The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It looked as if the node was large but in no way unusual.

  Then night came, as swiftly as it always did at those latitudes. Mina and Naqi took turns sleeping for two or three hour stretches while the other kept an eye on the readouts. During a lull Naqi climbed up onto the top of the airship and tried the antenna again, and for a moment was gladdened when she saw that a new message had arrived. But the message itself turned out to be a statement from the Snowflake Council stating that the blackout on civilian messages would continue for at least another two days, until the current “crisis” was over. There were allusions to civil disturbances in two cities, with curfews being imposed, and imperatives to ignore all unofficial news sources concerning the nature of the approaching ship.

  Naqi wasn’t surprised that there was trouble, though the extent of it took her aback. Her instincts were to believe the government line. The problem—from the government’s point of view—was that nothing was known for certain about the nature of the ship, and so by being truthful they ended up sounding like they were keeping something back. They would have been far better off making up a plausible lie, which could be gently moulded toward accuracy as time passed.

  Mina rose after midnight to begin her shift. Naqi went to sleep and dreamed fitfully, seeing in her mind’s eye red smears and bars hovering against amorphous green. She had been staring at the readouts too intently, for too many hours.

  Mina woke her excitedly before dawn.

  “Now I’m the one with the news,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Come and see for yourself.”

  Naqi rose from her hammock, neither rested nor enthusiastic. In the dim light of the cabin Mina’s fungal patterns shone with peculiar intensity, abstract detached shapes that only implied her presence.

  Naqi followed the shapes onto the balcony.

  “What,” she said again, not even bothering to make it sound like a question.

  “There’s been a development,” Mina said.

  Naqi rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “With the node?”

  “Look. Down below. Right under us.”

  Naqi pressed her stomach hard against the railing and leaned over as far as she dared. She had felt no real vertigo until they had lowered the sensor lines, and then suddenly there had been a physical connection between the airship and the ground. But was it her imagination or had the airship lowered itself to about half its previous altitude, reeling in the lines at the same time?

  The midnight light was all spectral shades of milky gray. The creased and crumpled landscape of the node reached away into midgray gloom, merging with the slate of the overlying cloud deck. Naqi saw nothing remarkable, other than the surprising closeness of the surface.

  “I mean really look down,” Mina said.

  Naqi pushed herself against the railing more than she had dared before, until she was standing on the very tips of her toes. Only then did she see it. Directly below them was a peculiar circle of darkness, almost as if the airship was casting a distinct shadow beneath itself. It was a circular zone of exposed seawater, like a lagoon enclosed by the greater mass of the node. Steep banks of Juggler biomass, its heart a deep charcoal gray, rimmed the lagoon. Naqi studied it quietly, sensing that her sister might judge her on any remark she made.

  “How did you see it?” she asked eventually.

  “See it?”

  “It can’t be more than twenty metres wide. A dot like that would have hardly shown up on the topographic map.”

  “Naqi, you don’t understand. I didn’t steer us over the hole. It appeared below us, as we were moving. Listen to the motors. We’re still moving. The hole’s shadowing us. It follows us precisely.”

  “Must be reacting to the sensors,” Naqi said.

  “I’ve hauled them in. We’re not trailing anything within thirty metres of the surface. The node’s reacting to us, Naqi—to the presence of the airship. The Jugglers know we’re here, and they’re sending us a signal.”

  “Maybe they are. But it isn’t our job to interpret that signal. We’re just here to take measurements, not to interact with the Jugglers.”

  “So whose job is it?” Mina asked.

  “Do I have to spell it out? Specialists from Umingmaktok.”

  “They won’t get here in time. You know how long nodes last. By the time the blackout’s lifted, by the time the swimmer corps hotshots get here, we’ll be sitting over a green smudge and not much more. This is a significant find, Naqi. It’s the largest node this season and it’s making a deliberate and clear attempt to invite swimmers.”

  She stepped back from the railing. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it all night. This isn’t just a large node, Naqi. Something’s happening—that’s why there’s been so much sprite activity. If we don’t swim here, we might miss something unique.”

  “And if we do swim, we’ll be violating every rule in the book. We’re not trained, Mina. Even if we learned something—even if the Jugglers deigned to communicate with us—we’d be ostracised from the entire scientific community.”

  “That would depend on what we learned, wouldn’t it?”

  “Don’t do this, Mina. It isn’t worth it.”

  “We won’t know if it’s worth it or not until we try, will we?” Mina extended a hand. “Look. You’re right in one sense. Chances are pretty good nothing will happen. Normally you have to offer them a gift—a puzzle, or something rich in information. We haven’t got anything like that. What’ll probably happen is we hit the water and there won’t be any kind of biochemical interaction. In which case, it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to tell anyone. And if we do learn something, but it isn’t significant—well, we don’t have to tell anyone about that either. Only if we learn something major. Something so big that they’ll have to forget about a minor violation of protocol.”

  “A minor violation ... ?” Naqi began, almost laughing at Mina’s audacity.

  “The point is, sis, we have a win-win situation here. And it’s been handed to us on a plate.”

  “You could also argue that we’ve been handed a major chance to fuck up spectacularly.”

  “You read it whichever way you like. I know what I see.”

  “It’s too dangerous, Mina. People have died ...” Naqi looked at Mina’s fungal patterns, enhanced and emphasised by her tattoos. “You flagged high for conformality. Doesn’t that worry you slightly?”

  “Conformality’s just a fairy tale they use to scare children into behaving,” said Mina. “ ‘Eat all your greens or the sea will swallow you up forever.’ I take it about as seriously as I take the Thule kraken, or the drowning of Arviat. I’m fully aware of the risk.”

  “The Thule kraken is a joke, and Arviat never existed in the first place. But the last time I checked, conformality was an accepted phenomenon.”

  “It’s an accepted research topic. There’s a distinction.”

  “Don’t split hairs ...” Naqi began.

  Mina gave every indication of not having heard Naqi speak. Her voice was distant, as if she were speaking to herself. It had a lilting, singsong quality. “Too late to even think about it now. But it isn’t long until dawn. I think it’ll still be there at dawn.”

  She pushed past Naqi.

  “Where are you going now?”

  “To catch some sleep. I need to be fresh for this. So will you.”

  They hit the lagoon with two gentle, anticlimactic splashes. Naqi was underwater! for a moment before she bobbed to the surface, holding her breath. At first she had to make a conscious effort to start breathing again: the air immediately above the water was so saturated with microscopic organisms that choking seemed a real possibility. Mina, surfacing next to her, drew in gulps with wild enthusiasm, as if willing the tiny creatures to invade her lungs. She shrieked delight at the sudden cold. When they had both gained equilibrium, treading with their shoulders above water, Naqi was finally able to take stock. She saw everything th
rough a stinging haze of tears. The gondola hovered above them, poised beneath the larger mass of the vacuum bladder. The life raft that it had deployed was sparkling new, rated for one hundred hours against moderate biological attack. But that was for mid-ocean, where the density of Juggler organisms would be much less than in the middle of a major node. Here, the hull might only endure a few tens of hours before it was consumed.

  Once again, Naqi wondered if she should withdraw. There was still time. No real damage had yet been done. She could be back in the boat and back aboard the airship in a minute or so. Mina might not follow her, but she did not have to be complicit in her sister’s actions. But Naqi knew she would not be able to turn back. She could not show weakness now that she had come this far.

  “Nothing’s happening ...” she said.

  “We’ve only been in the water a minute,” Mina said.

  The two of them wore black wetsuits. The suits themselves could become buoyant if necessary—all it would take would be the right sequence of tactile commands and dozens of tiny bladders would inflate around the chest and shoulder area—but it was easy enough to tread water. In any case, if the Jugglers initiated contact the suits would probably be eaten away in minutes. The swimmers who had made repeated contact often swam naked or near naked, but Naqi was not prepared for that level of abject surrender to the ocean’s assault. Nor was Mina.

  After another minute the water no longer seemed as cold. Through gaps in the cloud cover the sun was harsh on Naqi’s cheek. It etched furiously bright lines in the bottle-green surface of the lagoon, lines that coiled and shifted into fleeting calligraphic shapes as if conveying secret messages. The calm water lapped gently against their upper bodies. The walls of the lagoon were metre-high masses of fuzzy vegetation, like the steep banks of a river. Now and then Naqi felt something brush gently against her feet, like a passing frond or strand of seaweed. The first few times she flinched at the contact, but after a while it became strangely soothing. Occasionally something stroked one or other hand, then moved playfully away. When she lifted her hands from the sea, mats of gossamer green draped from her fingers like the tattered remains of expensive gloves. The green material slithered free and slipped back into the sea. It tickled between her fingers.

  “Nothing’s still happened,” Naqi said, more quietly this time.

  “You’re wrong. The shoreline’s moved closer.”

  Naqi looked at it. “It’s a trick of perspective.”

  “I assure you it isn’t.”

  Naqi looked back at the raft. They had drifted five or six metres from it. It might as well have been a kilometre for all the sense of security that the raft now offered. Mina was right: the lagoon was closing in on them, gently, slowly. If the lagoon had been twenty metres wide when they had entered it must now be a third smaller. There was still time to escape before the hazy green walls squeezed in on them, but only if they moved now, back to the raft, back into the safety of the gondola.

  “Mina ... I want to go. We’re not ready for this.”

  “We don’t need to be ready. It’s going to happen.”

  “We’re not trained!”

  “Call it learning on the job, in that case.” Mina was still trying to sound outrageously calm, but it wasn’t working. Naqi heard the flaw in her voice. She was either terribly frightened or terribly excited.

  “You’re more scared than I am,” she said.

  “I am scared,” said Mina. “Scared we’ll screw this up. Scared we’ll blow this opportunity. Understand? I’m that kind of scared.”

  Either Naqi was treading water less calmly, or the water itself had become visibly more agitated in the last few moments. The green walls were perhaps ten metres apart, and now were not quite the sheer vertical structures they had appeared before. They had taken on form and design, growing and complexifying by the second. It was akin to watching a distant city emerge from fog, the revealing of bewildering, plunging layers of mesmeric detail, more than the eye or the mind could process.

  “It doesn’t look as if they’re expecting a gift this time,” Mina said.

  Veined tubes and pipes coiled and writhed around each other in constant sinuous motion, making Naqi think of some hugely magnified circuitry formed from plant parts. It was restless living circuitry that never quite settled into one configuration. Now and then chequer-board designs appeared, or intricately interlocking runes. Sharply geometric patterns flickered from point to point, echoed, amplified and subtly iterated at each move. Distinct three-dimensional shapes assumed brief solidity, carved from greenery as if by the deft hand of a topiarist. Naqi glimpsed unsettling anatomies; the warped memories of alien bodies that had once entered the ocean, a million or a billion years ago. Here a three-jointed limb, here the shieldlike curve of an exoskeletal plaque. The head of something that was almost equine melted into a goggling mass of faceted eyes. Fleetingly, a human form danced from the chaos. But only once. Alien swimmers outnumbered human swimmers vastly.

  Here were the Pattern Jugglers, Naqi knew. The first explorers had mistaken these remembered forms for indications of actual sentience, thinking that the oceanic mass was a kind of community of intelligences. It was an easy mistake to have made, but it was some way from the truth. These animate shapes were enticements, like the gaudy covers of books. The minds themselves were captured only as frozen traces. The only living intelligence within the ocean lay in its own curatorial system.

  To believe anything else was heresy.

  The dance of bodies became too rapid to follow. Pastel-coloured lights glowed from deep within the green structure, flickering and stuttering. Naqi thought of lanterns burning from the depths of a forest. Now the edge of the lagoon had become irregular, extending peninsulas toward the centre of the dwindling circle of water, while narrow bays and inlets fissured back into the larger mass of the node. The peninsulas sprouted grasping tendrils, thigh-thick at the trunk but narrowing to the dimensions of plant fronds, and then narrowing further, bifurcating into lacy, fernlike hazes of awesome complexity. They diffracted light like the wings of dragonflies. They were closing over the lagoon, forming a shimmering canopy. Now and then a sprite—or something smaller but equally bright—arced from one bank of the lagoon to another. Brighter things moved through the water like questing fish. Microscopic organisms were detaching from the larger fronds and tendrils, swarming in purposeful clouds. They batted against her skin, against her eyelids. Every breath that she took made her cough. The taste of the Pattern Jugglers was sour and medicinal. They were in her, invading her body.

  She panicked. It was as if a tiny switch had flipped in her mind. Suddenly all other concerns melted away. She had to get out of the lagoon immediately, no matter what Mina would think of her.

  Thrashing more than swimming, Naqi tried to push herself toward the raft. But as soon as the panic reaction had kicked in she had felt something else slide over her. It was not so much paralysis as an immense sense of inertia. Moving, even breathing, became problematic. The boat was impossibly distant. She was no longer capable of treading water. She felt heavy, and when she looked down she saw that a green haze enveloped the parts of her body that she could see above water. The organisms were adhering to the fabric of her wetsuit.

  “Mina ...” she called. “Mina!”

  But Mina only looked at her. Naqi sensed that her sister was experiencing the same sort of paralysis. Mina’s movements had become languid, and yet instead of panic what Naqi saw on her face was profound resignation and acceptance. It was dangerously close to serenity.

  Mina wasn’t frightened at all.

  The patterns on her neck were flaring vividly. Her eyes were closed. Already the organisms had begun to attack the fabric of her suit, stripping it away from her flesh. Naqi could feel the same thing happening to her own suit. There was no pain, for the organisms stopped short of attacking her skin. With a mighty effort she hoisted her forearm from the water, studying the juxtaposition of pale flesh and dissolving black fabric.
Her fingers were as stiff as iron.

  But—and Naqi clung to this—the ocean recognised the sanctity of organisms, or at least thinking organisms. Strange things might happen to people who swam with the Jugglers, things that might be difficult to distinguish from death or near death. But people always emerged afterward, changed perhaps, but essentially whole. No matter what happened now, they would survive. The Jugglers always returned those who swam with them, and even when they did effect changes they were seldom permanent.

  Except, of course, for those who didn’t return.

  No, Naqi told herself. What they were doing was foolish, and might perhaps destroy their careers. But they would survive. Mina had flagged high on the conformality index when she had applied to join the swimmer corps, but that didn’t mean she was necessarily at risk. Conformality merely implied a rare connection with the ocean. It verged on the glamorous.

  Now Mina was going under. She had stopped moving entirely. Her eyes were blankly ecstatic.

  Naqi wanted to resist that same impulse to submission. But the strength had flown away from her. She felt herself commence the same descent. The water closed over her mouth, then her eyes, and in a moment she was under. She felt herself a toppled statue sliding toward the seabed. Her fear reached a crescendo and then passed. She was not drowning. The froth of green organisms had forced itself down her throat, down her nasal passage. She felt no fright. There was nothing except a profound feeling that this was what she had been born to do.

  Naqi knew what was happening, what was going to happen. She had studied enough reports on swimmer missions. The tiny organisms were infiltrating her entire body, creeping into her lungs and bloodstream. They were keeping her alive, while at the same time flooding her with chemical bliss. Droves of the same tiny creatures were seeking routes to her brain, inching along the optic nerve, the aural nerve, or crossing the blood-brain barrier itself. They were laying tiny threads behind them, fibres that extended back into the larger mass of organisms suspended in the water around her. In turn, these organisms established data-carrying channels back into the primary mass of the node. ... And the node itself was connected to other nodes, both chemically and via the packet-carrying sprites. The green threads bound Naqi to the entire ocean. It might take hours for a signal to reach her mind from halfway around Turquoise, but it didn’t matter. She was beginning to think on Juggler time, her own thought processes seeming pointlessly quick, like the motion of bees.