Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER EIGHT

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.’

‘At least one of us did well out of Sunday.’

‘Oh, I’ve done more than well. I see you have a brochure. You didn’t read it very closely, did you?’

Kanu blew away table crumbs and spread the brochure out before them. He could see it now, right at the end: a paragraph of acknowledgements in which Nissa’s name figured prominently. Not just Nissa but The Nissa Mbaye Research Foundation.

‘I’m amazed.’

‘And you’re seriously telling me you were wandering around here without a clue I was involved?’

Kanu hesitated. It was quite possible he might have turned away at the jetty if he had seen Nissa’s name and realised there was a good chance of bumping into her.

‘I didn’t know. Genuinely.’

‘Then your own interest in Sunday… that’s real?’

Kanu took a deep breath. ‘I’m at a bit of a loose end these days so I thought, why not take an interest in Sunday? You’re right — she never mattered much to me before. But that was wrong. It’s odd — she’s just my ancestor, but I started to feel as if I owed it to her to learn a little more about her life and legacy. I thought this might be a good place to start.’

‘We always liked the city. Was that a factor, too?’

Kanu lowered his voice, although there was no chance of them being overheard in the noisy café. ‘I’m lucky they didn’t lynch me the minute I set foot in the place. They have long memories here. Lisbon is where it all started — or all ended, more accurately.’

‘You didn’t personally bring down the Mechanism, Kanu. Also, it was merfolk tecto-engineering that kept Lisbon safe from another tsunami. Anyway, I’m not sure memories are as long as you think. Not these days. It’s an old world now. Too much to remember, too many lives. I mean, take us, for example.’

‘You don’t look any older.’

‘That’s very kind, but you were never much of a liar. Really, though — what happened? I’ll admit, I saw your name in the news. Some bad business on Mars.’

‘I was in an accident — injured, quite badly. But I’m all right now. They fixed me.’

‘They?’

‘The machines of the Evolvarium. I was hurt on the surface and taken into their care.’ After a moment, he said, ‘I still bleed. They didn’t turn me into a robot. I wouldn’t have got far from Mars if they had.’

‘My god. I had no idea it was that serious.’

‘Two of the other ambassadors were killed, so I got off lightly. But the robots’ intervention made it hard for me to carry on in that line of work — there’s a perception that I got too close to the robots. Which is why I’m at a loose end.’

‘So you came back to Lisbon?’

‘Madras first — one of my colleagues had family in India. But how could I resist the pull of this old place?’

‘This is too strange, you and I sitting together. I feel as if the universe has pulled a nasty trick on us both.’

‘Nasty?’

‘All right — unfair. We weren’t expecting this, were we?’

‘I certainly wasn’t.’ Kanu started to fold the brochure and slip it back into his satchel. After the oddness of this encounter, he had lost what little enthusiasm he had for the rest of the exhibition.

‘What are your plans in Lisbon?’

‘I didn’t have any, beyond visiting the exhibition.’ Kanu patted the satchel. ‘Early days, you see. I thought this would be a good way to get my bearings before digging deeper into her legacy. I suppose you’ll be in town as long as the exhibition’s here?’

‘There are only a few weeks left. You did well to make it back to Earth in time.’

‘There’d have been another one sooner or later, I suppose.’

‘And doubtless our paths would have crossed eventually. I know this wasn’t something either of us planned, but it is nice to see you again, Kanu.’

‘I feel the same way.’

There was a silence. He felt certain that Nissa could sense the inevitable question, floating in a state of unrealised potential between them. She had almost voiced it herself when she asked about his plans in the city. Perhaps she had meant him to go further in his answer.

‘We should meet up again,’ Nissa said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘We should definitely do that.’