Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘You think this was about retribution? That Mandala was somehow acting against the Tantors?’

‘The facts are all we have,’ Grave replied. ‘Mandala was provoked, Mandala acted, and the uplifted elephants ceased to exist. I make no inferences. It is up to each and every one of us to draw such conclusions as we see fit.’

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ Goma said, after a silence. ‘I was starting to think I might be able to stand being in the same room as you, let alone the same ship. I was wrong.’

‘And I am very sorry that we cannot find common ground.’

‘There isn’t any. There never will be.’

She was speaking when the blue radiance increased its intensity by many factors. There was barely time to react, barely time for anyone in the room to do more than draw breath. Goma had an impression, no more than that, of the gaps in the Watchkeeper’s layered, armour-like plating opening up, the way a pine cone changed with the weather, permitting more of its internal blue glow to gush out into space. And then it was gone — not just the blue glow, but the entire alien machine.

It had simply disappeared.

Kanu was unsettled. While Nissa slept, her ship operating itself, he made his way from window to window, pausing at each to survey his reflection — the cabin lights were dim but not totally off — and attempt to convince himself that he had not begun to slip into madness. What he saw in the reflection was the face of a profoundly troubled man with a desperate, searching stare in his eyes — as if the face in the glass expected answers of him, the man least capable of giving them.

He thought about what happened to him on Mars and everything he had been through since — the deaths of his colleagues, his own recuperation, the end of his political career. It would have been odd if he did not look troubled, like a man cast adrift from every certainty. But there was more to it than that, and as much as he tried to rationalise, he could not find a way to explain what he had dreamed. He had not known the name of her ship until she told him. So how was it possible that it had been prefigured during his dreams on Mars, when he never had the slightest intention of recontacting Nissa Mbaye?

Coincidence, he tried telling himself. His dreams had contained a set of random symbols, the senseless output of his subconscious mind, and by chance they gained an uncanny significance now that he knew the name of her ship. Had the name been different, he would never have returned to the content of those dreams — of him and Swift playing chess in heaving seas.

But that explanation was not sufficient. He felt that the symbolic connection was significant — a true portent of what was to come. Since he did not believe in precognition, that left an even less-palatable possibility: he must have known about Nissa’s ship somehow before he even left Mars.

And yet he had no recollection of thinking about her — and certainly no foreknowledge of her ship’s name. Could he have been thinking of Nissa, and her ship, and somehow misplaced the memory?

He thought back to Lisbon, to that moment of surprise when he recognised first her voice, and then her face. That memory was much closer to the present than his confused and episodic recollections of Mars. He could still see the sunlight in the gallery, the faces of the students gathered around Nissa, the strokes of their sketches. He could bring to mind the exact texture of the pastries they had shared in the upstairs café, when they had got over the shock of meeting. The shock had been genuine — he had faked none of it.

But something did not tally.

There was still the odd coincidence of their meeting in the first place. Life threw up its share of chance encounters, that was true. But to suddenly take an interest in his grandmother’s art and almost immediately stumble upon his ex-wife at the first exhibition he visited? He had been ready to put it down to caprice until now, but was it possible that their meeting had been intentional all along?

Kanu tore himself away from the reflection. None of this was helping. It was just sending his thoughts down ever-tightening spirals of paranoia and self-doubt. He had to trust himself. There had been no ulterior motive on his part.

He was sure of that.

His movements stirred Nissa. He was trying to be as quiet as he could, but it was her ship and her sleeping senses must have been acutely attuned to the presence of another human being.

‘What is it?’ she asked, laying a soft hand on his cheek. ‘You’re sweating like you’re running a fever. Shall I turn down the cabin temperature?’

‘I don’t think it’s that.’

‘Something’s bothering you. Bad dreams? No one’s going to blame you for having flashbacks, Kanu — not after what happened.’

‘I’m all right.’

They went up front. Nissa made warm chocolate for them both and insisted Kanu clear his head before returning to bed. She put on some music — an early recording by Toumani Diabaté, which she knew happened to be one of Kanu’s favourites. With the cabin lights back up to full strength, the readouts and navigational displays a riot of bright colours and symbols, and the reassuring chime-like cadences of the music, he started to feel the phantasms releasing their hold. He was just rattled, that was all. If anyone had a right to be, he did.

‘We should go back to Lisbon,’ Nissa said.

‘Now?’

‘I mean when we’re done with all this.’

‘I thought you were fed up with the place, after the exhibition.’

‘I’ll admit to being fed up with the routine of teaching those students, but it’d take more than that to put me off Lisbon.’

‘I like it there, too. It’s almost a second home to Akinyas.’

They made small talk, Nissa very deliberately steering the conversation away from anything directly connected to Mars or Kanu’s recent experiences. They spoke of favoured cafés, restaurants, the property prices in various quarters, the wisdom or otherwise of renting, all the while speeding through the solar system aboard a clever little dart of a spaceship, inside a bubble of six-hundred-year-old music.

Kanu felt some sort of ease. He wondered if she had slipped a mild barbiturate into the chocolate. Perhaps.

But when his dreams came again, they were no better.

He was in a white room, flat on his back on an operating table. He knew this because he was looking at his own body from the outside, seeing his own mangled form spread out on the sterile surface of the ellipse-shaped table. Surrounding the table, almost encasing it, was an array of surgical devices. They were also white, clearly medical, but their individual functions were unclear to him. Some of them were hinged or bent over, holding curved parts to his ruined body or pushing other parts of themselves through his flesh, or into the open horrors of still-raw wounds. The machines moved with deliberation. There was urgency, but not haste. They sucked at the wounds and he heard the occasional crack or flash of some cauterising process. Around the room, on the walls, diagrams of human anatomy flickered past at almost dizzying speed. They were black and white, drawn in ink, annotated with handwritten Latin.

Beyond this encirclement were more machines, all different shapes and sizes. There were pipes and tubes, white on white. Still another rank of machines stood behind the second, androform but otherwise featureless. They resembled snowmen, except thinner in proportion. Kanu sensed that his point of view must originate with one of these standing figures. He was among them, looking back at his own body.

He had never enquired too deeply of Swift as to the exact severity of his injuries, and when the human medics finally got their chance to look him over, it was hard for them to be sure how badly he had been hurt. In places, the traces of the robots’ surgery was easily discernible. In others, there was only the faintest hint that he had been worked on at all.