Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  The weather did break, in the end, although we dared not jump at the first easing of it in case there was worse to come just over the horizon. But after another day the rains and winds had passed, the skies had cleared to the limit of vision, and the sea had settled into a blue-green torpor barely marred by a wave. The air became warmer and drier, and by evening the stars overhead were as bright and unwavering as if they were lanterns, lowered by watchful gods. We all observed them with the same thought: somewhere in the darkness between those lit motes lay our enemy, and perhaps closer to hand than we might wish. But for now, we were powerless against the wolves, and we all pushed them to the backs of our minds as well as we could.

  Glass’s boat was ready. The hull was much as we had found it. To power the boat, Scythe had provided an outboard propulsion system based around three of the shipboard servitors. Their spheres were joined in a row, with a framework around them. They ingested air and accelerated it within themselves, the second and third spheres boosting the output of the one before them, before blasting it out as a cold, high-velocity jet. The thrust was enough to move the boat across water at about forty kilometres per hour, less if there was wind resistance or rough seas. It was barely faster than one of the electric carts we had in Sun Hollow, but it would suit our purposes. The line of spheres was attached to the rear of the boat by a swivelling mounting, and a manual tiller could be worked by someone seated on the last cross-plank. Glass had neural control of the power output, but there were manual inputs built into the tiller for lesser mortals. Nothing in Ararat could be guaranteed against erosion by the sea’s biochemical and molecular agents, but at least our motor was not immersed in water, which ought to extend its lifetime long enough to get us to the Pattern Jugglers and back.

  At the time of our landing, Glass had determined the nearest large Juggler mass as lying two hundred and twenty kilometres from First Camp. If it had not moved, and the sea conditions remained in our favour, we could be there in under six hours. Contact with the Jugglers did not happen on any sort of predictable schedule, but if we were rebuffed it was likely to be over with fairly quickly. At this latitude and time of year, Bright Sun was above the horizon for around eighteen hours. There was at least the chance of making a first bid and returning to base before nightfall, and while travelling at night would be riskier, Glass ought to be able to handle the navigation.

  We agreed to set off just before first light. Although we expected to be back before nightfall, we still made preparations for a longer expedition. We took three days’ worth of food and water, medical supplies, additional clothing, buoyancy aids, and a sun screen which could be strung over the boat should we end up becalmed under warm skies. We also took two pairs of oars, found in the debris and stowed under the cross-planks until we needed them. We brought knives and one gas-powered harpoon, but no other weapons. A radio-frequency communicator allowed us to remain in touch with Probably Rose, although we would limit its use to the minimum. According to Glass, any sort of energy emission was likely to deter the Jugglers. We could not avoid using an engine, but the less of our technological culture we brought with us, the better our chances.

  Glass and I were already in the boat, settling in and rearranging the stores, when Pinky, Barras and Probably Rose came alongside.

  ‘He says you need him for this,’ Barras said.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Bring him back,’ Probably Rose said, underlining this imperative with a cyclopean glare. ‘He doesn’t think we need his help, but we do, yes. Yes yes.’ She flicked the back of her hand against her forehead. ‘Bring him back, yes yes.’

  ‘We’re all coming back,’ I said, and then wished that I had not, because it sounded like empty bravado. ‘But we’ll take particularly good care of Scorp. He doesn’t need to be here. I’ve asked him along because I need a friend, and I think his presence will improve our chances, but he knows he could walk away and I wouldn’t force him to join us.’

  ‘I might,’ Glass muttered.

  Barras helped Pinky with the difficult stride into the boat, while I assisted from the other side. ‘You’ve decided you can’t live without my sparkling company, Glass?’ Pinky asked, grunting as he planted his feet on one of the few open spaces between the cross-planks.

  ‘I’ve decided Clavain might be right about your usefulness.’ She lifted her face to the two figures still on dry land. ‘We’re not likely to be back before at least thirteen hours have passed. Don’t become too concerned if we’re a lot later than that.’

  ‘Signal us if you, yes, yes. Signal if you . . . yes. Signal if you run into yes, difficulties, yes yes.’

  ‘Do you think you’d be able to help us, with no boat, and no other means of crossing open water?’

  ‘We’d still want to yes, still want to know, yes yes, and verily.’

  ‘You think you would,’ Glass answered.

  Pinky tucked himself low on the middle cross-plank. Glass was at the back, with the motor and tiller; I was at the front. Without a word from Glass we began to move, sluggishly at first, because seaweed had already begun to cloy itself around the hull, but then with gathering speed as the boat knifed out of the seaweed and forged into the relatively open and calm waters beyond the rocks. The motor made a thin, keening whistle, and the turbulence from its jet ruffled the water about ten metres behind us.

  Glass increased our speed to what I took to be the boat’s maximum. Wind and spray lashed my face, and I soon averted my gaze from the direction of travel, leaving Glass to worry about navigating.

  We were heading west, with Bright Sun at our backs. For the first half-hour there were reference points to measure our progress, as First Camp gradually fell away and the conch structures became smaller and smaller, until the land they were on dipped beneath the sun-hazed horizon and finally the tips of the structures vanished as well. After that, and with no other islands near enough to be visible, we were just a small moving point in the ocean, and progress became harder to gauge. The storm was gone, but the sea was choppier than it had looked when we set out, and the criss-crossing patterns of the waves confused my sense of motion. The boat had settled into a semi-regular bumping rhythm, the prow pitching up since most of the weight was near the back. Sometimes the waves grew large enough for the boat to steepen against their swell; at other times we cut through them in a slap of stinging spray.

  We had said nothing since departure. Glass was steady enough now, and focused on the job of guiding the boat, but I wondered at the reserves she was drawing on to hold herself together. Pinky was stoic, snout held to the wind, eyes pink-slitted and fixed on the south-westerly horizon. The fine white hairs on his brow were flattened against his skin.

  ‘All right?’ I asked after the first hour, when I had begun to swallow down the first hints of motion sickness.

  ‘This isn’t my first boat trip.’

  ‘This might be mine. I suppose I must have crossed water to reach the Jugglers before, but I don’t remember any part of the journey. The last time you were in a boat . . . was it here?’

  ‘Not much call for boats on Hela.’ He squinted at me. ‘Got any other topics, especially ones that don’t involve boats and Ararat?’

  I smiled once. ‘I’m sorry. I know how hard this must be for you.’

  ‘You don’t know half of it.’

  ‘You remember what happened on this planet, and you don’t want to revisit it. I don’t remember what happened to me, except that it left me with an aftertaste of fear and drowning. But I have to revisit it. Perhaps this will help us both.’

  Glass watched us silently. It was hard to tell how much she was listening, or indeed if she cared.

  ‘And if it doesn’t help us, let’s hope it doesn’t leave us even more fucked-up than we already are. You’d better be ready for that, because I’ve discovered this weird thing where life doesn’t always grant us our fondest wishes.’

  ‘I’m ready. Frightened, but ready. I also know that the worst thing this ocean will
do to me will be a kindness compared to extinction by the wolves.’

  ‘For once, a valid observation,’ Glass commented.

  ‘So you were listening.’

  ‘I always listen. Whether I process is a different matter. Sometimes the noise inside my head is preferable to any human babble.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Pinky said, eyeing me. ‘You made it through her threshold. You’re less annoying than white noise.’ But he paused, still regarding me. ‘I know what happened here, and what my part in it was. Nothing can change that. I’ve made my peace with what I did. Get back to me when you’ve killed your only true friend in the universe, and then maybe we’ll talk.’

  ‘You killed my brother,’ I said softly. ‘I think that gives me a stake.’

  Pinky said nothing. Glass kept her hand on the tiller, and the engine’s keening note drilled into my soul.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The sea was all that there was, with all reference points long behind us. We were more than two hours out from First Camp and the rhythm and sounds of the boat had become lulling enough that my thoughts strayed into the logic-less margins of sleep. I kept blinking to keep myself awake.

  Then I jolted to alertness. About one hundred metres off to our port side, I thought I had seen something break the water, surfacing briefly above the waves. Glass was preoccupied with the motor, but Pinky must have caught my twitch as I snapped to life and tried to track the fleeting form.

  ‘What?’

  It was the first word he had spoken to me since our exchange about my brother’s death.

  ‘Nothing,’ I answered, for the waves had reclaimed whatever it was I might or might not have seen. Then, unwisely: ‘I just thought . . .’

  ‘You saw something in the water.’ He was silent for a second or two. ‘Yeah. Me too. Not that time, but a couple of minutes ago, and maybe once before that.’

  Glass was paying attention to us now. ‘You should have spoken.’

  He swivelled to face her. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you wouldn’t have taken me seriously.’

  ‘A pig’s visual acuity is lacking compared to . . .’

  ‘Whatever he saw, I saw,’ I said, levelling my gaze at Glass. ‘There’s something else out here, besides sea and micro-organisms.’

  ‘Ararat contains no macro-scale ocean forms. The Jugglers are the only large, organised life form besides the seaweed rafts.’

  ‘I don’t care what your database says this ocean does or doesn’t contain,’ I said, reaching down into the base of the boat to unship the gas-powered harpoon. ‘Something’s following us, maybe more than one something. Could the Jugglers have some part of themselves swimming out here alone, detached from the main node?’

  ‘What I saw looked like an animal,’ Pinky said. ‘Just a glimpse of it, but enough to tell. Big, dark and powerful.’

  ‘As big as this boat?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe not.’

  I nodded slowly. ‘I couldn’t tell either. I’m not even sure if I saw a head or a fin. But it was real, and solid, and moving nearly as quickly as us. This wasn’t some mass of micro-organisms bobbing along the water. What I saw looked like whale skin.’ I inspected the harpoon gun, having paid it little enough attention when we loaded the boat. It had a barbed projectile loaded into the barrel, with two spares tucked into a slot in the stock. I armed it, drew it close to my body, sighting along the barrel, and realised how comfortable and familiar the weapon felt. Another dark form caught my eye, this time to starboard, and I tracked onto it with a smooth confidence that surprised me. My finger tightened on the trigger. But I did not fire. This one, at least, was a trick of the light and waves, melting back into green surf.

  ‘If the things you saw were real . . .’ Glass began.

  ‘No if about it,’ I snapped back.

  ‘Then they don’t fit any established template for Juggler manifestations. The ocean could support other life forms, clearly – it’s just that the records say that it doesn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t when were you here?’ I asked. ‘Before you chased me to Michaelmas. And that was a long time ago now. I don’t even know what the date is any more. Or that it matters. But there’s been time for things to happen here.’

  ‘Whatever it was, we don’t know that it’s dangerous,’ Pinky said.

  ‘You want to take that chance, after all we’ve been through?’ But I lowered the harpoon gun slowly.

  Glass was the first to see the Pattern Jugglers. Still guiding the boat, she used her right hand to draw my gaze to a spot on the western horizon. ‘There,’ she said, her voice flat and matter-of-fact. ‘The leading edge of the node.’

  We had been under way for nearly seven hours: longer than expected and proof that the mass had moved or reorganised itself in the days since our approach from space. The swimming forms, whatever they had been, had not returned since our earlier sightings, and I think Glass was still doubtful that they had been real in the first place. Some of that scepticism had lodged inside me as well. Had I really seen something? And if Pinky had been so sure of his sighting, why had he not mentioned it sooner?

  One thing was certain: the node was real. After five minutes I could see it clearly for myself, without any direction from Glass. It was a low, fixed smudge, like the first hint of a landmass emerging around the world’s curvature. It was altering the weather in that direction: conjuring a train of clouds above it, condensing moisture where the air was slightly cooler than out over the open water. I stared at it as we continued our approach, and within a few minutes Pinky confirmed that he was seeing it as well. The smudge widened, more and more of the mass emerging over the horizon. It was as low as a reef, at least on its margins, but hugely extended to the north and south: thousands of square kilometres of it, still mostly out of sight.

  ‘Look,’ I said excitedly, my eye catching movement to the south of us. ‘A flying fish, or a bird.’

  ‘No flying fish or birds on Ararat,’ Glass responded. But she was also watching the fast-fleeting thing as it skimmed the waves. ‘It’s a messenger sprite, flying between two nodes. Packaged with information at its point of origin, sent off to be received and digested by the recipient node. They send information by other means, including biochemical signals in the water and living transmission cables floating just beneath the surface and extending for hundreds or even thousands of kilometres. But these sprites are what they use when a large packet of information needs to be conveyed very rapidly.’

  ‘Does it mean we’ve been noticed?’

  ‘Let’s not get above ourselves, Clavain. They’ve noticed us, most certainly. There’s nothing they don’t notice. But these information exchanges go on all the time. Think of the nodes as a vast collective bureaucracy, constantly auditing itself.’

  Pinky asked: ‘What about the other things we saw?’

  Glass looked at him patiently. ‘Irrelevant to our present concerns.’

  Glass reduced our speed as we crossed the last few kilometres between open water and the boundary of the node. The transitions had looked sharp from space, but that had been deceptive. The node spread into the surrounding sea, thinning out, but pushing its influence far beyond the point where it resembled a distinct, raft-like mass. The sea was becoming more grey-green, more opaque and more sluggish, carrying a denser cargo of micro-organisms. The boat’s motion became more ponderous, the motor having to do more work to keep us pushing forward through the thickening resistance. The green mass slipped past our hull on either side. It had a slurry-like texture, but with increasing hints of structure and organisation. There were meshlike patterns and ropelike tubes embedded within it, and as the biomass moved on the remaining swell it gave the uneasy impression of countering the action of the waves, rather than going along with them. I had been feeling the edges of seasickness before; now the full force of it rose in my throat and I had to work very hard not to vomit.

  Our speed reduced to about half
our progress in open water. I peeked over the sides, noticing that the green slurry was adhering to the hull, not just in random splotches but in a deliberate, connected manner, like the crystalline patterns formed by frost on glass. Pinky and I dragged out a pair of oars and used them to flick away the larger concentrations before they took hold.

  ‘We’ll bog down before we ever reach the main part,’ I said.

  ‘There’s an open channel a little to the south,’ Glass said, turning the tiller. ‘If we can’t make it directly, we’ll back out and circle around.’

  The boat could not have been making more than a fast walking pace by the time our speed had dropped to its lowest, but at least we were still moving, and by concentrating our efforts with the oars, we kept the visible part of the hull relatively clean. Now we were heading more or less due south, travelling parallel to the node’s edge and hoping to pick up the inlet Glass had seen. I had to trust that she was right. I had no doubt that such channels existed, for I had seen the signs of them from space, cutting back into the node in glinting filigrees of reflected sunlight.

  The boat pitched forward, sharply enough that I had to grab onto the sides to stop myself tumbling into the bows. We came to a sudden halt, just as surely as if we had run aground. Glass increased the motor, but it made no difference, merely churning the green-scummed water behind us.