Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER ONE

Early one evening, Mposi Akinya went to visit his sister. He took a car from the parliamentary building in the heart of Guochang, out through the government quarter and across the residential districts, until at last he reached the secured compound surrounding her house. He walked to the gate and presented his identification, even though the guards were ready to usher him past without a second glance at his credentials.

He made his way to the entrance, knocked on the door and waited until Ndege opened it. For a moment she blocked his entry, standing with her arms folded across her chest, her head cocked to one side, her expression betokening neither warmth nor welcome. She was still taller than him, even in their mutual old age. Mposi had spent a lifetime being looked down on.

‘I brought greenbread.’ He offered her the paper-wrapped loaves. ‘Still fresh.’

She took the package, opened the paper, sniffed doubtfully at the contents. ‘I wasn’t expecting you until later in the week.’

‘I know it’s a little unexpected, but I promise this won’t take long.’

‘Good. I have reading to be doing.’

‘When do you ever not have reading to be doing, sister?’

After a moment, Ndege relented and admitted him into her house, then led him to her kitchen. She must have been sitting at the table, for she had her black notebooks laid out on it, open to reveal their dense scribbled columns of strange symbols and the sketchy relationships between them. Except for the notebooks and a small box of medicines to counter oxygen toxicity, the table was bare. Mposi took a chair opposite the one Ndege had been using.

‘I should have told you I was on my way, but I couldn’t keep this to myself a moment longer.’

‘A promotion? Another expansion of your powers?’

‘For once, it’s not about me.’

She looked at him for a moment, still not sitting down. ‘I suppose you’re expecting me to boil some chai?’

‘No, not today, thank you. And save that greenbread for yourself.’ He patted the plump padding of his belly. ‘I ate at the office.’

Before easing her tall, thin frame into the chair, Ndege gathered the notebooks off the table and set them carefully on her bookcase. Then she faced him and made an impatient beckoning gesture with her hands. ‘Out with it, whatever it is. Bad news?’

‘I’m honestly not sure.’

‘Something to do with Goma?’

‘Only indirectly.’ Mposi settled his hands on the table, unsure where to start. ‘What I’m about to disclose is a matter of the highest secrecy. It’s known to only a few people on Crucible, and I would be very glad if it remained that way.’

‘I’ll be sure not to mention it to my many hundreds of visitors.’

‘You do receive the occasional visitor. We went to a lot of trouble to allow you that luxury.’

‘Yes, and you never let me forget it.’

Her tone had been sharp, and perhaps she realised as much. She swallowed, creased her lips in immediate regret. In the silence that ensued, Mposi found his gaze wandering around the kitchen, taking in its blank, bare surfaces. It struck him that his sister had begun to turn her life into an exhibit of itself — a static tableau reduced to the uncluttered essentials. His own government had made her a prisoner, but Ndege herself was complicit in the exercise, happily discarding her remaining luxuries and concessions.

Somewhere in the house a clock ticked.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, finally. ‘I know you worked hard to help me. But being here on my own, knowing what the world thinks of me—’

‘We’ve picked up a signal.’

The oddness of this statement drew a frown from Ndege. ‘A what?’

‘A radio transmission — very faint, but clearly artificial — from a solar system tens of light-years away that no one from any of the settled systems is supposed to have reached or explored yet. Interestingly, the transmission’s strength definitely tailed off the further you moved from the system’s centre — meaning it was aimed at us, not broadcast in all directions. More than that: it appears to concern you.’

For the first time since his arrival he had at least a measure of her interest, guarded and provisional as it was.

‘Me?’

‘Quite unambiguous. It mentions your forename.’

‘There are lots of people called Ndege.’

‘Not lately there aren’t. It asked us to send you. Send Ndege, in Swahili. That’s the extent of the message. It began, continued repeating for a matter of hours, then shut off. We’re keeping an eye on that part of space, of course, but we’ve heard nothing since.’

‘Where?’

‘A system called Gliese 163, about seventy light-years from us. Someone or something there went to the trouble of lining up a radio transmitter and sending us this message.’

Ndege absorbed the information with the quiet concentration that was so thoroughly her own. Over a lifetime together, Mposi had learned to recognise their differences as well as their similarities. He was a speaker, a reactor, a man who needed to be constantly on the move, constantly engaged in this business or that. Ndege was the reflective one, the thinker, taking little for granted.

She opened the medical box, plucked out one of the hypodermic sprays and touched the device to the skin of her forearm.

‘The oxygen gets to me these days.’

‘I’m the same,’ he said. ‘It was hard in the early years of settlement, then for a long while I thought I had adapted — that I could live without medical assistance. But the blood carries a memory.’

She put the hypodermic back into the box, snapped the lid down and pushed the container aside.

‘So who sent this signal?’

‘We don’t know.’

The clock kept ticking. He studied Ndege, measuring her visible age against his own, wondering how much of her frailty was the direct result of time passing, of the physiological stress of adapting to a new planet, and how much the consequence of her imprisonment and public shaming. She was thinner in the face than Mposi, and there was still an asymmetry there from the minor stroke she had suffered three decades ago. Her hair was short, thin and white — she cut it herself, as far as he knew. Her skin was a map of old lesions and discolorations. She looked tremendously old to him, but there were also days when he caught a glimpse of his own reflection and stared back in startled affront, barely recognising his own face.

Then again, the light could shift, her expression could change, and she was his sister again, just as she had been during their brave young years aboard the holoship.

‘You think it might be our mother.’

Mposi gave the slightest of nods. ‘It’s a possibility, nothing more. We don’t know what became of the Trinity — Chiku, Eunice, Dakota.’

‘And you reckon they want me to go out there and meet them?’

‘So it would appear.’

‘Then it’s a shame no one told them I’m a decaying old crone under permanent house arrest.’

Mposi smiled sweetly, refusing to rise to the provocation. ‘I’ve always held that every problem is also an opportunity. You know of the two starships we’re building?’

‘They do let me look at the sky sometimes.’

‘Officially, their intended function — when they’re completed — is to expand our influence and trade connections to other systems. Unofficially, nothing is set in stone. Feelers have gone out concerning a possible expedition, using one of the two ships. Given the specific nature of the signal, there would be a certain logic to having you aboard.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Then you understand less about politics than I thought. I’m a pariah, Mposi — hated by millions. They’ll have my head on a stick before they let me leave Guochang, let alone the system.’

‘For now, it’s all hypothetical. The expedition won’t be ready for four or five years even if we accelerate the preparations. But if you agree to join, and I work to make it look as if you’re offering yourself up for… I don’t know, the selfless betterment of Crucible, there could be an immediate improvement in the terms of your detention.’

‘Working on people’s opinions — you’re good at that.’

‘I have my uses. My point, though, is that even by agreeing in spirit, you would not be automatically obliged to go on the expedition itself. Any number of things might happen between now and then. We may run into problems with the ship, or lose the argument to reassign it. We may discover that the signal is a fluke. You may fail the medical criteria for skipover. You may even—’

‘Die.’

‘I was not going to put it in such blunt terms.’

‘I’ve had my share of adventures, brother. So have you. This is where mine brought me — locked up and hated.’

‘You made a single miscalculation.’

‘Which killed four hundred and seventeen thousand people. You reckon one act will atone for that?’

‘No, but I do believe you have already paid back more than your share. Think it over, Ndege. There’s no immediate rush.’

‘And am I allowed to discuss this with Goma?’

‘For now, I’d rather you didn’t. If and when the expedition becomes likely, certain aspects of it may be made public. But until then, let this remain between you and me. Brother and sister, sharing a great responsibility — the way it has always been.’

Her look was sympathetic but also slightly pitying. ‘You miss the old days.’

‘I try not to. It’s an old man’s habit, and I don’t very much enjoy being an old man.’

‘Would you go, if the opportunity came?’

‘They’d never allow it on medical grounds. I’m about ready to be pickled and stuffed into a jar.’

‘And I’m not?’

‘You forget, Ndege: they asked for you by name. That rather changes things.’

She gave a lopsided squint, her expression of puzzlement. ‘What do I have that you don’t? We grew up together. We’ve experienced the same things.’

Mposi scraped back his chair and stood with a click of knees and a little involuntary groan of effort. ‘The only way to find out, I suppose, would be to respond to the signal.’ He nodded at the package he had arrived with. ‘Eat that greenbread, while it’s still fresh.’

‘Thank you, brother.’

She rose from her chair and walked him to the door; they embraced and kissed each other lightly on the cheek, and then she was back inside and he was alone, outside the house.

He looked beyond the perimeter wall of her compound, out towards the greening domes and ellipsoids of this early district of Guochang, with the later structures rising rectangular and pale beyond. The sky had darkened with the onset of evening and now the rings were starting to become visible. Present during the day, too, but almost never seen except at night, they rose from one horizon, vaulted over the zenith and descended to the opposite horizon — a twinkling procession of countless tiny bright fragments, each following an independent orbit, but nonetheless organised into a complex banded flow. A spectacle that could be beautiful, even enchanting, if one were not aware of its true meaning.

The rings had not been present when people first reached Crucible. They were a scar — the lingering evidence of a single calamitous mistake. The error had been made with the noblest of intentions, but that did not render it any more forgivable. In those hot and heady days, when the laws of this new world were still being formulated, many were prepared to see Ndege executed.

Mposi had done well to keep his sister from the gallows. But he could do nothing about the sky.

The airstrip was within the compound but screened off from the elephants. After she landed and secured the old white aeroplane, Goma grabbed her things, climbed down and made her way to a heavy gate set into the four-metre-tall electrified fence. She opened the lock and pushed through into the separate enclosed area which held their study buildings and vehicles. Over the years the camp had expanded, but the core remained a group of closely set domes, linked together like a cloverleaf. She walked the short distance to the first of the domes, then ascended the metal stairs leading to the entrance. Her lace-up boots rattled on the openwork treads.

Inside, where the heat and humidity were kept at bay, Tomas lay on his preferred bunk bed. He was eating greenbread out of a paper bag and leafing through expensively printed research notes. He peered at her over the top of the pages, smiled cautiously.

‘Home is the hunter. How’d it go?’

‘As well as expected.’ Goma took off her sunglasses, stuffed them into a hip pocket. ‘They said my request was very well presented, case well made, expect our decision in the fullness of time.’

Tomas nodded sagely. ‘In other words, the same old brush-off.’

‘All we can do is keep trying. How are the numbers on Alpha herd?’

He pinched at the bridge of his nose and squinted at a column of figures, scribbled over in ink. ‘Down two on last season. Measurable impairment across a battery of variables, all significant at three sigma. I’ll run the results again, just to be sure, but I think we know how the curves are trending.’

‘Yes.’ She was about to tell him not to bother rerunning the analysis — the outcome would be the same, she was sure — but a tiny part of her hoped there might be a glimmer of good news buried somewhere in the numbers. ‘I came to speak to Ru.’

‘She’s with the elephants. Beta herd, I think — study area two. You look exhausted — want me to drive you out there?’

‘No, I’ll be fine — it’s Ru I worry about. Look, run those numbers again, will you? Isolate the Agrippa subgroup, too — if there’s a signal to be found, I don’t want it smothered by the noise.’

‘Will do. Oh, and well done — however well it went.’

‘Thanks,’ Goma said doubtfully.

Outside the dome, she took the second electric buggy, dumped her gear in the rear hopper, buckled herself into the driving seat and headed through the automatic gate in the secondary fence, into the main part of the sanctuary. She picked up speed, bouncing in her seat as the buggy followed a rough, undulating path. The sanctuary’s terrain ranged from level ground to gentle uplands, with areas of grassland and heavier tree cover. On Earth, an elephant population of the same size would have stripped the vegetation back to its roots, but Crucible’s plant life grew with astonishing vigour all year round. Without the elephants to hold it in check, this whole zone would have returned to thick forestation within a few years.

Goma passed the occasional small building or equipment store along the way. Here and there she spotted elephants, sometimes partly screened by intervening trees and bushes. Glossy from a recent rain shower, they sometimes looked like boulders or rocky outcroppings — the exposed geology of an ancient world. Mostly they kept their distance, wary, if not actually afraid. She spied a lone bull or two, isolated from the larger herds. She gave them a wide berth. Drenched in testosterone, bulls could be unpredictable and dangerous. Over generations, and with the dwindling influence of the Tantors, the old herd dynamics were reasserting themselves.

Soon enough she was at the study area, and there was the Beta herd — lured in with enticements of fruit and greenbread, then persuaded to take part in cognitive games. Goma and Ru had designed the research programme, but it was mostly down to Ru to shape the individual challenges. Of necessity, these had grown increasingly simple as the elephants’ average intelligence baseline slowly declined. The complex tests — those that demanded a high degree of abstract reasoning — were now obsolete. Only Agrippa could pass them with any regularity, and Agrippa was too old and canny to be a reliable test subject.

Ru was standing up in her own buggy, back ramrod straight, a cap jammed down over her eyes. With a notebook wedged into the angle of her right arm and a stylus in the other hand, she was recording observations.

Goma slowed so as not to disturb the experiment. She stopped the buggy, grabbed her things and walked the rest of the way.

The herd comprised thirty members, give or take, led by the matriarch Bellatrix. There were older females under the matriarch, but the only males were infants and juveniles.

In a clearing, Ru had set up the day’s sequence of cognitive puzzles, and one by one the elephants were encouraged to try their luck. There were mirrors, to test recognition-of-self. There were pots with food under them that could be moved around, or blinds that served a similar purpose. There were sturdy upright boards set with movable symbols — simple problems of logic and association and memory, with clear rewards for a correct answer. There were piles of objects and tools that could be combined to solve a problem, such as extracting fruit from a container. With her usual diligence, Ru had been working through combinations of these tests all day. The elephants were generally obliging, but only up to a point. Goma knew how frustrating it became when the rewards stopped being sufficiently attractive.

‘I could use some good news,’ Goma said when she was within earshot.

‘How about you go first. Did you batter those idiots into a pulp?’

‘Metaphorically.’

‘So we get our brand-new fence?’

‘It’s pending, but I think I made a good case.’

‘I wouldn’t expect anything less of you. Still, arseholes, the lot of them.’

‘I wouldn’t go quite that far.’

‘Oh, I would.’ Ru hopped down from the buggy. ‘They’re just playing with us. They could give us ten times the amount we’ve asked for and it wouldn’t make a dent in their funding budget. We’re just down in the noise.’

They walked towards each other.

‘Speaking of noise,’ Goma said, ‘Tomas tells me the numbers aren’t looking great.’

‘Dismal, more like. But why are we surprised? Three years ago I could draw a chequer-board in the dirt and play a passable game of Go with Bellatrix. Now she just scuffs her trunk through the squares — it’s as if she almost remembers, but not enough to understand the point. That’s not an intergenerational decline — that’s a single elephant losing intelligence almost as we speak.’

‘We should expect some age-related cognitive deterioration. It affects people, so why not pachyderms?’

‘We never used to see such a sharp tail-off.’

‘I know — just trying to find a slightly less depressing way of looking at it. Have you been out here all day?’

‘Got caught up. You know how it goes.’

They met, embraced, kissed. They held each other for a few seconds, Goma straightening Ru’s cap. Then Goma stepped back and appraised the other woman, noticing the stiffness in her posture and the slight tremble in her hand, the one still holding her notebook. Ru was bigger and taller than Goma, but for all that she was also frailer.

‘You’re done for the day. Let’s pack up and drive home.’

‘I need to finish this batch of tests.’

‘No, you’re done.’ Goma spoke with all the firm authority she could muster, knowing full well that her wife would not take well to being pressured.

‘It’s just been a long one. I’ll be fine after a night’s rest.’

They packed the study items into the rear hoppers of their two buggies. Goma slaved her buggy to follow Ru’s, then joined her in the forward vehicle. Goma opened the storage compartment by the passenger seat, unsurprised to see that it was empty.

‘Did you even bring your medicines?’

‘I meant to go back for them.’

‘You never miss a detail with elephants — why is it so hard to extend the same care to yourself?’

‘I’m fine,’ Ru said. But after a moment, she added, ‘Can we detour to swing by Alpha herd? I’d like to take a look at Agrippa.’

‘Agrippa can wait — you need your medicine.’

But it was pointless arguing, especially as Ru was driving. She steered the buggy onto a narrower track, the rear vehicle following, and soon they were cresting a low hill to overlook the favoured gathering spot of Alpha herd. It was near the greened-over corpse of a Provider robot, frozen where it had been when the information wave hit Crucible.

They stopped. Goma hopped out first, then went around to help Ru step down.

‘There she is. Binoculars in the back, if you need them.’

‘No, I’ll manage.’ Goma levelled a hand over her eyes, screening out the platinum glare of the clouds. It only took her a few moments to pick out Agrippa, the matriarch of the Alpha herd, but her usual pleasure at recognition with offset with disquiet.

Something was not right with Agrippa.

‘She’s very slow.’

‘I noticed that a couple of days ago,’ Ru said. ‘Some lameness for a while, but this is different. I know she’s old, but she’s always had that underlying strength to get her through.’

‘We should take some blood.’

‘I agree. Bring her in, if necessary. Maybe it’s just an infection, or a bad reaction to something she ate.’

‘Possibly.’

But neither cared to admit the obvious truth: that Agrippa was showing the signs of extreme age rather than of any underlying malady that could be treated with drugs or transfusions. She was simply an old elephant — the oldest of the herd members.

But also the smartest, according to the cognition measures. The only one who could still pass most of the tests, proving that she had an inner monologue, a sense of her own identity, an understanding of cause and effect, of time’s arrow, of the distinction between life and death. Agrippa could not generate speech sounds, but she could understand spoken statements and formulate symbolic responses. She was the last of the Tantors — the last elephant to carry the fire of true intelligence.

But Agrippa had grown old, and although her immediate offspring were cleverer than the common herd, they were not as bright as their mother. Her children had produced grandchildren, diluting her genes even further, and these elephants were barely distinguishable from the others. So weak was the signal, it took careful statistical analysis to prove they had any cognitive enhancements.

‘We can’t lose her,’ Ru said eventually.

‘We will.’

‘Then it ends. We’ll have failed.’

‘There’s more work to be done. Always will be. We’ll still have all these elephants to look after.’

‘They don’t even care. That’s the part that really gets me. We do. It tears us apart to see them losing what they had, year by year. But to them it’s nothing. They don’t miss being Tantors — give them wide-open spaces, food to eat, some mud to roll in — why should they?’

‘Being Tantors was not a normal part of elephant development,’ Goma said. ‘We can’t blame them for not caring. Do dogs care that they’re not as clever as bonobos? Do ants care that they’re not as smart as dogs?’

‘I care.’

Goma squeezed her shoulder, then hugged her silently for a few moments. She shared Ru’s creeping despair — the sense of something bright and precious and mercurial slipping through their fingers. The more they tried to measure it, to preserve it, the more quickly it was fading. But she needed Ru to be strong, and in turn Goma needed to be strong for Ru. They were like two trees leaning against each other.

‘Let’s go home,’ Goma said. ‘I have to call my mother — I told her I’d visit tomorrow but Agrippa’s bloodwork is more important.’

‘I can take care of that,’ Ru said. ‘You know how much Ndege needs her routines.’

‘Can you blame her?’

‘Not me. I’m the last one who’d blame her for anything.’

A few days later, when early evening business brought Mposi back to the parliamentary building in Guochang, he found a visitor waiting for him in the annexe to his office.

‘Goma,’ he said, beaming. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

But his words drew no corresponding sentiment from her, nor even a smile.

‘Can we speak? In private?’

‘Of course.’

He let her into the office, still maintaining a façade of polite conviviality even though nothing in her manner suggested this was a social call. That would have been out of character, at least lately. When she had been less busy in both professional and private spheres, Goma had often visited him for a stroll around the parliamentary gardens, both of them trading stories and titbits of innocent rumour. He realised, with a swell of sadness, that he had almost forgotten how much pleasure those simple encounters had brought him, unencumbered by professional obligations on either side.

‘Chai?’ he offered, drawing the office blinds against a lowering sun as fat and red as a ripe tomato.

‘No. This won’t take long. She can’t go.’

He smiled. They were both still standing. ‘She?’

‘My mother. Ndege.’ Her hands were planted on her hips. Goma was small, slight of build, easily underestimated. ‘This stupid expedition of yours — the one you think I don’t know about.’

Mposi glanced at the door, making sure he had closed it on his way in.

‘You’d better sit down.’

‘I said this won’t take long.’

‘Nonetheless.’ He raised a hand in the direction of the chair he reserved for visitors, then eased his plump frame into the one on his side of the desk. ‘She was under express instructions not to mention it to anyone.’

‘I’m her daughter. Did you think she’d be able to keep something like that from me for long?’

‘You were to be informed when matters were on a more stable footing.’

‘You mean when everyone else learned about it.’

‘I’m not a fool, Goma, and I do understand your feelings. But secrecy is secrecy. What else did she mention?’

‘There’s more?’

‘Please, no games.’

After a silence, Goma said, ‘A signal, from somewhere out in deep space.’

Mposi rubbed his forehead. He could already feel a knot of tension building behind his eyes. ‘My god.’

‘Some possible connection with the Trinity — with Chiku, Eunice and Dakota. I can understand why that would be of interest to her. She lost her mother — watched as she was spirited away by an alien robot. But it’s Dakota I’m interested in.’

‘The elephant?’

‘The Tantor. If you received a signal from Eunice, then maybe Dakota’s out there as well. Do I have to explain why that’s of interest to me?’

‘No, I think I can guess.’ Mposi had always found Goma’s scientific reports too technical to be easily digested by a non-specialist like himself, but he could skim the abstracts, get the thrust of her argument. ‘It was just a signal. It never repeated, and we’ve been listening for it again for six months.’

‘But you believe it was a real message, and that it was meant for us. You think it might have some connection with the Trinity.’

‘This is what I told your mother. In confidence.’

‘If you start blaming her for the leak of your little secret, you’ll have a much bigger problem on your hands.’

‘Goodness, Goma. That almost sounds like a threat.’

‘You need to understand my seriousness.’

‘I do. Fully.’

‘Then I’ll cut to the point. Whatever that message says, Ndege’s not going.’

‘I rather think that choice should be your mother’s.’

‘It isn’t, not now. I’m going in her place. I’m a quarter of her age and much stronger.’

‘Be that as it may, Ndege is still alive. She has also consented to join the expedition.’

‘Only because you gave her no choice.’

‘I merely pointed out that volunteering for such an expedition could be turned to her immediate advantage.’

‘You dangled the idea of a pardon in front of her. I thought better of you.’

‘It was meant with all sincerity.’ Mposi picked up the paperweight he kept on his desk — the skull of a sea otter, polished to a pebble-like glossiness. It had been sent across space, a gift from his half-brother. ‘You have a nerve, Goma, lecturing me on my treatment of Ndege. If you doubt that, ask your mother.’

His outburst — delivered calmly enough — had an immediate and chastening effect on his visitor. She looked contrite, sad, momentarily ashamed at herself.

‘I just don’t want her expectations raised.’

‘Nor do I,’ Mposi answered softly. He put down the skull; it made a pleasingly solid thunk. ‘I would never put a false hope before your mother, not after all she’s been through. Are you serious, though — would you consider going in her place? You love this world, you love your work. You have a fine companion in Ru. Why give all of that up?’

‘Because I’d rather it was me than Ndege. And I’ve seen those ships of yours, swinging overhead like a pair of new moons. They’re huge. You can’t tell me there isn’t room for thousands of people on them.’

‘In their original design,’ Mposi answered. ‘But if one of the ships were to be refitted for a long-range expedition — and that’s still not a given — a great deal would need to be reorganised.’

‘I bet you could still find room for Ru.’

Mposi could hardly believe his ears. ‘You’ve spoken to her as well?’

‘Out of respect for your secret, no. In fact, I haven’t spoken about it to anyone except Ndege. Does that make you happier?’

‘Marginally.’

‘But I will put it to Ru. She’ll feel the same way about Dakota. We lost the Tantors, Mposi. We lost the most beautiful, surprising thing ever to happen to us as a species. New friends — new companions. And we let them die. That’s all Ru and I have ever done — chart the decline, the tailing-off of their intelligence. But now we have a chance to recontact one of the original Tantors, or at least her offspring. Even if all we recovered was fresh genetic material, that would give us something new. Ru knows that, too. She’ll want to come with me.’

‘Does Ndege know of your intentions?’

‘I told her I’d speak to you about it.’

‘And did she approve? No — you don’t need to answer that. Ndege would try to protect you just as you’re trying to protect her. She wouldn’t want you to leave.’

‘Ultimately, though, the choice would be yours, uncle. Commit your sister to something she won’t survive, or take a chance on your niece?’

‘When you put it like that, it sounds so simple.’

‘That’s because it is. Agree to my being on that ship, uncle.’

He felt himself on the brink of consenting. But he would not — could not — allow the decision to be made in haste. Too much was at stake. It was vastly more complicated than Goma understood.

‘I wished to do something good for your mother.’

‘You still can. That ship won’t be ready for a while, will it?’

He sighed, seeing where this was heading. ‘Another five years, so I’m told.’

‘Then that’s five years in which you can make things easier for Ndege. Are you ever going public with this?’

‘Some sort of limited disclosure will be required once it’s clear we’ve altered our plans for one of the ships. A year or two from now, perhaps.’

‘Then you can tell the world that Ndege has volunteered for the mission. Let her have that moment. Only the three of us need know that she won’t be going.’

‘It would be more than three of us. Your medical suitability for skipover would need to be assessed. There are no guarantees.’

‘I’m still more likely to cope with it than my mother.’

‘You place me in an unfortunate position.’

‘Then I’m glad you understand how it feels. Put me on the expedition and reserve a space for Ru. I won’t ask again, uncle. And my words earlier?’

‘Yes?’

‘They weren’t a threat. But if you want to think of it as a robust bargaining position, be my guest.’

He smiled fondly, simultaneously proud and a little terrified. ‘You were wasted on science, Goma. We could have made a fine politician of you.’