Poseidon's Wake (51 page)

‘But the statistical odds against these alignments being chance is actually rather high according to our experts – about one in twenty thousand, if I understand the analysis. Shall I tell you what I think is happening?’ But she glanced quickly at Goma. ‘What
we
think?’

‘We may as well hear it, as you’re here,’ Kanu said.

‘The Mandala on Paladin is communicating with other Mandalas in other solar systems. It is sending them wake-up signals – telling them to begin rebooting.’

‘Rebooting,’ Nissa said. ‘I don’t know that term.’

‘Old spacefaring terminology. It means to put your boots on – to start getting ready for business.’

‘I see,’ she said, nodding doubtfully. ‘And what exactly is it that is “rebooting”?’

‘It’s a machine,’ Goma said. ‘A machine hundreds, maybe thousands of light-years across. It’s been dead, dormant, for longer than we can imagine, thousands, millions of years, at least. But my mother restarted it. Crucible was a peripheral branch of the Mandala network – an outlying system, a dead end. Ndege’s Mandala sent its wake-up signal to this one and transported
Zanzibar
here during the same event, probably because
Zanzibar
just happened to get caught up in the initial reactivation process. But this system isn’t a dead end. It’s a node, a hub, in some wider network. There may be others, but this must be the closest one to our part of the galaxy. It’s what the Watchkeepers have been drawn to all this time. They know it’s significant – they just can’t advance their knowledge beyond that.’

‘A machine wouldn’t take this long to start up,’ Kanu said.

‘It could if its basic components are still light-limited,’ Eunice replied. ‘Depending on how far out the furthest parts of the network are, it might take tens of thousands of years for the whole thing to come back online. Signals whispering across the void – start-up instructions, error correction, status reporting. A process longer than the span of recorded history. But that’s what’s happening. And on a local scale, it may already be partly operable.’

‘Operable,’ Kanu said, almost laughing. ‘As if it’s a thing we might use?’

‘Why not?’ Eunice said. ‘The Risen are here because of it. Instead of barging to Poseidon, we should be consolidating our efforts, trying to understand how to make safe use of the Mandala network. We know from the survivors that the
Zanzibar
translation was instantaneous within their reference frame, which means they must have been travelling at only a whisker below the speed of light. Consequently, any other part of the network is also only a blink away in subjective terms. Deep exploration of the galaxy is within our grasp – and you’re risking all that for the agenda of a bunch of mindless alien robots?’

‘Why do you say mindless?’ Dakota asked.

‘We all felt it,’ Eunice replied, ‘from the moment the Trinity made direct contact with the Watchkeepers. There’s nothing inside them. They’re hollow – scooped out like an ice-cream cone. They’ve forgotten how to be conscious. Or are you in some sort of denial about this? Does it not worry you that you might be the willing servant of a zombie machine intelligence?’

‘They’ve passed the Gupta–Wing threshold,’ Nissa said. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘At least one of you has a grasp on things,’ Eunice said, miming applause. ‘Perhaps I should be addressing you, Nissa – are you the one I should be reaching out to?’

‘I am afraid we must curtail this discussion,’ Dakota said, rising from her seat – more nimble than any elephant had a right to be. ‘The time lag has consumed valuable hours.’

‘We’ve barely begun!’ Goma said.

‘It’s been six hours,’ Kanu said. ‘I’m sorry, but I think we’ve said all we can. We’re not adversaries, any of us, but we are on different paths. You have your concerns, we have ours – but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together when we returned from Poseidon.’

‘It’s going to kill you,’ Eunice said. ‘Dakota knows that – whether she admits it to herself or not. If you have a chance of turning away from this, I strongly recommend that you do so.’

She might have been on the point of saying something else, but before she had a chance her figment vanished from the environment. Goma was gone as well, their stone seats vacated.

Kanu expected to be snapped back into the normal time-flow of
Icebreaker
, no longer in ching. But Dakota turned her huge broad forehead to face him. ‘We have a measure of privacy here so we might as well use it. The younger human – Goma. What did she mean when she spoke of your “earlier message”?’

‘You’ve monitored all the transmissions between the two ships,’ Nissa said.

‘But she appeared to be referring to a conversation I do not know about. The mention of coercion, of lives being at stake – how could she know about the Friends, Kanu, unless you told her?’

‘Eunice would have told them.’

‘Eunice knows nothing of what has happened in any part of
Zanzibar
since her departure. This was specific, directed knowledge. How could either of them make such a deductive leap?’

‘It’s what we do,’ Nissa said. ‘Being humans.’

‘You think highly of your faculties. I don’t blame you for that. But it would be a mistake to underestimate me. If there was communication between
Icebreaker
and
Travertine
ahead of the exchanges I know about – or in parallel with them – I would very much like to know. What was discussed? What was considered, then abandoned?’

‘Nothing,’ Kanu said. ‘There was no communication.’

The Watchkeeper came in so swiftly that they had only a couple of hours to prepare for its arrival. It must have been among the gathering of alien machines on the system’s edge, waiting beyond the orbit of Paladin until
Icebreaker
’s movement snared its interest. For a little while, as it closed in with disdainful swiftness, it looked inevitable to Kanu that there would be a collision, or something just as catastrophic. This was nothing at all like the patient, inscrutable comings and goings of the Watchkeepers in the old system.

‘It’s not been damaged like the others,’ he said as they studied the sharpening images on the bridge – the Watchkeeper rendered as a stubby cone sidling in at a definite angle to its velocity vector.

‘Of course not,’ Dakota chided. ‘The corpses are as old as your hominid forebears. It has been aeons since a Watchkeeper was unwise enough to chance a close encounter with Poseidon; aeons since one of them was harmed. They learn slowly, but they do learn. You are quite wrong about the alien consciousness, by the way. It may be slower than you can perceive, but that does not mean it is absent. The machines have learned that the endurance of cosmological time demands no swift actions, no hasty measures.’

‘This looks pretty hasty to me,’ Nissa said.

‘An exception, because human activity is itself exceptional, especially when such activity is directed towards Poseidon. You would have drawn their attention sooner or later, even without that unfortunate accident. This movement, though, must be of particular interest to them – it originates with
Zanzibar
.’

‘They think you’re involved,’ Nissa said.

‘And that pleases them. These centuries are long to us. They swallow our lives as a whale swallows water. But they are merely a breath to the Watchkeepers – a moment between their great, slow thoughts. From their perspective,
Zanzibar
arrived a few busy instants ago.’

The image shivered, gaining a new layer of detail.

‘What should we do?’ Kanu asked.

‘Maintain our heading. Make no change. If it meant to stop us, it would already have done so. This is curiosity, concern, encouragement. It shares our desire to unravel the secrets of Poseidon.’

‘Oh, I’m just bursting with curiosity,’ Nissa said.

Kanu acknowledged that with a thin smile.

It came in closer still, slowly adjusting the angle of its course until its body was both parallel to
Icebreaker
and moving in the same direction. They were halfway along its length, with hundreds of kilometres of it to bow and stern. The nearest point was two hundred kilometres away, but in the airlessness of space where cues of distance and perspective were elusive, the Watchkeeper appeared to be dismayingly near. They had been closer to the corpse, but this one was very much alive. Blue radiance fought its way out between the close-layered scales of the Watchkeeper’s pine-cone armour.

Now something changed. The scales were angling apart, allowing more of that light to escape. It fanned out in hard blue arcs, sweeping across
Icebreaker
. They saw it on screens and sensors – had there been windows, the glare would have been too bright to tolerate.

‘Have we seen this before?’ Nissa asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ Kanu said, offering a shrug by way of incomprehension.

‘They will speak to me,’ Dakota said, with sudden decisiveness. ‘Reduce our thrust to zero. I will go out to them.’

‘In
Noah
?’

‘On my own. I will make dung, then you will assist me with the suit and the airlock. I will not be outside for long.’

They put
Icebreaker
into a free-fall cruise and followed Dakota to the main airlock, where she had first come aboard. Her suit was waiting there, partially dismantled – its hard, curving sections looked more like the pieces of a small white spacecraft than something meant to be worn. The parts clamped around her and locked together with airtight precision, first the two Easter-egg halves of the body, then the four limb sections, complexly jointed and accordioned, and finally the monstrous trunked helmet with its two blank circular portholes for eyes. There was something horrible about the lifelessness of that helmet, as if a second, exterior skull now enclosed the first. She flexed the trunk, experimenting with its dexterity, while the suit’s life-support system puffed and wheezed and ticked.

Her voice, amplified and resonant, boomed through the suit’s speaking system. ‘The others remain here, Kanu, and they have their orders with regard to
Zanzibar
. You would not be so unwise as to forget that, would you?’

‘No, I think we understand the situation perfectly.’

‘That is good, because our conversation with Goma gave me some small grounds for concern. It will be good to know that I may put them to rest.’

‘How will you move outside?’ Nissa asked.

‘Let me worry about that. If you wish to witness, no harm will come of it.’

She moved easily into the lock and the cycle was soon complete. Kanu had stopped the engines by then – it would make a small difference to their arrival at Poseidon, but nothing that would seriously complicate their plans – and Dakota was able to drift free of the ship without being left behind.

It turned out that her suit, which they had not been able to inspect in detail, was fitted with a set of steering thrusters arranged for three axes of control. She looked perfectly at ease with this technology, directing it with a tap of her trunk against a control plate fixed between her shoulders. Kanu reminded himself that this extra-vehicular equipment must have been developed during that brief and hopeful period when humans and Tantors had coexisted within
Zanzibar
. The sense of squandered possibility, of better paths now lost to them all, filled him with a sudden rising sadness. He wondered if it was too late to make something better of their world.

Dakota picked up speed. It was an exceedingly odd thing to see an elephant in a spacesuit. But to an elephant, a monkey in a suit must have looked no stranger, no more of an affront to the expected order of things. They were both mammals, both creatures who needed air in their lungs.

She diminished, becoming a small white sphere with appendages, then a dot soon lost against the scale of the Watchkeeper. They tracked the electronic signature of her suit with
Icebreaker
’s instruments, and then quite suddenly she was moving in a way that could not be explained by the capabilities of her suit alone. She began to accelerate along the narrowing length of the alien machine, gathered in some net of invisible force, until at last her signature vanished into the tiny circular aperture at the Watchkeeper’s tip. Tiny only in the most relative of senses, of course – the proportions of things, even at the machine’s extremity, remained mountainous, and Dakota would have been swallowed into the Watchkeeper like a speck of plankton.

As they carried on watching, the platelets – each of which was easily the size of a small land mass – began to close again, eventually shuttering the blue radiation.

The better part of an hour passed.

‘Do you think she’d give the order?’ Nissa asked.

‘To murder the Friends?’ Kanu said. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t want to find out the hard way what her limits are. It could be a bluff, but in
Zanzibar
I had the feeling she might go through with it. If they’ve already committed murder, which we as good as know they have, there’s no reason for them not to do it again.’

She gave him a sidelong, questioning look. ‘Is that you speaking or Swift?’

‘Why wouldn’t it be me?’

‘Because you have every incentive to find a way to back out of this. I’m not sure Swift feels quite the same way.’

‘Swift won’t agree to anything that puts the Friends’ lives at risk.’

‘No – but if there was a chance to turn around, without risking the Friends, would Swift accept that?’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘Because Swift’s agenda and ours aren’t quite the same thing.’

Swift had been silent until then, but this statement was enough to draw him to speak. ‘I do not believe our concerns are all that different, Nissa. Aren’t we all here to gather knowledge – to learn more than we already know?’

‘Some of us didn’t have a lot of choice about being here.’

‘There is truth in that, but you would not have gone to Europa were you not also in the business of seeking knowledge. Curiosity motivates us in different ways, I agree. Kanu has spent his life searching for answers to the oldest of questions: how may I live peacefully with my neighbour? On Earth, he worked to foster good relations between the distinct and troubled factions of modern humanity – between the folk of the land, the folk of the water, the folk of the air. On Mars, he quite literally gave his life for the betterment of human
–
machine affairs. But Kanu knew that a deeper solution to our differences required answers he could not hope to find within the old solar system. They drove him to travel here.’