Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  So she had also played her role, whether consciously or otherwise.

  Kanu Akinya looked on with a sort of horrified bemusement, grasping as he did that the larger narrative of his family – the things they had made, the events they had caused, the web of responsibilities they had inherited – had just taken a new and unexpected swerve. There were no Akinyas on Zanzibar, but the lives of the Risen and the Friends were an inseparable part of the flow of events Eunice had set in motion. Someone would have to follow up on this. Someone would have to take ownership of this event.

  Swift, who occupied the same physical space as Kanu and observed events using co-opted neural networks within the same central nervous system, felt something close to surprise. Swift was used to modelling future events, and over the course of his existence he liked to think he had gained some modest proficiency in that art. The likelihood of a terrorist attack on Mars, the chances of Kanu suffering injury . . . these were events Swift had considered to be well within the bounds of statistical probability. He had even taken it as read that the expedition to Gliese 163 was likely to run into local complications. Encountering the Tantors – especially Dakota – had been a surprise for Swift. But he had not been surprised to be surprised.

  This, though, was an event far outside the scope of even his wildest conjectures. Not one of his iterative forecasts had come close to predicting a second Mandala event. He was off the map now; a chess piece sliding over the edge of the board. The moment had come to discard all his earlier exercises in future-casting – they had failed him totally.

  Not for the first time, Swift would have given half of Mars not to be imprisoned in this cage of bone and meat, with its narrow, shuttered perception of the world. But he had done what he could. In the interests of information-gathering, he had already tasked every available sensor channel aboard the ship to record the Mandala event.

  The humans and elephants around him had not the slightest clue that his control of Icebreaker was so comprehensive.

  He had seen no need to inform them.

  Not yet.

  In the lander Mposi, Eunice Akinya considered the imminent consequences of her handiwork. It had been one thing to formulate her own ideas of the Mandala grammar, to hew them into the rock of Orison as if they had integrity and self-consistency. It had been quite another to find those connections confirmed and amplified in the patient handwriting of Ndege Akinya, in the black books that her great-great-granddaughter had in turn bequeathed to Goma. Quite another thing still to go beyond those symbols and connections and understand that she had the means to duplicate Ndege’s original command sequence.

  Not to whisper it, as Ndege had done, in the muted sotto voce of screens and shadows, but to proclaim it in the fierce, focused light of Paladin’s own star.

  To speak the words of truth to the Mandala, in the form of address it expected.

  To make it sing.

  Ru, for her part, wondered why no one had found the good sense to kill the old hag. She had cheated them all – lied about her control of the mirrors, lied about her intentions. And now the Mandala was changing so fast that the moment must be nearly upon them.

  She remembered the impression Eunice’s hands had left in her flesh as she was dragged into quarantine, fingers and nails pressing into her as if she were human clay. Only Ru had been near enough to see the hate in the old woman’s eyes; only Ru knew how close Eunice had come to murdering her there and then in a spasm of fury and recrimination. None of the others had seen it, not even Goma.

  Ru had tried to understand. It was true that the Tantors’ lives had been threatened; true that the disease in her blood made Ru look like the automatic culprit. But she had done nothing wrong, and Eunice had only been a twitch away from killing her.

  No one else saw that. And now she had trumped that with this monstrous, egomaniacal act – this act of godlike, spiteful indifference to the lives of the mere mortals around her.

  Making Mandala sing just because she could.

  Goma Akinya, meanwhile, could think only of the lost opportunities. They had met the Tantors on Orison. Even with the deaths of Sadalmelik and Achernar, she could not fail to find wonder in those hours she had spent in their presence. To know the minds of elephants when that possibility had been closed to her for most of her life – it had been a blessing, a bounty, a miracle. But the six Tantors who had shared Eunice’s camp could hardly be compared with the thousands more on Zanzibar. Eunice’s Tantors were companions, not servants. But they never had a chance to evolve their own social structures, to become fully independent. It would be a joy to see how elephants ran a world when that world was theirs to run.

  That chance was gone now – or soon to be gone.

  She had been granted a glimpse of something wonderful, promised that it would be hers, and been foolish enough to believe she would get her due.

  Elsewhere, observing events from viewpoints remote and chilly, Watchkeepers gathered data and found that it did not tally with anything in their immediate experience. The Mandala had been changing for centuries – moments by their galactically slow and patient reckoning – but in these last instants the changing had accelerated asymptotically, and that acceleration had very clearly been precipitated by the actions of the organic intelligences now active around Gliese 163.

  The Watchkeepers had uses for some of these intelligences; less for others. They also had their own names for things. They had never shaped a thought remotely congruent with ‘Mandala’ and the terms of reference they used for the worlds and star of this dim little solar system were simply not translatable into human terms. They were best considered as compilations, event strings with the scope of infinite extensibility. In the language of the Watchkeepers, no word was ever uttered to completion, no sentence ever finished. There was only an endless branching utterance, sagas that begat sagas, until time immemorial.

  The Watchkeepers were not capable of sadness, or of self-doubt, or at least no states of being that could be flattened into such simple human terms. But much as a hypersphere is the higher-dimensional analogue of a circle, they were capable of a kind of hyper-puzzlement, a kind of profound, vexing mismatch between expectation and external reality.

  It puzzled the Watchkeepers that these living intelligences were able to make use of the Mandala when they were not permitted to do so. It puzzled them that these busy, buzzing creatures were tolerated within close proximity to Poseidon. It caused them to question the reliability of their own simulations of long-term survival. If they could not understand everything happening here, now, in the space around Gliese 163, in this system where the M-builders had left their traces, then nothing else could be depended upon. The Watchkeepers were used to being right and certain about things. This intrusion of doubt troubled them.

  But not much. Being troubled was a state of existence most closely associated with fully conscious infovores, and the Watchkeepers had forgotten how to be conscious. Occasionally, as if surfacing from a bad dream, they felt a dim apprehension that something within them was missing; that what had been present was now absent. They felt hollow where once they had been full. It was an odd and contradictory impression because all rational data pointed to the Watchkeepers being more powerful than at any point in their history to date. How could something have been lost?

  It was not possible.

  But it was at instants like this, when the universe did something they were not expecting, that the Watchkeepers were at their most introspective. They pulled their scales tight, treasuring their blue light within. They reduced their communication with neighbouring Watchkeepers, becoming isolated units.

  They watched and thought and skirted the edges of a regret as old and mysterious as the gaps between the galaxies.

  And then the moment was upon them all.

  The Mandala reached its final configuration. Zanzibar had arrived in the space directly above it. There was
a flash, an energy release – space shearing and curdling and screaming its agonies in a flare of photons across the entire spectrum from gamma to the longest of radio wavelengths.

  The flash originated neither at the Mandala nor in Zanzibar, but rather from a volume of space between the two. On Crucible, it had occurred just above the atmosphere. Here there was nothing to stop the flood of radiation from lashing down on Paladin. But it was brief, lasting barely longer than the time it took for light to cross the space between the Mandala and Zanzibar.

  And Zanzibar moved again.

  There was no measurable acceleration, nothing that human or alien recording devices could quantify. Between one moment and the next, Zanzibar went from being in orbit to travelling at an infinitesimal fraction less than the speed of light. From mere kilometres a second, relative to Paladin’s surface, to something in the vicinity of three hundred thousand. If indeed there had been acceleration, it must have acted uniformly on every atom of Zanzibar and its occupants – or perhaps on the very space–time in which it was embedded, swept up to speed like a leaf in a current. No matter in the universe could have retained its integrity under such forces, much less a thing of rock and ice, metal and air, filled with living creatures.

  Later, when the observations had been collated and examined, it would be determined that Zanzibar had shown the effects of extreme relativistic length contraction: that the potato-shaped fragment of the original holoship had been reduced to a circular pancake, massively compressed by frame contraction. Instead of a solid thing, it appeared to have become a disc, a stamped-out impression of itself.

  The survivors of the original contraction had reported no experience of subjective time as they travelled between Crucible and Gliese 163. This could only mean that they were experiencing time-dilation factors of at least several billion. Such an inference had sounded doubtful before, but the new measurement of the frame contraction made it look much more probable.

  The same thing had happened again. Hard as it was to credit, that paper-thin disc contained the entirety of Zanzibar. Its chambers, its cities, the Risen, the skipover vaults – all were still present, pressed against each other, ready to be unpacked like a folded-up doll’s house. Within that subjective realm, nothing would have felt out of the ordinary.

  The original survivors had reported no elapsed time, but their first journey had been relatively short. Seventy light-years, after all, was a scratch against the galaxy.

  Who knew where Zanzibar was headed now?

  No one.

  Least of all Eunice Akinya.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Mandala was quieting, cycling through an ever-slowing sequence of changes. The mirrors had withdrawn, their purpose served. Aboard Mposi, Eunice surrendered herself to the consequences of her actions. She had done something that would be hard to explain, but the right course had presented itself to her with the supreme and ecstatic clarity of a temporal-lobe vision. She knew, given the choice, that she would do it again in an instant.

  ‘It was the only way.’

  They had bound her to a chair using its acceleration straps. She had made no effort to resist, offering herself up as compliantly as a puppet. Whatever they decided to do with her, she would accept.

  ‘Explain,’ Vasin said.

  ‘Kanu couldn’t turn around if there was a chance of the Friends being harmed. To begin with, I hoped Dakota wouldn’t go so far as to start killing them. Once she did, though, I saw no option but to initiate the translation.’

  ‘You worked very quickly,’ Karayan said.

  ‘I’d already prepared the groundwork. I’ve been thinking about the possibilities for a long time – almost as long as I was on Orison. It was always clear to me that a second Mandala event would shake things up a bit if the need ever arose. Of course, I didn’t have all the pieces until I saw Ndege’s work. And even then I didn’t have the means to make it happen. Not until we found the mirrors.’

  ‘But you had this plan at the back of your mind the whole time?’ Vasin said.

  ‘I’m all for spur-of-the-moment decisions, but sometimes you have to play the long game.’

  ‘Half the crew want to kill you,’ Goma said.

  ‘I don’t blame them.’

  ‘If I were you, I’d start presenting a few arguments in your defence. It looks as if you just committed mass murder.’

  ‘She did,’ Ru said.

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone. Zanzibar survived one translation; it will make it through another. The chances are better this time: there’s no debris left behind so the effect was cleaner, nothing outside the edges of the field. I think they will do perfectly well – thrive, most likely.’

  ‘You don’t even know where they’ve gone!’ Vasin said.

  ‘Where they’re going. It’s true – I don’t know. I didn’t have time to finesse anything to that degree. I couldn’t even be sure it would work! But the Mandala won’t have just sent them in a random direction. We’ll work it out – backtrack to the moment of the event, identify the candidate stars in the general angle of view. Then we’ll know.’

  ‘You’re so pleased with yourself,’ Ru accused.

  ‘Pleased that I’ve given Kanu a hope of digging his way out of that mess he’s in? Yes, I am. Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘You know nothing about Kanu’s situation,’ Grave said. ‘Wishing to turn around and being able to – they’re not the same thing. You’ve staked countless lives on this gamble.’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘How can you know?’ asked Vasin.

  ‘Because I’ve spoken to Swift,’ Eunice answered.

  And for a moment there was silence, until Goma asked the question they must all have been thinking.

  ‘Who the hell is Swift?’

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  There was darkness, and then there was light. For a few seconds Icebreaker had gone dead, all its displays inactive, its interior illumination shut off, the background noise of its life-support systems silenced. Even the Chibesa core had fallen to a sudden and ominous stillness. Nothing in Kanu’s prior experience of the ship had prepared him for this, not even the Watchkeeper’s attack.

  As the systems began to recover – emergency lights coming on in the bridge, fans restarting, a chorus of recorded voices informing him of various status indications – Nissa and the Tantors began to speak at once.

  ‘What has happened, Kanu?’ Dakota asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The elephant persisted. ‘Do you think it is connected to the Mandala event – the energy spilling out from Paladin?’

  ‘Zanzibar must have streaked past pretty close,’ Nissa said. ‘Maybe we got buffeted by . . . something?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kanu repeated.

  For once, he had no need of a mask, no need to lie. He genuinely had no idea what had just happened – he had neither initiated it nor expected it. But the more he thought about it, the less likely it felt to him that the Mandala event itself had anything to do with Icebreaker going dark. They had witnessed the event and the ship’s normal functions had continued uninterrupted, registering nothing of immediate concern within its environment. Zanzibar was long gone before the arrival of whatever hit Icebreaker.

  Whatever this was, it must have been initiated locally, whether by accident or design.

  A dark suspicion began to form.

  ‘Talk to me, Swift,’ Kanu subvocalised.

  ‘Ah, you can still hear me. That’s excellent. I wasn’t totally sure, you know. A shock to the ship of this magnitude – who knows what the collateral effects might be?’

  ‘I can hear you. Now talk to me.’

  Kanu was still in semi-darkness, but he was not alone. Nissa was next to him, both of them seated. Dakota and the other Risen were still present, too, but drifting free of the floor. Their huge breathin
g presences were tumbling like boulders – there was nothing fixed within reach of a trunk or foot to arrest their motion.

  Presumably they were just as bewildered by this latest development as Kanu. Or perhaps, having witnessed the Mandala event, their capacity for astonishment had been overloaded like a blown circuit. He could relate to that well enough.

  ‘The ship is ours again, Kanu,’ Swift said. ‘Or it will be, soon enough.’

  ‘It was never not ours.’

  ‘You know exactly what I mean. We were unable to take decisive action while the Friends were in jeopardy. Now they are no longer in jeopardy – or at least their prospective fates lie completely beyond our influence. That frees us, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘You made the ship do this?’ Nissa asked through the same subvocal channel. ‘You could do this all along, and you waited until now?’

  ‘You are both silent, yet I sense deliberation,’ Dakota said. ‘I will ask again. What do you know of this event – both of you?’

  ‘Some fault in the ship,’ Kanu said, for the sake of giving her something. ‘That’s all I know.’

  More of the lights and displays were coming online now and the recorded warnings were beginning to die down. The ship was restarting itself, cycling through health and calibration checks, but the process appeared to be running without complication.

  ‘Your ship seemed reliable until now,’ Dakota answered. ‘Do you have an explanation for this sudden fault?’

  ‘Nothing I’d bet my life on,’ Kanu said.

  She rammed the ceiling and tucked her trunk around a structural member. ‘Try me anyway.’

  ‘Clearly we missed something. But the ship’s coming back to us. When we have full functionality, the event logs should explain what the problem was.’