‘You think.’
‘You have a great many genes in common with an oak tree. Do you feel an intense kinship with oak trees?’
‘They’re both robots, Kanu. Try seeing things from our perspective for a while, not theirs.’
That was as close to arguing as they got. It was only four days from Earth to Jupiter space, hardly enough time to start getting on each other’s nerves. Fall of Night was certainly not large, but the provision of two cabins meant there was more than enough privacy available to keep irritation at bay.
After their breakfast discussion, Kanu had been careful not to raise the matter of his disquiet again. It was better that way. He allowed her to believe she had settled his misgivings, putting them down to the unpleasantness of his recent experience on Mars. And, indeed, Kanu was ready to concede that a component of his feelings could be explained away as a kind of post-traumatic episode. But he knew there was more to it than that.
On the third day, twenty-four hours from Jupiter, he was alone in his cabin when he became unaccountably certain he was being watched; that he was sharing the room with a silent observer. Out of reflex he twitched around, and for an instant he was convinced he had seen something, a figure or the shadow of a figure, out of the corner of his eye.
In any other situation he would have gladly put the matter behind him. But it was just Kanu and Nissa and her little spaceship, and there was nothing between them and another human being except millions of kilometres of vacuum. Nissa aside, he was more alone here than he had been on the surface of Mars. Nor had he ever been one to jump at shadows.
And yet there had been someone – something – there.
Perhaps it was just a glimpse of his own reflection in the mirror above his private washbasin.
Yes. Just the mirror.
That was it.
But now a question pushed itself to the forefront of his mind. He voiced it aloud, but in a quiet enough whisper that it was easily drowned out by the noise of Fall of Night’s systems.
‘What did you do to me?’
Because his thoughts were following the groove of a different, darker orbit now. Not that the machines on Mars had somehow erred in putting him back together, botching part of his brain wiring, but that this might be deliberate.
That all of this might suit some purpose of which he was not aware.
*
A day later they reached Jupiter. Nissa put extra power into Fall of Night’s electromagnetic deflectors, cocooning them from the worst effects of the Jovian magnetosphere. They were still moving quickly, about five hundred kilometres per second of excess speed, but Nissa had allowed for that with the aerobrake passage, knifing her ship through Jupiter’s extreme upper atmosphere at an oblique angle. It was as bumpy as she had predicted, but – she assured Kanu – the buffeting and heating were well within tolerable margins, and the dodge had shaved many hours off their flight. In fact he found the experience more bracing than unpleasant. By the time they reached clear space again, their speed was down to a manageable hundred kilometres per second, more than sufficient for operations within Jupiter’s system of moons.
Nissa was on the flight deck, confirming that their approach authorisation was in order. The certification was complicated and in a state of continuous adjustment and review, with a chance that it might be rescinded at any moment.
‘Something giving you cause for concern?’ Kanu asked, rubbing his face with a moistened towel. ‘I thought you had all the details covered.’
‘So did I, but there’s a heavier Consolidation presence than I was expecting. After that business with Yevgeny . . . what his surname?’
‘Korsakov.’
‘Him, yes. I’m starting to feel rattled. Sure, I’ve bent a rule or two, but I haven’t done anything to deserve this kind of attention.’
‘Nor have I.’
‘Well, of course you haven’t.’ She gave him a quizzical look. ‘Unless there’s something you haven’t told me.’
Kanu thought about it for a few moments. ‘I don’t believe those enforcement craft are anything to do with us. They’re here for some other reason entirely.’
‘And Korsakov’s interest in you? The Consolidation ship from which he’s transmitting is here, too.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I tracked its heading, and here it is. Doesn’t that concern you?’
‘He must be on diplomatic business, intergovernmental work. Europa’s a constant background problem for all the governments. That’s why those permissions are so difficult to arrange.’
‘I’ve fought long and hard for this, Kanu. No one’s taking it away from me now.’
On their fall to Europa they were interdicted by two of the Consolidation enforcement craft, pincering Fall of Night from either side. Kanu had a good view of the official vehicles – dark, shark-shaped ships with the interlocking ripples of the Consolidation’s emblem glowing along their sides.
‘If it came to it,’ he said, ‘do you think you could outrun them?’
‘Down to the ice, maybe. But I’d be in a world of trouble when I came back out.’
It was a formality, more or less. Her authorisation was queried, then re-queried. Even though she had filed all the necessary requests, the Consolidation ships still insisted on signalling for confirmation. Kanu and Nissa endured long hours of waiting while photons bounced around the system, pinballing from one encrypted router to the next. Meanwhile Nissa tried to get a signal through to her contact in Europa, informing them of the delay, but the omens were not propitious.
‘Something’s not right down there,’ she said when the response was late returning. ‘The last I heard, the Margrave was having trouble with border control. I hope the situation hasn’t worsened.’
As abruptly as they had arrived, though, the Consolidation ships broke off. Kanu watched them fall away with a vague feeling of resentment. No apology for detaining them, or for wasting hours of their time. Not even a bon voyage.
‘Rude.’
‘Planetary geopolitics looks a bit different when you’re one of the little people, doesn’t it?’ Nissa said.
‘I’m getting used to it.’
Europa had no atmosphere, so they were able to come in hard and fast until the last moment. The moon was an almost perfectly smooth sphere, an off-white eyeball crazed and veined by healing stress fractures, but with no mountains, valleys or craters. Abandoned cities littered the Europan plains, spires buckled and domes cracked, sagging down into the ice on their stilts and buttresses like drowning cathedrals. It was much too expensive to return these cold, airless, radiation-sleeted ruins to viable habitats. Besides, their economies had always depended on the cities and markets under the ice, in the blood-warm ocean. The abandoned cities were merely the ports of entry to the hidden kingdom, and now the kingdom was lawless.
‘Looters have stripped out almost anything useful,’ Nissa said as they vectored low over one of the tilted ruins. The clustered vanes and docking towers of the abandoned settlement brought to Kanu’s mind the image of a sailing ship, hemmed in by pack ice, its masts and rigging angled closer to the horizon than the zenith. And the thought shaped itself: only the ice traps that ship. She could still sail again, if only she could break free of its hold.
‘Kanu?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I was saying that looters have stripped out almost anything we might be able to use in those cities. Power, computer systems, elevator links through to the ocean. The ice has shifted, anyway. Unless those elevator shafts are constantly maintained, the ice soon severs them.’
‘Are you expecting the Regals to come up and meet you on the surface?’
‘No – they almost never show their faces.’
‘Then you have a problem.’
‘Only if I hadn’t done my homework first.’
Nissa ha
d preselected a landing spot near the equator and where the ice was thinner. Jupiter’s swollen one-eyed countenance lorded it over the sky, as if it had them pinned beneath its singular gaze. A case could be made for the beauty of Saturn, Kanu supposed, but never Jupiter. It was as ugly as an ogre, and it guarded its moons with an ogre’s mad-eyed jealousy.
Fall of Night settled onto the ice without landing legs, letting its hull take its weight. Europa’s gravity was barely a seventh that of Earth, less even than Mars, and after the two gees of their flight out to Jupiter, Kanu felt nearly weightless. It did not escape his attention that Nissa had put them down nowhere near any of the empty cities.
‘This is where I start testing the letter of the law,’ she said. ‘We’re not about to violate the terms of my authorisation – but we are going to make use of them in a way the Consolidation didn’t expect.’
‘Continue,’ Kanu said.
‘I was given forty-eight hours of surface time. That would be just enough to get in and out of the ocean if the elevators were working, but they’re not, and the Consolidation knows that. So they don’t believe I’ll be able to reach the sea.’
‘You, on the other hand, have your own plans.’
Nissa patted the couch adjoining her own. ‘Strap in next to me. I think you’re going to like this part.’
Kanu did as he was told, apprehension and curiosity vying for control of his emotions. Nissa was selecting navigation options he had not seen before, and beyond the enclosure of the command deck he sensed the ship going about some urgent new business. The hull was doing something. He felt the thud and whirr of activating mechanisms.
‘Heating elements in the outer skin,’ Nissa said, directing his attention to one display. ‘They’ll turn the ice to slush right under us and we’ll start sinking through. That won’t be fast enough, though.’ She tapped another diagram. ‘Active traction mechanisms. They’ll drag the slush from one end of the ship to the other, pulling us deeper – just like a mole burrowing into soil. Pitch-and-yaw stability, angle of attack, all under my direction. We’ll make about a metre a second at full crank.’
Kanu was dumbfounded. ‘You’ve turned your ship into a tunnelling machine.’
Nissa settled her hands on two lever-shaped controls which had emerged from the sides of her couch. ‘So let’s tunnel.’
She pushed the controls forwards and Kanu felt Fall of Night begin to burrow into Europa.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The moment of the Watchkeeper’s vanishing was too sudden and inexplicable to bring any sense of relief. It felt, instead, like the prelude to something else, one step in a conjuring trick which had yet to reach its conclusion.
It was only after hours of analysis and communication with Crucible that the disappearance began to be believed and understood. First and foremost, the Watchkeeper had not disappeared at all – it had simply moved away at unbelievable acceleration, somewhere in the region of twenty million gees according to the best estimates. This was in stark contrast to the normal movement of the alien machines as they travelled around Crucible’s system, but it did accord with the documented manner of their return, decades earlier: an almost instantaneous apparition. It was also the way in which Chiku Green’s Watchkeeper had ‘vanished’ after its departure from Crucible.
‘We always thought they had this other mode of propulsion,’ Mposi said, a day after the vanishing, ‘but it’s one thing to hypothesise about it and quite another to see it up close. The good news is that the radiation burst, all that blue light, doesn’t appear to have done us any harm. The ship is intact. In fact it’s slightly better than intact, if the technicians are to be believed.’
Ru frowned. He was addressing both of them, the trio sitting at one of the galley tables. Goma’s appetite had been slow to return, delayed by a sense that they were not quite beyond the Watchkeeper’s sphere of interest.
‘I don’t see how it can be better,’ Ru said.
‘It’s our acceleration: we are not using as much fuel as we expected. Which, of course, is impossible. But the technicians have double-checked their numbers.’
Goma picked up a pepper pot, allowed it to fall the short distance from her fingers to the tabletop. ‘Aren’t we at half a gee?’
‘Slightly less,’ Mposi said, ‘but we’re not losing any speed. Something is helping us along, so the engines have been dialled back a little. It will make life easier when we reach Gliese 163 if we don’t have to scramble around immediately to refill our initialising tanks. Even a Chibesa engine needs some fuel occasionally.’
‘This makes no sense,’ Goma said.
Mposi delighted in having the upper hand. ‘There’s something ahead of us. We’ve imaged it, but the quality is very poor – it’s at the absolute limit of our resolution. They haven’t had much more luck on Crucible, using synthetic data from the system’s monitoring devices. But we don’t really need better data, do we? It’s obvious what the thing must be.’
‘The Watchkeeper, I suppose,’ Ru answered.
‘The scientists have projected its course based on the acceleration burst. If it stays on that trajectory, it may end up on the same flight path we’re taking. It isn’t outpacing us, though – it’s matching our acceleration precisely, keeping about one hundred and fifty million kilometres of separation between us.’
Goma almost had to laugh. These numbers – accelerations of twenty million gees, distances wider than Crucible’s orbit around its star – were almost too absurdly large to bother trying to comprehend. Physics, with its exponents and Planck lengths and Hubble distances, left her feeling diminished, as if it would not be satisfied until she felt vanishingly irrelevant, annihilated between the tiny and the enormous.
You knew where you were with elephants.
‘What is it doing?’ Ru asked.
‘There are several possibilities. Clearing space ahead of us like a cosmic snowplough, perhaps. Space isn’t a perfect vacuum. If it holds this trajectory, we’ll have a much better chance of reaching Crucible without running into interstellar debris. Then there’s the acceleration boost. It’s as if we’re benefiting from whatever the Watchkeeper does to make itself move – we’re caught in its slipstream. The technicians want to make some measurements on the local vacuum, see if there’s anything different about it.’
‘It’s helping us?’ Goma said.
‘That’s one interpretation,’ Mposi answered, as if it was his duty not to alleviate her qualms. ‘Another is that these are accidental benefits, and that it neither knows nor cares what becomes of us.’
‘But it is moving in the same direction,’ Ru said. ‘That has to mean something.’
Goma felt her earlier apprehension reassert itself. ‘We’ll know when we arrive, I suppose. If it lets us.’
Within a few hours it was common knowledge that the Watchkeeper lay ahead of Travertine. From what Goma could judge, the other passengers shared her equivocal feelings. There was relief at not being immediately destroyed. Given the opacity of the Watchkeepers’ deeper motivations, though, it was hard to know whether to be comforted or unnerved by the continued presence of the alien robot.
There was some debate about how best to exploit the advantage provided by the slipstream effect. Ru felt that the technicians were being too cautious in their response. If they ran the drive at the planned level, they could exceed fifty per cent of the speed of light and reach their destination a number of years ahead of schedule. On the other hand, they would then be banking a lot on the Watchkeeper’s continued assistance. The holoships, travelling to Crucible, had made a similar gamble and been caught out.
Goma took Mposi’s view, which considered it better to keep to the existing schedule, saving fuel and engine life in the process. Travertine was not built to travel faster than half the speed of light, and to exceed that margin would be to place an additional burden on its hull insulation and
navigation systems.
The point was argued, and Crucible weighed in. Messages crawled back and forth, stretched out by ever-increasing time lag. Eventually the verdict was in and Mposi’s cautious view won out. They would use the Watchkeeper to their advantage, but they would not make the error of trusting it.
It was a fault of the human condition – or perhaps a blessing – that there was no situation which did not eventually become the normal state of affairs. All the people on Travertine knew it would be centuries before they made it back to Crucible, if indeed there was a world left to recognise upon their return. By turns, though, their psychological adjustment was slowly completed. The ship was their world now, and they had better learn to like it. Most found a way.
So life on Travertine fell into a comfortable rhythm of sorts. Mposi had said nothing more about the sabotage rumour and Goma was content to assume that the theory had been quietly discredited. All the same, she chose to keep out of the way of the Second Chancers, especially Peter Grave, and with Ru’s collusion it was not so hard to structure her routines around that principle of avoidance. Their differences, the years of tension and separation on Crucible, were now fully behind them. They spent long hours together in their cabin, sharing warmth and silence and intimacy. Goma began to feel that at last there had come a healing, a point beyond which no more apologies or excuses were necessary. History and circumstance had done what they would to them, and they had been stronger. It was good to be loved, good to love another human being – even in the belly of a starship arrowing for unmapped space.
Ru and Goma both maintained an interest in news updates from the elephant reserve, and they shared a genuine eagerness to see how the Alpha herd had reshuffled itself in the wake of Agrippa’s passing. But over time, Goma found that she had to work harder and harder to sustain her intellectual engagement. She sensed the same thing in Ru as well. It was not that they had ceased to care about the elephants, but the direction of their concern now had a different, outward focus. What happened to Crucible’s elephants was increasingly not their business – Tomas and the others were managing their affairs with predictable efficiency. But Goma and Ru had a chance to offer some constructive help to the Tantors, and so the weathervane of their sympathies had swung to a new bearing.
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