Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘That’s starting to sound like another article of faith,’ Ru said.

‘So be it. Both of you came here seeking knowledge — it’s been the arrow of your lives to know the world. Physics is one path — you chose to study the minds of other creatures. But that quest for meaning — for what you think of as truth — has only brought you to this. Doubt. Despair. A crisis of belief in anything.’

‘The truth hurts,’ Goma said. ‘But it’s still the truth.’

‘You need to find a way through it, in that case. Truth isn’t the end, Goma. It’s just a door. There’s always another door beyond it, too. Endlessly and for ever. The M-builders may not have realised that, but you don’t have to fall into the same trap. Both of you have work to do — here and on Crucible.’ He gave an easy-going shrug. ‘On Earth, too, for all I know. The hard times aren’t over yet. They may not even have begun. But we’ll need good, strong people to face them. You ask me about faith. I have faith in us — in our capabilities, our ultimate capacity to make the right choices. People and Risen. People and machines. All of us. But the worst thing of all would be to start doubting ourselves.’

Kanu came back to them three days later. The Watchkeeper returned to its former position, circling Orison in a higher orbit than Travertine ’s. For several hours there was no clear change in its disposition, nothing to show — presuming Kanu still existed in any meaningful sense — that it held a human being within itself. Goma debated consulting the records aboard the ship, to refresh her memory as to what happened under similar circumstances when Chiku Green was taken into one of those machines. But the circumstances were only similar up to a point — Kanu was not Chiku, and this world was not Crucible.

It came in just as quickly as the first time, and the focus of its interest was the same patch of ground where Kanu had waited. The proboscis made a darting strike at the surface, and when it retreated, leaving only a curl of dust, there was a spacesuited human form, on his knees, hands at his sides.

Goma had put her own suit on as soon as the Watchkeeper began to close in. She was in the lock and waiting.

She rushed to him, found their common channel. The lights on his suit were all in the green, and she could see the fogging and unfogging of his breath on the inner surface of his faceplate.

‘Kanu, talk to me.’

He stirred. He turned his face towards hers. He opened his eyes, blinked, appeared at first to struggle with focus. ‘Goma.’

‘Yes, I’m here. Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ But then he paused. A moment of quiet consideration followed, as if her questions merited the most sincere answers he could give. ‘I think so, anyway.’

‘Kanu, you were inside the Watchkeeper. For three whole days. Do you remember any of it?’

‘Three days?’

‘Yes.’

‘It didn’t feel like three days. Three years, maybe. Three decades. Something stranged happened to me, Goma. I’m not quite sure what.’ Then he reached out a hand and she helped him stand, unsteadily at first but appearing to find his strength by the second. ‘Something strange,’ he repeated. ‘We were inside them. We were trying to make them understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘What they used to be. What they ceased to be. What they could be again.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘The Gupta — Wing threshold. Ask Chiku. Swift told them. Swift made them see — he understood it better than I ever did.’

His words meant nothing to her, except for the mention of Chiku. ‘Kanu, is Swift still in your head?’

‘No. Swift’s with them now. They took him, but left me behind.’ With a certain resignation, he added, ‘They’re done with me now.’

‘Swift’s in that Watchkeeper?’

‘In all of them. He’s propagating between them, like an idea they can’t help but spread. They were blind to the Gupta — Wing theorem, and once they’d crossed the threshold, they had no reason to doubt themselves. But Swift is giving them reason to question what they are.’

It sounded like babble, but she thought it unlikely that Kanu Akinya would be spouting nonsense for the sake of it.

She took his elbow and helped him back to the camp. ‘Simplify it for me. I work with elephants, not machines. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?’

‘We’ll have to see. That’s all. Like everything else. Has it really been only three days, Goma?’

‘Would I lie to you, uncle?’

He stumbled on a pebble; she caught him before any harm was done. ‘Watch your step, ambassador.’

‘Oh, I’m not the ambassador now. I’ll leave that to my friend.’

‘Then what are you?’

‘A man still hoping to find some useful purpose in life. If it lets him. If he hasn’t worn out his welcome.’

‘You have one useful thing to do.’

The directness of her statement drew a laugh. ‘Do I?’

‘Yes. You’re coming back to Crucible with me. With Nissa. If they can help her on Crucible, so be it. Otherwise we’ll carry on to Earth. You know that planet, and I’m going to need a guide when I get there.’

‘Someone to keep you out of trouble? I may not be best qualified for that. Anyway, Earth will be very strange even to me when we get back.’

‘Have you been to Africa, Kanu?’

‘Once or twice.’

‘Will it still be there?’

‘Barring the frankly improbable… yes, I suppose. It ought to be.’

‘Then you can take me to Kilimanjaro. I have Eunice’s heart.’

‘Only her heart?’

‘The rest of her stays here, with the Risen.’ Goma risked a glance back over her shoulder, into the emptying sky. ‘Do you think the Watchkeeper will be coming back?’

‘Not for a little while. They have some thinking to do.’

‘Then we’ll need to move ahead with the funeral arrangements. Kanu, are you going to be all right? You’ve lost Nissa, now Swift. And then whatever happened to you in there—’

‘I’ll cope, Goma. When you’ve already died once, coping becomes second nature.’

‘I think you might have died a second time.’

‘Three times, if you include the Terror. I’ll try not to make a habit of it.’

‘Please don’t,’ Goma said.

It fell to Goma to lead the human party. It was a smaller cairn this time, for the body was that of a human woman, not one of the Risen.

The Risen had done the hard work of shaping the cairn with large stones of various shapes. They took great deliberation in the selection of these pieces, and when they were set into the cairn they appeared to interlock with uncanny neatness, as if they were the shattered pieces of some once-unified whole.

For the humans, it remained only to select their own smaller stones and fill in the gaps. They took pains not to upset the work that had already been done.

‘For Eunice,’ Goma said, placing one fist-shaped stone onto the cairn. ‘May these stones bind the thread of her memories with those who have already passed into the Remembering. May they bind her to the promise of the black skies she craved, and to the memory of the blue Earth she never stopped loving. Her name was Eunice Akinya, and her blood is my blood. They called her Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one. And I will bring this lion’s heart back to the place she knew as a child.’

The stone was set. Goma turned from the cairn.

Overhead, one by one, the Watchkeepers were dimming their blue lights to the lowest possible state of radiance. It was an accident of timing, nothing more. They were concentrating their mental resources on the vexing question of this odd and troubling mathematical theorem. At times like these, when a difficult matter required pondering, they had learned that it was wiser to assign separate streams of mentation to each Watchkeeper, each tackling the problem as a whole, rather than dividing it into fragments that could be processed among their dispersed elements, but with no one Watchkeeper grasping the entirety of the problem. That way, when answers tallied, they could view the results as significant. The Watchkeepers had indulged in this kind of deep meditation before, and they were quite prepared to take their time over it. These busy, buzzing humans had been a local distraction, and they were entertaining enough in their way. But it would be better when they moved on, and some silence had returned to this corner of creation.