Kanu leaned down for a better look through the window. ‘You did well. Hard to say, but I don’t think we can be much more than five kilometres from that wheel. We should be able to cross that, and then find a way to set up camp on the wheel.’
‘I hope they packed some climbing gear.’
‘We’ll manage,’ he said.
But the simpler truth was that he could think of better ways of dying than drowning in a sinking ship. Dying in open water was scarcely an improvement, but if it came to it, at least the choice would have been his. He knew they had no hope on the wheel, not now that its sheer size was so clear. And although it might only be a short distance from the waves up to the nearest groove – a scant few metres, probably – what use was that to an elephant?
They would die, all of them. But at least they would be moving.
‘That’s it,’ Nissa said, nodding at the horizon. ‘We’re picking up a definite list to the right. Noah’s flooding.’
‘Time to go.’
Dakota showed him to the onboard equipment store. It was well stocked, a mixture of the old and the new – items that must have come from Crucible and others fashioned more recently, for the express convenience of Tantors. They had supplementary oxygen supplies, water flasks, bales of compressed food concentrate. They decided to empty some of the flasks so they could serve as flotation aids. Meanwhile, Nissa and Kanu locked their helmets down over their neck rings but kept their external air valves open so they were not yet reliant on suit air. These were simple suits with a fixed supply of no more than twenty hours, and the less they used of that air now, the better. They strapped on as much of the equipment and supplies as they could manage.
Periodically, Nissa bent down to inspect the angle of the horizon, but Kanu could tell without looking that they were taking in more water. It was starting to become difficult to move around under the gee and a half of gravity and with the floor gaining a steepening tilt. Kanu moved to the side lock and operated the manual pressure equalisation, allowing Poseidon’s atmosphere to flood into Noah.
He inhaled deeply. It was oven-warm even after it had passed through the suit’s intake valve. The oxygen partial pressure was enough to keep them alive, although it would be similar to breathing at altitude. If there were organisms or toxins in the air, his suit had not yet detected them. Either way, he doubted they were his most pressing concern.
He opened both the inner and outer doors of the airlock. They were looking out over the wing that was already dipping down into the sea. The sun glared off it in an arc of brightness. The water had begun lapping over its furthest edge.
‘We need the rafts,’ Kanu said. ‘They’re in the external hold, just aft of the wing. It’s not underwater yet, but once it is we may find it hard to open against the sea pressure. I’m going in now.’
‘Take care,’ Nissa said.
He grinned back at her. ‘I used to be a merman.’
It was getting warm in his helmet – like inhaling the hot spent air from the mouth of a giant. The refrigeration cycle would not work properly until the suit was running off its own air supply, and he did not want to commit to that just yet. Outside, the temperature was a shade over fifty degrees. The organisms that floated on the ocean, the great green biomass rafts, were operating near the upper thermal limit for multicellular life forms.
He was out on the wing now. He moved to the edge, cautious on the slippery upper surface, and eased himself into a seated position, dipping booted feet into the water. He closed the intake valve and slid in. The water closed over him in an instant. Nets of sunlight wavered overhead. He surfaced and found that he was able to float, the suit providing sufficient buoyancy.
At least the waves were gentle. He swam to the cargo hold, most of its door still just above water. Next to the hold was a fold-back panel with scuffed stencilling in Swahili and Chinese. Kanu read enough to identify the panel as containing the manual release. He dug his gloved fingers into the gap around the panel and tried to hinge it back.
It would not move.
Kanu tried and tried again, but he had nothing to brace against and his fingertips refused to gain traction on the smooth, glossy material. Quickly he sensed that the effort was futile. Nissa was standing on the wing, leaning forwards to watch with her hands resting on her knees. Her voice boomed out through the amplifier in her neck ring. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Won’t work. Must’ve picked up some damage during the entry.’
‘Can Swift help?’
‘I think we’d have already heard by now if he could.’
The lander lurched, its tilt increasing by several degrees from one moment to the next. It stabilised, but the sudden change had nearly sent Nissa tumbling.
‘Something just flooded in a hurry.’
‘Get the Risen out,’ Kanu called. ‘Once it goes, it may go fast.’
‘What about the rafts?’
‘I don’t think we’re getting rafts. Not today.’
Neither Dakota nor Hector wanted to abandon dead Lucas, but when the lander tilted again, fear overcame their unwillingness. They shuffled out onto the wing, heavy under their burden of equipment, each footfall seeming to transmit itself through the fabric of the ship, into the water in which Kanu floated. He urged Nissa to join him, fearful that Noah was about to upend itself without warning. She held her mask for safety and splashed into the water. He reached out a hand, but Nissa was strong enough to tread water on her own.
The Risen were wearing their emergency spacesuits. They were made of a flexible grey fabric with accordioned limb joints, the round-eyed helmets similar in design to the one Dakota had already used. The suits would have been easier and quicker to don in the confined space of the shuttle, but to Kanu’s eyes they had a makeshift look about them, like something sewn together by prisoners as part of an escape attempt.
There was no graceful way for the Risen to enter the sea. They bounded off the wing, making two bomb-like splashes before resurfacing, armour-sheathed trunks periscoping for the sky in a pure reflex to immersion.
Dakota’s voice boomed from the white mask of her helmet. He had no trouble telling the two Tantors apart, for the differences in their size and body shape were still obvious despite the suits.
‘What is the difficulty, Kanu?’
‘We can’t use the rafts – the door’s jammed. We’ll have to swim for it. We can do that, can’t we? It’s not too far.’
‘In spacesuits?’ Nissa asked.
‘Better in them than out – we’d boil alive in these waters.’ He looked back at the floating ship, now listing hard to one side. ‘Whatever we do, I don’t think it’s a good idea to stay close to Noah.’
At least there was no wind or ocean current, and no doubt as to the direction in which they needed to swim. The wheel’s rim was the only landmark to be seen in any direction. The sky was cloudless. Even when the waves lapped high enough to hide its base, they could always see the wheel’s soaring flanks.
They swam out from the lander, the two humans setting the pace, the two Risen following. The going was not too hard at first. Kanu kept looking back, to reassure himself that Dakota and Hector were indeed still with them. He heard the regular huff and chuff of their suits’ life-support systems – oxygen packs strapped like panniers to either side of them – but beyond that they made little noise, with all the work of swimming going on under the surface. It struck him as profoundly absurd that elephants should be so capable in water, but there was the evidence. Not that it was easy for them, for they felt the pull of gravity just as surely as on land, and it took work to move those muscles and bones.
Kanu and Nissa floated well enough but they needed to move arms and legs to make any headway in the direction of the wheel. That was fine for a while, but before long Kanu felt himself beginning to overheat. Immersed in water, the suits were having trouble keeping their wearers cool. Kanu found hi
mself needing to pause, allowing his strength to recover and the suit to chill down again from his labours. He tried to find a posture that kept as much of his backpack out of the sea as possible, giving its radiators the best chance to work. He hoped all the critical systems were watertight.
‘It’s as far away as ever,’ Nissa said when they stopped for the fourth time.
Kanu could not disagree. Equally, the lander now looked very distant, so they had come some way. While they paused, he watched Noah with agonies of indecision. It had not sunk so far, and the angle of its tilt did not appear to have worsened since they abandoned it. Perhaps they had made a terrible miscalculation in surrendering their chances to the sea. Could they make it back? It was better than their chances of getting to the still-distant wheel, he reckoned.
‘Look,’ Nissa said.
She was nodding back to the only other thing visible besides the wheel and the four swimmers.
Something was taking Noah.
A dark mass, grey-green, glossily brilliant and quilted with scales, had swelled up from the water and enclosed some muscular parts of itself around the lander. From this low, bobbing vantage he could make out no more than that. Perhaps that was for the best.
‘There aren’t supposed to be monsters here,’ he said, feeling oddly calm in spite of himself. ‘It’s too warm. Nothing multicellular should be able to hold itself together.’
‘We’re multicellular,’ Nissa said, still watching as the grey-green thing hauled Noah out of sight.
‘For now.’
‘Is that a joke?’
‘Not a good one. I apologise.’
Kanu supposed that the monster must have come up to the surface from much cooler depths below, kilometers down, where perhaps a whole marine ecology lay waiting and undiscovered. Perhaps, once in a great while, the denizens of these cool black layers detected some surface disturbance which made the journey into the warm layers worth the risk of overheating.
After that, there was no point looking back. They swam on because to do otherwise was to leave space in their thoughts to dwell on the apparition. But the swimming cost Kanu so much of himself that after willing his arms and legs into motion, he had nothing else to spare. A sea-monster of some kind. But he had known sea-monsters and not all of them were monstrous.
Swim. Keep swimming.
Stop thinking.
The wheel shimmered and wobbled before him like a line of smoke in a thermal. The waterline bobbed up and down the glass of his faceplate. The air above the sea cut the horizon into ribbons, buckling it with mirage heat. He still had the dizzy sense that the wheel was moving.
‘I think—’ Nissa began.
‘Don’t speak. Save your energy. We still have a long way to go.’
Soon they had to stop again. The temperature inside his suit was unbearable now, his breath fogging the faceplate like the inside of a sweltering greenhouse. He wanted to remove the helmet, be rid of that glass, but the air outside was no cooler than the water. It had become a struggle even to maintain the correct angle in the water to prevent his backpack from being fully immersed.
‘Kanu,’ a voice said finally.
‘Swift. Yes.’
‘You must fight, Kanu. Fight or I will do it for you. Is that understood?’
‘I can do it.’
‘Then do it. I would much sooner spare you the indignity of being puppeteered because you lack the will to overcome your own tiredness.’
‘Fuck you, Swift.’
‘Good. Anger. Anger is an excellent sign. Now put some of that anger into your arms and legs.’
He did, for a little while. He would show Swift that he still had the determination to strike forward, to push through the pain and fatigue. But the effort was temporary, and by the end of it the suit had become a furnace, his own sweat stinging his eyes, his breathing ragged.
‘Kanu!’
‘I’m sorry, Swift. I need to rest.’
There was an interlude, a dream of coolness, and then he awoke. He was still hot, still drained, but he was not in water now. He had come to rest on a warm, dry surface, like a sun-baked boulder. He had taken off his helmet but was still holding it in one hand even as he lay sprawled like a drunkard. Through pained, salt-encrusted eyes he made out Nissa a little to his right. She was on a boulder, too, prone atop its ridged upper surface, head lolling away from him. Her foot dragged through the water.
The boulder moved under him. Beneath a membrane of flexible grey material it was breathing.
Kanu understood. The Risen were ferrying them over the water, to the wheel. Dakota was under him; Hector beneath Nissa. They were lying on the backs of swimming elephants.
The nearer they came, the more impossibly sheer the wheel looked. It ascended vertically for what looked like dozens of kilometres, until finally, resentfully, it began to arc over. Climb that? Kanu thought. Not in a million years, even if there was some way to get from one groove to the next. Could they worm their way up the near-vertical grooves cut into the rim rather than the horizontal ones in the tread? It would be no easier, he reckoned – and after the Risen had brought them this far, he could not countenance abandoning them.
‘Kanu.’ It was Nissa, her voice hoarse.
‘Try not to speak too much,’ he said. ‘We’ll tap into the fluid rations when we reach the wheel.’
‘Look up.’
‘I am looking up.’
‘Not at the wheel, merman. The moons.’
It took his tired, salt-gummed eyes a few moments to pick out the tiny orbs of the moons against the sky’s blue. He had not noticed them before, and had given no thought to how they must appear from Poseidon’s surface, from within the atmosphere. But however he might have imagined them, it was not like this.
‘They’re lining up.’
‘I know.’
‘What does that mean? Is it good or bad?’
‘We’ll find out,’ Nissa said.
He woke again. They were at the wheel, a few scant elephant-lengths from the tread. They had arrived close to the right side of the tread, not far from the right angle between the tread and rim. Kanu felt a shudder of vertigo, imagining the wheel’s continuation beneath the visible surface, plunging down through tens of kilometres of darkening water, enduring pressures beyond anything in his experience on either Earth or Europa. He had never felt vertigo in water before. Water was his element, the place where he felt safest. Water sustained, water provided, water gave him suspension.
Not here.
‘It’s turning,’ Nissa said. ‘I’ve been watching it for a while, and there’s no doubt.’
‘The wheels don’t turn.’ He had no strength for discussion, but the last thing he wanted was for Nissa to pin her hopes on something ridiculous. ‘We scanned them from orbit. Icebreaker would have seen signs of movement.’
‘Not then. Now,’ Nissa said. ‘The moons have changed, so why not the wheels? Besides, we’re close enough to see the grooves clearly now. Close enough to fix on them and watch them – they’re coming out of the water, one at a time, and going up. The wheel’s turning, or rolling.’
From his perch on Dakota’s back, he stared with as much concentration and focus as he could muster. The motion was slow – easy to miss when they were further away, with the rise and fall of the waves to confuse their eyes.
Not now.
It took about three seconds for a metre of the wheel to emerge from the sea. About every thirty seconds, an entirely new groove emerged. He tracked the latest one – watched it inch slowly above the sea, water sluicing out of it, until the next groove came into view.
‘We can get on it,’ Nissa said. ‘We all can.’
‘Yes.’
The Tantors were slower now, their strength ebbing. Kanu put his helmet on, again seeing the world through steam-smeared glass. He slipped from Dak
ota’s back into the blood-hot bath of the water. He bobbed, forced his limbs into motion. It felt as if the water were turning to something solid, like a cast setting around him. Nissa replaced her helmet and slid off Hector to join him in the water. She looked as exhausted as he felt.
They closed the distance to the wheel, but the last couple of hundred metres were a kind of torture. They were swimming so slowly by then, all of them, that the wheel must have been rolling away at nearly the same speed. They had to fight not only to keep up with it, but also to close the gap. He lost any sense of how long that final closing took – it could have been minutes or hours. All he knew was that when they were finally at the wheel’s side, he had given everything he had.
But at least there was no doubt that it was turning. The wheel made no noise, not even up close, except for the slosh as the water drained out of each kilometre-wide groove. The sloshing was nearly continuous, each newly emerged groove adding to the sound as the one above began to empty. It was like ocean breakers, a lulling, pleasing sound.
The grooves rose out of the water slower than walking pace, but they were only three or four metres from top to bottom – between nine and twelve seconds’ worth of ascent time. After that came a stretch of smooth, flawless surface until the top edge of the next groove appeared. They would have no purchase on that, and no chance to cross from one groove to the next. Once they were in a particular groove, there would be no way off – no way of reversing their decision.
‘Spread out,’ Kanu said, summoning the energy to talk as he trod water. ‘We all want to be on the same groove. No good being one above the other – we may as well be kilometres apart.’
Nissa had swum to within almost touching distance of the wheel. ‘One chance,’ she agreed. ‘That’s all we have. When the ceiling appears out of the water, we’ll swim into the gap – let the floor rise up under us, push us out of the water.’
‘The grooves vary in height,’ Kanu said.
‘Yes.’
‘And we can’t see that height until the floor’s already under us.’
Poseidon's Wake Page 64
