Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER TWELVE

Kanu was unsettled. While Nissa slept, her ship operating itself, he made his way from window to window, pausing at each to survey his reflection — the cabin lights were dim but not totally off — and attempt to convince himself that he had not begun to slip into madness. What he saw in the reflection was the face of a profoundly troubled man with a desperate, searching stare in his eyes — as if the face in the glass expected answers of him, the man least capable of giving them.

He thought about what happened to him on Mars and everything he had been through since — the deaths of his colleagues, his own recuperation, the end of his political career. It would have been odd if he did not look troubled, like a man cast adrift from every certainty. But there was more to it than that, and as much as he tried to rationalise, he could not find a way to explain what he had dreamed. He had not known the name of her ship until she told him. So how was it possible that it had been prefigured during his dreams on Mars, when he never had the slightest intention of recontacting Nissa Mbaye?

Coincidence, he tried telling himself. His dreams had contained a set of random symbols, the senseless output of his subconscious mind, and by chance they gained an uncanny significance now that he knew the name of her ship. Had the name been different, he would never have returned to the content of those dreams — of him and Swift playing chess in heaving seas.

But that explanation was not sufficient. He felt that the symbolic connection was significant — a true portent of what was to come. Since he did not believe in precognition, that left an even less-palatable possibility: he must have known about Nissa’s ship somehow before he even left Mars.

And yet he had no recollection of thinking about her — and certainly no foreknowledge of her ship’s name. Could he have been thinking of Nissa, and her ship, and somehow misplaced the memory?

He thought back to Lisbon, to that moment of surprise when he recognised first her voice, and then her face. That memory was much closer to the present than his confused and episodic recollections of Mars. He could still see the sunlight in the gallery, the faces of the students gathered around Nissa, the strokes of their sketches. He could bring to mind the exact texture of the pastries they had shared in the upstairs café, when they had got over the shock of meeting. The shock had been genuine — he had faked none of it.

But something did not tally.

There was still the odd coincidence of their meeting in the first place. Life threw up its share of chance encounters, that was true. But to suddenly take an interest in his grandmother’s art and almost immediately stumble upon his ex-wife at the first exhibition he visited? He had been ready to put it down to caprice until now, but was it possible that their meeting had been intentional all along?

Kanu tore himself away from the reflection. None of this was helping. It was just sending his thoughts down ever-tightening spirals of paranoia and self-doubt. He had to trust himself. There had been no ulterior motive on his part.

He was sure of that.

His movements stirred Nissa. He was trying to be as quiet as he could, but it was her ship and her sleeping senses must have been acutely attuned to the presence of another human being.

‘What is it?’ she asked, laying a soft hand on his cheek. ‘You’re sweating like you’re running a fever. Shall I turn down the cabin temperature?’

‘I don’t think it’s that.’

‘Something’s bothering you. Bad dreams? No one’s going to blame you for having flashbacks, Kanu — not after what happened.’

‘I’m all right.’

They went up front. Nissa made warm chocolate for them both and insisted Kanu clear his head before returning to bed. She put on some music — an early recording by Toumani Diabaté, which she knew happened to be one of Kanu’s favourites. With the cabin lights back up to full strength, the readouts and navigational displays a riot of bright colours and symbols, and the reassuring chime-like cadences of the music, he started to feel the phantasms releasing their hold. He was just rattled, that was all. If anyone had a right to be, he did.

‘We should go back to Lisbon,’ Nissa said.

‘Now?’

‘I mean when we’re done with all this.’

‘I thought you were fed up with the place, after the exhibition.’

‘I’ll admit to being fed up with the routine of teaching those students, but it’d take more than that to put me off Lisbon.’

‘I like it there, too. It’s almost a second home to Akinyas.’

They made small talk, Nissa very deliberately steering the conversation away from anything directly connected to Mars or Kanu’s recent experiences. They spoke of favoured cafés, restaurants, the property prices in various quarters, the wisdom or otherwise of renting, all the while speeding through the solar system aboard a clever little dart of a spaceship, inside a bubble of six-hundred-year-old music.

Kanu felt some sort of ease. He wondered if she had slipped a mild barbiturate into the chocolate. Perhaps.

But when his dreams came again, they were no better.

He was in a white room, flat on his back on an operating table. He knew this because he was looking at his own body from the outside, seeing his own mangled form spread out on the sterile surface of the ellipse-shaped table. Surrounding the table, almost encasing it, was an array of surgical devices. They were also white, clearly medical, but their individual functions were unclear to him. Some of them were hinged or bent over, holding curved parts to his ruined body or pushing other parts of themselves through his flesh, or into the open horrors of still-raw wounds. The machines moved with deliberation. There was urgency, but not haste. They sucked at the wounds and he heard the occasional crack or flash of some cauterising process. Around the room, on the walls, diagrams of human anatomy flickered past at almost dizzying speed. They were black and white, drawn in ink, annotated with handwritten Latin.

Beyond this encirclement were more machines, all different shapes and sizes. There were pipes and tubes, white on white. Still another rank of machines stood behind the second, androform but otherwise featureless. They resembled snowmen, except thinner in proportion. Kanu sensed that his point of view must originate with one of these standing figures. He was among them, looking back at his own body.

He had never enquired too deeply of Swift as to the exact severity of his injuries, and when the human medics finally got their chance to look him over, it was hard for them to be sure how badly he had been hurt. In places, the traces of the robots’ surgery was easily discernible. In others, there was only the faintest hint that he had been worked on at all.

But Kanu could see himself now, and the human remains on that operating table made him want to scream. It had been worse, far worse, than even his gravest imaginings.

A voice said: ‘Threshold of consciousness.’

Another: ‘Inhibit commissural traffic.’

A third: ‘Inhibiting.’

The second: ‘He must not wake until completion.’

The second, he realised, was himself. And it was not language he was speaking, at least not in human terms, but rather a rapid exchange of symbols which served the same communicational function.

Threshold of consciousness. Not long now, and then he would be well again — or at least well enough to be spoken to in the human manner.

He glanced down at his white forearm. The blank material of his anatomy gained texture, form and colour. It became fabric and flesh — a hand and a sleeve, the garb of a man of learning of the late eighteenth century.

‘There’s something wrong with me,’ Kanu told Nissa when they were sharing breakfast, spooning grapefruit out of a bowl, the engines throttled back to a gee while they ate.

‘A few bad dreams? I think you’re allowed.’

‘It’s more than just bad dreams. Ever since I returned from Mars, nothing’s been quite right. I thought I was fine to begin with, but I was deluding myself. I feel on edge, not quite in tune with things. Have you ever had déjà vu?’

‘Once, but I had the oddest feeling it had happened to me before. Sorry — I can see you’re bothered by something.’

‘I don’t know what it is. It’s been worse since Tangiers. A sort of continuous feeling of… dread, dislocation, premonition.’

‘Premonition? Are you serious?’

‘Perfectly. And then there are these dreams. I’m not one to attach significance to such things, Nissa, but when a dream of mine appeared to prefigure the name of this ship? That was bad enough, and I can’t easily rationalise it away. But now I’ve started getting flashbacks to when I was injured.’

‘You were more than injured, Kanu. How can you have flashbacks to being dead?’

‘I don’t know. Except they’re vivid, detailed, and I’m not watching from my body’s point of view. I’m seeing myself being repaired — with machines standing around debating my state of consciousness. I’ve had nightmares but never like that. I’ve never seen myself from outside, a barely conscious thing on a slab.’

‘All right — I can understand why you’re bothered. Who wouldn’t be, by something like that? But it’s still just dreams.’

‘I’m worried they’re symptomatic. That sense of not being in my own body — maybe it’s telling me there’s something wrong in my brain’s wiring? That some core sense of my own identity isn’t quite working the way it should?’

‘The odd thing would be if you didn’t feel a little strange, given everything you went through. You lost friends and colleagues on Mars; you lost your vocation and the trust of people who matter to you. It’s no wonder if something’s snapped, Kanu — you wouldn’t be human otherwise. When I met you in Lisbon—’

‘I’m glad you mentioned Lisbon. We bumped into each other by coincidence. How is that not supposed to make me feel a little strange?’

‘Coincidences happen all the time. You took a late interest in your grandmother’s art and I’m one of her highest-profile scholars — our paths were on a collision course.’

‘When we were married, did I ever show much interest in Sunday’s work?’

‘People change. Especially after something bad happens to them.’

Kanu was silent. He wanted to accept this version of events, the smooth plausibility of this offered narrative.

‘I hope that’s the answer.’

‘The more you dwell on it, the stranger you’re going to feel. You think too much, merman.’

‘Fine words coming from you.’

‘I’m not the one twisting myself in knots with introspection and self-doubt. Look, an adventure will do you good. We’re going to Europa! We have Consolidation authorisation to land on the ice and attempt contact with the Regals! How can that not stir the soul? Surrender to it, Kanu. Let some fun into your life.’

He smiled meekly, though she had done nothing to assuage his doubts. ‘I’ll try.’

Nissa tidied the breakfast bowl away. ‘I was going to notch up the engines but we can leave them for a little while. You need something to take your mind off yourself.’

The transmission came in on a routine civilian frequency and encryption protocol — nothing about it to suggest the slightest diplomatic connotation. It was aimed at Fall of Night, but beyond that contained no clue as to its origin or purpose.

Nissa accepted it, expecting it to be from a friend or colleague, perhaps concerning some aspect of her ongoing curatorial work. Instead, she was confronted by a man she did not know but who carried the automatic assumption of authority that only came from high office. He was as grey and grave as a statue, and looked worn away, somehow, as if he had been left out in the weather.

‘I am Yevgeny Korsakov,’ the man explained, belabouring the syllables of his name, when Nissa established a two-way send. ‘I was a friend… a colleague… of Kanu Akinya. We were both on Mars — both of us hurt in the terrorist incident. I wanted to see how he was doing,’

Nissa explained the request to Kanu while her response — that Kanu was indeed with her — was crawling its way back to the sender.

‘Did I do the right thing? He said he knew you on Mars.’

‘He did,’ Kanu said, struck by an apprehension he could not quite pin down. ‘He was also largely responsible for the end of my career.’

‘I think your accident had a lot to do with that.’

‘Maybe, but Korsakov was the first to argue that I’d been tainted by my experiences. Of all of them, why did he have to survive?’ But the uncharitable nature of this sentiment left a sour taste in his mouth. Dalal, Lucien… they deserved better from him. ‘I’m sorry — you were right to answer the call, and you can be sure Korsakov knew I was here whether you confirmed it or not.’

‘Do you hate him?’ Nissa asked.

‘He’s not a bad man, it’s just that we were on opposite sides of the fence. Never really saw eye to eye.’

‘He sounded concerned.’

‘That’s what concerns me.’

But when Korsakov spoke to Kanu directly, he appeared genuine enough. ‘I hope I did not violate your privacy by tracing you to Nissa Mbaye’s ship,’ the man said. ‘It was easily done, all public information — Nissa had to name you as a passenger in her flight plan, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Kanu whispered in return, although the words would form no part of his actual reply.

‘I am very glad to see you getting on with your life, Kanu. After Mars, we feared the worst. It was one thing to know you had survived, been repaired by the robots… but to regain your spirit, your sense of life? That was by no means guaranteed. I heard about your kindness to the Dalal family. In truth, I expected you to spend more time on Earth. I would have thought you’d had enough of space travel.’

Kanu smiled tightly as he formulated his response. ‘Thank you, Yevgeny. It’s good to see your face again, and to know you are well. I’m touched by your concern. As for the Dalals, it was the least I could do. I see from your time lag that you’re on the Moon. I must come and visit sometime. It would be good to catch up.’

He hoped that might be the end of it, but Korsakov was not quite done with him.

‘Of course you would be welcome on the Moon — indeed, anywhere in UON sovereign space. Your flight plan tells me that you have business in Europa — quite unusual, if you do not mind my saying. Very difficult to arrange those permissions. Might I ask the nature of your business there?’

‘Art,’ Kanu replied, as succinctly as he dared. Then he smiled again. ‘Well, Yevgeny — it’s very kind of you to track me down. And I’ll be sure to get in touch when I return.’

‘I have my eye on you now,’ Korsakov said, in tones that sounded friendly enough. ‘No escaping your old friend, Kanu.’

When it was over, Nissa floated opposite him, cross-legged. ‘What was all that about?’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘Why would he care what you’re up to now? If he’s the one who had you kicked out of the diplomatic service, hasn’t he already got what he wanted?’

‘I don’t think Yevgeny is completely satisfied with my behaviour.’

‘What business is it of his?’

‘I’ve no idea. It’s very odd.’

‘Well, here’s something else that’s odd. Did you say he was transmitting from the Moon?’

Kanu nodded. ‘He never said as much, but the time lag fitted. Why — did you get a better fix?’

‘Fall of Night’s cleverer than he assumed. That time lag was a spoof. He was bouncing the signal through a dozen mirrors, but I could still back-track to its real point of origin. It’s a ship, a Consolidation enforcement vehicle, and it’s much closer than the Moon.’

‘That makes no sense at all. Yevgeny was the ambassador for the United Orbital Nations, not the Consolidation.’

‘In which case, apparently you’re not the only one starting a new chapter.’

Beyond the orbit of Mars they passed within visual range of a Watchkeeper. Kanu wondered if Nissa had bent their course to make it possible, seeking the thrill of a close encounter, something to take their minds off the puzzle of the Consolidation ship — even his own mind off his troubled dreams.

‘The moratorium is stupid,’ she was saying. ‘Look at the size of that thing, the power it must contain. If the Watchkeepers didn’t want us to be flying around in spaceships, does anyone think we’d still be able to?’

‘They make people nervous,’ Kanu said as Fall of Night’s cameras relayed an increasingly sharp image of the alien machine. ‘Perhaps it’s sensible not to do anything too provocative until we have a better idea of their intentions.’

‘Maybe they don’t have any intentions — maybe they’re just going to sit in our solar system like rocks until we bore ourselves to death waiting for them to do something.’

The Watchkeeper was a thousand-kilometre-long pine cone, interlaced and overlapping black facets wrapped around a core of glowing blue mystery. There were eleven Watchkeepers in the solar system now; some of them in orbit around planets, others floating in free space. Occasionally they moved, changing orientation or position. They swung like weathercocks and slid from orbit to orbit in mute defiance of parochial human physics. Occasionally a beam of blue light would pass from one Watchkeeper to another, or stab out of the solar system entirely.

They had communicated not the slightest thing to any of the human powers. What they wanted, what they would permit, what was forbidden, remained within the realm of increasingly fraught speculation. It was clear only that they were here for something — observation, perhaps, or a reckoning, which lay at some point in the future.

Kanu was glad when their course began to take them further from the Watchkeeper.

‘It never hurts to give them a wide margin,’ he said, feeling he needed to defend his qualms.

‘Did your friends on Mars feel the same way?’

‘My friends on Mars were three human beings, two of whom are dead now — and you’ve met the other one.’ But that was a harsher answer than her innocent question merited. ‘I had good relations with the machines through Swift. It was exactly that good relationship that Yevgeny Korsakov disapproved of — he felt it was tantamount to treason against my own species.’

‘Extreme. But given that we know so little about the Martian robots — who can say what they’re really up to? How can we be sure they’re not in secret cahoots with the Watchkeepers, plotting our downfall?’

‘Believe me, it’s not like that at all. I spent enough time with Swift and the other machines to know how they feel about the Watchkeepers, and the truth is they’re as in the dark as the rest of us. They don’t feel some distant kinship with the Watchkeepers. They’re as alien and frightening to the Evolvarium as they are to us.’

‘You think.’

‘You have a great many genes in common with an oak tree. Do you feel an intense kinship with oak trees?’

‘They’re both robots, Kanu. Try seeing things from our perspective for a while, not theirs.’

That was as close to arguing as they got. It was only four days from Earth to Jupiter space, hardly enough time to start getting on each other’s nerves. Fall of Night was certainly not large, but the provision of two cabins meant there was more than enough privacy available to keep irritation at bay.

After their breakfast discussion, Kanu had been careful not to raise the matter of his disquiet again. It was better that way. He allowed her to believe she had settled his misgivings, putting them down to the unpleasantness of his recent experience on Mars. And, indeed, Kanu was ready to concede that a component of his feelings could be explained away as a kind of post-traumatic episode. But he knew there was more to it than that.

On the third day, twenty-four hours from Jupiter, he was alone in his cabin when he became unaccountably certain he was being watched; that he was sharing the room with a silent observer. Out of reflex he twitched around, and for an instant he was convinced he had seen something, a figure or the shadow of a figure, out of the corner of his eye.

In any other situation he would have gladly put the matter behind him. But it was just Kanu and Nissa and her little spaceship, and there was nothing between them and another human being except millions of kilometres of vacuum. Nissa aside, he was more alone here than he had been on the surface of Mars. Nor had he ever been one to jump at shadows.

And yet there had been someone — something — there.

Perhaps it was just a glimpse of his own reflection in the mirror above his private washbasin.

Yes. Just the mirror.

That was it.

But now a question pushed itself to the forefront of his mind. He voiced it aloud, but in a quiet enough whisper that it was easily drowned out by the noise of Fall of Night’s systems.

‘What did you do to me?’

Because his thoughts were following the groove of a different, darker orbit now. Not that the machines on Mars had somehow erred in putting him back together, botching part of his brain wiring, but that this might be deliberate.

That all of this might suit some purpose of which he was not aware.

A day later they reached Jupiter. Nissa put extra power into Fall of Night’s electromagnetic deflectors, cocooning them from the worst effects of the Jovian magnetosphere. They were still moving quickly, about five hundred kilometres per second of excess speed, but Nissa had allowed for that with the aerobrake passage, knifing her ship through Jupiter’s extreme upper atmosphere at an oblique angle. It was as bumpy as she had predicted, but — she assured Kanu — the buffeting and heating were well within tolerable margins, and the dodge had shaved many hours off their flight. In fact he found the experience more bracing than unpleasant. By the time they reached clear space again, their speed was down to a manageable hundred kilometres per second, more than sufficient for operations within Jupiter’s system of moons.

Nissa was on the flight deck, confirming that their approach authorisation was in order. The certification was complicated and in a state of continuous adjustment and review, with a chance that it might be rescinded at any moment.

‘Something giving you cause for concern?’ Kanu asked, rubbing his face with a moistened towel. ‘I thought you had all the details covered.’

‘So did I, but there’s a heavier Consolidation presence than I was expecting. After that business with Yevgeny… what his surname?’

‘Korsakov.’

‘Him, yes. I’m starting to feel rattled. Sure, I’ve bent a rule or two, but I haven’t done anything to deserve this kind of attention.’

‘Nor have I.’

‘Well, of course you haven’t.’ She gave him a quizzical look. ‘Unless there’s something you haven’t told me.’

Kanu thought about it for a few moments. ‘I don’t believe those enforcement craft are anything to do with us. They’re here for some other reason entirely.’

‘And Korsakov’s interest in you? The Consolidation ship from which he’s transmitting is here, too.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I tracked its heading, and here it is. Doesn’t that concern you?’

‘He must be on diplomatic business, intergovernmental work. Europa’s a constant background problem for all the governments. That’s why those permissions are so difficult to arrange.’

‘I’ve fought long and hard for this, Kanu. No one’s taking it away from me now.’

On their fall to Europa they were interdicted by two of the Consolidation enforcement craft, pincering Fall of Night from either side. Kanu had a good view of the official vehicles — dark, shark-shaped ships with the interlocking ripples of the Consolidation’s emblem glowing along their sides.

‘If it came to it,’ he said, ‘do you think you could outrun them?’

‘Down to the ice, maybe. But I’d be in a world of trouble when I came back out.’

It was a formality, more or less. Her authorisation was queried, then re-queried. Even though she had filed all the necessary requests, the Consolidation ships still insisted on signalling for confirmation. Kanu and Nissa endured long hours of waiting while photons bounced around the system, pinballing from one encrypted router to the next. Meanwhile Nissa tried to get a signal through to her contact in Europa, informing them of the delay, but the omens were not propitious.

‘Something’s not right down there,’ she said when the response was late returning. ‘The last I heard, the Margrave was having trouble with border control. I hope the situation hasn’t worsened.’

As abruptly as they had arrived, though, the Consolidation ships broke off. Kanu watched them fall away with a vague feeling of resentment. No apology for detaining them, or for wasting hours of their time. Not even a bon voyage.

‘Rude.’

‘Planetary geopolitics looks a bit different when you’re one of the little people, doesn’t it?’ Nissa said.

‘I’m getting used to it.’

Europa had no atmosphere, so they were able to come in hard and fast until the last moment. The moon was an almost perfectly smooth sphere, an off-white eyeball crazed and veined by healing stress fractures, but with no mountains, valleys or craters. Abandoned cities littered the Europan plains, spires buckled and domes cracked, sagging down into the ice on their stilts and buttresses like drowning cathedrals. It was much too expensive to return these cold, airless, radiation-sleeted ruins to viable habitats. Besides, their economies had always depended on the cities and markets under the ice, in the blood-warm ocean. The abandoned cities were merely the ports of entry to the hidden kingdom, and now the kingdom was lawless.

‘Looters have stripped out almost anything useful,’ Nissa said as they vectored low over one of the tilted ruins. The clustered vanes and docking towers of the abandoned settlement brought to Kanu’s mind the image of a sailing ship, hemmed in by pack ice, its masts and rigging angled closer to the horizon than the zenith. And the thought shaped itself: only the ice traps that ship. She could still sail again, if only she could break free of its hold.

‘Kanu?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I was saying that looters have stripped out almost anything we might be able to use in those cities. Power, computer systems, elevator links through to the ocean. The ice has shifted, anyway. Unless those elevator shafts are constantly maintained, the ice soon severs them.’

‘Are you expecting the Regals to come up and meet you on the surface?’

‘No — they almost never show their faces.’

‘Then you have a problem.’

‘Only if I hadn’t done my homework first.’

Nissa had preselected a landing spot near the equator and where the ice was thinner. Jupiter’s swollen one-eyed countenance lorded it over the sky, as if it had them pinned beneath its singular gaze. A case could be made for the beauty of Saturn, Kanu supposed, but never Jupiter. It was as ugly as an ogre, and it guarded its moons with an ogre’s mad-eyed jealousy.

Fall of Night settled onto the ice without landing legs, letting its hull take its weight. Europa’s gravity was barely a seventh that of Earth, less even than Mars, and after the two gees of their flight out to Jupiter, Kanu felt nearly weightless. It did not escape his attention that Nissa had put them down nowhere near any of the empty cities.

‘This is where I start testing the letter of the law,’ she said. ‘We’re not about to violate the terms of my authorisation — but we are going to make use of them in a way the Consolidation didn’t expect.’

‘Continue,’ Kanu said.

‘I was given forty-eight hours of surface time. That would be just enough to get in and out of the ocean if the elevators were working, but they’re not, and the Consolidation knows that. So they don’t believe I’ll be able to reach the sea.’

‘You, on the other hand, have your own plans.’

Nissa patted the couch adjoining her own. ‘Strap in next to me. I think you’re going to like this part.’

Kanu did as he was told, apprehension and curiosity vying for control of his emotions. Nissa was selecting navigation options he had not seen before, and beyond the enclosure of the command deck he sensed the ship going about some urgent new business. The hull was doing something. He felt the thud and whirr of activating mechanisms.

‘Heating elements in the outer skin,’ Nissa said, directing his attention to one display. ‘They’ll turn the ice to slush right under us and we’ll start sinking through. That won’t be fast enough, though.’ She tapped another diagram. ‘Active traction mechanisms. They’ll drag the slush from one end of the ship to the other, pulling us deeper — just like a mole burrowing into soil. Pitch-and-yaw stability, angle of attack, all under my direction. We’ll make about a metre a second at full crank.’

Kanu was dumbfounded. ‘You’ve turned your ship into a tunnelling machine.’

Nissa settled her hands on two lever-shaped controls which had emerged from the sides of her couch. ‘So let’s tunnel.’

She pushed the controls forwards and Kanu felt Fall of Night begin to burrow into Europa.