Alastair Reynolds: Poseidon's Wake

‘Are you serious?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Then you understand less about politics than I thought. I’m a pariah, Mposi — hated by millions. They’ll have my head on a stick before they let me leave Guochang, let alone the system.’

‘For now, it’s all hypothetical. The expedition won’t be ready for four or five years even if we accelerate the preparations. But if you agree to join, and I work to make it look as if you’re offering yourself up for… I don’t know, the selfless betterment of Crucible, there could be an immediate improvement in the terms of your detention.’

‘Working on people’s opinions — you’re good at that.’

‘I have my uses. My point, though, is that even by agreeing in spirit, you would not be automatically obliged to go on the expedition itself. Any number of things might happen between now and then. We may run into problems with the ship, or lose the argument to reassign it. We may discover that the signal is a fluke. You may fail the medical criteria for skipover. You may even—’

‘Die.’

‘I was not going to put it in such blunt terms.’

‘I’ve had my share of adventures, brother. So have you. This is where mine brought me — locked up and hated.’

‘You made a single miscalculation.’

‘Which killed four hundred and seventeen thousand people. You reckon one act will atone for that?’

‘No, but I do believe you have already paid back more than your share. Think it over, Ndege. There’s no immediate rush.’

‘And am I allowed to discuss this with Goma?’

‘For now, I’d rather you didn’t. If and when the expedition becomes likely, certain aspects of it may be made public. But until then, let this remain between you and me. Brother and sister, sharing a great responsibility — the way it has always been.’

Her look was sympathetic but also slightly pitying. ‘You miss the old days.’

‘I try not to. It’s an old man’s habit, and I don’t very much enjoy being an old man.’

‘Would you go, if the opportunity came?’

‘They’d never allow it on medical grounds. I’m about ready to be pickled and stuffed into a jar.’

‘And I’m not?’

‘You forget, Ndege: they asked for you by name. That rather changes things.’

She gave a lopsided squint, her expression of puzzlement. ‘What do I have that you don’t? We grew up together. We’ve experienced the same things.’

Mposi scraped back his chair and stood with a click of knees and a little involuntary groan of effort. ‘The only way to find out, I suppose, would be to respond to the signal.’ He nodded at the package he had arrived with. ‘Eat that greenbread, while it’s still fresh.’

‘Thank you, brother.’

She rose from her chair and walked him to the door; they embraced and kissed each other lightly on the cheek, and then she was back inside and he was alone, outside the house.

He looked beyond the perimeter wall of her compound, out towards the greening domes and ellipsoids of this early district of Guochang, with the later structures rising rectangular and pale beyond. The sky had darkened with the onset of evening and now the rings were starting to become visible. Present during the day, too, but almost never seen except at night, they rose from one horizon, vaulted over the zenith and descended to the opposite horizon — a twinkling procession of countless tiny bright fragments, each following an independent orbit, but nonetheless organised into a complex banded flow. A spectacle that could be beautiful, even enchanting, if one were not aware of its true meaning.

The rings had not been present when people first reached Crucible. They were a scar — the lingering evidence of a single calamitous mistake. The error had been made with the noblest of intentions, but that did not render it any more forgivable. In those hot and heady days, when the laws of this new world were still being formulated, many were prepared to see Ndege executed.

Mposi had done well to keep his sister from the gallows. But he could do nothing about the sky.

The airstrip was within the compound but screened off from the elephants. After she landed and secured the old white aeroplane, Goma grabbed her things, climbed down and made her way to a heavy gate set into the four-metre-tall electrified fence. She opened the lock and pushed through into the separate enclosed area which held their study buildings and vehicles. Over the years the camp had expanded, but the core remained a group of closely set domes, linked together like a cloverleaf. She walked the short distance to the first of the domes, then ascended the metal stairs leading to the entrance. Her lace-up boots rattled on the openwork treads.

Inside, where the heat and humidity were kept at bay, Tomas lay on his preferred bunk bed. He was eating greenbread out of a paper bag and leafing through expensively printed research notes. He peered at her over the top of the pages, smiled cautiously.

‘Home is the hunter. How’d it go?’

‘As well as expected.’ Goma took off her sunglasses, stuffed them into a hip pocket. ‘They said my request was very well presented, case well made, expect our decision in the fullness of time.’

Tomas nodded sagely. ‘In other words, the same old brush-off.’

‘All we can do is keep trying. How are the numbers on Alpha herd?’

He pinched at the bridge of his nose and squinted at a column of figures, scribbled over in ink. ‘Down two on last season. Measurable impairment across a battery of variables, all significant at three sigma. I’ll run the results again, just to be sure, but I think we know how the curves are trending.’

‘Yes.’ She was about to tell him not to bother rerunning the analysis — the outcome would be the same, she was sure — but a tiny part of her hoped there might be a glimmer of good news buried somewhere in the numbers. ‘I came to speak to Ru.’

‘She’s with the elephants. Beta herd, I think — study area two. You look exhausted — want me to drive you out there?’

‘No, I’ll be fine — it’s Ru I worry about. Look, run those numbers again, will you? Isolate the Agrippa subgroup, too — if there’s a signal to be found, I don’t want it smothered by the noise.’

‘Will do. Oh, and well done — however well it went.’

‘Thanks,’ Goma said doubtfully.

Outside the dome, she took the second electric buggy, dumped her gear in the rear hopper, buckled herself into the driving seat and headed through the automatic gate in the secondary fence, into the main part of the sanctuary. She picked up speed, bouncing in her seat as the buggy followed a rough, undulating path. The sanctuary’s terrain ranged from level ground to gentle uplands, with areas of grassland and heavier tree cover. On Earth, an elephant population of the same size would have stripped the vegetation back to its roots, but Crucible’s plant life grew with astonishing vigour all year round. Without the elephants to hold it in check, this whole zone would have returned to thick forestation within a few years.

Goma passed the occasional small building or equipment store along the way. Here and there she spotted elephants, sometimes partly screened by intervening trees and bushes. Glossy from a recent rain shower, they sometimes looked like boulders or rocky outcroppings — the exposed geology of an ancient world. Mostly they kept their distance, wary, if not actually afraid. She spied a lone bull or two, isolated from the larger herds. She gave them a wide berth. Drenched in testosterone, bulls could be unpredictable and dangerous. Over generations, and with the dwindling influence of the Tantors, the old herd dynamics were reasserting themselves.

Soon enough she was at the study area, and there was the Beta herd — lured in with enticements of fruit and greenbread, then persuaded to take part in cognitive games. Goma and Ru had designed the research programme, but it was mostly down to Ru to shape the individual challenges. Of necessity, these had grown increasingly simple as the elephants’ average intelligence baseline slowly declined. The complex tests — those that demanded a high degree of abstract reasoning — were now obsolete. Only Agrippa could pass them with any regularity, and Agrippa was too old and canny to be a reliable test subject.