Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

It was a challenging thing, Goma reflected, to remove one’s own helmet under near-vacuum conditions, and Dr Nhamedjo had given it his best shot. He must have retained his conscious faculties long enough not only to undo the neck-ring fastenings — supposedly fail-safe under reduced pressure, although there were loopholes in any design — but also to lift the helmet away from his head even as the air and heat surged from his body, stealing life and awareness in the same explosive gasp. A final few seconds of lucidity, and then darkness ink-blotting in from all sides. Goma wondered what had been the worst part of it: the inexpressible cold, shocking as a helium bath; or the airlessness, his lungs attempting to draw sustenance from vacuum? Both, perhaps, equal in their viciousness, their absolute promise of imminent death. Nor would it have been instantaneous. But he was a physician, and must therefore have had a shrewd idea of what to expect.

The Tantors found him on the trail between the camp and the lander, on his own, with no sign of the cargo sled he was supposed to have been dragging from the airlock. From his footprints it was clear that he had never reached the ship, nor had any intention of doing so. He had set off with only one goal in mind: the taking of his own life. These last days must have seen him marking time, waiting to learn whether the virus functioned in the intended fashion. Once he had his evidence, he was free to remove himself from the expedition.

None of this was immediately apparent to Goma, or indeed to any of her associates. All they had was a dead man, brought in by elephants. Heeding Eunice, the three spacesuited Tantors had remained outside after depositing Nhamedjo in the airlock. They had found his helmet close to his body and brought that back, too.

‘If it turns out they killed him…’ Vasin said, apparently thinking aloud.

‘I think he did this to himself,’ Goma said. ‘Look at his suit. It’s not like Eunice’s. The Tantors wouldn’t have known where to start opening it, even if they had the right tools on their trunks.’

‘Maybe they did?’ said Loring. ‘Went out to fix equipment, didn’t they?’

‘They had tools,’ Eunice confirmed flatly. ‘Trunk attachments, adaptors — stored in those panniers on their suits. They could have swapped them on and off easily enough — it’s how they work in vacuum. But do you see any signs of a struggle, scratches or damage to his suit?’

‘They’re so strong, he wouldn’t have had a chance to struggle,’ Loring said.

‘No, but he’d have had ample time to run away. They don’t move quickly in those suits. Even if they cornered him — which they didn’t — your friend would have had time to call us.’

‘Can’t have committed suicide,’ Loring said. ‘He went out there to help us? To fetch the medical equipment?’

‘To delay the actual act,’ Goma said. ‘To buy more time for the infection to take hold, to make the medicines less likely to help. He never had any intention of coming back.’

‘You’re very sure of his guilt,’ Vasin said.

‘He put the disease in Ru.’

‘You don’t know this.’

‘No, Gandhari, but who else could have done it? He had the opportunity, with Ru not being well enough to come out of skipover at the same time as the rest of us — and how do we know that was even true? We just took his word — he was the doctor. It gave him all the time he needed to pump her full of whatever nasty crap he needed to. I should have seen it sooner. Grave always said there was another saboteur among us.’

‘You’re forgetting something,’ said the captain. ‘Doctor Nhamedjo was openly critical of my handling of Grave. Of all us, he was the one who expressed the most scepticism concerning Grave’s guilt.’

‘He was clever, that’s all — he knew full well that nothing he said would make a blind bit of difference. Look at me — the innocent, thoughtful Doctor Nhamedjo.’

‘We can argue his guilt in due course,’ Karayan said, ‘but right now we still need those medical supplies. I am willing to return for them.’

‘The Tantors are still out there,’ said Loring.

‘Then I will exercise caution.’

They watched Karayan leave, dragging the sled behind him — light now that it was unladen. Eunice had warned Atria, Mimosa and Keid that another person would soon be on the move, and their shuffling, spacesuited forms were visible from a number of topside windows as they waited for further instructions.

‘Why don’t you send them to the lander?’ Goma asked. ‘They can help carry extra supplies.’

‘It’s that clear-cut to you, is it?’ Eunice snapped back. ‘Nhamedjo is dead, case closed? None of you had the slightest inkling of his guilt until just now, so how do I know I can trust any of you?’

‘You don’t,’ Goma said. ‘But you can begin by excluding Ru. She didn’t have a clue what he’d put in her.’

‘She’s still infected — still a lethal agent.’

‘You have her under quarantine, and pretty soon you’re going to have more medicines and tools at your disposal. At least start treating Ru as the victim, not the perpetrator.’

‘I’d like to contact Travertine,’ Vasin said. ‘I can speak to it via my suit, but it’ll be simpler if you just give us a direct line. Are we in the right alignment for that?’

Eunice nodded at the ceiling. ‘Your ship is overhead.’

‘Then let me talk to Nasim Caspari.’

‘Another trustworthy soul?’

‘I’m going to ask him to put a lock on Nhamedjo’s quarters and medical suite. I’ll want a complete search of his personal effects and a more thorough examination of his background than anything we’ve performed to date. Clearly we missed something.’

‘You have a fine talent for understatement.’

‘Then I’ll ask Andisa to start working with us to find a cure for Sadalmelik and the others, just as soon as our analysers have a look at the blood samples. You’ve met six of us—’

‘Yes, and hasn’t that gone well.’

‘There are forty-six more of us in space — forty-seven if I decide to thaw Peter Grave, which is at least an outside possibility at this point. That’s a lot of expertise — more than any of us has on our own, and that includes you, Eunice. If we made a mistake about Nhamedjo, then I’m truly sorry. But the only way out is via cooperation, and that means none of us acting rashly.’ Vasin looked at Goma. ‘I concur that Ru must remain in quarantine — that’s the only sensible option — but she must be informed that we do not think she is culpable. Do you accept that, Eunice?’

‘Nothing is proven either way.’

‘I’m not insisting on proof, just a little reasonableness. I am willing to turn over the resources of my entire starship to help you and the Tantors — now give me something back.’

‘You made this mess.’

‘You invited us,’ Vasin replied.

Of course there were no miracles to be had, except of the modest kind permitted by the exigencies of medicine and time. Karayan came back with a sled-load of supplies, and on the second trip the suited Tantors returned to the lander to help with additional logistics. Vasin outlined the situation to Caspari, and with all haste her desired arrangements were put in place. The lander’s medical analysers were patched through to Travertine and additional blood samples taken from both Tantors and humans. The remaining members of Nhamedjo’s medical staff — presumed innocent until otherwise proven — were assigned the task of processing this data, first to select the best therapeutic approach based on the existing medical stocks, and secondly to attempt synthesis of a targeted antiviral drug.

Not all of the news was against them. Atria, Mimosa and Keid had completed repairs on one of Eunice’s remote transmitters, which in turn allowed for better and more prolonged communications with Travertine. The starship, meanwhile, had now dispersed relay satellites into its own orbit, furthering their chances of remaining in contact. Vasin returned to the lander and moved it closer to the camp, allowing a flexible pressure bridge to be strung from one of the airlocks. This in turn permitted the humans to move more easily from one to the other.

Ru’s virus was detected at low concentrations in all the expedition members, most notably Goma, but not at a level where infection was a strong likelihood. After more than a day all remained asymptomatic, confirming that the virus had been engineered to avoid obvious detection.

‘Nhamedjo would have seen it in our blood,’ Goma said. ‘That’s a given. But no one was looking over his shoulder, doubting his word.’

Eunice remained entirely free of infection, although in other respects she appeared fully human, it was clear that she had some sort of immune system.

‘To think I let that bastard examine me,’ she said. ‘He was close enough that I could have snapped his neck like a dry twig.’

‘Would you have, if you’d known?’

‘In an instant.’

‘That would have done wonders for diplomacy. Anyway, the damage was done by then — Ru was already primed to infect the Tantors. For all we know he tainted her blood while the rest of us were still in skipover. With hindsight, it makes sense that he’d concentrate his efforts on one of us — we were always going to be among the first to contact them.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t speak of this making sense, Goma. Not while Sadalmelik is dying.’

‘I’m just saying there’s a twisted logic to it. He must have rejoiced when we put Peter Grave into skipover.’

‘Then this other man is definitely innocent?’

‘I think he and Mposi were trying to flush out the real saboteur. Grave confided in Mposi and they arranged to meet, but Doctor Nhamedjo got to Mposi first. When Gandhari digs into his background, I’ll be interested to know if he had expertise in nanotechnology.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s how he hoped to get rid of Mposi.’

‘I am sorry about that. I remember Mposi, although he was a much younger man when I knew him. I would have liked to meet the older version — to see the person he grew into. And Ndege, of course.’

‘You only thought to ask one of them to come.’

‘I did not have the luxury of sending a long and involved message. Besides, Ndege was the one who had the best knowledge of Tantors — the one most likely to impress Dakota. Well, my plans did what plans have a habit of doing.’ But she touched Goma’s hand. ‘You are blameless in this. I understand that.’

‘And Ru?’

‘You appear convinced of her innocence. I admit that the force of your opinion is… compelling.’

‘We studied Tantors on Crucible — we put our lives into bringing them back. Ru almost literally — that’s why she’s as damaged as she is. She didn’t want to follow me here at first — this expedition was going to tear us apart, wife from wife. But when she realised there was even a glimmer of a chance that they might still be alive… that was enough to change her mind.’

‘So the Tantors persuaded her where you could not?’

‘I love her. And I know she loves me. But I can’t ever be the biggest thing in her universe.’

Eunice nodded slowly, as if some great truth had disclosed itself to her. ‘Then we’re similar.’

‘You and me, or you and Ru?’

‘All three of us, I think. I like people — much more than my reputation would suggest. I’ve experienced happiness and loneliness, and I know which I prefer. I was married once, to a man called Jonathan Beza, who made money selling mobile telephones. A good, kind man, but we drifted apart. I couldn’t stay still, whereas Jonathan could. We watched the sun go down on Mars. As we held hands in our suits, Jonathan said to me, “I could watch this happen a thousand times and never grow bored of it.” And I found myself thinking: sunsets are all well and good, but who wants to see the same one twice?’

‘Almost all of humanity except for you.’

‘Well, yes. I never said I wasn’t an outlier. But nor am I a hermit. On Zanzibar, it was a joy when Chiku Green found me. Another face, another head to swim around in. And I have enjoyed seeing new faces on Orison.’

‘Until, as they say, all guests begin to stink.’

‘You don’t. Neither does Ru. I am not sorry I acted quickly to quarantine her, but I do regret hurting her.’

‘You had cause to be angry.’

‘But a moment’s consideration would have told me she was unlikely to be the knowing instrument of a sabotage plot. Do you think she will forgive me, after the pain I’ve caused?’

‘You’d have to ask her.’ But Goma remembered the agonised shriek Ru had let out and the fear in her eyes as Eunice transformed from friend to enemy, like the turning of the weather.

Justifiable, under the circumstances. But forgivable?

Knowing her wife as she did, Goma was not so sure of that.

A day passed, and then another. On the morning of the third day, Sadalmelik died. They were with him when it happened, although the Tantor had long since lost consciousness. Even Eunice had resigned herself to the inevitable by then, accepting that the battle was not to save Sadalmelik but to help Eldasich and Achernar. In their cases the infection had not been so advanced, and it appeared that the broad-spectrum antivirals had brought some valuable time — a window in which it might be possible to develop and administer something more effective.

The Tantors were still quarantined — Eldasich and Achernar in their own separate chambers, Atria, Mimosa and Keid in a temporary holding area where they could be relieved of their heavy, hulking spacesuits. By then it was clear that the infection could only have been passed via close proximity or direct contact and not through the air-circulation system. Nonetheless, Eunice refused to take any chances.

During the long vigil with Sadalmelik, Goma was often alone with Eunice as they did what they could to ease the Tantor’s suffering.

‘It was true what I said, about welcoming new faces,’ Eunice said, ‘but Sadalmelik has been a good friend to me over the years. We are different, yes — you only have to spend a few minutes with them to know that. They feel time differently from us. But partners don’t have to be alike. We could be so strong together — so useful.’

‘Do you think we’ll ever learn to get along?’

‘Each death makes it harder.’ She squeezed out a sponge, moistening the area around Sadalmelik’s sightless, gummed-over eye. ‘All our crimes against them have been senseless, but there’s a special idiocy about this one. Your doctor must have planned this before you even left Crucible.’

‘He probably did,’ Goma said, thinking of the demolition charges smuggled aboard Travertine. ‘I think he meant to get close enough to the Tantors to hurt them by destroying the ship — literally blowing it up in their faces. Suicide, obviously, unless he planned to put those charges aboard the lander. That failed — Mposi flushed out the threat — so he fell back on the virus. But even that wasn’t straightforward since he didn’t know that the majority of the Tantors were still aboard Zanzibar.’

‘He didn’t even know about the six here until he landed.’

‘That’s true. But if they were anywhere, the odds were pretty good that they’d be near you. He was wrong — thankfully.’

‘Not that it did Sadalmelik any good.’ After a silence, she added, ‘What put so much hate into someone, Goma?’

‘Not hate, exactly — I mean, how could he hate something he’d never known? More likely fear, I suspect.’

‘Fear of sharing the universe with another thinking species?’

‘Fear that the Tantors will always be something… wrong, I suppose — a mistake born from a mistake.’

‘Fucking stupidity. Is there any part of this universe that didn’t start out as a mistake?’

‘Not everyone has your perspective. And right now, I wish more of us did.’

‘Sadalmelik never knew Zanzibar — only ever this world, these closed-in spaces, these airlocks and spacesuits. Me for company. Me as his sole living example of a human being. And yet when we talked, I had to remind myself that he had never walked in those places, never known how they smelled, how they sounded. That’s what the Remembering is like, Goma — it’s more than recollection, passed-down stories, oral history. They feel it. It’s deep within them — a bridge of blood between the present and the past. He remembered Earth. He spoke of it not as something he’d been told about, but as a world he knew in his bones. As if he ached for blue skies, hard sunlight, the promise of the long rains. Life as an elephant — simple as breathing, hard as death, the joy and the sadness of being alive. Nothing was ever easy for them. But nothing was ever as strong, either. They were born knowing they were the kings of creation. They took the worst that the world could throw at them, including humanity.’

‘You weren’t such a bad companion,’ Goma said.

‘I tried to be what I could for them.’

‘And you succeeded. If there are debts to be repaid, yours is done. Whatever you are, whatever you were, you’ve achieved one human thing — you’ve been kind to the Tantors.’

Eunice touched Sadalmelik’s trunk, now quite cool and still. ‘He is passing.’

‘I know.’

‘I never speak of death in their presence. It’s not that they don’t understand, or need protecting from the truth. They understand perfectly well. They just find our view of it somewhat simplistic — limited, even. You won’t speak of death, will you?’

‘I promise,’ Goma said.

Eldasich rallied; Achernar worsened. On the fourth day he entered a coma. On the fifth, as Sadalmelik had done before him, he passed. It turned out they were brothers, born to a mother who had lived with Eunice in the earlier years of her exile.

The deaths were harrowing but by the time Achernar succumbed it was clear that the remaining four Tantors were now out of danger. The lander had made a return trip to Travertine, bringing better medicines from the well-equipped suites in orbit. These were administered to both people and Tantors, and after some adjustment of the relative dosages, the virus was in retreat. It had been studied, understood, its vulnerabilities pinpointed. It was clever, and engineered to hurt Tantors much more than humans, but it was not infallible. They were far from Crucible now, but their government had equipped the ship with the best tools at hand, and unlike Dr Nhamedjo they were not obliged to work in secrecy.

Ru, now also recovering from the infection, was released from quarantine. The experience had been harrowing, and it was clear to Goma that it was going to take more than her reassurances to rebuild her trust in Eunice.

‘I saw it in her eyes,’ Ru said. ‘The naked hate. And felt her strength. She might be skin and bones now, but she’s still a machine. She was only a twitch away from killing me.’

‘She’s human.’

‘And that’s meant to set my mind at ease?’

‘She regrets what she did to you. It was a heat-of-the-moment thing — you saw how much the Tantors mean to her. She knew that someone had tried to hurt them and you were the nearest thing to a suspect.’

‘I never want to be around her again. No, I’ll qualify that — around that thing shaped like your ancestor.’

It pained Goma, but she could hardly blame Ru.

‘She likes you.’

‘You mean she’s saying whatever she needs to, to keep you on her side.’

Goma had not thought of it in those terms, but now Ru had put the idea into her mind, it established itself with a nasty tenacity. Perhaps it was true. But then she thought back to Eunice’s tenderness with the dying Sadalmelik, the genuine and touching empathy she had shown. Yes, she had treated Ru badly. But it was a human thing to err, and a human thing to feel remorse afterwards.

In any case, Ru would have to accept sharing a ship with Eunice whether she cared to or not. They were leaving soon. Complicated arrangements were already in hand.

The remaining Tantors could not come with them — there was simply no means of providing for them aboard Travertine — but neither could they be expected to maintain the camp on their own during Eunice’s absence. Consequently, out of the remaining crew in orbit, a small delegation of technical specialists would be brought down and trained to care for the Tantors, instructed in the rudiments of life-support maintenance and briefed in the newly developing field of human — Tantor diplomatic relations. After an overlap period of a few days, the initial landing party would depart for Zanzibar.

They would not be gone for long — weeks at most.

First, though, there was the business of two Tantor funerals.

During the long years of her exile, Eunice had faced numerous times perhaps the hardest of all the decisions forced upon her by time and circumstance: what to do with the dead.

Nothing burned on the surface of Orison, nothing decayed.

The encampment was a closed-cycle ecosystem, its own life-support bubble, but no such system was entirely efficient. The dead were significant reservoirs of stored chemical wealth, demanding — by all considerations of logic and wise management — to be recycled back into the matrix, broken down into their useful constituents. Planetary ecologies did it all the time — the endless conveyor belt of birth, growth and predation. There was nothing unnatural or distasteful about it, and she ought to have felt no qualms about employing the corpses of her friends for the betterment of the camp.

But she could not bring herself to do it, even though — as she was fully aware — in this act of refusal she was only storing up problems for the future.

But they had been her friends, her allies, her companions. It was the least she could do for them.

Fortunately the deaths came infrequently and she had never needed to contend with two in close succession before. There was another consideration. She hated the idea of all four of them being outside at once. They were as precious as jewels, more vulnerable than they knew. She could not bear the thought of something happening to all four of them at once. When the earlier deaths had occurred, she had persuaded her friends to take turns going outside.

But now the four of them went out together, Atria, Mimosa, Keid, Eldasich, bearing the wrapped corpse of Sadalmelik, a burden that would have been impossible even for Tantors to move without the power augmentation of their suits. They carried him between them, Sadalmelik laid on a bower formed from a heavy-duty cargo sled, their armoured trunks wrapped around the handles at each corner. They took him beyond the lander, out along one of the trails, until at last they reached a rocky elevation where they set him down.

The humans followed behind, but when the Tantors surmounted the burial spot, Eunice directed the people to remain where they were.

The Tantors removed Sadalmelik from the bower, set him on the raised ground and brought the bower back down to the level plain. Decorously, without haste, the Tantors loaded the bower with an assortment of boulders and pebbles. They hauled the bower back up to Sadalmelik and began to construct a cairn around his reposed form. This took quite some while and entailed many trips back and forth with the sled. They worked in silence, no word or vocalisation breaking across the humans’ suit channels — only the slow, patient bellowing of furnace-sized lungs. Finally — after much deliberation and careful rearrangement of stones — the Tantors completed their cairn. It enclosed Sadalmelik completely, an igloo of interlocking rocks.

Then they returned to fetch Achernar.

Eunice signalled the human party. They proceeded up the slope and placed their own small stones and pebbles onto the cairn, taking care not to disrupt those already in place.

‘For the Tantors,’ Eunice said, confiding in a low voice, ‘these stones are anchors of memory.’ She placed a rock of her own onto the cairn. ‘Let the memory of Chiku Green find the memory of Sadalmelik, and both be stronger for it.’

‘For Ndege and Mposi,’ Goma said, placing two similar pebbles into the cairn.

Ru stepped to her side and set her own piece down. ‘For Agrippa, and everyone we left behind on Crucible.’

Soon, the Tantors returned with Achernar’s bower and set his body a short distance from the first cairn. As before, the human party watched the Tantors assemble a stone mound around the remains, and then they joined them and made their own offerings to the cairn.

‘For all the dead of Zanzibar,’ Goma said.