Poseidon's Wake

[sawyl]

Time for a bit of closure in the form of Alastair Reynolds' Poseidon's Wake, the final novel in his Poseidon's Children series. The story follows two distantly related members of the Akinya family, Goma and Kanu, as their paths cross in a distant star system.

Goma and her wife Ru have dedicated themselves to the study of Crucible's elephants, search for the remains of the enhanced intelligence introduced by the genetically enhanced Tantors. When a message arrives from Gliese 163 asking for Ndege, Goma's mother, Goma insists on being sent in her place and Ru, realising that the mission might offer a chance to meet a few of the remaining Tantors, tags along. After an eventful journey, during which Goma's uncle Mposi comes to suspect that someone might want to sabotage the mission, the starship Travertine arrives at its destination where it finds a version of Eunice Akinya, the clan's founder, holed up on airless world for daring to oppose the goals of the Tantors, a group of elephants uplifted to intelligence, and their scheming matriarch Dakota.

The initial sections on Crucible serve both a recap to the events of On the Steel Breeze and to provide an indication of the passage of time: the world, the focus of the centuries long destination of the moon-sized holoships, is now fully colonised, with Mposi and Ndege Akinya, young in the previous book, now well seriously elderly themselves. It is also clear that something has gone terribly wrong in the interval between the two books: Ndege is a pariah held under permanent house arrest for causing the deaths of large numbers of people while working on an experiment with the planet's mountain-sized Mandala structure.

Kanu, meanwhile, begins his journey as ambassador to the Evolvarium, a group of machine intelligences who have taken over Mars. Killed in a terrorist attack and reassembled by an AI called Swift, Kanu returns to Earth in disgrace where bumps into his ex-wife. Picking up where they left off, the pair head to Europa where Kanu is manipulated into travelling to Gliese 163 aboard a starship called Icebreaker. Upon arrival Kanu and Nissa fly past a super-earth water-world dubbed Poseidon, where vast arches loop out of the water and strange moons circulate in precise orbits and where the Watchkeeprs — alien machines the size of worlds who have been hanging like a Sword of Damocles over humanity's heads since their arrival at Crucible — have settled in to observe events from a safe distance.

After suffering damage to their ship shortly after their arrival, Nissa and Kanu are forced to see the help of a community of Tantors that have somehow come to dominate a small moon in orbit around one of the system's rockier planets. Her they fall under the power of Dakota who, clearly nursing an obsessive desire — given to her by the Watchkeeprs — to explore the planet of Poseidon, promptly blackmails them into modifying Icebreaker for a mission to the planet. Convinced by Eunice's argument that any investigation of the planet is likely to prove catastrophic for all of humanity — the planet's caretakers have threatened to exterminate any group of explorers they judge to be unworthy — the crew of the Travertine engage in a game of brinkmanship with the Icebreaker trying to persuade Dakota to abandon her mission. Kanu, trapped by Dakota's threats on one hand and by the M-builders' threats to his species on the other, tries to find a middle path that will satisfy both parties and which will also allow him to keep his own humanity.

As befits the last book in the trilogy, Reynolds gives us some answers to some of the questions raised by the two groups of aliens encountered in the second book — both the still-present Watchkeepers and the long-vanished M-builders — in a way that raises interesting secondary questions about what it means to be conscious and how to create meaning in an absurd universe.

Some of this information comes through revelation from authority — Eunice, having passed through the barrier surrounding Poseidon, has experienced the Terror, an acute existential angst imparted by the M-builders' knowledge that the universe is utterly meaningless — but many of the answers, most of which are incomplete, come from the speculative application of conscious intelligence to the problem. Thus many of the answers to the mysteries of the Mandala come from Ndege's investigations on Crucible and her attempts to relate them to Memphis Chibesa's early work on the alien equations first found on Phobos in Blue Remembered Earth, with the engraved symbols on Poseidon's great arches only serving to provide pointers to show just how far humanity still has to go. In some ways, the final section of the book reminds me of nothing quite so much as Rendezvous with Rama, with a group of poorly equipped but clever humans — aided in this case by enhanced elephants — explore a semi-hostile and completely indifferent world with indeterminate results.

Reynolds, unlike Clarke, populates his trilogy with a strong cast of characters, with Eunice Akinya the sustaining note that runs through entire series. Of the ultimate Akinya offspring, Kanu and Goma start at opposite ends of the spectrum — Goma's initial intolerance of the Second Chancers versus Kanu's willingness to accept the Evolvarium as friends — only for their positions to gradually come together as Goma becomes increasingly tolerant and Kanu realises that there are limits to the power of diplomacy when dealing with a zealous obsessive.

But my favourite relationship in the book is that between Ru and Eunice. The pair get off to a very bad start and, while Ru eventually comes to tolerate Goma's friendship with Eunice, she never quite forgets her initial encounter and is only member of the Travertine mission who seems to realise that Eunice is just as obsessive and difficult and potentially dangerous as Dakota. The final resolution, when it comes, feels earned: rather than some saccarine reconciliation, Eunice simply acknowledge the debt that she owes to Ru and takes the most pragmatic course of action, even though it comes at great cost to herself.

While I still think On the Steel Breeze might be my favourite book in the series, I really enjoyed Poseidon's Wake and I was impressed that Reynolds managed to stick the dismount, leaving us with a ending the rounds off the current threat and leaves us with a final image of hope: Memphis the Tantor heading off to confront a brave new future, unshackled, finally, from the chains of humanity.