Inhibitor Phase
Page 42
‘I think we’ve tangled with something,’ I said, creeping forward to where the nose of the boat was jammed down at an angle, half buried in a ropy green mass which emerged from the sea on either side of us. ‘It must be one of those cables you mentioned, Glass, or a bundle of them. It didn’t show above the surface until we ran into it. Can you back us out?’
‘Get down,’ she said.’ If you don’t, the thrust will blow you out of the boat.’
Pinky and I crouched low on the cross-planks. Glass put the motor into reverse thrust and brought it up through stages of power. The boat surged, trying to free itself, but whatever we were tangled with was refusing to yield.
‘It has us,’ Glass said, resignedly. She eased the engine down. ‘There’s no choice. We’ll have to cut it loose. Use the knives.’
I opened the stores box which contained the knives, thinking how much easier things would be if we had brought a boser pistol or excimer rifle. I passed a knife to Pinky and we leaned over the boat on either side of the bow. I was ready to hack away, but caution stilled my hand. ‘Glass. If we do this, aren’t we harming the organism? I thought the whole point was not to antagonise it?’
‘These connections must form and re-form all the time,’ Glass said. ‘The biomass has to be able to tolerate a certain level of damage due to environmental factors, without necessarily considering itself under attack.’
‘I hope you’re right, and I also hope we ran into these tentacles accidentally, not because the node is warning us off.’ I nodded at Pinky, indicating that we should coordinate our cutting. ‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘Glass? Wait until I give the signal, then gun the engine. We’ll cut what we can, and hope to jerk clean of whatever’s left underneath the water.’
We began to cut. The knives were sharp, and went through the fibrous green strands with very little resistance. At least to begin with. There were dozens of strands, knotted around each other in complicated fashion, and it almost seemed as if they were becoming hardier the more we worked at them. After a minute, my hand and wrist slathered in green, I paused to inspect the blade’s edge. It had already gained a shimmering, olive discoloration. ‘It’s fighting back. Try the engine, Glass.’
The boat surged back a good metre, straining the remaining tangles, but failed to free itself. The hull had been smooth, with nothing on it that could snag an underwater obstruction, but the fibres were still clinging on tenaciously. Perhaps they were already forming sticky bonds with the craft, striving to begin the slow but inevitable process of chemical breakdown and digestion.
‘We’ll have to work faster,’ I said, as Glass eased the motor. ‘We don’t have too much time before these knives give out.’
‘Should’ve kept Nevil’s knife,’ Pinky said. ‘That’d go through anything.’
I doubted that we had hacked our way through more than half of the entanglement. What remained was harder to reach, even at a full stretch, and there might be far more of it underwater than I imagined. When we seemed to have made more progress I made a motion to Glass and she gave the engine all it could take. The blast warmed my neck and we struggled back and then jerked free, at least temporarily, while still dragging a mass of the entanglement with us. Our speed increased, still in reverse.
I saw it then, about twenty metres north of our moving position. A form had broken the green-scummed water: a rounded hairless head blending into muscular shoulders. Breaching the green carpet next to the gleaming form was a spiked implement, a shaft festooned with green ribbons which trailed back into the water. Instinctively I looked to the south, sweeping the green slurry until I picked out the counterpart to the other form. They were about forty metres apart, swimming humanoids each holding a similar spiked implement, with a netlike trap stretched between them.
I tossed the blunted knife back into the bottom of the boat and took up the harpoon gun again. I levelled it what I judged to be the easier of the two targets, the one to the north, and fired. The gun coughed, expelling the harpoon with a single explosive gas discharge. I watched the projectile arc over the water, deploying further barbs, and extending its range with a secondary gas thruster of its own. My aim had been true, and the harpoon swift. But the swimmer pulled beneath the water in the instant before impact, and there was no way to judge whether I had hit it.
I began to retract the harpoon, using the manual winching handle built into the side the gun. I had only turned it a few times when the line went slack, and I knew instantly it had been severed. Rather than reel in the useless filament, I ejected the entire spool and loaded one of the two remaining barbs from the stock.
Glass kept us powering in reverse. Pinky was still hacking away at the remaining green threads adhering to the bow. At last the bulk of them seemed to slough away, and Glass reversed the boat’s thrust and took us on a looping course further to the south. For now, both swimming forms had disappeared.
‘Well, Glass,’ I said.
Pinky scraped his knife against the hull. ‘Well indeed.’
‘Would you like to offer an opinion on what the hell those things are?’
‘I have nothing to offer.’
‘Have you seen anything like those creatures before?’
‘No,’ she answered with uncharacteristic hesitancy. ‘Not here, not anywhere. Clearly they are derived from human genestock.’
‘Clearly,’ I echoed.
‘You . . . did well, Clavain. I took their intentions to be hostile.’
‘Laying a net is not generally the best way to open friendly negotiations.’ I set down the harpoon gun. ‘I don’t think I killed it. I also don’t think I want to run into any more of those until we’ve completed our business here. Maybe they’re just defending their territory, but I’m not much in the mood for politics.’
‘Everything is politics in the end,’ Glass said.
With a surge, the boat pushed through into clearer, less obstructed water. Glass turned hard to starboard, and we advanced along a passage where the green growth was hardly more than a surface dusting, offering minimal resistance. Banks of thicker green marked the channel’s boundaries, hemming us in and guiding our course. As we progressed, so these banks became more steeply sided and higher. First fifty centimetres, then a metre, and then high enough that we could not see over the top either to the south or north. My motion sickness was easing now, as the channel was waveless, but replacing it was a growing sense of claustrophobic encroachment. As the banks rose higher, and the channel narrowed, meandering its way into ever-rising green, I felt the age-old apprehension of the wanderer straying into the darkening forest, unsure of the secrets and terrors it held.
I looked back, wondering if any of the swimming forms were likely to follow us.
Glass reduced our speed to about twenty kilometres per hour, then further still. The boat’s wake was slapping off the green walls, and the turbulence from the motor was stirring patterns into them.
‘Should we think about rowing?’ I asked. ‘I know we’ll be slower, but this is starting to feel . . . impolite.’
‘We’re nowhere near enough to the core,’ Glass said. ‘Caution is a good thing, Clavain. But too much of it will kill you.’
‘Too much of anything will kill you. That’s the definition of “too much”.’
‘Caution or otherwise,’ Pinky said. ‘I’m not liking the look of that.’
I followed the line of his gaze.
The channel split into two even narrower forks. By now the rising walls on either side of us were house-high in places and leaning inwardly. The two forks went off in divergent directions, but neither was more or less inviting than the other. They were thickening, narrowing corridors of green, with sagging, ropelike connections strung between their walls.
‘This one,’ Glass said, taking us into the left fork. ‘It should be the most direct route to the core, if things haven’t changed too much. Don’t be alarmed by these cross-connections: they’re just to enable the node to
communicate with itself. Think of us as a cell moving through the commissural gap between brain hemispheres.’
‘I’m not sure that helps,’ Pinky said.
We continued down the channel, which stayed relatively constant in width for about a kilometre. I knew what Glass was hoping to find: a lagoon-like enclosure of open water within the node, one of several that had been apparent from space. These lagoons, deliberately maintained by the biomass, were often the best prospect for any swimmers hoping to make contact. They were a sign that the node was at least receptive, even if there could never be any guarantees of success.
Glass’s likening of the node to the structure of a brain stayed with me. There was still no definite opinion on the matter of whether the Pattern Juggler nodes were themselves conscious. But the nodes were certainly rich in biological methods of information storage, manipulation and dissemination. The Jugglers stored many different informational forms, from nuggets of pure, discorporeal knowledge to species-specific templates for particular modes of cognition. A person could swim in the Juggler waters and have the node’s micro-organisms rebuild their mind to permit the acquisition of some new gift, such as heightened mathematical insight or the grasping of some long-dead alien language. Such Juggler-derived talents tended to be temporary, though: after an interval – sometimes only a matter of hours – the imprinted structures would wither away. Very rarely, the change was enduring enough for the swimmer to accomplish some one-off challenge. Repeat visits to the Jugglers were uncommon, and rarely successful. It was also said that in the rare instances where the changes were permanent, there was wisdom in being careful what you wished for.
What had happened to my brother was not like that. If any part of him still existed, it was because his body had been absorbed into the Pattern Jugglers. Others had been taken by the Pattern Jugglers, but it usually only happened after an extended sequence of contact episodes, with ample warning along the way. Those individuals usually understood the risk that they were taking and made a calculation that the potential rewards were worth it. By the time they were taken, the seas’ organisms would already have insinuated themselves into their bodies to a high degree, marking them as likely candidates for absorption. My brother, according to those who had known him, had never swum. He had been too fearful of what he would find – or rather, what he would not find.
The sea had already taken something precious from him. Felka was a child of the Conjoiners, and for Nevil she was the nearest thing to a daughter. Her mother, in a sense that only Conjoiners could understand, had been Galiana, founder of the entire Conjoined movement. The Inhibitors had killed Galiana – in all likelihood she had been the first human being to encounter them – but long before her demise she had visited Ararat, and perhaps left a trace of herself in the ocean. If any human mind could be said to be of interest to the Jugglers, it would be the strange and beautiful brain that belonged to Galiana. Felka had been trying to make contact with her mother when the sea swallowed her whole. Nevil’s grief had been so all-consuming that even hope was a torment. Felka might have transmitted herself into the sea, and through his beloved Felka he might find a conduit to Galiana. Was it possible that both Felka and Galiana might have left conscious shadows of themselves, even as the medium in which they were stored was itself perhaps less than conscious?
But though he shut himself away from his affairs, and lived alone by the sea, Nevil could never bring himself to take the step into the waters that might have answered all his questions. It had taken death – death administered by the hand of his oldest and dearest friend – to finally bring him to the sea.
To these three lost souls might now be added a fourth. But I had no desire to be taken; just to make contact.
The boat scraped deeper into the node. Now the channel was a cloying green corridor with furry walls and a ceiling made of cross-fretted tendrils, through which Bright Sun, quite near its zenith, flickered hypnotically with our motion. It was humid and much warmer than it had been out at sea. My nose prickled with a green haze of airborne organisms.
Glass brought the engine to a halt.
‘The motor is creating too much disturbance. We’ll row from here on in.’
‘Excellent idea,’ I said, fixing my oar onto its mount. ‘Wish I’d thought of it myself.’
Pinky and I did the rowing, since I wanted Glass to conserve her energies. Rowing was not really the word for what we did, though. It was more a case of levering the tips of the oars against the resistance of the walls, which were soggy on the surface and then firmer and firmer the more we pushed in. We were doing well to move at a slow walking pace, and I was soon prickling with sweat. But there was something lulling about the mechanical activity of rowing that helped settle my nerves.
Something whirred past my cheek. Startled, I nearly dropped the oar. There was just time to see one of the messenger sprites, streaking ahead of us down the green tunnel. Now that the shadows were deeper, it was possible to see that the sprite glowed with bioluminescence. Another came streaking back a few moments later. Then, over our heads, we watched with a dreadful fascination as a pair of green horns extended out from either side, meeting in the middle like the halves of a cantilever bridge. The green tube thickened in throbbing pulses, and I caught a glimmer of colour and movement within it.
‘Heightened organisational activity,’ Glass said, as another pair of sprites fluttered by us. ‘All this takes energy. There’s no doubt that the node is reacting to us, aware of our presence.’
‘Did this happen to you before?’
I caught her hesitation. I think she meant to lie, then decided better of it. ‘No, not to this degree. But I wasn’t known to the ocean prior to my visit. That is no longer the case for either of us.’
‘It recognises us?’ I asked.
‘Something in it may recognise us.’
‘Again, not helpful,’ Pinky said.
A sprite sped down the tunnel, then looped around our boat three times. Now that it was near to us, I had the first opportunity to study it in any sort of detail. It had a bird-sized body, speckled with glowing dots, but no recognisable head or sensory appendages. The only limbs were the whirring wings, fine-veined and translucent. I wondered how it could draw in any information on its surroundings.
The sprite broke off from its inspection and zipped away.
We kept rowing, moving with the punting rhythm of the oars. The walls were no longer just an organised green slurry with designs on digesting our boat. Now there was a breathing, undulating quality to them, as if we were moving along the digestive tract of some great monster. When the oars sunk into the slurry, ripples spread away from the point of contact. The ripples rebounded off each other and generated second-order patterns through their interference. Colours glimmered beyond the green. Were we moving at all? It was hard to be sure. We had no reference points whatsoever, and I doubted that anything in Glass’s head was able to track our movement relative to Scythe or First Camp. I had a horrible vision of us trapped forever between these oozing walls, thinking we were rowing but actually motionless.
‘I see faces,’ Pinky said.
Under any other circumstances I felt sure that Glass would have been swift to contradict him, telling him that his brain was playing tricks on his conscious mind. Instead she nodded. ‘Yes. I see them as well. Momentary coherent forms, emerging and disappearing. Do you see them, Clavain?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, stopping punting for a moment, as Pinky had done. ‘It’s only started in the last few moments, hasn’t it? Something’s been roused.’
‘The faces mean nothing to me,’ Glass said. ‘But Pinky might recognise them, if they relate to the citizens of First Camp.’
‘We aren’t always good with human faces. You know how it is. Something about your lack of a decent pair of ears and a snout.’ But after a silence he added: ‘I don’t see anyone I remember. But they come and go so quickly, it’s hard to be sure. It’s like seeing phantoms in a fire.’
‘I’ve never felt so encouraged.’ But Pinky sighed and resumed his half of the rowing, and so did I.
‘Only human forms so far,’ I commented.
‘That we recognise,’ Glass said. ‘If there were alien faces in those patterns, our visual systems might have missed them completely. Assuming aliens even have faces. But I think it likely the biomass is drawing on information patterns that it understands to be pertinent to us, as humans, rather than the vast collective memory of other visitors who were here thousands or even millions of years ago. Again, I am inclined to see it as an encouraging overture.’
I forced a smile, hoping it would lift my spirits. ‘I’d hate to see your idea of discouraging.’
We continued down the channel, which had now become a squeezing corridor of faces, constantly forming and dissipating in the slurry. They were there and gone in much less than a second; just long enough for the eye to snag the proportions and know that it was detecting something meaningful. The faces were green masks, blank-eyed forms with a strange constancy of expression, like vaguely amused theatregoers roused from distracted trains of thought by our passage. Ripples rippling into ripples, become faces, dissolving back into randomness, over and over again. I recognised none of them, and saw nothing that looked like my own face.
Glass lunged for the gas-harpoon. She grabbed it double-handed and swung it back to aim at the disturbed water we had already passed through. Her hands were shaking, jerking the barbed barrel.
I reached out and steadied the harpoon.
‘What?’
‘One of those things. I saw it for a second, behind us in the channel. Just its head, but a clearer view. It’s humanoid. Human-derived, I should say.’
‘It’s not there now.’
‘It was,’ Glass said.
We kept rowing, but slowly, with nearly all our focus directed back along the green-shadowed channel. The torrent of faces had eased, seemingly detecting our nervousness. Glass’s hands were still shaking. It was not apprehension, in her case, but a neuromuscular consequence of whatever was happening in her brain.