Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘The work of a lifetime, then. Or at least an ordinary human lifetime,’ Kanu said.

‘It’s what we started. What we were trying — failing — to do, before Eunice’s message came in.’

‘I can’t think of two better candidates to bear that work,’ Kanu said.

‘It’ll be our successors,’ Goma replied. ‘Not us. Not until we get back from Earth.’

‘You have a weight to bear.’

‘Don’t we all?’ she answered, with a chill of foreboding.

They cut down into thicker, warmer, moister air. They overflew rainforest and swept across inky lagoons and white-hemmed bays and heavy green seas. Once, when the visibility allowed, Goma made out the dark stormfront that was one of Mandala’s peripheral walls, still much as she remembered it. Then they were over the outskirts of Guochang, now a vast sprawl of a city, what had once been its satellite towns become mere suburbs. The geometry of roads and parks was confusing, almost purposefully so — she kept seeing configurations that were almost familiar, but each would twist out of recognition as the shuttle swept nearer. The city had been made and remade half a dozen times since her departure, and only the oldest, most venerated parts of it remained unaltered.

‘You were born here?’ Kanu asked, at last rising from his seat, bending to peer through the glassy hull.

‘I was,’ Goma said. ‘But I don’t feel it.’

‘You will.’ He smiled. ‘Give it time.’

Presently they came up on a twisted black pyramid that seemed to drill its way out of what had been the old government district. The pyramid was enormous, with a horizontal slit across its warped faces at about a third of its height. Elsewhere it was windowless, with an oily, shimmering lustre. The shuttles — not just their own, but the others that had come down from the station — were filing into this slot, like bees returning to the hive.

One of the envoys turned to them, touching a hand to the sweep of her collar before she spoke. ‘This is the medical complex. The tests we ran on you in the ship were quite comprehensive, but there is more that we can do here. We wish to make sure you are all as well as you can be.’

‘Will it take long?’ Ru asked.

‘No more than a couple of days. It will make things very much easier if you allow little machines to replicate in your bodies. They will help you adjust to your new surroundings.’

‘Like nanotechnology?’ Goma asked.

‘Yes,’ the envoy answered, but there was an equivocation in her answer, as if she recognised that the truth was more complicated. ‘Yes, something very like that. In your time, there was something called the Mechanism?’

‘It had gone by the time we were born,’ Ru said.

‘We made something like the Mechanism again,’ the envoy stated. ‘Better, less fallible. If we had to give a name for it, it would be something like the All. The little machines will let the All flow into you.’ Carefully, she added: ‘If this is what you wish.’

‘And if we don’t?’ Goma asked, trying not to sound too alarmed by the prospect.

‘There are enclaves where the All is not as pervasive. You would be welcome to live out your lives there.’

Kanu turned from the view, laying his hand back on Nissa’s casket. ‘It sounds as if your medicine has come a long way from ours.’

‘In some respects,’ the envoy said, her eyes lowering. ‘But there is much that we have yet to achieve, or is outside the bounds of our medical-ethical framework. We were forewarned of Nissa’s case, though. Our best… experts… have been assigned to the problem. Rest assured that we will do what we can for her.’

Kanu licked his lips and nodded. They were softening him up, Goma thought — preparing him for the news he did not want. How could they not help Nissa? she thought. And a kind of anger flashed through her, a resentment that these people were not more advanced, more godlike. What had they been doing for the past three centuries — sitting on their hands?

The slot in the pyramid contained a landing bay, spread out under a low ceiling. Dozens of craft were also parked there, and the place was already swarming with medical staff. Unlike the dark-clad envoys, the pyramid’s medics wore outfits of a blazing, superluminous white. At best, the only instruments any of them carried were the little bulb-tipped wands. But they were also accompanied by many floating white spheres about the size of footballs, and the spheres cracked open along their midlines to spill out jointed arms and sensors. Goma and her friends were asked to offer their forearms to the spheres, and the machines tickled over them in a quick sampling of blood, tissue, DNA. The examination was painless and left no traces.

‘What about the All?’ she asked, as the whole party — human and Tantor — was led into the main part of the pyramid.

‘It’s already within you,’ the envoy answered. ‘The idiosyncratic connectome bridges will have begun to form. You may experience some mild hypnagogic imagery. The process can be aborted and reversed at any stage, though, should you decline participation.’

‘Would you decline?’ she asked.

The envoy looked at her with a sudden, fierce frankness. ‘Decline? No. I would sooner be dead. But you must make the choice for yourself.’

They were in the complex for two days. The tests were occasionally perplexing, generally dull, but never painless, and again Goma had the sense that much of it was formality, a series of legal obstacles that had to be surmounted before any of the newcomers were allowed free roam of Crucible. They had rooms in the pyramid, which were comfortable enough but austere in their provisions, almost as if the hosts were wary of overloading their delicate constitutions with too much novelty. There was a window, looking back across Guochang. Where the city thinned out Goma saw a margin of blazing green, a stretch of veldt hemmed by trees, and between those trees she thought she might have seen the distant moving forms of elephants, tiny as pollen grains, and she wanted to be out there more than anything.

Although the newcomers were being kept in a state of soft quarantine from the rest of Crucible, they were free to associate with one another and use lounges and public areas on one level of the complex. There was plenty of time between the tests, and Goma and her companions made use of it as they chose. Ru had her nose deep in the elephant literature, trying to catch up on three hundred years of scholarship. They had all been provided with antique data consoles, roughly comparable to their own technology. Through these consoles, and via extra layers of translation and mediation, it was possible to access public record and news channels.

Goma was restless. The elephants meant everything to her, but she could not simply return to her old role of researcher as if nothing had happened. What was the point, when she had no intention of remaining on Crucible?

Even Ru, she thought, was going through the motions.

She visited Grave, Vasin, the others. Everyone had the same slightly shell-shocked look about them, as if they had just been slapped hard in the face. They had been treated as well as one could hope, but still it was a jolt, to be back on Crucible. They had all known there was no going back to their old world, the one they had lived on before departure, but until now it had been an intellectual understanding, ungrounded in real experience. Now they were living it from moment to moment, seeing it with their own eyes.

Only Kanu seemed uninterested in what had happened on Crucible, what had changed and what had remained.

When she came to his room he had used his console to project an image up on one of the walls.

‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ he said, nodding at the image. It was the face of a planet, all reds and emeralds and little dabs of blue. Not Earth, she was fairly certain.