The ship approached slowly. It had been given instructions for docking with the arm adjacent to the one where Naqi and the other spectators gathered. Now that it was close it was apparent that the shuttle was larger than any of the dirigible craft normally moored to the city’s arms; by Naqi’s estimate it was at least half as wide as the city’s central core. But it slid into its designated mooring point with exquisite delicacy. Bright red symbols flashed onto the otherwise blank white hull, signifying airlocks, cargo ports and umbilical sockets. Gangways were swung out from the arm to align with the doors and ports. Dockers—supervised by proctors and city officials—scrambled along the precarious connecting ways and attempted to fix magnetic berthing stays onto the shuttle’s hull. The magnetics slid off the hull. They tried adhesive grips next, and these were no more successful. After that, the dockers shrugged their shoulders and made exasperated gestures in the direction of the shuttle.
The roar of the crowd had died down a little by now.
Naqi felt the anticipation as well. She watched as an entourage of VIPs moved to the berthing position, led by a smooth, faintly cherubic individual that Naqi recognised as Tak Thonburi, the mayor of Umingmaktok and presiding chair of the Snowflake Council. Tak Thonburi was happily overweight and had a permanent cowlick of black hair, like an inverted question mark tattooed upon his forehead. His cheeks and brow were mottled with pale green. Next to him was the altogether leaner frame of Jotah Sivaraksa. It was no surprise that Dr. Sivaraksa should be here today, for the Moat project was one of the most significant activities of the entire Snowflake Council. His iron-gray eyes flashed this way and that as if constantly triangulating the positions of enemies and allies alike. The group was accompanied by armed, ceremonially dressed proctors and a triad of martial servitors. Their articulation points and sensor apertures were lathered in protective sterile grease, to guard against rot.
Though they tried to hide it, Naqi could tell that the VIPs were nervous. They moved a touch too confidently, making their trepidation all the more evident.
The red door symbol at the end of the gangway pulsed brighter and a section of the hull puckered open. Naqi squinted, but even through the binoculars it was difficult to make out anything other than red-lit gloom. Tak Thonburi and his officials stiffened. A sketchy figure emerged from the shuttle, lingered on the threshold and then stepped with immense slowness into full sunlight.
The crowd’s reaction—and to some extent Naqi’s own—was double-edged. There was a moment of relief that the messages from orbit had not been outright lies. Then there was an equally brief tang of shock at the actual appearance of Captain Moreau. The man was at least a third taller than anyone Naqi had ever seen in her life, and yet commensurately thinner, his seemingly brittle frame contained within a jade-coloured mechanical exoskeleton of ornate design. The skeleton lent his movements something of the lethargic quality of a stick insect.
Tak Thonburi was the first to speak. His amplified voice boomed out across the six arms of Umingmaktok, echoing off the curved surfaces of the multiple vacuum bladders that held the city aloft. Float-cams jostled for the best camera angle, swarming around him like pollen-crazed bees.
“Captain Moreau ... May I introduce myself? I am Tak Thonburi, mayor of Umingmaktok Snowflake City and incumbent chairman of the Snowflake Council of All Turquoise. It is my pleasure to welcome you, your crew and passengers to Umingmaktok, and to Turquoise itself. You have my word that we will do all in our power to make your visit as pleasant as possible.”
The Ultra moved closer to the official. The door to the shuttle remained open behind him. Naqi’s binocs picked out red hologram serpents on the jade limbs of the skeleton. The Ultra’s own voice boomed at least as loud, but emanated from the shuttle rather than Umingmaktok’s public address system.
“People of greenish-blue ...” The captain hesitated, then tapped one of the stalks projecting from his helmet. “People of Turquoise ... Chairman Thonburi ... Thank you for your welcome, and for your kind permission to assume orbit. We have accepted it with gratitude. You have my word ... as captain of the lighthugger Voice of Evening ... that we will abide by the strict terms of your generous offer of hospitality.” His mouth continued to move even during the pauses, Naqi noticed: the translation system was lagging. “You have my additional guarantee that no harm will be done to your world, and Turquoise law will be presumed to apply to the occupants ... of all bodies and vessels in your atmosphere. All traffic between my ship and your world will be subject to the authorisation of the Snowflake Council, and any member of the council will—under the ... auspices of the council—be permitted to visit the Voice of Evening at any time, subject to the availability of a ... suitable conveyance.”
The captain paused and looked at Tak Thonburi expectantly. The mayor wiped a nervous hand across his brow, smoothing his kiss-curl into obedience.
“Thank you ... Captain.” Tak Thonburi’s eyes flashed to the other members of the reception party. “Your terms are of course more than acceptable. You have my word that we will do all in our power to assist you and your crew, and that we will do our utmost to ensure that the forthcoming negotiations of trade proceed in an equable manner ... and in such a way that both parties will be satisfied upon their conclusion.”
The captain did not respond immediately, allowing an uncomfortable pause to draw itself out. Naqi wondered if it was really the fault of the software, or whether Moreau was just playing on Tak Thonburi’s evident nervousness.
“Of course,” the Ultra said, finally. “Of course. My sentiments entirely ... Chairman Thonburi. Perhaps now wouldn’t be a bad time to introduce my guests?”
On his cue three new figures emerged from the Voice of Evening’s shuttle. Unlike the Ultra they could almost have passed for ordinary citizens of Turquoise. There were two men and one woman, all of approximately normal height and build. They all had long hair, tied back in elaborate clasps. Their clothes were brightly coloured, fashioned from many separate fabrics of yellow, orange, red and russet, and various permutations of the same warm sunset shades. The clothes billowed around them, rippling in the light afternoon breeze. All three members of the party wore silver jewellery, far more than was customary on Turquoise. They wore it on their fingers, in their hair, hanging from their ears.
The woman was the first to speak, her voice booming out from the shuttle’s PA system.
“Thank you, Captain Moreau. Thank you also, Chairman Thonburi. We are delighted to be here. I am Amesha Crane, and I speak for the Vahishta Foundation. Vahishta’s a modest scientific organisation with its origins in the cometary prefectures of the Haven Demarchy. Lately we have been expanding our realm of interest to encompass other solar systems, such as this one.” Crane gestured at the two men who had accompanied her from the shuttle. “My associates are Simon Matsubara and Rafael Weir. There are another seventeen of us aboard the shuttle. Captain Moreau carried us here as paying passengers aboard the Voice of Evening, and as such Vahishta gladly accepts all the terms already agreed upon.”
Tak Thonburi looked even less sure of himself. “Of course. We welcome your ... interest. A scientific organisation, did you say?”
“One with a special interest in the study of the Jugglers,” Amesha Crane answered. She was the most strikingly attractive member of the trio, with fine cheekbones and a wide, sensual mouth that always seemed on the point of smiling or laughing. Naqi felt that the woman was sharing something with her, something private and amusing. Doubtless everyone in the crowd felt the same vague sense of complicity.
Crane continued: “We have no Pattern Jugglers in our own system, but that hasn’t stopped us from focussing our research on them, collating the data available from the worlds where Juggler studies are on-going. We’ve been doing this for decades, sifting inference and theory, guesswork and intuition. Haven’t we, Simon?”
The man nodded. He had sallow skin and a fixed quizzical expression.
“No two Juggler worlds are precisely
alike,” Simon Matsubara said, his voice as clear and confident as the woman’s. “And no two Juggler worlds have been studied by precisely the same mix of human socio-political factions. That means that we have a great many variables to take into consideration. Despite that, we believe we have identified similarities that may have been overlooked by the individual research teams. They may even be very important similarities, with repercussions for wider humanity. But in the absence of our own Jugglers, it is difficult to test our theories. That’s where Turquoise comes in.”
The other man—Naqi recalled his name as Rafael Weir—began to speak. “Turquoise has been largely isolated from the rest of human space for the better part of two centuries.”
“We’re aware of this,” said Jotah Sivaraksa. It was the first time any member of the entourage other than Tak Thonburi had spoken. To Naqi he sounded irritated, though he was doing his best to hide it.
“You don’t share your findings with the other Juggler worlds,” said Amesha Crane. “Nor—to the best of our knowledge—do you intercept their cultural transmissions. The consequence is that your research on the Jugglers has been untainted by any outside considerations—the latest fashionable theory, the latest groundbreaking technique. You prefer to work in scholarly isolation.”
“We’re an isolationist world in other respects,” Tak Thonburi said. “Believe it or not, it actually rather suits us.”
“Quite,” Crane said, with a hint of sharpness. “But the point remains. Your Jugglers are an uncontaminated resource. When a swimmer enters the ocean, their own memories and personality may be absorbed into the Juggler sea. The prejudices and preconceptions that swimmer carries inevitably enter the ocean in some shape or form—diluted, confused, but nonetheless present in some form. And when the next swimmer enters the sea, and opens their mind to communion, what they perceive—what they ken, in your own terminology—is irrevocably tainted by the preconceptions introduced by the previous swimmer. They may experience something that confirms their deepest suspicion about the nature of the Jugglers—but they can’t be sure that they aren’t simply picking up the mental echoes of the last swimmer, or the swimmer before that.”
Jotah Sivaraksa nodded. “What you say is undoubtedly true. But we’ve had just as many cycles of fashionable theory as anyone else. Even within Umingmaktok there are a dozen different research teams, each with their own outlook.”
“We accept that,” Crane said, with an audible sigh. “But the degree of contamination is slight compared to other worlds. Vahishta lacks the resources for a trip to a previously unvisited Juggler world, so the next best thing is to visit one that has suffered the smallest degree of human cultural pollution. Turquoise fits the bill.”
Tak Thonburi held the moment before responding, playing to the crowd again. Naqi rather admired the way he did it.
“Good. I’m very ... pleased ... to hear it. And might I ask just what it is about our ocean that we can offer you?”
“Nothing except the ocean itself,” said Amesha Crane. “We simply wish to join you in its study. If you will allow it, members of the Vahishta Foundation will collaborate with native Turquoise scientists and study teams. They will shadow them and offer interpretation or advice when requested. Nothing more than that.”
“That’s all?”
Crane smiled. “That’s all. It’s not as if we’re asking the world, is it?”
Naqi remained in Umingmaktok for three days after the arrival, visiting friends and taking care of business for the Moat. The newcomers had departed, taking their shuttle to one of the other snowflake cities—Prachuap or the recently married Qaanaaq-Pangnirtung, perhaps—where a smaller but no less worthy group of city dignitaries would welcome Captain Moreau and his passengers.
In Umingmaktok the booths and bunting were packed away and normal business resumed. Litter abounded. Worm dealers did brisk business, as they always did during times of mild gloom. There were far fewer transport craft moored to the arms, and no sign at all of the intense media presence of a few days before. Tourists had gone back to their home cities, and the children were safely back in school. Between meetings Naqi sat in the midday shade of half-empty restaurants and bars, observing the same puzzled disappointment in every face she encountered. Deep down she felt it herself. For two years they had been free to imprint every possible fantasy on the approaching ship. Even if the newcomers had arrived with less than benign intent, there would still have been something interesting to talk about; the possibility, however remote, that one’s own life might be about to become drastically more exciting.
But now none of that was going to happen. Undoubtedly Naqi would be involved with the visitors at some point, allowing them to visit the Moat or one of the outlying research zones she managed, but there would be nothing life-changing.
She thought back to that night with Mina, when they had heard the news. Everything had changed then. Mina had died, and Naqi had found herself taking her sister’s role in the Moat. She had risen to the challenge and promotions had followed with gratifying swiftness, until she was in effective charge of the Moat’s entire scientific program. But that sense of closure she had yearned for was still absent. The men she had slept with—men who were almost always swimmers—had never provided it, and by turns they had each lost patience with her, realising that they were less important to her as people than what they represented, as connections to the sea. It had been months since her last romance, and once Naqi had recognised the way her own subconscious was drawing her back to the sea, she had drawn away from contact with swimmers. She had been drifting since then, daring to hope that the newcomers would allow her some measure of tranquillity.
But the newcomers had not supplied it.
She supposed she would have to find it elsewhere.
On the fourth day Naqi returned to the Moat on a high-speed dirigible. She arrived near sunset, dropping down from high altitude to see the structure winking back at her, a foreshortened ellipse of gray-white ceramic lying against the sea like some vast discarded bracelet. From horizon to horizon there were several Juggler nodes visible, webbed together by the faintest of filaments—to Naqi they looked like motes of ink spreading into blotting paper—but there were also smaller dabs of green within the Moat itself.
The structure was twenty kilometres wide and now it was nearly finished. Only a narrow channel remained where the two ends of the bracelet did not quite meet: a hundred-metre-wide shear-sided aperture flanked on either side by tall, ramshackle towers of accommodation modules, equipment sheds and construction cranes. To the north, strings of heavy cargo dirigibles ferried processed ore and ceramic cladding from Narathiwat atoll, lowering it down to the construction teams on the Moat.
They had been working here for nearly twenty years. The hundred metres of the Moat that projected above the water was only one tenth of the full structure—a kilometre high ring resting on the seabed. In a matter of months the gap—little more than a notch in the top of the Moat—would be sealed, closed off by immense hermetically tight sea-doors. The process would necessarily be slow and delicate, for what was being attempted here was not simply the closing-off of part of the sea. The Moat was an attempt to isolate a part of the living ocean, sealing off a community of Pattern Juggler organisms within its impervious ceramic walls.
The high-speed dirigible swung low over the aperture. The thick green waters streaming through the cut had the phlegmatic consistency of congealing blood. Thick, ropy tendrils permitted information transfer between the external sea and the cluster of small nodes within the Moat. Swimmers were constantly present, either inside or outside the Moat, kenning the state of the sea and establishing that the usual Juggler processes continued unabated.
The dirigible docked with one of the two flanking towers.
Naqi stepped out, back into the hectic corridors and office spaces of the project building. It felt distinctly odd to be back on absolutely firm ground. Although one was seldom aware of it, Umingmaktok was never qu
ite still, no snowflake city or airship ever was. But she would get used to it; in a few hours she would be immersed in her work, having to think of a dozen different things at once, finessing solution pathways, balancing budgets against quality, dealing with personality clashes and minor turf wars, and perhaps—if she was very lucky—managing an hour or two of pure research. Aside from the science none of it was particularly challenging, but it kept her mind off other things. And after a few days of that, the arrival of the visitors would begin to seem like a bizarre, irrelevant interlude in an otherwise monotonous dream. She supposed that two years ago she would have been grateful for that. Life could indeed continue much as she had always imagined it would.
But when she arrived at her office there was a message from Dr. Sivaraksa. He needed to speak to her urgently.
Dr. Jotah Sivaraksa’s office on the Moat was a good deal less spacious than his quarters in Umingmaktok, but the view was superb. His accommodation was perched halfway up one of the towers that flanked the cut through the Moat, buttressed out from the main mass of prefabricated modules like a partially opened desk drawer. Dr. Sivaraksa was writing notes when she arrived. For long moments Naqi lingered at the sloping window, watching the construction activity hundreds of metres below. Railed machines and helmeted workers toiled on the flat upper surface of the Moat, moving raw materials and equipment to the assembly sites. Above, the sky was a perfect cobalt blue, marred now and then by the passing, green-stained hull of a cargo dirigible. The sea beyond the Moat had the dimpled texture of expensive leather.
Dr. Sivaraksa cleared his throat, and when Naqi turned, he gestured at the vacant seat on the opposite side of his desk.
“Life treating you well?”
“Can’t complain, sir.”
“And work?”
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 103