Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘Is that Mars?’

Kanu looked pleased that she had recognised the place. ‘Yes. But not as I knew it. When I left Mars, the only humans anywhere on the planet were the ambassadors, cooped up in our embassy on Olympus Mons. We’d been in a stand-off for years. There were defence satellites in orbit, terrorists agitating for human takeover, endless tension… I didn’t have high hopes. Swift came with me because between us we thought there had to be a better way; a mode of existence where machines and people might be able to work together, not against each other.’

‘And now?’

Kanu beamed, as if showing off a newborn child. ‘Just look at it. Those green swatches, those lakes — those are areas of renewed human settlement! Finally there was a recolonisation treaty. Strict boundaries, strict borders — but it’s a start, isn’t it? They’ve even begun to terraform the old place. Domes for now, atmospheric tents, but the air’s thickening up, warming, gaining moisture. That’s not a job for people alone! Human-Evolvarium cooperation — a joint venture.’

Goma wanted to share his enthusiasm, but from where she was standing it looked like a capitulation for the machines.

‘What did Swift’s friends get out of it?’

‘Earth,’ he said. ‘Or parts of it. That was the other half of the treaty. Machine enclaves on Earth! In the oceans, on the land masses. And it’s working! Brokered largely by the Pans, I have to say. But what a thing to see.’ Excited, he worked the console’s settings, almost fumbling over himself in his eagerness. ‘Wait, though. Wait until you see this! Wait until you see what the machines have been making on Mars…’

The face turned, bringing a new part of the planet into view. It was still daylit, but the shadows were fierce, cutting in from the right, projecting long strokes across the landscape.

Kanu magnified the image. He zoomed in on one area of Mars. Something swelled into focus. A mountain, or perhaps a very large boulder, on an otherwise flat and featureless terrain.

There was a face on it, chiselled into the boulder’s upper surface, so that it looked back out to space. It was a minimalist portrait — eyes, nose, mouth, the merest suggestion of a personality. But she recognised it.

Her face. Or rather, Eunice’s.

‘One strain of them did this,’ Kanu was saying. ‘A faction among the machines. Call it a cult, if you will.’

‘Why have they done it?’

‘I’ll ask them, when I get a chance.’

‘I’ll save you the trouble,’ Goma replied. ‘I’m the one who has to go to Earth. Mars will only be a skip away.’

She asked him how things were progressing with Nissa. Kanu’s answers were guarded, and she wondered how much he in turn had been told by the medical staff.

‘There are some complications. The stuff that they have put inside us — those little machines? I gather there’s little they can’t do, in terms of microscopic tissue engineering. They could rebuild a damaged brain synapse by synapse.’

‘Isn’t that what she needs?’

‘The difficulty is knowing which pattern to reinstate.’ Kanu’s speech was supremely collected, but Goma sensed the force of the emotions he must be holding back. ‘Even if the medics have the technical means to rebuild her damaged cortex — which is by no means simple — there is still an ethical issue.’

‘An ethical issue in bringing someone back to life?’

‘Their law makes a careful distinction between the restoration of damaged neural structure, and the wholesale substitution of one set of structures for another. If they could satisfy themselves that they were rebuilding a personality, rather than inventing one from scratch, I gather they would consent to the procedure. Or at least consent to an attempt. But the ethicists are slow to make up their minds, and in the meantime…’

‘Nissa isn’t going to get any worse, is she?’

‘No,’ he admitted with a nod. ‘She is safe. But if these people cannot help her, I must look elsewhere.’

‘Earth?’

‘Perhaps.’

She touched a hand to his forearm. ‘I want the best for both of you, uncle.’

He clasped his own hand around hers. ‘Don’t worry about me, Goma Akinya. You have enough to think about.’

On the morning of their release from the medical complex, a ground vehicle, a wheel-less block with fluted sides and sharply angled ends, was waiting for them at a loading area in front of the lobby.

Kanu and Ru were with her, and two government officials: a dark-clad administrative envoy, and a white-clad medical representative. Both were women; their names — or at least the names that they were ready to share with their guests — were Malhi and Yefing.

Goma knew where they were going. She had asked if it might be possible, knowing that the longer she delayed matters, the less enthusiasm she would have to face them. Not that she had much enthusiasm now.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she told Kanu, as they settled into their seats.

‘My diary’s not exactly full,’ he replied.

‘Have the ethicists…?’ she began.

‘Still deliberating, and there’s nothing I can say or do which will make any difference.’ He added quickly: ‘Not that it isn’t a pleasure to accompany you.’

‘We understand,’ Ru said.

They sped through Guochang, winding their way between tall offices, through business and commercial districts, around parks and residential zones. Goma recognised nothing, although she was certain some of the older buildings had been around before her departure. If she squinted, and forgot about trying to recognise specific landmarks, none of it was too odd or unsettling. There were traffic jams, pedestrians, roadworks. People walking their pets, groups of schoolchildren were being led to school, fast-striding business types were deep in conversation. There were pavement cafés and areas that looked more run-down than others. But that was only if she squinted. With eyes wide and sharp, she was assaulted by the unfamiliar. The signs and banners above the shops and businesses were hard to read, as if there had been a specific lesion to the part of her brain that handled written script. There were colours that seemed wrong or improbable — reddish greens, blueish yellows. And a haze of subliminal texture, a kind of glimmering organised mist, floating between things.

Yefing, the medic, must have seen something in her face.

‘The All will be reaching integration now. If you start seeing things, you should not be too alarmed.’

‘We won’t,’ Kanu said. Then: ‘Is it like this everywhere else? In the other systems? Do they all have an All?’

‘Variations of it,’ Malhi answered, twisting around to answer. ‘But each system chooses its own path, its own approach. And of course our knowledge is never complete. We have good ties with Earth. There’s always been information exchange, but since the Watchkeepers left us alone, there’s been a much increased flow of ships.’

‘Do those ties extend to legal agreements?’ Kanu asked. ‘Extradition treaties, that sort of thing?’

‘No,’ Malhi said. ‘Our relationship is much looser than that. Necessarily. How could we ever enforce treaties with a time lag of nearly sixty years?’

‘You must barely remember how it was, with those things hanging over us,’ Goma said.

‘They were here when I was a child,’ Yefing answered. ‘But it has been seventy years. Times have changed. It’s hard to remember how it made us feel.’

Swift’s effect on the Watchkeepers in the Gliese 163 system had propagated to all the known Watchkeeper groupings in human space, and perhaps beyond. The influence had spread at the speed of light, so the disappearance of the Watchkeepers was old news by the time Travertine arrived back in Crucible space.