The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “No particular problems that I’m aware of.”

  “Good. Good.” Sivaraksa made a quick, cursive annotation in the notebook he had opened on his desk, then slid it beneath the smoky gray cube of a paperweight. “How long has it been now?”

  “Since what, sir?”

  “Since your sister ... Since Mina ...” He seemed unable to complete the sentence, substituting a spiralling gesture made with his index finger. His finely boned hands were marbled with veins of olive green.

  Naqi eased into her seat. “Two years, sir.”

  “And you’re ... over it?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly say I’m over it, no. But life goes on, like they say. Actually I was hoping ...” Naqi had been about to tell him how she had imagined the arrival of the visitors would close that chapter. But she doubted she would be able to convey her feelings in a way Dr. Sivaraksa would understand. “Well, I was hoping I’d have put it all behind me by now.”

  “I knew another conformal, you know. Fellow from Gjoa. Made it into the elite swimmer corps before anyone had the foggiest idea. ...”

  “It’s never been proven that Mina was conformal, sir.”

  “No, but the signs were there, weren’t they? To one degree or another we’re all subject to symbolic invasion by the ocean’s microorganisms. But conformals show an unusual degree of susceptibility. On one hand it’s as if their own bodies actively invite the invasion, shutting down the usual inflammatory or foreign cell rejection mechanisms. On the other, the ocean seems to tailor its messengers for maximum effectiveness, as if the Jugglers have selected a specific target they wish to absorb. Mina had very strong fungal patterns, did she not?”

  “I’ve seen worse.” Naqi said, which was not entirely a lie.

  “But not, I suspect, in anyone who ever attempted to commune. I understand you had ambitions to join the swimmer corps yourself?”

  “Before all that happened.”

  “I understand. And now?”

  Naqi had never told anyone that she had joined Mina in the swimming incident. The truth was that even if she had not been present at the time of Mina’s death, her encounter with the rogue mind would have put her off entering the ocean for life.

  “It isn’t for me. That’s all.”

  Jotah Sivaraksa nodded gravely. “A wise choice. Aptitude or not, you’d have almost certainly been filtered out of the swimmer corps. A direct genetic connection to a conformal—even an unproven conformal—would be too much of a risk.”

  “That’s what I assumed, sir.”

  “Does it ... trouble you, Naqi?”

  She was wearying of this. She had work to do—deadlines to meet that Sivaraksa himself had imposed.

  “Does what trouble me?”

  He nodded at the sea. Now that the play of light had shifted minutely, it looked less like dimpled leather than a sheet of beaten bronze. “The thought that Mina might still be out there ... in some sense.”

  “It might trouble me if I were a swimmer, sir. Other than that ... No. I can’t say that it does. My sister died. That’s all that mattered.”

  “Swimmers have occasionally reported encountering ... minds ... essences ... of the lost, Naqi. The impressions are often acute. The conformed leave their mark on the ocean at a deeper, more permanent level than the impressions left behind by mere swimmers. One senses that there must be a purpose to this.”

  “That wouldn’t be for me to speculate, sir.”

  “No.” He glanced down at the compad and then tapped his forefinger against his upper lip. “No. Of course not. Well, to the matter at hand ...”

  She interrupted him. “You swam once, sir?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.” The moment stretched. She was about to say something—anything—when Sivaraksa continued. “I had to stop for medical reasons. Otherwise I suppose I’d have been in the swimmer corps for a good deal longer, at least until my hands started turning green.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Astonishing. Beyond anything I’d expected.”

  “Did they change you?”

  At that he smiled. “I never thought that they did, until now. After my last swim I went through all the usual neurological and psychological tests. They found no anomalies; no indications that the Jugglers had imprinted any hints of alien personality or rewired my mind to think in an alien way.”

  Sivaraksa reached across the desk and held up the smoky cube that Naqi had taken for a paperweight. “This came down from the Voice of Evening. Examine it.”

  Naqi peered into the milky gray depths of the cube. Now that she saw it closely she realised that there were things embedded within the translucent matrix. There were chains of unfamiliar symbols, intersecting at right angles. They resembled the complex white scaffolding of a building.

  “What is it?”

  “Mathematics. Actually, a mathematical argument—a proof, if you like. Conventional mathematical notation—no matter how arcane—has evolved so that it can be written down, on a two-dimensional surface, like paper or a readout. This is a three-dimensional syntax, liberated from that constraint. It’s enormously richer, enormously more elegant.” The cube tumbled in Sivaraksa’s hand. He was smiling. “No one could make head or tail of it. Yet when I looked at it for the first time I nearly dropped it in shock. It made perfect sense to me. Not only did I understand the theorem, but I also understood the point of it. It’s a joke, Naqi. A pun. This mathematics is rich enough to embody humour. And understanding that is the gift they left me. It was sitting in my mind for twenty-eight years, like an egg waiting to hatch.”

  Abruptly, Sivaraksa placed the cube back on the table.

  “Something’s come up,” he said.

  From somewhere came the distant, prolonged thunder of a dirigible discharging its cargo of processed ore. It must have been one of the last consignments.

  “Something, sir?”

  “They’ve asked to see the Moat.”

  “They?”

  “Crane and her Vahishta mob. They’ve requested an oversight of all major scientific centres on Turquoise, and naturally enough we’re on the list. They’ll be visiting us, spending a couple of days seeing what we’ve achieved.”

  “I’m not too surprised that they’ve asked to visit, sir.”

  “No, but I was hoping we’d have a few months grace. We don’t. They’ll be here in a week.”

  “That’s not necessarily a problem for us, is it?”

  “It mustn’t become one,” Sivaraksa said. “I’m putting you in charge of the visit, Naqi. You’ll be the interface between Crane’s group and the Moat. That’s quite a responsibility, you understand. A mistake—the tiniest gaff—could undermine our standing with the Snowflake Council.” He nodded at the compad. “Our budgetary position is tenuous. Frankly, I’m in Tak Thonburi’s lap. We can’t afford any embarrassments.”

  “No sir.”

  She certainly did understand. The job was a poisoned chalice, or at the least a chalice with a strong potential to become poisoned. If she succeeded—if the visit went smoothly, with no hitches—Sivaraksa could still take much of the credit for it. If it went wrong, on the other hand, the fault would be categorically hers.

  “One more thing.” Sivaraksa reached under his desk and produced a brochure that he slid across to her. The brochure was marked with a prominent silver snowflake motif. It was sealed with red foil. “Open it; you have clearance.”

  “What is it, sir?”

  “A security report on our new friends. One of them has been behaving a bit oddly. You’ll need to keep an eye on him.”

  For inscrutable reasons of their own, the liaison committee had decided she would be introduced to Amesha Crane and her associates a day before the official visit, when the party was still in Sukhothai-Sanikiluaq. The journey there took the better part of two days, even allowing for the legs she took by high-speed dirigible or the ageing, unreliable trans-atoll railway line between Narathiwat and Cape Dorset. She arrived at Sukhothai-San
ikiluaq in a velvety purple twilight, catching the tail end of a fireworks display. The two snowflake cities had only been married three weeks, so the arrival of the off-worlders was an excellent pretext for prolonging the celebrations. Naqi watched the fireworks from a civic landing stage perched halfway up Sukhothai’s core, starbursts and cataracts of scarlet, indigo and intense emerald green brightening the sky above the vacuum bladders. The colours reminded her of the organisms that she and Mina had seen in the wake of their airship. The recollection left her suddenly sad and drained, convinced that she had made a terrible mistake by accepting this assignment.

  “Naqi?”

  It was Tak Thonburi, coming out to meet her on the balcony. They had already exchanged messages during the journey. He was dressed in full civic finery and appeared more than a little drunk.

  “Chairman Thonburi.”

  “Good of you to come here, Naqi.” She watched his eyes map her contours with scientific rigour, lingering here and there around regions of particular interest. “Enjoying the show?”

  “You certainly seem to be, sir.”

  “Yes, yes. Always had a thing about fireworks.” He pressed a drink into her hand and together they watched the display come to its mildly disappointing conclusion. There was a lull then, but Naqi noticed that the spectators on the other balconies were reluctant to leave, as if waiting for something. Presently a stunning display of three-dimensional images appeared, generated by powerful projection apparatus in the Voice of Evening’s shuttle. Above Sukhothai-Sanikiluaq, Chinese dragons as large as mountains fought epic battles. Sea monsters convulsed and writhed in the night. Celestial citadels burned. Hosts of purple-winged fiery angels fell from the heavens in tightly knit squadrons, clutching arcane instruments of music or punishment.

  A marbled giant rose from the sea, as if woken from some aeonslong slumber.

  It was very, very impressive.

  “Bastards,” Thonburi muttered.

  “Sir?”

  “Bastards,” he said, louder this time. “We know they’re better than us. But do they have to keep reminding us?”

  He ushered her into the reception chamber where the Vahishta visitors were being entertained. The return indoors had a magical sharpening effect on his senses. Naqi suspected that the ability to turn drunkenness on and off like a switch must be one of the most hallowed of diplomatic skills.

  He leaned toward her, confidentially.

  “Did Jotah mention any—”

  “Security considerations, chairman? Yes, I think I got the message.”

  “It’s probably nothing, only ...”

  “I understand. Better safe than sorry.”

  He winked, touching a finger against the side of his nose. “Precisely.”

  The interior was bright after the balcony. Twenty Vahishta delegates were standing in a huddle near the middle of the room. The captain was absent—little had been seen of Moreau since the shuttle’s arrival in Umingmaktok—but the delegates were talking to a clutch of local bigwigs, none of whom Naqi recognised. Thonburi steered her into the fray, oblivious to the conversations that were taking place.

  “Ladies and gentlemen ... Might I introduce Naqi Okpik? Naqi oversees the scientific program on the Moat. She’ll be your host for the visit to our project.”

  “Ah, Naqi.” Amesha Crane leaned over and shook her hand. “A pleasure. I just read your papers on information propagation methods in class-three nodes. Erudite.”

  “They were collaborative works,” Naqi said. “I really can’t take too much credit.”

  “Ah, but you can. All of you can. You achieved those findings with the minimum of resources, and you made very creative use of some extremely simplistic numerical methods.”

  “We muddle through,” Naqi said.

  Crane nodded enthusiastically. “It must give you a great sense of satisfaction.”

  Tak Thonburi said: “It’s a philosophy, that’s all. We conduct our science in isolation, and we enjoy only limited communication with other colonies. As a social model it has its disadvantages, but it means we aren’t forever jealous of what they’re achieving on some other world that happens to be a few decades ahead of us because of an accident of history or location. We think that the benefits outweigh the costs.”

  “Well, it seems to work,” Crane said. “You have a remarkably stable society here, Chairman. Verging on the Utopian, some might say.”

  Tak Thonburi caressed his cowlick. “We can’t complain.”

  “Nor can we,” said the man Naqi recognised as quizzical-faced Simon Matsubara. “If you hadn’t enforced this isolation, your own Juggler research would have been as hopelessly compromised as everywhere else.”

  “But the isolation isn’t absolute, is it?”

  The voice was quiet, but commanding.

  Naqi followed the voice to the speaker. It was Rafael Weir, the man who had been identified as a possible security risk. Of the three who had emerged from Moreau’s shuttle he was the least remarkable looking, possessing the kind of amorphous face that would allow him to blend in with almost any crowd. Had her attention not been drawn to him, he would have been the last one she noticed. He was not unattractive, but there was nothing particularly striking or charismatic about his looks. According to the security dossier, he had made a number of efforts to break away from the main party of the delegation while they had been visiting research stations. They could have been accidents—one or two other party members had become separated at other times—but it was beginning to look a little too deliberate.

  “No,” Tak Thonburi answered. “We’re not absolute isolationists, or we’d never have given permission for the Voice of Evening to assume orbit around Turquoise. But we don’t solicit passing traffic either. Our welcome is as warm as anyone’s—we hope—but we don’t encourage visitors.”

  “Are we the first to visit, since your settlement?” Weir asked.

  “The first starship?” Tak Thonburi shook his head. “No. But it’s been a number of years since the last one.”

  “Which was?”

  “The Pelican in Impiety, a century ago.”

  “An amusing coincidence, then,” Weir said.

  Tak Thonburi narrowed his eyes. “Coincidence?”

  “The Pelican’s next port of call was Haven, if I’m not mistaken. It was en route from Zion, but it made a trade stopover around Turquoise.” He smiled. “And we have come from Haven, so history already binds our two worlds, albeit tenuously.”

  Thonburi’s eyes narrowed. He was trying to read Weir and evidently failing. “We don’t talk about the Pelican too much. There were technical benefits—vacuum bladder production methods, information technologies ... but there was also a fair bit of unpleasantness. The wounds haven’t entirely healed.”

  “Let’s hope this visit will be remembered more fondly,” Weir said.

  Amesha Crane nodded, fingering one of the items of silver jewellery in her hair. “Agreed. All the indications are favourable, at the very least. We’ve arrived at a most auspicious time.” She turned to Naqi. “I find the Moat project fascinating, and I’m sure I speak for the entire Vahishta delegation. I may as well tell you that no one else has attempted anything remotely like it. Tell me, scientist to scientist. Do you honestly think it will work?”

  “We won’t know until we try,” Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question.

  “Fascinating, all the same.” Crane’s expression was knowing, as if she understood Naqi’s predicament perfectly. “I understand that you’re very close to running the first experiment?”

  “Given that it’s taken us twenty years to get this far, yes—we’re close. But we’re still looking at three to four months, maybe longer. It’s not something we want to rush.”

  “That’s a great pity,” Crane said, tu
rning now to Thonburi. “In three to four months we might be on our way. Still, it would have been something to see, wouldn’t it?”

  Thonburi leaned toward Naqi. The alcohol on his breath was a fog of cheap vinegar. “I suppose there wouldn’t be any chance of accelerating the schedule, would there?”

  “Out of the question, I’m afraid,” Naqi said

  “That’s just too bad,” said Amesha Crane. Still toying with her jewellery, she turned to the others. “But we mustn’t let a little detail like that spoil our visit, must we?”

  They returned to the Moat using the Voice of Evening’s shuttle. There was another civic reception to be endured upon arrival, but it was a much smaller affair than the one in Sukhothai-Sanikiluaq. Dr. Jotah Sivaraksa was there, of course, and once Naqi had dealt with the business of introducing the party to him she was able to relax for the first time in many hours, melting into the corner of the room and watching the interaction between visitors and locals with a welcome sense of detachment. Naqi was tired and had difficulty keeping her eyes open. She saw everything through a sleepy blur, the delegates surrounding Sivaraksa like pillars of fire, the fabric of their costumes rippling with the slightest movement, reds and russets and chrome yellows dancing like sparks or sheets of flame. Naqi left as soon as it was polite to do so, and when she reached her bed she fell immediately into troubled sleep, dreaming of squadrons of purple-winged angels falling from the skies and of the great giant rising from the depths, clawing the seaweed and kelp of ages from his eyes.

  In the morning she awoke without really feeling refreshed. Anaemic light pierced the slats on her window. She was not due to meet the delegates again for another three or four hours, so there was time to turn over and try and catch some proper sleep. But she knew from experience that it would be futile.

  She got up. To her surprise, there was a new message on her console from Jotah Sivaraksa. What, she wondered, did he have to say to her that he could not have said at the reception, or later this morning?

  She opened the message and read.

  “Sivaraksa,” she said to herself. “Are you insane? It can’t be done.”