Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘We were married once,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then not married.’

  ‘To my regret. But I’m glad we came back into each other’s lives.’

  ‘However it happened.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She nodded at the nearing surface. ‘It’s not a ring, but it is silver. When it touches us, we’ll be united. I don’t know if that’ll be good or bad, but we may as well make the best of it.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘Let’s say it remarries us. Even if that’s the last thought we hold in our heads. Do you agreed, Kanu?’

  For a moment her words had punched a hole through him. He had been hoping for her absolute forgiveness, but never counting on it. The human capacity for kindness was as infinite and inexhaustible as it was surprising. He had done nothing to earn this moment, and yet he would not refuse it.

  ‘Totally,’ he said, pinned between joy and horror.

  ‘Swift,’ she said quietly, ‘don’t say a word, but you are our witness.’

  Swift did not say a word. But they both sensed him there, fully participant in the same alien betrothal. Then the surface was on them, and in the exquisite and momentary bliss of their remarriage they also knew the Terror.

  Except ‘terror’, now that they were in it, was not quite the right word. They struggled to capture the essence of it, after the surface had passed through them and continued on its way, their bodies and minds put back together. But it was both more and less than terror. Better, they thought, to describe it as a total apprehension of the consequences of the present direction of their actions – a kind of absolute, unflinching understanding that they were assuming a responsibility not only to themselves, but to every creature of their kind across all their worlds and systems.

  That they were here at the sufferance of the M-builders, and that from this instant on they would be judged against the lofty priorities of that civilisation rather than their own. That the M-builders offered a guarded welcome to the wise and the curious, but reserved only punishment for the foolish and the rapacious. That merely to think in such parochial and human terms was itself an error, and a dangerous one.

  The M-builders had confronted the single most daunting truth facing all intelligent civilisations and arrived at their own response to that truth. That other cultures were free to learn from their example, if they so chose. That the gathering of knowledge was not to be discouraged, and that these guests were at liberty to study the structures and inscriptions of Poseidon as they pleased. The guests would be pleased to hear that the inscriptions contained additional operating guidelines for the transmitting elements of the Mandala network, that obsolete but harmless set of toys that the M-builders had left in place for the benefit of lesser civilisations.

  But there was something more.

  For on Poseidon, the M-builders had encoded a complete statement of their response to the ultimate truth of life’s fate in the cosmos, and these lesser civilisations were free to incorporate the facts of that response into their own strategic planning. But should the disclosure of that response result in the consideration of acts detrimental or injurious to the absolute security of the M-builders, they would not hesitate to enact species-level extinction.

  They had the means. They had done it before.

  They valued their word.

  Kanu understood. He felt it in his bones – as if this was knowledge that had been part of him for every second of his life, no more open to doubt than the specific blue of the sky, the sting of the sun on his neck, the salt of the ocean in his mouth.

  In the hundreds of millions of years since their abdication from the affairs of lesser civilisations, other cultures had come into contact with the work of the M-builders. Some, like the Watchkeepers, never passed the first line of protection. They were rebuffed, often violently, but had suffered no wider retribution. Being hollow machines, being dead to consciousness, they were not deemed a threat – more a thing to be pitied, for they knew not what they were.

  Others had passed the sampling, known the Terror and believed themselves wise enough to bear that higher responsibility. But they had faltered, allowed their masks to slip, and the M-builders – or rather their vigilant guardians – had decided they posed an unacceptable threat. Judgement had been delivered and punishment meted out. The evidence of that punishment was not hard to find, even now. There were dead worlds, scorched of life. There were stars that had reached the ends of their nuclear burning lifetimes too soon, as if something had stolen their fuel, or made their fusion processes misfire. There were tracts of space where interstellar dust floated too hot and too thin, swept clear by the blasts of supernovae occurring in odd and suggestive clusters of temporal and spatial proximity, like a spree of murders. There were worlds orphaned from their stars, floating in space.

  All this and more was the work of the M-builders. They would have done none of it without immense consideration, immense sorrow. Fundamentally, it was never their intention to kill. They would do only that which was necessary. In what might have passed for their alien hearts, they believed these cruelties were a greater kindness – perhaps the greatest kindness of all.

  They?

  Us.

  What are we?

  What were we?

  Much like you, Kanu Akinya – in our fashion.

  Life is short, against all the mute measures of the cosmos. A star barely draws breath. A world turns around that star a hundred times.

  The galaxy is frozen in an instant of its turning, like a jammed clock. A life begins, a life ends – nothing changes. The clock unjams itself for one vast, godlike tick and a billion souls know their fierce, fast moment in the light.

  Until the clock jams again. Until the next tick.

  And yet . . .

  We are more than the sum of all those short seconds that make up our span. We learn, we give, we love, we are loved. We stir ripples into the wider fabric of social discourse. We are in turn moved by the ripples of other lives. We open books and know the thoughts of those who have lived before us – the hopes and sorrows and golden joys of earlier lives. They move us to laughter or to tears. Their days are over, but in the marks they have left behind their lives continue to resonate. In that sense, their days are limitless. They have lived again, in us.

  So it is with all our deeds, all our acts of cleverness and stupidity. Our wars and inventions, our stories and our songs. The houses we make, the worlds we change, the truths we unearth. We end, we conclude, but our deeds continue. In this continuation, a retrospective meaning is shed onto every living moment. There is a point to love, if love itself is remembered. There is a point to the creation of beauty, because beauty will endure. All words, all thoughts, have a chance of transcending death and time. There is no heaven or hell, no afterlife, no divine creator, no great will behind the universe, no meaning beyond that revealed by our senses and our intellects.

  This is a hard thing to accept. Yet there is still a point to being alive, and that makes the acceptance bearable.

  But the universe withholds even this bleak consolation.

  Within its deepest structure, written like a curse into the very mathematics out of which it is forged, the universe contains a suicidal imperative. Vacuum itself is poised in an unstable condition. Given time – and the one certainty is that there will always be time – the vacuum instability will tip the universe into a new state of being. In that instant of un-creation, all information encoded in the present universe will be erased.

  No memory of anything will endure. No single experience of any living organism will be preserved. Nothing learned or discovered or made will survive. No art, no science, no history, no deed, no kindness, no fond thought, not a single moment of human happiness.

  Nothing will last.

  Nothing will matter.

  Nothing has ever matte
red.

  When the sampling was done, when the silver wall had passed through them all, the moon spun its filament down to a clean silver spoke and then withdrew it back into the rim. For a moment it hung ahead of them, a moving ring keeping pace with Icebreaker. Perhaps their fate was still in the balance, still being ajudicated.

  The moon retreated further still. It began to turn on its polar axis, blurring into a hard silver sphere. Then it veered off, returning to the orbit it had vacated during the chase. There were further layers of moons below, but they showed no interest in the ship. Kanu had just enough power to avoid coming too close to any of these moons, but not enough to stop Icebreaker’s fall towards the top of the atmosphere.

  His head rang like a bell. It was still full of the Terror. Not so much the emotion of terror, he now knew, but rather a very specific sort of terrifying knowledge engraved in his consciousness with the indelible force of truth. He could still feel its argument, sounding out like an after-chime. He looked at his own hand, marvelling at it as if seeing it for the first time. He knew it for what it was: the instrument of a directed intelligence, an extension of himself, the means by which a being such as himself might do anything. Move earth, move water, move the stars, numberless multitudes of them, feel a glittery cascade of them run between his fingers like little grains of diamond sand.

  And knew that all of it was futile, that no action had ultimate consequence, that the best and the worst he could be would all be forgotten; that in the white moment of forgetting, even the fact that he had existed, the fact that he had left the tiniest mark on creation, would be lost.

  As would everything else.

  He was still with Nissa. As they passed one of Icebreaker’s airlocks, wordlessly and with no prior exchange, they both slowed and looked at the lock, thinking of the void beyond it, the promise of immediate nullification. He could toss his helmet aside, step into that lock, release the air and life from his lungs.

  He had tried to kill himself on Icebreaker once before, but that attempted suicide had been born out of desperation, of seeing his death as the only thing that would stop Dakota and at the same time not endanger the sleepers. He had reached the decision to kill himself only as the culmination of a bleak calculus, not because he had wearied of life or sought any kind of release in death. Life had not stopped surprising him; he was not yet ready to surrender it without good reason.

  It was different now. His death would have little impact on their chances, and certainly would not improve them. Equally, he had no immediate and pressing external reason for killing himself.

  Except that the Terror had reached inside him and negated every conceivable argument for his continued existence. It was purposeless, a life’s ledger of futile acts that was itself doomed to be erased. Nothing would ever matter. Nothing would ever change that single fact, nothing would ever make it more tolerable. How could the M-builders ever have borne such knowledge?

  More to the point, how could Kanu Akinya?

  Nissa held his gloved hand.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  And he understood.

  No.

  Not yet.

  ‘I saw it,’ he stated, filled with a shivering horror. ‘The Terror. I understood it. It’s in me – filling me like a black poison. It’ll always be in me.’

  ‘I saw it, too,’ Nissa answered. ‘It’s in me as well. For the moment it’s all I can think of. I want to put my hands over my ears and shut it out. It’s like a shriek of despair coming from every cell in my body. But we have to be stronger than the Terror. It will pass. It must. Chiku endured it.’

  ‘I’m not as strong as Chiku.’

  ‘Nor am I. But there are two of us. I need you back from the edge, merman. And you need me. Remember, we’re married now.’

  Kanu forced a nod. He did not feel as if there was strength enough in the universe to push aside that soul-swallowing negation he now felt inside himself. But he would have to try.

  For both their sakes.

  From the bridge he ran the simulations over and over. There was no flaw in them, only a choice of deaths – various angles by which they would hit the air too steeply. Icebreaker had been armoured against the crush of the Europan ocean, but that was an entirely different proposition from the aerodynamics of transatmospheric flight.

  ‘Unless I’m missing something—’

  ‘You’re not,’ Swift said. ‘Noah is our only option. It might get us down through that atmosphere.’

  ‘Might?’

  ‘Our approach speed is still very high. Noah was built to shuttle between the low orbit of Zanzibar and the surface of Crucible, not to cope with a velocity in excess of eighty kilometres per second.’

  ‘Can it get us back into clear space?’ Nissa asked.

  ‘Not at this speed. We’d still be too deep into the gravity well. At best, we can use Noah’s remaining delta-vee to ease our atmospheric entry and trust that aerodynamic braking will do the rest.’

  Kanu nodded – it was pointless hoping for any more certainty than that. In truth, as he had told the crew of Mposi, he was already committed to their fate. He touched a glove to the control pedestal, feeling as if he were about to commit a loyal and dependable workhorse to the slaughterhouse. ‘It’s just a machine, but I almost feel as if I’m betraying it.’

  ‘That’s Swift, bleeding over,’ Nissa said.

  ‘What about you, Swift? The image of you inside Icebreaker – can you transfer it to Noah?’

  ‘I hesitate to say. What’s your estimate for the time left to us?’

  Kanu glanced at the display, squinting at the confusion of vectors and orbits – it looked like a wrestling match between many-tentacled sea-monsters. ‘It depends on the point of separation. Too early and the moons may mistake Noah for a second expedition – or even interpret it as a threat. In any case, I don’t want to go through the Terror again quite so soon. Too late and we won’t have sufficient time to decelerate. Either way, we’re looking at less then fifteen minutes.’

  Swift removed his pince-nez and studied the lenses. ‘Then I would say we are short of time by approximately three weeks minus, of course, those valuable fifteen minutes, since that is how long it would take me to transfer a secondary image to Noah.’

  ‘Then you’re in trouble,’ Nissa said.

  ‘The image has served its purpose. The version of me inside Kanu still has a chance. If it helps, do not think of one as being distinct from and independent of the other.’

  ‘I’m calling Goma,’ Kanu said, making sure they still had a communications lock on the other ship. ‘They need to know what’s happening. Once we hit the atmosphere, we may not be able to get a signal through.’ He turned to the matriarch, swivelling his head in the neck ring of his suit. ‘Dakota – can you move in these conditions?’

  ‘You would have me confined somewhere else while you complete the evacuation?’

  ‘No, I would have you aboard Noah – Hector and Lucas, too. This much I’m sure of – none of us passed that test as individuals. It was something in the entirety of us that tipped the scales. Human, Risen, machine. Together. A Trinity, like the first. For that reason alone we’re staying together.’

  ‘After all our differences? After the threats, the deaths?’

  ‘Recriminations can wait. Right now my main concern is that none of us dies a horrible fiery death. Does that sound like a plan to you?’

  ‘If I were you,’ Nissa said, ‘I’d listen to my husband.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  On Mposi they watched and listened as Kanu informed them that his crew had survived the Terror but were now about to abandon ship. This was no great surprise – he had already mentioned the lander – but privately they had all hoped for some new last-minute opportunity, something that might yet give Kanu a chance of avoiding direct contact with Poseidon.

  It
was not to be. The larger ship was now within one thousand kilometres of the top of Poseidon’s atmosphere and still travelling far too quickly to survive contact with the air. Finally the drive shut down, Icebreaker entering terminal free-fall, and the lander detached itself. They could see it with their sensors at maximum magnification: it was a tenth the size of the starship, a plump deltoid with a stubby tail fin. Goma had seen similar vehicles in the civic museums in Guochang and Namboze, preserved since the early days of Crucible’s settlement. She knew very well that they had not been designed for the gruelling environment of a sweltering superterran world such as Poseidon.

  The lander fired its control thrusters and opened up the distance from its mother craft. Once it had achieved a kilometre of separation, Noah’s own engine started up, trying to whittle down yet more residual velocity before it met the friction of the upper atmosphere. From Mposi’s point of view, Poseidon’s visible face was half in day and half in night, with the two ships tiny bright points against the darkening line of the terminator.

  ‘I hate to state the obvious,’ Eunice said, glaring at her wrists which had just been freed of the restraints, ‘but Kanu won’t have achieved much if the Risen still end up crushed to death under the re-entry loads.’

  ‘He’ll have gained the world,’ Goma said, ‘because when he had a choice, he did the human thing.’

  ‘You mean the futile thing.’

  ‘If you want to start passing as one of us, start thinking a little less analytically. Would you really have allowed the Risen to die?’

  ‘Dakota? In a heartbeat.’

  ‘And the others? We know there are more of them aboard.’

  She met this with a non-answer of pursed lips. But it was enough for Goma to know that Eunice had her limits.

  ‘I’ve signalled Nasim,’ Vasin said, without much enthusiasm in her voice. ‘Told him to bring Travertine in on a fast rendezvous. We can’t do a thing for Kanu, but we have a transatmospheric lander on the main ship. If all else fails, we could send it down under autonomous control.’