Poseidon's Wake (10 page)
Gliese 163 was nearly twice as far from Earth as Crucible so the images were never going to be as sharp. Crucible had also been observed more intently over a longer period of time, allowing for data to be synthesised across many planetary rotations and season cycles. No such effort had been expended on the more distant system since there had been no reason to expect any benefits from such extended study. The planetary globes looked sharp enough, delicately jewelled marbles, but when Goma pushed her hand into the image – feeling the cold suck of the membrane as it slid over her fingers and up her wrist – she could conjure any of the planets or moons to a much larger size and pluck them out of the well like apples, at which point the fuzzy nature of the data became very obvious.
Near the star, for instance, was something the annotation labelled a ‘superterran waterworld’ called Poseidon. It was the second world out from Gliese 163, and the first that was habitable by any stretch of the definition.
They knew the size of this planet and could infer its surface conditions and predict the make-up of its atmosphere even from a distance, but none of its features was sharp. ‘Habitable’ was also a relative term. Poseidon was hot – its coolest areas were equivalent to the warmest parts of Crucible – and its surface gravity was half as strong again. On its ocean-covered surface, conditions would be near the upper limit for the long-term viability of multicellular creatures, although that did not preclude the existence of extremophile organisms. There was oxygen in the atmosphere, so presumably some form of photosynthesis was occurring in or on the ocean, and since the planet had apparently escaped a runaway greenhouse effect, there must be thermal-regulatory mechanisms in play, keeping the atmosphere from turning into an incinerating furnace. While humans could endure such an environment for a short period, it was no place to consider making a home.
There were gas giants and smaller, rockier worlds in orbits circular and eccentric, some close to Gliese 163, some much further out. Since no hard data was available on the gas giants’ moons, it was difficult to say whether they might have any connection with the signal. Goma thought it more likely that the answer might lie with one of the terrestrial planets – worlds with names like Paladin and Orison. They moved in small, circular orbits – this was a very compact solar system. But there was little or no data on them or such moons as they might possess, or on the many smaller bodies orbiting Gliese 163.
The well, Goma knew, was actually a soup of nanomachines. When her fingers closed around a marble, the well sensed her intention and organised its resources – the Knowledge itself – to produce a ‘solid’ image, a ball composited from nanomachines at a much higher density than those in the transparent matrix. When she hauled her glowing prize from the well, the machines making up the sphere were reflecting the horizon of human knowledge at that moment in time. She could tear away a rind of crust, expose the best-guess for the planetary interior – cherry-red core or stone-dead, nonmagnetic heart.
But the nanomachines guarded themselves jealously and the prize was as ephemeral as a fairy-tale gift. Even as she held it in her hand, the machines began to seep through her grip, back into the pool. If she tried to take her prize beyond the limit of the device’s rim, the globe would collapse into liquid and drain away in a gush of colour. There was no harm in trying to beat it, and she tried again and again, hoping to hold a tatter of a world in her palm. But it was to no avail, for the machines were swifter than thought.
It pleased Goma that no one else appeared to be interested in the Knowledge Room – at least not yet. She enjoyed tossing the worlds back into the well, watching them shrink and return to their proper orbits. Which of these planets or moons, she wondered, had sent the signal to her mother? No one knew.
Exiting the room after one visit, she saw two men come bustling along the corridor on which it was situated. Both were Second Chancers, obvious from their dark red clothing. It was not quite a uniform – the styles varied from Chancer to Chancer – but close enough to convey a sense of kinship and shared purpose. One of the men was the burly, bearded Karayan, the other a younger and slighter man.
Goma desired no contact with these people, so her first instinct was to duck back into the Knowledge Room. But that would have been far too obvious and cowardly a gambit. She decided to brazen it out – they were going to keep bumping into each other, after all.
‘Ah,’ said the bearded man. ‘The redoubtable Goma. Could you not have stayed your tongue, at least for the duration of Gandhari’s introduction?’
‘I said what was on my mind.’
‘Yes, we noticed.’ Maslin Karayan’s eyes narrowed at her from beneath his formidable brow. ‘Crucible is a democracy, in case you didn’t realise. And we are aboard this ship by mutual consent – as entitled to our places as you or any of the other scientists.’
‘I didn’t say you weren’t.’
‘You also made no secret of your ill-feelings,’ Karayan said.
‘I’m entitled to them,’ Goma said, feeling a certain shameful thrill in her own studied belligerence.
The younger man had been silent until now. He had a pale complexion and a mop of blond hair which sat on his scalp in tight curls, save for a cowlick covering half his forehead.
‘Do you really hate us that much, Goma? Just because we have a slightly different set of values from your own?’
‘I must go on ahead and meet my wife,’ Karayan told the other man. ‘I will see you at the evening gathering, Peter.’
‘Thank you, Maslin.’
Karayan touched a big hand to the younger man’s shoulder and proceeded down the corridor, leaving Goma alone with the man named Peter.
‘I’m not stopping you from leaving,’ Goma said.
The man smiled, although there was more sadness than amusement in his expression. ‘I am Peter Grave, for what it’s worth. Yes, I’m a Second Chancer and I respect Maslin, but I’m also hoping you and I might become friends, at least while we’re stuck inside this ship.’
‘Why would you want that?’
‘Because I admire you. Because I know what you did, to spare your mother from this.’
‘The last thing I want to hear is a Second Chancer talking about my mother.’
‘Ours is a broad alliance. Not everyone holds Ndege to the same accountability.’
‘So what do you think?’
‘I think there are always grounds for forgiveness.’
‘Then you’re wrong. My mother didn’t need forgiveness. Forgiveness is only required when you commit a crime.’
‘And your mother’s deeds don’t count as a crime?’
‘She was trying to do something good.’
‘I don’t dispute that, but good deeds alone can’t excuse mistakes that kill hundreds of thousands of people.’ Grave offered her the palms of his hands. ‘Look, the last thing I want is to get into all that. I just feel that if we can at least agree to rub along together, it’s going to make life a lot easier for all of us. Maslin’s not such an ogre, you know – none of us is.’
‘Do you believe in a god, Peter Grave?’
‘My beliefs or otherwise don’t lend themselves to simple answers.’
‘That’s a yes, then.’
‘You are doing me a disservice, Goma.’ He averted his eyes, looking regretful. ‘Honestly, I was hoping for better from you. Open-mindedness, a willingness to accept differing viewpoints—’
‘There’s only one viewpoint.’
‘The infallible wisdom of science?’
‘Call it what you like.’
‘It might surprise you to know that I’m a great admirer of science. I’ve even read some of your work.’
‘I suppose it helps to know your enemy.’
‘Oh, please.’ At last he raised a surrendering hand. ‘Never mind. Point made. Point very excellently made. I’m sorry I detained you – sorry one of us wasn’t ready to begin building a bridge. You’re wrong, though – wrong about me, wrong about all of us. I just hope it doesn’t take the rest of the voyage for you to see your way past your prejudice.’
Goma blinked in surprise. ‘
I’m
the prejudiced one?’
But Peter Grave was already easing past her. ‘Goodbye, Goma Akinya.’
Kanu had been travelling on Earth for a week by the time he reached Lisbon. That time seemed improbably full of incident: the visit to the grieving Dalals, the airship flight across the Arabian sea, the warm reception in the aqualogy, his dismay at the plight of his old friend Leviathan. With his obligation to the Dalals discharged, and having paid a courtesy visit to the merfolk, he at last felt that he could afford to slow down and spend some time in one place. Finding lodgings had taken the better part of a day; now, rested – and no longer finding Earth’s light and gravity quite so burdensome as when he had first arrived – Kanu had no grand plans for his day beyond a trip to the quayside and a visit to an art show. He set out in a water taxi, a buzzing electric thing that conveyed him and a handful of fellow travellers the short distance to the concrete jetty, built around the feet of a Provider robot.
The towering, crane-sized robot had been there since the Mechanism fell, still poised halfway out into the Tagus River, where it was working at the time. Much too vast to move or economically dismantle, it now formed a permanent if unintentional sculptural installation. Accepting the inevitable, the city had put a landing deck on top of the Provider and jetties around its feet, then run elevators and staircases up the inside of its tripedal legs. Within its body and the bulges of its limbs’ articulation points, thousands of tonnes of useless machinery had been torn out to make way for multi-purpose event spaces. It was here, inside the Provider, that one of the most significant Sunday Akinya retrospectives in recent years was taking place.
Kanu had bought a ticket and joined the line on the jetty waiting for the elevators. Despite his diplomatic status on Mars and the link between his name and artist’s, he was no kind of celebrity on Earth. He moved through Lisbon in blissful obscurity, barely attracting a second glance. If he was noticed at all, it was only because merfolk always drew a certain amount of attention wherever they went. He had dressed in simple clothes, slung a shabby second-hand satchel over his shoulder and bolstered his anonymity with a pair of antique sunglasses. He was not even the only African-Aquatic in the line.
He entered the cool of the lift, which carried him up the leg to the exhibition level. He lingered in the windowed entrance lobby for a few moments, enjoying the view of Lisbon from this elevated vantage point. There was nothing to rival it anywhere in the city itself, and as he traced the maze of streets and squares around his pension, he felt the slow uncoiling of old spatial memories. Many years had passed since his last visit, but Lisbon was like the sea. It could change, and change again, yet in its eternal changefulness, the city would never be entirely unfamiliar to him.
Kanu crossed the lobby and entered the event space. Although the exhibition was sold out, the organisers had kept the numbers at a manageable level. The retrospective was divided into three main sections: paintings, sculpture, and decorative pieces and public works. Within each section, the pieces had been organised in approximate order of completion.
Kanu dithered over where to start. He had no real sense of how these works slotted into the larger narrative of Sunday’s life – whether she had been a sculptor before a painter, a decorator before a sculptor. With some trepidation, he dug the brochure out of his satchel. Unfortunately it offered little help on the matter – it appeared to be written with a tacit assumption of knowledge he had not yet acquired. Even the floor plan appeared to have been drawn in a deliberately counter-intuitive way, so that he had to hold it upside down to orientate himself with respect to the point of entry. Kanu observed the other patrons, who were strolling around with an air of cultured self-confidence, casually pointing out this and that to each other as if the landmarks and milestones of Sunday’s career were too obvious to mention.
Never mind. He had to start somewhere.
Near the entrance, preserved on a plinth, was a section of wall that had been cut and removed from the Descrutinized Zone on the Moon. It contained a piece of psycho-reactive graffiti done by Sunday in or around 2163. Kanu wandered over and tried to make sense of the piece. He stared at the smear of clashing colours, daring it show some acknowledgement of his presence. According to the accompanying text, the ‘paint’ was in fact a kind of licensed nanotechnology infiltrated with invisible attention-tracking devices. Those parts that were ‘looked at’ the most intensely would resist being overpainted by other hands. Areas of the art which suffered attentional neglect were liable to be changed. Kanu was free to drag his finger across the piece’s surface, altering colour and texture – but the installation always reset itself on the hour, reverting to the form it had taken when it was last on the Moon.
He moved to a selection of fired earthenware stained with glazes incorporating the greys and fawns of the Lunar surface. In Kanu’s eyes there was nothing to link these pieces to the graffiti, but he supposed better scholars than him had done their homework.
The earthenware could not hold his attention – ultimately it was just so many pots and vases. He moved to an upright glass cylinder which held a realistic-looking mannequin of a human figure, sitting in a grandly appointed armchair. The family likeness was inescapable. This was not Sunday, though, but rather her grandmother, the redoubtable Eunice Akinya. According to the annotation, Sunday had invested a lot of time programming a construct ‘tribute’ to the real space explorer.
Kanu could not tell if this was the actual construct or just a good copy.
A sudden sense of purposelessness overcame him. What was he doing here, going through the motions of art appreciation? Art had never spoken to him before, not in any meaningful way, so what was he hoping to get out of this experience? It was absurd to feel that he owed his dead ancestor anything. Sunday was gone – she could not have cared less whether or not he had an appreciation of her work.
A merman in an art gallery
, he thought to himself,
a fish out of water in all but the specifics
.
‘The real problem for us,’ someone was saying in clear, high Portuguese, ‘is to imagine ourselves inhabiting Sunday’s world of four hundred and fifty years ago – she’s as remote from us as Vermeer was from her. But if we’re going to understand the impulses behind her art, we have to bridge that mental gap – to see her as a fully formed human being, a woman with friends and family, confronted by the same mundane problems of love and life and work that we all face. How to pay the bills. Where to eat, where to live, who to approach for her next commission. She’s not a remote historical figure, floating in a cloud of pure inspiration. She was a real woman, with the same cares and fears as the rest of us. She even visited Lisbon – how many of you knew that?’
The speaker was an older woman, lecturing a group of well-dressed young people gathered around her in a loose circle, notepads, pens and crayons at the ready. She wore a dark green jacket over black trousers, with a scarf of a lighter shade of green tossed over one shoulder. She almost had her back to him, and from his present angle he could only see the side of her face. Over the shoulder of one of her audience, Kanu observed a creditable sketch of the graffiti wall rendered in bold diagonal strokes. It was a copy, but it had a vigour about it that captured something of the original.
‘In her day,’ the woman continued, ‘Sunday wasn’t famous at all. It’s true that she was born into a rich and powerful family, by the standards of the time. But she didn’t want any of that. She went to the Moon, set up shop in the Descrutinized Zone – that’s what they called the commune in which she lived – and more or less wrote herself out of ever being rich. She surrounded herself with like-minded souls who couldn’t have cared less where she came from. Artists, tinkerers, gypsies, renegade geneticists – every piece that didn’t
quite
fit into the ordered jigsaw of the Surveilled World.’
Kanu was intrigued now. He had no difficulty understanding the woman. Her diction was very good, but regardless he had spent enough time in Lisbon during the earlier phase of his life to have gained a decent grasp of Portuguese and its commoner dialects. But there was something more to this. It was not just the words the woman was speaking, but rather the precise cadences of her speech. It was as if he had heard her speak on many occasions, to the point where his brain was already ahead of her words, anticipating their flow.
He moved slightly and the angle of her face altered. She was an attractive woman with broad features and very appealing eyes. She was older than the people she was addressing, certainly – perhaps as old as himself. There was a fineness in her features, the definition of her cheekbones, temple and jaw. Her hair was nearly white but still thick and long, and she had allowed it to grow out naturally.
Kanu could not believe his eyes. He knew her.
‘Nissa,’ he said quietly, as if he needed to say it aloud before he could be sure of it.
Nissa.
Nissa Mbaye.
She had been a high-ranking technocrat in the United Surface Nations, not quite his opposite number, but close enough in their respective hierarchies that their paths had crossed many times. During the difficult years after the Fall, when the world had to learn to live without the Mechanism, without the aug, without instantaneous translation and instantaneous virtual telepresence, without absolute security and oversight, without the promise of limitless life extension, Kanu and Nissa had worked together on many of the intergovernmental emergency-response measures. They had their differences, but each recognised that the other was striving for the same thing – to help heal a wounded, traumatised world as best they could. Later, when the Watchkeepers came, Kanu and Nissa had cooperated on the formulation of a pan-governmental response, urging caution and non-aggressive interaction with the alien machines.
They had been opposites, rivals, colleagues, obstinate opponents. They had also come to be friends. Later, more than friends.
For thirty-five years, Nissa Mbaye had been his wife.
‘This is weird,’ she said, when they both had drinks and pastries.
‘Weird doesn’t begin to cover it,’ Kanu replied, smiling as he recalled Nissa’s old habit of masterful understatement. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was hallucinating, or stuck in a dream.’
‘If it’s a dream, then I’m stuck in it with you.’ They were alone, sitting opposite each other at a corner table in the upstairs café. Nissa had sent her students off with an impromptu drawing assignment that she was confident would keep them busy for a half-hour or so. ‘Shall we switch to Swahili, or would that be bad manners?’
‘It would be very bad manners.’
They switched to Swahili.
‘Let’s get one thing out of the way,’ Kanu continued, faltering over the consonants until his tongue got the message that they were no longer doing Portuguese. ‘It’s odd enough us bumping into each other, but at least I’m here as a member of the public. What are you doing teaching art history?’
‘There’s no law against it.’
‘You were a career politician, like me!’
‘Please,’ she said with a smile, ‘we’re in polite company.’
Kanu smiled in return. It was banter, but of an old and familiar form that would not have been possible had she not been comfortable around him. But he still felt that there had to be a catch to their meeting.
‘Civil servant, technocrat, functionary – whatever you want to call it. Unless my memory’s failing me, you had nothing to do with teaching art – and still less to do with my grandmother.’
‘All right, I’ll come clean – I’m not really a teacher. But they’re stretched here and I’ve agreed to help out the exhibitors by leading guided tours, mostly school and student parties.’
‘That doesn’t make it any clearer.’
‘I’m a scholar now. Don’t look so surprised – we’re allowed to do more than one thing with our lives. You of all people ought to know that.’
‘I do – and I agree. But I’m still reeling. You say “scholar”—’
‘Sunday is one of my principal interests. By helping out with the retrospective for a few hours a day, I get almost unlimited access to the archives – the rest of the collection and its documentation. I also assist with some of the cataloguing and annotation along the way.’
Kanu was still having trouble with the concept. ‘So you really are an art historian now?’
‘It’s not a complete stretch. Even when we worked together, I had other interests – antiquities, deluge architecture, pre-Mechanism cultural semiotics—’
‘All of that’s still a long way from being an expert on my grandmother.’
‘There’s the small detail that we were married. Is it such a surprise that I know a few things about your grandmother?’
‘I hadn’t forgotten that we were married.’ But in truth, it had been months, perhaps even years, since he had last called her to mind. Not because they had parted in bitterness, or that he wished to erase her from recollection, but simply because his life had changed in so many ways that the years with Nissa belonged in their own compartment, one that he seldom had cause to open.
‘Sunday was always looming there in your ancestral background. You didn’t have to take an interest in her, but that didn’t preclude me from doing so.’
‘I don’t remember any such thing.’
‘It was mostly after we split up. She was a bit of a niche interest then, so her stock hadn’t really begun to rise. Look, don’t tell me you’ve completely forgotten. What about the divorce settlement? You agreed to let me have some of her pieces.’
‘I’m afraid they can’t have meant much to me.’
‘More fool you, merman. You gave away a small fortune. Actually, sizeable fortune would be more like it, with the prices she’s fetching now. You could buy a spaceship with those pieces. In fact, that’s exactly what I did. But who knew, back then?’
Kanu feigned a glum look. ‘Not me.’
‘And you wouldn’t have cared even if you’d had an idea what those paintings might be worth. It was just family clutter to you. Money was never your motivator.’ She appraised him from across the table, doubtless taking in his unostentatious choice of clothing. ‘I’m guessing it still isn’t.’
