Poseidon's Wake - Страница 16

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.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Goma had long held a notional understanding of the starship’s size, but it was quite another thing to be coming up in the shuttle, gaining her first true understanding of the scale of her new home. It was four kilometres long, about five hundred metres across, and resembled a thick-barred dumb-bell with equal-sized spheres at either end. The forward sphere was patterned with windows and access hatches — cargo bays, shuttle docks, sensor ports — while the rearward globe was contrastingly featureless. That was the drive sphere, containing the post-Chibesa engine. Its exhaust, hidden around the sphere’s curve, would eventually boost Travertine to half the speed of light.