Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘You recognise it.’

‘Yes, but that’s not the same as understanding it, the way you can.’

‘You needn’t blame yourself. They’ve made it difficult. Books locked away in libraries, direct access to the Mandala tightly controlled…’ Ndege shook her head in disgust.

‘What are these other symbols?’ Goma asked, indicating the left-hand column, which appeared to be made up of stick figures in various poses, headless skeletal men with squiggles and zigzags for limbs. ‘They’re not part of the Mandala grammar, are they?’

‘No — these are elements in the Chibesa syntax.’

‘Which is…?’

‘The set of formal relationships underpinning both classical and post-Chibesa physics.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Goma was staring at the cross-linking lines, the arrows and forks implying a logical connection between the two sets of symbols, the Chibesa syntax and the Mandala grammar. ‘One of these is the alien writing we found on Crucible. The other is… there can’t be a connection, Mother. It’s a human invention. Chibesa invented the syntax to work out her calculations.’

Ndege shot her a look of stern reproval. ‘I know it was a long time ago, but you could at least do Memphis Chibesa the dignity of remembering that he was a man.’

Goma was not sure she had ever heard Chibesa’s first name. It was rather odd to think of this mythical figure being born, like any other human being.

‘Did you know him?’

‘Goodness, no. Memphis died… Well, it was a ridiculously long time before I was born. Eunice knew him, though. Look, there’s no need to rake over old ground here. Just accept that Chibesa lent a helping hand in formulating his theory — that it had its origin in some scratches Eunice found on a piece of rock on Phobos, one of Mars’s moons.’

‘Scratches?’

‘The keys to the new physics. Cosmic graffiti, if you like — a kind of irresponsible mischief-making left by someone or something who neither knew nor cared what the consequences would be, thousands or millions of years later.’

Goma considered, at least provisionally, that her mother might be delusional. Not a word of this had been mentioned in any previous conversation between them, at any point in Goma’s life. But nothing in Ndege’s manner suggested confusion.

‘How… Phobos?’ Goma shook her head, trying to clear a thickening mental fog. ‘What does Phobos have to do with Mandala? The Mandala is the product of a hypothetical alien civilisation — the M-builders. For all we know, the Watchkeepers are something else entirely. Now you’re asking me to accept that Eunice discovered the remnants of another alien culture, centuries before any of this?’

‘We do like our family secrets.’

‘Or our tall stories.’

‘If it was a tall story, it wouldn’t have told me how to talk to Mandala.’ Ndege tapped the notebooks again. ‘It took me years to make that connection, to see the links between the two linguistic structures. Once I did, though, it was like being given a key. I was able to unlock huge tracts of the Mandala’s inscriptions. I understood that the inscriptions were a kind of control interface, an invitation to start making the Mandala work for us.’

‘And that turned out well, didn’t it?’ Goma said, knowing her mother would not take her sarcasm to heart.

‘Accept that I had my insights,’ Ndege said, with a tolerant smile. ‘I realised that the rock carvings were an ancestral form of the Mandala inscriptions — that whoever or whatever left the scratchings on Phobos was there a long, long time before Mandala came into existence.’ Ndege pushed all the notebooks over to her daughter’s side of the table. ‘You’ll take these with you, too.’

Goma looked at the books. Even with the elephants, they only added up to a negligible fraction of her mass allowance. It would cost her nothing to take them on the ship, nothing except pride.

‘I am a biologist,’ she said slowly, as if her mother might somehow have forgotten this salient detail. ‘I know elephants, nervous systems, cognitive tests. I don’t know a single thing about physics or alien language systems.’

‘We’re cut from the same cloth, Goma. If I could make sense of these connections, then I expect no less from my daughter.’

‘You do have copies, don’t you?’

‘I destroyed them shortly before I was detained. I thought it would be safer that way.’

‘Then I can’t take them!’

‘They’re of no conceivable use to me, not now, so I would rather they were in your care. Even if they do end up halfway across the galaxy.’

Goma sensed an easing in her mother, the relief of a burden discharged. She began to wonder how long it had been playing on Ndege’s mind, this business with the books.

‘I can’t go with you and Mposi — that’s settled — but it would have been nice to get some answers. You’ll just have to be my eyes and ears. Rise to the occasion. Roar like a lion. Be an Akinya, like Senge Dongma herself.’

At the door, with the notebooks and two of the elephants in her possession, Goma said, ‘One day they’ll see they were wrong. You never deserved this.’

‘Few of us get the things we deserve,’ Ndege said, ‘but we make the best of what we’re given.’

Kanu was in no hurry to reach Madras; equally he knew that he would not be able to settle into the rhythms of his new life until he had discharged his obligation to the family of Garudi Dalal.

His port of entry was Sri Lanka, the nearest land mass to the Indian Ocean vacuum tower. From Colombo he took the high-speed train up the western side of Sri Lanka, passing under the Gulf of Mannar and heading up the eastern coast of India. On its way to Madras, the train surfaced into the hard silver glare of an overcast sky, speeding through a string of moderately affluent coastal communities: Cuddalore, Puducherry, Chengalpattu, each a blur of white buildings, pagodas, domes and towers hemmed by a blue-green rush of sea and jungle.

In Madras, the sun was hot and unforgiving and indecently large in the sky.

‘You’ll have read the official reports,’ Kanu said, when they were sitting around a metal table in the back garden of the Dalals’ home, surrounded by trees and birds. ‘I was there, in a sense. I can tell you that Garudi acted courageously and that her death would have been virtually instantaneous. It was an honour to have known her.’

‘These terrorists,’ Dalal’s father said, pouring fresh chai into their cups.

Kanu felt their grief as an invisible, silent presence at the garden table, acknowledged but uninvited. He supposed that the worst sting of it had passed by now, in the six weeks since the incident, but there were still months and years of quiet pain ahead of them.

‘You represented different interests,’ Dalal’s mother said, offering Kanu a dish of dried and sweetened fruit.

‘We did, but we always respected each other. Besides, we were both from Earth. We had far more in common than we had to divide us.’

‘I am sorry to hear that you have lost your ambassadorship,’ said Mr Dalal.

‘It was right to bring in new blood. Marius is a very safe pair of hands.’

‘Garudi wrote to us when she was able,’ said Mrs Dalal. ‘She thought highly of you, Mister Akinya.’

‘Kanu, please.’

‘She would not have thought it fair, that you should be considered… What is the word they use?’ asked Mr Dalal.

‘He doesn’t need to hear that,’ said Mrs Dalal.

Kanu laughed aside the awkwardness. ‘Tainted. It’s all right — I’ve heard it already.’

‘I do not suppose this is a time for idealists,’ said Mrs Dalal.