Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Good girl.’

  Goma lifted her helmet off and the air gushed in. It was cold, but nothing about it smelled or tasted suspicious. She gulped a load of it into her lungs and waited for some ill-effect to manifest.

  Nothing. No headache, no light-headedness, no sense that her thoughts were in any way affected.

  ‘The air is breathable,’ Eunice said, looking not at Goma but at the rest of them. ‘The gases’ ratios won’t differ greatly from those on your ship, I expect. There are no biological toxins or radiological hazards. If there were, I’d already know about them.’

  ‘Why would a robot care about biological toxins?’ Dr Nhamedjo asked. ‘For that matter, why does a robot need airlocks or a spacesuit? You’re a construct. You could walk out there naked and not feel a thing.’

  ‘Those are cooking utensils,’ Goma said, nodding at some of the tools she could see racked and shelved around the room. ‘That is a stove. Why would you need cooking utensils? Why would you ever need to cook anything?’

  ‘A woman’s got to eat. Why else?’

  Ru lifted the lid on a plastic container, then sprang away in revulsion. ‘Worms!’

  ‘Mealworms,’ their host corrected. ‘Very tasty. Very good source of protein. Practically all we ate on Mars in the early days. You should try them. Go well with a little curry powder – stops them wriggling off your chopsticks, too. Now – since you’re staying – will you be good guests and remove the rest of your spacesuits?’

  ‘Why?’ Vasin asked.

  ‘Manners, dear Captain.’

  They obliged, stripping down to their inner clothing layers, and set the spacesuit parts in neat piles by the door. Then, in plain view so there could be no possibility of substitution or subterfuge, she also discarded the outer elements of her spacesuit, removing the parts neatly and methodically, as befitted a veteran space explorer who had come to trust her life to the complex, interlocking components of the garment, and who accorded them the respect and care which was their due.

  Beneath the suit she wore a sleeveless ash-grey top and tight black leggings. She resumed her position at the table and offered one arm across it to Dr Nhamedjo, her palm raised.

  ‘Go ahead. Feel my pulse. Poke and prod to your heart’s content.’

  Nhamedjo moved to touch his fingers to her skin, but hesitated at the last instant. He glanced at his colleagues.

  ‘She cannot be living. We know what she was when she left. This is not open to debate.’

  Eunice gave a pout of disapproval. ‘Do I look like a robot to you?’

  ‘The records say you were a very good emulation. You could pass for a living person except under close scrutiny – you looked and sounded and moved like the real Eunice Akinya. But you were still a machine, a robot, under the layers of synthetic anatomy. You got better at acting like a person, but the essence of what you were did not change.’

  ‘Test her pulse,’ Goma said.

  Nhamedjo did as he was bid, holding the contact for long seconds. ‘It feels real.’

  ‘Not just the pulse,’ Eunice said.

  ‘No – everything. The texture of your skin, the anatomy of your wrist joint . . . it’s astonishingly good. May I examine your eyes?’

  ‘Whatever you like. You’ll come to the same conclusion.’

  He indulged himself by staring carefully into either eye, pinching back the surrounding skin with physicianly gentleness. He held a hand before her mouth and reported that he could feel the passage of her breath. ‘I can conduct further tests . . . scans, blood samples. But why doubt the evidence of our eyes and what she’s already telling us?’

  ‘Because history says she can’t be alive,’ Goma said.

  ‘History’s a stopped clock,’ Eunice said. ‘It’s nice to look at, but there’s only so much it can tell you.’

  ‘Then start by telling us how you can possibly be alive,’ Vasin said.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Because the living version of you, the flesh-and-blood Eunice, died in deep space,’ Goma said. ‘You went out in a stupid little ship, barely equipped for interstellar space, and unsurprisingly you didn’t make it. Years later, they came and found you. They pulled your frozen corpse out of that ship and found that there was no hope of ever reviving you. Your brain cells were just so much slush.’

  ‘But there were recoverable patterns,’ Eunice said. ‘Chiku brought them to me on Zanzibar. I uploaded them into myself, used them to make my emulation even better.’

  ‘But you were still a robot,’ Goma said. ‘You were a robot with some neural patterns copied from the dead corpse of the real Eunice – a few human flourishes to embellish your programming. But that didn’t make you flesh and blood.’

  ‘Something did,’ Nhamedjo said quietly. ‘Answer me this, Eunice – knowing that I’ll be able to verify the answers for myself, given time. Is any part of you still cybernetic?’

  She looked at her hand and wiggled the pinky. ‘My little finger. I kept that as a memento of better times.’

  ‘What about your brain? Do you have a brain?’

  ‘If I don’t, there’s an awful lot of blood wasting its time moving around inside my skull.’

  ‘And the structure of that brain . . . the modular organisation? Do you have hemispheres, a frontal cortex, a commissural gap? Is that where your visual processing takes place?’

  ‘I don’t know, Doctor – where does yours happen?’

  ‘We could put her in a suit,’ Vasin said. ‘Run a standard host medical, have the diagnostic piped to one of our faceplates. If she has a cardiovascular system – heart, lungs – the suit will tell us. It should also pick up neural activity if her brain’s anything like ours.’

  ‘I think we already know the answer,’ Nhamedjo said. ‘She must be organic. She would not embark on such a lie knowing how easily we could prove her wrong.’

  ‘Then the Watchkeepers must have done this,’ Goma said.

  This drew a nod from Eunice. ‘At least one of you has a tenuous grasp on the situation. Of course it was Watchkeeper intervention – how else could it have happened?’

  ‘Why?’ Goma said.

  ‘Because it was what I wanted. Because becoming organic – becoming the living incarnation of myself – was the end-point I’d been moving towards for my entire existence. I started off as a bodyless software emulation, a thing stitched together from public and private records of myself. A piece of art. Then I became something more than dear Sunday ever anticipated. A fully autonomous, self-aware artilect – a thing too dangerous to be allowed to exist. So I made myself invisible, dispersed, tenuous – far beyond the reach of the Cognition Police – until the time came when I needed an actual body to bottle myself into. That’s how I got aboard Zanzibar – stuffed into a robot puppet. But then I acquired those neural traces. They had an interesting effect on me – pushed me over the edge of my own computational prediction horizon. I could no longer foresee my own response to any given stimulus. I’d become quixotic, unguessable – prone to whims and sudden, irrational changes of mind. I experienced complex mental states that I could only characterise as emotions. Human, in other words – except for the fact that my body was still artificial.’

  ‘How do you know an emotion is an emotion?’ Nhamedjo said.

  ‘Because I’m not an idiot, Doctor. Because when something hurts inside you when you’ve never had the sense of being hurt inside before – you do the obvious thing and put a name to it. One of my emotions, if we’re going to articulate it, was longing.’

  ‘I find that difficult to believe,’ Nhemedjo answered.

  ‘I find you difficult to believe. The fact is that I sensed an absence in myself – an incompleteness. And I knew that until I filled that absence, I wouldn’t feel happy. There. Another emotion.’

  ‘Go on,’ Goma said, feeling a loyalty to
Eunice.

  ‘I sensed that I had almost attained something, but with that proximity came an almost unbearable desire to complete the circle, to achieve artistic culmination. Have you ever looked at a jigsaw with one piece still to be put in place? I had been sent into existence with one purpose: to stand for Eunice Akinya in the absence of her living self. I had always been an imperfect substitute, a close-enough copy, but nothing that could be mistaken for the real thing. But the Watchkeepers changed all that. It was a trivial thing for them, having taken apart Chiku Green. They knew what makes us tick. They knew how to make me alive – how to pour fire into my soul.’

  It could still be a trick, Goma knew – clever robotics could produce the illusion of a heartbeat, or an inhalation, or the liquid mysteries of the living eye. But every instinct told her that Dr Nhamedjo would find nothing amiss, no matter how thorough his examination. He was correct: she would not make this assertion unless it were provably the case.

  It was peculiar indeed to be sitting across from this person and find it strange and marvellous that they were made of skin and bone rather than metals and plastics. And in its way, more thoroughly unsettling than any robot could ever be. Robots were knowable; their governing algorithms might be complex and opaque but they were still algorithms. Robots could be shut down or destroyed if they became bothersome.

  It was not nearly so simple with people.

  ‘I don’t know what to make of you,’ Goma said.

  ‘That’s the first reasonable thing any of you has said. Of course you don’t. I don’t know what to make of myself, and I’ve had plenty of time to think about it.’

  Goma searched for a flaw in her face, some hint of machine stiffness, a texture or glossiness that was not quite correct. But there was nothing about Eunice that looked anything other than real.

  ‘How long have you been like this?’

  ‘For nearly as long as I’ve been here. That’s the odd thing – I don’t appear to be ageing, certainly not to any degree that I can measure.’ As she said this, she held her hand up for examination, turning it this way and that. ‘I didn’t ask them to make me physically immortal, but they appear to have done so anyway. Perhaps they mistook death for a simple design flaw, a bug in the system, and edited it out of my body. Should I be grateful? I suppose I should be.’

  ‘You don’t sound convinced.’

  ‘They’ve made me perfect, and in doing so they’ve introduced an imperfection – the one part of me that doesn’t match the living Eunice. She expected to die. Death was the mainspring making her tick. Do you think she’d have done a third of the things she did without that knowledge?’

  ‘Could you be killed?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose. Then again, I haven’t put that one to the test.’ She cocked her head with sudden birdlike interest. ‘What are you, exactly? My great- great-granddaughter? Let me think.’

  ‘You can add another “great” – my mother would have been your great-great-granddaughter. But none of that matters. Whatever you are, whatever you’ve become, it doesn’t suddenly make you my distant ancestor.’ But now Goma found herself hungry for more answers. ‘Speaking of Ndege – why did you summon her across space? What’s so important?’

  ‘I need an Akinya and I thought she would suffice.’

  ‘Just an Akinya? No more to it than that?’

  ‘Someone with experience of Tantors.’

  Goma allowed herself a shiver of private excitement. She glanced at Ru, the look drawing the merest acknowledgement of their shared thrill. The thing they had hoped for, the thing they had hardly dared believe, might just be possible.

  ‘Are they here?’

  ‘Some of them. But that’s where the story gets complicated.’

  ‘Like it wasn’t already complicated?’ Ru asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m just getting started.’

  Goma said, ‘When you say “here”, do you mean this system, this planet, what?’

  ‘I mean here in my encampment. Why do you imagine I need such a big airlock? It certainly wasn’t for the tourist trade.’

  ‘Show me them,’ Goma said. ‘Now.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Odd, unsettling dreams chased him all the way to consciousness. He kept seeing himself wandering the empty corridors of the ship, haunting it like a ghost. The dreams had a fever-like repetitiveness, circling back around themselves in Mobius loops. Again and again he returned to Nissa’s casket, touching its cold flanks as if he needed reassurance that she was still inside.

  Had he really slept, or spent a year sleepwalking his own vessel?

  But no, here he was – emerging from skipover, stiff and cold and groggy but relieved to find himself in something as unsparingly specific in its annoyances as reality. His back ached, his neck itched. He could feel where the edge of a fingernail had ripped itself from the quick. Dreams never bothered with that sort of detail.

  He waited until he had the strength to move, then hauled himself out of the casket, bones aching, muscles weak, sense of balance off-kilter. It was never good – even a year in skipover was a penitence. Nausea hit him and he dry-heaved into a metal pan, coughing up only a few strands of pinkish phlegm. His throat felt scraped raw as if by broken glass. Never mind, though – he was awake, and alive, and out of the coils of those dreams. Much more of that, he felt certain, and he would have gone mad.

  Vision still blurry, he fumbled his way to Nissa’s casket. Condensation beaded the unit’s hood and the medical display showed traces of rousing brain activity. She was coming out of skipover as well, but with a slight delay compared to his own revival. It happened; no two physiologies responded in exactly the same way.

  Kanu washed, and some of his discomfort began to ebb. He went to the bridge, checked that the ship was in no worse state now than when they had gone to sleep. The repair processes were proceeding to schedule, although there was still much more to be done.

  He boiled water and made chai, enough for two of them.

  Then he knelt next to her casket and waited for the return of life.

  *

  ‘Someone’s in there,’ Nissa said. ‘People, with machines and equipment. Things that can help us fix your poor little broken starship.’

  ‘We’ll ask nicely,’ Kanu said. ‘What else can we do?’

  They had both been awake for several hours, both of them feeling slightly groggy and frayed around the edges but otherwise unaffected by the skipover interval. Nissa was eating a plate of grapefruit while seated in her command chair, loosely gowned and with one leg crossed over the other. Her hair had not had time to grow back between the skipover episodes, still only a shadow of stubble across her scalp.

  Up on the main display was their best view of the shard, overlaid with contours and graphics showing thermal, compositional and geomorphological properties.

  They had gained the answer to at least one of the mysteries as soon as they woke. The volcano-like hot spots Kanu had noticed from halfway across the system were evidence of a technological support infrastructure – the signatures of a power-generation system.

  Power that was being still used for something.

  Nissa was right: someone had to be in there.

  ‘I’d like to know what Swift makes of this,’ Nissa said.

  ‘We’ll have his opinion sooner or later. Probably more of it than we want or need.’

  ‘Why is he keeping a low profile? Do you think there’s something wrong with the implant protocol?’

  ‘If I could see him but not you, I’d say that was the case. But I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of Swift since I woke. He’s here, though. I’m certain of that. I think he’s just allowing us some privacy.’

  ‘While listening to everything we’re saying?’

  ‘He can’t fight what he is. Can you, Swift? Well, you’re missing out on all the fun here, leavi
ng the analysis to Nissa and me, although we appear to be making progress without your input. Do you see those hot spots? They’re only a little cooler than the surface of Gliese 163. They’re pools of reflected and concentrated sunlight, gathered and directed onto the shard’s surface. There must be heat-transfer elements under those hot spots, turning the sunlight into power. We found the optical elements, too – all on our own. Backtracked the paths, identified four extremely dim infrared signatures, also in orbit around Paladin but at a higher elevation than the shard. Mirrors, Swift – each a few kilometres across. Aren’t you impressed?’

  There would never be a time when at least one of the mirrors was not in direct sight of Gliese 163. Their function was to gather the star’s energy and concentrate it with extreme accuracy onto the receptor sites on the shard’s surface. Controlling the mirror satellites required finesse to direct their beams with the same precision as the fortress stations spinning around Mars. On the other hand, solar energy was an old-fashioned and inflexible power source. Icebreaker’s own Chibesa core could easily duplicate the incident power of those beams, and it could be turned on and off and ramped up to higher output at will.

  Only someone lacking Chibesa technology of their own would need those mirrors.

  As they came in closer still, so the overall shape and nature of the shard became clearer. It was irregular, a tawny-black lump peppered with craters and veined with fissures. It turned slowly on its longest axis, about once every two minutes, like a lump of meat on a spit. A deep, mouthlike depression lay at one end of it. Like the Watchkeepers’ corpses, it appeared to have once been part of some larger body – there was an ominously clean, almost planar surface cutting diagonally across the other side of the shard from the depression. Perhaps it had also fallen foul of the Poseidon defences, or something similar guarding Paladin.

  But that did not account for the evidence of human habitation. Lodged among the craters and veins – even spilling out across the sheer face – were glints of silver and gold arranged in lines and grids and clusters, and at the nodes of these brighter threads were what Kanu instinctively recognised as a very human technology of spacecraft berths, signalling dishes, airlocks and large-scale cargo docks. The hot spots were now revealed to be circular grids criss-crossed with a quilting of pipes. Fluid pumped through those grids and heated by the beamed energy would be used to drive electrical generators. Once cooled, the fluid could be sent through the grids again, and the cycle repeated endlessly. The docks and berths, though absent of visible spacecraft, explained how the satellite mirrors must have been deployed and maintained.