Poseidon's Wake (55 page)

Not to whisper it, as Ndege had done, in the muted
sotto voce
of screens and shadows, but to proclaim it in the fierce, focused light of Paladin’s own star.

To speak the words of truth to the Mandala, in the form of address it expected.

To make it sing.

Ru, for her part, wondered why no one had found the good sense to kill the old hag. She had cheated them all – lied about her control of the mirrors, lied about her intentions. And now the Mandala was changing so fast that the moment must be nearly upon them.

She remembered the impression Eunice’s hands had left in her flesh as she was dragged into quarantine, fingers and nails pressing into her as if she were human clay. Only Ru had been near enough to see the hate in the old woman’s eyes; only Ru knew how close Eunice had come to murdering her there and then in a spasm of fury and recrimination. None of the others had seen it, not even Goma.

Ru had tried to understand. It was true that the Tantors’ lives had been threatened; true that the disease in her blood made Ru look like the automatic culprit. But she had done nothing wrong, and Eunice had only been a twitch away from killing her.

No one else saw that. And now she had trumped that with this monstrous, egomaniacal act – this act of godlike, spiteful indifference to the lives of the mere mortals around her.

Making Mandala sing just because she could.

Goma Akinya, meanwhile, could think only of the lost opportunities. They had met the Tantors on Orison. Even with the deaths of Sadalmelik and Achernar, she could not fail to find wonder in those hours she had spent in their presence. To know the minds of elephants when that possibility had been closed to her for most of her life – it had been a blessing, a bounty, a miracle. But the six Tantors who had shared Eunice’s camp could hardly be compared with the thousands more on
Zanzibar
. Eunice’s Tantors were companions, not servants. But they never had a chance to evolve their own social structures, to become fully independent. It would be a joy to see how elephants ran a world when that world was theirs to run.

That chance was gone now – or soon to be gone.

She had been granted a glimpse of something wonderful, promised that it would be hers, and been foolish enough to believe she would get her due.

Elsewhere, observing events from viewpoints remote and chilly, Watchkeepers gathered data and found that it did not tally with anything in their immediate experience. The Mandala had been changing for centuries – moments by their galactically slow and patient reckoning – but in these last instants the changing had accelerated asymptotically, and that acceleration had very clearly been precipitated by the actions of the organic intelligences now active around Gliese 163.

The Watchkeepers had uses for some of these intelligences; less for others. They also had their own names for things. They had never shaped a thought remotely congruent with ‘Mandala’ and the terms of reference they used for the worlds and star of this dim little solar system were simply not translatable into human terms. They were best considered as compilations, event strings with the scope of infinite extensibility. In the language of the Watchkeepers, no word was ever uttered to completion, no sentence ever finished. There was only an endless branching utterance, sagas that begat sagas, until time immemorial.

The Watchkeepers were not capable of sadness, or of self-doubt, or at least no states of being that could be flattened into such simple human terms. But much as a hypersphere is the higher-dimensional analogue of a circle, they were capable of a kind of hyper-puzzlement, a kind of profound, vexing mismatch between expectation and external reality.

It puzzled the Watchkeepers that these living intelligences were able to make use of the Mandala when they were not permitted to do so. It puzzled them that these busy, buzzing creatures were tolerated within close proximity to Poseidon. It caused them to question the reliability of their own simulations of long-term survival. If they could not understand everything happening here, now, in the space around Gliese 163, in this system where the M-builders had left their traces, then nothing else could be depended upon. The Watchkeepers were used to being right and certain about things. This intrusion of doubt troubled them.

But not much. Being troubled was a state of existence most closely associated with fully conscious infovores, and the Watchkeepers had forgotten how to be conscious. Occasionally, as if surfacing from a bad dream, they felt a dim apprehension that something within them was missing; that what had been present was now absent. They felt hollow where once they had been full. It was an odd and contradictory impression because all rational data pointed to the Watchkeepers being more powerful than at any point in their history to date. How could something have been lost?

It was not possible.

But it was at instants like this, when the universe did something they were not expecting, that the Watchkeepers were at their most introspective. They pulled their scales tight, treasuring their blue light within. They reduced their communication with neighbouring Watchkeepers, becoming isolated units.

They watched and thought and skirted the edges of a regret as old and mysterious as the gaps between the galaxies.

And then the moment was upon them all.

The Mandala reached its final configuration.
Zanzibar
had arrived in the space directly above it. There was a flash, an energy release – space shearing and curdling and screaming its agonies in a flare of photons across the entire spectrum from gamma to the longest of radio wavelengths.

The flash originated neither at the Mandala nor in
Zanzibar
, but rather from a volume of space between the two. On Crucible, it had occurred just above the atmosphere. Here there was nothing to stop the flood of radiation from lashing down on Paladin. But it was brief, lasting barely longer than the time it took for light to cross the space between the Mandala and
Zanzibar
.

And
Zanzibar
moved again.

There was no measurable acceleration, nothing that human or alien recording devices could quantify. Between one moment and the next,
Zanzibar
went from being in orbit to travelling at an infinitesimal fraction less than the speed of light. From mere kilometres a second, relative to Paladin’s surface, to something in the vicinity of three hundred thousand. If indeed there had been acceleration, it must have acted uniformly on every atom of
Zanzibar
and its occupants – or perhaps on the very space–time in which it was embedded, swept up to speed like a leaf in a current. No matter in the universe could have retained its integrity under such forces, much less a thing of rock and ice, metal and air, filled with living creatures.

Later, when the observations had been collated and examined, it would be determined that
Zanzibar
had shown the effects of extreme relativistic length contraction: that the potato-shaped fragment of the original holoship had been reduced to a circular pancake, massively compressed by frame contraction. Instead of a solid thing, it appeared to have become a disc, a stamped-out impression of itself.

The survivors of the original contraction had reported no experience of subjective time as they travelled between Crucible and Gliese 163. This could only mean that they were experiencing time-dilation factors of at least several billion. Such an inference had sounded doubtful before, but the new measurement of the frame contraction made it look much more probable.

The same thing had happened again. Hard as it was to credit, that paper-thin disc contained the entirety of
Zanzibar
. Its chambers, its cities, the Risen, the skipover vaults – all were still present, pressed against each other, ready to be unpacked like a folded-up doll’s house. Within that subjective realm, nothing would have felt out of the ordinary.

The original survivors had reported no elapsed time, but their first journey had been relatively short. Seventy light-years, after all, was a scratch against the galaxy.

Who knew where
Zanzibar
was headed now?

No one.

Least of all Eunice Akinya.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Mandala was quieting, cycling through an ever-slowing sequence of changes. The mirrors had withdrawn, their purpose served. Aboard
Mposi
, Eunice surrendered herself to the consequences of her actions. She had done something that would be hard to explain, but the right course had presented itself to her with the supreme and ecstatic clarity of a temporal-lobe vision. She knew, given the choice, that she would do it again in an instant.

‘It was the only way.’

They had bound her to a chair using its acceleration straps. She had made no effort to resist, offering herself up as compliantly as a puppet. Whatever they decided to do with her, she would accept.

‘Explain,’ Vasin said.

‘Kanu couldn’t turn around if there was a chance of the Friends being harmed. To begin with, I hoped Dakota wouldn’t go so far as to start killing them. Once she did, though, I saw no option but to initiate the translation.’

‘You worked very quickly,’ Karayan said.

‘I’d already prepared the groundwork. I’ve been thinking about the possibilities for a long time – almost as long as I was on Orison. It was always clear to me that a second Mandala event would shake things up a bit if the need ever arose. Of course, I didn’t have all the pieces until I saw Ndege’s work. And even then I didn’t have the means to make it happen. Not until we found the mirrors.’

‘But you had this plan at the back of your mind the whole time?’ Vasin said.

‘I’m all for spur-of-the-moment decisions, but sometimes you have to play the long game.’

‘Half the crew want to kill you,’ Goma said.

‘I don’t blame them.’

‘If I were you, I’d start presenting a few arguments in your defence. It looks as if you just committed mass murder.’

‘She did,’ Ru said.

‘I didn’t kill
anyone
.
Zanzibar
survived one translation; it will make it through another. The chances are better this time: there’s no debris left behind so the effect was cleaner, nothing outside the edges of the field. I think they will do perfectly well – thrive, most likely.’

‘You don’t even know where they’ve gone!’ Vasin said.

‘Where they’re going. It’s true – I don’t know. I didn’t have time to finesse anything to that degree. I couldn’t even be sure it would work! But the Mandala won’t have just sent them in a random direction. We’ll work it out – backtrack to the moment of the event, identify the candidate stars in the general angle of view. Then we’ll know.’

‘You’re so pleased with yourself,’ Ru accused.

‘Pleased that I’ve given Kanu a hope of digging his way out of that mess he’s in? Yes, I am. Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘You know nothing about Kanu’s situation,’ Grave said. ‘Wishing to turn around and being able to – they’re not the same thing. You’ve staked countless lives on this gamble.’

‘I haven’t.’

‘How can you know?’ asked Vasin.

‘Because I’ve spoken to Swift,’ Eunice answered.

And for a moment there was silence, until Goma asked the question they must all have been thinking.

‘Who the hell is Swift?’

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

There was darkness, and then there was light. For a few seconds
Icebreaker
had gone dead, all its displays inactive, its interior illumination shut off, the background noise of its life-support systems silenced. Even the Chibesa core had fallen to a sudden and ominous stillness. Nothing in Kanu’s prior experience of the ship had prepared him for this, not even the Watchkeeper’s attack.

As the systems began to recover – emergency lights coming on in the bridge, fans restarting, a chorus of recorded voices informing him of various status indications – Nissa and the Tantors began to speak at once.

‘What has happened, Kanu?’ Dakota asked.

‘I don’t know.’

The elephant persisted. ‘Do you think it is connected to the Mandala event – the energy spilling out from Paladin?’

‘
Zanzibar
must have streaked past pretty close,’ Nissa said. ‘Maybe we got buffeted by . . . something?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kanu repeated.

For once, he had no need of a mask, no need to lie. He genuinely had no idea what had just happened – he had neither initiated it nor expected it. But the more he thought about it, the less likely it felt to him that the Mandala event itself had anything to do with
Icebreaker
going dark. They had witnessed the event and the ship’s normal functions had continued uninterrupted, registering nothing of immediate concern within its environment.
Zanzibar
was long gone before the arrival of whatever hit
Icebreaker
.

Whatever this was, it must have been initiated locally, whether by accident or design.

A dark suspicion began to form.

‘Talk to me, Swift,’ Kanu subvocalised.

‘Ah, you can still hear me. That’s excellent. I wasn’t totally sure, you know. A shock to the ship of this magnitude – who knows what the collateral effects might be?’

‘I can hear you. Now talk to me.’

Kanu was still in semi-darkness, but he was not alone. Nissa was next to him, both of them seated. Dakota and the other Risen were still present, too, but drifting free of the floor. Their huge breathing presences were tumbling like boulders – there was nothing fixed within reach of a trunk or foot to arrest their motion.

Presumably they were just as bewildered by this latest development as Kanu. Or perhaps, having witnessed the Mandala event, their capacity for astonishment had been overloaded like a blown circuit. He could relate to that well enough.

‘The ship is ours again, Kanu,’ Swift said. ‘Or it will be, soon enough.’

‘It was never not ours.’

‘You know exactly what I mean. We were unable to take decisive action while the Friends were in jeopardy. Now they are no longer in jeopardy – or at least their prospective fates lie completely beyond our influence. That frees us, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘You made the ship do this?’ Nissa asked through the same subvocal channel. ‘You could do this all along, and you waited until now?’

‘You are both silent, yet I sense deliberation,’ Dakota said. ‘I will ask again. What do you know of this event – both of you?’

‘Some fault in the ship,’ Kanu said, for the sake of giving her something. ‘That’s all I know.’

More of the lights and displays were coming online now and the recorded warnings were beginning to die down. The ship was restarting itself, cycling through health and calibration checks, but the process appeared to be running without complication.

‘Your ship seemed reliable until now,’ Dakota answered. ‘Do you have an explanation for this sudden fault?’

‘Nothing I’d bet my life on,’ Kanu said.

She rammed the ceiling and tucked her trunk around a structural member. ‘Try me anyway.’

‘Clearly we missed something. But the ship’s coming back to us. When we have full functionality, the event logs should explain what the problem was.’

‘I find it telling that it happened so soon after the atrocity we just witnessed.’

‘I wouldn’t read too much into that. Can you get down from there?’

A lurch signalled the centrifugal wheel restarting itself, providing gravity in the absence of thrust. Dakota held on for a few seconds while the spin slowly phased in, then allowed herself to ‘fall’ the short distance to the floor. She landed hard enough to send a solid thud through the fabric of the ship. Hector and Lucas found their own footing, stumbling and then regaining balance.

‘Are you being honest with me, Kanu?’ Dakota asked.

‘No, he isn’t. But don’t blame him for that. He’s not responsible for me – at least, not entirely.’

The sounds were coming from Kanu, but Swift was generating the words. Kanu had no control over them. With the same absence of volition, Kanu rose from his seat. They had reached normal gravity. He walked around until he faced the Risen and gave a small bow, tucking his hand against his belly.

‘Permit me to introduce myself,’ he said.

Dakota eyes glittered with vehemence. ‘What is this?’

‘I am Swift. We haven’t met.’

Dakota shifted her gaze onto Nissa. ‘Do you understand what is happening?’

‘I do,’ she answered, ‘and I think you should listen.’ But there was apprehension in her voice as well – Kanu sharing her sense that Swift had begun to operate entirely on his own agenda.

‘I am an artificial intelligence,’ Swift said. ‘I came from the Evolvarium society on Mars, inside Kanu – operating on the same neural platform as his own consciousness.’

‘A parasite?’

‘A passenger,’ he corrected delicately, tapping a finger to Kanu’s lip. ‘My host was entirely cooperative – a full and willing partner in our enterprise.’

‘Which was?’

‘To understand ourselves. To explore our origins and our ultimate potential. To seek the paths by which the machine and the organic might coexist. Or, if such coexistence proved impossible, to learn which strategies would suit us best when forced into opposition. The least destructive paths. I had two primary ambitions. The second was to achieve meaningful contact with the Watchkeepers, something quite impossible within the human hegemony of the old solar system.’

‘And the first?’

‘To meet my maker.’

‘You believe in a god?’

‘I believe in Eunice Akinya. That may or may not be an equivalent statement. That ambition was achieved. I met Eunice, and we had a full and frank exchange of opinions.’

‘We met her,’ Dakota said. ‘In the ching environment. But only us.’

‘You forget – where Kanu goes, I go. What Kanu witnesses, I witness. But there’s so much more to it than that. Within the bounds of that environment, Eunice and I were able to exchange a great deal of information. You caught none of it. We used non-verbal channels – a battery of subtle methods. You’d be surprised at the resourcefulness of two artificial intelligences when they have something to communicate. Actually, I should clarify: she’s no longer running on a machine substrate. She’s become meat – returned to her human origins. That was an interesting adjustment for me to make – like discovering that god is made of wood, or flint. But the essence is still her, and her faculties haven’t been entirely diminished by reversion to the flesh.’

‘Reversion,’ Nissa said. ‘Thanks.’

‘No offence intended.’

‘None taken. What else did she tell you?’

‘That we have a chance. She believed she might be in a position to initiate a Mandala event, although nothing was certain. She encouraged me to do everything I could to maximise the usefulness of such an action. Fortunately, I had already done some preparatory work of my own. Of course, I knew nothing about the viability of instigating the Mandala event. But I had long thought it wise to install some precautionary measures in the operating architecture of this ship.’

Had Kanu been capable of registering surprise, this would have been his turn.

But Swift continued, ‘Let me explain. It’s rather impolite of me to keep using Kanu as a puppet in this way so I am going to relinquish control to him. In any case, I think the ship has now regained sufficient capacity to render this mode of communication quite superfluous.’

Kanu felt himself return. He worked his jaw, drew breath – Swift never appeared to breathe enough when he was in control.

‘Swift—’ he began.

‘A moment, my friend.’

The bridge’s main display filled with an image of Swift’s head and upper torso, dressed as always like a man of learning from the late eighteenth century, with a white scarf, frock coat, pince-nez glasses and a head of boyish curls.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Some explanation may be in order and we’ll come to that in a moment. Before we do, though, there are a couple of pressing issues to be addressed. The first concerns our trajectory. The Chibesa core is restarting – I have it on a fast cycle – and in a few minutes we will have full power and control. Once we have that capability, we will initiate a hard burn to avoid crossing the outer threshold of the moons. Given our present speed and course, that burn will push the ship to the limit of its structural and energetic tolerances. It will be uncomfortable for all passengers, but with due preparations it should be bearable for everyone.’

‘I hope you haven’t left it too late,’ Nissa said.

‘I haven’t. Now for the second issue. The Risen are no longer the commanding authority aboard this vehicle. Kanu and Nissa are in control, and any challenge to their status will be met with immediate punishment. I can make this ship do things to itself that would be uncomfortable for a primate but most certainly fatal for an elephant. Is that understood?’

‘Does he really have control?’ Dakota asked.

‘If he does,’ Kanu answered, ‘I have no idea how. But I don’t think he’s lying.’

‘I’m not. The moment is nearly upon us. Dakota – you may remain here, if you desire, but I would strongly recommend using one of the restraint couches.’

‘Whoever you are, however you are speaking to us,’ Dakota said, ‘this ship will continue to operate under my command. The loss of
Zanzibar
is shocking, and there will be consequences, but it must not distract us from our purpose. Kanu – resume our planned trajectory. Do not deviate. Our projected course remains valid.’

Swift did something that jammed the centrifuge to a violent halt, forcing an emergency braking system to engage equally violently. Kanu was thrown off his feet, Nissa likewise. He paddled madly and grabbed the nearest console, then reached out a hand to Nissa.

The Risen were not so fortunate. They had begun to drift again – paddling their feet and swinging their trunks in a vain effort to gain some traction. Air-swimming was barely effective for humans; for elephants it was entirely useless.

Nissa grabbed the back of her own chair and released herself from Kanu’s grip.

‘I can keep doing this indefinitely,’ Swift said, ‘but I hope the point is made. Force and strength will not help you now, Dakota. When I restore the gravity, you will secure yourselves in the restraining couches. Nissa – might I ask where you are going?’

‘To fetch something.’

She moved quickly and confidently even though gravity had not yet returned. A minute passed, maybe two – long enough for her to reach any number of adjoining rooms. Kanu swallowed hard, trying to ease the tightness in his throat.

‘I hope you’ve thought this through, Swift. Why did you have to shut down the ship?’

‘I installed an avatar of myself in
Icebreaker
’s control architecture. It needed a total shutdown to gain the necessary authority across all functions – without it I’d only have partial control. Besides, it’s rather helped to make my point.’

‘If making your point involved scaring me half to death, consider your work done.’

Nissa pushed her way back into the bridge holding something long and thin in her right hand and tucked into the crook of her right elbow. Kanu stared at it for a second before recognising it as the harpoon gun they had found on the dead Regal.

Nissa braced herself into a stable position next to one of the chairs and settled the harpoon into both hands like a rifle. It was a nasty, complex thing, with gas canisters and a gristle of pressure lines, the ugly barb of its tip a promise of the damage it could do to flesh.

She aimed it first at Kanu, thought for a moment, and then shifted the aim onto Dakota.

‘You appear to be in two minds,’ the matriarch said.

‘I was. Now do what Swift said.’

The gravity returned and the Risen took their positions in the acceleration couches, Nissa aiming the harpoon as if she was more than willing to use it. But the Risen had accepted the practicalities of their situation and offered no resistance to this change of status.

‘Will you kill us, Kanu?’ Dakota asked. ‘Is that your plan?’

He considered offering her glib reassurance, that he had no intention of harming them, but in truth he had not thought it through. Perhaps it would indeed come to killing. He hoped not, but this was not the time for empty promises.

‘We’ll see how we fare,’ he answered.

As soon as the drive was ready, Swift applied power in increasing increments, winding down the centrifuge as the thrust ramped up to half a gee and beyond. Kanu returned to his seat and Nissa to hers, where she cradled the harpoon in her lap.

‘You realise that would only have stopped one of them,’ he said. ‘And even that wasn’t certain.’

‘After what she did to the Friends, I’ll take what I can get.’

The drive climbed through one gee, then beyond. At one-point-five gees, Kanu sensed that he would struggle to lift himself from his seat and move around. At two gees, his own weight pressing against his bones, he decided it would be beyond his capacities. Nissa, lither and stronger, might still have been able to move around with care. But the Risen were now effectively prisoners of their couches. Their musculoskeletal structures were already operating at the limit under terrestrial gravity; now they weighed twice as much.

‘Can you still breathe, Dakota?’

‘We are not so weak as you imagine, Kanu. Our strength has carried us this far – it will serve us a little longer.’

But he could see the effect of the acceleration for himself – the muscles of her face being dragged down, the skin around her eye slipping to reveal the pink enclosure of her eyeball. Her trunk sagged listlessly.