Poseidon's Wake Read Free Page A

‘Can we detour to swing by Alpha herd? I’d like to take a look at Agrippa.’
    ‘Agrippa can wait – you need your medicine.’
    But it was pointless arguing, especially as Ru was driving. She steered the buggy onto a narrower track, the rear vehicle following, and soon they were cresting a low hill to overlook the favoured gathering spot of Alpha herd. It was near the greened-over corpse of a Provider robot, frozen where it had been when the information wave hit Crucible.
    They stopped. Goma hopped out first, then went around to help Ru step down.
    ‘There she is. Binoculars in the back, if you need them.’
    ‘No, I’ll manage.’ Goma levelled a hand over her eyes, screening out the platinum glare of the clouds. It only took her a few moments to pick out Agrippa, the matriarch of the Alpha herd, but her usual pleasure at recognition with offset with disquiet.
    Something was not right with Agrippa.
    ‘She’s very slow.’
    ‘I noticed that a couple of days ago,’ Ru said. ‘Some lameness for a while, but this is different. I know she’s old, but she’s always had that underlying strength to get her through.’
    ‘We should take some blood.’
    ‘I agree. Bring her in, if necessary. Maybe it’s just an infection, or a bad reaction to something she ate.’
    ‘Possibly.’
    But neither cared to admit the obvious truth: that Agrippa was showing the signs of extreme age rather than of any underlying malady that could be treated with drugs or transfusions. She was simply an old elephant – the oldest of the herd members.
    But also the smartest, according to the cognition measures. The only one who could still pass most of the tests, proving that she had an inner monologue, a sense of her own identity, an understanding of cause and effect, of time’s arrow, of the distinction between life and death. Agrippa could not generate speech sounds, but she could understand spoken statements and formulate symbolic responses. She was the last of the Tantors – the last elephant to carry the fire of true intelligence.
    But Agrippa had grown old, and although her immediate offspring were cleverer than the common herd, they were not as bright as their mother. Her children had produced grandchildren, diluting her genes even further, and these elephants were barely distinguishable from the others. So weak was the signal, it took careful statistical analysis to prove they had any cognitive enhancements.
    ‘We can’t lose her,’ Ru said eventually.
    ‘We will.’
    ‘Then it ends. We’ll have failed.’
    ‘There’s more work to be done. Always will be. We’ll still have all these elephants to look after.’
    ‘They don’t even care. That’s the part that really gets me. We do. It tears us apart to see them losing what they had, year by year. But to them it’s nothing. They don’t miss being Tantors – give them wide-open spaces, food to eat, some mud to roll in – why should they?’
    ‘Being Tantors was not a normal part of elephant development,’ Goma said. ‘We can’t blame them for not caring. Do dogs care that they’re not as clever as bonobos? Do ants care that they’re not as smart as dogs?’
    ‘ I care.’
    Goma squeezed her shoulder, then hugged her silently for a few moments. She shared Ru’s creeping despair – the sense of something bright and precious and mercurial slipping through their fingers. The more they tried to measure it, to preserve it, the more quickly it was fading. But she needed Ru to be strong, and in turn Goma needed to be strong for Ru. They were like two trees leaning against each other.
    ‘Let’s go home,’ Goma said. ‘I have to call my mother – I told her I’d visit tomorrow but Agrippa’s bloodwork is more important.’
    ‘I can take care of that,’ Ru said. ‘You know how much Ndege needs her routines.’
    ‘Can you blame her?’
    ‘Not me. I’m the last one who’d blame her for anything.’
    *
    A few days later, when early evening business brought