Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Goma’s first thought, when the fog of revival had cleared sufficiently for something like consciousness, was that Mposi and Ndege, sister and brother, her mother and her uncle, must by now be united in death. There could be little doubt of this, given the fact of her own survival. There would have been no cause to wake her before journey’s end, no accident that her body would have been capable of surviving, and at the same time, no chance that her mother had survived the long decades of Travertine’s crossing.

They had said goodbye, Goma reminded herself — or at the very least ended things well, with her mother’s loving imprecation that she had to look inside herself now, to find the strength she had depended on in Mposi, and to be that rock for the rest of them.

But Mposi was still dead, and the truth of that was no easier to bear now than before she had gone into skipover.

Presently there was a face, and a voice.

‘Gently now.’

Before the face assumed focus, something cool and sweet and soothing touched her lips. She thought for a drowsy instant that this kind form was Ru, for the voice was a woman’s. But it was Captain Gandhari Vasin helping her back to life.

‘Thank you,’ she said, when she was at last able to coax some sounds from her mouth. ‘I wasn’t expecting… I mean, you didn’t need to.’

‘I didn’t need to, but if a captain can’t welcome her crew back to the world of the living, what can she do? Anyway, I need you, Goma. Take your time — getting up and about is hard enough after a normal skipover interval — but I have something of interest to show you when you’re ready.’

Her eyes still would not focus properly, but the vague textures and colours of her surroundings were enough to establish that she was still in the skipover vault.

‘Are we safe? Did we make the crossing?’

‘Yes, we made the crossing. Seventy light-years, and not a single mishap. How much of that we owe to the Watchkeeper ahead of us, I don’t know. But the ship is in good condition, and we are where we wished to be.’

‘What have you found?’

‘A great deal. Most importantly, though, a welcome message — a signal telling us where to go. I think you should hear it. I would be very glad of your opinion.’

‘How is Ru?’

‘There’s no need to worry about Ru. She’s in excellent hands.’

That was meant well, but it was not quite the answer she had been hoping for. And yet Goma could only focus on her fears for so long before drowsiness pulled her under again.

She had no idea how long she was out, but there came a moment when the face of Dr Saturnin Nhamedjo was assuming gradual focus before her. He was studying her with magnificent and serene patience, as if nothing in his universe was more valuable than the health of this one patient. She could easily imagine that he had been there for hours, waiting by her skipover casket, untroubled by any concern save her own well-being.

‘Welcome back, Goma. I know you have already spoken to Gandhari, but I will reaffirm the news. You have come through safely. All is well. We have all survived skipover — even our prisoner.’

She thought of Grave, and that in turn made her think of Mposi. But for the moment there was only one thing at the forefront of her concerns. She made to get up out of the casket, forcing effort into unwilling muscles.

‘Steady!’ Dr Nhamedjo said, smiling at her determination.

‘I want to see Ru.’

‘In good time. Ru is receiving the very best care and I am perfectly satisfied with her progress.’

‘Something went wrong, didn’t it?’

‘We have all survived. This is a blessing. Anything else must be considered a minor setback, nothing more.’ A stern, admonitionary tone entered his voice. ‘I do not wish you to overtax yourself, Goma, not during these early hours. You have more than enough work to do in building your own strength back up. Leave Ru to us. She will be well. I have the utmost confidence in her.’

‘Is it the AOTS?’

‘It was always going to be a complicating factor. An already damaged nervous system is not best equipped to deal with the additional stresses of skipover, but I would not have agreed to let her join the expedition if I did not think her strong enough.’ He reached into the casket and patted her wrist, offering reassurance. ‘She is in a medically induced coma now, but that is for her own good. We are giving her a cocktail of drugs that will help with the combined effects of AOTS and the ordinary stresses of skipover. There is no reason for them not to work, but it must be done carefully, and the results monitored at each step. Gradually, she will be elevated back to proper consciousness. I have every confidence that she will be well again.’

‘How long?’

‘A matter of days. A hardship for her and a worry for you, I appreciate that, but it is an extremely small price to pay when set against the years we have already crossed. Now rest, Goma — and set your mind at ease. Ru will be well.’

She wanted to demand more of him — additional guarantees. But she was too tired, too groggy, to do more than place her trust in this man. Sometimes that was all you could do.

So she rested. After an hour or two, she was able to experiment with moving around, easing herself out of the casket and onto her feet, steadying herself against walls and furniture until she learned to trust bones and muscle. It was hard at first — she felt pinned down under a dead weight, nauseous and dizzy at the same time. But her strength and confidence returned, and the ill-effects slowly faded away. She kept down fluids and soon found herself able to eat. She wandered around a small area of the ship, regaining her bearings. Hour by hour, more and more people were awake and mobile. All appeared content to share the same assumption: that they were aboard a ship that had crossed seventy light-years of space, in one hundred and forty years of time.

Goma could hold these facts in her head well enough, but accepting them as deep, visceral truths was another thing entirely. She felt exhausted by skipover, physically drained, every part of her bruised, but that was not the same as feeling fourteen decades older.

She kept looking down at her own hand, studying the familiar anatomy of her wrist, the pores of her skin, the fine dark hairs, the architecture of bone and tendon beneath the flesh. Nothing had changed — nothing felt older. She pinched the skin of her belly, but it too appeared miraculously indifferent to the process it had undergone. Blemishes, moles, scars were all present and correct. She did not look quite herself in the mirror — there was a slackness of muscle tone, a vagueness to her gaze — but all of that was a normal consequence of skipover. Indeed, the ill-effects were connected with the transition from total skipover stasis to full animation rather than the fourteen decades of stasis itself.

They had moved Ru out of her skipover casket into a dedicated medical suite — one of two on the ship — and placed her on a normal bed under a bank of conventional medical instruments. She had lines going in and out of her, of different colours and thicknesses, conveying blood, urine, saline and drugs to and from different machines. She had a crown-like device fitted around her forehead, maintaining the medical coma and simultaneously running some sort of cyclic neural scan — peelings of her brain flickering in different colours on the display above her headboard. It was a difficult time for Dr Nhamedjo and his staff since they still had a dozen or more sleepers to bring out of skipover. But they managed to find time to make it look as if Ru was their chief concern.

Goma wanted to be at her side. But Dr Nhamedjo assured her there was no chance of her waking up ahead of schedule; that everything was proceeding according to a fixed and orderly timescale. ‘These prefrontal areas,’ he said, indicating part of the scan, ‘are still inflamed and must be brought under control. She is also suffering microseizures — a kind of temporal-lobe epilepsy. None of this is without precedent in AOTS cases, and all of it is responsive to careful management. But above all it must not be rushed, or we will leave Ru with greater impairments than when she joined us.’

It was hard to watch her lying there, so helpless and so clearly afflicted. Every now and then she tremored, sometimes violently enough that it was hard not to think she was in the grip of nightmares, or in pain. But Nhamedjo assured Goma that there was no conscious activity involved, and that Ru would remember nothing of this time.

Goma held her hand, tried to still it when the palsy hit. She whispered kindnesses to Ru and settled a kiss on her fever-hot brow.

‘Come back, my love. I need you.’

For the time being, though, there was nothing to do but wait.

‘Perhaps,’ Gandhari said, ‘a thing or two to take your mind off Ru — would that help?’

‘It might.’

‘The truth is, I hardly know where to begin. We’ve learned so much already, and yet all we’ve managed to do is replace every question with two more. Still, I have to start somewhere.’

They were in the captain’s cabin, just the two of them. Not much had changed since the last time Goma had been in it. The picture on the wall was different now — perhaps Vasin had changed it herself, or else the room had made the choice based on its own selection algorithm. It was a strange, gloomy painting of a pale and naked woman in the embrace of a withered skeletal figure. To one side of the coupling floated sperm-like forms; to the other bulbous-headed aliens.

Goma had difficulty squaring this image — or, for that matter, the destructive landscape that had preceded it — with the calm, collected, warm-spirited person who lived in this room.

‘Who was there to wake you up?’ Goma asked, remembering the other woman’s kindness.

‘Nobody. But one of us had to be first, and it might as well have been me.’

‘That can’t have been pleasant.’

‘Well, it was silent, I’ll say that for it. Colder than I wished. Something was off with the thermostat settings — we soon fixed that, but only after I’d shivered my way through two whole days, trying to restart the climate control. Still, it wasn’t too bad — mainly I was happy we’d made it, that we weren’t just some cloud of atoms sailing on through space.’

The ship had not been totally devoid of life during the main part of its cruise, Goma knew. Periodically, technicians had come in and out of skipover to review the vital systems, while Nhamedjo’s medical team had done the same thing for the sleepers, putting themselves through the ordeal of multiple skipover transitions. From what she could gather, there had been little work for these brave souls to do. Nothing had gone badly wrong; nothing had needed serious repair.

‘Then you were the first to see Gliese 163,’ Goma said.

‘Yes, I had that honour — dubious as it felt at the time. We’re close enough now that it’s harder to see the true colour, but when I first came out, you could really tell it’s a red dwarf — it had a definite pink tinge to it. Now it just looks blazing white, but that’s only because our eyes aren’t very good at dealing with bright objects. You’ll find it very familiar — in fact, it’s not so different in temperature from Crucible’s sun.’

‘Home sweet home.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Still, we didn’t come for the scenery. And if we’d only made one discovery, we’d have justified the expedition a thousand times over.’

‘Tell me what we’ve found.’

‘Another Mandala, for starters.’

Goma was so surprised she laughed. ‘My god.’

‘I know — astonishing, isn’t it? It’s on one of the rocky planets — Paladin, they call it. I’m guessing you remember it from the Knowledge Room.’

‘I do.’

‘If your mother were with us, she could tell us exactly if and how it differs from the one on Crucible. Loring and the others will be studying the data when they’re all awake. You’re welcome to share in the analysis, of course — it might stop you worrying about Ru.’

Goma doubted that, but she knew Vasin meant well by it. ‘I’m not sure I’ll have much to add. Don’t expect deep insights just because of my family connection.’

‘At this point, I’m ready to consider anything that might help. Anyway, the Mandala is only part of it. Are you ready for the rest?’

‘Go on.’

‘There’s a rock orbiting Paladin, like a little asteroid, and someone appears to have reached it ahead of us. There’s evidence of colonisation — surface structures, odd thermal activity. Maybe some additional orbiting objects that we can’t yet resolve, but which will be clearer when we get closer.’

‘Is that where we’re headed?’

‘You’d think so, and it would be a good guess if you didn’t know about the superterran. Remember the waterworld — Poseidon?’

Goma nodded — she recalled trying to clutch the pure blue ball in her fingers, to steal it from the Knowledge Room.

‘There are artificial structures rising from its waters. Not another Mandala this time — something different, but just as fascinating. Anomalous-looking moons, too, in orbits you wouldn’t expect to occur naturally. All very odd, all very enticing. I’m inclined to rate it as a higher priority than the second Mandala. After all, we already know quite a bit about one of those.’

‘Not as much as we’d like.’

‘True. But then there’s also the signal — aimed directly at us during our approach.’

‘From Poseidon?’

‘No — not from Paladin, either, or even the rock orbiting it. The point of origin is Orison, another one of the planets. Based on its characteristics, we think it likely that the sender is the same one who transmitted the original signal — which is the reason we’re here at all. See what you make of it.’

Vasin looked to the wall next to the gloomy painting where a scramble of geometric forms, a hash of numbers and symbols, gave way to a matrix of pixels assembling into a blocky, low-resolution mosaic of a human face looking back at them. Goma squinted, blurring the pixels together.

‘Eunice.’

‘Yes. Easy enough to check against the records, but it helps to have you confirm it.’

Now the face was speaking.

‘I wondered what was keeping you. Is half the speed of light really the best you can do?’ The question was clearly rhetorical, for the face continued its monologue after only the slightest of pauses. ‘Well, good that you’ve finally arrived, even if you’re not the first. Things have reached a pretty pickle and now you’re part of it. Under no circumstances respond to any transmission from Paladin or go anywhere near Poseidon. Come to me instead. Lock on to the origin of this transmission and adjust your course accordingly. I have amenities and technical know-how you may find useful. Above all else, I have knowledge. If you want to know what happened to the Trinity, I’m the one to talk to.’

The pixels rescrambled into the same blitz of numbers and symbols, then it recommenced.

Vasin permitted it to play a second time, then dulled the sound while allowing the visual to continue cycling.

‘It carries on like that — a repeating transmission, sent out in bursts every six hours. She must have set up some kind of automated send, waiting for us to answer. What do you think she means, that we’re not the first? We’ve sent no other expedition, and our government was careful to limit disclosure of the original signal. How could someone else be here before us?’

‘A ship from another system?’

‘But how would they know to come here? That transmission was aimed at us, Crucible — no one else.’

‘We assume.’

‘Rightly, I hope. That’s only the start of my worries, though. She’s expecting an answer, and we need to get off on the right footing.’

‘I should speak for us,’ Goma decided.

‘I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s only fitting that an Akinya should make the first formal response — for what little good it will do us. Do you like the painting, by the way? Death and the Maiden.’

Goma was attempting to read Ndege’s notebooks, trying to make some sense of the hash of symbols and connecting propositions, when Doctor Nhamedjo called to say that she should come to the medical suite as quickly as possible.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘Quite the contrary, Goma. Ru is on her way back to us, and I thought you would like to be here when she awakens.’

Goma snapped the notebooks shut with no small measure of guilty relief. She was in the medical suite in less than five minutes, equally relieved that she had not arrived too late. Ru was surfacing to consciousness but had not yet woken fully. Dr Nhamedjo was at her side, another of his medics — Dr Mona Andisa — on the opposite side of the bed. Neither appeared unduly concerned by the progress of their patient.

‘It worked, then,’ Goma said.

‘It counts in her favour that she is strong,’ Nhamedjo said. ‘It’s rather a severe case of AOTS, but she compensates very well. As a matter of interest, how did she ever suffer such extreme exposure? I treated one patient who was lost north of Namboze, wandering the jungles for weeks with nothing to protect them from the oxygen — a flier had gone down with a faulty transponder — but that was a very unusual set of circumstances.’

‘Self-neglect,’ Goma said. ‘Too many field trips, not enough time thinking of her own safety compared to the elephants. I’d have watched over her, but the harm was done by the time we met.’

‘She must have been fiercely dedicated to her elephants to think so little of her own well-being.’

‘They get into your blood.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard as much. Almost like an illness?’

‘I can’t say I’ve ever thought of it that way.’

‘Well, I dare say medicine is no different. We all have our magnificent obsessions.’

‘And what would yours be, Saturnin?’

‘The sanctity of human life, I suppose. The ever-unfolding challenge of doing more good than harm. But I would not pretend to share Ru’s dedication to a single cause. She will be frail for a little while, Goma. You will need to take even better care of her than usual, but I do not think that will be a problem.’

‘No, it won’t.’

He nodded towards the neural displays. ‘She is approaching consciousness. We will let you have some time alone together — you’ve earned it, both of you.’

Goma eased next to Ru and stroked the side of her face, the merest touch.

‘Come back to me, love.’

Ru woke. Her eyelids fluttered, opening to narrow slits. She was still and unresponsive for several seconds. Goma snatched a glance at the neural display, wondering if there could have been some mistake — some dreadful brain injury that had somehow escaped notice.

But then Ru said, ‘Am I awake now?’

Goma grinned. ‘You’re awake.’

‘It feels like I’ve been trying to wake up for centuries. Floating under ice, trying to find my way to the air.’

‘That’s not far from the truth. You hit some problems in skipover but you’re better now.’

‘Tell me you’re really Goma and not a figment of my imagination.’

‘I don’t feel like a figment.’ She squeezed Ru’s hand where it poked out from beneath the bedsheet. ‘It’s me — warts and all. We’ve come through. We’re here, in the other system. We all made it.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened to me?’

‘The AOTS complicated your revival, but there’s no lasting damage. You’ll just need to take it easy for a few days.’

‘You’re supposed to be the centre of attention, not me.’

‘Don’t worry about that — I’m sure my time’s coming. There’s so much to catch up on! I want to tell you everything now, in one breathless rush. But there’s time. You need to wake up at your own speed.’

‘I could use a drink.’

‘My pleasure.’

Dr Andisa gave Ru a beaker of amber fluid, some kind of medicinal restorative, which Goma in turn offered to Ru’s lips. Ru sipped slowly, then eased herself into a sitting position on the bed. Goma was encouraged by this show of determination and strength.

‘Thank you,’ Ru said, taking the beaker from Goma. ‘How was it for you, coming out?’

‘I thought it was bad until I saw you.’

‘That really lifts my spirits.’

‘If it’s any consolation, they say no one gets an easy ride.’

‘And are you sure this isn’t a hoax — you’re not all pulling a trick on me?’

‘No, we’re really there. Around Gliese 163 — or approaching it fast, anyway.’

‘I want to see everything.’

‘You will. But it’s like a sweet shop — we barely know where to start. I already have a job, though.’

‘Lucky you. What is it?’

‘I get to answer the message. We’ve been signalled, told to head for one particular planet. I think it’s Eunice.’

‘You think.’

‘The tone was frosty enough. We’ll know for sure when we get there.’

‘And Dakota — any word on her?’ Ru glanced at the remaining medic, lowered her voice fractionally. ‘The other Tantors you promised me?’

Goma smiled — it was as if they were sharing a naughty secret, barely daring to mention it aloud in the presence of others.

‘It was never a promise, just a possibility.’

‘Tantors?’ Dr Andisa asked with a smile.

‘We can’t let go of our work,’ Goma said. ‘Can’t stop thinking about the elephants back on Crucible. We live them, breathe them, dream them.’

‘It’s all right,’ Ru whispered. ‘We never expected to receive all the answers in one go, and I’d be disappointed if we did. But when we get to this planet, whichever one it is, I want to be part of that.’

‘You’ve a way to go before you’ll be strong enough.’

‘To be honest, right now I feel like something left out to die. What did they do to me while I was under?’

‘Whatever it was, believe it or not, it appears to have worked. If only you’d taken care of yourself way back when, this would have been easier on you.’

‘We’d never have met.’

‘Don’t be so sure of that.’

‘Oh, I can be. You and me — intellectual rivals, competitive investigators in the same line of research? I’d have been nothing to you unless I was a threat, Goma Akinya. And I only made myself a threat by working myself halfway to the grave.’

‘So I’m responsible for what you did to yourself before we met?’

‘I’m just saying — if I’d taken care of myself, I’d never have come to your attention.’

‘But I fell in love with you the moment I saw your face.’

‘And why was my face of such interest to you?’

Goma had no choice but to confess. ‘I wondered who this annoying woman was, trampling all over my research interests, daring to question my methods, having the nerve to imply that she knew more about animal cognitive science than I did.’

‘Bet you wanted to scratch her eyes out.’

‘I wouldn’t have stopped at the eyes.’

‘So the message here is… if you can’t beat them, marry them?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Poor fool me. I didn’t have a clue what I was letting myself in for.’

‘Neither did I,’ Goma said. ‘But I’m glad it happened.’

She kissed Ru. She was back, and for a moment, brief as it was, all was well with Goma’s world. They were in love, they were together again, there were mysteries waiting to be solved. This state of momentary, careless bliss could not last, and she did not expect it to. But she had grown old and wise enough to take such gifts when they were presented, without fear for their transience.

Vasin did her best to keep everyone informed about their discoveries in the new system. She made regular announcements over the shipwide intercom, and periodically, for those who were interested, she arranged gatherings in the largest of the common areas and showed the latest images and data. Goma wondered how the woman managed to find time to sleep. Less than a third of the crew were still in skipover now, and hour by hour that number grew smaller.

Goma tried hard not to resent each newly woken face. They were all entitled to be here, even the Second Chancers.

Vasin told them about the new Mandala, the strange rock orbiting Paladin, the structures on the waterworld, the transmission from the construct. The images amplified her story but added nothing dramatically new. Travertine was still operating at the limit of its sensory capabilities, offering tantalising glimpses rather than hard details. The Mandala on Paladin was clearly the same kind of thing as the object on Crucible, but its geometry differed in various interesting ways. Arch-like structures appeared to rise from the ocean on Poseidon, but their exact nature was difficult to guess at. Perhaps they were indeed arches, or — as Loring suggested, based on tantalising hints in the data — wheel-like structures which actually continued down into unimaginably deep layers of water. The girdling moons were simply weird — confusing Travertine’s sensors in a thousand ways, their orbits spherical according to some measurements, ring-shaped according to others. They would need to get much closer to say more than that.

But their immediate concern was another world entirely. Orison lay on an orbit between the hot Poseidon and the cooler Paladin, too far from its sun to have held on to a thick atmosphere. Whereas Paladin swung around Gliese 163 in just over two hundred days and Poseidon in a mere twenty-six, Orison’s orbit was seventy-four days. It was an unpromising, nearly airless little world, and were it not for the signal, this moonless planet would not have attracted their attention.

The origin of the signal, they now knew, was some kind of transmitter on Orison’s surface. It only swung into view with the planet’s rotation, and even within that rotational cycle the signal was only being sent for a relatively short interval.

Goma was ready with her response when the message started coming in again. She had gone over it with Vasin, and now the captain and Ru sat watching her as she prepared to recite her response.

She coughed, cleared her throat. Vasin nodded.

‘My name is Goma Akinya,’ she said. ‘I’m Ndege’s daughter, and I’ve come all the way from Crucible. I know you called for Ndege, but my mother was too old to make the crossing. Besides, there were other… complications. So I’ve come instead, as part of an expedition funded by Crucible. We come with no agenda, no objective beyond the gathering of knowledge. But of course we’re curious about you. And now that we know of the other Mandala, we’d like to find out some more about it, as well as whatever is on Poseidon. We don’t know why you’ve warned us away from them, we’ll assume you had good reason. You also mentioned someone arriving before us. That’s news to us. Maybe you can share some information when we meet. We have a fix on your transmission site and we are bringing in our ship. We’ll come down in our lander, as close to you as possible. If there’s anything else you feel we should know, we would be glad to hear it.’

Goma touched a hand to her throat. Her mouth was dry, but she was done.

‘Good,’ Vasin said.

‘What do you think will happen next?’ Ru asked.

‘No idea, but it’ll be interesting,’ Vasin said. ‘That first signal was very generic — it could have been aimed at anyone — and sent by a very simple repeating-transmission system with no intelligence behind it. But now she knows your name, and your relationship to Ndege. If we are dealing with anything more than a mindless recording device, we should know it soon enough.’

Orison completed another turn. There was silence, no hint of a return transmission. But on the next rotation the signal was there again.

‘Good,’ the woman said. ‘It was Ndege I wanted, but if I must make do with second best, another Akinya will have to suffice. How far the apples have fallen from the tree, Goma Akinya. I do hope you measure up.’

‘I’ll try,’ Goma answered acidly.

‘Assume orbit around Orison. You shouldn’t have any trouble spotting my surface encampment. Land at your convenience, within a kilometre or so, and meet me on foot near the main surface lock. I have food and water, so don’t worry about bringing rations. Oh, and prepare yourselves for a surprise or two.’

Tantors, Goma thought. It was a treacherous line of thinking — all too liable to lead to bitter, crushing disappointment. But she could not help herself. They would put everything right — every wrong thing in her universe.

She could not stop herself.