Poseidon's Wake

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‘We can cross water if we need to. There are rafts — big enough for all of us.’

‘They’d better be. We’re coming up on the wheel now — this may be your one chance for a good look before we ditch. Do you want to see it?’

‘More than anything in the world. I’ll be there in a moment.’

He had reached the Risen. He knelt by Dakota, glad when her pink-rimmed eye made contact with his.

‘We’re through the worst of it, I think. Icebreaker blew up and we ran into the shock wave. But other than the splashdown, we shouldn’t hit anything you can’t handle. Are you all right?’

‘I was always the hardiest of us, Kanu. Hector is alive, though weak. But Lucas has passed into the Remembering.’

It took only a glance to confirm this news. Hector looked drowsy, but his gaze still tracked Kanu and a twitch of his trunk signalled the presence of life. The other Risen’s eyes were open but quite unseeing. Kanu stared at the mountainous swell of his ribcage. It remained as still as a rock.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘We are stronger than you in so many ways, yet weaker in others. How far are we from the sea?’

‘Pretty close now. When we ditch… well, I’ll do what I can for everyone. Best stay in the hammock until we hit water.’

‘I shall.’

Kanu glanced out through the window again. The waters ruffled by the shock wave were returning to their former stillness. He tried to estimate their height from the hammered texture of the wave-tops, but it was impossible. And there was nothing down there, no rock or living thing, no trace of human presence, to offer the slightest hint of scale.

‘You’re missing the show,’ Nissa said.

He returned to the command deck, trying to put aside thoughts of what lay ahead by confining himself to the present moment, to the spectacle the universe had seen fit to let him witness.

Half of the wheel was hidden to him, lost beneath the water’s surface. The visible portion arched from the ocean in two places, separated by the two hundred kilometres of the wheel’s diameter. The nearest of those two points was only a few tens of kilometres from Noah. They were circling it now while also losing height — and still coming down harder and faster than Kanu would have wished. The upper portion of the wheel was not visible at all, but that owed less to Poseidon’s curvature than to the presence of so much atmosphere in between, hazing out detail and contrast. Looking up, he could track the ascent of the nearest arc, soaring almost vertically to begin with but gradually evidencing its great circular curve as it pushed higher and higher, finally cresting the atmosphere and vaulting into open space. There was much less air to obscure his vision when he looked to the zenith and the wheel’s arc was traceable far past its maximum height. He followed the fading white scratch until it vanished into the haze, pointing to the place on the horizon where the rest of the wheel must lie.

They continued descending. The wheel’s tread was a kilometre across; its rim had about the same depth. From space they had detected a suggestion of dense patterning on the surface, a complex, shifting backscatter of metallic traces. Now their eyes were all the equipment they needed to gather more data. The wheels only looked smooth from a distance; up close they bore a finely printed text. A pattern of grooves had been cut into both the tread and the rim, as sharp-edged as if they had been lasered yesterday. On the tread, the patterns consisted of horizontal grooves, one above the other, running nearly the full width of the wheel. The grooves were only straight when averaged across their length. On a scale of a few metres, they exhibited a series of angular changes of direction, sometimes doubling back before resuming course. Each groove appeared distinct from those above or below it, but it was impossible to look at more than a few at any one time. There were no more than ten metres between each groove; if the wheel’s circumference was somewhere in the region of six hundred kilometres, then there could be many hundreds of thousands of these grooves — more grooves than there were words in a book. The rims, meanwhile, carried about a hundred concentric grooves — circular statements which Kanu presumed continued all the way around the wheel. On the wheel’s concave face, too, were yet more angular grooves.

Kanu reminded himself that there were other wheels all over the planet. Some intuition told him that the wheels must each contain distinct patterns. If each wheel was a book, then Poseidon was a library.

‘I’m no expert,’ he said, ‘but that looks like the same sort of writing they found on Mandala.’

Nissa nodded. ‘No surprise if the M-builders were here.’

‘The same language,’ Swift said, ‘but not necessarily serving the same function. Eunice was only able to trigger the Mandala because the syntax provided a set of operating rules. This has to be something different.’

‘Operating rules for the wheels?’ Kanu speculated. ‘We know they’re multifunctional — they can become the moons, if needed, or the moons can turn into wheels.’

‘Perhaps,’ Swift said.

‘You think it’s something else.’

‘If the Terror taught me one thing, it’s that there are answers here — otherwise why guard against the likes of us? Perhaps a history, an accounting of what became of the M-builders. The wheels may encode that history, collectively or individually, and we have been granted permission to read it.’

‘Then it’s a pity we don’t have the lexicon,’ Nissa said. ‘Or did Eunice share that with you during your blissful communion?’

‘No — there wasn’t time for anything like that. But you are right — she would know what to make of this, I think. Better than I do, at any rate. I think I may have outlasted my usefulness to you both.’

‘We’ll be the judge of that,’ Kanu said. ‘Anyway, you’re here for the same reason I am — to see and learn. So make the most of it.’

‘Believe me, I am doing my utmost.’

As they spiralled down, Nissa strove to bring them closer and closer to the point where the wheel rim thrust from the waters. The scale of it had been overwhelming enough in abstract terms, but now Kanu had the sense of some stupendous cliff or pillar rising from the sea, a thing of imperturbable mass and solidity. They could dash Noah against it and not even leave a blemish.

‘One more circuit, if we’re lucky,’ Nissa said. ‘Are the Risen ready?’

‘It’s just Dakota and Hector now. I’m afraid Lucas didn’t make it.’

She must have heard something in his voice. ‘You’re sad about that, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know. A little while ago I’d have given a lot to see the three of them dead. But I can’t rejoice.’

‘Maybe Lucas was the lucky one — he got it over with quickly.’

‘We’ll see.’

Chimes sounded; Noah had detected the approach of the sea’s surface, thinking in its simple-minded way that it was still ferrying people from orbit to Crucible.

Whatever happened, it would not be long now until they hit the water.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Mposi was not yet committed to entering the thresh of moons, but it would not be long before they ran out of time to turn around. ‘We can go a little deeper,’ Vasin said, ‘but it’ll gain us very little in terms of our view and it probably won’t help them at all. The best we can do — the only responsible thing — is document their actions from this distance, so that at least we have a chance of telling someone else about them.’

‘You’re not dead,’ Eunice said, ‘until you’ve left a crater big enough to stick a name on.’

‘They won’t leave much of a crater on a waterworld,’ Vasin replied brusquely. ‘Anyway, what do you propose? This is a heavy lander, built like a squared-off brick. We are not remotely atmosphere-capable. And that’s not a question of skill or daring — it’s a basic limitation of the vehicle. Drop it into air, it’ll rip itself to pieces.’

‘If we keep our speed low, we can hold the aerodynamic stresses at a safe level.’

‘Perhaps. But the engine’s not rated to run in atmosphere, and we’d need to fire it continuously to keep our speed low enough to avoid structural overload — basically we’d be descending on a pillar of flame. That’s fine in the upper atmosphere, but as soon as it thickens up, we’d run into significant thermal transfer. We’ll superheat the air we’re descending into, and on top of that, our exhaust plasma will back up all the way to our tail quicker than you can blink. It’s easy to say that we should have brought something that can fly in air — but when we left Travertine, this wasn’t exactly where we thought we’d wind up.’

Eunice absorbed this without further argument — it was clear to Goma that she accepted the essential truthfulness of Vasin’s statement; just as it was clear that Eunice would not have rested without exploring all the options, however slight they might appear.

‘Then there’s nothing aboard — no escape pod or capsule — that we can send down into the atmosphere?’

‘Nothing,’ Vasin said. ‘And believe me, I wish it were otherwise. But if they can hold out long enough for Nasim to get here, maybe we can do something for them.’

‘You should see this?’ said Loring.

Vasin looked more irritated than intrigued. ‘Will it change our options?’

‘Not certain? Changes something, for sure.’