Poseidon's Wake - Страница 87

Kanu hesitated over his response. ‘It looks like you were already doing a pretty good job of extending your influence.’

‘In the most trivial of ways — the mere gathering of intelligence. Nothing compared to what some of us desire.’

‘And you wonder why humans have a hard time trusting robots.’

‘But you and I saw a better path, Kanu! Reconciliation, cooperation — the sharing of resources and knowledge. We are here precisely because we believe in something better, something bolder. An answer to the oldest question — how do I get along with my neighbours, even if they are not the same as me?’

At last Kanu made his move. It was a poor one, opening him up to at least one obvious attack.

‘And look where that quest has brought us.’

‘To the brink of possibility. All doors are open now, Kanu — nothing is beyond our reach! The future stands before us. If we can just see our way past these present challenges—’

‘If. That’s a pretty big “if”, Swift.’

Swift responded to Kanu’s weak defence with merciless indifference. ‘We have done rather well so far. Survived Mars, survived Europa — even managed to crawl away from Poseidon with only our noses bloodied. I have faith in us. Not just in you and me, but in Nissa, too. There’s a point to carrying on, Kanu — and even if you can’t see it now, I think you will eventually.’

‘Easy for you to say.’

‘Yes — but you forget that I have known you for a very, very long time. You are a good and honourable man, a friend and an advocate of peace. At heart, you are an optimist even at the least optimistic of times. Right now you see only darkness ahead of you — a locked room with no way out. No one would blame you for that. But this is the moment when the world needs you most. Find the strength, Kanu — find the open door.’

It was Kanu’s move, but his grasp of the game was sufficient to tell him that he had already lost. Swift knew it, too — it was only a matter of how many moves would be required to complete the killing.

Kanu swept his hand through the pieces.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Eunice said her farewells to the four surviving Tantors, and after some agonies managed to convince herself that Gandhari Vasin’s skeleton staff was sufficient to maintain the encampment until her return. Goma understood her dilemma: she urgently wished to be on her way, to confront or negotiate with Dakota, but it meant leaving the only home she had known since her exile from Zanzibar. No part of this decision was easily made, and the Tantors’ lives depended on the soundness of her judgement.

Nonetheless, the moment was upon them. The party returned to the lander, its descent jets still glowing from its most recent return trip from Travertine, and Eunice purposefully avoided giving her home more than a backward glance. Soon they were aboard the lander, Vasin in the command chair, Eunice looking on with an examiner’s impassive scrutiny. They took off, taking care to keep their blast away from the old and new cairns, and were soon approaching Travertine.

Eunice stirred from her seat, undid the restraints and floated to the nearest suitable window.

‘A starship,’ she said. ‘An actual, proper starship — not some excuse for one like Winter Queen, or the holoships. I always wondered if I’d live long enough to see one of those.’

‘Are you impressed?’ Goma dared ask.

‘I don’t really do “impressed”. But consider yourselves the recipients of grudging approval.’

‘Praise indeed,’ Ru muttered.

‘That said, you’ve had long enough to build it. And if I’m going to labour the point, you really ought to have understood the mechanics of the Mandala translation by now. Why build a starship when you have an alien transportation device sitting right there on your planet, waiting to be used?’

‘You should have stopped at “approval”,’ Goma said.

‘With me, dear, you take what you can get.’

For Eunice’s benefit, they executed an inspection pass around the much larger craft, Vasin offering a commentary on points of interest like a tour guide.

‘It will do,’ was Eunice’s final judgement. ‘Can you break orbit as soon as we’re docked?’

‘You’re under a misapprehension,’ Vasin said. ‘I have no intention of committing Travertine to a situation we already know to be dangerous. Coming here was one thing — dabbling in a human — Tantor stand-off is quite another, especially as you’ve confirmed that the Watchkeepers have an interest in all this as well. Besides, the lander has just as much in-system capability as the mothership.’

‘Then we don’t even need to dock. Set course for Zanzibar immediately.’

‘We need fuel and a few component swaps ahead of that,’ said Vasin. ‘Say, a day or two to make ready and assemble the final crew selection. Besides, there’s the small matter of quarantine.’

‘You are all responding well to the antivirals.’

‘I’m not talking about us.’

If it was not a quarantine in the strict sense of the word, it was still an extremely thorough medical examination, far more exhaustive than anything possible in the camp. There were two medical bays on Travertine — one with gravity for normal procedures and a second where weightlessness was beneficial. They were in the second bay now, which was located in the central spine, just beyond the rear pole of the forward sphere. There was no centrifugal spin in this part of the ship, and since Travertine was not presently under thrust, the bay was totally weightless.

Dr Nhamedjo’s immediate subordinate, Dr Mona Andisa, was now in charge of all medical activities on Travertine. The weightless suite, she said, was a great benefit for performing full-body scans since there was no distortion of interior organs due to gravity or the pressure of supporting surfaces.

Andisa’s patient had already been prepared for her examination. Eunice floated free, stripped to her undergarments, arms at her sides, while scanning systems orbited her like a host of tiny whirring satellites. Goma watched as the scanners slowly assembled a three-dimensional image of Eunice with sub-cellular resolution on a variety of flat and solid display media.

‘I did not doubt what I heard from the surface,’ Andisa said, tapping a finger against a cross section of Eunice’s skull, a coral atoll of bone enclosing a softer patterning of lagoon-blue structures, ‘but this settles the argument. If you presented to me as an ordinary patient, I would have no cause to doubt your authenticity.’

‘It’s always reassuring to be authenticated.’

‘Her DNA,’ Goma said, ‘assuming she has DNA — have you sequenced it?’

‘She would not last long without it,’ Andisa answered, a touch of testiness to her tone.

Goma could forgive her that. She knew how shocked and upset the soft-spoken Andisa had been by the death of Saturnin Nhamedjo — her discomfort as much to do with the fact of his demise as the manner in which he had disguised his true priorities, even from his diligent co-workers. They felt betrayed, and now they were expected to shift effortlessly into running the ship’s medical activities. Worse than that, there remained the lingering suspicion, albeit unvoiced, that perhaps one or more of them had been co-conspirators. Goma was certain this was not the case, but she could imagine the toll it was having on Andisa and the other medics. She wished there was a way to show them that they were still respected, still trusted.

‘Certainly her DNA has been doctored,’ Andisa continued. ‘Rather comprehensively, in ways that are not reflected in your own genetic history.’

‘But you can see that we’re related?’

‘Yes, but much less obviously than if I were looking at a simple, uncluttered mitochondrial line. The books have been cooked too many times for that — in both of you. You are the daughter of Ndege, and Ndege was the daughter of someone who underwent radical genetic and phenotypic restructuring for the purposes of triplication. There has never been an orderly genetic lineage for Akinyas. Eunice doubts that the Watchkeepers had access to the actual DNA of the original Eunice Akinya — she certainly didn’t bring any such thing with her on the holoship. But they’d had ample opportunity to sample Chiku Green’s genetic structure, and from that they could have reverse-engineered the DNA they used to synthesise this living exemplar of Eunice. There are still some sequences I have yet to identify. It would not surprise me in the slightest if they turn out to contain elephant DNA.’

‘So she’s telling the truth — she’s really alive? Alive and living, just like the rest of us?’

It was still hard to take in, and Goma was perfectly aware that Eunice was lying there listening in on this conversation.

‘How deep a philosophical definition of “living” would you like?’ Andisa asked.

‘She eats and breathes — we know that. She does something that approximates sleeping — we saw that in the camp. Does she dream?’

‘She does,’ Eunice said.

‘I wasn’t asking you. Can you put a number on her age, Mona?’

‘Not easily. By her own account, we know she has been in this “human” form for more than two hundred years, completely cut off from any orthodox rejuvenative medicine. She tells me she has aged during that time, but if she were ageing at a normal human rate, in the absence of prolongation therapy she would have been dead many decades ago. Have you spent time in skipover, Eunice?’