Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

A diagram of the ship appeared on a blank portion of Vasin’s wall, outlined in glowing red lines. Lilac cross hairs appeared over part of the forward sphere, and then the whole thing zoomed in on that section.

‘That’s his room,’ Goma said, ‘but he isn’t answering his door.’

‘Mposi? This is Gandhari. Are you there? Speak, please. We are concerned about you.’

There was no answer.

Vasin lowered her wrist. ‘We’ll visit his room first, then look at the other possibilities.’

There was no need for a search party — Vasin had all the tools and authority she needed. They went quickly to Mposi’s quarters, where a touch of another stud on her bangle unlocked his door. Goma braced herself for the worst as they entered his rooms, but it was clear after a moment or two that he was not present. The bed was only slightly rumpled, a cup of honeyed chai standing cold on a table.

Vasin found his bangle tucked under a cushion.

‘He may have left it here by mistake,’ she said. ‘None of us was used to these things on Crucible.’

That was true, but after so long on the ship, Goma now felt naked without her bangle. She could not imagine Mposi feeling differently. Still — absent-minded old Mposi. She supposed it was possible.

‘I’d like to look in the Knowledge Room,’ Goma said.

‘Of course.’

They were there in minutes. Vasin opened the door, bidding Goma and Ru wait at the threshold while she went inside. Not only had the door been locked, but the room was totally dark. A second or two passed before the lights came on.

Goma caught Vasin’s intake of breath, a single sharp sound in the silence.

‘Gandhari?’

She came out again, visibly shocked, and in the gentlest of ways prevented Goma from entering or looking into the Knowledge Room. She closed the door and elevated the bangle to her lips. ‘Gandhari,’ she breathed, as if the shock had taken all the air from her lungs. ‘We have a technical emergency. Doctor Nhamedjo… Nasim, Aiyana… anyone who’s listening — come to the Knowledge Room immediately.’

‘What’s going on?’ Goma said.

‘I am sorry, Goma. I saw Mposi in there. In the display… in the Knowledge itself. He’s dead, Goma.’

‘Open the door.’

‘You do not need to see this. I want my technicians here, people who understand—’

‘Gandhari. Open the door. I want to see him.’

It was Goma speaking but the words almost felt like someone else’s, stuffed into her mouth. No, she did not want to see him at all. The last thing she wanted was evidence of her uncle’s death, plain and undeniable. She wanted to run away, to bash her head against a wall until she woke up from this awful dream. But the brave thing, the noble thing, was to pretend otherwise. To let everyone think she was courageous enough even for this.

Ru took her hands. ‘Let us in, Gandhari. It’s better that we see.’

Gandhari gave a regretful nod and opened the door. ‘You should not touch anything,’ she said, ‘no matter how much you want to. Something bad has happened to him. It may not be safe.’ And then, as if the words demanded a second utterance: ‘Something bad has happened.’

Mposi was in the Knowledge. Goma knew instantly it was him even though he had his back to the door. He was leaning against the side of the display tank, head lolling, left arm hanging over the side so that his fingers brushed the floor on which Goma now stood. There was a gash on his forehead, traces of dried blood around the wound, but no sign of any more grievous injury. He looked supremely relaxed — like a man who had dozed off in a jacuzzi.

‘Mposi,’ Goma said.

Her instinct was to rush to him, but she knew better than that. Something was very wrong with the well. As she circled around to his side, she saw that no part of Mposi was visible beneath the well’s surface. Instead of being transparent, the matrix of nanomachines had turned opaque and muddy. The colour quivered before her eyes, and the surface — normally flawless — rippled and surged. Mposi, what she could see of him, was unclothed. She moved around the tank for a better view of his lolling head. His eyes were closed, his expression slack, as if he had indeed drifted into sleep. But he was much too still for that, and their presence would surely have roused him by now.

She looked down his angled torso to the point where it met the well’s troubled, turbulent surface. His right forearm was submerged below the elbow. Goma could not resist. She would not touch any part of the well, but she had to touch her uncle. Her fingers stroked his upper arm.

‘Uncle.’

Not because she expected an answer, but because to say nothing was worse.

‘Goma,’ Vasin said quietly. ‘You should step back now, until the technicians come.’

It was the gentlest of touches, scarcely any contact at all, but the press of her fingers had upset some equilibrium. Mposi began to slump away from her, leaning further into the well. As he tilted, so the steepening angle drew his right arm from the surface. Beneath the elbow, the arm was nearly gone. Goma stared in wordless horror. It had not been severed or burned, just dissolved away leaving milky strands, the liquidising remnants of bone and muscle, nerve and flesh. And as Mposi slumped further, so it became clear that a similar process had affected the rest of him.

Ru slapped a hand over Goma’s eyes, snapped her head around.

‘Don’t look,’ she whispered.

The Margrave of Underthrace was, naturally, apologetic for the inconvenience they had suffered on their way through Europa’s waters. ‘There was a time when Regals stood for something,’ he lamented. ‘We had our differences, yes, our disagreements over territory and negotiating rights with the Outside, but we had far more in common than we had to divide us. We knew where we stood with each other. These hooligans barely know they’re born. How dare they charge you to pass through my waters!’

‘I don’t suppose they’ll do it again,’ Kanu said.

‘They’ve had their gentle warnings,’ the Margrave said. ‘Unfortunately, we’re long past the point of reasoning with these ruffians. Force is the only language they understand — and if it isn’t brute force, you’re wasting your time. You’ve done me a favour — I would have had to nip those incursions in the bud sooner or later, so it might as well be today. I’m just sorry you had to get caught up in all that unpleasantness.’

‘I almost thought we wouldn’t make it,’ Nissa said. ‘Those Consolidation ships in close orbit — is that all connected with the trouble down here?’

‘If they touch this moon, they will learn a valuable lesson.’

‘I hope for your sake,’ Kanu said, ‘that the lesson isn’t too painful for either party.’

‘Spoken like a true ambassador. No water so troubled that it can’t be oiled.’

They were breathing the dry air of Underthrace, in a room furnished for the needs of Outside visitors. The Margrave’s Regals had escorted Fall of Night all the way in, easing through a thickening forest of submarine structures until they came to a kind of enclosed glade, a bubble of ocean in the fortified heart of Underthrace. The Regals had docked Nissa’s ship and connected an underwater airlock so that Nissa and Kanu could disembark.

The Margrave remained fully immersed, under deep-ocean conditions. In the middle of the room, rising from floor to ceiling, was a glass tube armoured to withstand a differential pressure of hundreds of megapascals. The glass was tinted, the Margrave no more than a shadowy form. Kanu made out a suggestion of some kind of headdress or helmet, a hard, ridged shape, but he could not decide if it was an adornment or some kind of bony extrusion of the Margrave’s altered anatomy. Of the face, he saw only the glint of goggles above a kind of mandrill-like snout or mask.