Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Kanu had nothing to say in the face of the elephants. Nothing in his long and strange life, no experience or lesson, had prepared him for this moment. He had a million questions for the elephants, but no idea where to begin. It was all he could do to stand still, caught in the paralysing rapture of the moment.

‘Who are you?’

It was Nissa who spoke first, her voice booming out through her suit’s loudspeaker. The elephant’s answer, when it returned, was also in Swahili. It was not merely an echo of her words, for the intonation was distinctly different, questioning and with a trace of superiority.

‘Who are you?’

‘I am Nissa Mbaye,’ she answered, with a collectedness that impressed Kanu, as if she had expected to meet and speak to elephants all along. ‘Our ship was damaged, we needed a place to repair it, and we weren’t expecting to find anyone alive inside this station.’

‘Station?’

The vocal sounds were coming from the lead elephant but they were not being generated by its mouth, or at least not directly. The elephant was the tallest of the three, its skin pigmentation a dark umber offset with pinkish mottling around the eyes and mouth. It exuded an impression of powerful muscularity, a sense of enormous force just barely contained.

The sounds, insofar as Kanu could judge, emanated from a thick angled plate that the elephant wore across the front of its face, fixed between its eyes and above the top of its trunk. The voice was loud and very deep. At the lower end of its frequency range, Kanu felt certain it would be deeper than any possible human utterance, and certainly far louder.

‘We thought this was a station, a base,’ Kanu said, finding his voice at last. ‘We were expecting people — humans, like ourselves. We were not expecting you.’

‘Take off your helmets. We will see your faces.’

Nissa glanced at Kanu through the side of her visor, then the two of them consulted their wrist readouts.

‘It’s safe enough,’ Kanu whispered. ‘If there’s enough oxygen to keep them alive, we should be fine.’

‘I don’t like it,’ Nissa said.

‘Nor do I, but when in Rome…’

They eased their helmets off, then tucked them under their arms. Kanu breathed in the air. There was a mustiness to it, but he had inhaled worse.

‘Speak your name.’

‘Kanu,’ he said levelly, hoping he sounded as matter-of-fact as Nissa had. ‘My name is Kanu Akinya.’

‘Akinya?’

‘Yes.’

He was talking to an elephant, and the elephant was replying. The strangeness of this situation was almost too much to bear. It felt dreamlike, and yet he had a clear sense of the events that had led up to it, the chain of contingencies, each of which had felt logical and inevitable in isolation. It was entirely likely that this was happening. Astonishing, absurd, wonderful, but not beyond the realms of the possible.

‘You look the same to us. Are you brothers?’

He glanced at Nissa, tried to imagine a point of view from which they were indistinguishable. They were both nearly hairless now, but as far as Kanu was concerned, that was where the similarities ended.

‘No, we’re not brothers. I am a man, Nissa is a woman. We aren’t related.’

‘You are the man Kanu Akinya?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you are the woman Nissa Mbaye?’

‘Yes,’ she answered.

‘Do you know the name of this place, Kanu Akinya and Nissa Mbaye?’

‘The planet is Paladin,’ Kanu said. ‘That’s what we call it, anyway. We found this shard of rock orbiting it and hoped it could help us fix our ship. That’s all we know.’

‘Then you do not know the name of this place.’

‘Do you?’ Nissa asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What do you call it?’ she asked.

‘Zan-zi-bar,’ said the elephant, each syllable a distinct, booming thing unto itself.

Nissa looked at him. Kanu shrugged within the collar of his suit. The temptation was to dismiss the name out of hand. Anyone with an education, anyone with the slightest interest in history knew what happened to the holoship. But here was a talking elephant, claiming otherwise.

It felt only fair and reasonable that he should listen to what the elephant had to say on the matter.

‘We thought Zanzibar was destroyed,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘But people saw it happen,’ Kanu persisted. ‘It was a terrible event, one of the worst in recent history.’

‘Were you there?’

‘No… we’ve come from Earth, not Crucible. Neither of us has ever been there.’

The elephant was looking at him, sometimes directly, sometimes by angling its huge head to favour one eye over the other. The eyes were a pale amber under a cowling of dark lashes.

‘But you know of Zanzibar.’

‘Everyone does,’ Kanu said. ‘Something terrible happened — an accident with the Mandala on Crucible.’

‘Speak of this accident.’

‘Zanzibar was passing overhead and there was an energy burst, a discharge — a massive explosion. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed — I’m not sure of the exact number. The holoship was turned into rubble and the debris formed a ring system that’s still orbiting Crucible. Are you saying that’s not what happened?’

‘There was an accident. But Zanzibar came here. We were on it. We survived. We have been here ever since.’

‘Do you have a name?’ Kanu asked.

‘I have two names. A true name and a short name. You cannot hear my true name. That will not pass into your knowing.’

‘What is your short name?’ Nissa asked.

‘I am Memphis. I speak for these Risen. You will speak to them through me.’

‘A name with a connection to the family,’ he whispered to Nissa. ‘It proves a link to the elephants that came to Crucible.’

They were led out of the chamber into a corridor easily high enough for the elephants and wide enough for two of them to walk abreast with room to spare. Memphis went ahead of Kanu and Nissa, the other two slightly smaller elephants bringing up the rear. Kanu was uncomfortably aware of their lumbering presence behind him, the ease with which he might be injured or even killed were he to stumble under their feet. Memphis’s massive hindquarters loomed ahead, muscular and baggy at the same time, as if the skin were a size too big for the meat and bones beneath. The elephant’s tiny afterthought of a tail pendulumed with each stride, as if setting the rhythm. Once, without any pause in his progress, Memphis released a sackful of steaming dung, forcing the humans to step around it.

‘This is a development,’ Swift said.

‘Is that your idea of understatement?’ Kanu answered, speaking subvocally.

‘It’s my idea of bewilderment. How can this be Zanzibar if the records say that it was destroyed?’

‘It’s hard to square with what we know. But then again, why would they make up something so unlikely?’

‘They need to explain how it got here,’ Nissa said, speaking through the same subvocal channel. ‘I may not be an expert on Akinya history, but I know how long it took the holoships to crawl their way to Crucible. This is even further from Earth.’

‘Then it got here faster,’ Kanu said.

‘This isn’t even all of Zanzibar,’ Nissa replied. ‘We’d have recognised a holoship immediately. Where’s the rest of it?’

‘You heard the elephant. A large part of it survived — not all.’

‘Speaking of elephants — what the hell is going on? What do you mean by “family connection”?’

‘You mean he never told you?’ Swift said.

‘There’s a history of involvement with elephants in my family,’ Kanu said, feeling like a man called upon to defend himself. ‘It goes back a long, long way — to academic studies in Africa, but also genetic experiments on the Moon and elsewhere, shaping an elephant daughter species with the resilience to survive in space.’

‘And this is the result?’ Nissa said.

‘I don’t know! Some elephants travelled aboard the holoships, and there have always been rumours about the emergence of a strain with enhanced intelligence. More than rumours, apparently. But those elephants didn’t use machinery and speak Swahili. These are something else — yet another strain.’

‘Does their name mean anything to you?’ Nissa asked.

‘Risen? No. I don’t think I’ve heard that before. Risen from what? By whose hand?’ Kanu’s pace must have slowed, for he felt a gentle shove from behind, a nudge against his backpack. ‘Where are you taking us, Memphis?’

‘To see Dakota.’

The corridor went on and on, following an almost imperceptibly rising curve. It must cut, Kanu decided, through the rocky shell of Zanzibar itself, defining in its curvature the rough outline of the former holoship.

Clearly the corridor had not always been as wide as its present state. Here and there he could tell where it had been blasted or excavated open from some narrower configuration, and some of the remodelling was far from neatly done. Parts of the corridor were clad; other areas were bare rock, crudely furnished with illumination. At intervals, various corridors and passageways branched off it, angling away to mysterious destinations. Some of these were large enough to admit an elephant, but not all of them. A juvenile elephant might still be able to get down them, but not one of these hulking, armoured adults. Either there were still people around, or there were parts of this place that the elephants could not access.

So it had not been built for them, but adapted — in haste, perhaps, and imperfectly. They had language and the evident ability to control doors and perhaps use tools, but he wondered how capable they were of modifying their larger environment. Had they made these makeshift changes, or had they received assistance? More pertinently: were they now the only tenants?

‘Look,’ Nissa whispered.

He followed her gaze to the error readout on her cuff which meant that her suit was no longer in contact with Fall of Night. Kanu checked his own suit. It was the same story. He tried a wider search, hoping to pick up a contact from Icebreaker, but both ships were silent.

‘We have gone too far into the rock,’ Swift said. ‘The intervening material is blocking an already weak signal. I am afraid there is nothing to be done.’

Presently they reached a branching corridor which climbed steeply up through a number of turns, until at last they arrived in a much larger enclosed space than any they had seen so far. They were at the base of it, with a vaulted ceiling soaring several hundred metres overhead, its rocky underside pinpricked by hundreds of bright blue lights. The chamber was large but — Kanu reminded himself — still small compared to the original size of the holoship. Waiting in the chamber was an impressive vehicle, easily as big as anything he had seen on Earth. It consisted of a platform flanked by three pairs of huge balloon-tyred wheels, with a steep access ramp leading up to the platform.

The elephants and their guests went up the platform. There were no seats or amenities aboard the vehicle, just protective railings around the outside edges. Memphis moved to a control pedestal near the front and started touching things with his trunk. The vehicle rolled into life, giving off no more than a rumble of tyres against the chamber’s rough flooring. Up at the front, beyond the control pedestal, Kanu saw what looked like a conventional cockpit of some kind, encased in a pressurised canopy.

‘Did you make this?’ he asked, one hand on the nearest railing, the other arm still cradling his helmet. He had been breathing Zanzibar’s air for many minutes now without obvious ill-effect.

‘No, we did not make it.’

‘Then who did?’

‘It was made for Crucible. Now it is for us.’

The pedestal had been welded to the deck, and wires and cables ran in crude fashion down its length.

‘Did you adapt it?’ Nissa said.

‘No.’

‘Then who did?’

‘The Friends. You will see them soon, once you have seen Dakota.’

They were rolling out of the chamber now, having gathered a respectable turn of speed — easily faster than an elephant’s stampede charge. Once again they were travelling down a corridor, but the course of this one was much more erratic than before, suggesting that it been bored anew rather than converted from an earlier element of Zanzibar. It twisted and turned, climbed and descended. The vehicle rolled on, Memphis keeping the very tip of his trunk in contact with the steering controls. He produced more dung and one of the other elephants used a kind of broom to sweep it into a hopper on the side of the vehicle, leaving only a greasy smear. They must eventually collect their waste wherever it falls, Kanu thought, or else the world would have been full of dung.

‘This vehicle was meant for the colony, surely,’ he said, addressing Nissa, keeping his voice low while not yet subvocalising. ‘Manufactured up here, I suppose. They would have kept most of the factories and fabricators in orbit, sending finished goods down to Crucible. This one never made it, and now it’s been altered so he can drive it. But no matter how smart they’ve become, I don’t see this being within their capabilities. Someone must have helped.’

‘Were there people on this thing when the accident happened?’

‘Hundreds of thousands. Most were presumed dead, wiped out in an instant. But if the elephants survived, then I suppose some people must have, too.’

‘Strange that they weren’t in the welcome party, isn’t it?’

‘Memphis,’ Kanu said, ‘who are these Friends you mention? Is Eunice among them?’

The great head turned to regard him. ‘No.’

Kanu said, ‘Do you know what happened to her?’

‘Why do you speak of Eunice?’

‘Then you’ve heard of her.’

Memphis flapped his ears — a gesture that Kanu could not help but interpret as one of irritation. He was still driving, but his attention was now on them, not the way ahead. Still the vehicle trundled on. ‘Eunice did not like us. Eunice is gone.’

‘What do you mean, gone?’

‘Dead.’

Presently they arrived in a significantly larger space — what Kanu guessed must be one of the holoship’s original pressure caverns. It was kilometres across in all dimensions — dizzying after the confinement of spacecraft and airlocks and corridors. He forgot how many chambers the holoships had carried, but he was sure it was more than a dozen. Still, this one chamber would suffice for tens of thousands of survivors, if they were prepared to put up with a measure of crowding.

But there were no people to be seen.

There were elephants, or Risen, if that was the name they now preferred. They were standing around in groups or moving in ones and twos — elephants both large and small, though Kanu was no expert in such matters. All but the smallest wore similar equipment to the three with them now, allowing for differences in detail. They stood in the open areas between buildings, or walked along wide, dusty pathways linking those same structures. There were many buildings, none of them more than a few stories high, and all had clearly been designed for human occupation. Enlarged doors and windows had been cut into the sides of some, but others were still as they must have been built. The buildings nestled in and around squares of open grassland, small lakes and woods. The chamber’s floor curved gradually upwards, the more distant buildings built on rising terrain and appearing to tilt inwards as if their foundations had subsided. But the chamber did not encompass more than a small fraction of Zanzibar’s circumference, the ground on either side eventually shrugging off vegetation and assuming a sheer, clifflike steepness before curving over again to form the ceiling. A honeycomb of blue panels covered the ceiling, glowing with the brightness of sky. The honeycomb was interrupted by patches of darkness where many of the individual panels had broken away or stopped working. But the overall effect was still sufficient to suggest the muted light of an overcast day.

The vehicle was slowing now as Memphis steered them along a dirt track passing between two of the buildings. Elephants turned to study them, lifting their trunks in a kind of salute. The elephants were talking to each other, or expressing some shared emotional response.

‘I hope that means they’re pleased to see us,’ Nissa said.

‘I can’t tell.’

They stopped at one of the larger buildings — it had a forbidding, civic look to it, with a frontage of grey pillars like a mouthful of teeth. The ramp lowered and Nissa and Kanu were encouraged to disembark.

‘Follow,’ Memphis said. ‘Dakota will see you.’

They entered the civic building through an open doorway twice as tall as an elephant. Beyond the entrance was an equally impressive lobby, at least a hundred metres wide and perhaps three times as long. For all its size, it was a gloomy place. Shafts of light shone down through windows in the ceiling and upper walls, but all they did was push the darkness into the corners. Kanu and Nissa’s boots clacked on the marble floor. Only Memphis accompanied them. Kanu guessed that the elephants were wise enough to know their guests would not attempt an escape now, when they were so far from their point of entry.

There was a kind of ramp in the middle of the floor leading down to lower levels, but Memphis steered them around this and brought them to a halt at the far end of the chamber. Next to a set of doors was an upright glass rectangle set on a stone plinth, and next to this was a huge metal staff. Memphis wrapped his trunk around the staff, lifted it effortlessly from the ground and hammered its blunt end against the floor.

The sound — a dull, atonal dong — echoed and echoed around the empty chamber. Kanu noticed now that the place where Memphis had struck the ground was spiderwebbed by myriad cracks, as if this ceremonial summoning had been conducted many times before.

A moment passed. Then a large pair of doors swung open in the chamber’s wall.

‘We found two people,’ Memphis said, addressing the form that waited in the red-lit space beyond.

‘Only these two?’

‘Yes. The man Kanu Akinya and the woman Nissa Mbaye.’

‘Where is their ship?’

‘We have it.’

‘You mean the smaller ship, of course.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then where is the larger ship?’

‘It is still where it was. We brought them straight here from the lock.’

‘Have they seen the Friends yet?’

‘No.’

‘But they shall. Bring them to me, Memphis. Let me see what they are. Let me see what time and tide have washed up for us.’

The voice was as deep as Memphis’s but the intonation was recognisably distinct — older, slower in its utterances, but at the same time conveying a sly and calculating capacity that Kanu had not sensed in the first animal. If it had been a surprise to find himself in the presence of a talking elephant, now he had the first disquieting sense that this intellect was superior to the first, and perhaps even to his own.

He wondered how Swift felt.

‘I am searching your memory, Kanu. There was an elephant by the name of Dakota, who may have been the product of genetic cognition enhancement. But it is quite impossible that particular Dakota could still be alive after all this time.’

Kanu could have sworn he felt Swift rummaging through his memories, travelling from one part of his skull to another like a slowly moving itch.

‘We’ll see about that. What happened to Dakota?’

‘Dakota was one of the three Watchkeeper ambassadors — the three intelligences that left Crucible shortly after settlement. The first was Chiku Green, the second Eunice—’

‘And the third an elephant. I should feel as if I’m getting answers to questions, Swift — why don’t I?’

‘Conceivably they are not quite the answers you were hoping for.’

Memphis encouraged them into the red-lit space beyond the doors and then retreated — his own head lowered, adopting a posture that Kanu could not help but interpret as submissive.

He thought about elephant power structures, the singular importance of the matriarch. No matter how much intelligence had been grafted onto elephant minds, the hard, strong bones of those ancient hierarchies would still push through.

But could this really be the same Dakota, after all these years?

The doors closed behind them. The room was a library, or part of one. Its shelf-lined walls were two storeys tall, with a narrow wooden balcony running around the upper level. The shelves were occupied by hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of heavy physical books. Their spines were mostly black, occasionally a dark academic red or an equally sombre blue or green. Their titles were printed in metal leaf, embossed into the leather of the spines.

The floor level contained an arrangement of study tables set with slightly sloping tops. Many books littered the tables in various states of organisation, some in loose piles, others spread open. Hooded reading lamps were scattered about, some of which cast a muted red light. These and equally muted lights set between the shelves were the only sources of illumination in the room. Kanu had the impression that the books must be too fragile to be exposed to anything brighter.

In the middle of the room, framed by two long rows of reading tables, was an elephant. It was on its knees, angled away from them, its great head lowered, its forehead almost brushing the surface of a reading table. There was a concentration of books before the elephant, stacked into haphazard piles. One was open before it, and in its trunk, pinched delicately at the very end, the elephant held a circular magnifying glass.

The elephant set down the glass. Still with its back to them, it picked up one of the books, rose from its knees — daintily managing not to upset the reading tables — and moved to one of the shelves. Taking its entire weight on its rear legs, the elephant used its trunk to return the book to a vacant spot on a high shelf. Then it plucked another down, just a little to the right of the one it had been reading.

‘Excuse me a moment.’

The elephant set the new book on the reading table, then employed the tip of its trunk to leaf through the densely printed pages. Finally it arrived at a passage near the middle, which it proceeded to study closely with the aid of the magnifying glass.

Kanu and Nissa watched in silence. Kanu had the feeling he had walked in on some surreal fantasy of his childhood.

‘Scholarship is one of the more harmless habits of old age. Sometimes I lose myself among these books for days at a time, following one thread of research to another. My needs are modest, and I am, regrettably, something of a slow reader. And an inexcusably bad host, too: you must forgive me.’ The elephant replaced the glass on the desk and turned around slowly to face them. ‘I am Dakota, as you were doubtless forewarned. You must excuse Memphis his clumsiness with Swahili — it is not his strong point — but in all other respects he is thoroughly dependable. I would miss him like the dung of my mother were he to leave us. Memphis mentioned your names, but I confess I need them repeated. Would you mind?’

‘I’m Kanu Akinya,’ he answered carefully. ‘This is Nissa Mbaye.’

‘Akinya,’ the elephant said, drawing out the syllables. ‘Yes, I thought that was what Memphis said. I would be surprised if that were a coincidence.’

‘I imagine it’s no more of a coincidence than you being called Dakota,’ he said. ‘Are you really the elephant that went with the Watchkeepers?’

‘I shall admit you into a confidence. “Elephant” is a term best reserved for conversations between people. If you must insist on a name bestowed on us by people, then we are the Tantors. Perhaps you know of us. But even Tantor has connotations of a doubtful past we would much sooner put behind us.’

She was smaller than Memphis, but still large enough to be intimidating. Dakota was also tusked, but the tusks were narrower and perhaps two-thirds as long as his. Like the other elephants, she wore a kind of speaking device across her forehead, but hers was smaller than the others. Under the device, her forehead was a huge bony swelling, almost like a malignancy. Her skin was a highly wrinkled pearly grey, like a landscape subjected to aeons of interesting geology. Beyond infancy, all elephants looked wizened and venerable to some degree. Kanu nonetheless had no doubt that he was in the presence of a truly ancient individual.

But could it be the same Dakota? It seemed impossible to him. The Dakota who had been part of the Trinity was an old elephant before Zanzibar reached Crucible — an event that was already hundreds of years in the past. In the absence of artificial prolongation measures, no elephant lived as long as a human.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kanu said. ‘I’ll try to watch what I say. But I’m finding it hard to accept that you could really be the same Dakota.’

‘Why would I not be?’

‘It’s been far too long, that’s why. Unless you’ve found a way to put elephants — sorry, Tantors — into skipover—’

‘You are not, if I might be so bold as to say so, the youngest of human beings. Presumably you are also quite old? Two centuries, perhaps more?’

‘Memphis appeared to have trouble telling us apart, and yet you can guess my age?’

‘I am not Memphis. I see a human man, a human woman, distinct in their individuality. Memphis sees only the common herd of humanity. You cannot blame him for that. He has not had a great deal of experience with people.’

‘And you have?’

‘More than my friend. But indulge me — how old are you, in point of fact?’

‘It’s complicated,’ Kanu said. ‘I was old when the Mechanism fell. Along the way I’ve had genetic modification from the merfolk, additional prolongation therapy, a long bout of skipover while we travelled to your system… and quite apart from all that, I died and was reborn on Mars, put back together like a jigsaw. I doubt very much whether any of these things apply to you.’

‘There are other kinds of prolongation therapy, Kanu — other ways of cheating time. It’s true that I have seen a great many changes since the Watchkeeper took us from Crucible. I was old then, as you rightly surmise, but from my present vantage I see my life before that time as a kind of infancy, no more than a preparation for what was to come. My full flowering, you might say. The Watchkeepers changed us all, a few decades after our arrival in this system. There were more of them then, you see — a whole host. The changes they wrought on us were almost trivial, from their perspective. They saw what was broken, deficient or incomplete, and they set it right.’

‘So they made you more than you were?’ Nissa asked.

‘One way of putting it. I have aged, and I continue to age — my eyes are not what they once were! But I grow old slowly, and if there has been a decline in my higher faculties, my ability to speak and read and reason, I remain blissfully ignorant of it.’

Kanu was still struck by her swollen forehead. He thought of what that expanded braincase must mean in terms of her mental capacity — a great pressured swelling of pure intellect. He hardly dared compare his own brain volume to hers.

‘Can the others read?’ he asked.

‘My offspring are blessed with some of my gifts, although seldom are all the attributes present in the same individual. Slowly, though, with each new generation I am becoming less exceptional. The calves are a miracle now — they have a thirst for learning and experience that you would scarcely credit. They gobble language as readily as they gobble dung! Sometimes they frighten me a little. I wonder how brightly their children will shine — and their grandchildren!’

‘You’re enough of a miracle for me,’ Kanu said.

‘You are very kind — and generous. Humans have carried the flame of intelligence for a million years. For you the gift was a consequence of natural factors — the stirring of genes, the adaptive pressures of a changing environment. You have earned it through generations of almost unbearable hardship — times when the human lineage was pinched to the brink of extinction. In our lineage, intelligence has been installed by artificial means, much as you might set a light in a darkened room. While there is a will, the light provides illumination. But it can just as easily be turned off, or allowed to falter. Your kind possess the inbuilt resilience of a hundred thousand generations. There is hope for us, in the new offspring. But we will not have the luxury of genetic resilience for a great many centuries, if we are fortunate to have it at all. As you see, not all the lights in this room work as they once did.’

‘But you’ve survived whatever happened to Zanzibar,’ Nissa said, ‘and now we’re here, if there’s anything we can do to help. There’ll be more like us, too. From now on you don’t have to be alone.’

‘I will admit that I am not ungrateful for your arrival. I hope we can be of benefit to each other. But first — your ship. Tell me what happened, to bring you to Zanzibar?’

‘We responded to a signal,’ Kanu said. ‘It appeared to concern us, but when we got here, no one replied. I’m afraid we found ourselves in some trouble — our ship was badly damaged, unable to steer itself. We set it on a transfer orbit and eventually ended up here.’

‘Because you knew of us?’

‘Not at all! But we’d seen your rock — Zanzibar — and we thought we might be able to use it as a staging point for our repairs.’

‘The ship fixed some of the damage while we travelled,’ Nissa said, ‘but not all of it. We’ll still need outside resources if we’re to make it back home.’

‘That is very unfortunate. If only you had come to us directly, all this could have been avoided. I must apologise for not responding to your arrival, but I am afraid our capabilities are still very limited. We can sense objects in the vicinity of Zanzibar, but not much further out than that. And I confess we were not expecting visitors.’

‘Then you didn’t transmit the signal?’ Nissa asked.

‘No — we had nothing to do with it. Let us put all that behind us, though. Were people hurt aboard your ship? Are there sick and injured to be helped?’

‘No, it’s just us,’ Kanu said.

‘That is a mercy. Should you have need of anything, though, you must not hesitate to ask. This ship was made for people, as you know, and many of its facilities are still largely as they once were. I cannot promise you that everything still works, but I do not think you will find it too great a hardship to spend some time with us. As for your ship — the damaged one — you may rest assured that we will do our utmost to help you mend it. In a little while we shall commence the arrangements to bring it closer to Zanzibar, and then we can discuss the practicalities of the repair process.’

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Kanu said.

‘Who are the Friends?’ Nissa asked.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You mentioned them to Memphis, when we arrived. He said we hadn’t seen them yet.’

‘You must forgive me — I’d quite forgotten. Perhaps old age is taking its toll after all. I find myself quite easily able to forget the thread of a conversation after only a few minutes, yet I can remember things that happened a century ago as if they were playing out before my eyes.’

‘Are the Friends the Watchkeepers?’ Kanu asked.

‘No — nothing so strange as that. In fact, the Friends are like yourselves — people, human beings. They were with us when we first arrived in this system. Would you like to see them?’

‘We didn’t think there were any people here,’ Nissa said.

‘You will not have seen them, but there is an excellent reason for that. In fact, the Friends are very near. I shall have Memphis show them to you — unless you would rather begin the repair work immediately?’

‘That might not be a bad thing,’ Nissa said.

‘It will not take long to see the Friends. And then you will have a better grasp of our situation.’ Dakota stomped a foot on the floor, three times. After a moment, the library doors reopened.

‘Take our guests to see the Friends, Memphis. I should like them to watch the recording, too — I think it may be of great interest to them.’

The larger elephant led them from the library back into the main part of the civic building. In the very middle of the grand space was the gently sloping ramp Kanu had noticed before, angling down into the building’s lower levels. It looked old enough to be part of the original architecture, but it was easily large enough for Memphis. Perhaps vehicles had used it to come and go from the basement levels. Kanu wished he knew more of Zanzibar’s history during its flight and the years spent orbiting Crucible. Mposi would know, he thought, and wondered what his distant half-brother would make of this place now.

The ramp reached a landing, reversed direction and descended again. Then it levelled out and reached a T-junction. It was almost totally dark now. Ahead was not a wall but rather a dimly sensed emptiness. Kanu moved to the railed barrier facing them. They had reached the upper part of a vault, presumably extending deeper into the lower levels.

‘See the Friends,’ Memphis said, standing at their backs, the slow in-and-out of his breathing like the movement of air through a house-sized bellows.

‘We can’t see anything,’ Nissa said. ‘Your eyesight must be better than ours. If we put our helmets back on—’

‘Wait.’

Memphis stepped forward, extending his trunk to touch a panel set into the nearside wall. Lights came on, banks of them in sequence, illuminating deeper parts of the vault. Kanu saw now that the pathway continued to either side of the T-junction, enclosing the length of the vault before joining up again at the far end. More ramps led down to the lower levels.

It was a skipover vault.

‘Amazing,’ Kanu said, taking in layer after layer of sleeper caskets, more than he could begin to count. ‘I’ve never seen anything on this scale. Must be hundreds, thousands of sleepers here.’

‘No one would have done anything like this since the holoships,’ Nissa said. ‘But why are they here?’

‘There must have been lots of people still in skipover when the holoships reached Crucible,’ Kanu guessed, ‘many vaults just like this, crammed full of the frozen. Remember how the cities weren’t ready for the colonists? They couldn’t move everyone down in one go. They’d have held them in skipover until the surface settlements were finished — and that was going to take decades. Even when they started waking everyone up, they’d have kept the vaults as an emergency resource.’

‘At least we know where the people are now. Why aren’t they awake, though? And what happened during the accident — were they already in skipover, or did that happen afterwards?’

Kanu turned to their elephant host. ‘Are there more than these, Memphis?’

‘These are all the Friends. There are no other Friends.’

‘They’re all asleep now,’ Nissa said. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was there ever a time when they were awake?’

‘Yes.’

She looked at Kanu before answering. ‘Then what happened?’

‘A time of troubles. I will show you the recording. Then you will understand.’

They returned to the lobby entrance where Memphis had first struck the floor with the metal staff. Kanu noticed again the upright rectangle of glass set into a stone plinth. He had taken it to be a piece of interior decoration, but now he realised there was rather more to it.

Memphis waved his trunk in front of the glass. At first nothing happened, but after a few passes the glass brightened. A standing human form appeared in the upright material, a woman with whom Kanu felt an instant and visceral bond of recognition. He knew the shape of that face, the cheekbones, the brow, the curve of the lips.

She was his mother.

She nodded once, bowed and began to speak. ‘I am Chiku Akinya. Chiku Green, for anyone who might take interest in such things. And I am here to tell you what happened to us.’