Poseidon's Wake
POSEIDON’S WAKE
Alastair Reynolds
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
—
Edward Thomas
Early one evening, Mposi Akinya went to visit his sister. He took a car from the parliamentary building in the heart of Guochang, out through the government quarter and across the residential districts, until at last he reached the secured compound surrounding her house. He walked to the gate and presented his identification, even though the guards were ready to usher him past without a second glance at his credentials.
He made his way to the entrance, knocked on the door and waited until Ndege opened it. For a moment she blocked his entry, standing with her arms folded across her chest, her head cocked to one side, her expression betokening neither warmth nor welcome. She was still taller than him, even in their mutual old age. Mposi had spent a lifetime being looked down on.
‘I brought greenbread.’ He offered her the paper-wrapped loaves. ‘Still fresh.’
She took the package, opened the paper, sniffed doubtfully at the contents. ‘I wasn’t expecting you until later in the week.’
‘I know it’s a little unexpected, but I promise this won’t take long.’
‘Good. I have reading to be doing.’
‘When do you ever not have reading to be doing, sister?’
After a moment, Ndege relented and admitted him into her house, then led him to her kitchen. She must have been sitting at the table, for she had her black notebooks laid out on it, open to reveal their dense scribbled columns of strange symbols and the sketchy relationships between them. Except for the notebooks and a small box of medicines to counter oxygen toxicity, the table was bare. Mposi took a chair opposite the one Ndege had been using.
‘I should have told you I was on my way, but I couldn’t keep this to myself a moment longer.’
‘A promotion? Another expansion of your powers?’
‘For once, it’s not about me.’
She looked at him for a moment, still not sitting down. ‘I suppose you’re expecting me to boil some chai?’
‘No, not today, thank you. And save that greenbread for yourself.’ He patted the plump padding of his belly. ‘I ate at the office.’
Before easing her tall, thin frame into the chair, Ndege gathered the notebooks off the table and set them carefully on her bookcase. Then she faced him and made an impatient beckoning gesture with her hands. ‘Out with it, whatever it is. Bad news?’
‘I’m honestly not sure.’
‘Something to do with Goma?’
‘Only indirectly.’ Mposi settled his hands on the table, unsure where to start. ‘What I’m about to disclose is a matter of the highest secrecy. It’s known to only a few people on Crucible, and I would be very glad if it remained that way.’
‘I’ll be sure not to mention it to my many hundreds of visitors.’
‘You do receive the occasional visitor. We went to a lot of trouble to allow you that luxury.’
‘Yes, and you never let me forget it.’
Her tone had been sharp, and perhaps she realised as much. She swallowed, creased her lips in immediate regret. In the silence that ensued, Mposi found his gaze wandering around the kitchen, taking in its blank, bare surfaces. It struck him that his sister had begun to turn her life into an exhibit of itself – a static tableau reduced to the uncluttered essentials. His own government had made her a prisoner, but Ndege herself was complicit in the exercise, happily discarding her remaining luxuries and concessions.
Somewhere in the house a clock ticked.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, finally. ‘I know you worked hard to help me. But being here on my own, knowing what the world thinks of me—’
‘We’ve picked up a signal.’
The oddness of this statement drew a frown from Ndege. ‘A what?’
‘A radio transmission – very faint, but clearly artificial – from a solar system tens of light-years away that no one from any of the settled systems is supposed to have reached or explored yet. Interestingly, the transmission’s strength definitely tailed off the further you moved from the system’s centre – meaning it was aimed at us, not broadcast in all directions. More than that: it appears to concern you.’
For the first time since his arrival he had at least a measure of her interest, guarded and provisional as it was.
‘Me?’
‘Quite unambiguous. It mentions your forename.’
‘There are lots of people called Ndege.’
‘Not lately there aren’t. It asked us to send you.
Send Ndege
, in Swahili. That’s the extent of the message. It began, continued repeating for a matter of hours, then shut off. We’re keeping an eye on that part of space, of course, but we’ve heard nothing since.’
‘Where?’
‘A system called Gliese 163, about seventy light-years from us. Someone or something there went to the trouble of lining up a radio transmitter and sending us this message.’
Ndege absorbed the information with the quiet concentration that was so thoroughly her own. Over a lifetime together, Mposi had learned to recognise their differences as well as their similarities. He was a speaker, a reactor, a man who needed to be constantly on the move, constantly engaged in this business or that. Ndege was the reflective one, the thinker, taking little for granted.
She opened the medical box, plucked out one of the hypodermic sprays and touched the device to the skin of her forearm.
‘The oxygen gets to me these days.’
‘I’m the same,’ he said. ‘It was hard in the early years of settlement, then for a long while I thought I had adapted – that I could live without medical assistance. But the blood carries a memory.’
She put the hypodermic back into the box, snapped the lid down and pushed the container aside.
‘So who sent this signal?’
‘We don’t know.’
The clock kept ticking. He studied Ndege, measuring her visible age against his own, wondering how much of her frailty was the direct result of time passing, of the physiological stress of adapting to a new planet, and how much the consequence of her imprisonment and public shaming. She was thinner in the face than Mposi, and there was still an asymmetry there from the minor stroke she had suffered three decades ago. Her hair was short, thin and white – she cut it herself, as far as he knew. Her skin was a map of old lesions and discolorations. She looked tremendously old to him, but there were also days when he caught a glimpse of his own reflection and stared back in startled affront, barely recognising his own face.
Then again, the light could shift, her expression could change, and she was his sister again, just as she had been during their brave young years aboard the holoship.
‘You think it might be our mother.’
Mposi gave the slightest of nods. ‘It’s a possibility, nothing more. We don’t know what became of the Trinity – Chiku, Eunice, Dakota.’
‘And you reckon they want me to go out there and meet them?’
‘So it would appear.’
‘Then it’s a shame no one told them I’m a decaying old crone under permanent house arrest.’
Mposi smiled sweetly, refusing to rise to the provocation. ‘I’ve always held that every problem is also an opportunity. You know of the two starships we’re building?’
‘They do let me look at the sky sometimes.’
‘Officially, their intended function – when they’re completed – is to expand our influence and trade connections to other systems. Unofficially, nothing is set in stone. Feelers have gone out concerning a possible expedition, using one of the two ships. Given the specific nature of the signal, there would be a certain logic to having you aboard.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘Then you understand less about politics than I thought. I’m a pariah, Mposi – hated by millions. They’ll have my head on a stick before they let me leave Guochang, let alone the system.’
‘For now, it’s all hypothetical. The expedition won’t be ready for four or five years even if we accelerate the preparations. But if you agree to join, and I work to make it look as if you’re offering yourself up for . . . I don’t know, the selfless betterment of Crucible, there could be an immediate improvement in the terms of your detention.’
‘Working on people’s opinions – you’re good at that.’
‘I have my uses. My point, though, is that even by agreeing in spirit, you would not be automatically obliged to go on the expedition itself. Any number of things might happen between now and then. We may run into problems with the ship, or lose the argument to reassign it. We may discover that the signal is a fluke. You may fail the medical criteria for skipover. You may even—’
‘Die.’
‘I was not going to put it in such blunt terms.’
‘I’ve had my share of adventures, brother. So have you. This is where mine brought me – locked up and hated.’
‘You made a single miscalculation.’
‘Which killed four hundred and seventeen thousand people. You reckon one act will atone for that?’
‘No, but I do believe you have already paid back more than your share. Think it over, Ndege. There’s no immediate rush.’
‘And am I allowed to discuss this with Goma?’
‘For now, I’d rather you didn’t. If and when the expedition becomes likely, certain aspects of it may be made public. But until then, let this remain between you and me. Brother and sister, sharing a great responsibility – the way it has always been.’
Her look was sympathetic but also slightly pitying. ‘You miss the old days.’
‘I try not to. It’s an old man’s habit, and I don’t very much enjoy being an old man.’
‘Would you go, if the opportunity came?’
‘They’d never allow it on medical grounds. I’m about ready to be pickled and stuffed into a jar.’
‘And I’m not?’
‘You forget, Ndege: they asked for you by name. That rather changes things.’
She gave a lopsided squint, her expression of puzzlement. ‘What do I have that you don’t? We grew up together. We’ve experienced the same things.’
Mposi scraped back his chair and stood with a click of knees and a little involuntary groan of effort. ‘The only way to find out, I suppose, would be to respond to the signal.’ He nodded at the package he had arrived with. ‘Eat that greenbread, while it’s still fresh.’
‘Thank you, brother.’
She rose from her chair and walked him to the door; they embraced and kissed each other lightly on the cheek, and then she was back inside and he was alone, outside the house.
He looked beyond the perimeter wall of her compound, out towards the greening domes and ellipsoids of this early district of Guochang, with the later structures rising rectangular and pale beyond. The sky had darkened with the onset of evening and now the rings were starting to become visible. Present during the day, too, but almost never seen except at night, they rose from one horizon, vaulted over the zenith and descended to the opposite horizon – a twinkling procession of countless tiny bright fragments, each following an independent orbit, but nonetheless organised into a complex banded flow. A spectacle that could be beautiful, even enchanting, if one were not aware of its true meaning.
The rings had not been present when people first reached Crucible. They were a scar – the lingering evidence of a single calamitous mistake. The error had been made with the noblest of intentions, but that did not render it any more forgivable. In those hot and heady days, when the laws of this new world were still being formulated, many were prepared to see Ndege executed.
Mposi had done well to keep his sister from the gallows. But he could do nothing about the sky.
The airstrip was within the compound but screened off from the elephants. After she landed and secured the old white aeroplane, Goma grabbed her things, climbed down and made her way to a heavy gate set into the four-metre-tall electrified fence. She opened the lock and pushed through into the separate enclosed area which held their study buildings and vehicles. Over the years the camp had expanded, but the core remained a group of closely set domes, linked together like a cloverleaf. She walked the short distance to the first of the domes, then ascended the metal stairs leading to the entrance. Her lace-up boots rattled on the openwork treads.
Inside, where the heat and humidity were kept at bay, Tomas lay on his preferred bunk bed. He was eating greenbread out of a paper bag and leafing through expensively printed research notes. He peered at her over the top of the pages, smiled cautiously.
‘Home is the hunter. How’d it go?’
‘As well as expected.’ Goma took off her sunglasses, stuffed them into a hip pocket. ‘They said my request was very well presented, case well made, expect our decision in the fullness of time.’
Tomas nodded sagely. ‘In other words, the same old brush-off.’
‘All we can do is keep trying. How are the numbers on Alpha herd?’
He pinched at the bridge of his nose and squinted at a column of figures, scribbled over in ink. ‘Down two on last season. Measurable impairment across a battery of variables, all significant at three sigma. I’ll run the results again, just to be sure, but I think we know how the curves are trending.’
‘Yes.’ She was about to tell him not to bother rerunning the analysis – the outcome would be the same, she was sure – but a tiny part of her hoped there might be a glimmer of good news buried somewhere in the numbers. ‘I came to speak to Ru.’
‘She’s with the elephants. Beta herd, I think – study area two. You look exhausted – want me to drive you out there?’
‘No, I’ll be fine – it’s Ru I worry about. Look, run those numbers again, will you? Isolate the Agrippa subgroup, too – if there’s a signal to be found, I don’t want it smothered by the noise.’
‘Will do. Oh, and well done – however well it went.’
‘Thanks,’ Goma said doubtfully.
Outside the dome, she took the second electric buggy, dumped her gear in the rear hopper, buckled herself into the driving seat and headed through the automatic gate in the secondary fence, into the main part of the sanctuary. She picked up speed, bouncing in her seat as the buggy followed a rough, undulating path. The sanctuary’s terrain ranged from level ground to gentle uplands, with areas of grassland and heavier tree cover. On Earth, an elephant population of the same size would have stripped the vegetation back to its roots, but Crucible’s plant life grew with astonishing vigour all year round. Without the elephants to hold it in check, this whole zone would have returned to thick forestation within a few years.