Poseidon's Wake (31 page)
‘I put a gun to your head. Actually, more like a harpoon. I retrieved it from that body you found outside, the Regal. Do you remember the Regal?’
‘I do now.’
‘I brought the harpoon thing back inside with me. I don’t know whether it works or not, but that’s not really the point. Swift didn’t know either, and he wasn’t going to take a chance and find out. I needed a bargaining position, you see. Does that make sense to you?’
‘Perfect sense.’
‘It wasn’t my intention to kill you – if it had been, I could have just let you fall away from the ship – but we do need to change our working relationship.’
‘In what way?’ Kanu asked, with a forced levity.
‘I accept the situation. I accept that Swift got inside your skull and dragged us across interstellar space. Nothing’s going to change that. And now that we’re here, I’m not about to turn my back on these discoveries. I want answers, too – and I want to survive, and to fix this ship. Swift says we can reach Paladin in about a year, if
Fall of Night
shoves
Icebreaker
into the right transfer orbit. I did suggest we take
Fall of Night
instead, get there quicker, but Swift argued me out of that – we need this ship to return to Earth, and I accept that. But everything else? We do things as equals from now on.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, we’ve been on equal terms since we reached this system.’
‘Fine words, Kanu, but from my position things look a little asymmetric. There’s the small matter of Swift. Now, I’m not so naive as to think I can cut him out of your head like a disease – nor would I want to.’
‘Good. That’s good.’
‘You and Swift got us into this; it’ll take both of you to get us out of it. But as I said, things have to change. Swift and I have been talking, and we’ve come to a mutually acceptable solution. The auto-surgeon is going to put a small implant into your head – a very simple device, nothing complicated. It will address your visual and auditory centres, in effect eavesdropping on your private conversations.’
‘Are you absolutely sure you want to go through with this?’
‘Yes, I’m quite sure. And here’s the clever part. When it’s done with you, the surgeon will reactivate some of my own latent neuromachinery, the stuff I’ve been carrying around in my head since the fall of the Mechanism. It’ll establish a communications protocol between the two sets of implants. Do you understand what that means?’
Kanu did not need to think about it for long. ‘You’ll be able to see and hear Swift.’
‘More than that – I’ll be able to talk to Swift just as easily as you can, at least when we’re in close proximity. Equals at last – or as equal as I want to be. Does that strike you as an acceptable arrangement?’
Kanu considered his options – try and talk her out of it, or accept that allowing Swift to be visible to both of them might be a path to forgiveness, or at least a step along the way.
‘I suppose it does.’
‘I’m glad. Although, to be fair, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me either way. I’d still be doing it.’
After a silence, Kanu said, ‘Do you hate me?’
‘Hate you? No, I don’t even dislike you. Why would I? We were married, and then we were lovers again. You’re all over me like a chemical stain.’
‘That’s a flattering way of putting it.’
‘You’ve been flattered enough. Things change now.’ She leaned over as if to kiss him, but instead she was merely activating the surgeon. ‘Now sleep. When you wake up, we’ll talk about our options. The three of us, as one happy family.’
The surgeon’s sterile hood whirred over him and he heard the hiss of anaesthetic gas.
‘Did you agree to this?’ he asked Swift.
‘I had to. You’d be surprised how persuasive a harpoon gun can be.’
The three of them were sitting on the bridge, the evidence of Kanu’s surgery visible as tiny clots of blood on either side of his temples.
‘So basically there are no good choices,’ Nissa said. ‘Is that what you’re telling us?’
‘We haven’t escaped Poseidon’s gravity well,’ Swift said, ‘and left to itself,
Icebreaker
doesn’t have the capability to do so. The damage to the propulsion system is simply too extensive. Equally, we aren’t in immediate peril. We’ll simply orbit and orbit, and hope we don’t attract the attention of either those moons or any more almost-dead Watchkeepers. Power isn’t our problem – we can easily return to skipover and await rescue.’
‘From where?’ Kanu asked.
‘Given that no one will be able to reply to our transmission until we repair our antennas, that is an exceptionally good question. At the moment our effective communicational range is no more than light-seconds, perhaps less. Sooner or later another ship will reach this system, and perhaps they will find a way to signal us, but we might have wait many decades for that to happen.’
Kanu and Nissa were in their control chairs; Swift’s figment was seated before them in a chair of his own imagining. He had one leg hooked over the other, an elbow on the armrest, chin resting in his hand, pince-nez glasses dangling from his fingers, the very model of urbane relaxation. Kanu thought back to their many chess games and wished that nothing more was at stake now than his own intellectual pride.
‘That’s no good,’ Nissa said.
‘Which is why we must consider Paladin,’ Swift said. ‘
Fall of Night
is much smaller than
Icebreaker
, but it has the capability to shove both ships out of Poseidon’s gravity well and into a transfer orbit for Paladin. When we reach Paladin,
Fall of Night
can steer us into a rendezvous with the orbiting shard.’
‘How long will that take?’ Kanu said.
‘About a year. I’m afraid that’s orbital transfer mechanics for you. The damage to our ship has effectively catapulted us back into the early rocket age. Now we move at the speed of comets, of asteroids.’
‘We could be there a lot quicker if we just took
Fall of Night
,’ Nissa said. ‘It can talk to other ships, too, if anyone’s listening.’
‘But then we would be abandoning our only hope of return,’ Swift answered patiently. ‘And we would still need to drag
Icebreaker
across the system to get it repaired and refuelled. At least this way we arrive with our ship.’
‘But all that time!’ Nissa said.
‘It won’t be wasted,’ Swift said. ‘Kanu’s ship can begin to repair some of the damage now – rebuild steering control and communications. That will give us a valuable head start.’
‘Then we go back into skipover,’ Kanu said.
‘Unless you would rather be awake for the entire transfer. Is this acceptable to you, Nissa?’
‘You did say there were no good options – I suppose sleeping is as good a way to pass the time as any other. But you’ll be asleep as well, won’t you, Swift?’
‘I’m afraid so. Skipover will suppress all Kanu’s higher brain functions, including those useful to me. But we need not worry.
Icebreaker
already has a high level of autonomy. It will wake us if there is a development.’
‘Such as what?’ Nissa said.
‘I have no idea,’ the figment answered. ‘I can tie our systems into
Fall of Night
’s and continue transmitting our recognition signal via Nissa’s ship. It will be less powerful, and less capable of detecting a weak return signal, but we will lose nothing by trying.’
‘Nothing will answer us,’ Kanu said, struck by a sudden gloomy fatalism. ‘If they meant to, it would already have happened.’
‘Nonetheless, we may as well keep trying. Nissa: I will provide you with a range of solutions for the transfer orbit – each will put a different strain on
Fall of Night
. I will leave it to you to make the final selection and handle the operation itself.’
‘That’s very good of you, Swift,’ Nissa said, drenching her answer in sarcasm.
Swift gave an obliging smile. ‘One tries.’
Nissa was easily capable of using her ship as a tug. They agreed on an option which provided for rendezvous with Paladin in just over eleven months, with fuel in reserve for the corresponding orbital correction at the other end of the manoeuvre. Not that it really mattered if they used up all of Nissa’s fuel: if they could not replenish
Icebreaker
’s initialising tanks, they would be going nowhere anyway.
Inside the larger ship, it was hard to believe there had been any course correction at all. Such was the difference in the masses of the two ships that even with its drive at maximum output,
Fall of Night
could provide only the gentlest of accelerations. But the push was sustained over several hours, and when it was done, Swift confirmed that they were on course.
Kanu spent a restless couple of days making sure the repair systems were working as intended. When that was not on his mind, he kept transmitting his recognition signal, this time sending it via
Fall of Night
’s much smaller antenna. He had announced his arrival to every obvious body in the solar system; now he was ready to consider anything larger than a pebble. But still the signal went unanswered. He was starting to imagine something in that silence: not the simple absence of an answer, but something more sinister, a kind of purposeful withholding. A decision not to speak, a deliberate and calculated refusal to acknowledge his presence.
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t be so surprised,’ Nissa said as his mood began to darken again. ‘The message wasn’t meant for you and Swift in the first place.’
‘They could at least do us the courtesy of answering, after all the distance we’ve travelled.’
‘It’s not how far you’ve come that matters. It’s where you’ve come from.’
After that, there was nothing to do but sleep.
Kanu reviewed the orbital transfer again and programmed their caskets for an interval a few days short of the end of the crossing. It would give them time to adjust to their surroundings, make renewed efforts at contact and generally recover from skipover before they arrived at their destination.
He put Nissa to sleep, watched her casket seal itself over her body, monitored the medical readouts for the smooth transition to unconsciousness, and then observed her gradual decline into cryogenic suspension. He touched a hand to the casket’s cool side, feeling an intense protectiveness for her. He loved her and wanted to make amends for the wrongs he had done her, from the failings of their marriage to the recent deceits concerning his intentions for Europa and beyond. It would please him very much if Nissa Mbaye were to start seeing him as a good man again.
Perhaps there was still time.
Almost without thought, he programmed the same sleep interval into his own casket. They would awaken together. Whatever the shard held for them, they would face it as partners.
And so Kanu submitted himself to the cold once more.
The airlock was set into the side of the largest dome, near the transmission tower. It was a high-capacity lock with a lofty ceiling, large enough to take a big vehicle. The chevroned door opened and they all passed through at the same time, Goma studying Eunice’s mirrored visor, trying to glimpse the face behind the glass.
Beyond the lock was a gently sloping corridor leading to lower levels. Eunice guided the party a short distance along it until they reached a secondary door set into the corridor’s wall. It was not an airlock, but was clearly capable of holding pressure in the event of a blow-out. She opened the door and invited them to step through.
They entered some kind of accommodation area with metal-lined walls and several passages leading off in various directions. There was a table and a set of chairs, although not nearly enough for all of them. Around the metal walls were shelves and cabinets, and various utensils and implements set upon the shelves.
Eunice lowered herself into the grandest chair at the table, then bid the others to take such chairs as were available.
‘We don’t need to sit down,’ Vasin said. ‘Not yet. We’ve come a long way and what we’d like first is an explanation.’
‘It’s rude not to sit,’ the spacesuited form said. ‘But look at me! Calling you rude and I haven’t even had the common courtesy to remove my helmet.’
She reached up with both hands, undid some latching mechanism on the neck ring and lifted the helmet free of her head. She placed it before her on the table and beamed at them over its crown.
Goma should not have been surprised – she had seen this woman’s face in the earlier transmission, after all – but a transmission could easily be faked or doctored. Yet here was the unmistakable face of Eunice Akinya, a figment from history, strikingly real and human-looking down to the last details.
‘There. Fresh air. I hate suit air. Always have, ever since I took that long trek on the Moon. Well, what about the rest of you? Are you going to stand there like fools?’
Nhamedjo was glancing down at his cuff readout. ‘The air looks good. Perfectly breathable, in fact – no trace toxins, according to the filters. I think we are safe to remove our helmets.’
‘No,’ Vasin said.
‘Oh, but I insist,’ Eunice said. ‘No – really. I insist. You want answers from me, meet me on my terms. Take off your helmets. I want to know who I’m dealing with.’
‘Worried we might be robots?’ Goma asked. But she had already taken a leap of faith and was reaching up to undo her own helmet.
‘Goma!’ Vasin said. ‘Don’t do it!’
‘You heard her. I want answers. If this is what it takes, so be it. I don’t think she’d drag us seventy light-years just to play a nasty trick with poison gases.’
‘Good girl.’
Goma lifted her helmet off and the air gushed in. It was cold, but nothing about it smelled or tasted suspicious. She gulped a load of it into her lungs and waited for some ill-effect to manifest.
Nothing. No headache, no light-headedness, no sense that her thoughts were in any way affected.
‘The air is breathable,’ Eunice said, looking not at Goma but at the rest of them. ‘The gases’ ratios won’t differ greatly from those on your ship, I expect. There are no biological toxins or radiological hazards. If there were, I’d already know about them.’
‘Why would a robot care about biological toxins?’ Dr Nhamedjo asked. ‘For that matter, why does a robot need airlocks or a spacesuit? You’re a construct. You could walk out there naked and not feel a thing.’
‘Those are cooking utensils,’ Goma said, nodding at some of the tools she could see racked and shelved around the room. ‘That is a stove. Why would you need cooking utensils? Why would you ever need to cook anything?’
‘A woman’s got to eat. Why else?’
Ru lifted the lid on a plastic container, then sprang away in revulsion. ‘Worms!’
‘Mealworms,’ their host corrected. ‘Very tasty. Very good source of protein. Practically all we ate on Mars in the early days. You should try them. Go well with a little curry powder – stops them wriggling off your chopsticks, too. Now – since you’re staying – will you be good guests and remove the rest of your spacesuits?’
‘Why?’ Vasin asked.
‘Manners, dear Captain.’
They obliged, stripping down to their inner clothing layers, and set the spacesuit parts in neat piles by the door. Then, in plain view so there could be no possibility of substitution or subterfuge, she also discarded the outer elements of her spacesuit, removing the parts neatly and methodically, as befitted a veteran space explorer who had come to trust her life to the complex, interlocking components of the garment, and who accorded them the respect and care which was their due.
Beneath the suit she wore a sleeveless ash-grey top and tight black leggings. She resumed her position at the table and offered one arm across it to Dr Nhamedjo, her palm raised.
‘Go ahead. Feel my pulse. Poke and prod to your heart’s content.’
Nhamedjo moved to touch his fingers to her skin, but hesitated at the last instant. He glanced at his colleagues.
‘She cannot be living. We know what she was when she left. This is not open to debate.’
Eunice gave a pout of disapproval. ‘Do I look like a robot to you?’
‘The records say you were a very good emulation. You could pass for a living person except under close scrutiny – you looked and sounded and moved like the real Eunice Akinya. But you were still a machine, a robot, under the layers of synthetic anatomy. You got better at acting like a person, but the essence of what you were did not change.’
‘Test her pulse,’ Goma said.
Nhamedjo did as he was bid, holding the contact for long seconds. ‘It feels real.’
‘Not just the pulse,’ Eunice said.
‘No – everything. The texture of your skin, the anatomy of your wrist joint . . . it’s astonishingly good. May I examine your eyes?’
‘Whatever you like. You’ll come to the same conclusion.’
He indulged himself by staring carefully into either eye, pinching back the surrounding skin with physicianly gentleness. He held a hand before her mouth and reported that he could feel the passage of her breath. ‘I can conduct further tests . . . scans, blood samples. But why doubt the evidence of our eyes and what she’s already telling us?’
‘Because history says she can’t be alive,’ Goma said.
‘History’s a stopped clock,’ Eunice said. ‘It’s nice to look at, but there’s only so much it can tell you.’
‘Then start by telling us how you can possibly be alive,’ Vasin said.
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘Because the living version of you, the flesh-and-blood Eunice, died in deep space,’ Goma said. ‘You went out in a stupid little ship, barely equipped for interstellar space, and unsurprisingly you didn’t make it. Years later, they came and found you. They pulled your frozen corpse out of that ship and found that there was no hope of ever reviving you. Your brain cells were just so much slush.’
‘But there were recoverable patterns,’ Eunice said. ‘Chiku brought them to me on
Zanzibar
. I uploaded them into myself, used them to make my emulation even better.’
‘But you were still a robot,’ Goma said. ‘You were a robot with some neural patterns copied from the dead corpse of the real Eunice – a few human flourishes to embellish your programming. But that didn’t make you flesh and blood.’
‘Something did,’ Nhamedjo said quietly. ‘Answer me this, Eunice – knowing that I’ll be able to verify the answers for myself, given time. Is any part of you still cybernetic?’
She looked at her hand and wiggled the pinky. ‘My little finger. I kept that as a memento of better times.’
‘What about your brain? Do you have a brain?’
‘If I don’t, there’s an awful lot of blood wasting its time moving around inside my skull.’
‘And the structure of that brain . . . the modular organisation? Do you have hemispheres, a frontal cortex, a commissural gap? Is that where your visual processing takes place?’
‘I don’t know, Doctor – where does yours happen?’
‘We could put her in a suit,’ Vasin said. ‘Run a standard host medical, have the diagnostic piped to one of our faceplates. If she has a cardiovascular system – heart, lungs – the suit will tell us. It should also pick up neural activity if her brain’s anything like ours.’
‘I think we already know the answer,’ Nhamedjo said. ‘She must be organic. She would not embark on such a lie knowing how easily we could prove her wrong.’
‘Then the Watchkeepers must have done this,’ Goma said.
This drew a nod from Eunice. ‘At least one of you has a tenuous grasp on the situation. Of course it was Watchkeeper intervention – how else could it have happened?’
‘Why?’ Goma said.
‘Because it was what I wanted. Because becoming organic – becoming the living incarnation of myself – was the end-point I’d been moving towards for my entire existence. I started off as a bodyless software emulation, a thing stitched together from public and private records of myself. A piece of art. Then I became something more than dear Sunday ever anticipated. A fully autonomous, self-aware artilect – a thing too dangerous to be allowed to exist. So I made myself invisible, dispersed, tenuous – far beyond the reach of the Cognition Police – until the time came when I needed an actual body to bottle myself into. That’s how I got aboard
Zanzibar
– stuffed into a robot puppet. But then I acquired those neural traces. They had an interesting effect on me – pushed me over the edge of my own computational prediction horizon. I could no longer foresee my own response to any given stimulus. I’d become quixotic, unguessable – prone to whims and sudden, irrational changes of mind. I experienced complex mental states that I could only characterise as emotions. Human, in other words – except for the fact that my body was still artificial.’
‘How do you know an emotion is an emotion?’ Nhamedjo said.
‘Because I’m not an idiot, Doctor. Because when something hurts inside you when you’ve never had the sense of being hurt inside before – you do the obvious thing and put a name to it. One of my emotions, if we’re going to articulate it, was longing.’
‘I find that difficult to believe,’ Nhemedjo answered.
‘I find you difficult to believe. The fact is that I sensed an absence in myself – an incompleteness. And I knew that until I filled that absence, I wouldn’t feel happy. There. Another emotion.’
‘Go on,’ Goma said, feeling a loyalty to Eunice.
‘I sensed that I had almost attained something, but with that proximity came an almost unbearable desire to complete the circle, to achieve artistic culmination. Have you ever looked at a jigsaw with one piece still to be put in place? I had been sent into existence with one purpose: to stand for Eunice Akinya in the absence of her living self. I had always been an imperfect substitute, a close-enough copy, but nothing that could be mistaken for the real thing. But the Watchkeepers changed all that. It was a trivial thing for them, having taken apart Chiku Green. They knew what makes us tick. They knew how to make me alive – how to pour fire into my soul.’
It could still be a trick, Goma knew – clever robotics could produce the illusion of a heartbeat, or an inhalation, or the liquid mysteries of the living eye. But every instinct told her that Dr Nhamedjo would find nothing amiss, no matter how thorough his examination. He was correct: she would not make this assertion unless it were provably the case.
It was peculiar indeed to be sitting across from this person and find it strange and marvellous that they were made of skin and bone rather than metals and plastics. And in its way, more thoroughly unsettling than any robot could ever be. Robots were knowable; their governing algorithms might be complex and opaque but they were still algorithms. Robots could be shut down or destroyed if they became bothersome.
It was not nearly so simple with people.
‘I don’t know what to make of you,’ Goma said.
‘That’s the first reasonable thing any of you has said. Of course you don’t. I don’t know what to make of myself, and I’ve had plenty of time to think about it.’
Goma searched for a flaw in her face, some hint of machine stiffness, a texture or glossiness that was not quite correct. But there was nothing about Eunice that looked anything other than real.
‘How long have you been like this?’
‘For nearly as long as I’ve been here. That’s the odd thing – I don’t appear to be ageing, certainly not to any degree that I can measure.’ As she said this, she held her hand up for examination, turning it this way and that. ‘I didn’t ask them to make me physically immortal, but they appear to have done so anyway. Perhaps they mistook death for a simple design flaw, a bug in the system, and edited it out of my body. Should I be grateful? I suppose I should be.’
‘You don’t sound convinced.’
‘They’ve made me perfect, and in doing so they’ve introduced an imperfection – the one part of me that doesn’t match the living Eunice. She expected to die. Death was the mainspring making her tick. Do you think she’d have done a third of the things she did without that knowledge?’
‘Could you be killed?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose. Then again, I haven’t put that one to the test.’ She cocked her head with sudden birdlike interest. ‘What are you, exactly? My great- great-granddaughter? Let me think.’
‘You can add another “great” – my mother would have been your great-great-granddaughter. But none of that matters. Whatever you are, whatever you’ve become, it doesn’t suddenly make you my distant ancestor.’ But now Goma found herself hungry for more answers. ‘Speaking of Ndege – why did you summon her across space? What’s so important?’
‘I need an Akinya and I thought she would suffice.’
‘Just an Akinya? No more to it than that?’
‘Someone with experience of Tantors.’
Goma allowed herself a shiver of private excitement. She glanced at Ru, the look drawing the merest acknowledgement of their shared thrill. The thing they had hoped for, the thing they had hardly dared believe, might just be possible.
‘Are they here?’
