Poseidon's Wake

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‘Not for a little while. They have some thinking to do.’

‘Then we’ll need to move ahead with the funeral arrangements. Kanu, are you going to be all right? You’ve lost Nissa, now Swift. And then whatever happened to you in there—’

‘I’ll cope, Goma. When you’ve already died once, coping becomes second nature.’

‘I think you might have died a second time.’

‘Three times, if you include the Terror. I’ll try not to make a habit of it.’

‘Please don’t,’ Goma said.

It fell to Goma to lead the human party. It was a smaller cairn this time, for the body was that of a human woman, not one of the Risen.

The Risen had done the hard work of shaping the cairn with large stones of various shapes. They took great deliberation in the selection of these pieces, and when they were set into the cairn they appeared to interlock with uncanny neatness, as if they were the shattered pieces of some once-unified whole.

For the humans, it remained only to select their own smaller stones and fill in the gaps. They took pains not to upset the work that had already been done.

‘For Eunice,’ Goma said, placing one fist-shaped stone onto the cairn. ‘May these stones bind the thread of her memories with those who have already passed into the Remembering. May they bind her to the promise of the black skies she craved, and to the memory of the blue Earth she never stopped loving. Her name was Eunice Akinya, and her blood is my blood. They called her Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one. And I will bring this lion’s heart back to the place she knew as a child.’

The stone was set. Goma turned from the cairn.

Overhead, one by one, the Watchkeepers were dimming their blue lights to the lowest possible state of radiance. It was an accident of timing, nothing more. They were concentrating their mental resources on the vexing question of this odd and troubling mathematical theorem. At times like these, when a difficult matter required pondering, they had learned that it was wiser to assign separate streams of mentation to each Watchkeeper, each tackling the problem as a whole, rather than dividing it into fragments that could be processed among their dispersed elements, but with no one Watchkeeper grasping the entirety of the problem. That way, when answers tallied, they could view the results as significant. The Watchkeepers had indulged in this kind of deep meditation before, and they were quite prepared to take their time over it. These busy, buzzing humans had been a local distraction, and they were entertaining enough in their way. But it would be better when they moved on, and some silence had returned to this corner of creation.

The shutters of their scales closed. The blue lights dimmed to the darkest shade of blue that is not black.

The Watchkeepers settled down to dwell on what they were.

Kanu Akinya, turning from the cairn after setting his own stone in place, thought he glimpsed an old friend out of the corner of his eye. In a single fluid movement the figure raised a hand, touched a finger to his pince-nez, smiled a fond farewell.

And then was gone for ever.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Goma and Ru had been awake for hours before they allowed themselves their first view of Crucible. It was less a case of apprehension than delayed gratification, refusing a reward until the proper moment, when they were both mentally prepared for it. Not that they had any real fears of failure, or concerns that their world would disdain them. Captain Vasin had assured them that Travertine had completed its return crossing successfully, and that they were now back in orbit, circling the planet at almost the same altitude from which they had begun their journey. Long before the ship completed its last course change it had been hailed, made welcome by a jostling flotilla of escort vehicles. The tone of the exchanges had been cordial, verging on the jubilant. There was no doubt of a warm reception.

But anything could have happened, Goma told herself. They had been away for two hundred and eighty-four years, enough time for governments to fall and rise, for revolutions and counter-revolutions, for personal reputations to crash or soar. Their expedition had been an expensive endeavour at a time when Crucible was still climbing out of the hardships that had come with the Fall of the Mechanism. Perhaps, with time, it had come to be viewed as a folly, or even worse: a negligent, criminal waste of resources and minds.

Perhaps that had been the view, at some point in these last three centuries. But if the wheel of opinion could turn once, it could turn again. Whatever might have happened, they were favoured now. Conceivably, Goma thought, the events surrounding their departure were simply too remote for anyone to get all that bothered about. The wonder was that they had returned. All else was forgivable.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked Ru.

‘As I’ll ever be.’

They floated together at a window in a weightless section of the ship. The window was facing Crucible, but for the moment it was shuttered.

‘I keep thinking of Mposi. I don’t think he ever expected to come home again. He’d have counted himself lucky enough just to make it all the way to Gliese 163.’

‘We’re here for him,’ Ru offered, although there was not much that could push Goma’s sadness aside. Sadness mingled with relief, gratitude, expectation. But also the heavy burden of the work that lay ahead of them. They had barely begun.

‘Let’s do it.’ Goma touched the control, and the window’s external shutters snapped open in silence.

For a few seconds they stared at their world in wordless contemplation. They were orbiting over the day side, the clouds giving way here and there to offer hints of recognisable landforms and seas. Goma compared what she saw against her memories of maps she had known since childhood. On this scale at least, it was hard to say that much had changed.

‘It’s still there,’ Ru said, with a sort of wonder, as if the very act of their world maintaining itself across these years was astonishing. ‘All that time we were on our way, all that time we were sleeping… it was still here, still going about its business, doing what worlds do — as if you and I never mattered to it.’

‘We didn’t,’ Goma said. She paused, added: ‘Anyway, it’s really not been that long. Trees that were middle-aged when we left, they’ll still be middle-aged — just a bit older. Us being away — it’s just a blip, a heartbeat, to a planet.’

But now Ru jabbed her finger at something nearer than their planet. It was an object, moving through space between them and Crucible. ‘A ship. Maybe one of those escorts Gandhari told us about.’

The vehicle, whatever it was, sidled closer to Travertine. Its form was a blunt-ended cylinder, wrapped with lights. It was hard to tell how far away it was, how big. It moved a little too confidently for Goma’s liking, coming in at too hard a vector. She tensed, unable to fight the instinct to brace against an impact, for all the good it would have done. But the cylinder cruised near and then veered sharply off, and at the moment of closest approach she thought she saw faces, pressed against the windows, gawking at this odd, antique apparition.

The cylinder swooped away, until it was only a tiny moving speck against the face of Crucible.

‘I suppose we’re of some amusement to them,’ said a voice beside them, speaking softly enough not to shatter the mood. ‘Visitors from the deep past. Gandhari says we’re not the only starship they’ve ever seen — there’s a flow of ships coming and going all the time — but you can bet it’s been a while since they’ve clapped sight on a relic like us.’

‘I don’t feel like a relic,’ Ru said.

‘Nor do I,’ Peter Grave said, Crucible’s blue-green light picking at the crinkling around his eyes. ‘But I strongly suspect it may have to be a role we have to get used to. Obliging ghosts at the banquet.’ He forced a smile. ‘Never mind. There must be worse things — and at least we’ll never be short of attention.’

Grave had come to the window while Goma and Ru were caught up in the spectacle. His presence was uninvited, but Goma struggled to find much resentment. Whatever differences they had once had, she felt certain that she and Grave now had infinitely more in common with each other than they did with the new citizens of Crucible. Ru, Goma and Grave were creatures out of time, unmoored from their rightful place in history. This was what interstellar travel did to people, and as yet no one had much experience coping with it.

‘Kanu is awake now,’ Grave said. ‘I’ve spoken to him, and he seems to have handled the crossing as well as any of us. I just wish there were better news about Nissa — some good development we could bring to his attention immediately.’

Goma understood that there had already been communication between Vasin, Mona Andisa, and the governing authorities of the system. At least part of that exchange had concerned the fate of Nissa, preserved in skipover since her death at Poseidon.

‘Maybe they have something,’ Ru said. ‘Better medicine than us, at any rate. How could they not have better medicine, after all this time?’

‘We don’t really know how far they’ve come,’ Goma said, her tone cautious, refusing to indulge in wishful thinking. Historical progress was not linear. She reminded herself that the medicine of the Age of Babel had been superior to the medicine after the Fall of the Mechanism. It was anyone’s guess as to the leaps and reversals that had happened since their departure. At some point she would have to sit down and catch up on all that skipped history.