Poseidon's Wake

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He smiled meekly, though she had done nothing to assuage his doubts. ‘I’ll try.’

Nissa tidied the breakfast bowl away. ‘I was going to notch up the engines but we can leave them for a little while. You need something to take your mind off yourself.’

The transmission came in on a routine civilian frequency and encryption protocol — nothing about it to suggest the slightest diplomatic connotation. It was aimed at Fall of Night, but beyond that contained no clue as to its origin or purpose.

Nissa accepted it, expecting it to be from a friend or colleague, perhaps concerning some aspect of her ongoing curatorial work. Instead, she was confronted by a man she did not know but who carried the automatic assumption of authority that only came from high office. He was as grey and grave as a statue, and looked worn away, somehow, as if he had been left out in the weather.

‘I am Yevgeny Korsakov,’ the man explained, belabouring the syllables of his name, when Nissa established a two-way send. ‘I was a friend… a colleague… of Kanu Akinya. We were both on Mars — both of us hurt in the terrorist incident. I wanted to see how he was doing,’

Nissa explained the request to Kanu while her response — that Kanu was indeed with her — was crawling its way back to the sender.

‘Did I do the right thing? He said he knew you on Mars.’

‘He did,’ Kanu said, struck by an apprehension he could not quite pin down. ‘He was also largely responsible for the end of my career.’

‘I think your accident had a lot to do with that.’

‘Maybe, but Korsakov was the first to argue that I’d been tainted by my experiences. Of all of them, why did he have to survive?’ But the uncharitable nature of this sentiment left a sour taste in his mouth. Dalal, Lucien… they deserved better from him. ‘I’m sorry — you were right to answer the call, and you can be sure Korsakov knew I was here whether you confirmed it or not.’

‘Do you hate him?’ Nissa asked.

‘He’s not a bad man, it’s just that we were on opposite sides of the fence. Never really saw eye to eye.’

‘He sounded concerned.’

‘That’s what concerns me.’

But when Korsakov spoke to Kanu directly, he appeared genuine enough. ‘I hope I did not violate your privacy by tracing you to Nissa Mbaye’s ship,’ the man said. ‘It was easily done, all public information — Nissa had to name you as a passenger in her flight plan, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Kanu whispered in return, although the words would form no part of his actual reply.

‘I am very glad to see you getting on with your life, Kanu. After Mars, we feared the worst. It was one thing to know you had survived, been repaired by the robots… but to regain your spirit, your sense of life? That was by no means guaranteed. I heard about your kindness to the Dalal family. In truth, I expected you to spend more time on Earth. I would have thought you’d had enough of space travel.’

Kanu smiled tightly as he formulated his response. ‘Thank you, Yevgeny. It’s good to see your face again, and to know you are well. I’m touched by your concern. As for the Dalals, it was the least I could do. I see from your time lag that you’re on the Moon. I must come and visit sometime. It would be good to catch up.’

He hoped that might be the end of it, but Korsakov was not quite done with him.

‘Of course you would be welcome on the Moon — indeed, anywhere in UON sovereign space. Your flight plan tells me that you have business in Europa — quite unusual, if you do not mind my saying. Very difficult to arrange those permissions. Might I ask the nature of your business there?’

‘Art,’ Kanu replied, as succinctly as he dared. Then he smiled again. ‘Well, Yevgeny — it’s very kind of you to track me down. And I’ll be sure to get in touch when I return.’

‘I have my eye on you now,’ Korsakov said, in tones that sounded friendly enough. ‘No escaping your old friend, Kanu.’

When it was over, Nissa floated opposite him, cross-legged. ‘What was all that about?’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘Why would he care what you’re up to now? If he’s the one who had you kicked out of the diplomatic service, hasn’t he already got what he wanted?’

‘I don’t think Yevgeny is completely satisfied with my behaviour.’

‘What business is it of his?’

‘I’ve no idea. It’s very odd.’

‘Well, here’s something else that’s odd. Did you say he was transmitting from the Moon?’

Kanu nodded. ‘He never said as much, but the time lag fitted. Why — did you get a better fix?’

‘Fall of Night’s cleverer than he assumed. That time lag was a spoof. He was bouncing the signal through a dozen mirrors, but I could still back-track to its real point of origin. It’s a ship, a Consolidation enforcement vehicle, and it’s much closer than the Moon.’

‘That makes no sense at all. Yevgeny was the ambassador for the United Orbital Nations, not the Consolidation.’

‘In which case, apparently you’re not the only one starting a new chapter.’

Beyond the orbit of Mars they passed within visual range of a Watchkeeper. Kanu wondered if Nissa had bent their course to make it possible, seeking the thrill of a close encounter, something to take their minds off the puzzle of the Consolidation ship — even his own mind off his troubled dreams.

‘The moratorium is stupid,’ she was saying. ‘Look at the size of that thing, the power it must contain. If the Watchkeepers didn’t want us to be flying around in spaceships, does anyone think we’d still be able to?’

‘They make people nervous,’ Kanu said as Fall of Night’s cameras relayed an increasingly sharp image of the alien machine. ‘Perhaps it’s sensible not to do anything too provocative until we have a better idea of their intentions.’

‘Maybe they don’t have any intentions — maybe they’re just going to sit in our solar system like rocks until we bore ourselves to death waiting for them to do something.’

The Watchkeeper was a thousand-kilometre-long pine cone, interlaced and overlapping black facets wrapped around a core of glowing blue mystery. There were eleven Watchkeepers in the solar system now; some of them in orbit around planets, others floating in free space. Occasionally they moved, changing orientation or position. They swung like weathercocks and slid from orbit to orbit in mute defiance of parochial human physics. Occasionally a beam of blue light would pass from one Watchkeeper to another, or stab out of the solar system entirely.

They had communicated not the slightest thing to any of the human powers. What they wanted, what they would permit, what was forbidden, remained within the realm of increasingly fraught speculation. It was clear only that they were here for something — observation, perhaps, or a reckoning, which lay at some point in the future.

Kanu was glad when their course began to take them further from the Watchkeeper.

‘It never hurts to give them a wide margin,’ he said, feeling he needed to defend his qualms.

‘Did your friends on Mars feel the same way?’

‘My friends on Mars were three human beings, two of whom are dead now — and you’ve met the other one.’ But that was a harsher answer than her innocent question merited. ‘I had good relations with the machines through Swift. It was exactly that good relationship that Yevgeny Korsakov disapproved of — he felt it was tantamount to treason against my own species.’

‘Extreme. But given that we know so little about the Martian robots — who can say what they’re really up to? How can we be sure they’re not in secret cahoots with the Watchkeepers, plotting our downfall?’

‘Believe me, it’s not like that at all. I spent enough time with Swift and the other machines to know how they feel about the Watchkeepers, and the truth is they’re as in the dark as the rest of us. They don’t feel some distant kinship with the Watchkeepers. They’re as alien and frightening to the Evolvarium as they are to us.’

‘You think.’

‘You have a great many genes in common with an oak tree. Do you feel an intense kinship with oak trees?’

‘They’re both robots, Kanu. Try seeing things from our perspective for a while, not theirs.’

That was as close to arguing as they got. It was only four days from Earth to Jupiter space, hardly enough time to start getting on each other’s nerves. Fall of Night was certainly not large, but the provision of two cabins meant there was more than enough privacy available to keep irritation at bay.

After their breakfast discussion, Kanu had been careful not to raise the matter of his disquiet again. It was better that way. He allowed her to believe she had settled his misgivings, putting them down to the unpleasantness of his recent experience on Mars. And, indeed, Kanu was ready to concede that a component of his feelings could be explained away as a kind of post-traumatic episode. But he knew there was more to it than that.

On the third day, twenty-four hours from Jupiter, he was alone in his cabin when he became unaccountably certain he was being watched; that he was sharing the room with a silent observer. Out of reflex he twitched around, and for an instant he was convinced he had seen something, a figure or the shadow of a figure, out of the corner of his eye.

In any other situation he would have gladly put the matter behind him. But it was just Kanu and Nissa and her little spaceship, and there was nothing between them and another human being except millions of kilometres of vacuum. Nissa aside, he was more alone here than he had been on the surface of Mars. Nor had he ever been one to jump at shadows.