Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘You mean dig down into quantum reality?’

  ‘Into the floorboards, Eunice said.’

  ‘I imagine that might be the work of a considerable number of millions of years. So there’s no immediate rush to make a decision. Not today, at any rate.’

  She forced out a smile of her own. ‘Is it hard to live with?’

  ‘The Terror?’

  ‘The knowledge. The futility. The end of everything, the pointlessness of every act. Can you go on now they’ve put that in your head?’

  Kanu, to his credit, did at least give every sign of considering his answer. ‘Not easily, Goma – I’ll be truthful. I’ve seen it. Felt it, deep in my bones. Not just as some abstract, theoretical result, but as a deep governing truth. I know that everything I see, everything I do, counts for nothing. We could sit here, now, and solve the mysteries of human happiness and all of that would be forgotten, erased, as if it had never happened. Which it may as well not have done.’

  ‘That sounds unbearable.’

  ‘It is. But then again, the eternal verities haven’t gone away. I watched my wife die. I saw her brain patterns fade to nothing, and although I know that our lives were meaningless, that neither of us has contributed anything to posterity, I still wept. I wish she were here with me now. I wish I had her in my arms, so I could ask her forgiveness. I would like to be back with her in Lisbon, feeling the sun on our faces, deciding where to eat. And I am hungry, and I have a bruise on my thigh and will be very glad when it heals because it is uncomfortable. So in that sense, I am still a human being, living in the moment, buffeted by wants and needs. Is that enough to build a life around, to carry on living?’

  ‘Eunice knew the Terror. She found a way.’

  ‘She was hardly typical.’

  ‘No, but I don’t think you are, either. We need you, Kanu. You’ve come through something truly momentous. You need to stick around for the rest of us – we need your wisdom.’

  ‘My wisdom?’

  ‘Your experience. Whatever you want to call it.’

  He acknowledged her point but looked discomforted by it. She wondered what he was thinking.

  ‘What about you?’ he said. ‘You mentioned Africa, but unless I’m mistaken, you’ve never been to Earth.’

  ‘Always a first time for everything, including that. Anyway, they have elephants there. I like elephants.’

  ‘So do I,’ Kanu said. ‘But to be honest, it took me a while to warm to them.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  By the time Travertine fell back into orbit around Orison, the lander had been restocked and made ready for the descent to Eunice’s old encampment. Goma and Ru travelled with Hector, squeezed into the pressurised bay alongside the hammock-suspended Risen, while Vasin handled the descent – a much easier proposition than landing on the wheel, and one which she handled with a certain casualness. Accompanying them were Kanu, Dr Andisa, Peter Grave and Karayan, and the body of Eunice Akinya.

  She had been autopsied in orbit. Nothing in Andisa’s examination contradicted Nhamedjo’s original findings, although she made a few discoveries of her own – quirks of anatomy and genetics that betrayed the handiwork of her alien makers, any one of which would have provided sufficient scholarly interest for an entire academic career. Andisa debated with Goma and Vasin about the best way to deal with the body – whether they were being negligent by taking it down to Orison to be buried with the other Risen and were in fact obliged to put it into skipover and return it to human civilisation.

  ‘You have your scans, your autopsy,’ Goma said without rancor, for she fully understood Andisa’s concerns – she was a scientist, too, not so different from Goma. ‘Some DNA and tissue samples, some blood. I’m afraid they’re the best you’re going to get. This is the way it has to be, Mona.’

  ‘She expressed a clear wish to be buried with the Risen?’

  ‘According to Kanu,’ Goma said.

  ‘Then we must honour that wish.’

  Before they landed, they had already made contact with the human skeleton staff left behind after the last visit. Goma, Ru and Vasin suited up and walked from the lander to the camp’s entrance, passing the stone burial mounds on their way. The remaining Tantors – Atria, Mimosa, Keid and Eldasich – had been forewarned about Eunice’s death. Goma nonetheless felt that she had a duty to share the message again in person. In their underground rooms, she and Ru sat and talked for long hours, recounting their memories of Eunice. Death was never mentioned, out of respect for the customs of their hosts. Goma and Ru spoke only of Eunice passing into the Remembering, and they stressed that hers had been a good and brave passing.

  It was hard to read the Risen, even now. They appeared satisfied with this account of things. But Goma could not guess at the errors she had made, the myriad small hurts she must have inflicted. All her old knowledge of elephants and Tantors felt obsolete in the presence of these bold new creatures with heads full of language and time.

  ‘There is another,’ she said, judging that the moment was right. ‘Hector is his name. He was with Dakota. I know that makes him your enemy after everything that happened between you and Zanzibar. But Hector’s on his own now.’

  ‘Is he here?’ Atria asked.

  Goma nodded. ‘In the lander. I wanted to see how you felt before we arranged for him to come here.’

  ‘You may bring him,’ Keid decided. ‘We will wait.’

  It took three hours to arrange this first meeting between the two factions of the Risen, after their long sundering. It was an uneven congress, Goma had to admit – four of them, one of him. At first all were trepidatious, as nervous and hesitant in their way as any wild elephants would be on encountering unfamiliar herd members.

  But the awkwardness passed. Trunks were intertwined. The Risen began to speak to Hector. Hector replied.

  It was clear to Goma that they had much to talk about. She wondered what she was witnessing in those first moments of cordiality. She hoped it was the beginning of something – a keystone on which the Risen could start the difficult work of becoming a viable line again. She could not count on finding the Tantors of Zanzibar any time soon, if they were recontacted within her lifetime. But they would make the best of what they had, with the best that their genetic science and wisdom could do for these five individuals. Doubtless there would be many setbacks – it would be ominous if there were none. But they had come so far, all of them. They were due some luck.

  She allowed herself an optimistic thought: Let the Risen make the best of what they are, and let us all find the best in each other. Humans and Risen – people both.

  She did not think there could be any harm in that.

  Meanwhile, there was work to do. Under the best set of assumptions, it would be weeks before Travertine was in any kind of position to commence its return journey to Crucible. Vasin had confided that months would be a more realistic estimate, and that it might be wise to assume they could be here for a year, even two. They still had to source fuel for the initialising tanks, and that would mean a much more thorough exploration of the system’s outer worlds than they had yet undertaken. Besides, having come this far, it was senseless to rush home. There was still the other Mandala to be explored in detail, and there was even some rash talk of possibly attempting to initiate another Mandala event. If the mirrors could be made to work again – they were still in orbit – then there was no compelling reason why Eunice’s work could not be replicated. Travertine could put a small probe in orbit, an instrument package with a long-range antenna. After the event, they would have some idea of the direction in the sky from which to await a response.

  Rasher still, Goma even heard talk of possibly doing the same thing with the lander, with people aboard – volunteers, of course. Since they could not count on finding mirrors at the other end, it would of necessity be a one-way trip into the interstellar unknow
n. But if the circumstances of Eunice’s event could be exactly duplicated, the lander might be sent to the same location as Zanzibar. They had promised they would come looking, after all.

  Strange to think that wherever Zanzibar had gone, it was still on its way from her perspective. That would be true for years, decades, centuries to come. But in the timeframe of Memphis and the other Risen, no more than an instant would separate their experience of being in this system from suddenly being somewhere else.

  In that sense, they were already there.

  Goma marvelled at that thought. She wondered what the old, slow Tantor was seeing now, through the dark scrutiny of his wise and patient elephant eyes. Something truly worthy of his interest, she hoped. It would be good to find out, one day. She vowed that she would never look at the stars and not think about Memphis, not until there was news of Zanzibar.

  ‘If there was a faster way to get you to Earth, I would jump on it,’ Vasin said, ‘but we have to go via Crucible, I’m afraid. Even if we had enough confidence to trust Travertine to that alien contraption, we still couldn’t send you to Earth. Mandala to Mandala – that’s the only way we know. We get the stepping stones, but not the choice of where they’re located.’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘Granted – and maybe we’ll learn more, if and when we get anywhere at all. But that’s for the future. When you get to Crucible, I’ll petition the government to allow us to make a rapid crossing to Earth space.’

  ‘If there’s still a government,’ Goma said.

  ‘There’s that, yes. But let’s hope we left the place in safe hands. You won’t be sorry to see it again?’

  ‘No, not at all. I never really wanted to leave.’

  ‘But you felt you had to.’

  ‘Because my mother was too old and I hoped we might do some good. Make some discoveries.’

  ‘You found the Risen,’ Vasin said. ‘That has to count for something.’

  ‘And now we’ve lost most of them again.’

  ‘Then we should be especially grateful for the five left to us. I was about to say “in our care”, but that doesn’t quite sound right. They really don’t need that much from us, do they? They’re our equals.’

  ‘At least.’

  ‘It would be good to bring one of them with us, back to Crucible – even onwards to Earth. An ambassador.’

  ‘Yes,’ Goma said. ‘We spoke about that. But it has to be their decision. We can’t force it on them.’

  ‘No,’ Vasin agreed. ‘There’s been quite enough of that.’

  It was not that any of them had stopped thinking about the Watchkeeper, least of all Kanu. It followed them from Poseidon, and when Travertine entered orbit, it too took up station around Orison. It was not orbiting in any conventional sense, but turning at an equal angular speed with the starship, only a much greater distance from the surface, the ship and the Watchkeeper like two dots on an invisible clock hand. It bothered them, hanging up there, its pine-cone shape aimed down at them like a blunt dagger. But then, people had been troubled by the presence of the Watchkeepers for a very long time, in all the systems where humans had left their mark. There was only so much mental energy available for worrying about them. Mortals could not dwell on the affairs of gods for the whole of the day.

  But in the morning, the Watchkeeper left its station.

  It descended down past Travertine’s orbit, paying the ship no heed, and then lowered itself to within a scant kilometre of Orison’s surface. It hung there, an object the size of a small continent massing the equivalent of ten thousand Zanzibars, yet stirring not a grain of dust below. In the airlessness of Orison, the Watchkeeper was as silent and wrong as a single thundercloud in an otherwise clear sky.

  Its black facets were partially open, allowing fans and blades of blue light to push out from its core. The Watchkeeper was hundreds of kilometres wide near its blunt tail, the part currently pointing back into space, but its sharp end, almost touching Orison, diminished down through layers of concentric rotating machinery to a scale that was almost within the bounds of human conception. That last kilometre of it was a kind of elephant’s trunk, a thing that corkscrewed and probed.

  The trunk lingered above Eunice’s camp. It touched nothing, but showed fleeting interest in the lander, the antennas, the glassed-over chambers where she grew her food, the curious stone kilns of the Risen burial mounds.

  The humans and Risen could only watch. The impulse was to go deeper into the warrens of the encampment. But how deep was deep enough when a Watchkeeper was involved? Besides, they needed to know their fate. It was impossible to pull away from the windows, impossible to think about anything other than that looming alien presence. What did it want with them? What did it want, specifically here and specifically now?

  An alarm sounded.

  An airlock was activating. The momentary fear was that something was trying to get in, but a second’s reflection showed how absurd that was. The Watchkeeper could have peeled back Orison’s crust like a scab if it cared to do so.

  No. That alarm was someone going out, not coming in.

  ‘Where’s Kanu?’ Goma asked.

  No one had seen him for some while.

  He was nearly under the proboscis when she found the right channel on her suit.

  ‘Kanu! It’s Goma. What are you doing?’

  He walked on for a few paces more, as if he had not heard her. Then he slowed, cast a glance back over his shoulder – light catching the edge of his visor, a hint of his too-familiar profile behind the glass.

  ‘Doing what an ambassador ought to do, Goma – establishing diplomatic relations. It wants something. One of us, maybe. Well, I think I’m the obvious candidate.’

  ‘I lost Mposi. I lost Eunice. I won’t lose you.’

  ‘We’ve all lost more than our share, Goma. But I came to this system to learn something about them. In a way, I’m glad the choice has been so easily made for me. I don’t think I’d have had the courage to go out into space and meet one. But this? It simplifies things a great deal, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Is it you talking, Kanu, or Swift?’

  He sounded amused, curious, in equal measure. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I’d like to know. I’d like to know if it’s a man making this decision or a machine making it for him.’

  ‘Oh, it’s very much the man. Swift is here, and we both know what must be done, but the choice is mine. The life is mine.’

  ‘You’re only doing this because you’ve given up on Nissa. But the rest of us haven’t!’

  ‘Nissa died, Goma. Taking her back home won’t change that. Besides, where is home for me now? I can’t go back to Mars and Earth considers me a traitor to my own species.’

  ‘For all you know, no one even remembers what you did by now.’

  ‘No one remembers anything, in the end.’

  The proboscis had begun to concentrate its darting, twisting movements in the space immediately above Kanu. Only a few hundred metres separated them now. Kanu had even stopped walking, sensing the inevitable. He let his arms dangle at his sides, assuming a position of patient submission.

  It was on him like a striking snake. There was no whip-crack, no shock wave, but the suddenness of the movement still left Goma stunned, almost falling back with the surprise of it. Nothing made of solid matter ought to move like that. Kanu was gone. The proboscis was withdrawing, telescoping back into that larger looming mass. At the same time, the Watchkeeper’s entire body was rising back into space. Numbed by what she had seen, it was all Goma could do to keep breathing. She felt that to move, to utter a word, to allow herself one unwise thought, would be enough to provoke the Watchkeeper to take her as well.

  She risked moving her head and looked up, tracking the Watchkeeper’s ascent. It was growing smaller. She wondered exactly what she had just witnessed, and wh
ether witnessing it would be a blessing or a curse on the rest of her life.

  Hours passed, and the Watchkeeper did not return. They tracked its departure, first via the ramshackle instruments and sensors of Eunice’s camp, and then with the keener eyes and ears of their orbiting ship. The Watchkeeper was speeding back out to the margins of the system where others of its kind, those that had not been damaged or destroyed by Poseidon, were presumably still waiting.

  Goma could not help but feel that they were all in a state of judicial abeyance, waiting the deliverance of some terrible, irreversible verdict. It was hard to sleep, hard to think of anything else. She wondered what had become of Kanu, whether in any sense ‘Kanu’ was still a living entity. It would have been good to speak with Ndege, and find out what she in turn had learned from her mother, during Chiku’s own time inside the Watchkeeper.

  She did not have Ndege; she did not have Mposi or Kanu. She could not even speak to Nissa, the only other human being who had endured the Terror and knew something of its qualities.

  ‘If it intended to harm us,’ Grave said, ‘I think we would already know it. It had every chance to attack when it took Kanu. It must have sensed us nearby – in the camp, aboard the ship – but it chose not to use destructive force.’

  ‘And if Kanu hadn’t gone out there?’ Ru asked.

  Grave looked down. ‘I don’t know.’

  The three of them were seated around one of Eunice’s tables. Since the burial ceremony, Goma and Ru had been spending a lot of time with the surviving Tantors in the lower levels of the camp. But it was necessary also to allow Orison’s Risen to get to know the sole survivor of Zanzibar’s Risen expedition, and human beings were an undesirable complication during that process.

  ‘Not like you, not to be sure of something,’ Ru said. ‘I thought it was all about certainty where Second Chancers are concerned?’

  There was only gentle needling in her question and Grave took no visible offence. ‘If only, Ru. Funnily enough, nothing in Second Chancer philosophy prepared me for this situation – being on Orison, waiting to hear what an implacable alien machine makes of our human envoy – who just happens to be carrying the hopes of the Martian machines with him.’