Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  Eunice nodded slowly, as if some great truth had disclosed itself to her. ‘Then we’re similar.’

  ‘You and me, or you and Ru?’

  ‘All three of us, I think. I like people – much more than my reputation would suggest. I’ve experienced happiness and loneliness, and I know which I prefer. I was married once, to a man called Jonathan Beza, who made money selling mobile telephones. A good, kind man, but we drifted apart. I couldn’t stay still, whereas Jonathan could. We watched the sun go down on Mars. As we held hands in our suits, Jonathan said to me, “I could watch this happen a thousand times and never grow bored of it.” And I found myself thinking: sunsets are all well and good, but who wants to see the same one twice?’

  ‘Almost all of humanity except for you.’

  ‘Well, yes. I never said I wasn’t an outlier. But nor am I a hermit. On Zanzibar, it was a joy when Chiku Green found me. Another face, another head to swim around in. And I have enjoyed seeing new faces on Orison.’

  ‘Until, as they say, all guests begin to stink.’

  ‘You don’t. Neither does Ru. I am not sorry I acted quickly to quarantine her, but I do regret hurting her.’

  ‘You had cause to be angry.’

  ‘But a moment’s consideration would have told me she was unlikely to be the knowing instrument of a sabotage plot. Do you think she will forgive me, after the pain I’ve caused?’

  ‘You’d have to ask her.’ But Goma remembered the agonised shriek Ru had let out and the fear in her eyes as Eunice transformed from friend to enemy, like the turning of the weather.

  Justifiable, under the circumstances. But forgivable?

  Knowing her wife as she did, Goma was not so sure of that.

  A day passed, and then another. On the morning of the third day, Sadalmelik died. They were with him when it happened, although the Tantor had long since lost consciousness. Even Eunice had resigned herself to the inevitable by then, accepting that the battle was not to save Sadalmelik but to help Eldasich and Achernar. In their cases the infection had not been so advanced, and it appeared that the broad-spectrum antivirals had brought some valuable time – a window in which it might be possible to develop and administer something more effective.

  The Tantors were still quarantined – Eldasich and Achernar in their own separate chambers, Atria, Mimosa and Keid in a temporary holding area where they could be relieved of their heavy, hulking spacesuits. By then it was clear that the infection could only have been passed via close proximity or direct contact and not through the air-circulation system. Nonetheless, Eunice refused to take any chances.

  During the long vigil with Sadalmelik, Goma was often alone with Eunice as they did what they could to ease the Tantor’s suffering.

  ‘It was true what I said, about welcoming new faces,’ Eunice said, ‘but Sadalmelik has been a good friend to me over the years. We are different, yes – you only have to spend a few minutes with them to know that. They feel time differently from us. But partners don’t have to be alike. We could be so strong together – so useful.’

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever learn to get along?’

  ‘Each death makes it harder.’ She squeezed out a sponge, moistening the area around Sadalmelik’s sightless, gummed-over eye. ‘All our crimes against them have been senseless, but there’s a special idiocy about this one. Your doctor must have planned this before you even left Crucible.’

  ‘He probably did,’ Goma said, thinking of the demolition charges smuggled aboard Travertine. ‘I think he meant to get close enough to the Tantors to hurt them by destroying the ship – literally blowing it up in their faces. Suicide, obviously, unless he planned to put those charges aboard the lander. That failed – Mposi flushed out the threat – so he fell back on the virus. But even that wasn’t straightforward since he didn’t know that the majority of the Tantors were still aboard Zanzibar.’

  ‘He didn’t even know about the six here until he landed.’

  ‘That’s true. But if they were anywhere, the odds were pretty good that they’d be near you. He was wrong – thankfully.’

  ‘Not that it did Sadalmelik any good.’ After a silence, she added, ‘What put so much hate into someone, Goma?’

  ‘Not hate, exactly – I mean, how could he hate something he’d never known? More likely fear, I suspect.’

  ‘Fear of sharing the universe with another thinking species?’

  ‘Fear that the Tantors will always be something . . . wrong, I suppose – a mistake born from a mistake.’

  ‘Fucking stupidity. Is there any part of this universe that didn’t start out as a mistake?’

  ‘Not everyone has your perspective. And right now, I wish more of us did.’

  ‘Sadalmelik never knew Zanzibar – only ever this world, these closed-in spaces, these airlocks and spacesuits. Me for company. Me as his sole living example of a human being. And yet when we talked, I had to remind myself that he had never walked in those places, never known how they smelled, how they sounded. That’s what the Remembering is like, Goma – it’s more than recollection, passed-down stories, oral history. They feel it. It’s deep within them – a bridge of blood between the present and the past. He remembered Earth. He spoke of it not as something he’d been told about, but as a world he knew in his bones. As if he ached for blue skies, hard sunlight, the promise of the long rains. Life as an elephant – simple as breathing, hard as death, the joy and the sadness of being alive. Nothing was ever easy for them. But nothing was ever as strong, either. They were born knowing they were the kings of creation. They took the worst that the world could throw at them, including humanity.’

  ‘You weren’t such a bad companion,’ Goma said.

  ‘I tried to be what I could for them.’

  ‘And you succeeded. If there are debts to be repaid, yours is done. Whatever you are, whatever you were, you’ve achieved one human thing – you’ve been kind to the Tantors.’

  Eunice touched Sadalmelik’s trunk, now quite cool and still. ‘He is passing.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I never speak of death in their presence. It’s not that they don’t understand, or need protecting from the truth. They understand perfectly well. They just find our view of it somewhat simplistic – limited, even. You won’t speak of death, will you?’

  ‘I promise,’ Goma said.

  Eldasich rallied; Achernar worsened. On the fourth day he entered a coma. On the fifth, as Sadalmelik had done before him, he passed. It turned out they were brothers, born to a mother who had lived with Eunice in the earlier years of her exile.

  The deaths were harrowing but by the time Achernar succumbed it was clear that the remaining four Tantors were now out of danger. The lander had made a return trip to Travertine, bringing better medicines from the well-equipped suites in orbit. These were administered to both people and Tantors, and after some adjustment of the relative dosages, the virus was in retreat. It had been studied, understood, its vulnerabilities pinpointed. It was clever, and engineered to hurt Tantors much more than humans, but it was not infallible. They were far from Crucible now, but their government had equipped the ship with the best tools at hand, and unlike Dr Nhamedjo they were not obliged to work in secrecy.

  Ru, now also recovering from the infection, was released from quarantine. The experience had been harrowing, and it was clear to Goma that it was going to take more than her reassurances to rebuild her trust in Eunice.

  ‘I saw it in her eyes,’ Ru said. ‘The naked hate. And felt her strength. She might be skin and bones now, but she’s still a machine. She was only a twitch away from killing me.’

  ‘She’s human.’

  ‘And that’s meant to set my mind at ease?’

  ‘She regrets what she did to you. It was a heat-of-the-moment thing – you saw how much the Tantors mean to her. She knew that someone had tried to hurt them and y
ou were the nearest thing to a suspect.’

  ‘I never want to be around her again. No, I’ll qualify that – around that thing shaped like your ancestor.’

  It pained Goma, but she could hardly blame Ru.

  ‘She likes you.’

  ‘You mean she’s saying whatever she needs to, to keep you on her side.’

  Goma had not thought of it in those terms, but now Ru had put the idea into her mind, it established itself with a nasty tenacity. Perhaps it was true. But then she thought back to Eunice’s tenderness with the dying Sadalmelik, the genuine and touching empathy she had shown. Yes, she had treated Ru badly. But it was a human thing to err, and a human thing to feel remorse afterwards.

  In any case, Ru would have to accept sharing a ship with Eunice whether she cared to or not. They were leaving soon. Complicated arrangements were already in hand.

  The remaining Tantors could not come with them – there was simply no means of providing for them aboard Travertine – but neither could they be expected to maintain the camp on their own during Eunice’s absence. Consequently, out of the remaining crew in orbit, a small delegation of technical specialists would be brought down and trained to care for the Tantors, instructed in the rudiments of life-support maintenance and briefed in the newly developing field of human–Tantor diplomatic relations. After an overlap period of a few days, the initial landing party would depart for Zanzibar.

  They would not be gone for long – weeks at most.

  First, though, there was the business of two Tantor funerals.

  During the long years of her exile, Eunice had faced numerous times perhaps the hardest of all the decisions forced upon her by time and circumstance: what to do with the dead.

  Nothing burned on the surface of Orison, nothing decayed.

  The encampment was a closed-cycle ecosystem, its own life-support bubble, but no such system was entirely efficient. The dead were significant reservoirs of stored chemical wealth, demanding – by all considerations of logic and wise management – to be recycled back into the matrix, broken down into their useful constituents. Planetary ecologies did it all the time – the endless conveyor belt of birth, growth and predation. There was nothing unnatural or distasteful about it, and she ought to have felt no qualms about employing the corpses of her friends for the betterment of the camp.

  But she could not bring herself to do it, even though – as she was fully aware – in this act of refusal she was only storing up problems for the future.

  But they had been her friends, her allies, her companions. It was the least she could do for them.

  Fortunately the deaths came infrequently and she had never needed to contend with two in close succession before. There was another consideration. She hated the idea of all four of them being outside at once. They were as precious as jewels, more vulnerable than they knew. She could not bear the thought of something happening to all four of them at once. When the earlier deaths had occurred, she had persuaded her friends to take turns going outside.

  But now the four of them went out together, Atria, Mimosa, Keid, Eldasich, bearing the wrapped corpse of Sadalmelik, a burden that would have been impossible even for Tantors to move without the power augmentation of their suits. They carried him between them, Sadalmelik laid on a bower formed from a heavy-duty cargo sled, their armoured trunks wrapped around the handles at each corner. They took him beyond the lander, out along one of the trails, until at last they reached a rocky elevation where they set him down.

  The humans followed behind, but when the Tantors surmounted the burial spot, Eunice directed the people to remain where they were.

  The Tantors removed Sadalmelik from the bower, set him on the raised ground and brought the bower back down to the level plain. Decorously, without haste, the Tantors loaded the bower with an assortment of boulders and pebbles. They hauled the bower back up to Sadalmelik and began to construct a cairn around his reposed form. This took quite some while and entailed many trips back and forth with the sled. They worked in silence, no word or vocalisation breaking across the humans’ suit channels – only the slow, patient bellowing of furnace-sized lungs. Finally – after much deliberation and careful rearrangement of stones – the Tantors completed their cairn. It enclosed Sadalmelik completely, an igloo of interlocking rocks.

  Then they returned to fetch Achernar.

  Eunice signalled the human party. They proceeded up the slope and placed their own small stones and pebbles onto the cairn, taking care not to disrupt those already in place.

  ‘For the Tantors,’ Eunice said, confiding in a low voice, ‘these stones are anchors of memory.’ She placed a rock of her own onto the cairn. ‘Let the memory of Chiku Green find the memory of Sadalmelik, and both be stronger for it.’

  ‘For Ndege and Mposi,’ Goma said, placing two similar pebbles into the cairn.

  Ru stepped to her side and set her own piece down. ‘For Agrippa, and everyone we left behind on Crucible.’

  Soon, the Tantors returned with Achernar’s bower and set his body a short distance from the first cairn. As before, the human party watched the Tantors assemble a stone mound around the remains, and then they joined them and made their own offerings to the cairn.

  ‘For all the dead of Zanzibar,’ Goma said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Kanu hammered the metal staff against the floor, summoning Memphis in the agreed manner. He felt sick, literally on the verge of vomiting, but he knew his only choice was to confront the matriarch directly. It was no good continuing in this state of ignorance, accepting that answers would be provided in the fullness of time.

  ‘Kanu,’ Swift said, ‘might I suggest a period of reflection before you engage in rash action?’

  ‘You can suggest whatever you like.’

  ‘You will have to account for your knowledge of these supposed events. How will you do that without revealing my presence?’

  ‘I’ll just ask the obvious questions I should have asked all along.’

  ‘With respect, you did ask those questions – and answers were forthcoming, regardless of their veracity. The construct broke down and was dismantled; Chiku and the others succumbed to gradual systematic life-support failures. Might I remind you that we have precisely no evidence to the contrary?’

  ‘Except Chiku’s testimony.’

  ‘We have Chiku’s expressed concerns relating to events which had not only failed to happen at the time of her recording, but which may never have happened.’

  ‘Shut up, Swift.’

  ‘Seconded,’ Nissa said.

  They had never requested Memphis’s presence until now, and this was an hour when they might have been expected to be resting. But Kanu was not prepared to sleep on his fears. He kept hammering on the floor.

  ‘If nothing happens, I’m going to walk there. I think I can find my way out of this place if I try hard enough.’

  Before long they heard the thudding footfalls and deep vocal rumblings of the Risen. The main doors opened and a pair of elephants entered the central hallway.

  ‘Is Memphis here?’ Kanu asked.

  ‘Memphis is outside. You asked for the Risen.’

  ‘Take us to Memphis,’ Nissa said.

  These subordinate Risen were clearly content to do exactly as they were told – to a point. Kanu and Nissa were allowed out of the household. On the level ground before the main entrance waited Memphis and the wheeled vehicle.

  ‘You called,’ Memphis said.

  ‘We want to speak to Dakota,’ Nissa answered.

  After a short silence, the huge bull said, ‘Now is not the time.’

  Kanu shook his head, anger overcoming his instinctive wariness of the larger creature. ‘I don’t care whether it’s the time or not. We have something to say – it’s very important. Take us to see her. Now.’

  ‘You have asked ma
ny things already.’

  ‘Not nearly enough,’ Nissa said.

  Memphis eventually relented, and they were soon on their way. As they travelled, Kanu turned the same thoughts over again and again, trying to find some sense in them. There had been people here once, coexisting with elephants, and now – by the evidence of his eyes – there were none. Had these slow and gentle creatures committed the worst of crimes, a kind of genocide? He could not begin to imagine how it might have happened, nor did he wish to dwell too long on the possibilities. There had to be some other explanation – one that absolved the Risen of any wrongdoing. He did not want to think of his hosts as murderers.

  And yet, Chiku must have thought it possible. And she had known elephants as well as anyone.

  He had no idea of Dakota’s sleeping habits – if indeed she slept – and was not surprised therefore to find her awake and alert when they were finally admitted into her presence. They were in the grand lobby of the civic building where only a little while earlier they had viewed the recording.

  ‘You may wait outside, Memphis.’

  Soon they were alone – just Kanu, Nissa and the matriarch.

  ‘Something has troubled you,’ she said, after a long silence.

  ‘It’s time to tell us what really happened,’ Kanu said.

  ‘Have I not been open and honest with you thus far?’

  ‘Where are all the people, Dakota?’ Nissa said. ‘What happened after Chiku made that recording?’

  ‘I gather from Memphis that you requested a second viewing.’

  ‘Answer my question,’ Nissa said.

  ‘I do not care for your tone. What answers have I not already provided? I told you what became of the construct, and of Chiku. These were tragedies, and they left us weakened. Yet we recovered. What more is there to say?’

  Kanu asked bluntly, ‘Did you kill them? Not just Chiku, not just Eunice, but all of the people who agreed to stay awake?’

  ‘Why would we have killed them? What purpose would that have served?’