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Poseidon's Wake

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‘And why would that be?’

‘Two heads, Nissa! I’m a diplomat, not a scientist. I don’t have the background to begin to do this justice.’

‘And you think mine’s any more qualified?’

‘I was married to you for long enough to know that you can turn your mind to just about anything if it interests you. Deep down, I’m not very imaginative. You are.’

‘It’s a bit late to start trying to turn my head with flattery.’

‘That’s not my intention. I just want you to feel valued. You can see your being here as a mistake, or you can see it as an opportunity, a chance—’

‘I’ll decide how I see it, thank you.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ But he knew that no choice of words was going to dig him out of this hole. It was largely of his own making, too.

Nissa was still standing, one hand cocked against her hip — her entire posture conveying scepticism and an unwillingness to be persuaded.

‘So what have you done with this news?’

‘Nothing at all. I started composing a message about the second Mandala — I didn’t even know about the arches at that point. But I thought about you and decided against sending it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it would be selfish of me to act as if the discovery were mine alone.’

‘You made it.’

‘That was just happy accident. Now that you’re awake, though, I’d like you to share it. I won’t transmit the news, not until you’ve had a chance to see all of this for yourself and decide what we say.’

‘Such nobility.’

She had meant the words sarcastically, but he decided to take them at face value. ‘It isn’t, and I know it. But if I can do anything to make amends…’ Then he shook his head. ‘I can’t, I know I can’t. And I don’t expect your forgiveness.’

‘Finally.’

‘But what I said is true. I value you, Nissa — and you should value yourself. Regardless of how we got here, who wronged whom, we’re here.’

‘And the prize for most tautologous statement goes to—’

He raised a hand. ‘I know. But I mean it — we are here. In this moment, experiencing this discovery. This is a place no human eyes have ever seen. Where no man has gone before — who said that — William Shakespeare?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘The point is, it’s just you and me. And we have responsibilities now, whether we want them or not.’

‘I’m clear about my responsibilities,’ Nissa said. ‘You don’t need to spell them out for me.’

‘That was never—’

‘Poseidon. How close will we get?’

‘About five light-seconds — there’s scope for adjusting our course if we want to skim nearer. We’ll have a steadily improving view of the arches as we approach — and of anything else on or near Poseidon. Mainly, I want to find the sender of that signal.’

‘If they’re still here.’

‘Icebreaker’s been transmitting its arrival for weeks, long before we were woken, and listening for a response. So far it hasn’t heard anything, but that doesn’t mean we won’t find something when we get closer.’

‘The bones of whoever sent it.’

‘I sincerely hope it’s more than bones.’

After a silence, she said, ‘I want to know it’s you. You and not the robot.’

‘It is me.’

‘Are you sure of that?’

‘Swift is in me, but I’m not Swift. And when you speak to me, it’s Kanu. The man you were married to. The man who still wishes he hadn’t dragged you into this. The man who wishes he was back in Lisbon, and happy to have found you again.’

He braced for a cutting response, but this time his words drew no venom.

‘Are you in control of the ship, or Swift?’

‘Me. Only me. Swift won’t take over my body without my permission — my authority.’

‘Are you sure of that?’

‘Yes.’ But he answered with more surety than he felt. What else could he do, if he were not to undermine Nissa’s already fragile confidence in their situation?

But perhaps she knew he was lying. ‘Good,’ she answered, with a coolness of tone that said she had seen right through him. ‘Let’s try and keep it that way, shall we?’

Kanu nodded. It was a small thing, but he would take what he could.

Days and weeks brought them nearer to Poseidon. The improvement in knowledge was steady rather than dramatic, their view of the system gradually sharpening and gaining detail and texture. After the initial discovery of the second Mandala and the arches there were no great surprises, just reinforcement of what they already knew. The Mandala was definitely real; the arches were definitely not of natural origin.

Beyond that there were hints of further interest, but nothing that answered Kanu’s central question: who or what had need of Ndege Akinya?

Paladin had a very small moon. That was not unusual in itself, but this misshapen little body was odd in a number of ways. It was too warm, for a start: much hotter than would be expected given the standard thermal equilibrium for something in its orbit and distance from Gliese 163. Kanu wondered whether the rock might have been an asteroid, or the remains of one, captured after some violent collisional process. Such an encounter would have needed to be recent enough that the thermal energy of the event was still bleeding away into space.

It became even stranger, though, because in addition to the overall temperature of the rock, there were a handful of even hotter regions on its surface. They were like the infrared traces of fingerprints left on an apple held in a human hand. They were hot enough — up in the three thousand kelvins — that they made him think of geysers or volcanic outflow points. Strangely, though, there was no trace of material boiling away into space.

What was making those hot spots glow? Were they natural features or evidence of deliberate activity? He had been aiming transmissions at the rock but nothing had come back from it. Kanu knew he would need to take a closer look, if for no other reason than to satisfy his curiosity about the peculiar heating effect. But that would be no inconvenience since he would want to examine the second Mandala in any case.

Closer to Poseidon, they found a secondary mystery. The arches were numerous and tantalising and definitely warranted examination. But lacing Poseidon — orbiting at different inclinations, in the manner electrons were once thought to orbit the atomic nucleus — was a host of small dark moons. They buzzed around Poseidon like flies, shell after shell of them. There had been no hint of them in the Ocular data, but that was to be expected. Dark as night and much smaller than the planet, they would have been almost impossible to resolve in time-averaged exposures, even when they passed across Poseidon’s visible face.

Clearly, they were not natural. Even if the moons were natural in origin — and their uniform size, shape and reflectivity suggested otherwise — they had most certainly not fallen into these orbits by chance.

The moons’ orbits ranged in diameter. The smallest nearly skimmed Poseidon’s atmosphere, almost down to the tops of the arches, while the widest spanned a distance of ten light-seconds. Between these extremes lay another fifteen shells. There were forty-five of these tiny moon-like objects in total, but no natural moons.

Kanu’s instinct was to avoid them. But they threshed around Poseidon in perfectly repeatable patterns, tracing staunchly Newtonian paths like marbles in grooves. Clearly their individual masses did not perturb each other, or the effects had been allowed for in some way. He could already calculate their positions to many centuries hence and be confident of his predictions. Threading Icebreaker through the weave of moons was a trivial matter: there were countless viable trajectories. The hard part would be choosing which he preferred; how close he was prepared to get to the world and to any one of its moons.

There was time to think it over — and of course it would not be a decision he took alone.

Nissa remained distant, offering no hint of imminent forgiveness. But her anger had softened to the point where they were able to have mostly cordial exchanges, even if there remained an underlying and unresolved tension. They kept themselves to themselves, occupying different bedrooms. Icebreaker was not a large starship, but there was space enough for privacy.

They did manage to put aside their differences long enough to eat together. They sat opposite each other, in high, stiff elephant-carved dining chairs, in a room set off from the control deck. Sometimes they ate in silence or with some musical accompaniment, often very old recordings. Occasionally the walls displayed moving images of African landscapes at dusk, skies like flame, trees like dark paper cut-outs against that brightness.

‘With your permission,’ Kanu said one evening, ‘we’ll take a closer look at Poseidon.’

‘Permission?’

‘Wrong word. Mutual consent. If you agree it’s the right thing to do.’

Nissa was silent. Kanu knew better than to press her. He studied her face, her eyes averted from his gaze — as if the act of eating demanded her total concentration. He still loved her. The more she pulled away from him, the more he wanted her. He thought of gravity, of inverse squares and the swarm of moons girdling Poseidon.

‘You’d have to be a corpse not to be interested in those arches,’ she said eventually. ‘That doesn’t mean I’m enthusiastic, or that I like this situation.’ She ate on. ‘I just want to know as much as possible, given that my survival may depend on the choices we make.’