Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

Now that he had returned, he felt a profound sense of belonging, a connection to the sea and its cargo of living things — everything in the great briny chain of being, from merfolk to plankton.

But he knew he could not afford to stay long, if he did not wish to be pulled back into his old life. Not that the prospect was unattractive — far from it. But even though he could not quite articulate the reasons, Kanu felt a deep sense that he must be moving on, attending to business that was as yet unfinished. What that business was, what it entailed, he could not quite say. But nothing would be gained by submitting to the lure of the merfolk.

‘Would you like to swim with us?’ Gwanda asked. ‘We can take you to Vouga. Ve will be done soon, I think.’

‘I think I remember how to swim,’ Kanu said. And then smiled, because he realised it had sounded like sarcasm. ‘No, genuinely. I think I remember. But it has been a long time — please be gentle with me.’

He left his clothes in the airpod and joined the other swimming things in the water. For a moment he sensed their eyes on him. They had no particular interest in his nakedness — few of them were wearing anything to begin with beyond a few sigils of rank and authority, equipment harnesses and swimming aids — but they had surely heard about his injuries on Mars, if not the specifics.

‘The machines did a good job on me,’ he said, disarming their curiosity. ‘I suspect they could have avoided scarring altogether, but they left me a few as a reminder of what I’d survived — not as a cruel thing, but to help with my psychological adjustment. Given that they’ve had remarkably little experience with human bodies, I don’t think they did too badly, did they?’

‘We heard that you died,’ said Tiznit, all whiskers and oily white fur.

‘A spaceship fell on me. That’d take the shine off anyone’s day.’

Vouga was done with ver work by the time Kanu arrived. They met in a private swimming chamber, a bubble-shaped turret high in the topside seastead.

‘Judging from the evidence, they put you back together very well. No one on Earth has that sort of surgical capability any more, you realise? Not even us. If you’d suffered a similar injury here, we’d have fed you to the fish by now.’

‘I suppose that puts me in their debt.’

‘Is that how you feel — indebted?’

‘Mostly, I’m just grateful to be alive. In my more cynical moments I tell myself that the robots did rather well out of it, too. They got to handle a human subject — took me apart like a jigsaw, put me back together again. We were trying to stop them getting their hands on corpses, and I gave them one for free!’

Vouga appraised him carefully. ‘The problem, Kanu, is that you’re not a natural cynic. You don’t wear bitterness or distrust particularly well.’

‘Perhaps I’m changing.’

‘No one could blame you after what you experienced. For myself, I’m happy the robots did one good deed, regardless of their deeper motives. Have you kept up with the news since you left the embassy? Things have been stirring up on Mars — your former friends are behaving provocatively. The Consolidation’s hard-liners want a decisive response, and frankly I don’t blame them. It’s no good just shooting the machines down when they try to reach space.’

Kanu smiled, although he felt a sourness in his belly. ‘So we endorse Consolidation policy now, do we? More’s changed here than I realised.’

‘Our anti-robot stance is as old as the movement, Kanu — I shouldn’t need to remind you of that.’

After the warmth of his welcome, the last thing he wanted to do was argue with Vouga. ‘Lin Wei would have found them marvellous. She’d have wanted to embrace them, to share the future with them.’

‘It’s a little late for pipe dreams. We had our chance, we blew it. These are post-Mechanism times, Kanu — we make the best of what we have and wander sadly through the ruins of what might once have been.’ But after a moment, Vouga added, ‘I know — we should all try to be positive. There’s always a place here for you. Those modifications you had reversed — it’s a trivial matter to have them reinstated. You should rejoin us, embrace the ocean fully. Put all that Martian business behind you like a bad dream.’

‘I wish that’s all it had been,’ Kanu said.

‘Is there anything we can do for you in the meantime?’

‘I thought I might drop in on Leviathan, if it isn’t too much trouble.’

‘Trouble? No, not at all.’ But Vouga sounded hesitant.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. I’ll make the arrangements. He’ll be very pleased to see you again.’

The great kraken’s haunt lay in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean, about a thousand kilometres south of the seastead. They went out in a sickle-shaped Pan flier, a machine nearly as old as the airpod that had brought Kanu from Mirbat¸, but larger and faster.

Vouga and a dozen other high-echelon Pans came along for the ride and a grand old time was had by all. They spent so much of their lives in the ocean that it was a novelty to see it from above, from outside, and they rushed from window to window, goggling at some extremely subtle demarcation of colour and current. Once they passed a tight-wound whorl of fish, spiralling about some invisible gravitational focus like stars at the centre of the galaxy. It was hard not to see the shoal as a single living unit, purposeful and organised, cheating the local entropy gradients. Kanu felt a shiver of alien perception, as if he was also momentarily seeing organic life from outside itself, in all its miraculous strangeness.

Life was a very odd thing indeed, he reflected, when you really thought about it.

But then they were on the move again, over reefs and smaller seasteads, over clippers and schooners and schools of dolphin, and then there was a darkness just beneath the surface, an inky nebula against turquoise.

‘Leviathan,’ Vouga said.

They slowed and hovered above the kraken. It was as large as a submarine. In the years since Kanu had last spent time with Leviathan, the kraken had easily doubled in size.

‘Who works with him now?’

‘You were the last, Kanu,’ Vouga said, as if this was something he ought to have remembered. ‘The need for construction krakens has declined significantly compared to the old days. Most of them were put out to pasture, until they died of old age. Some live longer than others. We try to keep Leviathan suitably occupied.’

Kanu had discovered an aptitude with the construction krakens not long after he joined the merfolk. There were some who found the genetically and cybernetically augmented creatures daunting, but Kanu had quickly overcome his misgivings. In fact, the huge and powerful animals were gentle, obliging and fond of human companionship — elephants of the deep, in many regards.

The most adept partners worked with their krakens so closely that an almost empathic bond was established, the kraken responding to the tiniest gestural commands and the partner in turn utterly sympathetic to the kraken’s own postural and visual-display communication channels. Kanu and Leviathan had established one of the most productive and long-lasting bonds between any such pairing.

But the years had rolled by, and the escalator of power had taken him to the top of the Panspermian Initiative and then to Mars, and he had never quite found the time to ask after Leviathan. Not even the minute or two it would have taken to formulate the enquiry and transmit it back to Vouga.

It was much too late to put that right now. But he still had to make the best amends he could.

‘I’d like to swim.’

‘Of course. Do you need a swimming suit, accompaniment?’