Poseidon's Wake - Страница 20

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.’