Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘Swift wonders if machines made the wheels. The worldwheels. And Swift wonders if that would make them gods.’

‘So your friend has begun to turn to faith? I’d watch him carefully if I were you.’

‘Robots are entitled to ask the same questions as the rest of us,’ Kanu said. ‘There’s no law against it.’

Soon they were inside the orbit of the moons, still moving at a hundred kilometres per second.

The forty-five moons were all alike as Icebreaker could tell: each a perfectly regular grey sphere two hundred kilometres across. They were still very hard to see, swallowing or scattering electromagnetic radiation and offering nothing to Icebreaker ’s other sensors. No hint of mass, or magnetism, or particle emission. Artificial, certainly, Kanu decided — and while the moons were larger than the worldwheels and the arrangement of their orbits an impressive feat, he found them less daunting an achievement than the surface structures. They were worthy of admiration, certainly, and definitely merited further attention — but he was content to relegate them to third place after the new Mandala and the worldwheels. They would suffice for study when the other wonders had been picked clean.

But as Icebreaker nosed its way through the dance of orbits, its sensors detected another dark thing circling Poseidon.

It was smaller than any of the moons, and consequently they had missed it until now. It was a light-second or two closer to Poseidon, orbiting more swiftly.

Kanu’s first thought was that they had chanced upon a piece of captured planetary debris — a tiny natural moon, blemishing the order of the forty-five artificial satellites. No solar system was free of primordial material, after all, and sooner or later some of those wandering fragments of early planet formation were bound to become gravitationally ensnared, tugged into orbits around larger worlds.

He was curious, though. Maybe there was water ice on this shard, tucked away in the shadows of craters. Maybe they could use it as a base for operations when they returned to take a closer look at Poseidon. He ordered Icebreaker to concentrate all its sensors on the little fragment and waited as the results appeared before him.

There it was: a sheared-off splinter of some larger thing — wider at one end than the other and hacked across at an angle with a very clean separation. Kanu stared at it wordlessly. He felt himself on the cusp of some vital recognition but not quite able to make the link.

It was Nissa who identified the thing.

‘That’s a Watchkeeper,’ she said, with a cool, calm reverence in her voice, as if she were speaking of the recently dead.

Which was perhaps the case.

It was the corpse of a Watchkeeper, not the living whole. They were looking at perhaps half of its former extent. It had been sliced in two, severed along an impossibly precise diagonal.

Kanu thought of the Watchkeeper they had seen on their way to Europa — the pine-cone form, the stabs of blue radiation spiking out from between the plates of its armour. They had always been dark apart from that blue light, but here there was only darkness.

‘Something killed it,’ he said.

Goma’s first thought, when the fog of revival had cleared sufficiently for something like consciousness, was that Mposi and Ndege, sister and brother, her mother and her uncle, must by now be united in death. There could be little doubt of this, given the fact of her own survival. There would have been no cause to wake her before journey’s end, no accident that her body would have been capable of surviving, and at the same time, no chance that her mother had survived the long decades of Travertine ’s crossing.

They had said goodbye, Goma reminded herself — or at the very least ended things well, with her mother’s loving imprecation that she had to look inside herself now, to find the strength she had depended on in Mposi, and to be that rock for the rest of them.

But Mposi was still dead, and the truth of that was no easier to bear now than before she had gone into skipover.

Presently there was a face, and a voice.

‘Gently now.’

Before the face assumed focus, something cool and sweet and soothing touched her lips. She thought for a drowsy instant that this kind form was Ru, for the voice was a woman’s. But it was Captain Gandhari Vasin helping her back to life.

‘Thank you,’ she said, when she was at last able to coax some sounds from her mouth. ‘I wasn’t expecting… I mean, you didn’t need to.’

‘I didn’t need to, but if a captain can’t welcome her crew back to the world of the living, what can she do? Anyway, I need you, Goma. Take your time — getting up and about is hard enough after a normal skipover interval — but I have something of interest to show you when you’re ready.’

Her eyes still would not focus properly, but the vague textures and colours of her surroundings were enough to establish that she was still in the skipover vault.

‘Are we safe? Did we make the crossing?’

‘Yes, we made the crossing. Seventy light-years, and not a single mishap. How much of that we owe to the Watchkeeper ahead of us, I don’t know. But the ship is in good condition, and we are where we wished to be.’

‘What have you found?’

‘A great deal. Most importantly, though, a welcome message — a signal telling us where to go. I think you should hear it. I would be very glad of your opinion.’

‘How is Ru?’

‘There’s no need to worry about Ru. She’s in excellent hands.’

That was meant well, but it was not quite the answer she had been hoping for. And yet Goma could only focus on her fears for so long before drowsiness pulled her under again.

She had no idea how long she was out, but there came a moment when the face of Dr Saturnin Nhamedjo was assuming gradual focus before her. He was studying her with magnificent and serene patience, as if nothing in his universe was more valuable than the health of this one patient. She could easily imagine that he had been there for hours, waiting by her skipover casket, untroubled by any concern save her own well-being.

‘Welcome back, Goma. I know you have already spoken to Gandhari, but I will reaffirm the news. You have come through safely. All is well. We have all survived skipover — even our prisoner.’

She thought of Grave, and that in turn made her think of Mposi. But for the moment there was only one thing at the forefront of her concerns. She made to get up out of the casket, forcing effort into unwilling muscles.

‘Steady!’ Dr Nhamedjo said, smiling at her determination.

‘I want to see Ru.’

‘In good time. Ru is receiving the very best care and I am perfectly satisfied with her progress.’

‘Something went wrong, didn’t it?’

‘We have all survived. This is a blessing. Anything else must be considered a minor setback, nothing more.’ A stern, admonitionary tone entered his voice. ‘I do not wish you to overtax yourself, Goma, not during these early hours. You have more than enough work to do in building your own strength back up. Leave Ru to us. She will be well. I have the utmost confidence in her.’

‘Is it the AOTS?’

‘It was always going to be a complicating factor. An already damaged nervous system is not best equipped to deal with the additional stresses of skipover, but I would not have agreed to let her join the expedition if I did not think her strong enough.’ He reached into the casket and patted her wrist, offering reassurance. ‘She is in a medically induced coma now, but that is for her own good. We are giving her a cocktail of drugs that will help with the combined effects of AOTS and the ordinary stresses of skipover. There is no reason for them not to work, but it must be done carefully, and the results monitored at each step. Gradually, she will be elevated back to proper consciousness. I have every confidence that she will be well again.’