Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘It’s not one of the rest of us. You’re the fanatics, not us.’

‘I hope for your sake that you are right. Truth is, Goma, I never wanted us to be at odds. Whatever you think of me — and you have made your feelings abundantly clear — I did not hurt your uncle. Someone else killed Mposi — someone still at liberty aboard this ship. I know this, but of course I cannot make you see it for yourself. Nonetheless, I can encourage you to keep it in mind. Do you think you will find Tantors, after all this time?’

Goma felt a flush of shame for the physical hurt she had inflicted on Grave. It was beneath her, beneath the dignity of her name, beneath the memory of Mposi. The anger had been genuine and justified, but she had allowed it to use her rather than the other way around.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you hope you will.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then be wise, Goma Akinya. Be very wise, and very vigilant. Because when the snake shows itself, I won’t be around to help you.’

Grave’s entry into skipover followed shortly afterwards, conducted without ceremony and with no apparent resistance from the subject. Goma was allowed to be present in the skipover vault with a small party of witnesses and technicians, including Ru, Maslin Karayan and a select number of other Second Chancers.

Grave had already been sedated and was only minimally conscious by the time the skipover casket was closed and the transition to suspended animation initiated. After their public dispute, Vasin and Nhamedjo appeared to have come to some grudging agreement regarding Grave’s committal to skipover. Saturnin handled the medical aspects, though with a conspicuous absence of enthusiasm.

Goma watched it all with a vague foreboding, knowing that she would soon be entering one of these sleek grey caskets and trusting her fate to a medical technology that was reliable but not foolproof, and which she did not pretend to understand. The assembly watched in silence as the status readouts marked Grave’s slide into medical hibernation, the gradual arresting of all cellular processes. Finally his brain gave its final surrendering flicker of neural activity, and all was still.

‘I am sorry I could not give you more,’ Vasin said to Goma, when the witnesses were beginning to disperse. ‘Some sense of justice having been done, rather than put on hold.’

‘Mposi wouldn’t have expected anything more.’

‘Perhaps not. But I admit that I felt the need for retribution — some sense that the punishment should fit the crime.’

Goma thought back to her night-time visit to Grave’s locked room. To the best of her knowledge it had gone unwitnessed and unreported. If Grave had mentioned it to anyone, there had been no consequences.

She thought of her fingernails, gouging little crescent-shaped wounds into his scalp.

‘I wouldn’t have wanted retribution.’

Kanu prepared chai and knelt by Nissa’s skipover casket until with a gasp of pressure the lid opened and slid back. She lay there, alive but not yet awake. He allowed that to happen in its own time, still kneeling, until the awkwardness of his posture became almost too much to bear. Still he waited. At last she stirred, her throat moving, her eyes opening to slits. Again he allowed her silence, although he was certain she felt his presence, breathing next to her.

Eventually she swallowed and said, ‘Where are we?’

‘Our destination,’ Kanu answered. ‘The Gliese 163 system.’ He spoke slowly, calmly, with as much gentleness as the words allowed. ‘We’re about six light-hours out — close enough for a good look at all the planets. I felt you should be awake for this.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s your right.’

After a silence, she said, ‘I haven’t got any rights, Kanu. I stopped having rights when I was kidnapped. I’m a hostage. A prisoner. Baggage.’

‘I’m sorry things happened the way they did.’

‘Then that makes it all better, doesn’t it.’

‘I mean it. I mean it more than you can know.’ Kanu searched his thoughts, wishing there was a way to make her see his good intentions, the vastness of his regret. ‘I wronged you, we both know that.’

‘Do you?’

‘I lied to you and I used you. My not being aware of it… that was never an excuse. Not when I planned it all in the first place, certain of how it would play out — us meeting, you having the ship, getting me to Europa, then going our separate ways.’

Her voice was a rasp. He remembered how dry his own throat had been, coming out of skipover only a few hours earlier.

‘And next you’ll say you had no choice, that it had to be done.’

He ran a hand across the cold skin of his scalp, shaved before skipover. ‘If I said as much, it would still be no excuse. I should have found another way — another means of reaching Europa. It was just that you presented the least risk of detection, and—’

‘There you go again.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘This is your way, Kanu. You’ll always have a justification, an excuse. There’s no action you can’t explain away. It’s always necessary, always the only thing you could have done.’

‘I will try to do better.’

‘It’s a little late for that, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘I will hold my hands up and say that everything I led you to believe after Lisbon was wrong. But this was never my intention. I didn’t want you on the ship.’

‘Out of sight, out of mind? You’d use me, but at least I wouldn’t be hanging around afterwards, reminding you of the fact?’

‘If that’s how it feels to you, I apologise. Do you remember much of what we talked about before skipover? This was the Margrave’s doing. He wanted to protect you, and I told him to do whatever was necessary. I didn’t think that meant capturing you and your ship and smuggling them aboard my own!’

‘Give me back my ship.’

‘It’s yours, whenever you want it. But we’re fifty light-years from Earth. Fall of Night would be lucky to make it to the edge of this solar system, let alone get you home.’

‘Then I’ll die trying. Better that than this.’

‘It’s normal to be a little fatalistic after skipover. You’ll start to feel differently when you’ve been up and about for a bit.’

‘Don’t tell me how I’ll feel, Kanu.’ A notch of suspicion formed on her brow. ‘Why are you awake before me, anyway? You promised we’d come out together.’

He nodded. ‘I did, and I’m sorry that promise was broken. Swift… thought it might be better this way.’

‘That’s useful, then. Blame everything on Swift.’

‘I regret that, like so many other things. But I’m not sorry that you’re here, that you’re with me.’ He shifted on his old, old knees. ‘It’s something marvellous, Nissa — something that eclipses anything that happened to me in my old life. I want you to see it, to share in the discovery — to be a part of this.’ He paused. ‘We’ve found… well, you really should see it for yourself.’

‘Nothing’s going to make this better, Kanu. The sooner you accept that, the easier it’ll be for both of us.’

‘I brought you chai,’ he said, with a certain finality. ‘I thought you might like some.’

‘Chai doesn’t make everything better. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I do,’ Kanu answered.

When he was satisfied with her progress, Kanu returned to the control deck. Nissa was free to follow him there — he hoped she would — but she would have to make up her own mind about that. The displays and readouts were all still active, as he had left them: schematics and close-ups of various aspects of the system and the ship. The largest was a series of nested ellipses, marking the orbits of the worlds around their parent star. Taking his seat, Kanu refreshed the display. One by one, the globes of planets popped onto the image in their current orbital positions. They were shown at a scale much larger than their orbits, but their relative sizes were preserved. Next to each was a column of names and data.