The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “That’s one view.”

  Mina shrugged. “I’d love to be proved otherwise.”

  “Well, do you think we should try following them? I know we can’t track sprites over any distance, but we might be able to keep up for a few hours before we drain the batteries.”

  “We wouldn’t learn much.”

  “We wouldn’t know until we tried,” Naqi said, gritting her teeth. “Come on—it’s got to be worth a go, hasn’t it? I reckon that swarm moved a bit slower than’ a single sprite. We’d at least have enough for a report, wouldn’t we?”

  Mina shook her head. “All we’d have is a single observation with a little bit of speculation thrown in. You know we can’t publish that sort of thing. And anyway-assuming that sprite swarm did have something to do with the ship—there are going to be hundreds of similar sightings tonight.”

  “I was just hoping it might take our minds off the news.”

  “Perhaps it would. But it would also make us unforgivably late for our target.” Mina dropped the tone of her voice, making an obvious effort to sound reasonable. “Look—I understand your curiosity. I feel it as well. But the chances are it was either a statistical fluke or part of a global event everyone else will have had a much better chance to study. Either way we can’t contribute anything useful, so we might as well just forget about it.” She rubbed at the marks on her forearm, tracing the paisley-patterned barbs and whorls of glowing colouration. “And I’m tired, and we have several busy days ahead of us. I think we just need to put this one down to experience, all right?”

  “Fine,” Naqi said.

  “I’m sorry, but I just know we’d be wasting our time.”

  “I said fine.” Naqi stood up and steadied herself on the railing that traversed the length of the airship’s back.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To sleep. Like you said, we’ve got a busy day coming up. We’d be fools to waste time chasing a fluke, wouldn’t we?”

  An hour after dawn they crossed out of the dead zone. The sea below began to thicken with floating life, becoming soupy and torpid. A kilometre or so farther in and the soup showed ominous signs of structure: a blue-green stew of ropy strands and wide kelplike plates. They suggested the floating, half-digested entrails of embattled sea monsters.

  Within another kilometre the floating life had become a dense vegetative raft, stinking of brine and rotting cabbage. Within another kilometre of that the raft had thickened to the point where the underlying sea was only intermittently visible. The air above the raft was humid, hot and pungent with microscopic irritants. The raft itself was possessed of a curiously beguiling motion, bobbing and writhing and gyring according to the ebb and flow of weirdly localised current systems. It was as if many invisible spoons stirred a great bowl of spinach. Even the shadow of the airship—pushed far ahead of it by the low sun—had some influence on the movement of the material. The Pattern Juggler biomass scurried and squirmed to evade the track of the shadow, and the peculiar purposefulness of the motion reminded Naqi of an octopus she had seen in the terrestrial habitats aquarium on Umingmaktok, squeezing its way through impossibly small gaps in the glass prison of its tank.

  Presently they arrived at the precise centre of the circular raft. It spread away from them in all directions, hemmed by a distant ribbon of sparkling sea. It felt as if the airship had come to rest above an island, as fixed and ancient as any geological feature. The island even had a sort of geography: humps and ridges and depressions sculpted into the cloying texture of layered biomass. But there were few islands on Turquoise, especially at this latitude, and the Juggler node was only a few days old. Satellites had detected its growth a week earlier, and Mina and Naqi had been sent to investigate. They were under strict instructions simply to hover above the island and deploy a handful of tethered sensors. If the node showed any signs of being unusual, a more experienced team would be sent out from Umingmaktok by high-speed dirigible. Most nodes dispersed within twenty to thirty days, so there was always a sense of urgency. They might even send trained swimmers, eager to dive into the sea and open their minds to alien communion. Ready to—as they said—ken the ocean.

  But first things first. Chances were this node would turn out to be interesting rather than exceptional.

  “Morning,” Mina said, when Naqi approached her. Mina was swabbing the sensor pod she had reeled in earlier, collecting green mucous that had adhered to its ceramic teardrop. All human artifacts eventually succumbed to biological attack from the ocean, although ceramics were the most resilient.

  “You’re cheerful,” Naqi said, trying to make the statement sound matter-of-fact rather than judgmental.

  “Aren’t you? It’s not everyone gets a chance to study a node up this close. Make the most of it, sis. The news we got last night doesn’t change what we have to do today.”

  Naqi scraped the back of her hand across her nose. Now that the airship was above the node she was breathing vast numbers of aerial organisms into her lungs with each breath. The smell was redolent of ammonia and decomposing vegetation. It required an intense effort of will not to keep rubbing her eyes more raw than was already the case. “Do you see anything unusual?”

  “Bit early to say.”

  “So that’s a ‘no,’ then.”

  “You can’t learn much without probes, Naqi.” Mina dipped a swab into a collection bag, squeezing tight the plastic seal. Then she dropped the bag into a bucket between her feet. “Oh, wait. I saw another of those swarms, after you’d gone to sleep.”

  “I thought you were the one complaining about being tired.”

  Mina dug out a fresh swab and rubbed vigorously at a deep olive smear on the side of the sensor. “I picked up my messages, that’s all. Tried again this morning, but the blackout still hadn’t been lifted. I picked up a few shortwave radio signals from the closest cities, but they were just transmitting a recorded message from the Snowflake Council: stay tuned and don’t panic.”

  “So let’s hope we don’t find anything significant here,” Naqi said, “because we won’t be able to report it if we do.”

  “They’re bound to lift the blackout soon. In the meantime I think we have enough measurements to keep us busy. Did you find that spiral sweep program in the airship’s avionics box?”

  “I haven’t looked for it,” Naqi said, certain that Mina had never mentioned such a thing before. “But I’m sure I can program something from scratch in a few minutes.”

  “Well, let’s not waste any more time than necessary. Here.” Smiling, she offered Naqi the swab, its tip laden with green slime. “You take over this, and I’ll go and dig out the program.”

  Naqi took the swab after a moment’s delay.

  “Of course. Prioritise tasks according to ability, right?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Mina said soothingly. “Look. Let’s not argue, shall we? We were best friends until last night. I just thought it would be quicker ...” She trailed off and shrugged. “You know what I mean. I know you blame me for not letting us follow the sprites, but we had no choice but to come here. Understand that, will you? Under any other circumstances ...”

  “I understand,” Naqi said, realising as she did how sullen and childlike she sounded; how much she was playing the petulant younger sister. The worst of it was that she knew Mina was right. At dawn it all seemed much clearer.

  “Do you? Really?”

  Naqi nodded, feeling the perverse euphoria that came with an admission of defeat. “Yes. Really. We’d have been wrong to chase them.”

  Mina sighed. “I was tempted, you know. I just didn’t want you to see how tempted I was, or else you’d have found a way to convince me.”

  “I’m that persuasive?”

  “Don’t underestimate yourself, sis. I know I never would.” Mina paused and took back the swab. “I’ll finish this. Can you handle the sweep program?”

  Naqi smiled. She felt better now. The tension between them would still take a l
ittle while to lift, but at least things were easier now. Mina was right about something else: they were best friends, not just sisters.

  “I’ll handle it,” Naqi said.

  Naqi stepped through the hermetic curtain into the air-conditioned cool of the gondola. She closed the door, rubbed her eyes, and then sat down at the navigator’s station. The airship had flown itself automatically from Umingmaktok, adjusting its course to take cunning advantage of jet streams and weather fronts. Now it was in hovering mode: once or twice a minute the electrically driven motors purred, stabilising the craft against gusts of wind generated by the microclimate above the Juggler node. Naqi called up the current avionics program, a menu of options appearing on a flat screen. The options quivered; Naqi thumped the screen with the back of her hand until the display behaved itself. Then she scrolled down through the other flight sequences, but there was no preprogrammed spiral loaded into the current avionics suite. Naqi rummaged around in the background files, but there was nothing to help her there either. She was about to start hacking something together—at a push it would take her half an hour to assemble a routine—when she remembered that she had once backed up some earlier avionics files onto the fan. She had no idea if they were still there, or even if there was anything useful among the cache, but it was probably worth taking the time to find out. The fan lay closed on a bench, where Mina must have left it after she verified that the blackout was still in force.

  Naqi grabbed the fan and spread it open across her lap. To her surprise, it was still active: instead of the usual watercolour patterns the display showed the messages she had been scrolling through earlier.

  She looked closer and frowned. These were not her messages at all. She was looking at the messages Mina had copied onto the fan during the night. At this realisation Naqi felt an immediate prickle of guilt. She knew that she should snap the fan shut, or at the very least close her sister’s mail and delve into her own area of the fan. But she did neither of those things. Telling herself that it was only what anyone else would have done, she accessed the final message in the list and examined its incoming time-stamp. To within a few minutes, it had arrived at the same time as the final message Naqi had received.

  Mina had been telling the truth when she said that the blackout was continuing.

  Naqi glanced up. Through the window of the gondola she could see the back of her sister’s head, bobbing up and down as she checked winches along the side.

  Naqi looked at the body of the message. It was nothing remarkable, just an automated circular from one of the Juggler special-interest groups. Something about neurotransmitter chemistry.

  She exited the circular, getting back to the list of incoming messages. She told herself that she had done nothing shameful so far. If she closed Mina’s mail now, she would have nothing to feel guilty about.

  But a name she recognized jumped out at her from the list of messages: Dr. Jotah Sivaraksa, manager of the Moat project. The man she had met in Umingmaktok, glowing with renewed vitality after his yearly worm change. What could Mina possibly want with Sivaraksa?

  She opened the message, read it.

  It was exactly as she had feared, and yet not dared to believe.

  Sivaraksa was responding to Mina’s request to work on the Moat. The tone of the message was conversational, in stark contrast to the businesslike response Naqi had received. Sivaraksa informed her sister that her request had been appraised favourably, and that while there were still one or two other candidates to be considered, the expectation was that Mina would emerge as the most convincing applicant. Even if this turned out not to be the case, Sivaraksa continued—and that outcome was not thought very likely—Mina’s name would be at the top of the list when further vacancies became available. In short, she was more or less guaranteed a chance to work on the Moat within the year.

  Naqi read the message again, just in case there was some highly subtle detail that threw the entire thing into a different, more benign light.

  Then she snapped shut the fan with a sense of profound fury. She placed it back where it was, exactly as it had been.

  Mina pushed her head through the hermetic curtain.

  “How’s it coming along?”

  “Fine ...” Naqi said. Her voice sounded drained of emotion even to herself.

  “Got that routine cobbled together?”

  “Coming along,” Naqi said.

  “Something the matter?”

  “No ...” Naqi forced a smile. “No. Just working through the details. Have it ready in a few minutes.”

  “Good. Can’t wait to start the sweep. We’re going to get some beautiful data, sis. And I think this is going to be a significant node. Maybe the largest this season. Aren’t you glad it came our way?”

  “Thrilled,” Naqi said, before returning to her work.

  Thirty specialised probes hung on telemetric cables from the underside of the gondola, dangling like the venom-tipped stingers of some grotesque aerial jellyfish. The probes sniffed the air metres above the Juggler biomass, or skimmed the fuzzy green surface of the formation. Weighted plumb lines penetrated to the sea beneath the raff, sipping the organism-infested depths dozens of metres under the node. Radar mapped larger structures embedded within the node—dense kernels of compacted biomass, or huge cavities and tubes of implacable function—while sonar graphed the topology of the many sinewy organic cables which plunged into darkness, umbilicals anchoring the node to the seabed. Smaller nodes drew most of their energy from sunlight and the breakdown of sugars and fats in the sea’s other floating microorganisms but the larger formations—which had a vastly higher information-processing burden—-needed to tap belching aquatic fissures, active rifts in the ocean bed kilometres under the waves. Cold water was pumped down each umbilical by peristaltic compression waves, heated by being circulated in the superheated thermal environment of the underwater volcanoes, and then pumped back to the surface.

  In all this sensing activity, remarkably little physical harm was done to the extended organism itself. The biomass sensed the approach of the probes and rearranged itself so that they passed through with little obstruction, even those scything lines that reached into the water. Energy was obviously being consumed to avoid the organism sustaining damage, and by implication the measurements must therefore have had some effect on the node’s information processing efficiency. The effect was likely to be small, however, and since the node was already subject to constant changes in its architecture—some probably intentional, and some probably forced on it by other factors in its environment—there appeared to be little point in worrying about the harm caused by the human investigators. Ultimately, so much was still guesswork. Although the swimmer teams had learned a great deal about the Pattern Jugglers’ encoded information, almost everything else about them—how and why they stored the neural patterns, and to what extent the patterns were subject to subsequent postprocessing—remained unknown. And those were merely the immediate questions. Beyond that were the real mysteries, which everyone wanted to solve, but were simply beyond the scope of immediate academic study. What they would learn today could not be expected to shed any light on those profundities. A single data point—even a single clutch of measurements—could not usually prove or disprove anything. But nonetheless it might later turn out to play a vital role in some chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery.

  It was something she was proud to be part of.

  The spiral sweep continued uneventfully, the airship chugging around in a gently widening circle. Morning shifted to early afternoon, and then the sun began to climb down toward the horizon, bleeding pale orange into the sky through soft-edged cracks in the cloud cover. For hours Naqi and Mina studied the incoming results, the ever-sharper scans of the node appearing on scree
ns throughout the gondola. They discussed the results cordially enough, but Naqi could not stop thinking about Mina’s betrayal. She took a spiteful pleasure in testing the extent to which her sister would lie, deliberately forcing the conversation around to Dr. Sivaraksa and the project he steered.

  “I hope I don’t end up like one of those deadwood bureaucrats,” Naqi said, when they were discussing the way their careers might evolve. “You know, like Sivaraksa.” She observed Mina pointedly, yet giving nothing away. “I read some of his old papers; he used to be pretty good once. But now look at him.”

  “It’s easy to say that,” Mina said. “But I bet he doesn’t like being away from the frontline any more than we would. But someone has to manage these big projects. Wouldn’t you rather it was someone who’d at least been a scientist?”

  “You sound like you’re defending him. Next you’ll be telling me you think the Moat is a good idea.”

  “I’m not defending Sivaraksa,” Mina said. “I’m just saying ...” She eyed her sister with a sudden glimmer of suspicion. Had she guessed that Naqi knew? “Never mind. Sivaraksa can fight his own battles. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Anyone would think you were changing the subject,” Naqi said. But Mina was already on her way out of the gondola to check the equipment again.

  At dusk the airship arrived at the perimeter of the node, completed one orbit, then began to track inward again. As it passed over the parts of the node previously mapped, time-dependent changes were highlighted on the displays: arcs and bands of red superimposed against the lime and turquoise false-colour of the mapped structures. Most of the alterations were minor: a chamber opening here or closing there, or a small alteration in the network topology to ease a bottleneck between the lumpy subnodes dotted around the floating island. Other changes were more mysterious in function, but conformed to types seen in other studies. They were studied at enhanced resolution, the data prioritised and logged.