Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘Oh, it’s very much the man. Swift is here, and we both know what must be done, but the choice is mine. The life is mine.’

‘You’re only doing this because you’ve given up on Nissa. But the rest of us haven’t!’

‘Nissa died, Goma. Taking her back home won’t change that. Besides, where is home for me now? I can’t go back to Mars and Earth considers me a traitor to my own species.’

‘For all you know, no one even remembers what you did by now.’

‘No one remembers anything, in the end.’

The proboscis had begun to concentrate its darting, twisting movements in the space immediately above Kanu. Only a few hundred metres separated them now. Kanu had even stopped walking, sensing the inevitable. He let his arms dangle at his sides, assuming a position of patient submission.

It was on him like a striking snake. There was no whip-crack, no shock wave, but the suddenness of the movement still left Goma stunned, almost falling back with the surprise of it. Nothing made of solid matter ought to move like that. Kanu was gone. The proboscis was withdrawing, telescoping back into that larger looming mass. At the same time, the Watchkeeper’s entire body was rising back into space. Numbed by what she had seen, it was all Goma could do to keep breathing. She felt that to move, to utter a word, to allow herself one unwise thought, would be enough to provoke the Watchkeeper to take her as well.

She risked moving her head and looked up, tracking the Watchkeeper’s ascent. It was growing smaller. She wondered exactly what she had just witnessed, and whether witnessing it would be a blessing or a curse on the rest of her life.

Hours passed, and the Watchkeeper did not return. They tracked its departure, first via the ramshackle instruments and sensors of Eunice’s camp, and then with the keener eyes and ears of their orbiting ship. The Watchkeeper was speeding back out to the margins of the system where others of its kind, those that had not been damaged or destroyed by Poseidon, were presumably still waiting.

Goma could not help but feel that they were all in a state of judicial abeyance, waiting the deliverance of some terrible, irreversible verdict. It was hard to sleep, hard to think of anything else. She wondered what had become of Kanu, whether in any sense ‘Kanu’ was still a living entity. It would have been good to speak with Ndege, and find out what she in turn had learned from her mother, during Chiku’s own time inside the Watchkeeper.

She did not have Ndege; she did not have Mposi or Kanu. She could not even speak to Nissa, the only other human being who had endured the Terror and knew something of its qualities.

‘If it intended to harm us,’ Grave said, ‘I think we would already know it. It had every chance to attack when it took Kanu. It must have sensed us nearby — in the camp, aboard the ship — but it chose not to use destructive force.’

‘And if Kanu hadn’t gone out there?’ Ru asked.

Grave looked down. ‘I don’t know.’

The three of them were seated around one of Eunice’s tables. Since the burial ceremony, Goma and Ru had been spending a lot of time with the surviving Tantors in the lower levels of the camp. But it was necessary also to allow Orison’s Risen to get to know the sole survivor of Zanzibar ’s Risen expedition, and human beings were an undesirable complication during that process.

‘Not like you, not to be sure of something,’ Ru said. ‘I thought it was all about certainty where Second Chancers are concerned?’

There was only gentle needling in her question and Grave took no visible offence. ‘If only, Ru. Funnily enough, nothing in Second Chancer philosophy prepared me for this situation — being on Orison, waiting to hear what an implacable alien machine makes of our human envoy — who just happens to be carrying the hopes of the Martian machines with him.’

‘We’re all in the same boat, then,’ Goma said.

‘Do you think he’d have done what he did if Nissa were still alive?’

Ru looked sharply at him. ‘You think it was suicide?’

‘I don’t know him well enough to say for sure, but it looked like the act of a man who had run out of hope.’

‘You can’t blame him,’ Goma said. ‘First the Terror, then the loss of his wife? None of us is in a position to judge Kanu for that.’

‘Believe me, judgement is the last thing on my mind,’ Grave said. ‘I just wish he’d had more time to come to terms with his experiences. I think he would have had the strength to make peace with them, had they not all happened at once.’

‘Easy for you to say, not having been through the Terror,’ Goma said.

‘None of us went through it,’ Grave answered. ‘But at the end of it all, we’d each and every one of us have been free to reject its message.’

Ru made a sceptical face. ‘You mean deny it?’

‘If denial is the mental strategy that allows life to be faced, so be it. Death is negation. Denial is better than that, under any circumstances. Besides — we have no objective evidence that the Terror is anything other than a psychological weapon, a set of apparent propositions that only feel persuasive because they’re being drilled into our minds at a very deep level, like some kind of insidious propaganda.’

‘We don’t need the Terror to tell us the message,’ Goma said. ‘We’ve got the wheels for that — the Mandala grammar lays out the same truth. The vacuum will collapse. There is no arguing with that.’

‘ May collapse,’ Grave stated. ‘But their physics might be wrong. Have you considered that possibility?’

Goma shook her head. ‘They had millions of years to find a flaw in it. If there was one, they’d have found it.’

‘That’s almost a position of faith, though, isn’t it? By accepting unquestioningly that there was no error in the M-builders’ logic, you’re placing them on the level of gods. But they were not infallible — we’ve seen the evidence of that for ourselves.’

‘Have we?’ Goma asked.

‘Poseidon is ruthless, but it is also indiscriminate. And these Mandalas — a dangerous, powerful technology allowed to fall fallow? If they were gods, they were reckless, careless ones. Slipshod deities. They left us some lethal ruins — ask the citizens of Zanzibar . Ask your mother.’

‘My mother is dead.’

‘I am sorry, but the point stands. I don’t see infallibility in the M-builders’ work, Goma. I see arrogance. A blindness to their own flaws. Knowing that, how can we have the slightest confidence in their prophecies?’

‘They’re not prophecies — they’re predictions!’

Grave nodded solemnly, as if some great and subtle truth had been laid out before him. ‘Nonetheless, this might just as easily be a delusion they talked themselves into — a kind of species-level psychosis. Why should we be bound by that?’

‘If you understood the physics—’ Goma began.

‘Do you? It isn’t your native discipline any more than it’s mine. Everything you believe you know was filtered through Eunice’s understanding.’

‘That was enough for me to get it.’

‘But Eunice didn’t take it into her heart, did she? If she had — if she’d truly accepted the M-builders’ gospel — that all acts are futile, that there’s no point in any deed, any gesture — then she wouldn’t have given up her own life to save Ru’s. That was an act born of kindness and empathy, not despair.’

‘We can’t know what was in her head,’ Goma said.

‘But we can do her the honour of recognising that her sacrifice had meaning — that it was more than an empty gesture. With that one kind act, she repudiated every word the M-builders ever wrote. Their truth was theirs to live with — we don’t have to.’