Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER SIX

Kanu was in no hurry to reach Madras; equally he knew that he would not be able to settle into the rhythms of his new life until he had discharged his obligation to the family of Garudi Dalal.

His port of entry was Sri Lanka, the nearest land mass to the Indian Ocean vacuum tower. From Colombo he took the high-speed train up the western side of Sri Lanka, passing under the Gulf of Mannar and heading up the eastern coast of India. On its way to Madras, the train surfaced into the hard silver glare of an overcast sky, speeding through a string of moderately affluent coastal communities: Cuddalore, Puducherry, Chengalpattu, each a blur of white buildings, pagodas, domes and towers hemmed by a blue-green rush of sea and jungle.

In Madras, the sun was hot and unforgiving and indecently large in the sky.

‘You’ll have read the official reports,’ Kanu said, when they were sitting around a metal table in the back garden of the Dalals’ home, surrounded by trees and birds. ‘I was there, in a sense. I can tell you that Garudi acted courageously and that her death would have been virtually instantaneous. It was an honour to have known her.’

‘These terrorists,’ Dalal’s father said, pouring fresh chai into their cups.

Kanu felt their grief as an invisible, silent presence at the garden table, acknowledged but uninvited. He supposed that the worst sting of it had passed by now, in the six weeks since the incident, but there were still months and years of quiet pain ahead of them.

‘You represented different interests,’ Dalal’s mother said, offering Kanu a dish of dried and sweetened fruit.

‘We did, but we always respected each other. Besides, we were both from Earth. We had far more in common than we had to divide us.’

‘I am sorry to hear that you have lost your ambassadorship,’ said Mr Dalal.

‘It was right to bring in new blood. Marius is a very safe pair of hands.’

‘Garudi wrote to us when she was able,’ said Mrs Dalal. ‘She thought highly of you, Mister Akinya.’

‘Kanu, please.’

‘She would not have thought it fair, that you should be considered… What is the word they use?’ asked Mr Dalal.

‘He doesn’t need to hear that,’ said Mrs Dalal.

Kanu laughed aside the awkwardness. ‘Tainted. It’s all right — I’ve heard it already.’

‘I do not suppose this is a time for idealists,’ said Mrs Dalal.

‘No,’ Kanu said ruefully. ‘I don’t think it is.’

They asked Kanu what had happened to him since the terrorist incident. He told them how the machines had healed him, keeping him in their care for twenty-two days before releasing him to the embassy. ‘Then I was told that my services were no longer required. Soon after, a shuttle arrived to take me away.’

‘And you came straight to Earth?’ asked Mr Dalal.

‘No, there were some administrative formalities first. I was subjected to the most intensive medical examination you can imagine, just in case the robots had planted something in me while I was under.’ Kanu nibbled at one of the dried fruit slices. Overhead, the blades of plants scissored in an afternoon breeze. He was glad to be in the shade. Here the sunlight struck the surfaces of things with a hard, interrogatory brightness. ‘I had to disappoint them, though. Other than some scars, the robots hadn’t left any trace of themselves.’

‘Then you should be allowed to continue with your work,’ Mrs Dalal said, her tone indignant.

‘In a perfect world.’

‘Do you have plans?’ asked Mr Dalal.

‘Nothing terribly detailed. I thought I might visit some old friends now I’m back on Earth. After that, I have enough funds that I don’t need to make any immediate decisions. Also, I’ve been meaning to look into the history of a relative of mine — my grandmother, Sunday Akinya?’

‘She has the same name as the artist,’ said Mrs Dalal.

Kanu smiled at this. ‘She is the artist. Or rather was. Sunday died a very long time ago, and we never had the chance to meet.’

Mrs Dalal nodded, clearly impressed.

‘When Garudi mentioned your name, I did not make the connection,’ Mr Dalal said. ‘But I suppose Akinya is not all that common a surname. I should have realised.’

‘The odd thing,’ Kanu said, ‘is that Sunday never made much of a name for herself when she was alive — not through her art, anyway. Her grandmother was the famous one.’

‘Eustace?’ asked Mrs Dalal.

‘Eunice,’ Kanu corrected. It was a perfectly forgivable error, this long into her afterlife.

After a silence, Mr Dalal said: ‘More chai, Kanu?’

He raised his hand, webbing his fingers apart. ‘No — it’s very kind of you, Mr Dalal, but I need to be on my way.’

‘Thank you again for bringing Garudi’s things,’ Mrs Dalal said.

They needed groceries so decided to walk him back to the railway station. Beyond the shade of their garden the afternoon was still warm and now virtually breezeless. Kanu thought of the ocean and wished he could be in it.

‘I was hoping you might set our minds at ease,’ Mr Dalal said.

‘About what?’ Kanu asked.

‘During the day you don’t usually see it, but at night, it’s hard to ignore. When it passes over Madras, over India, it’s hard to sleep. Just the thought of that thing up there, wondering what it’s thinking, planning. I imagine it’s the same for everyone.’

‘I suggest we take encouragement from the fact that the Watchkeepers have not acted against us,’ Kanu said delicately, drawing on one of a thousand diplomatic responses he kept in mind for questions such as this. ‘It’s clear they have the capability to do so, but they haven’t used it. I think if they meant to, we would already know.’

‘Then what do they want?’ asked Mrs Dalal, her tone demanding. ‘Why have they come back if they don’t want something from us?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kanu said.

Noticing his unease, she shook her head and said, ‘I am sorry, we should not have pressed you. It’s just—’

‘It would be good to know we can sleep well in our beds,’ Mr Dalal said.

From Madras he travelled west to Bangalore; from Bangalore he took a night connection to Mumbai; from Mumbai at dawn a dragon-red passenger dirigible, ornamented with vanes and sails and a hundred bannering kitetails. The dirigible droned at low altitude across the Arabian Sea, a thousand passengers promenading through its huge windowed gondola. In the evening they docked at Mirbat¸, where Kanu found lodgings for the night and a good place to eat. Over his meal, alone at an outdoor table, he watched the boats in the harbour, recalling the feeling of rigging between his fingers, remembering how it felt to trim a sail, to read the horizon’s weather.

In the morning he drew upon his funds for the expense of an airpod, an ancient but well-maintained example of its kind, and vectored south-west at a whisker under the speed of sound, across the Gulf of Aden and down the coast towards Mogadishu. He veered around fleets of colourful fishing boats, lubber and merfolk crews gathering their hauls. Their boats had eyes painted on their hulls. It was good to fly, good to see living seas and living land beneath him, people with jobs and lives and things to think about besides robots on Mars and alien machines in the sky.

Presently a seastead loomed over the horizon. Kanu slowed and announced his approach intentions.

‘Kanu Akinya, requesting permission—’

But the reply was immediate, cutting him off before he had even finished his sentence. ‘You of all people, Kanu, do not need to seek permission. Approach at leisure and be prepared for a boisterous welcoming party.’

He recognised the voice. ‘I’m that transparent, Vouga?’

‘You’re almost a celebrity now. We’ve been following developments since we heard the good news about your survival. I’m dreadfully sorry about the Martian business.’

‘I got off lightly.’

‘Not from what I heard.’

The seastead came up quickly. It was a raft of interlocking platelets upon which rose a dense forest of buildings packed so tightly together that from a distance they resembled a single volcanic plug, carved into crenellated regularity by some fussy, obscure geological process. Several of the structures were inhabited, but the majority were sky farms, solar collectors and aerial docking towers. By far the largest concentration of living space was under the seastead, projecting into the layered cool of the deep ocean.

The airpod was not submersible so Kanu docked at one of the towers, nudging past a gaggle of plump cargo dirigibles. The reception was, mercifully, not quite as boisterous as Vouga had warned, but warm and good-spirited for all that. These were his people, the merfolk he had joined and served and later commanded. Some were like Kanu — still essentially humanoid but for some modest aquatic adaptations. For the sake of practicality, Kanu had even allowed some of his own adaptations to be reversed prior to his Martian assignment. There were some among the welcoming party who bore no merfolk characteristics at all: recent arrivals, perhaps, or people who shared the ideology but not the desire to return to the sea.

Others were unquestionably stranger, even to Kanu’s eye. He had been away for long enough to view matters with the detachment of the émigré. Genuine human merpeople, their legs reshaped into fish tails, were the least remarkable. A few resembled otters or seals, furred or otherwise, and several had taken on different aspects of cetacean anatomy. Some had lungs and others had become true gilled water-breathers, never needing to surface. Some greeted him from the water-filled channels around the docking port. Others made use of mobility devices, enabling them to walk or roll on dry land.

‘Thank you,’ Kanu said, unable to stop himself bowing to the assembled well-wishers. ‘It’s good to be home, good to be among friends.’

‘Will you be staying with us?’ one of the merwomen called from the water.

‘Only for a little while, Gwanda.’ They had worked in many of the same administrative areas before his ambassadorship. ‘There’s a lot to keep me busy away from the aqualogies.’

Now that he had returned, he felt a profound sense of belonging, a connection to the sea and its cargo of living things — everything in the great briny chain of being, from merfolk to plankton.

But he knew he could not afford to stay long, if he did not wish to be pulled back into his old life. Not that the prospect was unattractive — far from it. But even though he could not quite articulate the reasons, Kanu felt a deep sense that he must be moving on, attending to business that was as yet unfinished. What that business was, what it entailed, he could not quite say. But nothing would be gained by submitting to the lure of the merfolk.

‘Would you like to swim with us?’ Gwanda asked. ‘We can take you to Vouga. Ve will be done soon, I think.’

‘I think I remember how to swim,’ Kanu said. And then smiled, because he realised it had sounded like sarcasm. ‘No, genuinely. I think I remember. But it has been a long time — please be gentle with me.’

He left his clothes in the airpod and joined the other swimming things in the water. For a moment he sensed their eyes on him. They had no particular interest in his nakedness — few of them were wearing anything to begin with beyond a few sigils of rank and authority, equipment harnesses and swimming aids — but they had surely heard about his injuries on Mars, if not the specifics.

‘The machines did a good job on me,’ he said, disarming their curiosity. ‘I suspect they could have avoided scarring altogether, but they left me a few as a reminder of what I’d survived — not as a cruel thing, but to help with my psychological adjustment. Given that they’ve had remarkably little experience with human bodies, I don’t think they did too badly, did they?’

‘We heard that you died,’ said Tiznit, all whiskers and oily white fur.

‘A spaceship fell on me. That’d take the shine off anyone’s day.’

Vouga was done with ver work by the time Kanu arrived. They met in a private swimming chamber, a bubble-shaped turret high in the topside seastead.

‘Judging from the evidence, they put you back together very well. No one on Earth has that sort of surgical capability any more, you realise? Not even us. If you’d suffered a similar injury here, we’d have fed you to the fish by now.’

‘I suppose that puts me in their debt.’

‘Is that how you feel — indebted?’

‘Mostly, I’m just grateful to be alive. In my more cynical moments I tell myself that the robots did rather well out of it, too. They got to handle a human subject — took me apart like a jigsaw, put me back together again. We were trying to stop them getting their hands on corpses, and I gave them one for free!’

Vouga appraised him carefully. ‘The problem, Kanu, is that you’re not a natural cynic. You don’t wear bitterness or distrust particularly well.’

‘Perhaps I’m changing.’

‘No one could blame you after what you experienced. For myself, I’m happy the robots did one good deed, regardless of their deeper motives. Have you kept up with the news since you left the embassy? Things have been stirring up on Mars — your former friends are behaving provocatively. The Consolidation’s hard-liners want a decisive response, and frankly I don’t blame them. It’s no good just shooting the machines down when they try to reach space.’

Kanu smiled, although he felt a sourness in his belly. ‘So we endorse Consolidation policy now, do we? More’s changed here than I realised.’

‘Our anti-robot stance is as old as the movement, Kanu — I shouldn’t need to remind you of that.’

After the warmth of his welcome, the last thing he wanted to do was argue with Vouga. ‘Lin Wei would have found them marvellous. She’d have wanted to embrace them, to share the future with them.’

‘It’s a little late for pipe dreams. We had our chance, we blew it. These are post-Mechanism times, Kanu — we make the best of what we have and wander sadly through the ruins of what might once have been.’ But after a moment, Vouga added, ‘I know — we should all try to be positive. There’s always a place here for you. Those modifications you had reversed — it’s a trivial matter to have them reinstated. You should rejoin us, embrace the ocean fully. Put all that Martian business behind you like a bad dream.’

‘I wish that’s all it had been,’ Kanu said.

‘Is there anything we can do for you in the meantime?’

‘I thought I might drop in on Leviathan, if it isn’t too much trouble.’

‘Trouble? No, not at all.’ But Vouga sounded hesitant.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. I’ll make the arrangements. He’ll be very pleased to see you again.’

The great kraken’s haunt lay in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean, about a thousand kilometres south of the seastead. They went out in a sickle-shaped Pan flier, a machine nearly as old as the airpod that had brought Kanu from Mirbat¸, but larger and faster.

Vouga and a dozen other high-echelon Pans came along for the ride and a grand old time was had by all. They spent so much of their lives in the ocean that it was a novelty to see it from above, from outside, and they rushed from window to window, goggling at some extremely subtle demarcation of colour and current. Once they passed a tight-wound whorl of fish, spiralling about some invisible gravitational focus like stars at the centre of the galaxy. It was hard not to see the shoal as a single living unit, purposeful and organised, cheating the local entropy gradients. Kanu felt a shiver of alien perception, as if he was also momentarily seeing organic life from outside itself, in all its miraculous strangeness.

Life was a very odd thing indeed, he reflected, when you really thought about it.

But then they were on the move again, over reefs and smaller seasteads, over clippers and schooners and schools of dolphin, and then there was a darkness just beneath the surface, an inky nebula against turquoise.

‘Leviathan,’ Vouga said.

They slowed and hovered above the kraken. It was as large as a submarine. In the years since Kanu had last spent time with Leviathan, the kraken had easily doubled in size.

‘Who works with him now?’

‘You were the last, Kanu,’ Vouga said, as if this was something he ought to have remembered. ‘The need for construction krakens has declined significantly compared to the old days. Most of them were put out to pasture, until they died of old age. Some live longer than others. We try to keep Leviathan suitably occupied.’

Kanu had discovered an aptitude with the construction krakens not long after he joined the merfolk. There were some who found the genetically and cybernetically augmented creatures daunting, but Kanu had quickly overcome his misgivings. In fact, the huge and powerful animals were gentle, obliging and fond of human companionship — elephants of the deep, in many regards.

The most adept partners worked with their krakens so closely that an almost empathic bond was established, the kraken responding to the tiniest gestural commands and the partner in turn utterly sympathetic to the kraken’s own postural and visual-display communication channels. Kanu and Leviathan had established one of the most productive and long-lasting bonds between any such pairing.

But the years had rolled by, and the escalator of power had taken him to the top of the Panspermian Initiative and then to Mars, and he had never quite found the time to ask after Leviathan. Not even the minute or two it would have taken to formulate the enquiry and transmit it back to Vouga.

It was much too late to put that right now. But he still had to make the best amends he could.

‘I’d like to swim.’

‘Of course. Do you need a swimming suit, accompaniment?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then we’ll hover until you need us. Good luck, Kanu.’

He dropped the short distance from the flier’s belly into the water. He hit the surface hard and was under before he had taken the shallowest of breaths. He fought back to the surface, coughing, the salt stinging his eyes.

When the coughing fit passed and he had gathered enough air into his lungs, he chanced another submersion. He fought for the depths. Leviathan was further below the surface then he had appeared from the air. Kanu wondered what had drawn the kraken to this particular spot in the ocean. Given the chance, krakens were free-roaming and fond of the cool and lightless depths.

Kanu’s augmented eyes dragged information from the ebbing light. Leviathan was a pale presence below — much paler than he had looked from the air. The iridophores in his body shifted colour and brightness according to mood and concentration. Kanu watched a wave of amber slide along the main body, from eye to tail — a guarded acknowledgement of his presence. But Leviathan’s eye was looking obliquely past him, as if he did not care to meet Kanu’s gaze directly.

Kanu bottled up his qualms. The kraken was huge and he was small, but Vouga would never have allowed him to swim if there was the least chance of injury.

He noticed now that something was occupying Leviathan. The kraken had not chosen this spot randomly. There was a structure here, pushing up from the depths. Massive and ancient, its outlines were blurred by coral and corrosion. Kanu made out four supporting pillars, thick as skyscrapers, and a complicated metal platform like a tabletop. He could not tell how far down the legs went, but the entire thing was slightly lopsided.

It had become a kind of toy for Leviathan. The kraken used his arms to move things around on the upper deck of the platform like a child playing with building blocks. The kraken had a shipping container pincered between two arms, some maritime logo still faintly readable through layers of rust and living accretion. Another pair of arms moved a jagged and buckled crane through the air, then jammed it down on the platform. He placed the container next to it. Even through metres of water, Kanu felt a seismic thud as the objects hit the hard surface.

He swam into clear view of the nearest eye, wider than his body was tall, unblinking as a clock face. Still using the air he had drawn into his lungs, Kanu allowed himself to float passively. He wanted some show of recognition from Leviathan, but the eye appeared to look right through him. The kraken was still moving things around, picking the same things up, putting the same things down.

‘You know me,’ Kanu mouthed, as if that was going to make any difference.

The kraken hesitated in his labours. For a moment he was as still as Kanu, poised in the water, arms moving only with the gentlest persuasion of the ocean currents. Kanu would need to surface again shortly, but he forced himself to remain with Leviathan, certain that a connection — however fragile — had been re-established.

I was away too long, he wanted to say. I’m sorry.

He just hoped that the mere fact of his being there was enough to convey the same sentiment.

But Leviathan could not tear himself from the puzzle of the drilling platform. He picked up the container again, moved it like a chess piece to some new configuration. With a shudder of insight, Kanu grasped that the activity was as unending as it was purposeless. It satisfied the kraken’s need to be moving things, to find permutations of space and form.

At last his lungs reached their limit. He surfaced, conscious even as he ascended that he had slipped beyond the horizon of Leviathan’s attention. The kraken might have been dimly cognisant of his presence for a few moments, but no more than that.

He broke into daylight. The flier was over him, ready to take him back to the seastead. Vouga did not ask if he wished to dive again, and he was glad of that.

The following morning, Kanu was on his way north.