Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘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.