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Poseidon's Wake

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133

‘If there was a faster way to get you to Earth, I would jump on it,’ Vasin said, ‘but we have to go via Crucible, I’m afraid. Even if we had enough confidence to trust Travertine to that alien contraption, we still couldn’t send you to Earth. Mandala to Mandala — that’s the only way we know. We get the stepping stones, but not the choice of where they’re located.’

‘For now.’

‘Granted — and maybe we’ll learn more, if and when we get anywhere at all. But that’s for the future. When you get to Crucible, I’ll petition the government to allow us to make a rapid crossing to Earth space.’

‘If there’s still a government,’ Goma said.

‘There’s that, yes. But let’s hope we left the place in safe hands. You won’t be sorry to see it again?’

‘No, not at all. I never really wanted to leave.’

‘But you felt you had to.’

‘Because my mother was too old and I hoped we might do some good. Make some discoveries.’

‘You found the Risen,’ Vasin said. ‘That has to count for something.’

‘And now we’ve lost most of them again.’

‘Then we should be especially grateful for the five left to us. I was about to say “in our care”, but that doesn’t quite sound right. They really don’t need that much from us, do they? They’re our equals.’

‘At least.’

‘It would be good to bring one of them with us, back to Crucible — even onwards to Earth. An ambassador.’

‘Yes,’ Goma said. ‘We spoke about that. But it has to be their decision. We can’t force it on them.’

‘No,’ Vasin agreed. ‘There’s been quite enough of that.’

It was not that any of them had stopped thinking about the Watchkeeper, least of all Kanu. It followed them from Poseidon, and when Travertine entered orbit, it too took up station around Orison. It was not orbiting in any conventional sense, but turning at an equal angular speed with the starship, only a much greater distance from the surface, the ship and the Watchkeeper like two dots on an invisible clock hand. It bothered them, hanging up there, its pine-cone shape aimed down at them like a blunt dagger. But then, people had been troubled by the presence of the Watchkeepers for a very long time, in all the systems where humans had left their mark. There was only so much mental energy available for worrying about them. Mortals could not dwell on the affairs of gods for the whole of the day.

But in the morning, the Watchkeeper left its station.

It descended down past Travertine’s orbit, paying the ship no heed, and then lowered itself to within a scant kilometre of Orison’s surface. It hung there, an object the size of a small continent massing the equivalent of ten thousand Zanzibars, yet stirring not a grain of dust below. In the airlessness of Orison, the Watchkeeper was as silent and wrong as a single thundercloud in an otherwise clear sky.

Its black facets were partially open, allowing fans and blades of blue light to push out from its core. The Watchkeeper was hundreds of kilometres wide near its blunt tail, the part currently pointing back into space, but its sharp end, almost touching Orison, diminished down through layers of concentric rotating machinery to a scale that was almost within the bounds of human conception. That last kilometre of it was a kind of elephant’s trunk, a thing that corkscrewed and probed.

The trunk lingered above Eunice’s camp. It touched nothing, but showed fleeting interest in the lander, the antennas, the glassed-over chambers where she grew her food, the curious stone kilns of the Risen burial mounds.

The humans and Risen could only watch. The impulse was to go deeper into the warrens of the encampment. But how deep was deep enough when a Watchkeeper was involved? Besides, they needed to know their fate. It was impossible to pull away from the windows, impossible to think about anything other than that looming alien presence. What did it want with them? What did it want, specifically here and specifically now?

An alarm sounded.

An airlock was activating. The momentary fear was that something was trying to get in, but a second’s reflection showed how absurd that was. The Watchkeeper could have peeled back Orison’s crust like a scab if it cared to do so.

No. That alarm was someone going out, not coming in.

‘Where’s Kanu?’ Goma asked.

No one had seen him for some while.

He was nearly under the proboscis when she found the right channel on her suit.

‘Kanu! It’s Goma. What are you doing?’

He walked on for a few paces more, as if he had not heard her. Then he slowed, cast a glance back over his shoulder — light catching the edge of his visor, a hint of his too-familiar profile behind the glass.

‘Doing what an ambassador ought to do, Goma — establishing diplomatic relations. It wants something. One of us, maybe. Well, I think I’m the obvious candidate.’

‘I lost Mposi. I lost Eunice. I won’t lose you.’

‘We’ve all lost more than our share, Goma. But I came to this system to learn something about them. In a way, I’m glad the choice has been so easily made for me. I don’t think I’d have had the courage to go out into space and meet one. But this? It simplifies things a great deal, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Is it you talking, Kanu, or Swift?’

He sounded amused, curious, in equal measure. ‘Does it matter?’

‘I’d like to know. I’d like to know if it’s a man making this decision or a machine making it for him.’

‘Oh, it’s very much the man. Swift is here, and we both know what must be done, but the choice is mine. The life is mine.’

‘You’re only doing this because you’ve given up on Nissa. But the rest of us haven’t!’

‘Nissa died, Goma. Taking her back home won’t change that. Besides, where is home for me now? I can’t go back to Mars and Earth considers me a traitor to my own species.’

‘For all you know, no one even remembers what you did by now.’

‘No one remembers anything, in the end.’

The proboscis had begun to concentrate its darting, twisting movements in the space immediately above Kanu. Only a few hundred metres separated them now. Kanu had even stopped walking, sensing the inevitable. He let his arms dangle at his sides, assuming a position of patient submission.

It was on him like a striking snake. There was no whip-crack, no shock wave, but the suddenness of the movement still left Goma stunned, almost falling back with the surprise of it. Nothing made of solid matter ought to move like that. Kanu was gone. The proboscis was withdrawing, telescoping back into that larger looming mass. At the same time, the Watchkeeper’s entire body was rising back into space. Numbed by what she had seen, it was all Goma could do to keep breathing. She felt that to move, to utter a word, to allow herself one unwise thought, would be enough to provoke the Watchkeeper to take her as well.

She risked moving her head and looked up, tracking the Watchkeeper’s ascent. It was growing smaller. She wondered exactly what she had just witnessed, and whether witnessing it would be a blessing or a curse on the rest of her life.

Hours passed, and the Watchkeeper did not return. They tracked its departure, first via the ramshackle instruments and sensors of Eunice’s camp, and then with the keener eyes and ears of their orbiting ship. The Watchkeeper was speeding back out to the margins of the system where others of its kind, those that had not been damaged or destroyed by Poseidon, were presumably still waiting.

Goma could not help but feel that they were all in a state of judicial abeyance, waiting the deliverance of some terrible, irreversible verdict. It was hard to sleep, hard to think of anything else. She wondered what had become of Kanu, whether in any sense ‘Kanu’ was still a living entity. It would have been good to speak with Ndege, and find out what she in turn had learned from her mother, during Chiku’s own time inside the Watchkeeper.

She did not have Ndege; she did not have Mposi or Kanu. She could not even speak to Nissa, the only other human being who had endured the Terror and knew something of its qualities.

‘If it intended to harm us,’ Grave said, ‘I think we would already know it. It had every chance to attack when it took Kanu. It must have sensed us nearby — in the camp, aboard the ship — but it chose not to use destructive force.’

‘And if Kanu hadn’t gone out there?’ Ru asked.

Grave looked down. ‘I don’t know.’

The three of them were seated around one of Eunice’s tables. Since the burial ceremony, Goma and Ru had been spending a lot of time with the surviving Tantors in the lower levels of the camp. But it was necessary also to allow Orison’s Risen to get to know the sole survivor of Zanzibar’s Risen expedition, and human beings were an undesirable complication during that process.

‘Not like you, not to be sure of something,’ Ru said. ‘I thought it was all about certainty where Second Chancers are concerned?’

There was only gentle needling in her question and Grave took no visible offence. ‘If only, Ru. Funnily enough, nothing in Second Chancer philosophy prepared me for this situation — being on Orison, waiting to hear what an implacable alien machine makes of our human envoy — who just happens to be carrying the hopes of the Martian machines with him.’

‘We’re all in the same boat, then,’ Goma said.

‘Do you think he’d have done what he did if Nissa were still alive?’