Poseidon's Wake

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‘Then you should be allowed to continue with your work,’ Mrs Dalal said, her tone indignant.

‘In a perfect world.’

‘Do you have plans?’ asked Mr Dalal.

‘Nothing terribly detailed. I thought I might visit some old friends now I’m back on Earth. After that, I have enough funds that I don’t need to make any immediate decisions. Also, I’ve been meaning to look into the history of a relative of mine — my grandmother, Sunday Akinya?’

‘She has the same name as the artist,’ said Mrs Dalal.

Kanu smiled at this. ‘She is the artist. Or rather was. Sunday died a very long time ago, and we never had the chance to meet.’

Mrs Dalal nodded, clearly impressed.

‘When Garudi mentioned your name, I did not make the connection,’ Mr Dalal said. ‘But I suppose Akinya is not all that common a surname. I should have realised.’

‘The odd thing,’ Kanu said, ‘is that Sunday never made much of a name for herself when she was alive — not through her art, anyway. Her grandmother was the famous one.’

‘Eustace?’ asked Mrs Dalal.

‘Eunice,’ Kanu corrected. It was a perfectly forgivable error, this long into her afterlife.

After a silence, Mr Dalal said: ‘More chai, Kanu?’

He raised his hand, webbing his fingers apart. ‘No — it’s very kind of you, Mr Dalal, but I need to be on my way.’

‘Thank you again for bringing Garudi’s things,’ Mrs Dalal said.

They needed groceries so decided to walk him back to the railway station. Beyond the shade of their garden the afternoon was still warm and now virtually breezeless. Kanu thought of the ocean and wished he could be in it.

‘I was hoping you might set our minds at ease,’ Mr Dalal said.

‘About what?’ Kanu asked.

‘During the day you don’t usually see it, but at night, it’s hard to ignore. When it passes over Madras, over India, it’s hard to sleep. Just the thought of that thing up there, wondering what it’s thinking, planning. I imagine it’s the same for everyone.’

‘I suggest we take encouragement from the fact that the Watchkeepers have not acted against us,’ Kanu said delicately, drawing on one of a thousand diplomatic responses he kept in mind for questions such as this. ‘It’s clear they have the capability to do so, but they haven’t used it. I think if they meant to, we would already know.’

‘Then what do they want?’ asked Mrs Dalal, her tone demanding. ‘Why have they come back if they don’t want something from us?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kanu said.

Noticing his unease, she shook her head and said, ‘I am sorry, we should not have pressed you. It’s just—’

‘It would be good to know we can sleep well in our beds,’ Mr Dalal said.

From Madras he travelled west to Bangalore; from Bangalore he took a night connection to Mumbai; from Mumbai at dawn a dragon-red passenger dirigible, ornamented with vanes and sails and a hundred bannering kitetails. The dirigible droned at low altitude across the Arabian Sea, a thousand passengers promenading through its huge windowed gondola. In the evening they docked at Mirbat¸, where Kanu found lodgings for the night and a good place to eat. Over his meal, alone at an outdoor table, he watched the boats in the harbour, recalling the feeling of rigging between his fingers, remembering how it felt to trim a sail, to read the horizon’s weather.

In the morning he drew upon his funds for the expense of an airpod, an ancient but well-maintained example of its kind, and vectored south-west at a whisker under the speed of sound, across the Gulf of Aden and down the coast towards Mogadishu. He veered around fleets of colourful fishing boats, lubber and merfolk crews gathering their hauls. Their boats had eyes painted on their hulls. It was good to fly, good to see living seas and living land beneath him, people with jobs and lives and things to think about besides robots on Mars and alien machines in the sky.

Presently a seastead loomed over the horizon. Kanu slowed and announced his approach intentions.

‘Kanu Akinya, requesting permission—’

But the reply was immediate, cutting him off before he had even finished his sentence. ‘You of all people, Kanu, do not need to seek permission. Approach at leisure and be prepared for a boisterous welcoming party.’

He recognised the voice. ‘I’m that transparent, Vouga?’

‘You’re almost a celebrity now. We’ve been following developments since we heard the good news about your survival. I’m dreadfully sorry about the Martian business.’

‘I got off lightly.’

‘Not from what I heard.’

The seastead came up quickly. It was a raft of interlocking platelets upon which rose a dense forest of buildings packed so tightly together that from a distance they resembled a single volcanic plug, carved into crenellated regularity by some fussy, obscure geological process. Several of the structures were inhabited, but the majority were sky farms, solar collectors and aerial docking towers. By far the largest concentration of living space was under the seastead, projecting into the layered cool of the deep ocean.

The airpod was not submersible so Kanu docked at one of the towers, nudging past a gaggle of plump cargo dirigibles. The reception was, mercifully, not quite as boisterous as Vouga had warned, but warm and good-spirited for all that. These were his people, the merfolk he had joined and served and later commanded. Some were like Kanu — still essentially humanoid but for some modest aquatic adaptations. For the sake of practicality, Kanu had even allowed some of his own adaptations to be reversed prior to his Martian assignment. There were some among the welcoming party who bore no merfolk characteristics at all: recent arrivals, perhaps, or people who shared the ideology but not the desire to return to the sea.

Others were unquestionably stranger, even to Kanu’s eye. He had been away for long enough to view matters with the detachment of the émigré. Genuine human merpeople, their legs reshaped into fish tails, were the least remarkable. A few resembled otters or seals, furred or otherwise, and several had taken on different aspects of cetacean anatomy. Some had lungs and others had become true gilled water-breathers, never needing to surface. Some greeted him from the water-filled channels around the docking port. Others made use of mobility devices, enabling them to walk or roll on dry land.

‘Thank you,’ Kanu said, unable to stop himself bowing to the assembled well-wishers. ‘It’s good to be home, good to be among friends.’

‘Will you be staying with us?’ one of the merwomen called from the water.

‘Only for a little while, Gwanda.’ They had worked in many of the same administrative areas before his ambassadorship. ‘There’s a lot to keep me busy away from the aqualogies.’

Now that he had returned, he felt a profound sense of belonging, a connection to the sea and its cargo of living things — everything in the great briny chain of being, from merfolk to plankton.

But he knew he could not afford to stay long, if he did not wish to be pulled back into his old life. Not that the prospect was unattractive — far from it. But even though he could not quite articulate the reasons, Kanu felt a deep sense that he must be moving on, attending to business that was as yet unfinished. What that business was, what it entailed, he could not quite say. But nothing would be gained by submitting to the lure of the merfolk.

‘Would you like to swim with us?’ Gwanda asked. ‘We can take you to Vouga. Ve will be done soon, I think.’

‘I think I remember how to swim,’ Kanu said. And then smiled, because he realised it had sounded like sarcasm. ‘No, genuinely. I think I remember. But it has been a long time — please be gentle with me.’

He left his clothes in the airpod and joined the other swimming things in the water. For a moment he sensed their eyes on him. They had no particular interest in his nakedness — few of them were wearing anything to begin with beyond a few sigils of rank and authority, equipment harnesses and swimming aids — but they had surely heard about his injuries on Mars, if not the specifics.

‘The machines did a good job on me,’ he said, disarming their curiosity. ‘I suspect they could have avoided scarring altogether, but they left me a few as a reminder of what I’d survived — not as a cruel thing, but to help with my psychological adjustment. Given that they’ve had remarkably little experience with human bodies, I don’t think they did too badly, did they?’

‘We heard that you died,’ said Tiznit, all whiskers and oily white fur.

‘A spaceship fell on me. That’d take the shine off anyone’s day.’

Vouga was done with ver work by the time Kanu arrived. They met in a private swimming chamber, a bubble-shaped turret high in the topside seastead.

‘Judging from the evidence, they put you back together very well. No one on Earth has that sort of surgical capability any more, you realise? Not even us. If you’d suffered a similar injury here, we’d have fed you to the fish by now.’

‘I suppose that puts me in their debt.’

‘Is that how you feel — indebted?’

‘Mostly, I’m just grateful to be alive. In my more cynical moments I tell myself that the robots did rather well out of it, too. They got to handle a human subject — took me apart like a jigsaw, put me back together again. We were trying to stop them getting their hands on corpses, and I gave them one for free!’