Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘That answers one question, anyway. I tracked the point of origin of this other ship for a while before I lost a fix on it.’ Eunice was striding on, fit as a fiddle, apparently oblivious to the cold. ‘It was hard to be sure, but it didn’t look as if it came from your quadrant of the sky. Earth, maybe, although there were some other possibilities.’

‘Did you try talking to them?’ Goma asked.

‘Not until it was too late. They made me nervous, popping up in the wrong corner of the sky like that. Call it a fault of old age but I’m not fond of surprises. Anyway, I did eventually try to signal them, but by then they’d run into some trouble around Poseidon and either I wasn’t sending reliably or they weren’t listening.’

‘When was this?’ Goma asked.

‘A little over a year ago. Frankly, I was starting to think Poseidon had done us all a favour by taking that ship out of the argument.’

‘And then?’ Ru asked.

‘Six weeks ago I intercepted another burst of transmissions — short duration, low signal strength. These came from the other side of the system, close to Paladin. Did you pick up something similar?’

‘We’d still have been on deceleration thrust then,’ Vasin said, ‘which limited our sensitivity. Unless the signal was strong or kept repeating, we were more likely to miss it than hear it.’

‘You think it was the same ship?’ Goma asked.

‘Almost certainly. It must have gone dark — spent the intervening year making a very slow transfer from Poseidon. No way for me to track that. Probably damaged, too, if that second burst was an indicator of their transmitting capacity. I tried signalling again, but either they couldn’t hear me or they chose not to respond. You had a good look at Paladin on your approach — did you see any evidence of a ship?’

‘No,’ Vasin said. ‘And I don’t see how we could have missed something that big.’

‘You would if they’d hidden it inside Zanzibar while they make repairs.’

‘Mystery ship or not,’ said Karayan, ‘that rock cannot be Zanzibar . The remains of that holoship are still orbiting Crucible. End of discussion.’

‘Whatever remains you’ve seen,’ Eunice answered, ‘they’re not the whole thing. A good bit of it ended up here. It wasn’t teleported or sent down a wormhole. It came the same way you did — moving through space, through all the points between here and Crucible. It just did so very, very quickly.’

‘Faster than the speed of light?’ Goma asked.

‘No — that really is impossible. But close to the speed of light. Very close. The survivors didn’t report any subjective time interval between being in one system and the next, which means their clocks barely had time to tick.’

‘You just said survivors,’ Goma stated, hardly daring to imagine what that news would have meant to her mother, to the people who had damned her, to the loyal but ridiculed Travertine. It would not have absolved Ndege of a crime, but it would have made the magnitude of it far less — and she would have been hailed in the same breath as the discoverer of something wonderful.

Too late now.

‘Hundreds of thousands of them,’ Eunice said. ‘Adults, children — Tantors, as I’ve already mentioned. Snatched from Crucible to Paladin, bounced between two Mandalas.’

‘Then it’s no wonder that ship made contact,’ Ru said. ‘If you weren’t answering them, they must have homed in on the first signs of human habitation elsewhere in the galaxy.’

‘And that’s where we run into a little local complication. No easy way of breaking this news, but I’m afraid there aren’t any people left in Zanzibar . There were… difficulties… differences of opinion. Rather violent differences.’

‘What happened to my grandmother?’ Goma asked.

‘Something bad,’ Eunice said. ‘But understand this: you can’t blame the Tantors for any of it. It was Dakota who led them astray. But even she can’t be held to account for what became of her, what the Watchkeepers turned her into. It was never her fault that she became a monster.’

‘And these Tantors — did they play any part in what happened?’ Ru asked.

‘Blameless. As innocent as babes. But please don’t underestimate them on that basis.’

They had reached a flatter part of the corridor where an enormous door led into the sidewall. Eunice touched a control and the door heaved open. Light drenched the corridor, accompanied by a steamy warmth. She stepped into whatever room lay beyond, indicating that the party should wait before following her.

Goma felt her emotions wrenched askew — dismay and horror at what might have happened on Zanzibar , to the people in general and her own grandmother in particular; and a delicious, giddy anticipation of what she was about to experience. She felt like a traitor to herself, not fully surrendering to the sadness and anger that were the right and proper response. But what could she do? There was joy in her heart that Ndege might now, at least in death, receive a measure of forgiveness. She would have given anything to communicate this one vital fact to Crucible, back in time, so that it might ease Ndege’s burden. She could not bend time to her will; she could not bring that greater happiness to Ndege. But she had this moment, and for now she was thankful.

And she was about to meet Tantors.

She heard Eunice speaking. She heard answering voices. She felt as if all the arrows of her life pointed to this moment.

Eunice came back into the corridor. ‘All right, they’re ready for you. These Tantors are my friends and they mean well, but aside from me, they’ve never seen another human being. So please — no sudden movements, no shouting, nothing that could be construed as a threatening gesture.’

‘We won’t scare them,’ Goma said.

‘It’s not them I worry about, dear.’

‘The two of you should go first,’ Vasin said, beckoning Goma and Ru to step through the doorway. ‘You’ve earned this. May it be everything you’ve hoped for.’

‘Thank you,’ Goma said with genuine gratitude.

They entered with Eunice next to them, and for a moment all they could do was squint against the brightness of this underground room. It was warm — much warmer and more humid than the corridor — and Goma felt the blood returning to her fingertips.

Under their feet was dirt. The chamber had a huge vaulted roof, with a dome-shaped skylight set into it. The floor was stepped, with different levels.

‘It was a natural bubble,’ Eunice was saying. ‘Ours for the taking. We roofed it over, sealed it against pressure loss, pumped it full of atmosphere. We’ve dug out some adjoining chambers, but this is still the biggest.’

She might as well have been talking gibberish for all Goma cared. It was the Tantors that had her absolute and binding attention. In that instant, nothing else in the universe mattered.

‘They’re glorious,’ she said.

Ru was holding her hand. Goma squeezed back. The moment was theirs and theirs alone, as precious as any they had shared. ‘Yes.’

The cold of the corridor had already brought water to her eyes; now the water became tears of joy. It was only three of them, yes — nothing compared to the multitude she had dared hope for. But still: to be here now, to be standing in this room and beholding three living Tantors — there would always be her life before this moment, and her life after it, the one a dim reflection of the other, and nothing would ever be the same.

The universe had given them a gift. She was light-headed with the thrill of it all, delirious with gratitude and wonder and a sense that beautiful possibilities still lay ahead of them all.