. I mean that in the literal sense. If we were expecting anything, it was a robot.’

‘I must be a disappointment to you all.’

‘No,’ said Dr Nhamedjo, moving his hands in a magnanimous flourish. ‘You’re a wonder of the age! But you’re also human. As recording systems go, memories are fallible. And by your own account, all this happened such a long time ago.’

‘You’ve been on your own here,’ Goma said soothingly. ‘Nothing but you and the Tantors and a totally deserted, barely hospitable planet.’

‘And you think I went mad without the benefit of your sparkling conversation?’

‘I think we need to be sure that you’re as sane as you think you are,’ Vasin said. ‘Hence our questions. You’ll admit it’s an unlikely set of circumstances — you becoming flesh and blood, Zanzibar reappearing… Tantors turning against people. It’s not that I doubt these things, but I’m still trying to understand how they fit together.’

‘You told us the Watchkeepers needed you,’ Goma said, ‘something to do with Poseidon not letting them near, but I still don’t really get what that means.’

They were in Eunice’s kitchen. She wet her finger and drew a watery circle on the table, then another circle surrounding it. ‘Poseidon prohibits examination by purely machine intelligences. But the Trinity was able to bypass that prohibition.’

‘One of you was a machine,’ Ru said.

‘And one of us was human, and one of us had a trunk. It was the totality of us that counted. Collectively, we were more than our individual selves — we were a distinct information-gathering entity.’

‘Then you’ve been there,’ Goma said.

‘We got close but turned back. Something touched us. The Terror, Chiku called it.’ She smiled at their uneasy reactions. ‘There was nothing occult about it. The Terror was just a form of deep understanding — information being drilled into our heads. A vast, precise, intuitive grasp of the probable consequences of our actions. That to know the truth of the M-builders was to grasp the most dangerous knowledge of all.’

‘All right,’ Goma said. ‘We’ve skirted around this long enough — what’s the big deal about the M-builders? What’s so important that they have to put the Terror into you? What secret is worth protecting that badly? And if it’s such a big, bad secret, why not just erase it, or hide it away for ever?’

‘I don’t know what it is. I didn’t get close enough to find out.’

‘But you got close enough to experience the Terror. And you’ve had all this time since then to think about it, to put it into perspective. Don’t tell me you didn’t come up with something — you’re Eunice Akinya.’

‘At least someone has faith in me.’

‘I’m trying very hard,’ Goma said.

After a while, she said, ‘The M-builders discovered something. A fundamental truth about the universe, about the fate of things — what happens to the universe, what happens to all the matter, and all the life in it, in the future. This much I understood. The rest is… harder. It’s like telling a child about death. There’s no nice way to break the news.’

‘They let you know this fundamental truth?’ Ru asked.

‘It came through.’

‘And the secret itself?’ Goma probed. ‘If you got a glimpse of it, you need to share it with us. You can’t expect us to get worked up about Dakota if we don’t know exactly what’s at stake.’

‘It’s a lot for you to take in.’

‘Then give us your best stab. You can’t expect us to get worked up about Dakota when we only have a clue what it’s all about.’

‘I can expect whatever I like.’

‘Eunice… please.’

‘Persistent little upstart, aren’t you. Annoying. Annoying and cocksure and full of your own insufferable self-belief.’

Goma lifted her chin in defiance, displaying more boldness than she felt. ‘Coming from you? You made a career out of insufferable self-belief. You built an empire on the back of it.’

This drew the tiniest grudging smile from Eunice. ‘Very well. At least you and I can speak plainly. You can take this, I think. You’ve got the steel for it. I can’t speak for your companions — they’re your business. The M-builders… are you sure of this?’

‘Yes, we’re damned well sure,’ Goma said.

‘They arrived at this truth. It’s a bitter pill. None more bitter. The universe ends. It has a built-in expiration clause. It’s going to stop — and not at some remote cosmological time from now, when the galaxies crash together or the suns fizzle out, but sooner… much sooner.’

‘When you say sooner…’ Vasin said. ‘What are we talking? Thousands of years, millions?’

‘It can’t be quantified. It’s a fluctuation event, a vacuum instability, a random but inevitable process like the flipping of an atomic nucleus, the decay of a neutron. It could happen tomorrow or a hundred billion years from now. Statistically speaking? Probably won’t happen for hundreds of millions of years… a good few billion, most likely.’

Goma could not help but let out a gasp of relief. ‘Then it’s so far off as to not matter.’

Eunice looked at her with scorn. ‘Try, just for a second, not to think like a thing made out of cells, with a lifespan shorter than some planetary weather systems. You’re a human being. You have limited horizons. Thinking beyond next week is a reach for you. That’s fine, it’s what you are.’

‘Thanks,’ Goma said.

‘You’re welcome. But it wasn’t like that for the M-builders. They’d already been around for tens of millions of years when they made this discovery. They’d accepted the idea of being an immortal super-civilisation. It suited them down to the ground. Masters of creation? Lords of all they surveyed? Architects of eternity? Why not? Bring it on. But there’s always a catch — they needed the universe not to die on them in the meantime. When they worked out that the end state was not just probable but inevitable… let’s just say it didn’t feel quite so far off to them. Not when they’d already been around for aeon upon aeon and were making plans for the rest of time.’

‘Then the truth is… what?’ Vasin said. ‘The confirmation of all this? Then we don’t need it. I’ve seen those theories, too. We already know about vacuum fluctuations.’

‘So do the Watchkeepers,’ Eunice answered. ‘So does every galactic intelligence with the ability to count up to three. But it’s always been a theory… a dragon in the mathematics. Something nasty, but which you aren’t required to take seriously. The M-builders did, though. Their mathematics was watertight, and they’d excluded all competing theories. They knew the end was coming. And Poseidon is their answer.’

‘A solution?’ Ru asked.

‘An answer,’ Eunice repeated.

Ru began, ‘I’m not sure—’

‘Did something go wrong on your ship’s life-support when you were on the way here? Some catastrophic lowering of your overall intelligence baseline? I’ll spell it out to you slowly. Poseidon is a species-level response. Information, yes. A requiem, if you like — although we’d have to read it to be sure. Whatever Poseidon is, it encodes their response to the knowledge that life, existence itself, has a finite duration. That it cannot last for ever.’

‘And that’s what the Watchkeepers want to know — how the M-builders responded to that information?’ Goma asked.

‘Well, wouldn’t you?’

Goma shrugged. There was a certain formality or protocol to dealing with Eunice, and she felt as if some of the rules were becoming clearer. ‘If I were a machine civilisation instead of a bag of cells — maybe. But I’m not sure I’d go to all this trouble to get it.’

‘You would if you were them. The Watchkeepers are also ancient, and just like the M-builders, they’re keen on the idea of long-term survival, of enduring deep-time, burrowing into the extreme future of the universe. They know that vacuum fluctuation is real — they can see it in their physics, and in the physics of all the other cultures they’ve encountered or unearthed. So inasmuch as worry is an emotion they’re capable of, they worry. They fret in their dim little machine minds and wish they knew what the M-builders knew. But to find that out, they have to enlist proxy intelligences like ourselves. The trouble with that, though, is that we have to know the Terror. We have to allow our souls to be ripped open while they look on. We’re disposable instruments to them, that’s all. Doesn’t matter if we’re blunted or damaged or burned in the process so long as we function long enough to extract information. Well, fuck that.’

Goma laughed in surprise and admiration. ‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. Fuck it. Fuck being the tools of a higher alien intelligence.’

‘Only you could say that.’

‘Say it? We did more than say it. We downed tools.’ Eunice straightened in her chair, puffed up with pride. ‘We said we weren’t going to do it. That they’d have to find another way. That was their problem, you see. They could only use coercion up to a point, and then we stopped being free agents. But only free agents, creatures operating under their own free will — only they could survive the moons. Of course, the Watchkeepers don’t give up that easily. They tried different avenues of persuasion.’