‘I wish that’s all it had been,’ Kanu said.
‘Is there anything we can do for you in the meantime?’
‘I thought I might drop in on Leviathan, if it isn’t too much trouble.’
‘Trouble? No, not at all.’ But Vouga sounded hesitant.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. I’ll make the arrangements. He’ll be very pleased to see you again.’
The great kraken’s haunt lay in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean, about a thousand kilometres south of the seastead. They went out in a sickle-shaped Pan flier, a machine nearly as old as the airpod that had brought Kanu from Mirba
t
¸
, but larger and faster.
Vouga and a dozen other high-echelon Pans came along for the ride and a grand old time was had by all. They spent so much of their lives in the ocean that it was a novelty to see it from above, from outside, and they rushed from window to window, goggling at some extremely subtle demarcation of colour and current. Once they passed a tight-wound whorl of fish, spiralling about some invisible gravitational focus like stars at the centre of the galaxy. It was hard not to see the shoal as a single living unit, purposeful and organised, cheating the local entropy gradients. Kanu felt a shiver of alien perception, as if he was also momentarily seeing organic life from outside itself, in all its miraculous strangeness.
Life was a very odd thing indeed, he reflected, when you really thought about it.
But then they were on the move again, over reefs and smaller seasteads, over clippers and schooners and schools of dolphin, and then there was a darkness just beneath the surface, an inky nebula against turquoise.
‘Leviathan,’ Vouga said.
They slowed and hovered above the kraken. It was as large as a submarine. In the years since Kanu had last spent time with Leviathan, the kraken had easily doubled in size.
‘Who works with him now?’
‘You were the last, Kanu,’ Vouga said, as if this was something he ought to have remembered. ‘The need for construction krakens has declined significantly compared to the old days. Most of them were put out to pasture, until they died of old age. Some live longer than others. We try to keep Leviathan suitably occupied.’
Kanu had discovered an aptitude with the construction krakens not long after he joined the merfolk. There were some who found the genetically and cybernetically augmented creatures daunting, but Kanu had quickly overcome his misgivings. In fact, the huge and powerful animals were gentle, obliging and fond of human companionship – elephants of the deep, in many regards.
The most adept partners worked with their krakens so closely that an almost empathic bond was established, the kraken responding to the tiniest gestural commands and the partner in turn utterly sympathetic to the kraken’s own postural and visual-display communication channels. Kanu and Leviathan had established one of the most productive and long-lasting bonds between any such pairing.
But the years had rolled by, and the escalator of power had taken him to the top of the Panspermian Initiative and then to Mars, and he had never quite found the time to ask after Leviathan. Not even the minute or two it would have taken to formulate the enquiry and transmit it back to Vouga.
It was much too late to put that right now. But he still had to make the best amends he could.
‘I’d like to swim.’
‘Of course. Do you need a swimming suit, accompaniment?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Then we’ll hover until you need us. Good luck, Kanu.’
He dropped the short distance from the flier’s belly into the water. He hit the surface hard and was under before he had taken the shallowest of breaths. He fought back to the surface, coughing, the salt stinging his eyes.
When the coughing fit passed and he had gathered enough air into his lungs, he chanced another submersion. He fought for the depths. Leviathan was further below the surface then he had appeared from the air. Kanu wondered what had drawn the kraken to this particular spot in the ocean. Given the chance, krakens were free-roaming and fond of the cool and lightless depths.
Kanu’s augmented eyes dragged information from the ebbing light. Leviathan was a pale presence below – much paler than he had looked from the air. The iridophores in his body shifted colour and brightness according to mood and concentration. Kanu watched a wave of amber slide along the main body, from eye to tail – a guarded acknowledgement of his presence. But Leviathan’s eye was looking obliquely past him, as if he did not care to meet Kanu’s gaze directly.
Kanu bottled up his qualms. The kraken was huge and he was small, but Vouga would never have allowed him to swim if there was the least chance of injury.
He noticed now that something was occupying Leviathan. The kraken had not chosen this spot randomly. There was a structure here, pushing up from the depths. Massive and ancient, its outlines were blurred by coral and corrosion. Kanu made out four supporting pillars, thick as skyscrapers, and a complicated metal platform like a tabletop. He could not tell how far down the legs went, but the entire thing was slightly lopsided.
It had become a kind of toy for Leviathan. The kraken used his arms to move things around on the upper deck of the platform like a child playing with building blocks. The kraken had a shipping container pincered between two arms, some maritime logo still faintly readable through layers of rust and living accretion. Another pair of arms moved a jagged and buckled crane through the air, then jammed it down on the platform. He placed the container next to it. Even through metres of water, Kanu felt a seismic thud as the objects hit the hard surface.
He swam into clear view of the nearest eye, wider than his body was tall, unblinking as a clock face. Still using the air he had drawn into his lungs, Kanu allowed himself to float passively. He wanted some show of recognition from Leviathan, but the eye appeared to look right through him. The kraken was still moving things around, picking the same things up, putting the same things down.
‘You know me,’ Kanu mouthed, as if that was going to make any difference.
The kraken hesitated in his labours. For a moment he was as still as Kanu, poised in the water, arms moving only with the gentlest persuasion of the ocean currents. Kanu would need to surface again shortly, but he forced himself to remain with Leviathan, certain that a connection – however fragile – had been re-established.
I was away too long
, he wanted to say.
I’m sorry.
He just hoped that the mere fact of his being there was enough to convey the same sentiment.
But Leviathan could not tear himself from the puzzle of the drilling platform. He picked up the container again, moved it like a chess piece to some new configuration. With a shudder of insight, Kanu grasped that the activity was as unending as it was purposeless. It satisfied the kraken’s need to be moving things, to find permutations of space and form.
At last his lungs reached their limit. He surfaced, conscious even as he ascended that he had slipped beyond the horizon of Leviathan’s attention. The kraken might have been dimly cognisant of his presence for a few moments, but no more than that.
He broke into daylight. The flier was over him, ready to take him back to the seastead. Vouga did not ask if he wished to dive again, and he was glad of that.
The following morning, Kanu was on his way north.
Goma had long held a notional understanding of the starship’s size, but it was quite another thing to be coming up in the shuttle, gaining her first true understanding of the scale of her new home. It was four kilometres long, about five hundred metres across, and resembled a thick-barred dumb-bell with equal-sized spheres at either end. The forward sphere was patterned with windows and access hatches – cargo bays, shuttle docks, sensor ports – while the rearward globe was contrastingly featureless. That was the drive sphere, containing the post-Chibesa engine. Its exhaust, hidden around the sphere’s curve, would eventually boost
Travertine
to half the speed of light.
Constructing a starship, or indeed a pair of such craft, was still beyond the economic reach of all but a few governments, in all but a handful of solar systems. Two hundred years after Travertine’s work on
Zanzibar
, the mechanics of a
PCP
engine still presented fiendish challenges. The new generation of engines were faster and more efficient than the old, but they were no less dangerous to work with, no less unforgiving of error.
But Crucible had committed itself to building two of these ships, banking its future on their construction. It had hoped to tap into the still-young extrasolar trade networks and do business with its stellar neighbours. These ships gave it legitimacy, proving that it had the financial and technical maturity to join the league of spacefaring worlds.
All that had made tremendous sense until the Watchkeepers returned.
The shuttle approached
Travertine
’s forward sphere where they docked and transferred inside. There was artificial gravity, provided by the rotation of the ring-shaped interior sections. Ru wanted to see the cabin, but before any of them were allowed to their rooms – or given access to the personal effects shuttled aboard days ago – there was the necessary formality of a meeting with the captain and her technical staff.
All of the crew and passengers – fifty-four souls – convened in the largest lounge, its windows shuttered against the glare of day.
‘Welcome aboard,’ said Gandhari Vasin, spreading her arms wide as if to embrace all of them, technical crew and passengers both. ‘This is a great day for all of us – a monumental day – and a privilege for those of us fortunate enough to be riding the ship. I would like to wish us all a safe voyage and a productive, bountiful expedition. I also extend our collective gratitude to the people of Crucible, for their kindness and generosity in making this expedition possible. It is nothing that we take lightly, any of us. Let us hope for good fortune, for ourselves and for our sister ship, and those who will travel aboard her.’
Goma had already met Gandhari Vasin. She was a good choice, extremely satisfactory to all parties. It helped, perhaps, that she had not been born on Crucible. Vasin had arrived on the planet via the same quarterlight vehicle that had brought Arethusa. A senior propulsion specialist, she had decided that she wished to remain behind on Crucible when the QV departed. She was regarded as non-partisan, and Goma believed that Mposi had favoured her candidature for exactly that reason, aside from her obvious competence.
She was also a cheerful-looking woman with a broad smile and a habit of wearing colourful wraps and headscarves, disdaining titles and the regalia of hierarchy at all times. ‘I am your captain,’ she said, as if it were a kind of confession. ‘This is the role they have given me, and I will do my utmost to be worthy of it. But I am also Gandhari, and I would much rather you call me that than Captain Vasin. We are all going to be aboard this ship for a very long time. Formalities will begin to fade sooner or later, so we might as well dispense with them immediately.’
All well and good, Goma thought, but Gandhari was also in charge of a starship, a massive and lethal piece of technology, and before long they would be on their own, independent of external support. She could be their friend up to a point, but Gandhari would also need nerves of steel and an iron will to go with it.
Gandhari said a few more words, then set about introducing the key members of the expedition, trusting that everyone else would get to know each other over the coming days.
‘I must first mention Goma Akinya, who did not have to join us, but chose to out of selfless consideration for her mother.’ Gandhari pointed both hands at Goma, palms nearly together, the gesture almost worshipful. ‘It is true that we have all made sacrifices, but many of us were long committed to the idea of an interstellar voyage – it is the ambition to which we have bent our professional lives. Not so with Goma. She had no desire to leave Crucible, no desire to abandon her friends and work. Yet here she is. I do not think we can speak highly enough of her loyalty to Crucible.’
Then Gandhari pivoted slightly, shifting the focus of her attention to Ru.
‘While we are speaking of sacrifices, let us also remember our friend Ru Munyaneza, Goma’s wife, who has left behind her beloved elephants to come with us. Ru’s loss is our gain, however.’
Gandhari turned to introduce Dr Saturnin Nhamedjo. It was a formality: the physician was already known to most of the party since he had been involved in assessing their suitability for skipover.
‘Saturnin brings with him a small but highly capable medical team, all multispecialists and all – like the rest of us – volunteers. They are to be our doctors, our first line of defence against illness and injury, but above all else they are to be our friends, full members of the expedition.’
Next, Gandhari introduced Nasim Caspari, head of the eighteen-strong technical section and, like Gandhari herself, an expert in post-Chibesa theory. Caspari was a slight, unassuming man who clearly did not relish being in the limelight, visibly relieved when Gandhari moved on to her next introduction, who was sitting close to Caspari. Aiyana Loring was a multispecialist, heading the astrophysics and exoplanet group, which also included biologists and ecosystem experts. Loring would have little data to work with until they reached their destination, but Goma doubted that ve would have difficulty keeping verself occupied, especially given ver willingness to cross between disciplines.
‘Ve’s good,’ Ru whispered, as if there had been any doubt. ‘Came up with some of the algorithms we use for our own studies. Turns out that what works for galaxy clusters also works for elephant neurones.’
‘Thank you, Captain Vasin,’ said the willowy, graceful Loring, who moved like a cat and was by all accounts a fine dancer. ‘I mean Gandhari. My apologies. And please, everyone – I am Aiyana. My door is always open. I hope to get to know you all very well.’
Technically, Goma and Ru were both subsumed into Loring’s team of specialists – they were now the resident experts on large fauna and interspecies communication. But in practice (as Mposi had assured Goma) neither would be required to answer to anyone but Gandhari. That said, Goma took an immediate liking to the elegant Loring and looked forward to contributing to the team.
Next was Maslin Karayan, head of the twelve-member Second Chance delegation. Maslin Karayan was a bullish, barrel-chested man, bearded and patriarchal, perhaps the oldest person on the ship after Mposi. He had been close to
Zanzibar
when it was destroyed, narrowly avoiding death, and by all accounts took the whole incident personally.
‘I don’t know why she’s bothering introducing them,’ Goma said to Ru. ‘It’s not like we’ll ever need to talk to each other.’
Ru smiled. ‘Everyone’s useful – even believers.’
‘Thank you, Gandhari, for your kind sentiments,’ Karayan said, sweeping the room with wide, challenging eyes set under a prominent brow. So much of his face was covered by his beard that it was hard to read his expression, which was perhaps the intention. ‘I speak for my family and friends when I say that we are very glad indeed to have assumed our place in the expedition. The hand of history lies heavy upon us, and its retribution will be merciless should we fail in any respect. We must have courage, yes –’ he was still looking around the room, his gaze settling for a moment on Goma, or so it felt to her ‘– but courage is not in itself sufficient. We must also exercise prudence and caution – those higher faculties of judgement – to the very limit of our abilities.’
Officially they were a coalition of conservative political interests with a common desire not to repeat the errors of the past, from the Mechanism to the Mandala event. They had been instrumental in keeping Ndege under lock and key when more enlightened voices called for a relaxation in the terms of her incarceration. Unofficially, they tolerated – even encouraged – a strain of superstitious thinking which Goma considered profoundly objectionable. She had nothing against untestable belief systems per se. She just did not care to share a ship with people who subscribed to them.
‘God-botherers,’ she whispered.
If Karayan heard her, no sign of it perturbed his leonine mask of a face. ‘Great challenges lie ahead of us. Scientific puzzles. Mysteries and wonders, no doubt. Temptations.’
Goma rolled her eyes.
‘But with the right frame of mind, the right spirit, we may overcome our worst appetites for mere knowledge. The moderating influence of my friends may never be called upon, yet—’
‘You’ve won your victory by being on the ship,’ Goma said, finally unable to contain herself. ‘Now will you let someone else have their say?’
‘I think we can all agree,’ Mposi said, rising from his seat, ‘that these last few days have been extraordinarily taxing. Against our better nature, we may say things that we regret an instant later. Isn’t that right, Goma?’ He was looking at her with fierce intensity, as if branding his thoughts directly into her brain. ‘
Isn’t that right
, Goma?’
‘Yes,’ she said, at a prod from Ru. ‘Yes.’
‘I accept your apology,’ Maslin Karayan said, making a tiny bow in her direction.
‘I would add,’ Mposi went on, ‘that I entirely echo Maslin’s sentiments. We must all do our best to act with intelligence and caution. We will be tested, I know, but I do not doubt that we have it in us to succeed.’
‘Mposi speaks wisely,’ Gandhari said, her voice slow and oratorical. ‘There will be challenges, certainly. But if we can avoid tearing each other limb from limb, at least for a few weeks, I think that would make for an excellent start.’ Then, with a deliberate shift in tone, she added, ‘We will remain in orbit, completing final system tests, for another five or six days. You have until then to decide your place in this expedition. From the moment I light the Chibesa drive, no force in the universe will make me turn this ship around.’
In that promise, Goma saw, was a glint of the steel she had guessed must be there. Gandhari be damned – this was Captain Vasin in all her pomp and authority, and she was all the more magnificent for it.
‘I do not think,’ Mposi said, ‘that any of us will take you up on that chance to leave, Gandhari, but it is good to know it is there.’
Their captain made a few more introductions before wishing the best for everyone, thanking the people of Crucible again and finally dismissing the assembly. ‘Go! You have a ship to explore. But don’t explore too much of it in one day – we all need to leave a few surprises for later!’
Like all the married couples on the expedition, Goma and Ru had been given a cabin to themselves. It was a decent size, with an en suite bathroom and toilet, even a small kitchen area where they could prepare food when they did not feel like eating in the communal spaces. The walls were capable of displaying any colour or pattern, and pictures and murals summoned from the central library. Goma had already taken out the two wooden elephants Ndege had given her and set them within a low alcove.
The room was large enough, but there was also a ship to explore. There were many levels, many sections, and not all of them would be routinely accessible. Instead of keys, Goma and Ru had bangles around their wrists which opened the doors they were allowed to use. Every crew-member’s bangle was set to allow different levels of access. Only Nasim Caspari’s technical crew were permitted anywhere near the rear sphere, and there were few good reasons for an ordinary passenger to enter the connecting spine. But this still left hundreds of rooms and bays to explore, some of them as large as any enclosed space Goma had known on Crucible.
The Knowledge Room quickly became one of her favourite haunts. She quickly began to feel a claim on its territory, especially as it was not often visited by Ru or the other crew-members. Perhaps that would change when they were under way, but for now it was hers. The room itself was a circular chamber, the centre of which was occupied by a well-shaped projection device. The device was about four metres across, walled around by an opaque material and virtually filled to the brim with a level transparent substance.
Beneath the surface of the well – embedded in the transparent matrix – floated a representation of their current total knowledge of the Gliese 163 system. In its neutral state, the display had the form of an orrery, with the star at the middle and its family of worlds ticking around on their orbital paths. Much was known about the star, but then stars were simple things, their physical natures dependent on only a handful of parameters – mass, metallicity, age. The essential nature of Gliese 163 had been common knowledge for over half a millennium.
Worlds were a different matter, however, their histories contingent on a billion random factors. They did not fit into neat categories; they did not readily disclose their secrets, especially across many light-years. All of the larger worlds in the Gliese 163 system had been studied from Earth’s solar system using the swarm of telescopes called Ocular. Ocular data had proven the existence of Mandala and sent the first wave of holoships on their way.
But that data had been deliberately tainted, and when people eventually learned the truth, they tore Ocular apart in their fury and fear. Nothing like it had been constructed since, in any solar system. That said, the data was still archived and available for analysis. Goma was given to understand that it had been cleansed of any bias, intentional or otherwise.