Poseidon's Wake (3 page)

‘I bet you could still find room for Ru.’

Mposi could hardly believe his ears. ‘You’ve spoken to her as well?’

‘Out of respect for your secret, no. In fact, I haven’t spoken about it to anyone except Ndege. Does that make you happier?’

‘Marginally.’

‘But I will put it to Ru. She’ll feel the same way about Dakota. We lost the Tantors, Mposi. We lost the most beautiful, surprising thing ever to happen to us as a species. New friends – new companions. And we let them die. That’s all Ru and I have ever done – chart the decline, the tailing-off of their intelligence. But now we have a chance to recontact one of the original Tantors, or at least her offspring. Even if all we recovered was fresh genetic material, that would give us something new. Ru knows that, too. She’ll want to come with me.’

‘Does Ndege know of your intentions?’

‘I told her I’d speak to you about it.’

‘And did she approve? No – you don’t need to answer that. Ndege would try to protect you just as you’re trying to protect her. She wouldn’t want you to leave.’

‘Ultimately, though, the choice would be yours, uncle. Commit your sister to something she won’t survive, or take a chance on your niece?’

‘When you put it like that, it sounds so simple.’

‘That’s because it is. Agree to my being on that ship, uncle.’

He felt himself on the brink of consenting. But he would not – could not – allow the decision to be made in haste. Too much was at stake. It was vastly more complicated than Goma understood.

‘I wished to do something good for your mother.’

‘You still can. That ship won’t be ready for a while, will it?’

He sighed, seeing where this was heading. ‘Another five years, so I’m told.’

‘Then that’s five years in which you can make things easier for Ndege. Are you ever going public with this?’

‘Some sort of limited disclosure will be required once it’s clear we’ve altered our plans for one of the ships. A year or two from now, perhaps.’

‘Then you can tell the world that Ndege has volunteered for the mission. Let her have that moment. Only the three of us need know that she won’t be going.’

‘It would be more than three of us. Your medical suitability for skipover would need to be assessed. There are no guarantees.’

‘I’m still more likely to cope with it than my mother.’

‘You place me in an unfortunate position.’

‘Then I’m glad you understand how it feels. Put me on the expedition and reserve a space for Ru. I won’t ask again, uncle. And my words earlier?’

‘Yes?’

‘They weren’t a threat. But if you want to think of it as a robust bargaining position, be my guest.’

He smiled fondly, simultaneously proud and a little terrified. ‘You were wasted on science, Goma. We could have made a fine politician of you.’

CHAPTER TWO

In the early spring of the northern hemisphere of Occupied Mars, in the year 2640, on the evening of the day before he died, Kanu Akinya stood at a tall fretted window with his back to Swift. He had his hands behind him but not quite clasped, a slim-stemmed goblet dangling loosely from his fine-webbed fingers. It had been years since he was a true merman, but his anatomy retained traces of that phase of his life. Muscles corded his mountainous neck; his shoulders had a swimmer’s top-heavy broadness. Kanu’s mouth was small, his nose flat, his eyes large and expressive, optimised for light-gathering in conditions of low visibility. Grey now, he still wore his hair long, gathered into a pleated tail that hung halfway down his back.

‘Your move,’ Swift reminded him.

Kanu had been watching the sunset. The sky at his eye level was an extremely deep blue, virtually black at the zenith, shading to purple and then salmon pink as his gaze tracked down to the horizon. This ancient volcanic summit had been the obvious location for the embassy: the closest point to space, and the furthest from the confusion and danger of the forbidden surface.

‘My apologies,’ he said, turning from the window.

Kanu resumed his position at the table facing Swift and set his goblet next to the board. They were playing chess, that most ancient of African games.

‘Troubled?’ Swift asked.

‘Thinking about my brother, actually. Wondering if it wouldn’t hurt the universe for us to swap places, just for a year or two.’

‘Your brother is twenty-nine light-years away. Also, technically speaking, he is not your brother.’

‘Half-brother, then.’

‘Not even that. Your mother died on Earth. Mposi’s mother may or may not be dead, although the balance of probability points in that direction. I’m sorry to belabour these unfortunate facts, Kanu, but I have difficulty enough understanding human affairs without you complicating things.’

‘I’m sorry it’s not simple enough for machine comprehension. I’ll make a note of that for future reference.’

‘Pray do so, your memory being as fallible as it is.’

Swift had adopted scrupulously human anatomy and dress for the purposes of diplomatic relations, his face, outfit and bearing approximating those of a young man of learning of the late eighteenth century. He favoured a frock coat, a white scarf around his neck and pince-nez glasses through which he was inclined to peer with his chin cocked at a high, imperious angle. A head of thick, boyish curls was combed and oiled into some sort of submission.

After a moment, while Kanu continued staring at the board, Swift added, ‘Seriously, though – you would swap places with Mposi, if that were an option?’

‘Why wouldn’t I? A backwater colony, a modest but growing economy, easy relations between humans and machines . . . no Consolidation breathing down my neck, no great concerns about the Watchkeepers. I bet Mposi even has a room with a view.’

‘I feel obligated to point out that it’s easy to maintain cordial relations between humans and machines when there are hardly any machines. Are you planning to make that move, incidentally, or would you like a few more months to think about it?’

Kanu had evaluated his narrowing options and was about to move his piece. But as he raised his hand towards the board, a chime sounded from across the room.

‘I’d better take that.’

‘If it helps delay the inevitable, be my guest.’

Kanu rose from his chair, walked to the console and angled its screen to address his standing form. The face of Garudi Dalal, one of his three human colleagues on Olympus Mons, appeared before him.

‘Garudi. I’m late for dinner, I know. I’ll be on my way up shortly.’

‘It’s not about dinner, Kanu. I take it you haven’t heard the news?’

‘That Swift is terrible at chess?’

But the normally amiable Dalal – his best friend among the other humans – did not respond in kind. Her face was grave. ‘There’s been a development in the last few minutes.’

‘That sounds ominous.’

‘It may well be. Something’s come in. Slipped right through interdiction.’

Kanu glanced at Swift again. Technically, this information was confidential, a communication between ambassadors. But if something had happened close to Mars or on it, Swift would not be ignorant of it for long.

‘Normally we worry about things
leaving
Mars.’

‘Not this time. It’s a supply shuttle, inbound from Jupiter. Semi-autonomous. Sometimes they put a crew inside, but not for this run. It wouldn’t have got close to us except it was scheduled to dock with one of the fortresses. Approach clearances all checked out. Then at the last minute it veered off and slipped into the atmosphere.’

‘In which case there won’t be much left of it. Do we have an impact point yet?’

‘I’m afraid,’ Swift said, rising from his chair to stand behind him, ‘that you have rather more than an impact point.’

Kanu turned to his friend. ‘What do you know?’

‘The news has just reached me – by somewhat different channels, of course – the ship made it down.’ Swift directed his own face to the screen. ‘Good evening, by the way, Ambassador Dalal.’

Dalal acknowledged Swift with a nod but did not reciprocate the verbal greeting.

‘Swift’s right. Most of it’s still in one piece. The guns hit part of it, and then the atmospheric friction did some more damage, but that’s when things got strange.’

‘Strange? In what way?’ Kanu said.

‘It slowed down. Used thrust after it was in the atmosphere. By the time it hit the surface it was hardly moving at all.’

‘Sounds like a deliberate attempt to land.’

‘That’s the theory,’ she said. ‘Reclamationist sabotage, maybe. If they intercepted and boarded it somewhere between here and Jupiter . . . ’

‘Do you think Reclamationists were inside it?’

Dalal gave a weary shrug. ‘Who knows. What I
do
know is that someone’s going to have to find out, even if all they end up doing is recovering corpses. I’m convening the others to discuss how we handle this.’

Kanu nodded – she shared exactly her misgivings over the whole business. ‘Let Korsakov and Lucien know I’m on my way. So where did it come down? Please say it was the other side of Mars, that this doesn’t have to be our problem.’

‘I’m afraid it’s just within range of a flier.’

Kanu closed the console and returned to the chessboard. He moved his piece, setting it down with a decisive
clack
.

‘More fool me.’

Swift looked puzzled. ‘For what?’

‘Hoping for some drama in my life. This is what you get.’

It was always cold on the landing deck. The dome at the top of the embassy was sealed, the air pressurised to a breathable norm, but it never got warm enough to be comfortable. This was the literal summit of the human presence on Mars – the embassy rising like a small pinnacle of its own from the monstrous upwelling of Olympus Mons.

In the cold it was easy to believe that space was a hop and a skip away.

‘Garudi tells me you allowed Swift to eavesdrop on her conversation yesterday,’ said Korsakov, standing next to Kanu, the two of them with their helmets tucked under their arms.

‘Swift knew about it before we did.’

‘Nonetheless, Kanu. It’s hardly protocol, is it?’ Korsakov spoke slowly, as if each word needed consideration and that the patience of his listeners could be expected. ‘What is it about that one, exactly? What do you see in
that
machine, compared to the others?’

‘I enjoy Swift’s company. Anyway, why do I have to explain myself? Isn’t that what we’re here for – to communicate with them?’

‘Communication is fine,’ Korsakov said, his fine grey eyes surveying Kanu from beneath an imperious brow, surmounted by a sweep of long grey hair which he wore combed back. ‘But it can’t be more than that. These machines stole Mars from us. It was
our
world,
our
inheritance, and they tore it from our control.’

The flier, powered up and ready, was turning on a platform after being serviced.

‘I’m broadly aware of recent history, Yevgeny.’

The tall, stooping Korsakov began: ‘I can’t speak for the United Aquatic Nations—’

‘Then don’t.’

‘But
your people
have an expectation, Kanu. A tacit understanding that your sympathies, when put to the test, will always fall on the human side of the equation.’

‘Is anyone saying they don’t?’

‘The robot is using you, Kanu. Machines don’t understand friendship. This is leverage, pure and simple.’

Kanu was glad when the other two ambassadors arrived at the landing deck. They were also wearing surface suits, although their outfits hinted at their differing allegiances within the solar system. Kanu wore a blue-green suit pattened with starfish, their arms linked together in a kind of synaptic net. Korsakov, who stood for the United Orbital Nations, wore regolith grey, embossed with a representation of craters. Dalal, the representative for the United Surface Nations, carried the motif of a single tree, its branches hung with birds and fruit.

Lucien, the recently appointed ambassador for the Consolidation – everything out to the Oort Cloud that was not Earth, the Moon or Mars – wore a suit threaded with a ripple-like design of complex interlocking orbits.

‘Swift will be joining us?’ Dalal asked of Kanu.

‘Yes. He should be here in a moment.’

‘I don’t care for this arrangement,’ Lucien confessed. ‘We should be free to conduct our inspection without having a robot along for the ride.’

‘It’s what’s been agreed,’ Kanu answered, just as Swift appeared from a door leading onto the deck. ‘Transparency. Cooperation. It’s bound to help.’

‘Them, or us?’ Korsakov muttered, stooping to avoid scraping his head on the underside of the vehicle.

Once the flier was sealed, the air was pumped out of the deck and the dome opened to the sky. The passengers took lounge seats and tucked their helmets between their feet. By consent Garudi Dalal took the controls. She vectored them east, maintaining altitude at the agreed value. In the cabin, a soft automatic voice reeled off indices of airspeed, temperature and pressure. Kanu turned around in his lounge seat to view the receeding spire of the embassy, the dome clam-shelling tight once they were gone.

The embassy was a dark fluted spire with broad, rootlike foundations. It corkscrewed a kilometre and a half from the summit of Olympus Mons, a unicorn’s horn jammed into Mars. With the four ambassadors now aboard the flier, the place was completely devoid of human inhabitation. In fact, since the ambassadors were in the sky, there was now no human presence on the surface of Mars at all.

They had been under way for an hour when Dalal raised her voice, though without any particular urgency. ‘Something coming up. Three envoys, standard approach formation.’

Korsakov moved to look over her shoulder, studying the console displays. ‘Weapons readiness?’

‘Nominal,’ Dalal answered.

The flier itself carried no armaments – that would have been an express violation of the terms of the embassy settlement – but they were under constant surveillance and cover from the orbital fortresses. Kanu had been expecting the escorts, though. They were a normal feature of their occasional inspection flights.

‘They won’t harm us,’ he said. ‘Not with Swift as a hostage.’

Swift looked affronted. ‘I trust that is meant as a joke.’

‘You’d make a very poor hostage given what you’ve always told me about your massively distributed nature.’

Swift touched a hand to his frock-coated chest. ‘I am still very attached to this body. It would be a nuisance to have to make a new one.’

Korsakov scowled in annoyance.

The three flying things were smaller than the ambassadorial vehicle, each a bronze ellipsoid with blue and red lights glowing through from within. How they flew was open to conjecture. Once, humans would have harvested their technological cleverness for profit, but those days were long behind them. The three machines enclosed the flier in a triangular formation.

‘You are free to descend,’ Swift said.

Dalal took them down to an altitude of only two kilometres above the mean surface level, close enough that the robots’ workings were in plain view. At periodic intervals, the machines had built towering diamond-faceted citadels on the face of Mars. They studded the surface like anthills, beehives or ice-cream cornets. They were huge, candy-coloured, aglow with secret purpose. Tentacular tubes linked them, hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometres long. Glowing corpuscular things shot along these tubes, or occasionally moved through the air between the citadels.

Undoubtedly there was much more going on beneath the crust, beyond the easy scrutiny of orbital sensors.

‘Coming up on the impact site,’ Dalal announced. ‘Twenty kilometres dead ahead. Visual on it now. Dropping speed to minimum. Swift – please remind your friends of our agreed intentions?’

‘All is in hand,’ Swift said.

Still accompanied by their machine escort, the ambassadors made a slow approach to the object of their interest. It was bigger than Kanu had expected – skyscraper-sized. An ugly squared-off thing never designed to move through air, it resembled a grey metal filing cabinet and was jammed into a sand dune like a surrealist art installation. He thought of his grandmother’s sculptures, and wondered whether Sunday would have appreciated the comparison.

‘An hour is an insult,’ Korsakov said, tapping life-support instructions into his suit cuff.

‘We’ll make the best of it,’ Kanu answered.

‘Always the optimist, merman.’

‘I try, Yevgeny. There are worse habits.’

They could not land on or dock with the tilted, damaged wreck, but orbital surveillance had identified a possible entrance just above the point where the ship met the ground. It was a tiny airlock, but it would have to suffice. They circled once, verifying that the lock was as it had appeared from space, and then settled down about fifty metres from the wreck.

All in hand, as Swift had said.

When the flier was down, Dalal pumped the air out of the cockpit and lowered the boarding ramp. Korsakov and Lucien were the first to exit, followed by Kanu, then Swift – Swift, of course, had no need of a spacesuit – and finally Dalal, once she had secured the flier. The ramp folded up behind her, but the little vehicle was ready and waiting for their return.