Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  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.’

  ‘Such as?’ Goma asked.

  ‘The gifts – the bestowings.’ She touched a finger to her chest. ‘Making me human. They thought they could bribe me into doing their will. But it wasn’t sufficient inducement.’

  Goma nodded. ‘What did the others get?’

  ‘Dakota was already clever. They made her much cleverer – and almost immortal.’

  ‘And Chiku?’

  ‘Dear Chiku. In hindsight, she was the only shrewd one among us. There was nothing they could offer her – no carrot, no stick. She wasn’t interested in being smarter, or living longer, and she certainly didn’t want to become anything she already wasn’t. Blame it on my grandson – that boy Geoffrey put some distinctly odd ideas into her head.’

  ‘They sound healthy enough to me,’ Ru said.

  ‘Then you’re as odd as he was.’

  ‘Carry on, please,’ Goma said, a knot of foreboding tightening in her stomach.

  ‘Chiku’s defiance put her on a path against the Watchkeepers. When Zanzibar arrived, we all did what we could to help. But the Watchkeepers already had plans for Dakota. If they couldn’t use humans, why not elephants instead? It’s not that they understood us, that they had deep insights into our psychology. They just saw another group of vertebrate animals and knew what needed to be done to get what they wanted. Dakota was to be the new matriarch – the new ruler of the Tantors. The homecoming queen. They shuffled her genes, mixed in some new ones and let her breed – allowing her offspring to become the dominant order.’

  ‘Beyond the Tantors?’ Ru asked.

  ‘The Risen, they call themselves. In reality, they’re just another instrument of the Watchkeepers – all being groomed for an expedition.’

  ‘Tell me more about Chiku,’ Goma said.

  ‘She died. It was near the end of the human presence in Zanzibar. I was there, I saw it. They killed her.’

  ‘No,’ Goma said, preferring to believe anything but that.

  ‘It was a dark time. Bad things were done by both parties. The humans began to realise that the Risen were slipping from their control, so of course some of them overreacted – tried to use Zanzibar’s systems to contain the elephants. Pumped inert gases into the life-support network – that sort of thing. Humans could easily squeeze into suits or airlocks, but the elephants couldn’t hide. But it was too clumsy, and not fast enough. There were reprisals. Then the humans switched to lethal weapons – it’s really not that hard to kill an elephant if you’ve the will. But the elephants, especially the Risen, were quick and smart enough to respond in kind. After that it was war.’

  ‘Please let this be a lie,’ Ru said, and Goma breathed out hard and held her hand, together finding the mutual strength to face this awful truth.

  ‘Chiku tried to broker a peace. She had friends among the Tantors – even among the Risen. But blood was running too hot on both sides. She was bludgeoned and killed. It was fast. She wouldn’t have felt anything.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have stopped them?’ Goma asked, barely holding back her rage.

  ‘You think I didn’t try? You think I wouldn’t have bloodied my hands against them if I could have made a difference? I’m not on the side of elephants or people, Goma. I’m on the side against stupidity.’ She looked down at herself, giving a little shiver of disgust. ‘But I wasn’t strong enough. Not strong enough, not fast enough, not bold enough. Look at what I’ve allowed myself to become.’

  ‘One of us,’ Goma said. ‘In which case, pity poor you.’

  ‘Whatever happened on Zanzibar, Eunice can’t be held accountable for it,’ Ru said.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ Eunice said. ‘But that doesn’t get us out of the mess. I’ve been stuck here without a ship ever since my exile. But you’ve changed all that.’

  ‘And the other ship?’ Vasin asked.

  ‘It’s a worry – and another reason for making contact with Zanzibar as quickly as possible. I doubt very much that your arrival has gone unnoticed – especially with all the electromagnetic noise you were putting out.’

  ‘Your fault for asking us to come in the first place,’ Goma said.

  ‘Yes, that hasn’t escaped my attention – nor the possibility that I may have inadvertently caused the arrival of the other ship. But I had no choice. I could not sit back and do nothing, not knowing what the Watchkeepers want of Dakota.’

  ‘You must have known we’d take more than a century to get here,’ Vasin said. ‘Who the hell plans on that kind of timescale?’

  ‘I do. It’s the habit of a lifetime. And look – you’re here.’

  ‘So what’s next?’ Goma asked.

  ‘The other three will be here shortly. I should very much like to take them all with me, but I doubt your ship is geared up to accommodate Tantors. They’ll just have to sit tight here on Orison until I get back.’ She gave an unconcerned shrug. ‘They’re clever. They can run the camp on their own, provided nothing major breaks down.’

  ‘You have a lot of faith in them,’ Karayan said.

  ‘Someone needs to. It might as well be me.’

  Their arrival had interrupted her work, and Eunice said she could not leave until she had set down in stone the thread of her most recent insight. Goma wondered why she did not just write it down on paper, or record herself for posterity.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I could try.’

  Eunice put on her spacesuit, the one with the heavy utility belt, and Goma followed her out through the lock, although she had not been specifically invited to do so. Wordlessly, Eunice set off for the cliff where they had first encountered her. She picked her way around one of the high stone cairns, then stopped at the base of the cliff. She inspected it for a moment, hand shading her helmet like a visor, and then chose a confident route up through the cracks and shelves of the face.

  Goma watched from below. Eunice took out the cutting tool, made its tip flare bright and then began cutting meticulous angular marks into the rock.

  Feeling herself on the brink of some momentous, life-changing disclosure, Goma swallowed hard and said: ‘I’ve seen these symbols before.’

  Eunice carried on working in silence. She completed a section, then traversed gingerly to the right, her toes resting on the merest wrinkle of out-jutting rock. She cut another series of markings.

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  ‘And I’m pretty sure I have. It’s the Mandala grammar – the same pattern as the one cut into Mandala’s sides, like long chains of dominoes, zigzagging and branching. Only there’s something more, isn’t there? You’re mixing in other types of symbol.’

  ‘You are very clever. Now why don’t you run along and play?’

  ‘That’s the Chibesa syntax. You’re combining statements from the Chibesa syntax with the Mandala grammar, as if they’re part of the same hierarchical language, or at least deeply connected.’

  Eunice stopped what she was doing. She turned off the cutting tool and returned it to her pouch, then shimmied back down to the ground.

  ‘And you’d know that how, exactly?’

  ‘Because my mother showed me. After you left us, Ndege spent thirty years finding conn
ections between the two forms. Eventually she used her knowledge of the Chibesa syntax as a key to unlock the Mandala grammar. That was how she learned to talk to Mandala.’

  ‘I always knew Ndege had promise.’

  ‘Never mind my mother – how can you be coming up with the same connections? I know what you are. Your memories aren’t Eunice’s actual memories – you’re made up from her public utterances, the outside facts of her life. Mother said these connections were a deep family secret – too deep for you to know about.’

  ‘Your mother was correct. She also does me a modest injustice – there is more to me than the posterity engines ever provided – but the essential truth is beyond dispute. I know that the Chibesa syntax is a mathematical formalism, a gateway into new physics, and I also know – or suspect, at least – that it has its origin in the rock scratchings of a passing alien tourist. I also have access to the entire public corpus of academic work on the Mandala grammar, at least as it stood at the time of my departure. But the notion that the two might be connected? I had to figure that out for myself.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The Terror. Whatever you make of it, it was a form of intimate contact with the M-builders’ technology, and of course it changed us all. In my case it left me with glimmerings, a sense of larger insights just out of reach. All that stuff about the vacuum rip . . . the end of time? That came through. Like I said, leakage. Contamination. More of their nature was revealed than perhaps they intended. Ever since then, I’ve had an odd sense of connections waiting to be made. My dreams—’

  ‘Then you do dream.’

  ‘Yes. Now, if you’d allow me to continue?’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘My dreams were great fevered battles between armies of symbols, regiments of logic and formal structure. They would not leave me alone. They chased me for years, decades, grinding away at my sanity until I began to exorcise them by way of these rock carvings. That appears to help. I still only have glimpses most of the time. I can’t see how the syntax and the grammar fit together at all levels . . . just little pieces, phrases in a larger argument. But that’s enough. It’s as if the glimpses want to be carved into rock – as if they crave permanence. And with each breakthrough – each new carving that appears to lock into the whole – I see that my initial insight must have been real. There is a link.’

  ‘Ndege agreed.’

  ‘And did she . . . theorise?’

  ‘My mother wasn’t allowed to talk about her ideas – not even to me. But she did. And yes, she theorised. The grammar is an evolution of the syntax – a later, more elegant form. The syntax is a useful shorthand, but it’s hard to use it to talk about anything other than physics. The grammar goes beyond that – it’s richer, more complex, like a language with lots of tenses and genders.’

  ‘And she understood the formal relationships?’

  ‘No,’ Goma answered. ‘She had many deep ideas and worked out a lot of the details, but that was already a lifetime’s work. I know my mother didn’t feel as if she was done with it, only that she’d made inroads, seen further than anyone else. If they’d allowed her continued access to Mandala . . .’

  ‘And to the Mandala here.’

  ‘Yes – she’d have wept to have known about that. To know that some part of Zanzibar survived – that she wasn’t the monster they thought she was.’

  ‘Do not think ill of me, Goma. It has taken courage for you to come here, and I know you are at least as bright as the rest of your expedition.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘But you are not Ndege. I asked for her, and hoped fervently she would be the one who came. I was thinking of the help – the guidance – she could offer to the Tantors, but I see now that she could have been of incalculable value in other respects. How I would have benefitted from her insights. How much I could have learned, just by showing her this wall.’

  ‘I’m as sorry as you are that she can’t be here now.’

  ‘Sorry won’t get us very far.’

  ‘But I have her notebooks. I brought then with me – all of them. Do they interest you?’

  Eunice looked at her through her faceplate. She had adjusted the reflectivity, offering Goma a chance to see her expression. She was smiling, and the smile was as genuine and beautiful as any Goma had seen.

  ‘I correct myself. I am not sorry you came, Goma Akinya. Not sorry at all.’

  They could have left directly – the lander was ready for immediate take-off – but the other three Tantors still had not returned. In any case, Eunice needed a day to make the necessary housekeeping arrangements, placing the camp in a state of semi-dormancy so that it could be easily maintained by Sadalmelik and the others.

  Goma saw this enforced delay as a blessing, offering further opportunity for interaction with the Tantors. She had to sleep and eat, but if not for those necessities she would have gladly spent every hour in their presence. Ru shared her excitement. Together, though, they realised they had an obligation to shift into a more structured methodology, using this opportunity to gather data rather than anecdote. The free-flowing exchanges of the early hours were all very well, but now it was time for discipline and rigor. Many of the cognitive tests they had performed on Crucible could be duplicated here, and these stood a real chance of answering questions only hinted at through dialogue. Language projected a bluff of intelligence, but no fakery could circumvent some of the more challenging tests in their arsenal. So they went down to the Tantors, excited and daunted by what lay ahead. Both knew that a few careful hours here could supplant the work of a lifetime back on Crucible.

  But when Goma entered their domain, she immediately saw that something was terribly wrong.

  Sadalmelik was on the ground.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It took Kanu a moment to realise he was mistaken – that the woman speaking from the glass was not in fact his mother. The error was forgivable: Chiku Yellow, Chiku Red and Chiku Green had once been a single individual, and their likenesses remained very similar despite vastly different personal histories.

  ‘You know her,’ Nissa said, studying his reaction.

  ‘She’s one of my mother’s three embodiments,’ Kanu replied in a near-whisper. ‘Chiku Green, who came to Crucible on the holoship. But I wasn’t her son – that was Mposi.’

  ‘This must be strange for you.’

  ‘Just a little,’ Kanu said, smiling at his own understatement, the exquisite sadness of the moment.

  Nissa took his hand as the figure continued speaking.

  ‘None of this is easy to explain,’ she said. ‘My story is complicated – so much so that even I am not sure of all its parts. But what matters now is only recent history. A number of very odd and surprising things have happened to me lately, and now they bring me to this place, and this recording.’

  Her voice was familiar – intensely, personally familiar – but as she spoke it phased in and out of clarity, like something recorded onto wax or cellulose and played back too many times.

  ‘Is it really her?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Our Covenant with the Watchkeepers,’ she said, ‘was for three individuals to travel into interstellar space with the machines. In return, the rest were allowed to settle and colonise Crucible, and to explore the Mandala.’ Chiku nodded and smiled. ‘It was a perfect Trinity: a synthesis of the born, the made and the evolved.’

  She paused and glanced down at her hands before raising her eyes back to her future audience. ‘They brought us here. We didn’t know where we were at first. Another solar system, one not so far away that we couldn’t recognise some of the constellations. It all happened very quickly. We must have travelled close to the speed of light because the journey did not appear to take more than a few days in our reference frame. Eventually we learned that this system is Gliese 163 – that we had tr
avelled seventy light-years. And, just as slowly, we began to understand why the Watchkeepers had brought us here.’

  The image glitched, remained frozen for a second or two, then jumped back to life. ‘By now, I’m guessing you already know about the second Mandala and the structures on Poseidon. You have probably wondered how they relate to the Watchkeepers, and the reason for their deeper interest in them. You must exercise extreme caution in relation to these structures.’

  ‘Thank you for the timely warning,’ Nissa said.

  But the image had frozen again. It jumped, the recording of Chiku shifting her posture as if frames had been skipped over.

  Skipped over, Kanu wondered, or deliberately edited?

  ‘We did what we could for the survivors of Zanzibar. They were in a bad way, and there was only so much help we could offer given the limited tools at our disposal. It was a huge challenge. This little fragment of our old holoship had to keep alive not just people, but also the Tantors still aboard. The early days were incredibly hard. It was a constant battle just to survive. Finding ways to return to Crucible, even generating enough power to send a transmission – those were luxuries we couldn’t begin to think about. It was tomorrow that counted, and the day after, not some possible rescue hundreds of years in the future. The—’

  Again the image jumped.

  Kanu glanced at Nissa. Privately, he was sure she was thinking the same thing. The recording might have suffered some natural breakdown, but it was more likely that it had been doctored. He wondered what Swift, who had been silent throughout, would make of it all.

  ‘In the end,’ Chiku continued, ‘the resource load was too great to support the entire population of survivors. We had the skipover vaults, but there was no hope of converting them to take elephants. So we reached a compromise. The Tantors would remain awake, but most of the human survivors would go into skipover. Some of us volunteered to stay with the Tantors to guide them through the difficulties of the coming years. Together – human and Tantor – we planned to work to expand Zanzibar’s life-support capability, to turn it into a world we could all begin to share. Once that was achieved, we could turn our collective efforts to the greater problem of getting home – if that was still what we wanted. Given my experience with Tantors, you’ll hardly be surprised to hear that I chose to stay with the living.’ She smiled. ‘Don’t think too highly of me. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice – I’d far rather be up and about, doing something, no matter the odds against us. With most of the colonists back in skipover, it was easier for the rest of us. Of course we always knew there would be difficult times ahead—’