Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Nothing was wrong with their rooms in the household, nothing obviously amiss with the amenities on hand, but Kanu had never experienced a more restless night’s sleep in his life. He was back aboard Icebreaker, haunting the corridors again — ghosting their long, darkened lengths, returning to his periodic vigil at Nissa’s sleeping station. There were only so many hours in the night but his dreams felt like they contained weeks or months of mindless wandering. When at last he surrendered to day — the blue of the chamber’s ceiling lights had returned to its prior brilliance after dimming for the night — he felt as drained as if he had lived through every one of those wandering hours. He looked at his little finger, irritated again by the torn fingernail he had noticed on first waking from skipover. How had that happened, exactly? The inside of a skipover casket was smoothly contoured — there was nothing to catch a fingernail on.

He rose, gathered a sheet about his midriff and moved through the adjoining rooms to the washbasins and shower cubicles. He filled a basin with the odd-tasting water and doused his face, removing some of the night’s grease and grime.

‘What do you think Swift knows?’

‘About what?’ Kanu asked, turning around.

‘Everything. Us. The Tantors. What Dakota really wants. What happened to Chiku and the others.’

Nissa had entered the room through the other doorway. She was naked, her free hand resting on one hip, a chunk of fruit held in the other, the posture unselfconscious and one that Kanu found unavoidably arousing. They had been married, once, and then lovers again so recently it was easy to think that everything that had happened in the meantime was no more than a momentary loss of affection, a lovers’ spat. But years had passed since their divorce — decades, in fact — and even the reunion that began in Lisbon had been predicated on his ultimate betrayal of her.

After all that, how did he dare allow himself to feel that he might have fallen back in love with her? How did he dare hope that his feelings might be reciprocated? The universe did not contain enough forgiveness for that.

‘The thing is, I keep coming back to this: everything I know about you says you acted in service to what you thought was the common good. You’re not a bad man and you want the best for everyone — in so far as you understand it. But that still leaves us with a little difficulty, doesn’t it?’

Kanu swallowed hard. ‘Swift.’

‘Swift. Yes. And you know what? I’m almost at the point of thinking you might have earned my trust. Maybe even my forgiveness, although let’s not run before we can walk.’

Not wishing to hurt his chances of being viewed in a better light, Kanu nodded eagerly. ‘Let’s not.’

‘You’re an idealist, and you’re also hopelessly naive. But you’re not a fool, and nothing that’s happened to us was because you were acting selfishly, or for personal gain. I keep reminding myself of that. It’s the bridge that’s helping me find a way back to forgiving you. But here’s the difficulty. However I might end up feeling about you, I’m reserving that clemency for you, not the other voice in our heads. And — yes — I don’t doubt for a minute that he’s listening in.’

‘I allowed Swift inside me — offered him sanctuary beyond Mars. To that extent, I’m responsible for him.’

‘Yes, you are. In which case you’d better hope he’s still on our side. That our ends are the same as his. Because if one or both of us gets in the way of whatever Swift really wants… well, who knows what might happen?’

‘Let’s try not to assume the worst.’

‘There you go again: always the optimist.’ She bit into her fruit. ‘You’re an old fool and you’ve made some terrible decisions. You’ll probably make more. But deep down you’re good and kind and I think you still want to make the best of things. Shall I tell you something?’

‘Go on.’

‘When I found myself trapped aboard your ship, being shot at on our way out of Europa, I’d have gladly strangled you. I mean literally — no exaggeration.’

‘I believe you.’

‘You should. But on another level, I can’t quite say that I’m sorry it happened. I may not be an artist, but I’m a scholar of the arts — a seeker of wonder and novelty, if you like. I like it when life surprises me. And this morning I woke up to find three tiny elephants putting fresh fruit out for us.’ She levelled her palm at hip height. ‘They were this big. Not baby elephants, exactly, but miniature ones. They were clever, too. They could talk and answer questions. Their little piping voices came out of those contraptions they have strapped to their foreheads. We have elephant butlers. How marvellous is that?’

Kanu grinned. He felt flooded with joy, filled with the promise of her forgiveness. It was not there yet; it was nothing he could count on, but it was at least within the scope of his future, and for now that was enough.

‘Elephant butlers. I wish I’d been awake to see that.’

‘I suppose you’ll get your chance. Have you washed?’

‘I was in the process.’

‘Then finish. I’d like to make love to you. Do you have any particular problems with that?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘On the evidence, I didn’t think so. Afterwards we’ll have breakfast, and then we’ll see what Dakota has in store for us. And, Swift, if you’re listening in? Go and think machine thoughts for a while. You’re not wanted here.’

They were returned to their broken ship. Once aboard, Kanu satisfied himself with a quick check of the systems, verifying that Icebreaker had not been tampered with during their absence. All was well — or as well as when they disembarked. The ongoing repair processes had inched forward, although there was no useful change in the ship’s capabilities.

‘That door is sealed now,’ Nissa said, meaning the entrance to the polar berthing dock, ‘but if we had to get through it, I’m sure we could find a way.’

‘Icebreaker won’t be much use as a tool of persuasion — at least, not for a while.’

‘But we still have my ship. Granted, it’s not big enough to ram its way out, but it could still do some damage that I’m sure the elephants would rather avoid.’

‘Including our own suicides?’

‘I didn’t say it was a perfect plan. While you think of a better one, would you like some chai?’

Kanu began to dig through the repair summaries, running a finger down the list of tasks. Icebreaker had taken care of itself up to this point, but now it needed materials and parts it could not easily synthesise. Weeks or months of further work looked inevitable. After the year they had already spent in skipover between Poseidon and Paladin, though, Kanu supposed the additional delay was acceptable.

‘All this for an instant of damage!’

‘Stop complaining — we’re alive.’ She handed him a bulb of tepid chai, the best that could be managed in the weightless core.

‘Oh, I’m not complaining. But I’d much rather not be in her debt.’

‘She’s getting the better side of this bargain, Kanu. Have you seen the size of this place? She won’t miss a few thousand tonnes of materials, but in return she regains those sleepers.’

‘She strikes me as clever enough to have worked out how to do that herself,’ he mused. ‘You’d think they’d have made more of an effort if the Friends mean so much to them.’

‘Be grateful there’s something we can do for her.’

‘Oh, I am.’

When they had done as much with the repair tasks as could be managed in a day, Memphis met them at the airlock and brought them back to Dakota. Along the way, Kanu debated asking for another chance to view the recording of Chiku, but his instincts told him not to sound too eager to view it again so quickly.

Especially as Swift appeared to think there was something he ought not to blink for.

‘We will make every effort in our power to help you,’ Dakota said when he had outlined what was needed on an immediate basis. ‘I will assign a number of trusted Risen to you. You may direct them as you wish. I will instruct them to do everything they can to assist you with setting up the supply chains.’

‘It’ll take a while to get the ship running again,’ Kanu said.

‘Provided you find your lodging arrangements to your satisfaction, I do not see any great difficulty accommodating you. Besides, I have a selfish desire to enjoy your company for as long as I may.’

‘I think we’ll be around for a little while,’ Nissa said. ‘Would you like us to look at the skipover vault now?’

‘You are tired and there is no tremendous urgency. I would not wish you to feel beholden to me. Get the repair effort up and running, and then we may turn our thoughts to the Friends. Does that sound like a sensible course of action?’

‘Very,’ Kanu said.

The next day was similar, and the next, and the one after that. Slowly the supply lines were established. When the requirements were simple, everything went smoothly. When Kanu had more complicated requests, however, he found it difficult to communicate his needs to the Risen. There were inevitable misunderstandings, some of which required careful unravelling. Slowly, though, he could see the glimmerings of progress. There would be setbacks, the odd calamity or two — such things were inevitable. Equally, he could see no insurmountable barriers. The ship was fully capable of repairing itself. They would be able to leave.

Dakota always made sure she was appraised of their progress. During their audiences with her, they spoke of technical matters for an hour or so before turning to more general topics of conversation. No subject was obviously out of bounds, but Kanu had noticed a disinclination on Dakota’s part to speak in detailed terms about the history of Zanzibar. Even so, they did their best to coax information out of her while trying not to make it sound as if they had specific concerns.

‘It all looks idyllic,’ Nissa said offhandedly during one conversation. ‘Tantors thriving, living independently of human support. You’ve got it all organised — heat, air, power, water, food, waste management — even education! Chiku would have been glad to see you doing so well.’

‘She would recognise our difficulties, too — that we still recovering from the resource crisis. She would agree that we must not allow ourselves to become complacent. But at least we are laying the foundations for better times.’ Dakota closed the heavy volume she had been consulting. She had asked Kanu and Nissa for help with a difficult, ambiguous passage. ‘Yes, I am sure she would have been very pleased for us.’

‘And the construct,’ Kanu said. ‘Eunice had a stake in your future, too.’

‘That is very true.’

‘What happened to them?’ Nissa asked.

There was a silence, and Kanu began to fear that the question had been too direct, Nissa’s suspicions too overt. But when Dakota replied, she appeared unfazed.

‘It was all a tremendous sadness. The construct was the first to leave us. Gradually, she began to cease to function properly. It was very upsetting, after everything Eunice had done for our kind during the crossing. Like all machines, though, she began to wear out. Is it wrong of me to speak of her as a person? I know she wasn’t human, but the force of her adopted personality was striking, even to myself — she felt like a person to us.’

‘I understand,’ Kanu said.

‘Over time — years rather than months — she became progressively more unreliable and confused. She lost the thread of herself. We did what we could, but given the failing state of our own systems and the difficulties we already faced, our efforts were destined to meet with little reward. Truly, we could have benefited much from the construct’s guidance had she remained to help us. But in the end she stopped working.’

‘She died, you mean?’ Kanu asked.

‘As I said, it is a sadness.’

Swift, who was standing in silent observation to Kanu’s right, made a sceptical frown. He shook his head, touched a finger to the tip of his nose, looked on the verge of making a significant observation.

‘What happened to her remains?’ Nissa asked. ‘May we see them?’

‘They were dismantled and destroyed. It was one of her last coherent requests. It troubled us, but we had no choice but to honour her wish. Doubtless you have some sense of our loss. But that is as nothing compared to our feelings about Chiku. As you know from the recording, she remained awake to help the rest of us — a typically selfless gesture. Unfortunately, there was a gradual collapse of the closed-cycle life-support system, and conditions deteriorated over time. It became very hard for the humans, even the small number who had remained awake to assist us. In desperation, most of them joined the others in skipover. I’m afraid Chiku was among that number.’

‘Why was that a bad thing?’ Nissa asked.

‘Because those last few did not survive. There was a systematic failure of an entire bank of skipover caskets. I am sorry, Kanu — I can only imagine how upsetting this must be to you. Truly she gave us more than could ever be repaid. And we wept for the deaths of these martyrs — wept and scolded ourselves for not having done more. That was when we realised how far we still had to go before becoming your equals.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us all this sooner?’ Kanu asked.

‘For exactly the same reason I am sorry to have told you now — because it is a terrible thing, and a particular cruelty in light of your family connection. If I might offer one consolation, it is that the Risen cherish her memory — everything she did for us, everything she planned to do. And it is an honour to have another Akinya among us.’

Eventually Kanu felt it was safe to ask for a second viewing of the Chiku recording. They had been aboard Zanzibar for more than six weeks; the repair work was proceeding satisfactorily — it was perfectly reasonable that he should wish to begin fulfilling his side of the arrangement.

‘If you insist,’ Dakota said. ‘But please be assured that I have every confidence in your abilities, and that you will keep your word. Still, as you say, the repair process demands less of your time than it did originally.’

So Memphis took them back to the skipover vault beneath the civic building, and they were allowed to conduct as thorough an examination of the equipment as they desired. It was cold in the layered depths of the vault, and silent, and since they were surrounded by the sleeping dead it was hard not to think of ghosts, of lives in abeyance, of collective dreams of an unending winter.

‘I don’t like it in here,’ Nissa confided.

‘Neither do I.’ Kanu blew on the tips of his fingers, already numb. ‘But we have an agreement.’

There were thousands of caskets, but as most of them were of a similar design, they only needed to inspect a sample of the sleepers. At first, the technology looked dauntingly unfamiliar compared to the skipover caskets aboard their own spacecraft. But upon closer study, the fundamentals proved to be similar, with only the overlying control and observation systems being of a markedly different design. Here there was no need for extreme automation since the presumption was that there would always be human caretakers to watch over the sleepers and intervene as needed.

Nonetheless, it was soon apparent that not all of the sleepers could be brought back to life. A fraction of the caskets had malfunctioned in one way or another, and some of the occupants must have been dead or gravely unwell before they were committed to skipover. Kanu and Nissa did not have the resources or expertise to assist with these difficult marginal cases.

Encouragingly, though, the majority of the sleepers appeared revivable. It would need to be done gradually, in small enough numbers that individual problems could be addressed as they arose. Once they were thawed, well and adjusted to their surroundings, the newly awoken could begin to help with the effort of waking the others. The work would get faster as they progressed.

Still, Kanu dared not guess how long the whole process would take. It felt optimistic to think in terms of months. Where would these people live once they were up and about, in a world remade for the convenience of elephants? It was one thing to keep a couple of human guests fed and watered — what of thousands, or even tens of thousands?

They were on their way back to Dakota, already inside the civic building, when Kanu said, ‘Memphis — might I have another look at the recording? It won’t take a moment.’

‘Why, Kanu?’

It helped that their hair had begun to grow back since their arrival on Zanzibar, enabling Memphis to distinguish more easily between human man and human woman. Kanu’s hair was still short and appeared to be growing back whiter than when he had shaved it, and it bristled out from his scalp in all directions. Nissa’s was darker and she had made an effort to tame its growth, which resulted in her looking younger rather than older, despite their travails.

‘Your leader has asked us to help with the sleepers,’ Kanu said. ‘Chiku left some information that we need to bring them out of skipover. You’ll be saving us a great deal of time if we could review the recording again now. I’m sure Dakota would approve.’

‘You are not Dakota. You do not know her.’

‘But you do, Memphis.’ It was Nissa speaking now, confidently adding her voice to Kanu’s. ‘She told us how much she admires you — your loyalty, your strength of character. She said you were one of the few she could talk to as an equal.’

‘Did she?’

‘Oh, yes. She was fulsome in her praise.’ Nissa was being quite brazen now. ‘Did Dakota have a problem with us viewing the recording originally, Memphis?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then, there won’t be a problem this time — and you’ll have shown useful initiative in decision-making.’

‘It won’t take long, Memphis,’ Kanu said.

He could almost feel the slow, clock-like deliberation of the elephant’s brain. Unfair to make that comparison, of course — he had judged Memphis to be a thing of wonder until Dakota offered him a new baseline — but he could not help it. Humans were cleverer than chimps, but a dull child was somehow more pitiable than any animal. Here was a talking elephant with only average intelligence.

‘You will see the recording.’

‘Thank you, Memphis,’ Nissa said.

Memphis brought them to the upright glass and once again summoned the image of Chiku Green. Kanu had seen it all before, but this time he could not dismiss a sense of furtiveness, knowing that he had ulterior reasons for watching the message again. True, they had a theoretical interest in the appended documents. But that was not the reason they were here.

Rather than worrying about concealing his guilt, though, Kanu was doing his best not to blink.

Back at the household, Kanu kept being drawn to the windows. The rooms only offered a limited view of the surrounding household, overlooking an area of open ground, some trees, and part of an adjoining wing. But he had seen no sign of activity since Memphis brought them back from the civic building. Feeling oddly foolish, he checked cupboards and looked under beds, just in case one of the dwarf elephants had squeezed away somewhere.

But they were alone.

‘Well, Swift?’ he asked finally. ‘You’ve had time to think about the recording, and I tried as hard as I could not to blink. What was the point of that particular exercise?’

‘I would have thought that was as blatant as one of your opening chess gambits, Kanu. The recording had been edited — rather crudely if I might say so.’

‘We both spotted that.’

‘Yes. But you may not have spotted that Chiku Green was ahead of her silencers.’

‘How so?’ Nissa said.

‘She must have prepared her statement ahead of time, reading from a script. She took the words she meant to speak and embedded them in the technical appendage, as a safeguard.’

‘It was too fast for me,’ Kanu said. ‘Just a blur of graphs and numbers.’

‘Fortunately, your visual system recorded rather more than your conscious mind was capable of processing. The words were encoded numerically — a very simple cyclic numerical cipher. Virtually hidden in plain sight. A child could have decoded the statement — but it would have needed to recognise what it was seeing in the first place. Chiku must have been confident that the Risen — the majority of the Risen, at least — would not be quite so perceptive.’

‘Can you show us these words?’ Nissa asked.

‘You forget that I have also seen Chiku and studied her patterns of speech. I can emulate her.’

Something made Kanu hesitate — some lingering notion that it was an act of disrespect to Chiku to have Swift animate her. But he forced himself to set aside that disquiet. It would be better to hear the words from her lips.

‘Do it. Show us the things she said that we didn’t get to hear.’

‘I suggest you simply ask me to explain the most germane points for now, and I will provide a transcript of the entire document at my leisure.’

‘I’m not sure—’

‘I am,’ Nissa said. ‘It makes sense. Do it, Swift.’

Swift’s form shifted to that of Chiku, exactly as she had looked in the glass, only sharper, more real, more suggestive of actual physical presence. And when she spoke, it was not a recording they were hearing, but the living voice of his third-mother.

‘What would you like to know?’

Kanu was frozen. He had no idea how to begin addressing her. The likeness was too striking, the similarity heartbreaking. He had known two iterations of Chiku back on Earth, neither of them this woman, but everything about her was a reminder of that past, the contentment of the good years they had barely known they were living. He saw her profile in sunlit doorways, standing like a figure in a Dutch interior, the angle of her averted face stroked with gold. He remembered the kindness of Chiku Yellow as she cared for Chiku Red, who had lost language and needed to be nursed back to it like a child. He remembered the smell of brine at the quayside, the mewl of seagulls, the clack of rigging, the drowsy warmth of a Lisbon evening.

He recalled the fortitude and patience of Chiku Red, who when the Mechanism fell had turned out to be the strongest of them all.

‘Let’s begin at the beginning,’ Nissa said, when his silence grew uncomfortable. ‘Why are you here? Why did you come here in the first place?’

‘They needed us,’ she said. ‘The Watchkeepers are old and immensely powerful, but there are things even they can’t discover for themselves. The M-builders were an older civilisation — vastly older. Something happened to them, and the Watchkeepers would like to be able to incorporate that data into their own strategic planning. This system is a key to understanding what became of the M-builders, but the Watchkeepers can’t use it.’

At last, Kanu forced himself to speak. ‘Why not?’

‘They’re wholly machine. That’s their strength, but also their limitation. The answers are on Poseidon, but they can’t get there. Poseidon is closed to investigation by machine intelligences — or at least, to machine intelligences like the Watchkeepers. It’s hard to explain, but it has something to do with them being too powerful, having too much processing power — they’ve slipped over the Gupta — Wing threshold.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything to me,’ Kanu said.

‘I wouldn’t expect it to — it’s quite arcane. But there’s something called integrated information theory — a model of consciousness — that was very interesting to a couple of mid-twenty-second-century cyberneticists called June Wing and Jitendra Gupta. The underlying theory’s much older than that, though — it’s a way of looking at neural networks and how information can be made to flow through them. In feed-forward networks, the flow is all one-way — like a river running downhill. The cerebellum is a feed-forward network. Meanwhile, your higher brain areas incorporate information-feedback properties — you’re gathering information and processing it in complex ways. That’s an integrated network, and it’s the key to conscious experience. Here’s the interesting thing, though. Under certain conditions, an integrated network can be functionally duplicated by a feed-forward network, but at the expense of greater computational resources. It’s not a particularly elegant or efficient mapping, but it is mathematically equivalent. Obviously you don’t have that option. You’re made out of meat. You’re conscious because you can’t afford to waste limited brain capacity on not being conscious.’

‘That’s a relief.’

‘There are only so many neural pathways in that skull of yours, Kanu — you have to use them in the most efficient way, and your consciousness is just a by-product of that neural efficiency. But here’s the thing. If you had limitless processing capacity, you could supplant your integrated networks with feed-forward networks, and you’d be functionally indistinguishable to an external observer. But there’d be one difference.’

‘I wouldn’t be conscious.’

‘You’d be a computational zombie — giving all the appropriate external responses suggestive of consciousness, but with no conscious activity going on inside your head.’

‘Would I care?’

‘There wouldn’t be anything left of you to care. That’s the point of the Gupta — Wing theorem. It says that any conscious entity with unlimited computational resources runs the risk of remodelling itself as a series of feed-forward networks, thereby slipping over the horizon of consciousness. But it never notices, because at the precise moment it happens, there ceases to be a conscious “it” to detect the change. And after the transition, there’s no compulsion to reverse it. That’s what happened to the Watchkeepers. Collectively, they became too powerful — farmed out too much of their neural processing to feed-forward networks because they had the computational freedom to do so. Consequently they slipped over the Gupta — Wing threshold.’

‘They’re machine zombies,’ Nissa said.

‘At least partially. Maybe they’ve retained enough residual self-awareness to understand that they’ve lost something, especially after being rebuffed by the systems around Poseidon for so long. But from the point of view of those systems, of the M-builders, they’re hollow. They can process, interpret, deploy forms of intelligence, but they’re not conscious so they’re barred from Poseidon. The moons can tell — they can detect which side of the Gupta — Wing threshold the Watchkeepers now lie on. But it doesn’t stop them trying. They have almost limitless patience, an endless willingness to keep attacking the same problem. Maybe that in itself is a marker for the Gupta — Wing threshold — an inability to grow frustrated, bored, indifferent. The Watchkeepers have been throwing themselves against this knowledge barrier for millions of years — longer than we’ve been a species. But on a kind of glacial timescale their strategies can evolve. Lately they’ve begun to co-opt the assistance of other intelligences, creatures running on different cognitive substrates. Creatures like us — living organisms, like me or Dakota, or hybrid machine-human intelligences like Eunice. Individually, none of us is up to the task. But it was the Watchkeepers’ intention that the Trinity would be able to function as an investigative whole, a single information-gathering collective intelligence, one that would be able to slip through the barrier of the moons and reach Poseidon. And learn, and report back — give them the M-builders’ insights that they can’t reach for themselves.’

‘Is that what you did?’ Nissa asked.

‘We tried. They gave us tools — a ship full of sensors and instruments, all of it copied from our own technology. They made us understand what they expected of us. And of course we tried to do as we were asked, because we saw it as an extension of the Covenant, a necessary act for continued non-intervention. Also, of course, because we were curious. To begin with, we approached Poseidon slowly, coming a little closer each time, gathering more and more data. Finally, though, we had to go deeper. And that’s when we were tested.’

‘In what way?’ Kanu said.

‘Examined, scrutinised, our nature probed — the test the Watchkeepers failed. By some miracle, we passed and were permitted to go deeper. But we could not. The Terror had touched us. Something got into our heads — a kind of final warning for the curious. It is difficult to put into language, something more easily felt than expressed — but as near as I can phrase it, it was an invitation to proceed if we dared. Come nearer and learn something of our secrets — how we changed our fate. But know that from this moment, you will be judged. Not just us — not just the Trinity — but our entire species, our entire flowering, from people, to Tantors, to hybrids like Eunice. That was the Terror — we were about to take that responsibility on our shoulders for the sake of increasing the knowledge base of another civilisation entirely. So we refused. We had come this far, acted for the Watchkeepers — done their bidding without complaint. But no more, not until we had a better understanding of the risks.’

‘You stood up to them,’ Kanu said, smiling in admiration. ‘You had the brazen nerve to do that. That took real courage.’

‘The Watchkeepers knew they could not coerce us too forcefully,’ Chiku said. ‘We had to be free agents, not the zombie puppets of a zombie civilisation. So they tried to barter with us, and that’s when they bestowed the gifts. Increased longevity for Dakota. Turning Eunice into a living woman. These boons were granted with the willing consent of the subject. They tried to offer me immortality, as well — they said it was a trivial thing.’

‘You took it?’ Kanu said.

‘I refused. That didn’t go down well, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. The other two weren’t capable of functioning as an expedition team on their own. So: stalemate. Who knows what might have happened if Zanzibar hadn’t appeared? None of us was expecting that — not even the Watchkeepers.’

‘Was there any warning?’ Nissa asked.

‘Not much. A brief, powerful surge of energy from the Mandala on Paladin across every electromagnetic band we could measure, hard gamma all the way down to ultra-long baseline radio waves. And then it was over, and Zanzibar was hanging over Paladin. It should have come crashing down! But somehow it had retained the orbital angular momentum it had at the moment of the Crucible event, and that was enough to send it looping around Paladin. We had no idea what had happened, to begin with. We barely recognised what we were looking at as being a chunk of the old holoship.’

‘Did you attempt contact?’ Nissa asked.

‘Rescue, more like. We picked up emergency transmissions from the survivors. Confused, panic-stricken — they had even less of a clue about what had happened than we did. At least we knew we were in another solar system after the Watchkeepers transported us. All they knew was that there’d been a massive explosion and half their world was gone. They were only starting to come to terms with that when we boarded. Of course, we were something of a shock to them — but not as much of a shock as what had just happened. Yes, you are orbiting a new planet now. Yes, we are the Trinity. Yes, you appear to have followed us across seventy light-years.’

‘The Watchkeepers allowed you to interact?’ Kanu said.

‘They kept their distance. The three of us were all highly regarded by the original colonists and the survivors readily accepted our guidance, even our leadership. I was invited to coordinate the human survivors, while Dakota — the cleverest, wisest of the Tantors — assumed her former role as matriarch. Eunice, being neither machine nor human nor elephant, didn’t command quite such ready loyalty from either faction, but her expertise was invaluable in knitting Zanzibar’s broken systems back together. Even the harshest of her sceptics came to see her value. But then things began to change. We thought we were over the worst of our difficulties, but in truth they had barely begun. Our little rock was simply not big enough to sustain humans and elephants simultaneously.’

‘Swift,’ Nissa said. ‘Might I ask a question?’

Swift adopted his usual camouflage. ‘By all means.’

‘How much of this did you suspect the first time we saw the recording?’

‘Had I suspected any of it, Nissa, I would have voiced my concerns immediately.’

‘Yet you’re the one who wanted another look at the recording. That was your idea.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Then you had some idea that encrypted data was there, whether or not you’re prepared to admit it now.’

‘It was clear to me that the recording had been edited, Nissa. But then, did we not all reach that conclusion?’

‘Only you were capable of detecting that embedded data,’ Kanu said, struck by a powerful sense that he was arguing with himself. ‘Neither Nissa nor I saw anything suspicious in those numbers. You saw the alphabetical cipher — we didn’t. And if you saw nothing the first time, why were you so keen that I not blink the second time?’

‘He knew,’ Nissa said. ‘All of it, or part of it, at least.’

‘Is this true, Swift? Did you withhold your suspicions?’

‘I rather resent the thrust of that question.’

‘Just answer it.’

‘We were in the midst of delicate negotiations with Dakota. It would have been counterproductive of me to raise doubts on the basis of incomplete data.’

‘Counterproductive to you,’ Nissa said.

‘She has a point, Swift,’ Kanu said. ‘When we debated remaining aboard Icebreaker or taking it inside Zanzibar for repairs, you raised no objections.’

‘You were at liberty to take whichever course of action you thought the wisest, Kanu. Please do not blame me for failing to find fault in your own argument.’

‘You slippery little…’ Nissa said.

Kanu raised a calming hand. ‘It’s too late for recriminations.’

‘Is that you speaking, or Swift?’

‘It’s me, and we’re in this situation now, so there’s no point arguing about it. Maybe Swift could have spoken up sooner, but he’s helping us now, isn’t he?’

‘Now that we’re committed. Now that our ship is locked inside Zanzibar.’

‘May I continue?’ Swift said, becoming Chiku again.

‘Provided you promise to be a little less devious from now on,’ Nissa said.

‘Gradually it became clear to me that it’s not human assistance the Watchkeepers need, but organic assistance. The species doesn’t really matter. From the perspective of an alien robot, a Tantor is just another warm-blooded organism with a central nervous system. The Tantors are already on the cusp of human intelligence — we did that ourselves, through generations of genetic intervention. All the Watchkeepers had to do to achieve their purposes was give them the final push. Extreme longevity was only the first of the gifts bestowed on Dakota. The next was human-level intelligence, perhaps something beyond that, even. It was not hard for them. They had a good understanding of how our minds worked, given how deeply they’d already looked into my head. When they took Dakota from us the second time, I still felt I knew her. When she returned, I wasn’t sure.’

‘What had changed?’ Kanu asked.

‘She’s become something new — something formidable and clever. And whatever mix of genes produces that cognitive enhancement, it’s inheritable. Her offspring are significantly smarter than the Tantor baseline. It’s unevenly distributed — they don’t all get the same package of enhancements — but across all her children, and their children, Dakota’s genes are slowly raising the intelligence of the entire Tantor population. More of them speak like her, more of them use tools the way she does — more of them can plan and strategise and out-think us. And I don’t know quite what to make of that. I don’t want to be frightened of it. I don’t want to overreact against a development that could be wonderful. But all of a sudden, the Tantors are no longer ours. We neither control nor understand them — and we have no idea what they are going to do next. Something good and wise, I hope; something that serves all our needs. But I fear it may not play out that way. We have remade Zanzibar and given them the means to run it on their own. I think they could become totally autonomous, in time.’

‘They did,’ Nissa said.

‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Kanu said.

‘Look around, Kanu. Have you seen another living human soul since we arrived? The worst did happen, just as Chiku feared — a war between the Risen and the people. And now we know who won.’