Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

The shutters of their scales closed. The blue lights dimmed to the darkest shade of blue that is not black.

The Watchkeepers settled down to dwell on what they were.

Kanu Akinya, turning from the cairn after setting his own stone in place, thought he glimpsed an old friend out of the corner of his eye. In a single fluid movement the figure raised a hand, touched a finger to his pince-nez, smiled a fond farewell.

And then was gone for ever.

Goma and Ru had been awake for hours before they allowed themselves their first view of Crucible. It was less a case of apprehension than delayed gratification, refusing a reward until the proper moment, when they were both mentally prepared for it. Not that they had any real fears of failure, or concerns that their world would disdain them. Captain Vasin had assured them that Travertine had completed its return crossing successfully, and that they were now back in orbit, circling the planet at almost the same altitude from which they had begun their journey. Long before the ship completed its last course change it had been hailed, made welcome by a jostling flotilla of escort vehicles. The tone of the exchanges had been cordial, verging on the jubilant. There was no doubt of a warm reception.

But anything could have happened, Goma told herself. They had been away for two hundred and eighty-four years, enough time for governments to fall and rise, for revolutions and counter-revolutions, for personal reputations to crash or soar. Their expedition had been an expensive endeavour at a time when Crucible was still climbing out of the hardships that had come with the Fall of the Mechanism. Perhaps, with time, it had come to be viewed as a folly, or even worse: a negligent, criminal waste of resources and minds.

Perhaps that had been the view, at some point in these last three centuries. But if the wheel of opinion could turn once, it could turn again. Whatever might have happened, they were favoured now. Conceivably, Goma thought, the events surrounding their departure were simply too remote for anyone to get all that bothered about. The wonder was that they had returned. All else was forgivable.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked Ru.

‘As I’ll ever be.’

They floated together at a window in a weightless section of the ship. The window was facing Crucible, but for the moment it was shuttered.

‘I keep thinking of Mposi. I don’t think he ever expected to come home again. He’d have counted himself lucky enough just to make it all the way to Gliese 163.’

‘We’re here for him,’ Ru offered, although there was not much that could push Goma’s sadness aside. Sadness mingled with relief, gratitude, expectation. But also the heavy burden of the work that lay ahead of them. They had barely begun.

‘Let’s do it.’ Goma touched the control, and the window’s external shutters snapped open in silence.

For a few seconds they stared at their world in wordless contemplation. They were orbiting over the day side, the clouds giving way here and there to offer hints of recognisable landforms and seas. Goma compared what she saw against her memories of maps she had known since childhood. On this scale at least, it was hard to say that much had changed.

‘It’s still there,’ Ru said, with a sort of wonder, as if the very act of their world maintaining itself across these years was astonishing. ‘All that time we were on our way, all that time we were sleeping… it was still here, still going about its business, doing what worlds do — as if you and I never mattered to it.’

‘We didn’t,’ Goma said. She paused, added: ‘Anyway, it’s really not been that long. Trees that were middle-aged when we left, they’ll still be middle-aged — just a bit older. Us being away — it’s just a blip, a heartbeat, to a planet.’

But now Ru jabbed her finger at something nearer than their planet. It was an object, moving through space between them and Crucible. ‘A ship. Maybe one of those escorts Gandhari told us about.’

The vehicle, whatever it was, sidled closer to Travertine . Its form was a blunt-ended cylinder, wrapped with lights. It was hard to tell how far away it was, how big. It moved a little too confidently for Goma’s liking, coming in at too hard a vector. She tensed, unable to fight the instinct to brace against an impact, for all the good it would have done. But the cylinder cruised near and then veered sharply off, and at the moment of closest approach she thought she saw faces, pressed against the windows, gawking at this odd, antique apparition.

The cylinder swooped away, until it was only a tiny moving speck against the face of Crucible.

‘I suppose we’re of some amusement to them,’ said a voice beside them, speaking softly enough not to shatter the mood. ‘Visitors from the deep past. Gandhari says we’re not the only starship they’ve ever seen — there’s a flow of ships coming and going all the time — but you can bet it’s been a while since they’ve clapped sight on a relic like us.’

‘I don’t feel like a relic,’ Ru said.

‘Nor do I,’ Peter Grave said, Crucible’s blue-green light picking at the crinkling around his eyes. ‘But I strongly suspect it may have to be a role we have to get used to. Obliging ghosts at the banquet.’ He forced a smile. ‘Never mind. There must be worse things — and at least we’ll never be short of attention.’

Grave had come to the window while Goma and Ru were caught up in the spectacle. His presence was uninvited, but Goma struggled to find much resentment. Whatever differences they had once had, she felt certain that she and Grave now had infinitely more in common with each other than they did with the new citizens of Crucible. Ru, Goma and Grave were creatures out of time, unmoored from their rightful place in history. This was what interstellar travel did to people, and as yet no one had much experience coping with it.

‘Kanu is awake now,’ Grave said. ‘I’ve spoken to him, and he seems to have handled the crossing as well as any of us. I just wish there were better news about Nissa — some good development we could bring to his attention immediately.’

Goma understood that there had already been communication between Vasin, Mona Andisa, and the governing authorities of the system. At least part of that exchange had concerned the fate of Nissa, preserved in skipover since her death at Poseidon.

‘Maybe they have something,’ Ru said. ‘Better medicine than us, at any rate. How could they not have better medicine, after all this time?’

‘We don’t really know how far they’ve come,’ Goma said, her tone cautious, refusing to indulge in wishful thinking. Historical progress was not linear. She reminded herself that the medicine of the Age of Babel had been superior to the medicine after the Fall of the Mechanism. It was anyone’s guess as to the leaps and reversals that had happened since their departure. At some point she would have to sit down and catch up on all that skipped history.

For now she had no appetite for it.

‘If not here, then Earth,’ Grave said.

‘Assuming Earth isn’t even further behind,’ Goma said. ‘And even if we find out what the situation’s like now , Crucible’s best knowledge of Earth is still thirty years old. Just going on to Earth will still be a gamble, a leap into the dark.’

‘Would you consider it?’ he asked.

‘I promised I’d take her heart back home.’ Goma swallowed and nodded. ‘Yes. I mean to do that.’

But it was so much harder now that she was home. The vow had been easy when even Crucible lay at an unimaginable distance, and she had barely dared count on seeing it again. Yet to be here now, looking down on her old home, knowing its airs and waters were almost close enough to touch — and soon would be — made her wonder if she really had the resolve to deliver on that pledge.