Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘We’re all in the same boat, then,’ Goma said.

  ‘Do you think he’d have done what he did if Nissa were still alive?’

  Ru looked sharply at him. ‘You think it was suicide?’

  ‘I don’t know him well enough to say for sure, but it looked like the act of a man who had run out of hope.’

  ‘You can’t blame him,’ Goma said. ‘First the Terror, then the loss of his wife? None of us is in a position to judge Kanu for that.’

  ‘Believe me, judgement is the last thing on my mind,’ Grave said. ‘I just wish he’d had more time to come to terms with his experiences. I think he would have had the strength to make peace with them, had they not all happened at once.’

  ‘Easy for you to say, not having been through the Terror,’ Goma said.

  ‘None of us went through it,’ Grave answered. ‘But at the end of it all, we’d each and every one of us have been free to reject its message.’

  Ru made a sceptical face. ‘You mean deny it?’

  ‘If denial is the mental strategy that allows life to be faced, so be it. Death is negation. Denial is better than that, under any circumstances. Besides – we have no objective evidence that the Terror is anything other than a psychological weapon, a set of apparent propositions that only feel persuasive because they’re being drilled into our minds at a very deep level, like some kind of insidious propaganda.’

  ‘We don’t need the Terror to tell us the message,’ Goma said. ‘We’ve got the wheels for that – the Mandala grammar lays out the same truth. The vacuum will collapse. There is no arguing with that.’

  ‘May collapse,’ Grave stated. ‘But their physics might be wrong. Have you considered that possibility?’

  Goma shook her head. ‘They had millions of years to find a flaw in it. If there was one, they’d have found it.’

  ‘That’s almost a position of faith, though, isn’t it? By accepting unquestioningly that there was no error in the M-builders’ logic, you’re placing them on the level of gods. But they were not infallible – we’ve seen the evidence of that for ourselves.’

  ‘Have we?’ Goma asked.

  ‘Poseidon is ruthless, but it is also indiscriminate. And these Mandalas – a dangerous, powerful technology allowed to fall fallow? If they were gods, they were reckless, careless ones. Slipshod deities. They left us some lethal ruins – ask the citizens of Zanzibar. Ask your mother.’

  ‘My mother is dead.’

  ‘I am sorry, but the point stands. I don’t see infallibility in the M-builders’ work, Goma. I see arrogance. A blindness to their own flaws. Knowing that, how can we have the slightest confidence in their prophecies?’

  ‘They’re not prophecies – they’re predictions!’

  Grave nodded solemnly, as if some great and subtle truth had been laid out before him. ‘Nonetheless, this might just as easily be a delusion they talked themselves into – a kind of species-level psychosis. Why should we be bound by that?’

  ‘If you understood the physics—’ Goma began.

  ‘Do you? It isn’t your native discipline any more than it’s mine. Everything you believe you know was filtered through Eunice’s understanding.’

  ‘That was enough for me to get it.’

  ‘But Eunice didn’t take it into her heart, did she? If she had – if she’d truly accepted the M-builders’ gospel – that all acts are futile, that there’s no point in any deed, any gesture – then she wouldn’t have given up her own life to save Ru’s. That was an act born of kindness and empathy, not despair.’

  ‘We can’t know what was in her head,’ Goma said.

  ‘But we can do her the honour of recognising that her sacrifice had meaning – that it was more than an empty gesture. With that one kind act, she repudiated every word the M-builders ever wrote. Their truth was theirs to live with – we don’t have to.’

  ‘That’s starting to sound like another article of faith,’ Ru said.

  ‘So be it. Both of you came here seeking knowledge – it’s been the arrow of your lives to know the world. Physics is one path – you chose to study the minds of other creatures. But that quest for meaning – for what you think of as truth – has only brought you to this. Doubt. Despair. A crisis of belief in anything.’

  ‘The truth hurts,’ Goma said. ‘But it’s still the truth.’

  ‘You need to find a way through it, in that case. Truth isn’t the end, Goma. It’s just a door. There’s always another door beyond it, too. Endlessly and for ever. The M-builders may not have realised that, but you don’t have to fall into the same trap. Both of you have work to do – here and on Crucible.’ He gave an easy-going shrug. ‘On Earth, too, for all I know. The hard times aren’t over yet. They may not even have begun. But we’ll need good, strong people to face them. You ask me about faith. I have faith in us – in our capabilities, our ultimate capacity to make the right choices. People and Risen. People and machines. All of us. But the worst thing of all would be to start doubting ourselves.’

  Kanu came back to them three days later. The Watchkeeper returned to its former position, circling Orison in a higher orbit than Travertine’s. For several hours there was no clear change in its disposition, nothing to show – presuming Kanu still existed in any meaningful sense – that it held a human being within itself. Goma debated consulting the records aboard the ship, to refresh her memory as to what happened under similar circumstances when Chiku Green was taken into one of those machines. But the circumstances were only similar up to a point – Kanu was not Chiku, and this world was not Crucible.

  It came in just as quickly as the first time, and the focus of its interest was the same patch of ground where Kanu had waited. The proboscis made a darting strike at the surface, and when it retreated, leaving only a curl of dust, there was a spacesuited human form, on his knees, hands at his sides.

  Goma had put her own suit on as soon as the Watchkeeper began to close in. She was in the lock and waiting.

  She rushed to him, found their common channel. The lights on his suit were all in the green, and she could see the fogging and unfogging of his breath on the inner surface of his faceplate.

  ‘Kanu, talk to me.’

  He stirred. He turned his face towards hers. He opened his eyes, blinked, appeared at first to struggle with focus. ‘Goma.’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ But then he paused. A moment of quiet consideration followed, as if her questions merited the most sincere answers he could give. ‘I think so, anyway.’

  ‘Kanu, you were inside the Watchkeeper. For three whole days. Do you remember any of it?’

  ‘Three days?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It didn’t feel like three days. Three years, maybe. Three decades. Something stranged happened to me, Goma. I’m not quite sure what.’ Then he reached out a hand and she helped him stand, unsteadily at first but appearing to find his strength by the second. ‘Something strange,’ he repeated. ‘We were inside them. We were trying to make them understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘What they used to be. What they ceased to be. What they could be again.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘The Gupta–Wing threshold. Ask Chiku. Swift told them. Swift made them see – he understood it better than I ever did.’

  His words meant nothing to her, except for the mention of Chiku. ‘Kanu, is Swift still in your head?’

  ‘No. Swift’s with them now. They took him, but left me behind.’ With a certain resignation, he added, ‘They’re done with me now.’

  ‘Swift’s in that Watchkeeper?’

  ‘In all of them. He’s propagating between them, like an idea they can’t help but spread. They were blind to the Gupta–Wing theorem, and once they’d crossed the threshold, they had no reason to doubt themselv
es. But Swift is giving them reason to question what they are.’

  It sounded like babble, but she thought it unlikely that Kanu Akinya would be spouting nonsense for the sake of it.

  She took his elbow and helped him back to the camp. ‘Simplify it for me. I work with elephants, not machines. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?’

  ‘We’ll have to see. That’s all. Like everything else. Has it really been only three days, Goma?’

  ‘Would I lie to you, uncle?’

  He stumbled on a pebble; she caught him before any harm was done. ‘Watch your step, ambassador.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not the ambassador now. I’ll leave that to my friend.’

  ‘Then what are you?’

  ‘A man still hoping to find some useful purpose in life. If it lets him. If he hasn’t worn out his welcome.’

  ‘You have one useful thing to do.’

  The directness of her statement drew a laugh. ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes. You’re coming back to Crucible with me. With Nissa. If they can help her on Crucible, so be it. Otherwise we’ll carry on to Earth. You know that planet, and I’m going to need a guide when I get there.’

  ‘Someone to keep you out of trouble? I may not be best qualified for that. Anyway, Earth will be very strange even to me when we get back.’

  ‘Have you been to Africa, Kanu?’

  ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘Will it still be there?’

  ‘Barring the frankly improbable . . . yes, I suppose. It ought to be.’

  ‘Then you can take me to Kilimanjaro. I have Eunice’s heart.’

  ‘Only her heart?’

  ‘The rest of her stays here, with the Risen.’ Goma risked a glance back over her shoulder, into the emptying sky. ‘Do you think the Watchkeeper will be coming back?’

  ‘Not for a little while. They have some thinking to do.’

  ‘Then we’ll need to move ahead with the funeral arrangements. Kanu, are you going to be all right? You’ve lost Nissa, now Swift. And then whatever happened to you in there—’

  ‘I’ll cope, Goma. When you’ve already died once, coping becomes second nature.’

  ‘I think you might have died a second time.’

  ‘Three times, if you include the Terror. I’ll try not to make a habit of it.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Goma said.

  It fell to Goma to lead the human party. It was a smaller cairn this time, for the body was that of a human woman, not one of the Risen.

  The Risen had done the hard work of shaping the cairn with large stones of various shapes. They took great deliberation in the selection of these pieces, and when they were set into the cairn they appeared to interlock with uncanny neatness, as if they were the shattered pieces of some once-unified whole.

  For the humans, it remained only to select their own smaller stones and fill in the gaps. They took pains not to upset the work that had already been done.

  ‘For Eunice,’ Goma said, placing one fist-shaped stone onto the cairn. ‘May these stones bind the thread of her memories with those who have already passed into the Remembering. May they bind her to the promise of the black skies she craved, and to the memory of the blue Earth she never stopped loving. Her name was Eunice Akinya, and her blood is my blood. They called her Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one. And I will bring this lion’s heart back to the place she knew as a child.’

  The stone was set. Goma turned from the cairn.

  Overhead, one by one, the Watchkeepers were dimming their blue lights to the lowest possible state of radiance. It was an accident of timing, nothing more. They were concentrating their mental resources on the vexing question of this odd and troubling mathematical theorem. At times like these, when a difficult matter required pondering, they had learned that it was wiser to assign separate streams of mentation to each Watchkeeper, each tackling the problem as a whole, rather than dividing it into fragments that could be processed among their dispersed elements, but with no one Watchkeeper grasping the entirety of the problem. That way, when answers tallied, they could view the results as significant. The Watchkeepers had indulged in this kind of deep meditation before, and they were quite prepared to take their time over it. These busy, buzzing humans had been a local distraction, and they were entertaining enough in their way. But it would be better when they moved on, and some silence had returned to this corner of creation.

  The shutters of their scales closed. The blue lights dimmed to the darkest shade of blue that is not black.

  The Watchkeepers settled down to dwell on what they were.

  Kanu Akinya, turning from the cairn after setting his own stone in place, thought he glimpsed an old friend out of the corner of his eye. In a single fluid movement the figure raised a hand, touched a finger to his pince-nez, smiled a fond farewell.

  And then was gone for ever.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Goma and Ru had been awake for hours before they allowed themselves their first view of Crucible. It was less a case of apprehension than delayed gratification, refusing a reward until the proper moment, when they were both mentally prepared for it. Not that they had any real fears of failure, or concerns that their world would disdain them. Captain Vasin had assured them that Travertine had completed its return crossing successfully, and that they were now back in orbit, circling the planet at almost the same altitude from which they had begun their journey. Long before the ship completed its last course change it had been hailed, made welcome by a jostling flotilla of escort vehicles. The tone of the exchanges had been cordial, verging on the jubilant. There was no doubt of a warm reception.

  But anything could have happened, Goma told herself. They had been away for two hundred and eighty-four years, enough time for governments to fall and rise, for revolutions and counter-revolutions, for personal reputations to crash or soar. Their expedition had been an expensive endeavour at a time when Crucible was still climbing out of the hardships that had come with the Fall of the Mechanism. Perhaps, with time, it had come to be viewed as a folly, or even worse: a negligent, criminal waste of resources and minds.

  Perhaps that had been the view, at some point in these last three centuries. But if the wheel of opinion could turn once, it could turn again. Whatever might have happened, they were favoured now. Conceivably, Goma thought, the events surrounding their departure were simply too remote for anyone to get all that bothered about. The wonder was that they had returned. All else was forgivable.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she asked Ru.

  ‘As I’ll ever be.’

  They floated together at a window in a weightless section of the ship. The window was facing Crucible, but for the moment it was shuttered.

  ‘I keep thinking of Mposi. I don’t think he ever expected to come home again. He’d have counted himself lucky enough just to make it all the way to Gliese 163.’

  ‘We’re here for him,’ Ru offered, although there was not much that could push Goma’s sadness aside. Sadness mingled with relief, gratitude, expectation. But also the heavy burden of the work that lay ahead of them. They had barely begun.

  ‘Let’s do it.’ Goma touched the control, and the window’s external shutters snapped open in silence.

  For a few seconds they stared at their world in wordless contemplation. They were orbiting over the day side, the clouds giving way here and there to offer hints of recognisable landforms and seas. Goma compared what she saw against her memories of maps she had known since childhood. On this scale at least, it was hard to say that much had changed.

  ‘It’s still there,’ Ru said, with a sort of wonder, as if the very act of their world maintaining itself across these years was astonishing. ‘All that time we were on our way, all that time we were sleeping . . . it was still here, still going about its business, doing what worlds do – as if you and I never mattered to it.’

&nb
sp; ‘We didn’t,’ Goma said. She paused, added: ‘Anyway, it’s really not been that long. Trees that were middle-aged when we left, they’ll still be middle-aged – just a bit older. Us being away – it’s just a blip, a heartbeat, to a planet.’

  But now Ru jabbed her finger at something nearer than their planet. It was an object, moving through space between them and Crucible. ‘A ship. Maybe one of those escorts Gandhari told us about.’

  The vehicle, whatever it was, sidled closer to Travertine. Its form was a blunt-ended cylinder, wrapped with lights. It was hard to tell how far away it was, how big. It moved a little too confidently for Goma’s liking, coming in at too hard a vector. She tensed, unable to fight the instinct to brace against an impact, for all the good it would have done. But the cylinder cruised near and then veered sharply off, and at the moment of closest approach she thought she saw faces, pressed against the windows, gawking at this odd, antique apparition.

  The cylinder swooped away, until it was only a tiny moving speck against the face of Crucible.

  ‘I suppose we’re of some amusement to them,’ said a voice beside them, speaking softly enough not to shatter the mood. ‘Visitors from the deep past. Gandhari says we’re not the only starship they’ve ever seen – there’s a flow of ships coming and going all the time – but you can bet it’s been a while since they’ve clapped sight on a relic like us.’

  ‘I don’t feel like a relic,’ Ru said.

  ‘Nor do I,’ Peter Grave said, Crucible’s blue-green light picking at the crinkling around his eyes. ‘But I strongly suspect it may have to be a role we have to get used to. Obliging ghosts at the banquet.’ He forced a smile. ‘Never mind. There must be worse things – and at least we’ll never be short of attention.’