Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Goma rose early, by routine, with Ru still deeply asleep on her side of the bed. She had slept only fitfully, knowing that her mind would not be fully at ease until she had picked up the thread of last night’s aborted conversation. Not wishing to disturb Ru, she washed and dressed quietly before leaving the room. She went to one of the galleys and poured herself coffee. The galley was empty and she had passed hardly anyone else on her way there. Travertine’s lights were still dimmed to their nocturnal level, encouraging its human crew to continue following a diurnal sleep pattern. The ship was all shades of brown and amber now, and as quiet as a spacecraft could ever be. Non-essential life-support systems had been turned low or switched off completely and the noise of the drive — conducted through the fabric of the ship — amounted only to a distant, waterfall-like roar, as lullingly soporific as a white-noise generator.

Mposi would be awake, though. He was a creature of extreme habit and always up and working before anyone else. Granted, he no longer had the duties of his political life on Crucible, the pressures and obligations of high office. But he would find enough to keep himself busy no matter where he was, and Goma knew he currently had the matter of the saboteur to occupy his thoughts. No, Mposi would be awake by now and probably anxious to resume their conversation.

When the coffee had restored some clarity to her thoughts, Goma moved through the ship until she reached Mposi’s cabin. She knocked quietly on the door, not wishing to disturb anyone in the adjoining cabins, presuming they were occupied.

She waited a decent interval, then knocked again.

Two possibilities presented themselves: Mposi was profoundly asleep or had already left his room. She risked a harder set of knocks but there was still no sign of life.

Fine: he was already up and about.

Goma searched the obvious alternatives — the galleys, lounges and public spaces — and still there was no sign of her uncle. She went to the gym and found it empty. She checked the medical bay, just in case, but there was no one inside the glass-doored area.

By the time she got back to her own cabin, Ru was drowsily awake.

‘About last night—’

‘I can’t find Mposi.’

Ru scrunched her still-sleepy eyes. ‘Where have you looked?’

‘Just about everywhere. No sign of him in his cabin, no sign of him anywhere else.’

‘That still leaves a lot of the ship — places you and I can’t get into.’

‘I know. But Mposi shouldn’t be able to get into them either, not without special authorisation.’

Some alertness was returning to Ru. She dug dust from the corners of her eyes, inspected it with a sleepy fascination. ‘For which he’d need to go to Gandhari. You want to talk to her? For all we know, she and Mposi might be sharing a cabin by now.’

‘I’d have heard,’ Goma said, not particularly in the mood for humour. ‘Let’s leave her out of it for the moment. I’m concerned for him, but I don’t want to cause an unnecessary panic.’

‘You look panicked already.’

It was true, but Goma closed her eyes and forced a kind of calm upon herself. ‘He can’t have gone anywhere. It’s a ship, and there are only so many places he could be. I probably missed him. We’ll search thoroughly ourselves before we go to the captain.’

‘That’ll take a while. We’d better divide up the sections, meet back at our room every hour.’

‘Make it every thirty minutes,’ Goma said.

‘Fine, thirty minutes. And we will find him — probably at some porthole, gazing back at Crucible and wondering why the hell he ever signed up for this.’

Try as she might, Goma could not be cheered by this. ‘I’m worried for him.’

‘So am I, but he’ll be fine.’

Ru washed and dressed while Goma made chai. They drank it quickly, nothing much to say to each other, too much still unspoken from the night before. But when they were nearly ready to leave, Ru reached out and touched Goma’s wrist.

‘He’ll be all right. And I still love you.’

‘Thank you,’ Goma said.

They separated and searched the ship. The lights were beginning to warm up for the day cycle now, but the transition was gradual and there were still relatively few people moving around. This made it easier to look for Mposi, but also made Goma feel more conspicuous. She was going into parts of the ship she would not normally visit at these hours with no ready explanation for her presence there. She did not want to have to tell anyone that she was searching for her lost uncle. But as she searched the corridors, stairwells and passageways, no one minded her, or even engaged her in anything more than passing conversation.

Goma searched all the permitted areas in the lower half of the forward sphere, and then as much of the spine as she had access to. Since Travertine was still accelerating, entering the spine felt like descending into the supporting tower of some huge sphere-capped building, with another sphere at its foundation. Beyond a certain point, though, the lower levels were open only to technicians. Mposi might have had a way of getting through those locked bulkheads but she certainly did not.

Some doors offered access — via airlocks, disposal vents or cargo bays — to open space. But Goma was certain that Mposi could not have opened any of those doors without Gandhari Vasin being informed immediately. There would have been alarms, emergency procedures, staff dashing to the affected area. No; Mposi could not have left the ship — or been pushed off it, for that matter.

The thought was there, then. The possibility of murder. Was that melodramatic of her, given so little evidence of misfortune?

But Mposi had been aware of a possible sabotage plot, and he had spoken to Maslin Karayan only recently.

So yes, murder: why dismiss the obvious?

But she found neither Mposi nor his body. When she and Ru checked in with each other, at half-hourly intervals as agreed, Ru was having no more success.

‘I’ve accessed every room I can get into,’ she said. ‘That excludes all the private quarters, unoccupied rooms and various areas closed to anyone who isn’t on the technical staff. To get into those, we’ll need to see Gandhari.’

‘Maybe now we have cause,’ Goma said.

‘Have you double-checked his room, just in case he was sound asleep after all?’

‘Twice. And I’d have woken the dead the second time.’ She regretted the choice of words immediately. ‘I don’t think he’s in there. But again, we’d need the captain to open that door.’

‘Then we go to Gandhari. I had my doubts to begin with, Goma, but you’re right — we should have found him by now.’

‘One more sweep,’ Goma said. ‘If we were unlucky, he could have been taking one set of stairs while we were using another. Did you check the Knowledge Room?’

‘No, it was locked. Who ever uses that place, anyway, other than you?’

‘A few,’ Goma said. ‘And I’ve never known it to be locked.’

Still, Ru was right: Goma very rarely met anyone else in the Knowledge Room. Even after other people had started spending more time there, she had managed to hang onto the idea of it as her personal kingdom, an enclave of privacy and solitude where not even Ru was likely to wander.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she said. ‘We go straight to the captain now.’

‘I agree.’

Gandhari Vasin was readying herself for the day when they disturbed her, although still in her nightclothes. If Goma had expected resentment at their early arrival, none was evident.

‘You were right to tell me,’ she said, after taking a few moments to dress for the rest of the ship. ‘You ought to have found him by now, and I doubt he had the means to get through any of the sealed doors. Rest assured, though — he’s still on the ship, and we will find him.’

Goma mentioned the Knowledge Room. They had checked it again on the way to Vasin and found it still secured.

‘I’ve given no orders for it to be locked and I can’t see why it would be. Was it somewhere Mposi went very often?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Goma said.

And it was true. As the data in the Knowledge Room had hardly altered since departure, few people saw any reason to go in there at all. It would be different when they neared Gliese 163, but for most of them that was decades of sleep away.

‘Mposi’s not a scientist anyway,’ Ru said.

‘I know. And thank goodness for that,’ Vasin said. ‘He’s the one person on this ship the scientists and Second Chancers can both talk to.’

‘There’s you,’ Goma felt obliged to point out.

‘Next to Mposi, I’m a rank amateur. Your uncle’s liked and trusted by all parties, and that makes him as invaluable to me as any part of this ship. I shudder to think how we would ever have managed without him.’

Vasin opened a drawer and snapped a bangle around her wrist. ‘We had some lengthy discussions about the functionality of these devices. They allow access to the rooms, but they’re clearly capable of much more than that. Have you ever wondered why we didn’t make provision for communication, for localisation?’

‘I am now,’ Goma said.

‘The truth is, the bangles can do all of that and more if they need to, but our psychologists were against the idea. The dynamics of a ship aren’t the same as those of a city or even a planet. They considered it unwise to implement the full functionality. Sometimes it’s good to have the choice not to be found, not to be spoken to — especially on a starship. There’s enough to drive us mad without engineering the last traces of privacy out of our lives.’ But she offered a semi-smile. ‘Still, rank has its privileges. My bangle can locate any one of you if the need arises.’

‘You didn’t need to tell us that,’ Ru said, Goma sending a nod of agreement — both of them aware that Vasin had shown her trust in them with this confidence. ‘You’d have figured it out sooner or later.’ Vasin touched a stud on the bangle’s rim and raised her wrist to her lips. ‘Find Mposi Akinya, please. Throw his location onto my wall and open a vocal channel to his bangle.’

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.