Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

She did not think there could be any harm in that.

Meanwhile, there was work to do. Under the best set of assumptions, it would be weeks before Travertine was in any kind of position to commence its return journey to Crucible. Vasin had confided that months would be a more realistic estimate, and that it might be wise to assume they could be here for a year, even two. They still had to source fuel for the initialising tanks, and that would mean a much more thorough exploration of the system’s outer worlds than they had yet undertaken. Besides, having come this far, it was senseless to rush home. There was still the other Mandala to be explored in detail, and there was even some rash talk of possibly attempting to initiate another Mandala event. If the mirrors could be made to work again — they were still in orbit — then there was no compelling reason why Eunice’s work could not be replicated. Travertine could put a small probe in orbit, an instrument package with a long-range antenna. After the event, they would have some idea of the direction in the sky from which to await a response.

Rasher still, Goma even heard talk of possibly doing the same thing with the lander, with people aboard — volunteers, of course. Since they could not count on finding mirrors at the other end, it would of necessity be a one-way trip into the interstellar unknown. But if the circumstances of Eunice’s event could be exactly duplicated, the lander might be sent to the same location as Zanzibar . They had promised they would come looking, after all.

Strange to think that wherever Zanzibar had gone, it was still on its way from her perspective. That would be true for years, decades, centuries to come. But in the timeframe of Memphis and the other Risen, no more than an instant would separate their experience of being in this system from suddenly being somewhere else.

In that sense, they were already there.

Goma marvelled at that thought. She wondered what the old, slow Tantor was seeing now, through the dark scrutiny of his wise and patient elephant eyes. Something truly worthy of his interest, she hoped. It would be good to find out, one day. She vowed that she would never look at the stars and not think about Memphis, not until there was news of Zanzibar .

‘If there was a faster way to get you to Earth, I would jump on it,’ Vasin said, ‘but we have to go via Crucible, I’m afraid. Even if we had enough confidence to trust Travertine to that alien contraption, we still couldn’t send you to Earth. Mandala to Mandala — that’s the only way we know. We get the stepping stones, but not the choice of where they’re located.’

‘For now.’

‘Granted — and maybe we’ll learn more, if and when we get anywhere at all. But that’s for the future. When you get to Crucible, I’ll petition the government to allow us to make a rapid crossing to Earth space.’

‘If there’s still a government,’ Goma said.

‘There’s that, yes. But let’s hope we left the place in safe hands. You won’t be sorry to see it again?’

‘No, not at all. I never really wanted to leave.’

‘But you felt you had to.’

‘Because my mother was too old and I hoped we might do some good. Make some discoveries.’

‘You found the Risen,’ Vasin said. ‘That has to count for something.’

‘And now we’ve lost most of them again.’

‘Then we should be especially grateful for the five left to us. I was about to say “in our care”, but that doesn’t quite sound right. They really don’t need that much from us, do they? They’re our equals.’

‘At least.’

‘It would be good to bring one of them with us, back to Crucible — even onwards to Earth. An ambassador.’

‘Yes,’ Goma said. ‘We spoke about that. But it has to be their decision. We can’t force it on them.’

‘No,’ Vasin agreed. ‘There’s been quite enough of that.’

It was not that any of them had stopped thinking about the Watchkeeper, least of all Kanu. It followed them from Poseidon, and when Travertine entered orbit, it too took up station around Orison. It was not orbiting in any conventional sense, but turning at an equal angular speed with the starship, only a much greater distance from the surface, the ship and the Watchkeeper like two dots on an invisible clock hand. It bothered them, hanging up there, its pine-cone shape aimed down at them like a blunt dagger. But then, people had been troubled by the presence of the Watchkeepers for a very long time, in all the systems where humans had left their mark. There was only so much mental energy available for worrying about them. Mortals could not dwell on the affairs of gods for the whole of the day.

But in the morning, the Watchkeeper left its station.

It descended down past Travertine ’s orbit, paying the ship no heed, and then lowered itself to within a scant kilometre of Orison’s surface. It hung there, an object the size of a small continent massing the equivalent of ten thousand Zanzibar s, yet stirring not a grain of dust below. In the airlessness of Orison, the Watchkeeper was as silent and wrong as a single thundercloud in an otherwise clear sky.

Its black facets were partially open, allowing fans and blades of blue light to push out from its core. The Watchkeeper was hundreds of kilometres wide near its blunt tail, the part currently pointing back into space, but its sharp end, almost touching Orison, diminished down through layers of concentric rotating machinery to a scale that was almost within the bounds of human conception. That last kilometre of it was a kind of elephant’s trunk, a thing that corkscrewed and probed.

The trunk lingered above Eunice’s camp. It touched nothing, but showed fleeting interest in the lander, the antennas, the glassed-over chambers where she grew her food, the curious stone kilns of the Risen burial mounds.

The humans and Risen could only watch. The impulse was to go deeper into the warrens of the encampment. But how deep was deep enough when a Watchkeeper was involved? Besides, they needed to know their fate. It was impossible to pull away from the windows, impossible to think about anything other than that looming alien presence. What did it want with them? What did it want, specifically here and specifically now?

An alarm sounded.

An airlock was activating. The momentary fear was that something was trying to get in, but a second’s reflection showed how absurd that was. The Watchkeeper could have peeled back Orison’s crust like a scab if it cared to do so.

No. That alarm was someone going out, not coming in.

‘Where’s Kanu?’ Goma asked.

No one had seen him for some while.

He was nearly under the proboscis when she found the right channel on her suit.

‘Kanu! It’s Goma. What are you doing?’

He walked on for a few paces more, as if he had not heard her. Then he slowed, cast a glance back over his shoulder — light catching the edge of his visor, a hint of his too-familiar profile behind the glass.

‘Doing what an ambassador ought to do, Goma — establishing diplomatic relations. It wants something. One of us, maybe. Well, I think I’m the obvious candidate.’

‘I lost Mposi. I lost Eunice. I won’t lose you.’

‘We’ve all lost more than our share, Goma. But I came to this system to learn something about them. In a way, I’m glad the choice has been so easily made for me. I don’t think I’d have had the courage to go out into space and meet one. But this? It simplifies things a great deal, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Is it you talking, Kanu, or Swift?’

He sounded amused, curious, in equal measure. ‘Does it matter?’

‘I’d like to know. I’d like to know if it’s a man making this decision or a machine making it for him.’