Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  If the artist had meant to celebrate the sun’s return after night, they had instead produced an image of brutal cosmic obliteration. It struck Goma as less a depiction of renewal than a fierce cleansing annihilation – space itself breaking down, or returning to a more primal, basic condition.

  ‘And what happens when they get here?’ she asked.

  ‘As your captain, I wish I had something concrete to offer you. If pushed, I’d say there are two distinct possibilities. The first is that we are scrutinised and then ignored, in the same way that the Watchkeepers appear happy to ignore almost all of our day-to-day activities.’ Vasin moved two of the playing cards which were still set out on her coffee table.

  ‘And the second?’ Goma pressed.

  ‘It destroys us. From what we know of previous encounters, it will at least be quick, and probably painless. Chances are we won’t even have any warning.’

  ‘We’ll take our mercies where we find them,’ Mposi said.

  ‘What are you hoping to get from Crucible?’ Goma asked the captain.

  ‘Chai and sympathy, not much more than that. Really I am waiting for them to tell me not to attempt evasive action, because we all know how much good it would do.’ She moved another card. It was a coping strategy, Goma decided, not a reflection of her lack of concern. ‘Of course we will transmit our intentions to the Watchkeeper, in every language they have ever been exposed to – for all the good that will do: “Please ignore us, we mean no harm.”’

  ‘What about the other Watchkeepers?’ Karayan asked. ‘Are they doing anything?’

  ‘Just this one,’ said Aiyana Loring.

  ‘Maslin is right,’ Vasin said. ‘Better five hours than fifty. But better fifty hours than have this hanging over us for the rest of our expedition. None of us wants this fear inside us all the way to Gliese 163.’

  ‘I think we’d all agree with that sentiment,’ Nhamedjo said. ‘I have fifty-four largely sane individuals to look after – including myself. Confined surroundings, the routine dangers of space travel, the knowledge that whatever world we return to, it will no longer be our home – those are bad enough stressors for the human psyche. I would much rather not add years of anxiety to the melting pot. Whatever that Watchkeeper means to do with us, let it be done, and let it be quick.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  By the time the exhibition wrapped up Kanu was not sad to be moving on from Lisbon. He had always been fond of the city – it had provided sanctuary to his mother for many years, and much of her own affection for the place and its people had rubbed off on him – but after his time in the embassy he had no desire to be rooted to one place for very long. As it transpired, Nissa had a gap in her commitments, so they agreed to be tourists for another three weeks. Nissa, for her part, had identified a number of small museums and galleries they could visit during their travels, each of which contained works by his famous ancestor Sunday Akinya.

  ‘Not the real treasures,’ she cautioned. ‘They’ve all been sucked up by the Lisbon show, and it’ll take a few months for those pieces to get back to their home collections. But there should still be enough to broaden your education.’

  ‘I have a lot of catching up to do,’ Kanu said. But his frame of mind was agreeable and receptive.

  From Lisbon they travelled to Seville and Gibraltar, riding the great suspension bridge to Morocco. In Tangiers they visited a small private collection housed in the lower rooms of a salmon-coloured town house constructed around the cool geometry of a lovely shaded courtyard. Kanu had been doubtful about intruding on someone’s privacy, but the family owners were flattered to have the attention of the renowned scholar Nissa Mbaye and threw open their doors accordingly. Kanu and Nissa were treated splendidly, finally conceding to remain as guests of the household so they might enjoy a little more of Tangiers.

  Their hosts, the Al Asnam family, were born on the Moon but had returned to Earth fifty years ago. After selling a tract of valuable Fra Mauro real estate, they moved into art, a shared fascination.

  ‘I’m as pleased as anyone to see Sunday receive the recognition she was due in her lifetime,’ said Mr Hassan Al Asnam as they dined on couscous in an upstairs room, its walls hung with carpets. ‘But as a relative, Mr Akinya, you must wonder how it would have changed her, to have received this acclaim when she was alive.’

  Kanu chose his thoughts and words carefully. They were speaking French, since their hosts were fluent and Kanu’s French was not as dreadful as his Arabic.

  ‘I barely knew my grandmother,’ he said. ‘She visited Earth precisely once in my lifetime, and that was only very near the end of her life. But I can tell you this.’ He took a moment to pour more honeyed mint tea for Nissa and their hosts. ‘She did not feel for a second that her genius had been overlooked. She spent part of her life being an artist and she made a modest living from it, but when the time came she was perfectly willing to turn away from it.’

  ‘It has to be said that Sunday’s position was exceptional,’ Nissa put in. ‘It was her choice to leave the family business, but that money was always there if she chose to return.’ She glanced at Kanu, as if seeking his approval.

  Kanu nodded. ‘Yes. She was a struggling artist, but she always had that safety net. And when the time came, she felt she had no choice but to take on her share of the family responsibility. But it was not a surrender. From what I understand – and Nissa is the historian here, not me – Sunday could have carried on creating art indefinitely.’

  ‘She was prolific enough as it was,’ said Mrs Karimah Al Asnam. ‘Imagine how hard it would be to get to grips with her work if she’d continued for another century!’

  ‘Picasso produced around fifty-two thousand works of art,’ Nissa said, ‘and Vermeer fewer than fifty, yet they are of equal interest to us. It’s true, though: Sunday’s legacy is already more than enough for most of us. And that’s before we start worrying about all the lost pieces, scattered around Earth and the solar system.’

  ‘I am just sorry she could not share in this,’ said Mr Al Asnam. ‘It would have been a blessing on her life. What is the point of having all this fame and prestige if you are not alive to share it?’

  ‘You think about death too much,’ chided Mrs Al Asnam, placing a hand on her husband’s wrist. ‘It’s not a healthy preoccupation.’

  ‘I think about death to stare it in the eye,’ Mr Al Asnam replied, with a sudden fierce enthusiasm.

  There was a formulaic quality to this exchange which led Kanu to suspect it had been aired before, perhaps many times. The Al Asnams appeared cosily settled in their routines, as comfortable with each other as a pair of gloves.

  ‘You must tell us again how you came to meet,’ said Mrs Al Asnam. ‘Nissa explained quickly, but I do not think I quite understood. You were married once, and now you have met again because of your mutual interest in Sunday?’

  ‘We met in Lisbon,’ Nissa said. ‘Accidentally. But had it not been for Sunday’s work, it wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘And you were aware of Mrs Mbaye’s scholarship beforehand?’ Mr Al Asnam asked.

  ‘How could he not have been?’ asked Mrs Al Asnam, as if this was the silliest thing he had ever said.

  ‘Actually, I wasn’t,’ Kanu said, smiling. ‘It’s a terrible confession, I know, but I’ve really only developed an interest in Sunday since I got home. And it was a coincidence, our meeting again.’

  ‘The world still has the capacity to surprise us,’ said Mr Al Asnam, visibly pleased with himself at the expression of this sentiment. ‘This gives me hope.’

  ‘Sooner or later,’ Nissa said, ‘our paths would have crossed. In some ways, perhaps it’s not such a coincidence. I developed an interest in Sunday’s work because of our marriage, and it must always have been at the back of Kanu’s mind, something he meant to look into.’

  ‘I’m glad it happened, though,’
Kanu said. ‘I didn’t realise how much I’d missed a friend until I was back on Earth.’

  With a certain inevitability they had become lovers again a week after their reunion in Lisbon. It was tentative at first, both of them recognising that their new-found friendship could just as easily be broken as reinforced. Equally, neither had much to lose. If they became lovers and then decided it was not working, no great hurt would have been done to either party. They could still part on good terms, better for the experience. In the meantime, as in all things, Kanu opted to trust the compass of his instincts and hope for the best.

  Both had changed in the century since their marriage ended. Kanu was much older than Nissa – very old indeed even by the modern measure. He had benefited from his merfolk genetic transformation, which protected him against the worse effects of the Mechanism’s fall. Nissa was less advantaged, but as she approached the turn of her third century, it was clear she had made the wisest use of her wealth and contacts, seeking out the best prolongation therapies available in this harsher, simpler world. They both carried their allotment of scars, inside and out.

  ‘I have work to do,’ she said as they were lying next to each other in one of the guest bedrooms. ‘Too much work and not enough time. I’m not ready to give in just yet.’

  ‘I was thinking back to what Mr Al Asnam said. He had a point, didn’t he? What’s the sense in all this glory if Sunday’s not around to be a part of it?’ Kanu kept his voice low, not wanting to disturb the other sleepers in the household. It was late and the night silent. He felt himself at the epicentre of an almost perfect stillness, as if Tangiers was the unmoving pivot around which the rest of the universe revolved.

  Perhaps it was the wine.

  ‘Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators,’ Nissa answered in the same low murmur. ‘I know, it’s a terribly unfair state of affairs, but that’s just life. At least your grandmother wasn’t unhappy, or starving, or persecuted. That’s more than some of them managed.’

  ‘I’m not ungrateful. We’d both be poorer without her work.’

  Nissa rolled over into his belly, straddling him. She began to draw lazy spiralling designs on his chest, circles within circles, wheels within wheels. ‘Reputation’s everything to you Akinyas, isn’t it? You’ve always got to push at the boundaries, looking to the horizon.’

  ‘Not all of us.’

  She stroked his neck. ‘What happened to the gills?’

  ‘I didn’t need them on Mars and they’re a bother in a spacesuit.’ Kanu began to stroke the side of her face, testing the line of her jaw against his memory. ‘Perhaps I should grow them back. I think my space-travelling days are over.’

  ‘That’s a shame. I thought you might like to see my ship.’

  ‘You really have a ship?’

  ‘A terrible waste of money, most of the time – just sits up in orbit, depreciating.’

  ‘Then sell it.’

  ‘I would, except it’s not exactly a seller’s market right now. Hello, would you like to buy a spaceship? Nearly new, one careful owner? The only drawback is you’ll need to spend a month filing flight applications even if you only want to go to Venus and back. Oh, and there are huge alien things floating out there which might be about to kill us. Most people can’t be bothered.’ She was working her way down his abdomen, slowly and with care, as if mapping an alien territory. ‘Besides, I’m going to need it again. All I’m waiting on is the permission.’

  She had been vague about her plans for the future. Kanu began to understand why.

  ‘You mean to go somewhere?’

  ‘Not far – just an exploratory expedition, following up a line of enquiry.’

  ‘To do with Sunday?’

  ‘From the right angle, everything is to do with Sunday. I’m serious, though – I thought you might like to see the ship.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Well, don’t overdo the enthusiasm.’

  ‘No, really – it would be nice. Where exactly are you going, anyway?’

  ‘You don’t get to learn all my secrets at once, Kanu Akinya.’

  He smiled at her coyness. ‘Nor would I wish to.’

  They fell into wordless, near-silent lovemaking, after which they lay back in their bed and tried to sleep.

  But Kanu found it impossible. After a few restless hours he rose, dressed, left the room as quietly as possible and began to stroll the moonlit corridors, stairs and courtyard of the house. When the shutters were thrown wide, the windows turned out to be wooden carvings cut with tremendous skill into mesmerising Islamic patterns. By day, they cast interlocking designs across the courtyard’s tiles, developing across the hours like a slowly revealing mathematical argument. At night the same theorem repeated itself in the paler hues of moonlight.

  But the absence of glass left Kanu oddly unsettled, as if it had been omitted purely to throw him off-kilter. On Mars, a thumb’s width of glass had stood between him and death. He had come to depend on the sanctity of glass, to sleep well in its care.

  He tried not to disturb Nissa when he returned to their bed.

  ‘You can’t sleep?’

  ‘Still on Mars time,’ Kanu said.

  ‘You’ve been back on Earth for weeks.’

  ‘It takes a while. Perhaps it’s the Moon. It’s very high and full tonight and I’ve never slept well when it’s bright. I’m a marine organism – we live by the tides.’

  ‘You mean you’re a creature of water.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Then you should come with me when I take the ship. I’m going somewhere wet.’

  He smiled. ‘There aren’t many wet places in the solar system.’

  ‘Do you like surprises or not?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ But after a silence, he added, ‘Surely not Europa? Don’t tell me you’re going there?’

  ‘You’re no fun. You guess too easily.’

  ‘It was just a guess.’

  A cat shrieked across the night. Kanu knew that his chances of sleeping were now hopelessly lost. It would be best to resign himself to that. Before very long, from the telephone masts and solar towers of old Tangiers, the faithful would be called to prayer.

  The Al Asnams had been marvellous hosts, but Kanu and Nissa had a world to see and limited time in which to do so. From Tangiers they took the coastal express to Dakar; from Dakar they crossed the Gulf of Guinea to Accra, riding a sleek old clipper ship that had once navigated autonomously but whose sails were now trimmed by a boisterous crew of sea-hardened merfolk. In the evening, as the ship cut through wine-dark waters, Nissa and Kanu sat on deck. They listened to happy shanties about foolhardy mariners and troublesome sirens and fell asleep under equatorial stars. Kanu slept better on the ship than he had in the household, even when they ran into heavy seas off Freetown.

  In Accra there was a museum to visit, a modest public affair but nonetheless bright and well maintained. They had six Sunday pieces on permanent display – three paintings, two Maasai-inspired sculptures and a ceramic jug she had bought in a Lunar flea market and glazed with her own designs. Nissa patiently explained the various provenances of these pieces and their relatively minor significance within Sunday’s wider output.

  ‘Really,’ she said, when they were out of earshot of the museum’s hosts, ‘it’s just an excuse to visit Accra. It’s lovely at this time of year.’

  It was, but since Tangiers a disquiet had settled over Kanu’s mood. It was with him at all hours of the day. If it began to slip away, the mere observation of its departure was enough to bring it scuttling back.

  They had been married, but that was an earlier part of his life and for years Nissa had barely troubled his thoughts. He would never have wished harm upon her, but equally he had taken no interest in her day-to-day affairs. I
f she wished to place herself in peril for the sake of intellectual curiosity or academic reward, that was her right; he would have resented Nissa telling him he was taking an absurd risk by living on the surface of Mars. Now they were lovers and companions again, and it was natural that he should take a greater interest in her well-being. But he did not think this breezy affair would last for the rest of their lives. It would come to its natural conclusion, as their marriage had, and they would go their separate ways again. And in time there would be a day during which he did not think of Nissa, and eventually a week, and sooner or later what she did with herself would cease to concern him.

  And yet here they were, wandering Accra’s public gardens, and the thought of her travelling to Europa alone drove a knife into him.

  Kanu was staring at the jangle of light through a fountain when his anxiety shifted into focus.

  It was not precisely Europa that worried him, he realised. Nor was it the notion of Nissa going there in her little ship.

  It was a fear of not being there as well.

  They caught up with Fall of Night over the Horn of Africa. It was parked in the orbit where Nissa had left it, quietly minding its own business. Like all spacecraft, it had a level of autonomy that would have been unusual or forbidden on the Earth’s surface.

  ‘I warned you it was small,’ Nissa said as their transfer shuttle completed its final approach.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting a holoship.’ Kanu was floating at a porthole, restraining himself by his fingertips. ‘Actually, it’s bigger than you led me to expect. Quite an old ship, isn’t it?’

  ‘Old is good, they say. It’s served me well enough over the years. I’ve splashed out on a few modifications since the last time I used it.’

  Fall of Night was a charcoal-coloured arrowhead, sharp at one end and swelling out to a fistful of engines at the other. They docked and boarded, transferring their luggage at the same time. Nissa completed some basic checks and then signalled that the shuttle could be on its way. Kanu quickly orientated himself, exploring the living quarters, the two separate cabins, the command deck. For an old ship, Fall of Night was bright and modern inside. There were a couple of skipover caskets, but they would not be needing those on the hundred-hour cruise out to Jupiter space.