Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The days on Orison could never be long enough for Goma and Ru. There were too few hours and too many things they wished to ask of both the Tantors and their host. Goma could hardly believe that there were another three Tantors still out there, on their way back to the camp. In her limited time with the first trio, she had already formed an appreciation of Sadalmelik, Eldasich and Achernar as distinct individuals, each with their own past, their own place in the Tantor hierarchy. All were interested in the world beyond Orison, in the stories of Agrippa and the other elephants on Crucible, and all appeared willing to learn about Ndege and the wider Akinya clan. But in the case of Eldasich and Achernar, the latter interest was more polite than insatiable. They were mildly curious, but human business clearly sounded less important to them than news of other Tantors.

Goma offered the most truthful account she could. It was hard to skirt around the issue of the Tantor decline, the gradual weakening of their intelligence, without alluding to their similarity to baseline elephants. She did the best she could, with Ru’s assistance, and if offence were taken, it was not obvious to either of them.

The Tantors, for their part, appeared to relish dialogue with someone other than Eunice. It was clear from their surroundings that they required constant intellectual stimulation. In the main bubble and the sub-chambers excavated around it, they had been provided with many tools and toys — or perhaps they were better thought of as puzzles, for toys sounded demeaning for creatures of such evident cognitive gifts. There was an upright rack, divided into black and white squares, with movable symbols — some kind of game or logic exercise. There was a horizontal flat panel bisected by a central net of recovered insulation material with two racket-like paddles suggestive of table tennis. There was a fist-sized cube made of many smaller coloured cubes which could be twisted into different permutations, but only via cooperative action between two or more elephants. There were tall sculptural objects made of interchangeable networks of transparent plumbing, through which the Tantors liked to roll little polished marbles. There were data screens arranged in stereo pairs for the convenience of animals with broad skulls and opposed eyes. There was a socklike tool which could be worn over a trunk and came equipped with a variety of plug-in micromanipulators, allowing the Tantors to perform the deftest tasks. There were cave paintings, splashed on the walls in bright primary colours. There was a wire-frame wind chime which the Tantors liked to set in motion as they passed, and a thing like an alpine horn which they enjoyed blowing into that produced a note so deep it made Goma’s guts throb.

But the Tantors also had work to do, sharing the business of survival. They each placed a much higher demand on the camp’s life-support capabilities than one human. One of the sub-chambers led into a lithoponic glasshouse, while another accessed the nutrient troughs where the mealworms were grown and harvested. Another chamber contained the lavish waste-treatment beds — the smell of elephant dung brought Goma and Ru back to Crucible in an instant. Elsewhere they were shown the elephant-sized spacesuits, with their goggled helmets and accordioned trunk sheaths like antique gas masks. Eunice said it generally took three Tantors to prepare another three for the outside, so they seldom went out at the same time.

They shared the camp on equal terms with Eunice. She had expertise and insight but she was not their master. She had been exiled, and the Tantors’ ancestors had agreed to defect with her. But their relationship was based on loyalty, not blind subservience. They needed each other to survive, the partnership built on friendship and mutual dependence.

Goma and Ru had as many questions for Eunice as they did for the Tantors. She was obliging, up to a point — willing to go over the same details, to repeat or re-examine that which was not immediately clear. But it was not like asking things of a robot.

‘I knew a Finnish astronaut,’ she said, launching off on a sudden tangent. ‘Hannu. It was on Phobos, when we were cooped up there waiting for that big Martian storm to die down. Nerves were starting to fray — the slightest thing set us off. Someone sneezes the wrong way, someone rubs their nose or keeps saying they miss Earth. “All guests stink on the third day,” said my Finnish colleague. He was right.’

‘Give us a break,’ Goma said. ‘We’ve barely been here two days, let alone three.’

‘It feels like longer. I have opened my home to you, offered you sanctuary and the essentials of life-support. How many times do we need to keep going over the same basic facts?’

‘You’ll have to excuse us,’ Vasin said, with the manner of one who minded very little whether or not she was excused. ‘We’ve arrived in the middle of a situation we don’t understand with next to no prior information. You’re our only reference point, and you shouldn’t even be alive. I mean that in the literal sense. If we were expecting anything, it was a robot.’

‘I must be a disappointment to you all.’

‘No,’ said Dr Nhamedjo, moving his hands in a magnanimous flourish. ‘You’re a wonder of the age! But you’re also human. As recording systems go, memories are fallible. And by your own account, all this happened such a long time ago.’

‘You’ve been on your own here,’ Goma said soothingly. ‘Nothing but you and the Tantors and a totally deserted, barely hospitable planet.’

‘And you think I went mad without the benefit of your sparkling conversation?’

‘I think we need to be sure that you’re as sane as you think you are,’ Vasin said. ‘Hence our questions. You’ll admit it’s an unlikely set of circumstances — you becoming flesh and blood, Zanzibar reappearing… Tantors turning against people. It’s not that I doubt these things, but I’m still trying to understand how they fit together.’

‘You told us the Watchkeepers needed you,’ Goma said, ‘something to do with Poseidon not letting them near, but I still don’t really get what that means.’

They were in Eunice’s kitchen. She wet her finger and drew a watery circle on the table, then another circle surrounding it. ‘Poseidon prohibits examination by purely machine intelligences. But the Trinity was able to bypass that prohibition.’

‘One of you was a machine,’ Ru said.

‘And one of us was human, and one of us had a trunk. It was the totality of us that counted. Collectively, we were more than our individual selves — we were a distinct information-gathering entity.’

‘Then you’ve been there,’ Goma said.

‘We got close but turned back. Something touched us. The Terror, Chiku called it.’ She smiled at their uneasy reactions. ‘There was nothing occult about it. The Terror was just a form of deep understanding — information being drilled into our heads. A vast, precise, intuitive grasp of the probable consequences of our actions. That to know the truth of the M-builders was to grasp the most dangerous knowledge of all.’

‘All right,’ Goma said. ‘We’ve skirted around this long enough — what’s the big deal about the M-builders? What’s so important that they have to put the Terror into you? What secret is worth protecting that badly? And if it’s such a big, bad secret, why not just erase it, or hide it away for ever?’

‘I don’t know what it is. I didn’t get close enough to find out.’

‘But you got close enough to experience the Terror. And you’ve had all this time since then to think about it, to put it into perspective. Don’t tell me you didn’t come up with something — you’re Eunice Akinya.’

‘At least someone has faith in me.’

‘I’m trying very hard,’ Goma said.

After a while, she said, ‘The M-builders discovered something. A fundamental truth about the universe, about the fate of things — what happens to the universe, what happens to all the matter, and all the life in it, in the future. This much I understood. The rest is… harder. It’s like telling a child about death. There’s no nice way to break the news.’

‘They let you know this fundamental truth?’ Ru asked.

‘It came through.’

‘And the secret itself?’ Goma probed. ‘If you got a glimpse of it, you need to share it with us. You can’t expect us to get worked up about Dakota if we don’t know exactly what’s at stake.’

‘It’s a lot for you to take in.’

‘Then give us your best stab. You can’t expect us to get worked up about Dakota when we only have a clue what it’s all about.’

‘I can expect whatever I like.’

‘Eunice… please.’

‘Persistent little upstart, aren’t you. Annoying. Annoying and cocksure and full of your own insufferable self-belief.’

Goma lifted her chin in defiance, displaying more boldness than she felt. ‘Coming from you? You made a career out of insufferable self-belief. You built an empire on the back of it.’

This drew the tiniest grudging smile from Eunice. ‘Very well. At least you and I can speak plainly. You can take this, I think. You’ve got the steel for it. I can’t speak for your companions — they’re your business. The M-builders… are you sure of this?’

‘Yes, we’re damned well sure,’ Goma said.

‘They arrived at this truth. It’s a bitter pill. None more bitter. The universe ends. It has a built-in expiration clause. It’s going to stop — and not at some remote cosmological time from now, when the galaxies crash together or the suns fizzle out, but sooner… much sooner.’

‘When you say sooner…’ Vasin said. ‘What are we talking? Thousands of years, millions?’

‘It can’t be quantified. It’s a fluctuation event, a vacuum instability, a random but inevitable process like the flipping of an atomic nucleus, the decay of a neutron. It could happen tomorrow or a hundred billion years from now. Statistically speaking? Probably won’t happen for hundreds of millions of years… a good few billion, most likely.’

Goma could not help but let out a gasp of relief. ‘Then it’s so far off as to not matter.’

Eunice looked at her with scorn. ‘Try, just for a second, not to think like a thing made out of cells, with a lifespan shorter than some planetary weather systems. You’re a human being. You have limited horizons. Thinking beyond next week is a reach for you. That’s fine, it’s what you are.’

‘Thanks,’ Goma said.

‘You’re welcome. But it wasn’t like that for the M-builders. They’d already been around for tens of millions of years when they made this discovery. They’d accepted the idea of being an immortal super-civilisation. It suited them down to the ground. Masters of creation? Lords of all they surveyed? Architects of eternity? Why not? Bring it on. But there’s always a catch — they needed the universe not to die on them in the meantime. When they worked out that the end state was not just probable but inevitable… let’s just say it didn’t feel quite so far off to them. Not when they’d already been around for aeon upon aeon and were making plans for the rest of time.’

‘Then the truth is… what?’ Vasin said. ‘The confirmation of all this? Then we don’t need it. I’ve seen those theories, too. We already know about vacuum fluctuations.’

‘So do the Watchkeepers,’ Eunice answered. ‘So does every galactic intelligence with the ability to count up to three. But it’s always been a theory… a dragon in the mathematics. Something nasty, but which you aren’t required to take seriously. The M-builders did, though. Their mathematics was watertight, and they’d excluded all competing theories. They knew the end was coming. And Poseidon is their answer.’

‘A solution?’ Ru asked.

‘An answer,’ Eunice repeated.

Ru began, ‘I’m not sure—’

‘Did something go wrong on your ship’s life-support when you were on the way here? Some catastrophic lowering of your overall intelligence baseline? I’ll spell it out to you slowly. Poseidon is a species-level response. Information, yes. A requiem, if you like — although we’d have to read it to be sure. Whatever Poseidon is, it encodes their response to the knowledge that life, existence itself, has a finite duration. That it cannot last for ever.’

‘And that’s what the Watchkeepers want to know — how the M-builders responded to that information?’ Goma asked.

‘Well, wouldn’t you?’

Goma shrugged. There was a certain formality or protocol to dealing with Eunice, and she felt as if some of the rules were becoming clearer. ‘If I were a machine civilisation instead of a bag of cells — maybe. But I’m not sure I’d go to all this trouble to get it.’

‘You would if you were them. The Watchkeepers are also ancient, and just like the M-builders, they’re keen on the idea of long-term survival, of enduring deep-time, burrowing into the extreme future of the universe. They know that vacuum fluctuation is real — they can see it in their physics, and in the physics of all the other cultures they’ve encountered or unearthed. So inasmuch as worry is an emotion they’re capable of, they worry. They fret in their dim little machine minds and wish they knew what the M-builders knew. But to find that out, they have to enlist proxy intelligences like ourselves. The trouble with that, though, is that we have to know the Terror. We have to allow our souls to be ripped open while they look on. We’re disposable instruments to them, that’s all. Doesn’t matter if we’re blunted or damaged or burned in the process so long as we function long enough to extract information. Well, fuck that.’

Goma laughed in surprise and admiration. ‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. Fuck it. Fuck being the tools of a higher alien intelligence.’

‘Only you could say that.’

‘Say it? We did more than say it. We downed tools.’ Eunice straightened in her chair, puffed up with pride. ‘We said we weren’t going to do it. That they’d have to find another way. That was their problem, you see. They could only use coercion up to a point, and then we stopped being free agents. But only free agents, creatures operating under their own free will — only they could survive the moons. Of course, the Watchkeepers don’t give up that easily. They tried different avenues of persuasion.’

‘Such as?’ Goma asked.

‘The gifts — the bestowings.’ She touched a finger to her chest. ‘Making me human. They thought they could bribe me into doing their will. But it wasn’t sufficient inducement.’

Goma nodded. ‘What did the others get?’

‘Dakota was already clever. They made her much cleverer — and almost immortal.’

‘And Chiku?’

‘Dear Chiku. In hindsight, she was the only shrewd one among us. There was nothing they could offer her — no carrot, no stick. She wasn’t interested in being smarter, or living longer, and she certainly didn’t want to become anything she already wasn’t. Blame it on my grandson — that boy Geoffrey put some distinctly odd ideas into her head.’

‘They sound healthy enough to me,’ Ru said.

‘Then you’re as odd as he was.’

‘Carry on, please,’ Goma said, a knot of foreboding tightening in her stomach.

‘Chiku’s defiance put her on a path against the Watchkeepers. When Zanzibar arrived, we all did what we could to help. But the Watchkeepers already had plans for Dakota. If they couldn’t use humans, why not elephants instead? It’s not that they understood us, that they had deep insights into our psychology. They just saw another group of vertebrate animals and knew what needed to be done to get what they wanted. Dakota was to be the new matriarch — the new ruler of the Tantors. The homecoming queen. They shuffled her genes, mixed in some new ones and let her breed — allowing her offspring to become the dominant order.’

‘Beyond the Tantors?’ Ru asked.

‘The Risen, they call themselves. In reality, they’re just another instrument of the Watchkeepers — all being groomed for an expedition.’

‘Tell me more about Chiku,’ Goma said.

‘She died. It was near the end of the human presence in Zanzibar. I was there, I saw it. They killed her.’

‘No,’ Goma said, preferring to believe anything but that.

‘It was a dark time. Bad things were done by both parties. The humans began to realise that the Risen were slipping from their control, so of course some of them overreacted — tried to use Zanzibar’s systems to contain the elephants. Pumped inert gases into the life-support network — that sort of thing. Humans could easily squeeze into suits or airlocks, but the elephants couldn’t hide. But it was too clumsy, and not fast enough. There were reprisals. Then the humans switched to lethal weapons — it’s really not that hard to kill an elephant if you’ve the will. But the elephants, especially the Risen, were quick and smart enough to respond in kind. After that it was war.’

‘Please let this be a lie,’ Ru said, and Goma breathed out hard and held her hand, together finding the mutual strength to face this awful truth.

‘Chiku tried to broker a peace. She had friends among the Tantors — even among the Risen. But blood was running too hot on both sides. She was bludgeoned and killed. It was fast. She wouldn’t have felt anything.’

‘Couldn’t you have stopped them?’ Goma asked, barely holding back her rage.

‘You think I didn’t try? You think I wouldn’t have bloodied my hands against them if I could have made a difference? I’m not on the side of elephants or people, Goma. I’m on the side against stupidity.’ She looked down at herself, giving a little shiver of disgust. ‘But I wasn’t strong enough. Not strong enough, not fast enough, not bold enough. Look at what I’ve allowed myself to become.’

‘One of us,’ Goma said. ‘In which case, pity poor you.’

‘Whatever happened on Zanzibar, Eunice can’t be held accountable for it,’ Ru said.

‘No, I can’t,’ Eunice said. ‘But that doesn’t get us out of the mess. I’ve been stuck here without a ship ever since my exile. But you’ve changed all that.’

‘And the other ship?’ Vasin asked.

‘It’s a worry — and another reason for making contact with Zanzibar as quickly as possible. I doubt very much that your arrival has gone unnoticed — especially with all the electromagnetic noise you were putting out.’

‘Your fault for asking us to come in the first place,’ Goma said.

‘Yes, that hasn’t escaped my attention — nor the possibility that I may have inadvertently caused the arrival of the other ship. But I had no choice. I could not sit back and do nothing, not knowing what the Watchkeepers want of Dakota.’

‘You must have known we’d take more than a century to get here,’ Vasin said. ‘Who the hell plans on that kind of timescale?’

‘I do. It’s the habit of a lifetime. And look — you’re here.’

‘So what’s next?’ Goma asked.

‘The other three will be here shortly. I should very much like to take them all with me, but I doubt your ship is geared up to accommodate Tantors. They’ll just have to sit tight here on Orison until I get back.’ She gave an unconcerned shrug. ‘They’re clever. They can run the camp on their own, provided nothing major breaks down.’

‘You have a lot of faith in them,’ Karayan said.

‘Someone needs to. It might as well be me.’

Their arrival had interrupted her work, and Eunice said she could not leave until she had set down in stone the thread of her most recent insight. Goma wondered why she did not just write it down on paper, or record herself for posterity.

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘I could try.’

Eunice put on her spacesuit, the one with the heavy utility belt, and Goma followed her out through the lock, although she had not been specifically invited to do so. Wordlessly, Eunice set off for the cliff where they had first encountered her. She picked her way around one of the high stone cairns, then stopped at the base of the cliff. She inspected it for a moment, hand shading her helmet like a visor, and then chose a confident route up through the cracks and shelves of the face.

Goma watched from below. Eunice took out the cutting tool, made its tip flare bright and then began cutting meticulous angular marks into the rock.

Feeling herself on the brink of some momentous, life-changing disclosure, Goma swallowed hard and said: ‘I’ve seen these symbols before.’

Eunice carried on working in silence. She completed a section, then traversed gingerly to the right, her toes resting on the merest wrinkle of out-jutting rock. She cut another series of markings.

‘I very much doubt it.’

‘And I’m pretty sure I have. It’s the Mandala grammar — the same pattern as the one cut into Mandala’s sides, like long chains of dominoes, zigzagging and branching. Only there’s something more, isn’t there? You’re mixing in other types of symbol.’

‘You are very clever. Now why don’t you run along and play?’

‘That’s the Chibesa syntax. You’re combining statements from the Chibesa syntax with the Mandala grammar, as if they’re part of the same hierarchical language, or at least deeply connected.’

Eunice stopped what she was doing. She turned off the cutting tool and returned it to her pouch, then shimmied back down to the ground.

‘And you’d know that how, exactly?’

‘Because my mother showed me. After you left us, Ndege spent thirty years finding connections between the two forms. Eventually she used her knowledge of the Chibesa syntax as a key to unlock the Mandala grammar. That was how she learned to talk to Mandala.’

‘I always knew Ndege had promise.’

‘Never mind my mother — how can you be coming up with the same connections? I know what you are. Your memories aren’t Eunice’s actual memories — you’re made up from her public utterances, the outside facts of her life. Mother said these connections were a deep family secret — too deep for you to know about.’

‘Your mother was correct. She also does me a modest injustice — there is more to me than the posterity engines ever provided — but the essential truth is beyond dispute. I know that the Chibesa syntax is a mathematical formalism, a gateway into new physics, and I also know — or suspect, at least — that it has its origin in the rock scratchings of a passing alien tourist. I also have access to the entire public corpus of academic work on the Mandala grammar, at least as it stood at the time of my departure. But the notion that the two might be connected? I had to figure that out for myself.’

‘How?’

‘The Terror. Whatever you make of it, it was a form of intimate contact with the M-builders’ technology, and of course it changed us all. In my case it left me with glimmerings, a sense of larger insights just out of reach. All that stuff about the vacuum rip… the end of time? That came through. Like I said, leakage. Contamination. More of their nature was revealed than perhaps they intended. Ever since then, I’ve had an odd sense of connections waiting to be made. My dreams—’

‘Then you do dream.’

‘Yes. Now, if you’d allow me to continue?’

‘By all means.’

‘My dreams were great fevered battles between armies of symbols, regiments of logic and formal structure. They would not leave me alone. They chased me for years, decades, grinding away at my sanity until I began to exorcise them by way of these rock carvings. That appears to help. I still only have glimpses most of the time. I can’t see how the syntax and the grammar fit together at all levels… just little pieces, phrases in a larger argument. But that’s enough. It’s as if the glimpses want to be carved into rock — as if they crave permanence. And with each breakthrough — each new carving that appears to lock into the whole — I see that my initial insight must have been real. There is a link.’

‘Ndege agreed.’

‘And did she… theorise?’

‘My mother wasn’t allowed to talk about her ideas — not even to me. But she did. And yes, she theorised. The grammar is an evolution of the syntax — a later, more elegant form. The syntax is a useful shorthand, but it’s hard to use it to talk about anything other than physics. The grammar goes beyond that — it’s richer, more complex, like a language with lots of tenses and genders.’

‘And she understood the formal relationships?’

‘No,’ Goma answered. ‘She had many deep ideas and worked out a lot of the details, but that was already a lifetime’s work. I know my mother didn’t feel as if she was done with it, only that she’d made inroads, seen further than anyone else. If they’d allowed her continued access to Mandala…’

‘And to the Mandala here.’

‘Yes — she’d have wept to have known about that. To know that some part of Zanzibar survived — that she wasn’t the monster they thought she was.’

‘Do not think ill of me, Goma. It has taken courage for you to come here, and I know you are at least as bright as the rest of your expedition.’

‘Thank you,’ she said doubtfully.

‘But you are not Ndege. I asked for her, and hoped fervently she would be the one who came. I was thinking of the help — the guidance — she could offer to the Tantors, but I see now that she could have been of incalculable value in other respects. How I would have benefitted from her insights. How much I could have learned, just by showing her this wall.’

‘I’m as sorry as you are that she can’t be here now.’

‘Sorry won’t get us very far.’

‘But I have her notebooks. I brought then with me — all of them. Do they interest you?’

Eunice looked at her through her faceplate. She had adjusted the reflectivity, offering Goma a chance to see her expression. She was smiling, and the smile was as genuine and beautiful as any Goma had seen.

‘I correct myself. I am not sorry you came, Goma Akinya. Not sorry at all.’

They could have left directly — the lander was ready for immediate take-off — but the other three Tantors still had not returned. In any case, Eunice needed a day to make the necessary housekeeping arrangements, placing the camp in a state of semi-dormancy so that it could be easily maintained by Sadalmelik and the others.

Goma saw this enforced delay as a blessing, offering further opportunity for interaction with the Tantors. She had to sleep and eat, but if not for those necessities she would have gladly spent every hour in their presence. Ru shared her excitement. Together, though, they realised they had an obligation to shift into a more structured methodology, using this opportunity to gather data rather than anecdote. The free-flowing exchanges of the early hours were all very well, but now it was time for discipline and rigor. Many of the cognitive tests they had performed on Crucible could be duplicated here, and these stood a real chance of answering questions only hinted at through dialogue. Language projected a bluff of intelligence, but no fakery could circumvent some of the more challenging tests in their arsenal. So they went down to the Tantors, excited and daunted by what lay ahead. Both knew that a few careful hours here could supplant the work of a lifetime back on Crucible.

But when Goma entered their domain, she immediately saw that something was terribly wrong.

Sadalmelik was on the ground.