Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Goma and Ru had been awake for hours before they allowed themselves their first view of Crucible. It was less a case of apprehension than delayed gratification, refusing a reward until the proper moment, when they were both mentally prepared for it. Not that they had any real fears of failure, or concerns that their world would disdain them. Captain Vasin had assured them that Travertine had completed its return crossing successfully, and that they were now back in orbit, circling the planet at almost the same altitude from which they had begun their journey. Long before the ship completed its last course change it had been hailed, made welcome by a jostling flotilla of escort vehicles. The tone of the exchanges had been cordial, verging on the jubilant. There was no doubt of a warm reception.

But anything could have happened, Goma told herself. They had been away for two hundred and eighty-four years, enough time for governments to fall and rise, for revolutions and counter-revolutions, for personal reputations to crash or soar. Their expedition had been an expensive endeavour at a time when Crucible was still climbing out of the hardships that had come with the Fall of the Mechanism. Perhaps, with time, it had come to be viewed as a folly, or even worse: a negligent, criminal waste of resources and minds.

Perhaps that had been the view, at some point in these last three centuries. But if the wheel of opinion could turn once, it could turn again. Whatever might have happened, they were favoured now. Conceivably, Goma thought, the events surrounding their departure were simply too remote for anyone to get all that bothered about. The wonder was that they had returned. All else was forgivable.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked Ru.

‘As I’ll ever be.’

They floated together at a window in a weightless section of the ship. The window was facing Crucible, but for the moment it was shuttered.

‘I keep thinking of Mposi. I don’t think he ever expected to come home again. He’d have counted himself lucky enough just to make it all the way to Gliese 163.’

‘We’re here for him,’ Ru offered, although there was not much that could push Goma’s sadness aside. Sadness mingled with relief, gratitude, expectation. But also the heavy burden of the work that lay ahead of them. They had barely begun.

‘Let’s do it.’ Goma touched the control, and the window’s external shutters snapped open in silence.

For a few seconds they stared at their world in wordless contemplation. They were orbiting over the day side, the clouds giving way here and there to offer hints of recognisable landforms and seas. Goma compared what she saw against her memories of maps she had known since childhood. On this scale at least, it was hard to say that much had changed.

‘It’s still there,’ Ru said, with a sort of wonder, as if the very act of their world maintaining itself across these years was astonishing. ‘All that time we were on our way, all that time we were sleeping… it was still here, still going about its business, doing what worlds do — as if you and I never mattered to it.’

‘We didn’t,’ Goma said. She paused, added: ‘Anyway, it’s really not been that long. Trees that were middle-aged when we left, they’ll still be middle-aged — just a bit older. Us being away — it’s just a blip, a heartbeat, to a planet.’

But now Ru jabbed her finger at something nearer than their planet. It was an object, moving through space between them and Crucible. ‘A ship. Maybe one of those escorts Gandhari told us about.’

The vehicle, whatever it was, sidled closer to Travertine. Its form was a blunt-ended cylinder, wrapped with lights. It was hard to tell how far away it was, how big. It moved a little too confidently for Goma’s liking, coming in at too hard a vector. She tensed, unable to fight the instinct to brace against an impact, for all the good it would have done. But the cylinder cruised near and then veered sharply off, and at the moment of closest approach she thought she saw faces, pressed against the windows, gawking at this odd, antique apparition.

The cylinder swooped away, until it was only a tiny moving speck against the face of Crucible.

‘I suppose we’re of some amusement to them,’ said a voice beside them, speaking softly enough not to shatter the mood. ‘Visitors from the deep past. Gandhari says we’re not the only starship they’ve ever seen — there’s a flow of ships coming and going all the time — but you can bet it’s been a while since they’ve clapped sight on a relic like us.’

‘I don’t feel like a relic,’ Ru said.

‘Nor do I,’ Peter Grave said, Crucible’s blue-green light picking at the crinkling around his eyes. ‘But I strongly suspect it may have to be a role we have to get used to. Obliging ghosts at the banquet.’ He forced a smile. ‘Never mind. There must be worse things — and at least we’ll never be short of attention.’

Grave had come to the window while Goma and Ru were caught up in the spectacle. His presence was uninvited, but Goma struggled to find much resentment. Whatever differences they had once had, she felt certain that she and Grave now had infinitely more in common with each other than they did with the new citizens of Crucible. Ru, Goma and Grave were creatures out of time, unmoored from their rightful place in history. This was what interstellar travel did to people, and as yet no one had much experience coping with it.

‘Kanu is awake now,’ Grave said. ‘I’ve spoken to him, and he seems to have handled the crossing as well as any of us. I just wish there were better news about Nissa — some good development we could bring to his attention immediately.’

Goma understood that there had already been communication between Vasin, Mona Andisa, and the governing authorities of the system. At least part of that exchange had concerned the fate of Nissa, preserved in skipover since her death at Poseidon.

‘Maybe they have something,’ Ru said. ‘Better medicine than us, at any rate. How could they not have better medicine, after all this time?’

‘We don’t really know how far they’ve come,’ Goma said, her tone cautious, refusing to indulge in wishful thinking. Historical progress was not linear. She reminded herself that the medicine of the Age of Babel had been superior to the medicine after the Fall of the Mechanism. It was anyone’s guess as to the leaps and reversals that had happened since their departure. At some point she would have to sit down and catch up on all that skipped history.

For now she had no appetite for it.

‘If not here, then Earth,’ Grave said.

‘Assuming Earth isn’t even further behind,’ Goma said. ‘And even if we find out what the situation’s like now, Crucible’s best knowledge of Earth is still thirty years old. Just going on to Earth will still be a gamble, a leap into the dark.’

‘Would you consider it?’ he asked.

‘I promised I’d take her heart back home.’ Goma swallowed and nodded. ‘Yes. I mean to do that.’

But it was so much harder now that she was home. The vow had been easy when even Crucible lay at an unimaginable distance, and she had barely dared count on seeing it again. Yet to be here now, looking down on her old home, knowing its airs and waters were almost close enough to touch — and soon would be — made her wonder if she really had the resolve to deliver on that pledge.

But a vow was a vow.

‘You have my admiration,’ Grave said. ‘Both of you, because I do not believe for a moment that Goma will make this crossing alone.’

It had been meant as a kindness, but having his admiration only left her feeling more beleaguered, as if the task ahead of her had become even more daunting. She held her nerve, though. And Ru closed her hand around Goma’s.

‘Of course,’ Ru said, as if nothing could have been less contentious. ‘I’m her wife. We do this together.’

A little later, Goma went to see how their five most vulnerable passengers had coped with the crossing.

The surviving Risen had returned to Crucible along with the human members of the expedition. For the first ten years of the voyage, Hector and the others had remained awake aboard Travertine, accompanied by a small and dwindling support team, working with the Tantors to overcome the biological impediments to putting them into skipover. Goma and Ru had remained awake for a good portion of that time as well, and even after entering skipover Goma had come out again when the Tantors were ready for their own immersion. By then, all but a handful of doubts had been settled… but there would be no guarantee of success until the Tantors were revived. There had even been talk of keeping the Tantors awake for the entire crossing, down through generations of offspring. Nothing was without risk, though, and in the end Mona Andisa had declared herself confident that the Tantors had at least a better than average chance of surviving skipover.

So it was agreed, and the Risen had been drugged and drip-fed and intubated, and finally placed in immersion vessels converted from expended fuel tanks, each now a giant, makeshift skipover casket. Periodically — once every decade or so — a waking technician would peer through dark windows into the murky interior of the caskets, make readouts, slide a stethoscope across the curving alloy, perform some tiny, precise adjustment of the life-support systems.

All of this seemed risky and perhaps unnecessary, given that some or all of the Risen could have remained back in the Gliese 163 system. But if the Risen were left to themselves, they would have to fend alone for another three centuries. Without Zanzibar, without thousands of their fellow beings, without the stewardship of Eunice, that would have been another risk again. Transporting them to Crucible was the least worst option.

Or so Goma tried to convince herself. She had been a strong advocate of exactly this outcome. But then again, she had been thinking of her own elephants, and of the genetic bounty now carried by the Risen. Agrippa’s death had extinguished the signal of intelligence in the Crucible herds. But a signal could be pulled back out of the noise, with the right encouragement. It was her profound hope that the Risen would provide the means of amplifying that trace, no matter how uselessly faint it had now become.

A forlorn hope?

Perhaps. But she had entertained wilder fantasies, and some of them had become real.

‘Goma,’ said Mona Andisa — her face carrying the lines and shadows of the years she had spent awake, ministering to the Tantors. ‘You’ve arrived just in time. Hector is rousing.’ And she nodded at a display, the cross section of a mighty skull, fortified with bone the way a castle armoured itself with walls and ramparts. ‘The signs are good,’ she added. ‘I think they all made it.’

‘We made it,’ Goma said. ‘All of us. And we all owe you our thanks, Mona. Have you seen Crucible?’

Andisa flashed a quick smile, as if she had something to apologise for. ‘Not yet. Too busy with the ambassadors.’

‘You should. It’s still beautiful.’

Ambassadors. The word had stuck, when speaking of the Risen. But ambassadors to whom, and representing what, exactly? All the rest of their kind now lay somewhere off in deep space, wherever Zanzibar was now. If indeed Zanzibar were still not travelling, still hurtling along the path the Mandala had ordained for it, at a breath below the speed of light, so fast that the Risen aboard would not yet have had the time to formulate a single thought, let alone ponder their fate…

Less than a century and half had passed since the second Zanzibar translation, thought Goma, with a shivering insight into the scale of things. At best, Zanzibar was now one hundred and fifty light-years from Paladin… a distance to shrivel the soul, but still nothing, not even a scratch, on galactic terms.

Wherever they’re going, they may not even be a tenth of the way there yet… or a hundredth part.

Andisa brought her to Hector. He had been taken from the skipover tank and placed on a support hammock. His forelegs were angled over the hammock’s front, the boulder-like mass of his head resting on his knees, his trunk brushing the floor. There was gravity in this section of the ship, and although her bones and muscles still ached from the adjustment after skipover, Goma was glad of it. She would soon be walking on Crucible.

So would the ambassadors.

Hector breathed. She touched a hand to the upper part of his trunk, feeling the leathery, bristly roughness of it against her palm. At the contact, Hector opened one weary, sleep-gummed eye. It was the pink of a sunset, like a pale jewel jammed into grey flesh.

‘We made it,’ she said softly. ‘All of us. There’s a world down there. You can walk in the open air, under the sky, without suits or domes. For as far as you like.’

Andisa nodded at the neural display. Colours were blooming in tight knots of activity. ‘He wishes to respond. Those are vocalisation impulses. But I don’t want to hook up the voice apparatus until he’s up and about.’

‘Take your time,’ Goma said, still stroking his trunk. ‘You need to be strong, Ambassador Hector. All of you. Your work’s barely begun.’

Nor, for that matter, had hers.

Travertine’s orbit gradually brought it within range of a station. It was a golden structure, with a dozen curving docking arms flung out from a bulbous glowing core. Beautiful and strange, it made Goma think of a chandelier, or perhaps an octopus. Along the arms were numerous studlike docking ports, many of which were occupied by ships of various sizes. Some were like the cylinder they had seen earlier, but there were also spheres and darts and translucent, barb-tailed things shaped like manta rays. The spacecraft glowed gently with different colours — there were no lights or markings as such.

Travertine had obviously been assigned a docking port. They nudged home and a small swarm of mothlike service craft was soon in attendance. Goma and Ru watched the colourful display, mesmerised, until a summons drew them to the main commons area. Grave had already gone on to speak with the other members of the Second Chance delegation, and Vasin was calling the entire ship to a meeting.

Kanu was there, the first time Goma had seen him since their revival. She and Ru joined him. They hugged, each thankful that they had come through the crossing.

‘I went to see the Tantors,’ Kanu said. ‘They’re doing well. It’s a fine thing you did, helping them with the skipover equipment.’

‘It wasn’t anything compared to the years Mona and her team put in,’ Ru said.

‘You all made sacrifices,’ Kanu replied.

Goma knew she could either skirt awkwardly around the Nissa question, or get it out in the open. ‘I understand there’s already been some contact between Travertine and the medics on Crucible. We’ve been gone a long while, Kanu. There must be a lot of options open to them.’

He nodded, like a man trying to put a brave face on things. ‘We’ll see.’

‘They’ll do the best they can,’ Ru said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

‘I’m certain they will.’ He was speaking slowly, distantly. ‘It was the best thing, keeping her in skipover. Even though she missed most of our time in the Tantors’ system.’

‘We’ll have to go back, won’t we?’ Goma said, trying to strike an optimistic note. ‘Not us, necessarily, but people. Maybe we won’t even need a starship to do it. Just crank up Mandala again, the way it worked before.’

‘Someone’s going to have to try,’ Kanu agreed.

But it would not be him, Goma thought. Or her, or Ru. Captain Vasin, perhaps, if she had not yet had her fill of cosmic exploration. But even Gandhari looked drawn, worn out by what they had gone through.

She was speaking.

‘In a little while, so I am assured, we will be met by diplomatic envoys from the present government. They are bound to seem odd to us. Perhaps a little frightening, too. It’s been a while. But you can be certain that they are just as apprehensive about meeting us. We must seem very strange to them indeed. But with good intentions in our hearts, good faith in our new hosts, good faith in ourselves, we will find a way through. Some of you will attempt to return to your old lives on Crucible. I do not wish to understate the challenges you will face — although I am quite sure you have a ready appreciation of what lies ahead. But never forget this. We are a crew now, and we will remain a crew. When you leave this ship, you do not leave behind the friendships and alliances we have forged. They remain with us. They will be our bond across all the years and challenges to come. Each and every one of you has my respect and gratitude.’

There were more words to come, not just from Vasin, but after a while they began to wash over Goma, her thoughts spinning away on their own trajectories. She was thinking of the ambassadors — how easy it was to gloss over the complicated business of introducing five new sentient beings to a world, until the time was almost upon them. She was thinking of Kanu, for whom this was no kind of homecoming, and for whom any mood of celebration must have rung cruelly false. She was thinking of Nissa, neither dead nor alive, and the hopes that had been placed on the unknown medicine of a world three centuries from their understanding. It was a kind of magical thinking, she saw now, like a child’s trust in the intervention of fairies. And she was thinking of Eunice Akinya’s heart, which had yet to reach its resting place.

Soon the envoys came. Their manner was quiet, understated, deferential. Even as they moved through the ship, she never saw more than two of them at any one time. They were doing their best to be unobtrusive, not wishing to shock their time-slipped guests. Their faces and skin tones showed a variety of ethnicities, and there were some among them who had the sleek, hairless features she associated with merfolk, but it was hard to be certain. Their clothes were dark, modest of cut, with wide white collars and puffed white cuffs. Some of them wore small skullcaps or berets over short, neatly manicured hairstyles. If they brought technology with them, Goma recognised none of it. Perhaps they were so saturated with it that carrying technology was unnecessary.

She heard them speak, shifting effortlessly from one language to another. They came equipped with Swahili, Zulu, Chinese, Punjabi, a dozen other tongues. Their diction was over-precise, their speech clotted with formalisms, including the odd phrase that was old-fashioned even when Goma was a child, but she could not fault them for that. Yet between themselves she caught them whispering sentences that hovered just beyond comprehension — not quite a foreign language to her — the cadences and rhythms were naggingly familiar — but a dialect so far removed from her experience that it may as well have been.

There were medical tests. One by one, all the crew were brought to the non-weightless clinic. Mona Andisa’s team stood aside while the Crucible envoys performed subtle investigations. It was the one and only time Goma saw any kind of tool or instrument in their hands. They had black styluses, tipped with a small bulb, which they swept slowly over the bodies of their subjects. They spoke to Andisa’s medics, whispered agreeably between themselves. They seemed unconcerned, going through formalities. Eventually word filtered through that there were no barriers to any of the crew, passengers or ambassadors, descending to Crucible. They were free to disembark into the golden station, from which shuttles were available to take them all the way home.

Goma and Ru only took the minimum of possessions with them — the rest could be freighted down later. They walked through the vaults and atria of the golden station, gawking at cathedral-sized spaces which seemed largely deserted, as if the station had been emptied of human occupation in readiness for Travertine’s arrival, or even built especially for them. Perhaps it had. They’d had decades to get ready for it, after all, decades to rehearse every detail of the reception.

The shuttles turned out to be the translucent manta things Goma had seen earlier. Each was large enough to take one or two Tantors and a dozen or more human passengers. Eldasich and Atria went down in one shuttle, Mimosa and Keid in another, and Hector stayed with Goma and Ru. Kanu was there as well, together with the draped form of Nissa’s skipover casket. The envoys fussed around the interior of the shuttle making adjustments to the provisions, moulding and shaping its décor with practised, wizard-like gestures. Finally they were satisfied, the casket secured, the passengers comfortable, and the last leg of the journey home could begin. Two envoys remained aboard the shuttle, but as far as Goma could tell no one was in direct control. The vehicle seemed to know what it was meant to do.

They detached from the station over Crucible’s nightside, then arrowed down from orbit, knifing into the upper atmosphere and gradually catching up with dawn. Even as re-entry plasma flickered and curled around the shuttle, its brightness throwing highlights across their faces, the ride remained as smooth as if they were on rails.

‘Gandhari spoke well,’ Kanu said, keeping one hand on the casket secured next to his seat. ‘You couldn’t have asked for a better captain. But this world won’t hold her interest for long. She’ll want to move on. I can see it in her eyes.’

‘I’m not sure it’s our world any more,’ Goma said.

Kanu’s look was kind. ‘You’ll fit back in.’

‘Not for long, I hope. I have an obligation to discharge. It’ll mean a trip to Earth, one way or another. I gather they have more starships. Sooner or later there’ll be a ship going that way.’

‘Can you afford the passage?’

She had no answer to that. None of them did. Whatever funds they might have left behind on Crucible were now moot. Perhaps they had snowballed into vast personal fortunes, or perhaps they were worthless. Or worse, had somehow transmogrified into crippling debts. Besides, Goma did not have the least idea how much it would cost to transport herself back to Earth. It would cost twice as much again to take Ru, assuming she was deemed fit enough to tolerate another skipover episode. ‘I’ll find a way,’ she said, as if the will alone was sufficient.

‘But this is where the Risen will remain,’ Kanu said.

‘For now,’ Ru said. ‘At least until we’ve gone beyond five living members. Maybe in a couple of generations we — they — will feel comfortable about committing some of their number to Earth. Not just Earth, but to other solar systems.’ Her tone hardened, gaining conviction. ‘Wherever there’s a human presence, there ought to be Tantors. Risen. It’s the only way. But we’re twenty, thirty, fifty years from worrying about that. Let’s help them build up the herd, get that on a stable footing, before we start reaching for the stars again.’

‘The work of a lifetime, then. Or at least an ordinary human lifetime,’ Kanu said.

‘It’s what we started. What we were trying — failing — to do, before Eunice’s message came in.’

‘I can’t think of two better candidates to bear that work,’ Kanu said.

‘It’ll be our successors,’ Goma replied. ‘Not us. Not until we get back from Earth.’

‘You have a weight to bear.’

‘Don’t we all?’ she answered, with a chill of foreboding.

They cut down into thicker, warmer, moister air. They overflew rainforest and swept across inky lagoons and white-hemmed bays and heavy green seas. Once, when the visibility allowed, Goma made out the dark stormfront that was one of Mandala’s peripheral walls, still much as she remembered it. Then they were over the outskirts of Guochang, now a vast sprawl of a city, what had once been its satellite towns become mere suburbs. The geometry of roads and parks was confusing, almost purposefully so — she kept seeing configurations that were almost familiar, but each would twist out of recognition as the shuttle swept nearer. The city had been made and remade half a dozen times since her departure, and only the oldest, most venerated parts of it remained unaltered.

‘You were born here?’ Kanu asked, at last rising from his seat, bending to peer through the glassy hull.

‘I was,’ Goma said. ‘But I don’t feel it.’

‘You will.’ He smiled. ‘Give it time.’

Presently they came up on a twisted black pyramid that seemed to drill its way out of what had been the old government district. The pyramid was enormous, with a horizontal slit across its warped faces at about a third of its height. Elsewhere it was windowless, with an oily, shimmering lustre. The shuttles — not just their own, but the others that had come down from the station — were filing into this slot, like bees returning to the hive.

One of the envoys turned to them, touching a hand to the sweep of her collar before she spoke. ‘This is the medical complex. The tests we ran on you in the ship were quite comprehensive, but there is more that we can do here. We wish to make sure you are all as well as you can be.’

‘Will it take long?’ Ru asked.

‘No more than a couple of days. It will make things very much easier if you allow little machines to replicate in your bodies. They will help you adjust to your new surroundings.’

‘Like nanotechnology?’ Goma asked.

‘Yes,’ the envoy answered, but there was an equivocation in her answer, as if she recognised that the truth was more complicated. ‘Yes, something very like that. In your time, there was something called the Mechanism?’

‘It had gone by the time we were born,’ Ru said.

‘We made something like the Mechanism again,’ the envoy stated. ‘Better, less fallible. If we had to give a name for it, it would be something like the All. The little machines will let the All flow into you.’ Carefully, she added: ‘If this is what you wish.’

‘And if we don’t?’ Goma asked, trying not to sound too alarmed by the prospect.

‘There are enclaves where the All is not as pervasive. You would be welcome to live out your lives there.’

Kanu turned from the view, laying his hand back on Nissa’s casket. ‘It sounds as if your medicine has come a long way from ours.’

‘In some respects,’ the envoy said, her eyes lowering. ‘But there is much that we have yet to achieve, or is outside the bounds of our medical-ethical framework. We were forewarned of Nissa’s case, though. Our best… experts… have been assigned to the problem. Rest assured that we will do what we can for her.’

Kanu licked his lips and nodded. They were softening him up, Goma thought — preparing him for the news he did not want. How could they not help Nissa? she thought. And a kind of anger flashed through her, a resentment that these people were not more advanced, more godlike. What had they been doing for the past three centuries — sitting on their hands?

The slot in the pyramid contained a landing bay, spread out under a low ceiling. Dozens of craft were also parked there, and the place was already swarming with medical staff. Unlike the dark-clad envoys, the pyramid’s medics wore outfits of a blazing, superluminous white. At best, the only instruments any of them carried were the little bulb-tipped wands. But they were also accompanied by many floating white spheres about the size of footballs, and the spheres cracked open along their midlines to spill out jointed arms and sensors. Goma and her friends were asked to offer their forearms to the spheres, and the machines tickled over them in a quick sampling of blood, tissue, DNA. The examination was painless and left no traces.

‘What about the All?’ she asked, as the whole party — human and Tantor — was led into the main part of the pyramid.

‘It’s already within you,’ the envoy answered. ‘The idiosyncratic connectome bridges will have begun to form. You may experience some mild hypnagogic imagery. The process can be aborted and reversed at any stage, though, should you decline participation.’

‘Would you decline?’ she asked.

The envoy looked at her with a sudden, fierce frankness. ‘Decline? No. I would sooner be dead. But you must make the choice for yourself.’

They were in the complex for two days. The tests were occasionally perplexing, generally dull, but never painless, and again Goma had the sense that much of it was formality, a series of legal obstacles that had to be surmounted before any of the newcomers were allowed free roam of Crucible. They had rooms in the pyramid, which were comfortable enough but austere in their provisions, almost as if the hosts were wary of overloading their delicate constitutions with too much novelty. There was a window, looking back across Guochang. Where the city thinned out Goma saw a margin of blazing green, a stretch of veldt hemmed by trees, and between those trees she thought she might have seen the distant moving forms of elephants, tiny as pollen grains, and she wanted to be out there more than anything.

Although the newcomers were being kept in a state of soft quarantine from the rest of Crucible, they were free to associate with one another and use lounges and public areas on one level of the complex. There was plenty of time between the tests, and Goma and her companions made use of it as they chose. Ru had her nose deep in the elephant literature, trying to catch up on three hundred years of scholarship. They had all been provided with antique data consoles, roughly comparable to their own technology. Through these consoles, and via extra layers of translation and mediation, it was possible to access public record and news channels.

Goma was restless. The elephants meant everything to her, but she could not simply return to her old role of researcher as if nothing had happened. What was the point, when she had no intention of remaining on Crucible?

Even Ru, she thought, was going through the motions.

She visited Grave, Vasin, the others. Everyone had the same slightly shell-shocked look about them, as if they had just been slapped hard in the face. They had been treated as well as one could hope, but still it was a jolt, to be back on Crucible. They had all known there was no going back to their old world, the one they had lived on before departure, but until now it had been an intellectual understanding, ungrounded in real experience. Now they were living it from moment to moment, seeing it with their own eyes.

Only Kanu seemed uninterested in what had happened on Crucible, what had changed and what had remained.

When she came to his room he had used his console to project an image up on one of the walls.

‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ he said, nodding at the image. It was the face of a planet, all reds and emeralds and little dabs of blue. Not Earth, she was fairly certain.

‘Is that Mars?’

Kanu looked pleased that she had recognised the place. ‘Yes. But not as I knew it. When I left Mars, the only humans anywhere on the planet were the ambassadors, cooped up in our embassy on Olympus Mons. We’d been in a stand-off for years. There were defence satellites in orbit, terrorists agitating for human takeover, endless tension… I didn’t have high hopes. Swift came with me because between us we thought there had to be a better way; a mode of existence where machines and people might be able to work together, not against each other.’

‘And now?’

Kanu beamed, as if showing off a newborn child. ‘Just look at it. Those green swatches, those lakes — those are areas of renewed human settlement! Finally there was a recolonisation treaty. Strict boundaries, strict borders — but it’s a start, isn’t it? They’ve even begun to terraform the old place. Domes for now, atmospheric tents, but the air’s thickening up, warming, gaining moisture. That’s not a job for people alone! Human-Evolvarium cooperation — a joint venture.’

Goma wanted to share his enthusiasm, but from where she was standing it looked like a capitulation for the machines.

‘What did Swift’s friends get out of it?’

‘Earth,’ he said. ‘Or parts of it. That was the other half of the treaty. Machine enclaves on Earth! In the oceans, on the land masses. And it’s working! Brokered largely by the Pans, I have to say. But what a thing to see.’ Excited, he worked the console’s settings, almost fumbling over himself in his eagerness. ‘Wait, though. Wait until you see this! Wait until you see what the machines have been making on Mars…’

The face turned, bringing a new part of the planet into view. It was still daylit, but the shadows were fierce, cutting in from the right, projecting long strokes across the landscape.

Kanu magnified the image. He zoomed in on one area of Mars. Something swelled into focus. A mountain, or perhaps a very large boulder, on an otherwise flat and featureless terrain.

There was a face on it, chiselled into the boulder’s upper surface, so that it looked back out to space. It was a minimalist portrait — eyes, nose, mouth, the merest suggestion of a personality. But she recognised it.

Her face. Or rather, Eunice’s.

‘One strain of them did this,’ Kanu was saying. ‘A faction among the machines. Call it a cult, if you will.’

‘Why have they done it?’

‘I’ll ask them, when I get a chance.’

‘I’ll save you the trouble,’ Goma replied. ‘I’m the one who has to go to Earth. Mars will only be a skip away.’

She asked him how things were progressing with Nissa. Kanu’s answers were guarded, and she wondered how much he in turn had been told by the medical staff.

‘There are some complications. The stuff that they have put inside us — those little machines? I gather there’s little they can’t do, in terms of microscopic tissue engineering. They could rebuild a damaged brain synapse by synapse.’

‘Isn’t that what she needs?’

‘The difficulty is knowing which pattern to reinstate.’ Kanu’s speech was supremely collected, but Goma sensed the force of the emotions he must be holding back. ‘Even if the medics have the technical means to rebuild her damaged cortex — which is by no means simple — there is still an ethical issue.’

‘An ethical issue in bringing someone back to life?’

‘Their law makes a careful distinction between the restoration of damaged neural structure, and the wholesale substitution of one set of structures for another. If they could satisfy themselves that they were rebuilding a personality, rather than inventing one from scratch, I gather they would consent to the procedure. Or at least consent to an attempt. But the ethicists are slow to make up their minds, and in the meantime…’

‘Nissa isn’t going to get any worse, is she?’

‘No,’ he admitted with a nod. ‘She is safe. But if these people cannot help her, I must look elsewhere.’

‘Earth?’

‘Perhaps.’

She touched a hand to his forearm. ‘I want the best for both of you, uncle.’

He clasped his own hand around hers. ‘Don’t worry about me, Goma Akinya. You have enough to think about.’

On the morning of their release from the medical complex, a ground vehicle, a wheel-less block with fluted sides and sharply angled ends, was waiting for them at a loading area in front of the lobby.

Kanu and Ru were with her, and two government officials: a dark-clad administrative envoy, and a white-clad medical representative. Both were women; their names — or at least the names that they were ready to share with their guests — were Malhi and Yefing.

Goma knew where they were going. She had asked if it might be possible, knowing that the longer she delayed matters, the less enthusiasm she would have to face them. Not that she had much enthusiasm now.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she told Kanu, as they settled into their seats.

‘My diary’s not exactly full,’ he replied.

‘Have the ethicists…?’ she began.

‘Still deliberating, and there’s nothing I can say or do which will make any difference.’ He added quickly: ‘Not that it isn’t a pleasure to accompany you.’

‘We understand,’ Ru said.

They sped through Guochang, winding their way between tall offices, through business and commercial districts, around parks and residential zones. Goma recognised nothing, although she was certain some of the older buildings had been around before her departure. If she squinted, and forgot about trying to recognise specific landmarks, none of it was too odd or unsettling. There were traffic jams, pedestrians, roadworks. People walking their pets, groups of schoolchildren were being led to school, fast-striding business types were deep in conversation. There were pavement cafés and areas that looked more run-down than others. But that was only if she squinted. With eyes wide and sharp, she was assaulted by the unfamiliar. The signs and banners above the shops and businesses were hard to read, as if there had been a specific lesion to the part of her brain that handled written script. There were colours that seemed wrong or improbable — reddish greens, blueish yellows. And a haze of subliminal texture, a kind of glimmering organised mist, floating between things.

Yefing, the medic, must have seen something in her face.

‘The All will be reaching integration now. If you start seeing things, you should not be too alarmed.’

‘We won’t,’ Kanu said. Then: ‘Is it like this everywhere else? In the other systems? Do they all have an All?’

‘Variations of it,’ Malhi answered, twisting around to answer. ‘But each system chooses its own path, its own approach. And of course our knowledge is never complete. We have good ties with Earth. There’s always been information exchange, but since the Watchkeepers left us alone, there’s been a much increased flow of ships.’

‘Do those ties extend to legal agreements?’ Kanu asked. ‘Extradition treaties, that sort of thing?’

‘No,’ Malhi said. ‘Our relationship is much looser than that. Necessarily. How could we ever enforce treaties with a time lag of nearly sixty years?’

‘You must barely remember how it was, with those things hanging over us,’ Goma said.

‘They were here when I was a child,’ Yefing answered. ‘But it has been seventy years. Times have changed. It’s hard to remember how it made us feel.’

Swift’s effect on the Watchkeepers in the Gliese 163 system had propagated to all the known Watchkeeper groupings in human space, and perhaps beyond. The influence had spread at the speed of light, so the disappearance of the Watchkeepers was old news by the time Travertine arrived back in Crucible space.

‘No one really knows what happened,’ Malhi said. ‘Clearly your intervention around Gliese 163 played a part in it. From a causal standpoint, no other explanation is possible. But until we have your own accounting of events…’

‘Don’t expect answers to every question,’ Kanu said, in a tone of friendly warning. ‘We may not have one.’

‘Not even you, Kanu?’ Yefing queried, a notch of doubt pushing into her forehead. ‘Our understanding was that no one had a closer contact than you.’

‘It was Swift, not me,’ Kanu said.

‘But you were there,’ Yefing persisted. ‘The Watchkeeper took you… the Watchkeeper returned you. It was why our medical examination of you had to be unusually thorough.’

‘I was a bystander, that’s all.’

Malhi cleared her throat with a cough. ‘But you do think we are free of them? For ever?’

Kanu smiled at that. ‘Ever’s a long time. I suppose the real test will be when we return to Gliese 163, or when we start making active use of the Mandala network. Perhaps that will draw them back to us. But they won’t necessarily return as our foes.’

‘You are an optimist,’ Yefing said.

‘So I’ve been told.’

‘You could a play a part in these grand adventures,’ Malhi said, as if she wished to brighten his mood. ‘Our rejuvenation methods are the equal of anything from the Age of Babel — superior in some respects. You could be made as strong or young as you desire.’ And she turned to Ru: ‘And your AOTS. It’s curable. Easily done. There’s barely a mention of it in the medical literature these days.’

‘I don’t need it cured,’ Ru said. ‘Unless it’s to help me through another skipover episode.’

Yefing pinched her lips. ‘We use a different process now. There are fewer complications.’

‘Then I’ll be fine. Goma and I only need to live on Crucible until there’s a ship to take us to Earth. Or are you going to tell us we couldn’t afford passage?’

‘You are… celebrities,’ Malhi answered, with a touch of awkwardness. ‘There would be few impediments, if you were determined to leave us. But please make no decisions in haste — you’ve barely arrived.’

The vehicle sped on. They had been passing through residential districts for a while now, sprawling suburbs and precincts, thatches of woodlands, recreational lakes, new building developments. Eventually the houses thinned out into continuous parkland. They passed some kind of sports stadium, a pagoda garden, more woods. Then the vehicle turned onto a tree-lined side road and Goma recognised where they were.

Ndege’s house.

They had kept the area around it undeveloped, and the dwelling itself appeared serenely untouched by the centuries. The walls of the old secured compound were still present, but there was nothing to stop anyone going through the gate — no checkpoint or guards any more. The vehicle slipped through unchallenged and parked between the compound and the house.

They got out, all five of them. Goma studied the house again, searching for traces of time’s hand.

‘You hated her,’ she said quietly, speaking not to Malhi or Yefing as individuals, but in their roles as government operatives. ‘Why didn’t you tear the place down once she was gone?’

‘That was a long time ago,’ Malhi said. ‘Things changed. You should go inside.’

Goma looked at Ru and Kanu, nodding that they should accompany her.

But Kanu raised a hand. ‘I don’t want to intrude.’

‘You came all this way,’ Goma said.

‘And I’ll enter the house shortly. But not until you’ve had a moment or two to yourself.’

He had not spoken for Ru, but after only the slightest hesitation she nodded. ‘Kanu’s right. We’ll be right outside, until you need us.’

‘I need you now.’

‘No,’ Ru said. ‘You only think you do. But you’re stronger than you realise, Goma Akinya. If I didn’t know that before we left Crucible, I know it now. Go on in.’

So she walked to the front door, pushed it open and went on in.

And a thought flashed through her head: Mposi always used to bring her greenbread. I should have brought greenbread.

No one else was in the house, and Malhi and Yefing had remained outside with Ru and Kanu. Inside it was cool and shadowed, with no illumination beyond that which the windows provided. They threw oblongs of brightness across the rooms’ pale surfaces, the walls, the bookcases and furniture and such sparse ornamentation as Ndege had allowed herself. Goma touched a window sill, testing it for dust. She held her fingertip up for inspection. It was immaculate, harbouring not a trace of dirt. Someone had taken pains to keep this place both pristine and exactly undisturbed, as if it were a hallowed public shrine.

Goma moved between rooms. She had never been here without Ndege. Some part of her mind kept trying to impose her on the scene: a suggestion of human presence at the corner of Goma’s vision, dissolving when she turned her gaze upon it. Not a haunting, but the power of memory, the forcefulness of its influence on the present moment.

Nothing was kinder or crueller than memory.

She went to take a book from one of the shelves. But as her hand neared the shelf, a glowing rectangle lit up on a portion of the ajoining wall. Text and images appeared in the rectangle. To her surprise, the text was in a familiar form of Swahili, the wording easily comprehensible. The images were of Ndege, and of things to do with her life. The holoship, her mother Chiku, the early days of the settlement, the Mandala, her experiments in direct communication with it… the ring of rubble that was all that was left of Zanzibar.

Trial, censure, imprisonment.

It was a familiar story, even though the tone of it was not quite what Goma would have expected. Not so much damning and judgemental, as sympathetic: framing her mistakes as understandable errors, rather than as crimes of hubris. Miscalculations, not misdeeds.

This rectangle told only part of the story. As she wandered the rooms, similar patterns of text and image appeared. Sometimes there were moving images and audio recordings, with her mother’s voice whispering softly from the walls of her house.

Goma traced the arc of a life. Ndege had lived for another thirty years after the expedition’s departure. It had not been long enough for her to learn the truth about Zanzibar, but then Goma had never really thought she would. Ndege had been dead long before the expedition reached Gliese 163, and still more years had passed before any news of their findings made its way back to Crucible. There had been no death-bed pardon for her, no easing of her conscience in those final years.

Still, with time, the government had decided to reassess its view of her. With the Watchkeepers gone, and with the news about the second Mandala — and its activation by Eunice — there was now a concerted push to understand and tame this daunting alien technology. It might take decades, centuries, before the Mandalas could be made to sing at humanity’s whim. What was clear, though — and abundantly so, given the content of these biographical fragments — was that Ndege’s work provided the foundation for all subsequent experiments. Need dictated that they build on her accomplishments, and what had once been considered a crime must now be viewed in a new, more clement light.

Goma wanted to accept this tacit forgiveness on its own terms. It was good to know her mother was no longer detested, no longer held morally accountable for a terrible accident. But there was a cynicism here that she could not set aside. It suited the government to build on her work, and therefore her reputation had to be rehabilitated.

But still. Forgiveness was better than opprobrium, wasn’t it?

Perhaps.

She was turning to leave the house when Ndege appeared before her, standing in a shaft of sunlight.

Ndege raised a calming hand.

‘You’re back, daughter. At least, if you’re seeing me now, you must be. Don’t fear, I’m no ghost. Long dead. This is a recording. They’ve allowed me to make it, on the assumption you’ll one day be in a position to hear my words.’

It was Ndege, but the older version of her mother she had only seen in the wall’s images — Ndege as she had been near the end of those final thirty years. The All must be playing its part, Goma thought — manifesting this image before her, as real as day. Was that the reason they had been so keen to get the All into her so quickly — so she would be able to see Ndege?

‘You mustn’t fear for me,’ Ndege said. ‘They’ve been kind, these recent years. My brother held the government to its word, even in death. They said they’d ease the terms of my confinement if I volunteered for the expedition, and so they have.’ She had to pause, gathering her breath before speaking again. Her voice was frail and frayed. ‘The fact that I never boarded the ship is incidental — the will was there, as you know.’

‘I do,’ Goma said.

The image continued without interruption. ‘I’ve been holding out for a pardon, but it’s clearly not going to happen while I still have a heartbeat. Still, I’ve confidence in you, daughter. You’ll have found something out there, I know. Something that puts me in a better light. Whatever it is, I know you’ll find it.’

‘I did,’ she whispered, as if to speak aloud might shatter the spell.

‘The doctors are kind, but they skirt around the issue of how much time I have left. I daren’t think in terms of years now. Months would be good, but weeks might be more realistic.’ Her smile was gentle, her eyes sparkling with fondness. Some fierce edge was gone from her mother now — dented or worn away in the years since Goma had left. ‘I want you to know, nonetheless, that these last years haven’t been the worst. Of course I miss you, and I still grieve for Mposi. But I have found ways to keep living. My enemies would be pleased to think that my days have been a catalogue of misery and despair, but I have disappointed them. We’re resilient, and we like life. Sunsets are good, but sunrises are better — even an alien sunrise, on a world that still doesn’t really like us. That’s what makes us who we are. Call it an Akinya trait, if you will. I’d say we’re just being human.’ She paused, drawing breath — slow, laboured inhalations. ‘I’ve made them promise me one thing. I can’t enforce it — I won’t be around to — but I think they’ll keep their word. It really isn’t much to ask, and I wanted you to have something when you got back to us. Whoever’s brought you here, they’ll know what I mean. Have them show it to you. You’ve earned the right to have it back. Welcome home, Goma.’

The image paled, faded from view. Goma wandered the room again, in case something in her motion or bearing might bring Ndege back. But there was no second apparition. Some intuition told her this was all there was; that what she had heard would not be repeated. Ndege would not have cared to have her words ground down to meaninglessness by endless repetition.

But what had she meant?

Goma stepped out into the silvery glare of Crucible’s day. She had to squint against the brightness. The others were still waiting for her, their expressions wary, as if none of them were quite sure what had happened inside.

‘Well?’ Ru said, to the point as ever.

‘She left me a message. She said there’s something for me — something she wanted me to have.’

‘There is,’ Malhi confirmed. ‘But we weren’t sure what to make of it, or what you’d think. It’s round the back of the house. Do you wish to see it?’

Goma swallowed. ‘Yes. Whatever it is.’

Ru took her hand from the right, Kanu from the left. ‘There was a message?’ he asked.

‘From Ndege. On the All. You can go inside, if you like. I’d be interested to know if she appears for you.’

‘She won’t,’ Ru said firmly.

Goma gave a nod. ‘No, I don’t think she will. This was for me. Only me. And I don’t think there’ll be another message.’

‘Does there need to be another?’ Kanu asked.

‘No,’ she answered, after a moment’s consideration. ‘I think we said all that needed to be said.’

Malhi and Yefing had gone on ahead. As Goma rounded the corner to the back of the house, Malhi was standing there with one arm outstretched, pointing to the object that had been hidden from view until then. Goma stared at it for a few seconds, hardly believing what she was being shown. It was both utterly familiar, utterly a part of her, and yet it had been such a long time since she had brought it to mind, such a long time since she had considered its lines, admired its elegant balance of form and function, that it might as well have been the first time she had set eyes on it. It seemed unreal, blazing in the same superluminous white of Yefing’s medical uniform.

‘Geoffrey’s aeroplane,’ she said, wonderingly. ‘The Sess-Na.’

She slipped her hands free of Ru and Kanu, walked up to the aeroplane’s side, touched a hand to that blazing whiteness. She half expected it to burst like a soap bubble. But it was real. It was cold and hard under her palm, undeniably present.

She touched the wing. She walked to the front and stroked the edge of the propeller, like a swordsman testing the keenness of a blade.

‘Who’s Geoffrey?’ Kanu asked, stepping into the wing’s shadow, eyeing the ancient machine with more than a little trepidation.

‘You should know,’ she chided teasingly. ‘He was one of ours. Your… what? Uncle? Great-uncle? He was Sunday’s brother. You figure it out.’

‘I knew I’d heard the name.’ Kanu smiled back at her and continued his doubtful examination of the primitive aircraft. ‘He owned this?’

‘He owned this, and it wasn’t even new at the time. It came with us, all the way from Earth. All the way from Africa. It’s… old. Stupidly old. Nine hundred years. Maybe more.’

‘Can you fly it?’

‘I used to, all the time. Against my mother’s wishes, most of the time — she thought I’d break my neck.’

‘And yet,’ Kanu said, ‘she made sure you got it.’

‘If you were going to break your neck, you’d have done it by now,’ Ru said.

‘Can you dismantle it, or box it up?’ she asked Malhi.

Malhi frowned back. ‘You don’t like it?’

‘It’s not about whether I like it or not. I have to go to Earth. It might as well come back with me. That’s where it belongs, not here.’

‘I’d say it belongs here as well as anywhere,’ Kanu said.

‘Doesn’t matter. It can still come back with me.’

He walked over and placed an arm over her shoulder. ‘The machine belongs here. This is where it’s spent most of its existence, isn’t it?’

‘And?’ she asked, squinting against the abstract white glare made by the Sess-Na’s shape.

‘So do you,’ he said. ‘Here with the Tantors, the Risen. Here on the world where you were born.’ He nodded to Ru. ‘Both of you. This is your world, not Earth. You’ve work to be getting on with. Crucible needs you.’

‘Haven’t we done enough for Crucible?’ Goma asked.

‘The more you do, the more you’re needed.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I have to go back. For Eunice’s sake.’

He lifted his arm from her shoulder, brought himself about to face her, his tone firm but affectionate.

‘You made a vow, at least to yourself, that you’d see her heart returned to Africa.’

‘Yes.’

‘That vow can stand. But I can be the one who delivers the heart. Where’s the problem in that? It’s not as if I’m not family. It’s not as if I couldn’t be trusted to deliver on the commitment.’ He looked at her sharply. ‘Is it?’

‘Of course not. But—’

‘And I’m going there anyway.’

‘But Nissa—’ Ru began.

‘She’ll come with me. Earth’s medicine may or may not be more advanced than what they have here on Crucible. They may or may not have the same ethical constraints concerning the regeneration of damaged neural tissue. But it’s not Earth I’m counting on. I’ll take Nissa to Mars. They remade me once, when I should have died. Rebuilt my brain cell by cell, stitched Swift into my skull like a pattern woven into a tapestry. If they could do that for me, they can bring Nissa back too.’

‘You would have no guarantee,’ Yefing said.

‘No, I wouldn’t. But if curing her was easy, you’d have already done it. It’s beyond what you can do — or beyond what you’ll allow yourselves. Isn’t it?’

‘There are impediments,’ Yefing answered, in a confessional tone. ‘But none of us wished to dash your hopes so quickly. There are still avenues to be explored…’

‘And I appreciate your efforts, your good intentions,’ Kanu said. ‘But there’s another consideration. I have to go back to Earth. It’s not just about Eunice’s heart. I have to answer for myself.’

Malhi said: ‘I do not understand.’

‘Years ago, when I was leaving Earth’s system, I turned my ship’s weaponry on another vehicle. I killed a man. At least one. His name was Yevgeny Korsakov. We were friends. Or at least colleagues. I saw no other course of action open to me, but that does not absolve me of responsibility. You say there is no extradition treaty.’

‘You would go voluntarily,’ Malhi confirmed. ‘We have no record of this crime, and Earth has no knowledge that you have returned to us. If you chose to remain here, there is no reason why you could not enjoy decades of freedom.’

‘But I’d still have to live with myself.’ Kanu smiled at them all. It was a smile of wise and sad acceptance more than of joy. ‘It’s all right. I’d more or less made my mind up before we left the medical complex. As soon as there’s a ship, I’ll be on it. Perhaps they’ll have forgotten my crime, or decided to forgive me for it. Whatever their view, I’ll abide by it. I’m sure they’ll grant me the mercy of delivering Nissa to Mars, and Eunice’s heart to Africa.’

‘You’re doing this for her,’ Goma said. ‘Not because you can’t live with yourself. But because she matters more to you than anything.’

Kanu had no answer for that.

‘A ship is scheduled to leave in a few weeks,’ Malhi said, finally breaking the silence. ‘There would be no problem in placing you and Nissa aboard it, if that’s what you wish. But there is time to think about your decision.’

‘Thank you, Malhi. But I don’t think I’ll change my mind. This is what must be done. Besides, it’s no hardship. Earth is my home. Whatever lies in store for me there, it’s where I belong.’ And he turned his face to Goma, letting her know that she need have no regrets, no second thoughts, no doubts, no misgivings, that all was well between them. ‘Where Eunice belongs. I’ll see that she returns home. It’s the least I can do.’

‘Kanu…’ Goma said, her eyes welling up. ‘Uncle.’

He drew her closer, hugged her to him. ‘It’s a beautiful machine Ndege left you. I think you should spend some time enjoying it again. I’ll be fine. One day, perhaps, I’ll come back to Crucible.’

‘I wanted to see Earth.’

‘Earth’s not going anywhere. It’ll still be there in a hundred, or a thousand years. But meanwhile, there are Risen. This is their cusp, Goma — their bottleneck. We came through our share of them; now it’s our turn to do something for our friends. They’re in good hands, I know.’

‘I hope it works out for you, Kanu,’ Ru said.

‘It will. I always try to hope for the best. What else can we do?’

Twenty days later they watched him depart.

Goma had already said her farewells; there had been no need to say goodbye to him at the spaceport. Instead they had flown out in the Sess-Na, far beyond Guochang’s last straggling suburb, into elephant territory.

The ambassadors would soon be walking these alien plains, but not just yet: there were still weeks or months of acclimatisation ahead of them, before they could comfortably breathe Crucible’s air. But elephants had made that transition once before, without the benefit of contemporary medicine, and Goma had no doubt the ambassadors would prove equally adaptable.

For now it was just her and Ru, standing together a few dozen paces from the aircraft.

‘I spoke to Malhi,’ Goma mentioned. ‘They’re still tracking her, after all this time.’

Ru looked at Goma with only mild interest, her real attention still on the distant spaceport, lying somewhere beyond the distant shark fin of the medical pyramid. ‘Her?’

‘Arethusa. She’s still alive, still somewhere out there. But bigger and stranger than she ever was before. She nearly killed Mposi, did you know? He tried fixing a tracking device on her. That didn’t go down well.’

‘And now…?’

‘Someone needs to bring her up to speed. She may not be an Akinya, but she’s been part of this for long enough. I want Malhi to take me out there. A boat, submarine, whatever it takes. There are still merfolk. They can help me find her.’

‘And if she tries to kill you as well?’

‘I’m counting on her wanting to hear my story first. Someone owes her this much.’

‘For old times’ sake?’

‘For old times’ sake.’

They saw it long before any sound had a chance to reach their ears. A rising spark, steady as an ascending star, a glint of hull balanced on that brightness, arrowing its way to orbit, to meet with the larger starship that would soon be embarking for interstellar space. Goma waited, and waited, but there never was any sound, just the heat and stillness of the day, their own breathing, the untroubled silence between them. She thought of Kanu in that ship, his wife with him, their hopes and fears, and the heart that travelled with them, on its long homecoming.

There had been warning, but not quite enough.

When the moment of translation came, there was still much that the Risen could have done to ready their world for its next port of call. In the stony corridors, enclosed halls and great vaulted chambers of Zanzibar, countless Risen were still engaged in their daily activities. They had been going about their business despite Dakota’s departure and the irksome human interference with their power-generation grid. Fortunately, the grid was not essential for their continued existence, although it certainly made life easier. Ideally, when the warning arrived, the Risen would have abandoned their less vital tasks and taken up monitoring stations throughout Zanzibar, but most especially near the vulnerable points of its skin, ready to act if some part of that outer layer ruptured. None of them had direct memories of the first translation event, the one that had brought Zanzibar (or rather this chip of it) from the orbit of Crucible to the orbit of Paladin, across a numbing span of light-years. But in the community of the Risen, direct memories were only one strand in the larger tapestry of the Remembering. All knew of the severity of that event — the terrible toll of Risen and human lives. All could recount the hard days that had followed as the survivors fought to transform this severed fragment into a home that could keep them alive. And after the hard days — hard weeks, months, years. Crushing setbacks, bruising failures. Not until Dakota came to them had the worst of it been surpassed, and even then their difficulties were not over.

Not by a long margin.

But they had prevailed, and they had found stability. Whatever the outcome of this latest event, Memphis felt certain they would find it again — no matter how hard it would be, no matter how long it took them. It would not be his generation that broke the continuity of the Remembering, nor the one that followed.

In fact, this translation event was not violent at all. This time, all of Zanzibar was displaced, leaving no trace of it — save the mirrors, which were too far away to be caught up in the event — in orbit around Paladin. But Memphis knew that something had happened. Beneath the pads of his feet he felt the world shudder as if gong-struck. There was one large upheaval, then a diminishing series of lesser vibrations. Dust fell from the ceilings; water trembled in basins; the fabric of the world gave a single bored groan; and then all was still again.

And they were somewhere else.

To begin with, of course, Memphis had no idea where that might be. In her final urgent transmission from Icebreaker during the last few minutes before the event, Dakota had warned that they could expect to end up around another star, in some other solar system — but she could offer nothing more specific than that. No idea of what sort of star, what sort of worlds it might have gathered around itself, how far from Paladin it lay. All of that, it was made clear, Memphis and his fellows would have to work out for themselves.

Were they up to such a task?

There were some Risen who considered Memphis slow. None of them was as quick as Dakota, that was true. But among her subordinates there were indeed Risen who had a quicker, more fluid command of language than Memphis. Words did not form as easily in his head as they did for others. But the weakness of that faculty should not have blinded them to his inner strengths. He comprehended as well as any of them, and although he might not be the quickest at expressing the ideas that took shape in his head, he had no doubt as to his own capabilities. He had served Dakota well, and she had entrusted this world to him. When the instruction came to dispose of the bodies of the Friends who could never be revived, he had understood her intentions perfectly. She was not a natural murderer, and nor was Memphis. And just as she had placed her trust in him then, he felt bound by an implicit trust now. He felt that burden of duty even though he was certain he would never see the matriarch again.

So he would live up to it. To start with, they would not concern themselves with what lay outside. That could wait. In the immediate hours following the event, there was more than enough to be done making sure that their home had come through without serious damage, and that the Risen were all aware of the sudden change in their circumstances. Memphis made a point of informing as many of them in person as he was able to, but before long he had to appoint deputies of his own, sending them out into the warrens and tunnels with such facts as he could give them.

Robbed of the mirrors, Zanzibar was running on emergency power for now. They could endure this for a while, but in the longer run, Risen needed bright skies. The mirrors, Memphis knew, had been made from bits and pieces scavenged from inside Zanzibar and lashed together with haste and ingenuity. The Risen could not have done such a thing on their own back then, but these were different times. They had learned a lot — not least the fact that they did not need human authority or permission to run their own world. Memphis would pick the cleverest of his Risen and assign them the job of making new mirrors. They would succeed — he was sure of it. Fortunately, there was still abundant water and food. After centuries of occupation, it would take more than a few years for Zanzibar’s stone walls to lose all their trapped heat, even if they had popped out far from the warmth of a star. The essentials were still in place. The Risen could live, and keep living, while they addressed their problems in a methodical fashion. They would do what they had always done — place one sure foot in front of another.

When Memphis had satisfied himself that the absolute essentials were in hand (in trunk — he would force his mind out of these old human patterns of speech eventually, but not today) — when all was in trunk — he at last allowed his mind to turn to the question of where they had arrived.

Memphis organised a small expeditionary party. They made their way out through the peripheral tunnels to one of the docking points, where there were windows.

Zanzibar was still turning. It had kept its angular momentum during the translation, which meant there was still gravity in its chambers. The view wheeled around with the clock-like rhythm Memphis had known all his life. Until this latest development, the only significant thing beyond the windows had been rocky, airless Paladin and its single Mandala. He had long been accustomed to the presence of Gliese 163, but the star was always too distant to be anything other than an abstract source of light.

Now a harder and brighter light, a light that was much bluer, much fiercer, streamed through layers of pitted and scratched glass.

‘We will need fewer mirrors,’ Memphis declared.

If they needed mirrors at all. The blaze caused him to squint. He had rarely needed to squint before, so in a way it was encouraging that the old reflex worked as reliably as it did. Their new sun was hotter and bluer than their old one, and it looked larger. He raised his trunk as a point of comparison. He could not quite block the disc of his new blue star, whereas he had never had any difficulty obscuring Gliese 163.

There was a world, too. They were orbiting it. It was hard to tell how big it was — they would need more time to take that sort of measurement. But it was spherical and a very emphatic green, and there was a mottling in that green which did not quite strike him as the kind of pattern that would arise from purely natural processes. Beyond the curve of this new world’s horizon lay an even larger one, and in a dizziness of hierarchies Memphis grasped that, as Zanzibar orbited this planet, so this planet was but a moon of the larger one.

There was much to explore here — much to keep the minds of the Risen occupied.

Memphis became aware of something then — a black object sliding across the patterned face of the green world. It appeared at first to be an extension of the planet’s surface, but as their relative angles diverged he saw that the black object was raised above it, perhaps in its own orbit. It was a flattened six-sided surface, and on it was another Mandala.

The black object was easy to see when it was over the green, but as it slipped beyond the limb of the world he lost track of it. There was another, though. It followed on behind the first, and then there was a third, as if there might be a necklace of them strung around the green world.

So this location had more than one. Zanzibar had come here from somewhere else; from here, presumably, they could also travel to other places.

If they so wished.

The blue sun washed out the stars, but when Zanzibar turned from it, Memphis’s bright-adapted eyes still made out a handful of them. He had never studied the shapes of the stars, the patterns and constellations they formed, but some shiver of disquieting intuition told him that these configurations were not at all familiar, not even to those who had made their home under the alien skies of Paladin. How far had the Risen come?

Did it matter? The Risen were the Risen. This home was their home, wherever it took them.

Presently, as Zanzibar again swung its face back towards the green world, he noticed movement. He stirred, alarmed at first, then realised it would do his deputies no good at all to see him perturbed. So he squared his ears and adopted a posture of studied repose.

‘Visitors.’

Little gold things were crossing space to Zanzibar. They came in several antlike processions, dozens at a time, converging from different directions. Each was a tiny double sphere with many golden appendages. It was impossible to say precisely where they had originated from — the green world, the orbiting Mandalas or the larger planet beyond the green one. Memphis allowed himself a moment’s speculation as to their intentions. Perhaps they meant ill to Zanzibar and its citizens — startled and alarmed by the sudden arrival of this oddly shaped rock. More charitably, though, he could presume their intentions were benign, for the time being, at least.

They would arrive very shortly. It occurred to Memphis that the prudent thing might be to wake up some of the Friends, to see what the humans made of the golden envoys. In time, he decided, he would do just that. The humans were owed their stake in Zanzibar, after all — they would all have to share its spaces for a while.

But for the moment, just for now, the Risen had no need of anyone else.