Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

He moved to a selection of fired earthenware stained with glazes incorporating the greys and fawns of the Lunar surface. In Kanu’s eyes there was nothing to link these pieces to the graffiti, but he supposed better scholars than him had done their homework.

The earthenware could not hold his attention — ultimately it was just so many pots and vases. He moved to an upright glass cylinder which held a realistic-looking mannequin of a human figure, sitting in a grandly appointed armchair. The family likeness was inescapable. This was not Sunday, though, but rather her grandmother, the redoubtable Eunice Akinya. According to the annotation, Sunday had invested a lot of time programming a construct ‘tribute’ to the real space explorer.

Kanu could not tell if this was the actual construct or just a good copy.

A sudden sense of purposelessness overcame him. What was he doing here, going through the motions of art appreciation? Art had never spoken to him before, not in any meaningful way, so what was he hoping to get out of this experience? It was absurd to feel that he owed his dead ancestor anything. Sunday was gone — she could not have cared less whether or not he had an appreciation of her work. A merman in an art gallery , he thought to himself, a fish out of water in all but the specifics .

‘The real problem for us,’ someone was saying in clear, high Portuguese, ‘is to imagine ourselves inhabiting Sunday’s world of four hundred and fifty years ago — she’s as remote from us as Vermeer was from her. But if we’re going to understand the impulses behind her art, we have to bridge that mental gap — to see her as a fully formed human being, a woman with friends and family, confronted by the same mundane problems of love and life and work that we all face. How to pay the bills. Where to eat, where to live, who to approach for her next commission. She’s not a remote historical figure, floating in a cloud of pure inspiration. She was a real woman, with the same cares and fears as the rest of us. She even visited Lisbon — how many of you knew that?’

The speaker was an older woman, lecturing a group of well-dressed young people gathered around her in a loose circle, notepads, pens and crayons at the ready. She wore a dark green jacket over black trousers, with a scarf of a lighter shade of green tossed over one shoulder. She almost had her back to him, and from his present angle he could only see the side of her face. Over the shoulder of one of her audience, Kanu observed a creditable sketch of the graffiti wall rendered in bold diagonal strokes. It was a copy, but it had a vigour about it that captured something of the original.

‘In her day,’ the woman continued, ‘Sunday wasn’t famous at all. It’s true that she was born into a rich and powerful family, by the standards of the time. But she didn’t want any of that. She went to the Moon, set up shop in the Descrutinized Zone — that’s what they called the commune in which she lived — and more or less wrote herself out of ever being rich. She surrounded herself with like-minded souls who couldn’t have cared less where she came from. Artists, tinkerers, gypsies, renegade geneticists — every piece that didn’t quite fit into the ordered jigsaw of the Surveilled World.’

Kanu was intrigued now. He had no difficulty understanding the woman. Her diction was very good, but regardless he had spent enough time in Lisbon during the earlier phase of his life to have gained a decent grasp of Portuguese and its commoner dialects. But there was something more to this. It was not just the words the woman was speaking, but rather the precise cadences of her speech. It was as if he had heard her speak on many occasions, to the point where his brain was already ahead of her words, anticipating their flow.

He moved slightly and the angle of her face altered. She was an attractive woman with broad features and very appealing eyes. She was older than the people she was addressing, certainly — perhaps as old as himself. There was a fineness in her features, the definition of her cheekbones, temple and jaw. Her hair was nearly white but still thick and long, and she had allowed it to grow out naturally.

Kanu could not believe his eyes. He knew her.

‘Nissa,’ he said quietly, as if he needed to say it aloud before he could be sure of it.

Nissa.

Nissa Mbaye.

She had been a high-ranking technocrat in the United Surface Nations, not quite his opposite number, but close enough in their respective hierarchies that their paths had crossed many times. During the difficult years after the Fall, when the world had to learn to live without the Mechanism, without the aug, without instantaneous translation and instantaneous virtual telepresence, without absolute security and oversight, without the promise of limitless life extension, Kanu and Nissa had worked together on many of the intergovernmental emergency-response measures. They had their differences, but each recognised that the other was striving for the same thing — to help heal a wounded, traumatised world as best they could. Later, when the Watchkeepers came, Kanu and Nissa had cooperated on the formulation of a pan-governmental response, urging caution and non-aggressive interaction with the alien machines.

They had been opposites, rivals, colleagues, obstinate opponents. They had also come to be friends. Later, more than friends.

For thirty-five years, Nissa Mbaye had been his wife.

‘This is weird,’ she said, when they both had drinks and pastries.

‘Weird doesn’t begin to cover it,’ Kanu replied, smiling as he recalled Nissa’s old habit of masterful understatement. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was hallucinating, or stuck in a dream.’

‘If it’s a dream, then I’m stuck in it with you.’ They were alone, sitting opposite each other at a corner table in the upstairs café. Nissa had sent her students off with an impromptu drawing assignment that she was confident would keep them busy for a half-hour or so. ‘Shall we switch to Swahili, or would that be bad manners?’

‘It would be very bad manners.’

They switched to Swahili.

‘Let’s get one thing out of the way,’ Kanu continued, faltering over the consonants until his tongue got the message that they were no longer doing Portuguese. ‘It’s odd enough us bumping into each other, but at least I’m here as a member of the public. What are you doing teaching art history?’

‘There’s no law against it.’

‘You were a career politician, like me!’

‘Please,’ she said with a smile, ‘we’re in polite company.’

Kanu smiled in return. It was banter, but of an old and familiar form that would not have been possible had she not been comfortable around him. But he still felt that there had to be a catch to their meeting.

‘Civil servant, technocrat, functionary — whatever you want to call it. Unless my memory’s failing me, you had nothing to do with teaching art — and still less to do with my grandmother.’

‘All right, I’ll come clean — I’m not really a teacher. But they’re stretched here and I’ve agreed to help out the exhibitors by leading guided tours, mostly school and student parties.’

‘That doesn’t make it any clearer.’

‘I’m a scholar now. Don’t look so surprised — we’re allowed to do more than one thing with our lives. You of all people ought to know that.’

‘I do — and I agree. But I’m still reeling. You say “scholar”—’

‘Sunday is one of my principal interests. By helping out with the retrospective for a few hours a day, I get almost unlimited access to the archives — the rest of the collection and its documentation. I also assist with some of the cataloguing and annotation along the way.’