Poseidon's Wake (5 page)

When the door opened, Kanu had to stop himself toppling out. He had climbed up on the way in but now he chanced a jump, hingeing his legs to absorb the impact and trusting that the reduced gravity of Mars would spare him any injury. He hit the dirt and sprawled, nearly burying his visor in the soil. He grunted, gathered air into his lungs and pushed himself to his feet. He was still alive, and Korsakov was just vanishing into the belly of the flier. ‘I’m clear!’ he called. ‘But Swift is still coming through.’

Korsakov and the others would have heard something of the exchange between Kanu and the robot, even if its meaning were unclear. ‘Why did you allow—’

‘I didn’t!’

Kanu set about crossing the ground to the flier. It really was not very far, but after a dozen paces he felt compelled to turn back, anxious to see Swift appear in the open lock. He wanted Swift to be true to his word, to be the sincere and honest friend he had always believed in.

The ship blew up.

It was not a nuclear blast or metallic-hydrogen phase change; it was not the flare-up of a runaway Chibesa motor. It was not the swallowing whiteness of an unbound post-Chibesa process, the kind of catastrophic event that had destroyed entire holoships.

It was still an explosion.

The detonation tore through the ship about a third of the way up the exposed part of the vessel. Above the blast zone, the already leaning edifice started buckling over. Kanu had thought it on the verge of toppling before; now it was fulfilling that promise. Debris, flung in all directions by the detonation, began to rain down around Kanu.

‘Kanu!’ someone shouted.

‘Take the flier!’ someone shouted in return, and it was only when the words were out that he recognised his own voice.

Kanu started running, or what passed for running in the soft, slipping dust under his feet. In the distance, the flier was taking off. The boarding ramp was still lowered, dragging across the ground, and the flier was turning to meet him.

‘No, Garudi,’ Kanu called. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

Kanu glanced back again. A lengthening shadow loomed over him now. The wreck was coming down, bowing to meet him. He could see no sign of Swift, and with an exquisite clarity he knew he stood no chance of reaching the flier.

CHAPTER THREE

The seas were heavy, the boat’s rise and fall testing Mposi’s delicate constitution to its limits. For an Akinya, he had always been a poor traveller. Chai and greenbread and paperwork, four square walls and a horizon that stayed still – that was all he really wanted from life.

Even without the tracking device, it was not usually too hard to find Arethusa. They knew her haunts, her favoured latitudes and familiar places. The only large living thing anywhere in Crucible’s waters, she could be tracked using the ancient and venerable methods of submarine warfare. She gave off a mass signature and distorted the waters above her as she swam. Her songlike ruminations, when she talked to herself or recounted Chinese lullabies, sent an acoustic signature across thousands of kilometres. Networks of floating hydrophones triangulated her position to within what was normally a small volume. During times of heavy weather or seismic activity, though, she had stealth on her side.

Nonetheless, the merfolk had narrowed down her location, and swimming out from the hydrofoil they had finally sighted their quarry. But that was as close as the merfolk could get. They owed their very existence to Arethusa – she had been involved since the start of the Panspermian Initiative. Some obscure bad blood lay in their mutual past, however, and she would not deign to talk to them any more.

So Mposi had to swim alone. The merfolk fitted him into a powered swimsuit equipped with a breathing system and launched him into the darkening swell. He gave chase, and of course Arethusa indulged in her usual games, allowing him to come very near before swimming away faster than he could follow. She could keep this up until the cells in his suit ran out of energy.

But Mposi knew that curiosity would eventually prompt her to relent.

‘It’s me,’ he sent into the water ahead of himself, using the suit’s loudspeaker. ‘We need to talk. It’s nothing to do with the tracking device – I’ll never ask such a thing of you again. This is something else, and I need your advice.’

But it always paid to flatter Arethusa.

‘More than your advice,’ Mposi added. ‘Your wisdom. Your perspective on events. No one has your outlook, Arethusa, your breadth of experience or insight.’

It was hard to talk. The suit was powered, but it still required some effort to drive and coordinate his movements. His lungs burned, even when he turned up the oxygen flow in his mask. She would hear his weakness, he felt sure. She would hear it and mock him for it.

‘Something’s happened,’ Mposi carried on after he had swum a dozen more strokes. ‘A signal’s come in from a long way off. We don’t understand why it’s been sent to us, or what we should make of it. There’s a chance it has something to do with—’

‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’

She had answered, in her fashion, and his suit had picked up the emanations and converted them into natural Swahili. Arethusa did in fact speak Swahili, or at least she had been able to in the past. Lin Wei, the girl she had once been, had attended school in East Equatorial Africa.

Dolphin-torn, gong-tormented.

He was doing the one thing he had meant not to do – getting on her nerves.

But she slowed, allowing him to narrow the distance between them, and he was soon approaching her great fluked tail. His mask showed her body, two hundred metres away, as a whiskered oval. She had been two hundred metres long when she hurt him; now she had grown by a third as much again. Arethusa was the oldest sentient organism, as far as Mposi knew. But the cost of that sentience was an endless need to grow. To grow, and to move further and further from the epicentre of human affairs. The murmurings the hydrophone network picked up were increasingly strange, increasingly suggestive of a mind that had slipped its moorings.

And yet he would still risk all for an audience.

‘The signal,’ Mposi persisted, ‘was aimed at us, unidirectional. Low power, even allowing for the transmission distance – and while it repeated long enough for us to recover the content, it was only active for a short while. Doesn’t that interest you, Arethusa? I’ll tell you something else. The message mentioned Ndege. That’s a name you recognise. My sister, of course. Another Akinya. And while you might not be blood, our business is always your business.’

Arethusa had stopped in the water, so Mposi slowed his rate of approach, painfully conscious of what those flippers could do to him. Like a great spacecraft making a course adjustment, the whale turned gradually until Mposi was hovering just before her left eye. Scarcely any light now reached them, so Mposi was reliant on his goggles’ sonar overlay. He shivered, as he had shivered before, at the magnitude of her – and the very human scrutiny of her eye, looking at him from a cliff of grooved flesh.

‘I thought I killed you once, Mposi.’

‘You gave it a good try. The fault was mine, though. I understand there was nothing personal in it.’

‘Do you?’

As large as she was, she could move with surprising speed. He had allowed himself to enter her sphere of risk.

‘Gliese 163,’ he said. ‘That’s the name of the star in the other solar system. We know a little bit about it: Ocular data, a few later observations.’

‘No one has mentioned Ocular in a very long time.’

That was true, but Mposi had not made the reference thoughtlessly. The vast telescope had been Lin Wei’s brainchild, and she had seen it hobbled by Akinya interference. There was danger in bringing that up, he realised. But he was also seeking a direct connection to her past.

‘Eunice was your friend, before it all turned bad over Ocular. That’s true, isn’t it?’

‘You never knew her. What right have you to speak of her?’

‘None, except that I’m her great-great-great-grandson. And I think she may have some connection with the message.’

Arethusa’s flukes stirred, moving tonnes of water with each stroke. ‘You
think
?’

‘There hasn’t been time for any human ship to get that far out, and send a return transmission. But the Watchkeepers? We don’t know how they move or how fast they can travel. What we do know is that they took three of us with them – the Holy Trinity. Chiku Green, of course. Dakota. And the Eunice construct.’

‘The map is not the territory.’

‘I understand that the construct isn’t the same thing as your flesh-and-blood friend. But she was getting closer, becoming . . . what’s the word? When a curve meets a line? Asymptotic?’

‘Your point, Mposi?’

‘Someone has to go out there. We can’t just pretend this message never arrived. Someone went to the trouble to send it. The least we can do is respond.’

‘Just like that.’

‘We’re getting a ship ready. It’ll make the crossing, with some modifications. Wheels are turning. The expedition will happen – it’s just a question of who goes on it.’

‘You have your answer. Send Ndege.’

‘That’s the problem. My sister is very old.’

‘So are you.’

‘But I haven’t been wasting away under house arrest for more than a century. Aside from the political complications, there’s another headache. Ndege has one child, a daughter named Goma. She wishes to take her mother’s place.’

‘Either this Goma is very old herself, or Ndege was allowed conjugal visits.’

‘Neither. The child was conceived long before Ndege’s incarceration, but Ndege and her husband chose not to have their daughter until later in the colony’s settlement. They kept the fertilised egg in the facility in Guochang – it wasn’t an unusual arrangement in those days. But her husband died, and Ndege pushed herself into her work, and the Mandala event changed everything. For a long while afterwards she could not bring herself to consider the unborn child, but eventually she relented.’

‘Did you play some part in that, Mposi?’

‘I was concerned for my sister. The arrest was taking its toll on her and I felt that raising a daughter would be good for her soul.’

‘Soul. Listen to you.’

‘Soul, spirit, state of mind – whichever term you prefer. The point was, Goma gave Ndege something else to think about. The government allowed her to have the child and to raise her while remaining in detention. It was an odd upbringing for Goma, I’ll admit – very cloistered. But it did her no harm, and Ndege is still with us.’

‘And now this Goma becomes a thorn in your side.’

‘She wasn’t supposed to find out about any of this. But on the face of it, Goma is the better candidate – young and strong enough that there is no question she can endure the skipover interval. It means I won’t be sending Ndege to her almost certain death.’

‘Then your conscience can be clear. I do not see the difficulty.’

‘Goma’s safety is hardly guaranteed. She might survive the skipover, a hundred and forty years of it, but then what? What will she find around Gliese 163? For all we know it’s a trap of some sort – maybe a fatal one.’

‘It sounds like a very long-winded way of killing someone.’

‘That’s my hope.’

‘Then you must send Goma. She consents, and she is an Akinya. Why do you ask me?’

‘I want to know that I am doing the right thing. Regardless of whether I back Ndege or Goma, I’ll still be separating a mother from her daughter.’

‘You are an inveterate meddler, Mposi. Always have been, always will be. You Akinyas can never leave well enough alone, none of you. You meddled in Ocular, you meddled in human technological development, you meddled in the fates of elephants, you meddled in first contact, you meddled with Mandala. Is your sister’s happiness really any of your business? You didn’t cause her incarceration – she did, by being rash. And yet you made her bring a daughter into the world because you thought it was what she needed. And now you meddle again – mother, daughter, who shall you send? Whose life shall you cast to the winds?’

‘I’m just trying to do the right thing,’ Mposi protested.

‘You can’t. It’s not in you. The only thing you Akinyas can be relied on to do is make new mistakes, over and over. The more you try to do right, the worse your choices. You’re a corrupting influence. It’s what the universe made you to be.’

‘Is that really what you think of us?’

‘Give me a reason to form a different opinion. Give me a reason to think there’s a single one of you who doesn’t have their eye on the main chance. Even you, Mposi.’

‘I didn’t ask to be placed in this position. If Goma insists on taking her mother’s place and has a better chance of surviving the trip, who am I to stand in her way?’ But then a sudden, shivering insight overcame him. If Arethusa wished to doubt his good intentions, his hopelessness in the face of an impossible choice, he would give her pause for thought. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, simply and quietly, as if it were the smallest thing.

‘In her place?’

‘No. I’m not much stronger than Ndege, and besides – I’m not her daughter. But I can be there for her.’

‘Brave intentions, Mposi. I know what this world has come to mean to you. But you won’t stand by these words. The moment you’re out of the water, out of my presence, you’ll pretend they were never spoken.’

‘I won’t. I’ll talk to the doctors. They’ll find me fit enough. I’m swimming with a sea-monster, aren’t I?’

‘Be careful with your words.’

‘And you be careful who you doubt, Arethusa. I came to you for your wisdom, not your scorn. You’re wrong about us, especially Goma, and especially me, and I mean every word I just said.’

‘Go on, then, Mposi Akinya.’ She uttered his name with sneering condescension. ‘Prove me wrong about you and your kind. I’ll be here, waiting to hear what becomes of you.’

‘If you’re still sane by the time we get back, I’ll be glad to tell you. But frankly I have low expectations.’

He turned from her without another word, thinking of the boat and the dry and distant sanctuary of Guochang.

Ndege had prepared chai for the two of them. She took a sip, pursed her lips in a habit of familiar distaste. Ndege, who had been born on
Zanzibar
, maintained that boiled water always tasted wrong on Crucible. Goma had learned to humour her, but the fact was that sooner or later water tasted like water. How long had her mother been on Crucible, that she could not learn to like the taste of it?

‘He’s a fool.’

‘But a fool with the medical authorisation to do whatever he wants. Anyway, you shouldn’t speak ill of your brother.’

‘He’s still a fool.’

‘He’s only doing this out of some misguided sense of obligation.’ Goma worked at her own tea. ‘Since I’m going in your place and he can’t do anything about it, he feels he has to be there to take care of me. I can’t blame him for that. He’s wrong, of course – I don’t need him looking over my shoulder – but I can’t begrudge him the adventure.’

‘No good will come of it.’

‘Then you try arguing him out of it.’

‘Not much chance of that, Mposi’s like an asteroid – once he’s set on a course, there’s not much to be done.’

‘If only we could swap Ru for Mposi, both our problems would be solved. How are things with Ru, by the way?’

Goma studied her mother’s face, searching for clues as to the intent behind the question. There were lots of new lines lately, complicating the map.

‘Nothing’s changed. I’d have told you if something had.’

‘But you still speak to each other?’

‘We’re colleagues. We work on the same project. It would be difficult not to speak.’

‘I mean as wife and wife.’

‘What do you want me to say – that it’s all fine between us?’

‘It looked like it was, to begin with. You said Ru was accepting of your decision.’

‘Maybe she was, at first.’

‘So what changed?’

Goma worked at her chai. She thought, for a second, of finishing it in a gulp and storming out. Her mother had requested – no, demanded – this meeting. It had come at an awkward time and Goma had struggled to alter her plans to accommodate it. She assumed Ndege had something more important on her mind than rubbing salt into recent wounds.

‘Ru was just deluding herself, that’s all. Can we talk about something else?’

‘I’d rather we talked about Ru.’