Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘Art,’ Kanu replied, as succinctly as he dared. Then he smiled again. ‘Well, Yevgeny — it’s very kind of you to track me down. And I’ll be sure to get in touch when I return.’

‘I have my eye on you now,’ Korsakov said, in tones that sounded friendly enough. ‘No escaping your old friend, Kanu.’

When it was over, Nissa floated opposite him, cross-legged. ‘What was all that about?’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘Why would he care what you’re up to now? If he’s the one who had you kicked out of the diplomatic service, hasn’t he already got what he wanted?’

‘I don’t think Yevgeny is completely satisfied with my behaviour.’

‘What business is it of his?’

‘I’ve no idea. It’s very odd.’

‘Well, here’s something else that’s odd. Did you say he was transmitting from the Moon?’

Kanu nodded. ‘He never said as much, but the time lag fitted. Why — did you get a better fix?’

‘ Fall of Night ’s cleverer than he assumed. That time lag was a spoof. He was bouncing the signal through a dozen mirrors, but I could still back-track to its real point of origin. It’s a ship, a Consolidation enforcement vehicle, and it’s much closer than the Moon.’

‘That makes no sense at all. Yevgeny was the ambassador for the United Orbital Nations, not the Consolidation.’

‘In which case, apparently you’re not the only one starting a new chapter.’

Beyond the orbit of Mars they passed within visual range of a Watchkeeper. Kanu wondered if Nissa had bent their course to make it possible, seeking the thrill of a close encounter, something to take their minds off the puzzle of the Consolidation ship — even his own mind off his troubled dreams.

‘The moratorium is stupid,’ she was saying. ‘Look at the size of that thing, the power it must contain. If the Watchkeepers didn’t want us to be flying around in spaceships, does anyone think we’d still be able to?’

‘They make people nervous,’ Kanu said as Fall of Night ’s cameras relayed an increasingly sharp image of the alien machine. ‘Perhaps it’s sensible not to do anything too provocative until we have a better idea of their intentions.’

‘Maybe they don’t have any intentions — maybe they’re just going to sit in our solar system like rocks until we bore ourselves to death waiting for them to do something.’

The Watchkeeper was a thousand-kilometre-long pine cone, interlaced and overlapping black facets wrapped around a core of glowing blue mystery. There were eleven Watchkeepers in the solar system now; some of them in orbit around planets, others floating in free space. Occasionally they moved, changing orientation or position. They swung like weathercocks and slid from orbit to orbit in mute defiance of parochial human physics. Occasionally a beam of blue light would pass from one Watchkeeper to another, or stab out of the solar system entirely.

They had communicated not the slightest thing to any of the human powers. What they wanted, what they would permit, what was forbidden, remained within the realm of increasingly fraught speculation. It was clear only that they were here for something — observation, perhaps, or a reckoning, which lay at some point in the future.

Kanu was glad when their course began to take them further from the Watchkeeper.

‘It never hurts to give them a wide margin,’ he said, feeling he needed to defend his qualms.

‘Did your friends on Mars feel the same way?’

‘My friends on Mars were three human beings, two of whom are dead now — and you’ve met the other one.’ But that was a harsher answer than her innocent question merited. ‘I had good relations with the machines through Swift. It was exactly that good relationship that Yevgeny Korsakov disapproved of — he felt it was tantamount to treason against my own species.’

‘Extreme. But given that we know so little about the Martian robots — who can say what they’re really up to? How can we be sure they’re not in secret cahoots with the Watchkeepers, plotting our downfall?’

‘Believe me, it’s not like that at all. I spent enough time with Swift and the other machines to know how they feel about the Watchkeepers, and the truth is they’re as in the dark as the rest of us. They don’t feel some distant kinship with the Watchkeepers. They’re as alien and frightening to the Evolvarium as they are to us.’

‘You think.’

‘You have a great many genes in common with an oak tree. Do you feel an intense kinship with oak trees?’

‘They’re both robots, Kanu. Try seeing things from our perspective for a while, not theirs.’

That was as close to arguing as they got. It was only four days from Earth to Jupiter space, hardly enough time to start getting on each other’s nerves. Fall of Night was certainly not large, but the provision of two cabins meant there was more than enough privacy available to keep irritation at bay.

After their breakfast discussion, Kanu had been careful not to raise the matter of his disquiet again. It was better that way. He allowed her to believe she had settled his misgivings, putting them down to the unpleasantness of his recent experience on Mars. And, indeed, Kanu was ready to concede that a component of his feelings could be explained away as a kind of post-traumatic episode. But he knew there was more to it than that.

On the third day, twenty-four hours from Jupiter, he was alone in his cabin when he became unaccountably certain he was being watched; that he was sharing the room with a silent observer. Out of reflex he twitched around, and for an instant he was convinced he had seen something, a figure or the shadow of a figure, out of the corner of his eye.

In any other situation he would have gladly put the matter behind him. But it was just Kanu and Nissa and her little spaceship, and there was nothing between them and another human being except millions of kilometres of vacuum. Nissa aside, he was more alone here than he had been on the surface of Mars. Nor had he ever been one to jump at shadows.

And yet there had been someone — some thing — there.

Perhaps it was just a glimpse of his own reflection in the mirror above his private washbasin.

Yes. Just the mirror.

That was it.

But now a question pushed itself to the forefront of his mind. He voiced it aloud, but in a quiet enough whisper that it was easily drowned out by the noise of Fall of Night ’s systems.

‘What did you do to me?’

Because his thoughts were following the groove of a different, darker orbit now. Not that the machines on Mars had somehow erred in putting him back together, botching part of his brain wiring, but that this might be deliberate.

That all of this might suit some purpose of which he was not aware.

A day later they reached Jupiter. Nissa put extra power into Fall of Night ’s electromagnetic deflectors, cocooning them from the worst effects of the Jovian magnetosphere. They were still moving quickly, about five hundred kilometres per second of excess speed, but Nissa had allowed for that with the aerobrake passage, knifing her ship through Jupiter’s extreme upper atmosphere at an oblique angle. It was as bumpy as she had predicted, but — she assured Kanu — the buffeting and heating were well within tolerable margins, and the dodge had shaved many hours off their flight. In fact he found the experience more bracing than unpleasant. By the time they reached clear space again, their speed was down to a manageable hundred kilometres per second, more than sufficient for operations within Jupiter’s system of moons.

Nissa was on the flight deck, confirming that their approach authorisation was in order. The certification was complicated and in a state of continuous adjustment and review, with a chance that it might be rescinded at any moment.