Poseidon's Wake

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Before the face assumed focus, something cool and sweet and soothing touched her lips. She thought for a drowsy instant that this kind form was Ru, for the voice was a woman’s. But it was Captain Gandhari Vasin helping her back to life.

‘Thank you,’ she said, when she was at last able to coax some sounds from her mouth. ‘I wasn’t expecting… I mean, you didn’t need to.’

‘I didn’t need to, but if a captain can’t welcome her crew back to the world of the living, what can she do? Anyway, I need you, Goma. Take your time — getting up and about is hard enough after a normal skipover interval — but I have something of interest to show you when you’re ready.’

Her eyes still would not focus properly, but the vague textures and colours of her surroundings were enough to establish that she was still in the skipover vault.

‘Are we safe? Did we make the crossing?’

‘Yes, we made the crossing. Seventy light-years, and not a single mishap. How much of that we owe to the Watchkeeper ahead of us, I don’t know. But the ship is in good condition, and we are where we wished to be.’

‘What have you found?’

‘A great deal. Most importantly, though, a welcome message — a signal telling us where to go. I think you should hear it. I would be very glad of your opinion.’

‘How is Ru?’

‘There’s no need to worry about Ru. She’s in excellent hands.’

That was meant well, but it was not quite the answer she had been hoping for. And yet Goma could only focus on her fears for so long before drowsiness pulled her under again.

She had no idea how long she was out, but there came a moment when the face of Dr Saturnin Nhamedjo was assuming gradual focus before her. He was studying her with magnificent and serene patience, as if nothing in his universe was more valuable than the health of this one patient. She could easily imagine that he had been there for hours, waiting by her skipover casket, untroubled by any concern save her own well-being.

‘Welcome back, Goma. I know you have already spoken to Gandhari, but I will reaffirm the news. You have come through safely. All is well. We have all survived skipover — even our prisoner.’

She thought of Grave, and that in turn made her think of Mposi. But for the moment there was only one thing at the forefront of her concerns. She made to get up out of the casket, forcing effort into unwilling muscles.

‘Steady!’ Dr Nhamedjo said, smiling at her determination.

‘I want to see Ru.’

‘In good time. Ru is receiving the very best care and I am perfectly satisfied with her progress.’

‘Something went wrong, didn’t it?’

‘We have all survived. This is a blessing. Anything else must be considered a minor setback, nothing more.’ A stern, admonitionary tone entered his voice. ‘I do not wish you to overtax yourself, Goma, not during these early hours. You have more than enough work to do in building your own strength back up. Leave Ru to us. She will be well. I have the utmost confidence in her.’

‘Is it the AOTS?’

‘It was always going to be a complicating factor. An already damaged nervous system is not best equipped to deal with the additional stresses of skipover, but I would not have agreed to let her join the expedition if I did not think her strong enough.’ He reached into the casket and patted her wrist, offering reassurance. ‘She is in a medically induced coma now, but that is for her own good. We are giving her a cocktail of drugs that will help with the combined effects of AOTS and the ordinary stresses of skipover. There is no reason for them not to work, but it must be done carefully, and the results monitored at each step. Gradually, she will be elevated back to proper consciousness. I have every confidence that she will be well again.’

‘How long?’

‘A matter of days. A hardship for her and a worry for you, I appreciate that, but it is an extremely small price to pay when set against the years we have already crossed. Now rest, Goma — and set your mind at ease. Ru will be well.’

She wanted to demand more of him — additional guarantees. But she was too tired, too groggy, to do more than place her trust in this man. Sometimes that was all you could do.

So she rested. After an hour or two, she was able to experiment with moving around, easing herself out of the casket and onto her feet, steadying herself against walls and furniture until she learned to trust bones and muscle. It was hard at first — she felt pinned down under a dead weight, nauseous and dizzy at the same time. But her strength and confidence returned, and the ill-effects slowly faded away. She kept down fluids and soon found herself able to eat. She wandered around a small area of the ship, regaining her bearings. Hour by hour, more and more people were awake and mobile. All appeared content to share the same assumption: that they were aboard a ship that had crossed seventy light-years of space, in one hundred and forty years of time.

Goma could hold these facts in her head well enough, but accepting them as deep, visceral truths was another thing entirely. She felt exhausted by skipover, physically drained, every part of her bruised, but that was not the same as feeling fourteen decades older.

She kept looking down at her own hand, studying the familiar anatomy of her wrist, the pores of her skin, the fine dark hairs, the architecture of bone and tendon beneath the flesh. Nothing had changed — nothing felt older. She pinched the skin of her belly, but it too appeared miraculously indifferent to the process it had undergone. Blemishes, moles, scars were all present and correct. She did not look quite herself in the mirror — there was a slackness of muscle tone, a vagueness to her gaze — but all of that was a normal consequence of skipover. Indeed, the ill-effects were connected with the transition from total skipover stasis to full animation rather than the fourteen decades of stasis itself.

They had moved Ru out of her skipover casket into a dedicated medical suite — one of two on the ship — and placed her on a normal bed under a bank of conventional medical instruments. She had lines going in and out of her, of different colours and thicknesses, conveying blood, urine, saline and drugs to and from different machines. She had a crown-like device fitted around her forehead, maintaining the medical coma and simultaneously running some sort of cyclic neural scan — peelings of her brain flickering in different colours on the display above her headboard. It was a difficult time for Dr Nhamedjo and his staff since they still had a dozen or more sleepers to bring out of skipover. But they managed to find time to make it look as if Ru was their chief concern.

Goma wanted to be at her side. But Dr Nhamedjo assured her there was no chance of her waking up ahead of schedule; that everything was proceeding according to a fixed and orderly timescale. ‘These prefrontal areas,’ he said, indicating part of the scan, ‘are still inflamed and must be brought under control. She is also suffering microseizures — a kind of temporal-lobe epilepsy. None of this is without precedent in AOTS cases, and all of it is responsive to careful management. But above all it must not be rushed, or we will leave Ru with greater impairments than when she joined us.’

It was hard to watch her lying there, so helpless and so clearly afflicted. Every now and then she tremored, sometimes violently enough that it was hard not to think she was in the grip of nightmares, or in pain. But Nhamedjo assured Goma that there was no conscious activity involved, and that Ru would remember nothing of this time.

Goma held her hand, tried to still it when the palsy hit. She whispered kindnesses to Ru and settled a kiss on her fever-hot brow.

‘Come back, my love. I need you.’

For the time being, though, there was nothing to do but wait.

‘Perhaps,’ Gandhari said, ‘a thing or two to take your mind off Ru — would that help?’

‘It might.’

‘The truth is, I hardly know where to begin. We’ve learned so much already, and yet all we’ve managed to do is replace every question with two more. Still, I have to start somewhere.’

They were in the captain’s cabin, just the two of them. Not much had changed since the last time Goma had been in it. The picture on the wall was different now — perhaps Vasin had changed it herself, or else the room had made the choice based on its own selection algorithm. It was a strange, gloomy painting of a pale and naked woman in the embrace of a withered skeletal figure. To one side of the coupling floated sperm-like forms; to the other bulbous-headed aliens.

Goma had difficulty squaring this image — or, for that matter, the destructive landscape that had preceded it — with the calm, collected, warm-spirited person who lived in this room.

‘Who was there to wake you up?’ Goma asked, remembering the other woman’s kindness.

‘Nobody. But one of us had to be first, and it might as well have been me.’

‘That can’t have been pleasant.’

‘Well, it was silent, I’ll say that for it. Colder than I wished. Something was off with the thermostat settings — we soon fixed that, but only after I’d shivered my way through two whole days, trying to restart the climate control. Still, it wasn’t too bad — mainly I was happy we’d made it, that we weren’t just some cloud of atoms sailing on through space.’

The ship had not been totally devoid of life during the main part of its cruise, Goma knew. Periodically, technicians had come in and out of skipover to review the vital systems, while Nhamedjo’s medical team had done the same thing for the sleepers, putting themselves through the ordeal of multiple skipover transitions. From what she could gather, there had been little work for these brave souls to do. Nothing had gone badly wrong; nothing had needed serious repair.