Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘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.’