Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Kanu was staring at the approach solutions for the swarm of moons, thinking back to their first ignorant encounter with the killing space around Poseidon, when the chime of an incoming transmission began to sound.

‘I think we have heard all we need to,’ Dakota said. ‘Our point was made, as was theirs. They have begun to turn from us, and we have clarified their status as potential prisoners of war. I do not believe there is anything left to say.’

‘We may as well hear them out,’ Nissa said. ‘If there’s the slightest chance it might be useful information, we’d be fools to ignore them.’

‘They have nothing we need or can use,’ Dakota said. ‘Our knowledge of Poseidon is already immeasurably richer than theirs.’

‘They have Eunice,’ Kanu said.

‘They have a bag full of dying memories that thinks it once owned the stars. I am sorry to speak so bluntly of her, Kanu, but you have seen first hand the harm she would have done us had the means been available. As it was, she overreached herself.’

The chime continued knelling.

‘I’d take the call if I were you,’ Swift said. ‘I think it may be a matter of some urgency.’

‘How would you know?’

‘I’ve spent some time getting to know the ship.’

‘You’re in my skull, Swift. You only see and hear what I see and hear.’

‘That’s perfectly true, Kanu, but as I hoped I demonstrated in Zanzibar, you do not make the best use of those channels. The ship is telling me that this signal is something we would indeed be very foolish to ignore. It speaks of a matter of urgency that I think one might characterise as “dire”.’

‘They have nothing that can touch us.’

‘We are not the subject of the dire urgency, but we can assist those who are. Something awful is about to happen to Zanzibar, Kanu, and in that respect, I think we can agree that it concerns us all.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Ignore Dakota. Take the call.’

In his own voice, Kanu instructed Icebreaker to play the transmission. Dakota began to voice her disapproval, but she had barely begun when Goma started speaking.

‘Don’t shut me off. Listen. You too, Dakota. This isn’t a threat, or any kind of negotiation. Eunice claims that Zanzibar is about to experience a second Mandala event. A second translation to who knows where. It’s imminent — minutes away, maybe less. We can’t stop it happening, and nor can you — but you can warn them. It was bad the first time; now you can at least tell them to prepare for it — to bring in anyone or anything outside and to brace for whatever’s coming. Please heed us — we gain nothing by lying to you. And tell them that wherever they end up, they won’t be forgotten.’

Goma fell silent. Kanu looked at Nissa, then back to Dakota — wondering if they felt the same way he did. He hoped this would prove to be nothing more than a ruse. But the time he had spent talking with Goma had convinced him that she spoke with absolute sincerity. More than that: she was genuinely afraid of what was coming.

So was he.

‘After all this time,’ Dakota said, ‘a Mandala event would not simply happen all by itself.’

‘So it’s not a coincidence,’ Nissa replied. ‘It’s something to do with our activity. Triggered by us, or by them.’

‘There is no mechanism by which they could reach Mandala at that distance.’

‘That we know of,’ Kanu said. ‘And Nissa’s right: they gain nothing by lying. We must take her seriously. I think you need to consider giving that warning.’

‘I will not be held hostage to absurd threats.’

‘Signal Memphis,’ Nissa said. ‘Tell him there’s a chance something is about to happen. Tell him to act as if it might be real — that’s all you have to do.’

The elephant cogitated. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Do it!’ Kanu snarled. ‘Goma said we might only be minutes away from the event. It’ll take that long to get a signal back to Zanzibar!’

But then the chime sounded again. On his console, Kanu saw that the point of origin was Paladin space, not Mposi. He raised an eyebrow at Dakota.

‘Someone wants to speak to you.’

It was Memphis, as he guessed it must be. The huge bull filled the wall, projected larger than life. The other Tantors, with the exception of Dakota, lowered their heads in submission.

‘The mirrors have moved,’ Memphis said. ‘They are not pointed at Zanzibar now. They are pointed at Paladin. They are shining light onto the Mandala. We cannot make them stop. What should we do?’

Not all of them, Kanu guessed — the mechanics of their orbits and sight lines would not allow for that. But if someone wished to communicate with the Mandala using light, they needed only one mirror.

‘Memphis,’ Dakota said. ‘I have news… information. You must act upon it with all haste. Zanzibar moved once, when it came from Crucible. Now there is a chance it may move again, and very soon. Communicate with all chambers. Bring all Risen inside as quickly as you can — away from the locks and the berthing core. Zanzibar was very badly damaged during the first translation, and there may be damage during the second… You must be ready, Memphis. Close the great doors, ready the chambers for isolation… prepare to bring the emergency generators into use. You have never been the swiftest of us, Memphis, but you are good and loyal and there is no Risen I would sooner trust with the welfare of our home. You have a slow strength — but you are seldom wrong, and you have never disappointed me.’

Kanu spoke up. ‘Memphis — hear what I have to say. You’re going to another solar system, probably, into orbit around another star with a Mandala on one of its planets. Everything’s going to be strange. You’ll have to fend for yourselves to begin with, but I promise you won’t be forgotten. We’ll come — no matter how long it takes. We won’t rest until we’ve found you.’

‘None of us shall,’ Dakota said. ‘But answer me this, Kanu — who is this “we” you speak of?’

‘Whatever we make of ourselves, Dakota. Humans, merfolk. Tantors. Machines. Whatever we manage to salvage from this. We’re all orphans of the storm now, all Poseidon’s children. We either find a way to live with what we are, with all our differences, or we face oblivion. I know which I’d rather.’

Few had been in a position to witness the first Mandala event, mostly only those caught up in its immediate and devastating effects. For excellent reasons, their testimonies had never entered the public record: the majority of them were now part of the cloud of gas and debris circling Crucible — a monument to their own destruction.

It was different this time. There were multiple spectators both within Zanzibar and beyond, and to a degree all had been forewarned. On Paladin itself, no living thing stirred. But the changes to the second Mandala, quickened by Eunice’s play of light, had now become convulsive. Patterns shifted and shifted again becoming hypnotic, beguiling. Once, it had been a thing of wonder to witness changes on a timescale of hours or days. Now the Mandala adapted from second to second, moving matter around with a careless disdain for the ordinary limitations of inertia and rigidity. Indeed, since something odd was clearly happening to space in the vicinity of the second Mandala — or was about to happen when the translation event initiated — perhaps that was also true of time. Clocks might be running strangely down there — who could say? It was beyond any conceivable human physics — an invocation of alien science and engineering that might as well have been the work of mages, for all that it corresponded to any theory or hypothesis.

On Zanzibar, Memphis and the Risen watched as their orbit brought them closer and closer to the edge of the changing Mandala, and then they were over it. They saw this through cameras, through portholes and observation bubbles — faces pressed against the glass, filled with apprehension and terror, wondering what new fate the universe now had in store for them.

On Travertine, long-range sensors captured the same spectacle. By some dark fortune, the Mandala and Zanzibar were both visible to them. Zanzibar was a pollen-like smudge, bright and tiny, the Mandala a shivering labyrinth of intersecting circles and radials foreshortened by their angle of view. Nasim Caspari was reminded of ripples on a pond, of the interference patterns where they met and interacted. This pond was governed by weird, restless symmetries. He yearned to reach a deeper understanding of the fundamentals.

They had been warned. From the data on the first Mandala event, some sort of energy release could be anticipated. Caspari ordered Travertine on high alert, its Chibesa core quenched as a precaution. The crew rushed to their emergency stations and braced for the unknowable.

There wasn’t much time left.

On Icebreaker, Kanu, Nissa and Dakota observed the same changes. They were also tracking Zanzibar, although from a different viewing angle — Paladin’s spin had brought Mandala into nearly perfect alignment with their sensor array, and Zanzibar was about to transit across it like a planet sliding over the face of its sun.

Dakota had sent her warning in a spirit of precaution, but now there could be no doubt that it had been a wise decision. There had been no time for Memphis to organise a return transmission, but she was inclined to look on that as a favourable indicator. It meant he was busy, rushing to prepare Zanzibar for the moment of translation. He was doing everything she had ever counted on him to do.

Much had changed for Dakota since she first arrived in the system as a guest of the Watchkeepers. She had felt the Terror and come to regard it as a challenge rather than an impediment. She had seen the arrival of Zanzibar, flicking into existence around Paladin, and she had helped steward the Tantors — the Risen — through the immense and testing hardships of those first days. Over time, she had diverged from her companions in the Trinity — come to see them as adversaries rather than allies. The Watchkeepers had bestowed gifts upon her, and in turn she had become their instrument, their willing servant. She accepted this role with equanimity. They had made her more than she had been or ever could be by herself, and it was an honour to be chosen, to be considered worthwhile. But she had not entirely discarded the bonds of love and loyalty, even though these things were now vastly diminished among her greater concerns. Memphis had always been dutiful and she had come to think fondly of him, even as the Watchkeepers’ changes pushed her further and further from the ranks of the ordinary Risen. Even now, she felt empathy for the old bull. She could do nothing for him, not at this distance. But whatever happened, she hoped he would rise to the challenge, and that the challenge would not be too testing for him — indeed for all of them, and if his plans found a use for the Friends, she would also wish them well.

Nissa Mbaye, who was not an Akinya but whose life had been snared in their concerns, wondered what part, small or otherwise, she had played in this development. It seemed probable that Kanu’s arrival had precipitated much of what was now taking place — the expedition, the deaths, the coming translation. She accepted no moral blame for any of that — those forces had been in motion long before she had any conception of their purpose. But had it not been for her desire to reach Sunday’s artworks, she would never have provided Kanu with his ride to Europa. Could a meeting in an art gallery in distant Lisbon really have led to this? She told herself that Kanu would always have found a way to reach his ship, but there was no guarantee of that.

So she had also played her role, whether consciously or otherwise.

Kanu Akinya looked on with a sort of horrified bemusement, grasping as he did that the larger narrative of his family — the things they had made, the events they had caused, the web of responsibilities they had inherited — had just taken a new and unexpected swerve. There were no Akinyas on Zanzibar, but the lives of the Risen and the Friends were an inseparable part of the flow of events Eunice had set in motion. Someone would have to follow up on this. Someone would have to take ownership of this event.

Swift, who occupied the same physical space as Kanu and observed events using co-opted neural networks within the same central nervous system, felt something close to surprise. Swift was used to modelling future events, and over the course of his existence he liked to think he had gained some modest proficiency in that art. The likelihood of a terrorist attack on Mars, the chances of Kanu suffering injury… these were events Swift had considered to be well within the bounds of statistical probability. He had even taken it as read that the expedition to Gliese 163 was likely to run into local complications. Encountering the Tantors — especially Dakota — had been a surprise for Swift. But he had not been surprised to be surprised.

This, though, was an event far outside the scope of even his wildest conjectures. Not one of his iterative forecasts had come close to predicting a second Mandala event. He was off the map now; a chess piece sliding over the edge of the board. The moment had come to discard all his earlier exercises in future-casting — they had failed him totally.

Not for the first time, Swift would have given half of Mars not to be imprisoned in this cage of bone and meat, with its narrow, shuttered perception of the world. But he had done what he could. In the interests of information-gathering, he had already tasked every available sensor channel aboard the ship to record the Mandala event.

The humans and elephants around him had not the slightest clue that his control of Icebreaker was so comprehensive.

He had seen no need to inform them.

Not yet.

In the lander Mposi, Eunice Akinya considered the imminent consequences of her handiwork. It had been one thing to formulate her own ideas of the Mandala grammar, to hew them into the rock of Orison as if they had integrity and self-consistency. It had been quite another to find those connections confirmed and amplified in the patient handwriting of Ndege Akinya, in the black books that her great-great-granddaughter had in turn bequeathed to Goma. Quite another thing still to go beyond those symbols and connections and understand that she had the means to duplicate Ndege’s original command sequence.

Not to whisper it, as Ndege had done, in the muted sotto voce of screens and shadows, but to proclaim it in the fierce, focused light of Paladin’s own star.

To speak the words of truth to the Mandala, in the form of address it expected.

To make it sing.

Ru, for her part, wondered why no one had found the good sense to kill the old hag. She had cheated them all — lied about her control of the mirrors, lied about her intentions. And now the Mandala was changing so fast that the moment must be nearly upon them.

She remembered the impression Eunice’s hands had left in her flesh as she was dragged into quarantine, fingers and nails pressing into her as if she were human clay. Only Ru had been near enough to see the hate in the old woman’s eyes; only Ru knew how close Eunice had come to murdering her there and then in a spasm of fury and recrimination. None of the others had seen it, not even Goma.

Ru had tried to understand. It was true that the Tantors’ lives had been threatened; true that the disease in her blood made Ru look like the automatic culprit. But she had done nothing wrong, and Eunice had only been a twitch away from killing her.

No one else saw that. And now she had trumped that with this monstrous, egomaniacal act — this act of godlike, spiteful indifference to the lives of the mere mortals around her.

Making Mandala sing just because she could.

Goma Akinya, meanwhile, could think only of the lost opportunities. They had met the Tantors on Orison. Even with the deaths of Sadalmelik and Achernar, she could not fail to find wonder in those hours she had spent in their presence. To know the minds of elephants when that possibility had been closed to her for most of her life — it had been a blessing, a bounty, a miracle. But the six Tantors who had shared Eunice’s camp could hardly be compared with the thousands more on Zanzibar. Eunice’s Tantors were companions, not servants. But they never had a chance to evolve their own social structures, to become fully independent. It would be a joy to see how elephants ran a world when that world was theirs to run.

That chance was gone now — or soon to be gone.

She had been granted a glimpse of something wonderful, promised that it would be hers, and been foolish enough to believe she would get her due.

Elsewhere, observing events from viewpoints remote and chilly, Watchkeepers gathered data and found that it did not tally with anything in their immediate experience. The Mandala had been changing for centuries — moments by their galactically slow and patient reckoning — but in these last instants the changing had accelerated asymptotically, and that acceleration had very clearly been precipitated by the actions of the organic intelligences now active around Gliese 163.

The Watchkeepers had uses for some of these intelligences; less for others. They also had their own names for things. They had never shaped a thought remotely congruent with ‘Mandala’ and the terms of reference they used for the worlds and star of this dim little solar system were simply not translatable into human terms. They were best considered as compilations, event strings with the scope of infinite extensibility. In the language of the Watchkeepers, no word was ever uttered to completion, no sentence ever finished. There was only an endless branching utterance, sagas that begat sagas, until time immemorial.

The Watchkeepers were not capable of sadness, or of self-doubt, or at least no states of being that could be flattened into such simple human terms. But much as a hypersphere is the higher-dimensional analogue of a circle, they were capable of a kind of hyper-puzzlement, a kind of profound, vexing mismatch between expectation and external reality.

It puzzled the Watchkeepers that these living intelligences were able to make use of the Mandala when they were not permitted to do so. It puzzled them that these busy, buzzing creatures were tolerated within close proximity to Poseidon. It caused them to question the reliability of their own simulations of long-term survival. If they could not understand everything happening here, now, in the space around Gliese 163, in this system where the M-builders had left their traces, then nothing else could be depended upon. The Watchkeepers were used to being right and certain about things. This intrusion of doubt troubled them.

But not much. Being troubled was a state of existence most closely associated with fully conscious infovores, and the Watchkeepers had forgotten how to be conscious. Occasionally, as if surfacing from a bad dream, they felt a dim apprehension that something within them was missing; that what had been present was now absent. They felt hollow where once they had been full. It was an odd and contradictory impression because all rational data pointed to the Watchkeepers being more powerful than at any point in their history to date. How could something have been lost?

It was not possible.

But it was at instants like this, when the universe did something they were not expecting, that the Watchkeepers were at their most introspective. They pulled their scales tight, treasuring their blue light within. They reduced their communication with neighbouring Watchkeepers, becoming isolated units.

They watched and thought and skirted the edges of a regret as old and mysterious as the gaps between the galaxies.

And then the moment was upon them all.

The Mandala reached its final configuration. Zanzibar had arrived in the space directly above it. There was a flash, an energy release — space shearing and curdling and screaming its agonies in a flare of photons across the entire spectrum from gamma to the longest of radio wavelengths.

The flash originated neither at the Mandala nor in Zanzibar, but rather from a volume of space between the two. On Crucible, it had occurred just above the atmosphere. Here there was nothing to stop the flood of radiation from lashing down on Paladin. But it was brief, lasting barely longer than the time it took for light to cross the space between the Mandala and Zanzibar.

And Zanzibar moved again.

There was no measurable acceleration, nothing that human or alien recording devices could quantify. Between one moment and the next, Zanzibar went from being in orbit to travelling at an infinitesimal fraction less than the speed of light. From mere kilometres a second, relative to Paladin’s surface, to something in the vicinity of three hundred thousand. If indeed there had been acceleration, it must have acted uniformly on every atom of Zanzibar and its occupants — or perhaps on the very space — time in which it was embedded, swept up to speed like a leaf in a current. No matter in the universe could have retained its integrity under such forces, much less a thing of rock and ice, metal and air, filled with living creatures.

Later, when the observations had been collated and examined, it would be determined that Zanzibar had shown the effects of extreme relativistic length contraction: that the potato-shaped fragment of the original holoship had been reduced to a circular pancake, massively compressed by frame contraction. Instead of a solid thing, it appeared to have become a disc, a stamped-out impression of itself.

The survivors of the original contraction had reported no experience of subjective time as they travelled between Crucible and Gliese 163. This could only mean that they were experiencing time-dilation factors of at least several billion. Such an inference had sounded doubtful before, but the new measurement of the frame contraction made it look much more probable.

The same thing had happened again. Hard as it was to credit, that paper-thin disc contained the entirety of Zanzibar. Its chambers, its cities, the Risen, the skipover vaults — all were still present, pressed against each other, ready to be unpacked like a folded-up doll’s house. Within that subjective realm, nothing would have felt out of the ordinary.

The original survivors had reported no elapsed time, but their first journey had been relatively short. Seventy light-years, after all, was a scratch against the galaxy.

Who knew where Zanzibar was headed now?

No one.

Least of all Eunice Akinya.