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Poseidon's Wake

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134

Ru looked sharply at him. ‘You think it was suicide?’

‘I don’t know him well enough to say for sure, but it looked like the act of a man who had run out of hope.’

‘You can’t blame him,’ Goma said. ‘First the Terror, then the loss of his wife? None of us is in a position to judge Kanu for that.’

‘Believe me, judgement is the last thing on my mind,’ Grave said. ‘I just wish he’d had more time to come to terms with his experiences. I think he would have had the strength to make peace with them, had they not all happened at once.’

‘Easy for you to say, not having been through the Terror,’ Goma said.

‘None of us went through it,’ Grave answered. ‘But at the end of it all, we’d each and every one of us have been free to reject its message.’

Ru made a sceptical face. ‘You mean deny it?’

‘If denial is the mental strategy that allows life to be faced, so be it. Death is negation. Denial is better than that, under any circumstances. Besides — we have no objective evidence that the Terror is anything other than a psychological weapon, a set of apparent propositions that only feel persuasive because they’re being drilled into our minds at a very deep level, like some kind of insidious propaganda.’

‘We don’t need the Terror to tell us the message,’ Goma said. ‘We’ve got the wheels for that — the Mandala grammar lays out the same truth. The vacuum will collapse. There is no arguing with that.’

‘May collapse,’ Grave stated. ‘But their physics might be wrong. Have you considered that possibility?’

Goma shook her head. ‘They had millions of years to find a flaw in it. If there was one, they’d have found it.’

‘That’s almost a position of faith, though, isn’t it? By accepting unquestioningly that there was no error in the M-builders’ logic, you’re placing them on the level of gods. But they were not infallible — we’ve seen the evidence of that for ourselves.’

‘Have we?’ Goma asked.

‘Poseidon is ruthless, but it is also indiscriminate. And these Mandalas — a dangerous, powerful technology allowed to fall fallow? If they were gods, they were reckless, careless ones. Slipshod deities. They left us some lethal ruins — ask the citizens of Zanzibar. Ask your mother.’

‘My mother is dead.’

‘I am sorry, but the point stands. I don’t see infallibility in the M-builders’ work, Goma. I see arrogance. A blindness to their own flaws. Knowing that, how can we have the slightest confidence in their prophecies?’

‘They’re not prophecies — they’re predictions!’

Grave nodded solemnly, as if some great and subtle truth had been laid out before him. ‘Nonetheless, this might just as easily be a delusion they talked themselves into — a kind of species-level psychosis. Why should we be bound by that?’

‘If you understood the physics—’ Goma began.

‘Do you? It isn’t your native discipline any more than it’s mine. Everything you believe you know was filtered through Eunice’s understanding.’

‘That was enough for me to get it.’

‘But Eunice didn’t take it into her heart, did she? If she had — if she’d truly accepted the M-builders’ gospel — that all acts are futile, that there’s no point in any deed, any gesture — then she wouldn’t have given up her own life to save Ru’s. That was an act born of kindness and empathy, not despair.’

‘We can’t know what was in her head,’ Goma said.

‘But we can do her the honour of recognising that her sacrifice had meaning — that it was more than an empty gesture. With that one kind act, she repudiated every word the M-builders ever wrote. Their truth was theirs to live with — we don’t have to.’

‘That’s starting to sound like another article of faith,’ Ru said.

‘So be it. Both of you came here seeking knowledge — it’s been the arrow of your lives to know the world. Physics is one path — you chose to study the minds of other creatures. But that quest for meaning — for what you think of as truth — has only brought you to this. Doubt. Despair. A crisis of belief in anything.’

‘The truth hurts,’ Goma said. ‘But it’s still the truth.’

‘You need to find a way through it, in that case. Truth isn’t the end, Goma. It’s just a door. There’s always another door beyond it, too. Endlessly and for ever. The M-builders may not have realised that, but you don’t have to fall into the same trap. Both of you have work to do — here and on Crucible.’ He gave an easy-going shrug. ‘On Earth, too, for all I know. The hard times aren’t over yet. They may not even have begun. But we’ll need good, strong people to face them. You ask me about faith. I have faith in us — in our capabilities, our ultimate capacity to make the right choices. People and Risen. People and machines. All of us. But the worst thing of all would be to start doubting ourselves.’

Kanu came back to them three days later. The Watchkeeper returned to its former position, circling Orison in a higher orbit than Travertine’s. For several hours there was no clear change in its disposition, nothing to show — presuming Kanu still existed in any meaningful sense — that it held a human being within itself. Goma debated consulting the records aboard the ship, to refresh her memory as to what happened under similar circumstances when Chiku Green was taken into one of those machines. But the circumstances were only similar up to a point — Kanu was not Chiku, and this world was not Crucible.

It came in just as quickly as the first time, and the focus of its interest was the same patch of ground where Kanu had waited. The proboscis made a darting strike at the surface, and when it retreated, leaving only a curl of dust, there was a spacesuited human form, on his knees, hands at his sides.

Goma had put her own suit on as soon as the Watchkeeper began to close in. She was in the lock and waiting.

She rushed to him, found their common channel. The lights on his suit were all in the green, and she could see the fogging and unfogging of his breath on the inner surface of his faceplate.

‘Kanu, talk to me.’

He stirred. He turned his face towards hers. He opened his eyes, blinked, appeared at first to struggle with focus. ‘Goma.’

‘Yes, I’m here. Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ But then he paused. A moment of quiet consideration followed, as if her questions merited the most sincere answers he could give. ‘I think so, anyway.’

‘Kanu, you were inside the Watchkeeper. For three whole days. Do you remember any of it?’

‘Three days?’

‘Yes.’

‘It didn’t feel like three days. Three years, maybe. Three decades. Something stranged happened to me, Goma. I’m not quite sure what.’ Then he reached out a hand and she helped him stand, unsteadily at first but appearing to find his strength by the second. ‘Something strange,’ he repeated. ‘We were inside them. We were trying to make them understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘What they used to be. What they ceased to be. What they could be again.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘The Gupta — Wing threshold. Ask Chiku. Swift told them. Swift made them see — he understood it better than I ever did.’

His words meant nothing to her, except for the mention of Chiku. ‘Kanu, is Swift still in your head?’

‘No. Swift’s with them now. They took him, but left me behind.’ With a certain resignation, he added, ‘They’re done with me now.’

‘Swift’s in that Watchkeeper?’

‘In all of them. He’s propagating between them, like an idea they can’t help but spread. They were blind to the Gupta — Wing theorem, and once they’d crossed the threshold, they had no reason to doubt themselves. But Swift is giving them reason to question what they are.’

It sounded like babble, but she thought it unlikely that Kanu Akinya would be spouting nonsense for the sake of it.

She took his elbow and helped him back to the camp. ‘Simplify it for me. I work with elephants, not machines. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?’

‘We’ll have to see. That’s all. Like everything else. Has it really been only three days, Goma?’

‘Would I lie to you, uncle?’

He stumbled on a pebble; she caught him before any harm was done. ‘Watch your step, ambassador.’

‘Oh, I’m not the ambassador now. I’ll leave that to my friend.’

‘Then what are you?’

‘A man still hoping to find some useful purpose in life. If it lets him. If he hasn’t worn out his welcome.’

‘You have one useful thing to do.’

The directness of her statement drew a laugh. ‘Do I?’

‘Yes. You’re coming back to Crucible with me. With Nissa. If they can help her on Crucible, so be it. Otherwise we’ll carry on to Earth. You know that planet, and I’m going to need a guide when I get there.’

‘Someone to keep you out of trouble? I may not be best qualified for that. Anyway, Earth will be very strange even to me when we get back.’

‘Have you been to Africa, Kanu?’

‘Once or twice.’

‘Will it still be there?’

‘Barring the frankly improbable… yes, I suppose. It ought to be.’

‘Then you can take me to Kilimanjaro. I have Eunice’s heart.’

‘Only her heart?’

‘The rest of her stays here, with the Risen.’ Goma risked a glance back over her shoulder, into the emptying sky. ‘Do you think the Watchkeeper will be coming back?’