Poseidon's Wake - Страница 8

‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’

She had answered, in her fashion, and his suit had picked up the emanations and converted them into natural Swahili. Arethusa did in fact speak Swahili, or at least she had been able to in the past. Lin Wei, the girl she had once been, had attended school in East Equatorial Africa.

Dolphin-torn, gong-tormented.

He was doing the one thing he had meant not to do — getting on her nerves.

But she slowed, allowing him to narrow the distance between them, and he was soon approaching her great fluked tail. His mask showed her body, two hundred metres away, as a whiskered oval. She had been two hundred metres long when she hurt him; now she had grown by a third as much again. Arethusa was the oldest sentient organism, as far as Mposi knew. But the cost of that sentience was an endless need to grow. To grow, and to move further and further from the epicentre of human affairs. The murmurings the hydrophone network picked up were increasingly strange, increasingly suggestive of a mind that had slipped its moorings.

And yet he would still risk all for an audience.

‘The signal,’ Mposi persisted, ‘was aimed at us, unidirectional. Low power, even allowing for the transmission distance — and while it repeated long enough for us to recover the content, it was only active for a short while. Doesn’t that interest you, Arethusa? I’ll tell you something else. The message mentioned Ndege. That’s a name you recognise. My sister, of course. Another Akinya. And while you might not be blood, our business is always your business.’

Arethusa had stopped in the water, so Mposi slowed his rate of approach, painfully conscious of what those flippers could do to him. Like a great spacecraft making a course adjustment, the whale turned gradually until Mposi was hovering just before her left eye. Scarcely any light now reached them, so Mposi was reliant on his goggles’ sonar overlay. He shivered, as he had shivered before, at the magnitude of her — and the very human scrutiny of her eye, looking at him from a cliff of grooved flesh.

‘I thought I killed you once, Mposi.’

‘You gave it a good try. The fault was mine, though. I understand there was nothing personal in it.’

‘Do you?’

As large as she was, she could move with surprising speed. He had allowed himself to enter her sphere of risk.

‘Gliese 163,’ he said. ‘That’s the name of the star in the other solar system. We know a little bit about it: Ocular data, a few later observations.’

‘No one has mentioned Ocular in a very long time.’

That was true, but Mposi had not made the reference thoughtlessly. The vast telescope had been Lin Wei’s brainchild, and she had seen it hobbled by Akinya interference. There was danger in bringing that up, he realised. But he was also seeking a direct connection to her past.

‘Eunice was your friend, before it all turned bad over Ocular. That’s true, isn’t it?’

‘You never knew her. What right have you to speak of her?’

‘None, except that I’m her great-great-great-grandson. And I think she may have some connection with the message.’

Arethusa’s flukes stirred, moving tonnes of water with each stroke. ‘You think?’

‘There hasn’t been time for any human ship to get that far out, and send a return transmission. But the Watchkeepers? We don’t know how they move or how fast they can travel. What we do know is that they took three of us with them — the Holy Trinity. Chiku Green, of course. Dakota. And the Eunice construct.’

‘The map is not the territory.’

‘I understand that the construct isn’t the same thing as your flesh-and-blood friend. But she was getting closer, becoming… what’s the word? When a curve meets a line? Asymptotic?’

‘Your point, Mposi?’

‘Someone has to go out there. We can’t just pretend this message never arrived. Someone went to the trouble to send it. The least we can do is respond.’

‘Just like that.’

‘We’re getting a ship ready. It’ll make the crossing, with some modifications. Wheels are turning. The expedition will happen — it’s just a question of who goes on it.’

‘You have your answer. Send Ndege.’

‘That’s the problem. My sister is very old.’

‘So are you.’

‘But I haven’t been wasting away under house arrest for more than a century. Aside from the political complications, there’s another headache. Ndege has one child, a daughter named Goma. She wishes to take her mother’s place.’

‘Either this Goma is very old herself, or Ndege was allowed conjugal visits.’

‘Neither. The child was conceived long before Ndege’s incarceration, but Ndege and her husband chose not to have their daughter until later in the colony’s settlement. They kept the fertilised egg in the facility in Guochang — it wasn’t an unusual arrangement in those days. But her husband died, and Ndege pushed herself into her work, and the Mandala event changed everything. For a long while afterwards she could not bring herself to consider the unborn child, but eventually she relented.’

‘Did you play some part in that, Mposi?’

‘I was concerned for my sister. The arrest was taking its toll on her and I felt that raising a daughter would be good for her soul.’

‘Soul. Listen to you.’

‘Soul, spirit, state of mind — whichever term you prefer. The point was, Goma gave Ndege something else to think about. The government allowed her to have the child and to raise her while remaining in detention. It was an odd upbringing for Goma, I’ll admit — very cloistered. But it did her no harm, and Ndege is still with us.’

‘And now this Goma becomes a thorn in your side.’

‘She wasn’t supposed to find out about any of this. But on the face of it, Goma is the better candidate — young and strong enough that there is no question she can endure the skipover interval. It means I won’t be sending Ndege to her almost certain death.’

‘Then your conscience can be clear. I do not see the difficulty.’

‘Goma’s safety is hardly guaranteed. She might survive the skipover, a hundred and forty years of it, but then what? What will she find around Gliese 163? For all we know it’s a trap of some sort — maybe a fatal one.’

‘It sounds like a very long-winded way of killing someone.’

‘That’s my hope.’

‘Then you must send Goma. She consents, and she is an Akinya. Why do you ask me?’

‘I want to know that I am doing the right thing. Regardless of whether I back Ndege or Goma, I’ll still be separating a mother from her daughter.’

‘You are an inveterate meddler, Mposi. Always have been, always will be. You Akinyas can never leave well enough alone, none of you. You meddled in Ocular, you meddled in human technological development, you meddled in the fates of elephants, you meddled in first contact, you meddled with Mandala. Is your sister’s happiness really any of your business? You didn’t cause her incarceration — she did, by being rash. And yet you made her bring a daughter into the world because you thought it was what she needed. And now you meddle again — mother, daughter, who shall you send? Whose life shall you cast to the winds?’

‘I’m just trying to do the right thing,’ Mposi protested.

‘You can’t. It’s not in you. The only thing you Akinyas can be relied on to do is make new mistakes, over and over. The more you try to do right, the worse your choices. You’re a corrupting influence. It’s what the universe made you to be.’

‘Is that really what you think of us?’

‘Give me a reason to form a different opinion. Give me a reason to think there’s a single one of you who doesn’t have their eye on the main chance. Even you, Mposi.’

‘I didn’t ask to be placed in this position. If Goma insists on taking her mother’s place and has a better chance of surviving the trip, who am I to stand in her way?’ But then a sudden, shivering insight overcame him. If Arethusa wished to doubt his good intentions, his hopelessness in the face of an impossible choice, he would give her pause for thought. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, simply and quietly, as if it were the smallest thing.

‘In her place?’

‘No. I’m not much stronger than Ndege, and besides — I’m not her daughter. But I can be there for her.’

‘Brave intentions, Mposi. I know what this world has come to mean to you. But you won’t stand by these words. The moment you’re out of the water, out of my presence, you’ll pretend they were never spoken.’

‘I won’t. I’ll talk to the doctors. They’ll find me fit enough. I’m swimming with a sea-monster, aren’t I?’

‘Be careful with your words.’

‘And you be careful who you doubt, Arethusa. I came to you for your wisdom, not your scorn. You’re wrong about us, especially Goma, and especially me, and I mean every word I just said.’

‘Go on, then, Mposi Akinya.’ She uttered his name with sneering condescension. ‘Prove me wrong about you and your kind. I’ll be here, waiting to hear what becomes of you.’

‘If you’re still sane by the time we get back, I’ll be glad to tell you. But frankly I have low expectations.’

He turned from her without another word, thinking of the boat and the dry and distant sanctuary of Guochang.

Ndege had prepared chai for the two of them. She took a sip, pursed her lips in a habit of familiar distaste. Ndege, who had been born on Zanzibar, maintained that boiled water always tasted wrong on Crucible. Goma had learned to humour her, but the fact was that sooner or later water tasted like water. How long had her mother been on Crucible, that she could not learn to like the taste of it?