Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘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 o
f illumination in the room. Kanu had the impression that the books must be too fragile to be exposed to anything brighter.

  In the middle of the room, framed by two long rows of reading tables, was an elephant. It was on its knees, angled away from them, its great head lowered, its forehead almost brushing the surface of a reading table. There was a concentration of books before the elephant, stacked into haphazard piles. One was open before it, and in its trunk, pinched delicately at the very end, the elephant held a circular magnifying glass.

  The elephant set down the glass. Still with its back to them, it picked up one of the books, rose from its knees – daintily managing not to upset the reading tables – and moved to one of the shelves. Taking its entire weight on its rear legs, the elephant used its trunk to return the book to a vacant spot on a high shelf. Then it plucked another down, just a little to the right of the one it had been reading.

  ‘Excuse me a moment.’

  The elephant set the new book on the reading table, then employed the tip of its trunk to leaf through the densely printed pages. Finally it arrived at a passage near the middle, which it proceeded to study closely with the aid of the magnifying glass.

  Kanu and Nissa watched in silence. Kanu had the feeling he had walked in on some surreal fantasy of his childhood.

  ‘Scholarship is one of the more harmless habits of old age. Sometimes I lose myself among these books for days at a time, following one thread of research to another. My needs are modest, and I am, regrettably, something of a slow reader. And an inexcusably bad host, too: you must forgive me.’ The elephant replaced the glass on the desk and turned around slowly to face them. ‘I am Dakota, as you were doubtless forewarned. You must excuse Memphis his clumsiness with Swahili – it is not his strong point – but in all other respects he is thoroughly dependable. I would miss him like the dung of my mother were he to leave us. Memphis mentioned your names, but I confess I need them repeated. Would you mind?’

  ‘I’m Kanu Akinya,’ he answered carefully. ‘This is Nissa Mbaye.’

  ‘Akinya,’ the elephant said, drawing out the syllables. ‘Yes, I thought that was what Memphis said. I would be surprised if that were a coincidence.’

  ‘I imagine it’s no more of a coincidence than you being called Dakota,’ he said. ‘Are you really the elephant that went with the Watchkeepers?’

  ‘I shall admit you into a confidence. “Elephant” is a term best reserved for conversations between people. If you must insist on a name bestowed on us by people, then we are the Tantors. Perhaps you know of us. But even Tantor has connotations of a doubtful past we would much sooner put behind us.’

  She was smaller than Memphis, but still large enough to be intimidating. Dakota was also tusked, but the tusks were narrower and perhaps two-thirds as long as his. Like the other elephants, she wore a kind of speaking device across her forehead, but hers was smaller than the others. Under the device, her forehead was a huge bony swelling, almost like a malignancy. Her skin was a highly wrinkled pearly grey, like a landscape subjected to aeons of interesting geology. Beyond infancy, all elephants looked wizened and venerable to some degree. Kanu nonetheless had no doubt that he was in the presence of a truly ancient individual.

  But could it be the same Dakota? It seemed impossible to him. The Dakota who had been part of the Trinity was an old elephant before Zanzibar reached Crucible – an event that was already hundreds of years in the past. In the absence of artificial prolongation measures, no elephant lived as long as a human.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kanu said. ‘I’ll try to watch what I say. But I’m finding it hard to accept that you could really be the same Dakota.’

  ‘Why would I not be?’

  ‘It’s been far too long, that’s why. Unless you’ve found a way to put elephants – sorry, Tantors – into skipover—’

  ‘You are not, if I might be so bold as to say so, the youngest of human beings. Presumably you are also quite old? Two centuries, perhaps more?’

  ‘Memphis appeared to have trouble telling us apart, and yet you can guess my age?’

  ‘I am not Memphis. I see a human man, a human woman, distinct in their individuality. Memphis sees only the common herd of humanity. You cannot blame him for that. He has not had a great deal of experience with people.’

  ‘And you have?’

  ‘More than my friend. But indulge me – how old are you, in point of fact?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Kanu said. ‘I was old when the Mechanism fell. Along the way I’ve had genetic modification from the merfolk, additional prolongation therapy, a long bout of skipover while we travelled to your system . . . and quite apart from all that, I died and was reborn on Mars, put back together like a jigsaw. I doubt very much whether any of these things apply to you.’

  ‘There are other kinds of prolongation therapy, Kanu – other ways of cheating time. It’s true that I have seen a great many changes since the Watchkeeper took us from Crucible. I was old then, as you rightly surmise, but from my present vantage I see my life before that time as a kind of infancy, no more than a preparation for what was to come. My full flowering, you might say. The Watchkeepers changed us all, a few decades after our arrival in this system. There were more of them then, you see – a whole host. The changes they wrought on us were almost trivial, from their perspective. They saw what was broken, deficient or incomplete, and they set it right.’

  ‘So they made you more than you were?’ Nissa asked.

  ‘One way of putting it. I have aged, and I continue to age – my eyes are not what they once were! But I grow old slowly, and if there has been a decline in my higher faculties, my ability to speak and read and reason, I remain blissfully ignorant of it.’

  Kanu was still struck by her swollen forehead. He thought of what that expanded braincase must mean in terms of her mental capacity – a great pressured swelling of pure intellect. He hardly dared compare his own brain volume to hers.

  ‘Can the others read?’ he asked.

  ‘My offspring are blessed with some of my gifts, although seldom are all the attributes present in the same individual. Slowly, though, with each new generation I am becoming less exceptional. The calves are a miracle now – they have a thirst for learning and experience that you would scarcely credit. They gobble language as readily as they gobble dung! Sometimes they frighten me a little. I wonder how brightly their children will shine – and their grandchildren!’

  ‘You’re enough of a miracle for me,’ Kanu said.

  ‘You are very kind – and generous. Humans have carried the flame of intelligence for a million years. For you the gift was a consequence of natural factors – the stirring of genes, the adaptive pressures of a changing environment. You have earned it through generations of almost unbearable hardship – times when the human lineage was pinched to the brink of extinction. In our lineage, intelligence has been installed by artificial means, much as you might set a light in a darkened room. While there is a will, the light provides illumination. But it can just as easily be turned off, or allowed to falter. Your kind possess the inbuilt resilience of a hundred thousand generations. There is hope for us, in the new offspring. But we will not have the luxury of genetic resilience for a great many centuries, if we are fortunate to have it at all. As you see, not all the lights in this room work as they once did.’

  ‘But you’ve survived whatever happened to Zanzibar,’ Nissa said, ‘and now we’re here, if there’s anything we can do to help. There’ll be more like us, too. From now on you don’t have to be alone.’

  ‘I will admit that I am not ungrateful for your arrival. I hope we can be of benefit to each other. But first – your ship. Tell me what happened, to bring you to Zanzibar?’

  ‘We responded to a signal,’ Kanu said. ‘It appeared to concern us, but when we got here, no one replied. I’m afraid we found ourselves in some trouble – our ship was badly damaged, un
able to steer itself. We set it on a transfer orbit and eventually ended up here.’

  ‘Because you knew of us?’

  ‘Not at all! But we’d seen your rock – Zanzibar – and we thought we might be able to use it as a staging point for our repairs.’

  ‘The ship fixed some of the damage while we travelled,’ Nissa said, ‘but not all of it. We’ll still need outside resources if we’re to make it back home.’

  ‘That is very unfortunate. If only you had come to us directly, all this could have been avoided. I must apologise for not responding to your arrival, but I am afraid our capabilities are still very limited. We can sense objects in the vicinity of Zanzibar, but not much further out than that. And I confess we were not expecting visitors.’

  ‘Then you didn’t transmit the signal?’ Nissa asked.

  ‘No – we had nothing to do with it. Let us put all that behind us, though. Were people hurt aboard your ship? Are there sick and injured to be helped?’

  ‘No, it’s just us,’ Kanu said.

  ‘That is a mercy. Should you have need of anything, though, you must not hesitate to ask. This ship was made for people, as you know, and many of its facilities are still largely as they once were. I cannot promise you that everything still works, but I do not think you will find it too great a hardship to spend some time with us. As for your ship – the damaged one – you may rest assured that we will do our utmost to help you mend it. In a little while we shall commence the arrangements to bring it closer to Zanzibar, and then we can discuss the practicalities of the repair process.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Kanu said.

  ‘Who are the Friends?’ Nissa asked.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You mentioned them to Memphis, when we arrived. He said we hadn’t seen them yet.’

  ‘You must forgive me – I’d quite forgotten. Perhaps old age is taking its toll after all. I find myself quite easily able to forget the thread of a conversation after only a few minutes, yet I can remember things that happened a century ago as if they were playing out before my eyes.’