Poseidon's Wake

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They left their helmets off for now, judging that there would be time to put them on if the ship really did begin to suffer some catastrophic structural failure. With the helmets tucked under their arms, they continued further into the ship. They did not have far to go before they reached the end of the central shaft, which ran a significant part of the distance back to the propulsion section. The shaft stretched away before them, picked out by running lights.

They floated there, holding gloved hands. Neither of them needed to say anything. They could see what was coming.

The end of the shaft was a moving silver surface. It filled the shaft perfectly, as smooth and tight-fitting as a plug of liquid mercury. It was slightly mirrored, so they were able to see the converging perspective lines of the shaft. Far in the distance, where those perspective lines pinched together, lay their own tiny reflections — two floating suited forms, barely distinguishable from each other.

‘The ship is still there, beyond the surface,’ Swift said. ‘We would know by now if that were not the case. It is not a destructive sampling process. The material must be examining matter on the molecular level, then reconsitituting it as it passes through.’

‘Shut up, Swift,’ Nissa said. ‘I need to face this without you in my head.’

Kanu squeezed her hand. ‘It’ll be all right.’

His instincts told him to try to paddle away from the approaching surface, but he could never have made enough speed to outpace it. Besides, there was nowhere to go. At least this way they would face it with dignity.

It came fast, appearing to accelerate as it consumed the last few metres of the shaft, but that must have been an optical illusion. Kanu stiffened his body and held his breath — it was impossible not to, even as his rational mind argued that it would make no difference. Nissa’s grip tightened on his own.

‘We were married once,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘And then not married.’

‘To my regret. But I’m glad we came back into each other’s lives.’

‘However it happened.’

‘Yes.’

She nodded at the nearing surface. ‘It’s not a ring, but it is silver. When it touches us, we’ll be united. I don’t know if that’ll be good or bad, but we may as well make the best of it.’

‘I agree.’

‘Let’s say it remarries us. Even if that’s the last thought we hold in our heads. Do you agreed, Kanu?’

For a moment her words had punched a hole through him. He had been hoping for her absolute forgiveness, but never counting on it. The human capacity for kindness was as infinite and inexhaustible as it was surprising. He had done nothing to earn this moment, and yet he would not refuse it.

‘Totally,’ he said, pinned between joy and horror.

‘Swift,’ she said quietly, ‘don’t say a word, but you are our witness.’

Swift did not say a word. But they both sensed him there, fully participant in the same alien betrothal. Then the surface was on them, and in the exquisite and momentary bliss of their remarriage they also knew the Terror.

Except ‘terror’, now that they were in it, was not quite the right word. They struggled to capture the essence of it, after the surface had passed through them and continued on its way, their bodies and minds put back together. But it was both more and less than terror. Better, they thought, to describe it as a total apprehension of the consequences of the present direction of their actions — a kind of absolute, unflinching understanding that they were assuming a responsibility not only to themselves, but to every creature of their kind across all their worlds and systems.

That they were here at the sufferance of the M-builders, and that from this instant on they would be judged against the lofty priorities of that civilisation rather than their own. That the M-builders offered a guarded welcome to the wise and the curious, but reserved only punishment for the foolish and the rapacious. That merely to think in such parochial and human terms was itself an error, and a dangerous one.

The M-builders had confronted the single most daunting truth facing all intelligent civilisations and arrived at their own response to that truth. That other cultures were free to learn from their example, if they so chose. That the gathering of knowledge was not to be discouraged, and that these guests were at liberty to study the structures and inscriptions of Poseidon as they pleased. The guests would be pleased to hear that the inscriptions contained additional operating guidelines for the transmitting elements of the Mandala network, that obsolete but harmless set of toys that the M-builders had left in place for the benefit of lesser civilisations.

But there was something more.

For on Poseidon, the M-builders had encoded a complete statement of their response to the ultimate truth of life’s fate in the cosmos, and these lesser civilisations were free to incorporate the facts of that response into their own strategic planning. But should the disclosure of that response result in the consideration of acts detrimental or injurious to the absolute security of the M-builders, they would not hesitate to enact species-level extinction.

They had the means. They had done it before.

They valued their word.

Kanu understood. He felt it in his bones — as if this was knowledge that had been part of him for every second of his life, no more open to doubt than the specific blue of the sky, the sting of the sun on his neck, the salt of the ocean in his mouth.

In the hundreds of millions of years since their abdication from the affairs of lesser civilisations, other cultures had come into contact with the work of the M-builders. Some, like the Watchkeepers, never passed the first line of protection. They were rebuffed, often violently, but had suffered no wider retribution. Being hollow machines, being dead to consciousness, they were not deemed a threat — more a thing to be pitied, for they knew not what they were.

Others had passed the sampling, known the Terror and believed themselves wise enough to bear that higher responsibility. But they had faltered, allowed their masks to slip, and the M-builders — or rather their vigilant guardians — had decided they posed an unacceptable threat. Judgement had been delivered and punishment meted out. The evidence of that punishment was not hard to find, even now. There were dead worlds, scorched of life. There were stars that had reached the ends of their nuclear burning lifetimes too soon, as if something had stolen their fuel, or made their fusion processes misfire. There were tracts of space where interstellar dust floated too hot and too thin, swept clear by the blasts of supernovae occurring in odd and suggestive clusters of temporal and spatial proximity, like a spree of murders. There were worlds orphaned from their stars, floating in space.

All this and more was the work of the M-builders. They would have done none of it without immense consideration, immense sorrow. Fundamentally, it was never their intention to kill. They would do only that which was necessary. In what might have passed for their alien hearts, they believed these cruelties were a greater kindness — perhaps the greatest kindness of all.

They?

Us.

What are we?

What were we?

Much like you, Kanu Akinya — in our fashion.

Life is short, against all the mute measures of the cosmos. A star barely draws breath. A world turns around that star a hundred times.

The galaxy is frozen in an instant of its turning, like a jammed clock. A life begins, a life ends — nothing changes. The clock unjams itself for one vast, godlike tick and a billion souls know their fierce, fast moment in the light.

Until the clock jams again. Until the next tick.

And yet…

We are more than the sum of all those short seconds that make up our span. We learn, we give, we love, we are loved. We stir ripples into the wider fabric of social discourse. We are in turn moved by the ripples of other lives. We open books and know the thoughts of those who have lived before us — the hopes and sorrows and golden joys of earlier lives. They move us to laughter or to tears. Their days are over, but in the marks they have left behind their lives continue to resonate. In that sense, their days are limitless. They have lived again, in us.

So it is with all our deeds, all our acts of cleverness and stupidity. Our wars and inventions, our stories and our songs. The houses we make, the worlds we change, the truths we unearth. We end, we conclude, but our deeds continue. In this continuation, a retrospective meaning is shed onto every living moment. There is a point to love, if love itself is remembered. There is a point to the creation of beauty, because beauty will endure. All words, all thoughts, have a chance of transcending death and time. There is no heaven or hell, no afterlife, no divine creator, no great will behind the universe, no meaning beyond that revealed by our senses and our intellects.

This is a hard thing to accept. Yet there is still a point to being alive, and that makes the acceptance bearable.

But the universe withholds even this bleak consolation.

Within its deepest structure, written like a curse into the very mathematics out of which it is forged, the universe contains a suicidal imperative. Vacuum itself is poised in an unstable condition. Given time — and the one certainty is that there will always be time — the vacuum instability will tip the universe into a new state of being. In that instant of un-creation, all information encoded in the present universe will be erased.