Poseidon's Wake by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page A

active for a short while. Doesn’t that interest you, Arethusa? I’ll tell you something else. The message mentioned Ndege. That’s a name you recognise. My sister, of course. Another Akinya. And while you might not be blood, our business is always your business.’
    Arethusa had stopped in the water, so Mposi slowed his rate of approach, painfully conscious of what those flippers could do to him. Like a great spacecraft making a course adjustment, the whale turned gradually until Mposi was hovering just before her left eye. Scarcely any light now reached them, so Mposi was reliant on his goggles’ sonar overlay. He shivered, as he had shivered before, at the magnitude of her – and the very human scrutiny of her eye, looking at him from a cliff of grooved flesh.
    ‘I thought I killed you once, Mposi.’
    ‘You gave it a good try. The fault was mine, though. I understand there was nothing personal in it.’
    ‘Do you?’
    As large as she was, she could move with surprising speed. He had allowed himself to enter her sphere of risk.
    ‘Gliese 163,’ he said. ‘That’s the name of the star in the other solar system. We know a little bit about it: Ocular data, a few later observations.’
    ‘No one has mentioned Ocular in a very long time.’
    That was true, but Mposi had not made the reference thoughtlessly. The vast telescope had been Lin Wei’s brainchild, and she had seen it hobbled by Akinya interference. There was danger in bringing that up, he realised. But he was also seeking a direct connection to her past.
    ‘Eunice was your friend, before it all turned bad over Ocular. That’s true, isn’t it?’
    ‘You never knew her. What right have you to speak of her?’
    ‘None, except that I’m her great-great-great-grandson. And I think she may have some connection with the message.’
    Arethusa’s flukes stirred, moving tonnes of water with each stroke. ‘You think ?’
    ‘There hasn’t been time for any human ship to get that far out, and send a return transmission. But the Watchkeepers? We don’t know how they move or how fast they can travel. What we do know is that they took three of us with them – the Holy Trinity. Chiku Green, of course. Dakota. And the Eunice construct.’
    ‘The map is not the territory.’
    ‘I understand that the construct isn’t the same thing as your flesh-and-blood friend. But she was getting closer, becoming . . . what’s the word? When a curve meets a line? Asymptotic?’
    ‘Your point, Mposi?’
    ‘Someone has to go out there. We can’t just pretend this message never arrived. Someone went to the trouble to send it. The least we can do is respond.’
    ‘Just like that.’
    ‘We’re getting a ship ready. It’ll make the crossing, with some modifications. Wheels are turning. The expedition will happen – it’s just a question of who goes on it.’
    ‘You have your answer. Send Ndege.’
    ‘That’s the problem. My sister is very old.’
    ‘So are you.’
    ‘But I haven’t been wasting away under house arrest for more than a century. Aside from the political complications, there’s another headache. Ndege has one child, a daughter named Goma. She wishes to take her mother’s place.’
    ‘Either this Goma is very old herself, or Ndege was allowed conjugal visits.’
    ‘Neither. The child was conceived long before Ndege’s incarceration, but Ndege and her husband chose not to have their daughter until later in the colony’s settlement. They kept the fertilised egg in the facility in Guochang – it wasn’t an unusual arrangement in those days. But her husband died, and Ndege pushed herself into her work, and the Mandala event changed everything. For a long while afterwards she could not bring herself to consider the unborn child, but eventually she relented.’
    ‘Did you play some part in that, Mposi?’
    ‘I was concerned for my sister. The arrest was taking its toll on her and I felt that raising a daughter would be good for her