She sensed herself becoming vaster.
She was no longer just a pale, hard-edged thing labelled Naqi, suspended in the lagoon like a dying starfish. Her sense of self was rushing out toward the horizon in all directions, encompassing first the node and then the empty oceanic waters around it. She couldn’t say precisely how this information was reaching her. It wasn’t through visual imagery, but more an intensely detailed spatial awareness. It was as if spatial awareness had suddenly become her most vital sense.
She supposed this was what swimmers meant when they spoke of kenning.
She kenned the presence of other nodes over the horizon, their chemical signals flooding her mind, each unique, each bewilderingly rich in information. It was like hearing the roar of a hundred crowds. And at the same time she kenned the ocean depths, the cold fathoms of water beneath the node, the life-giving warmth of the crustal vents. Closer, too, she kenned Mina. They were two neighbouring galaxies in a sea of strangeness. Mina’s own thoughts were bleeding into the sea, into Naqi’s mind, and in them Naqi felt the reflected echo of her own thoughts, picked up by Mina. ...
It was glorious.
For a moment their minds orbited each other, kenning each other on a level of intimacy neither had dreamed possible.
Mina ... Can you feel me?
I’m here, Naqi. Isn’t this wonderful?
The fear was gone, utterly. In its place was a marvellous feeling of immanence. They had made the right decision, Naqi knew. She had been right to follow Mina. Mina was deliciously happy, basking in the same hopeful sense of security and promise.
And then they began to sense other minds.
Nothing had changed, but it was suddenly clear that the roaring signals from the other nodes were composed of countless individual voices, countless individual streams of chemical information. Each stream was the recording of a mind that had entered the ocean at some point. The oldest minds—those that had entered the ocean in the deep past—were the faintest ones, but they were also the most numerous. They had begun to sound alike, the shapes of their stored personalities blurring into each other, no matter how alien they had been to start with. The minds that had been captured more recently were sharper and more variegated, like oddly shaped pebbles on a beach. Naqi kenned brutal alienness, baroque architectures of mind shaped by outlandish chains of evolutionary contingency. The only thing any of them had in common was that they had all reached a certain threshold of tool-using intelligence, and had all—for one reason or another—been driven into interstellar space, where they had encountered the Pattern Jugglers. But that was like saying the minds of sharks and leopards were alike because they had both evolved to hunt. The differences between the minds were so cosmically vast that Naqi felt her own mental processes struggling to accommodate them.
Even that was becoming easier. Subtly—slowly enough that from moment to moment she was not aware of it—the organisms in her skull were retuning her neural connections, and allowing more and more of her consciousness to seep out into the extended processing loom of the sea.
She sensed the most recent arrivals.
They were all human minds, each a glittering gem of distinctness. Naqi sensed a great gulf in time between the earliest human mind and the last recognisably alien one. She had no idea if it was a million or a billion years, but it felt immense. At the same time she grasped that the ocean had been desperate for newness, and that while these human minds were welcome, they were barely sufficient.
The minds were snapshots, frozen in the conception of a single thought. It was like an orchestra of instruments, all sustaining a single unique note. Perhaps there was a grindingly slow evolution in those minds—she sensed the merest subliminal hint of change—but if that was the case it would take centuries to complete a thought ... thousands of years to complete the simplest internalised statement. The newest minds might not even have come to the realisation that they had been swallowed by the sea.
Yet now Naqi sensed a single mind flaring louder than the others.
It was recent and human, and yet there was something about it that struck her as discordant. The mind was damaged, as if it had been captured imperfectly. It was disfigured, giving off squalls of hurt. It had suffered dreadfully. It was reaching out to her, craving love and affection; something to cling to in the abyssal loneliness it now knew.
Images ghosted through her mind. Something was burning. Flames licked through the interstitial gaps in a great black structure. She couldn’t tell if it was a building or a vast, pyramidal bonfire.
She heard screams, and then something hysterical, which she at first took for more screaming, until she realised that it was something far, far worse. It was laughter, and as the flames roared higher, consuming the mass, smothering the screams, the laughter only intensified.
She thought it might be the laughter of a child.
Perhaps it was her imagination, but this mind appeared more fluid than the others. Its thoughts were still slow—far slower than Naqi’s—but the mind appeared to have usurped more than its share of processing resources. It was stealing computational cycles from neighbouring minds, freezing them into absolute stasis while it completed a single sluggish thought.
The mind worried Naqi. Pain and fury was boiling off it.
Mina kenned it too. Naqi tasted Mina’s thoughts and knew that her sister was equally disturbed by the mind’s presence. Then she felt the mind’s attention shift, drawn to the two inquisitive minds that had just entered the sea. It became aware of both of them, quietly watchful. A moment or two passed, and then the mind slipped away, back to wherever it had come from.
What was that ...
She felt her sister’s reply. I don’t know. A human mind. A conformal, I think. Someone who was swallowed by the sea. But it’s gone now.
No, it hasn’t. It’s still there. Just hiding.
Millions of minds have entered the sea, Naqi. Thousands of conformals, perhaps, if you think of all the aliens that came before us. There are bound to be one or two bad apples.
That wasn’t just a bad apple. It was like touching ice. And it sensed us. It reacted to us. Didn’t it?
She sensed Mina’s hesitation.
We can’t be sure. Our own perceptions of events aren’t necessarily reliable. I can’t even be certain we’re having this conversation. I might be talking to myself ...
Mina ... Don’t talk like that. I don’t feel safe.
Me neither. But I’m not going to let one frightening thing unnecessarily affect me.
Something happened then. It was a loosening, a feeling that the ocean’s grip on Naqi had just relented to a significant degree. Mina, and the roaring background of other minds, fell away to something much more distant. It was as if Naqi had just stepped out of a babbling party into a quiet adjacent room, and was even now moving farther and farther away from the door.
Her body tingled. She no longer felt the same deadening paralysis. Pearl-gray light flickered above. Without being sure whether she was doing it herself, she moved toward the surface. She was aware that she was moving away from Mina, but for now all that mattered was to escape the sea. She wanted to be as far from the mind as possible.
Her head rammed through a crust of green into air. At the same moment the Juggler organisms fled her body in a convulsive rush. She thrashed stiff limbs and took in deep, panicked breaths. The transition was horrible, but it was over in a few seconds. She looked around, expecting to see the sheer walls of the lagoon, but all she saw in one direction was open waters. Naqi felt panic rising again. Then she kicked herself around and saw a wavy line of bottle-green that had to be the perimeter of the node, perhaps half a kilometre away from her present position. The airship was a distant silvery teardrop that appeared to be perched on the surface of the node itself.
In her fear she did not immediately think of Mina. All she wanted to do was reach the safety of the airship, to be aloft. Then she saw the raft, bobbing only one or two hundred metres away. Someho
w it had been transplanted to the open waters as well. It looked distant but reachable. She started swimming, the fear giving her strength and sense of purpose. In truth, she was still thick well within the true boundary of the node: the water was still thick with suspended microorganisms, so that it was more like swimming through cold green soup. It made each stroke harder, but by the same token she did not have to expend much effort to stay afloat.
Did she trust the Pattern Jugglers not to harm her? Perhaps. After all, she had not encountered their minds at all—if they even had minds. They were merely the archiving system. Blaming them for that one poisoned mind was like blaming a library for one hateful book.
But it had still unnerved her profoundly. She wondered why none of the other swimmers had ever communicated their encounters with the mind. After all, she remembered it well enough now, and she was nearly out of the ocean. She might forget shortly—there were bound to be subsequent neurological effects—but under other circumstances there would have been nothing to prevent her relating her experiences to a witness or inviolable recording system.
She kept swimming, and began to wonder why Mina hadn’t emerged from the waters as well. Mina had been just as terrified. But Mina had also been more curious, and more willing to ignore her fears. Naqi had grasped the opportunity to leave the ocean when the Jugglers released their grip on her. But what if Mina had elected to remain?
What if Mina was still down there, still in communion with the Jugglers?
Naqi reached the raft and hauled herself aboard, being careful not to capsize it. She saw that the raft was still largely intact. It had been moved but not damaged, and although the ceramic sheathing was showing signs of attack, peppered here and there with scabbed green accretions, it was certainly good for another few hours. The rot-hardened control systems were still alive and still in telemetric connection with the distant airship.
Naqi had crawled from the sea naked. Now she felt cold and vulnerable. She pulled an aluminised quilt from the raft’s supply box and wrapped it around herself. It did not stop her from shivering, did not make her feel any less nauseous, but at least it afforded some measure of symbolic barrier against the sea.
She looked around again, but there was still no sign of Mina.
Naqi folded aside the weatherproof control cover and tapped commands into the matrix of waterproofed keys. She waited for the response from the airship. The moment stretched. But there it was: a minute shift in the dull gleam on the silver back of the vacuum bladder. The airship was turning, pivoting like a great slow weather vane. It was moving, responding to the raft’s homing command.
But where was Mina?
Now something moved in the water next to her, coiling in weak, enervated spasms. Naqi looked at it with horrified recognition. She reached over, still shivering, and with appalled gentleness fished the writhing thing from the sea. It lay in her fingers like a baby sea serpent. It was white and segmented, half a metre long. She knew exactly what it was.
It was Mina’s worm. It meant Mina had died.
II
Two years later Naqi watched a spark fall from the heavens.
Along with many hundreds of spectators, she was standing on the railed edge of one of Umingmaktok’s elegant cantilevered arms. It was afternoon. Every visible surface of the city had been scoured of rot and given a fresh coat of crimson or emerald paint. Amber bunting had been hung along the metal stay-lines that supported the tapering arms protruding from the city’s towering commercial core. Most of the berthing slots around the perimeter were occupied with passenger or cargo craft, while many smaller vessels were holding station in the immediate airspace around Umingmaktok. The effect—which Naqi had seen on her approach to the city a day earlier—had been to turn the snowflake into a glittering, delicately ornamented vision. By night they had fireworks displays. By day, as now, conjurors and confidence tricksters wound their way through the crowds. Nose-flute musicians and drum dancers performed impromptu atop improvised podia. Kick-boxers were cheered on as they moved from one informal ring to another, pursued by whistle-blowing proctors. Hastily erected booths were marked with red and yellow pennants, selling refreshments, souvenirs or tattoo-work, while pretty costumed girls who wore backpacks equipped with tall flagstaffs sold drinks or ices. The children had balloons and rattles marked with the emblems of both Umingmaktok and the Snowflake Council, and many of them had had their faces painted to resemble stylised space travellers. Puppet theatres had been set up here and there, running through exactly the same small repertoire of stones that Naqi remembered from her childhood. The children were enthralled nonetheless; mouths agape at each miniature epic, whether it was a roughly accurate account of the world’s settlement—with the colony ship being stripped to the bone for every gram of metal it held—or something altogether more fantastic, like the drowning of Arviat. It didn’t matter to the children that the one was based in fact and the other pure mythology. To them the idea that every city they called home had been cannibalised from the belly of a four-kilometre-long ship was no more or less plausible than the idea that the living sea might occasionally snatch cities beneath the waves when they displeased it. At that age everything was both magical and mundane, and she supposed that the children were no more or less excited by the prospect of the coming visitors than they were by the promised fireworks display, or the possibility of further treats if they were well behaved. Other than the children, there were animals—caged monkeys and birds—and the occasional expensive pet, being shown off for the day. One or two servitors stalked through the crowd, and occasionally a golden float-cam would bob through the air, loitering over a scene of interest like a single detached eyeball. Turquoise had not seen this level of celebration since the last acrimonious divorce, and the networks were milking it remorselessly, over-analysing the tiniest scrap of information.
This was, in truth, exactly the kind of thing Naqi would normally have gone to the other side of the planet to avoid. But something had drawn her this time, and made her wangle the trip out from the Moat at an otherwise critical time in the project. She could only suppose that it was a need to close a particular chapter in her life, one that had begun the night before Mina’s death. The detection of the Ultra ship—they now knew that it was named the Voice of Evening—had been the event that triggered the blackout, and the blackout had been Mina’s justification for the two of them attempting to swim with the Jugglers. Indirectly, therefore, the Ultras were “responsible” for whatever had happened to Mina. That was unfair, of course, but Naqi nonetheless felt the need to be here now, if only to witness the visitors’ emergence with her own eyes and see if they really were the monsters of her imagination. She had come to Umingmaktok with a stoic determination that she would not be swept up by the hysteria of the celebrations. Yet now that she had made the trip, now that she was amidst the crowd, drunk on the chemical buzz of human excitement with a nice fresh worm hooked onto her gut wall, she found herself in the perverse position of actually enjoying the atmosphere.
And now everyone had noticed the falling spark.
The crowd turned their heads into the sky, ignoring the musicians, conjurors and confidence tricksters. The backpacked girls stopped and looked aloft along with the others, shielding their eyes against the midday glare. The spark was the shuttle of the Voice of Evening, now parked in orbit around Turquoise.
Everyone had seen Captain Moreau’s ship by now, either with their own eyes as a moving star or via the images captured by the orbiting cameras or ground-based telescopes. The ship was dark and sleek, outrageously elegant. Now and then its Conjoiner drives flickered on just enough to trim its orbit, those flashes like brief teasing windows into daylight for the hemisphere below.
A ship like that could do awful things to a world, and everyone knew it.
But if Captain Moreau and his crew meant ill of Turquoise, they’d had ample opportunity to do harm already. They had been silent at two years out, but at one year out the Voice of Evening had tr
ansmitted the usual approach signals, requesting permission to stopover for three or four months. It was a formality—no one argued with Ultras—but it was also a gladdening sign that they intended to play by the usual rules.
Over the next year there had been a steady stream of communications between the ship and the Snowflake Council. The official word was that the messages had been designed to establish a framework for negotiation and person-to-person trade. The Ultras would need to update their linguistics software to avoid being confused by the subtleties of the Turquoise dialects, which, although based on Canasian, contained confusing elements of Inuit and Thai, relics of the peculiar social mix of the original settlement coalition.
The falling shuttle had slowed to merely supersonic speed now, shedding its plume of ionised air. Dropping speed with each loop, it executed a lazily contracting spiral above Umingmaktok. Naqi had rented cheap binoculars from one of the vendors. The lenses were scuffed, shimmering with the pink of fungal bloom. She visually locked onto the shuttle, its roughly delta shape wobbling in and out of sharpness. Only when it was two or three thousand metres above Umingmaktok could she see it clearly. It was very elegant, a pure brilliant white like something carved from cloud. Beneath the mantalike hull, complex machines—fans and control surface—moved too rapidly to be seen as anything other than blurs of subliminal motion. She watched as the ship reduced speed until it hovered at the same altitude as the snowflake city. Above the roar of the crowd—an ecstatic, flag-waving mass—all Naqi heard was a shrill hum, almost too far into ultrasound to detect.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 102