The message informed her that there had been a change of plan. The first closure of the sea-doors would be attempted in two days, while the delegates were still on the Moat.
It was pure madness. They were months away from that. Yes, the doors could be closed—the basic machinery for doing that was in place—and yes, the doors could be hermetically tight for at least one hundred hours after closure. But nothing else was ready. The sensitive monitoring equipment, the failsafe subsystems, the backups ... None of that would be in place and operational for many weeks. Then there was supposed to be at least six weeks of testing, slowly building up to the event itself ...
To do it in two days made no sense at all, except to a politician. At best all they would learn was whether or not the Jugglers had remained inside the Moat when the door was closed. They would learn nothing about how the data flow was terminated, or how the internal connections between the nodes adapted to the loss of contact with the wider ocean.
Naqi swore and hit the console. She wanted to blame Sivaraksa, but she knew that was unfair. Sivaraksa had to keep the politicians happy, or the whole project would be endangered. He was just doing what he had to do, and he almost certainly liked it even less than she did.
Naqi pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and found some coffee in one of the adjoining mess rooms. The Moat was deserted, quiet except for the womblike throb of generators and air-circulation systems. A week ago it would have been as noisy now as at any other time of day, for the construction had continued around the clock. But the heavy work was done now; the last ore dirigible had arrived while Naqi was away. All that remained was the relatively light work of completing the Moat’s support subsystems. Despite what Sivaraksa had said in his message there was really very little additional work needed to close the doors. Even two days of frantic activity would make no difference to the usefulness of the stunt.
When she had judged her state of mind to be calmer, she returned to her room and called Sivaraksa. It was still far too early, but seeing as the bastard had already ruined her day she saw no reason not to reciprocate.
“Naqi.” His silver hair was a sleep-matted mess on the screen. “I take it you got my message?”
“You didn’t think I’d take it lying down, did you?”
“I don’t like it anymore than you do. But I see the political necessity.”
“Do you? This isn’t like switching a light on and off, Jotah.” His eyes widened at the familiarity, but she pressed on regardless. “If we screw up the first time, there might never be a second chance. The Jugglers have to play along. Without them all you’ve got here is a very expensive midocean refuelling point. Does that make political sense to you?”
He pushed green fingers through the mess of his hair. “Have some breakfast, get some fresh air, then come to my office. We’ll talk about it then.”
“I’ve had breakfast, thanks very much.”
“Then get the fresh air. You’ll feel better for it.” Sivaraksa rubbed his eyes. ‘You’re not very happy about this, are you?”
“It’s bloody madness. And the worst thing is you know it.”
“And my hands are tied. Ten years from now, Naqi, you’ll be sitting in my place having to make similar decisions. And ten to one there’ll be some idealistic young scientist telling you what a hopeless piece of deadwood you are.” He managed a weary smile. “Mark my words, because I want you to remember this conversation when it happens.”
“There’s nothing I can do to stop this, is there?”
“I’ll be in my office in ...” Sivaraksa glanced at a clock. “Thirty minutes. We can talk about it properly then.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
But even as she said that she knew she sounded petulant and inflexible. Sivaraksa was right: it was impossible to manage a project as complex and expensive as the Moat without a degree of compromise.
Naqi decided that Sivaraksa’s advice—at least the part about getting some fresh air—was worth heeding. She descended a helical staircase until she reached the upper surface of the Moat’s ring-shaped wall. The concrete was cold beneath her bare feet and a pleasant cool breeze caressed her legs and arms. The sky had brightened on one horizon. Machines and supplies were arranged neatly on the upper surface ready for use, although further construction would be halted until the delegates completed their visit. Stepping nimbly over the tracks, conduits and cables that crisscrossed each other on the upper surface, Naqi walked to the side. A high railing, painted in high-visibility rot-resistant sealer, fenced the inner part of the Moat. She touched it to make sure it was dry, then leaned over. The distant side of the Moat was a colourless thread, twenty kilometres away, like a very low wall of sea mist.
What could be done in two days? Nothing. Or at least nothing compared to what had always been planned. But if the new schedule was a fait accompli—and that was the message she was getting from Sivaraksa—then it was her responsibility to find a way to squeeze some scientific return from the event. She looked down at the cut, and at the many spindly gantries and catwalks that spanned the aperture or hung some way toward the centre of the Moat. Perhaps if she arranged for some standard-issue probes to be prepared today, the type dropped from dirigibles ...
Naqi’s eyes darted around, surveying fixtures and telemetry conduits.
It would be hard work to get them in place in time, and even harder to get them patched into some kind of real-time acquisition system. ... But it was doable, just barely. The data quality would be laughable compared to the supersensitive instruments that were going to be installed over the next few months. ... But crude was a lot better than nothing at all.
She laughed, aloud. An hour ago she would have stuck pins into herself rather than collaborate in this kind of fiasco.
Naqi walked along the railing until she reached a pair of pillar-mounted binoculars. They were smeared with rot-protection. She wiped the lens and eyepieces clean with a rag that was tied to the pedestal, then swung the binoculars in a slow arc, panning across the dark circle of water trapped within the Moat. Only vague patches of what Naqi would have called open water were visible. The rest was either a verdant porridge of Juggler organisms, or fully grown masses of organised floating matter, linked together by trunks and veins of the same green biomass. The latest estimate was that there were three small nodes within the ring. The smell was atrocious, but that was an excellent sign as well: it correlated strongly with the density of organisms in the nodes. She had experienced that smell many times, but it never failed to slam her back to that morning when Mina had died.
As much as the Pattern Jugglers “knew” anything, they were surely aware of what was planned here. They had drunk the minds of the swimmers who had already entered the sea near or within the Moat, and not one of those swimmers was ignorant of the project’s ultimate purpose. It was possible that that knowledge simply couldn’t be parsed into a form the aliens would understand, but Naqi considered that unlikely: the closure of the Moat would be about as stark a concept as one could imagine. If nothing else, geometry was the one thing the Jugglers did understand. And yet the aliens chose to remain within the closing Moat, hinting that they would tolerate the final closure that would seal them off from the rest of the ocean.
Perhaps they were not impressed. Perhaps they knew that the event would not rob them of every channel of communication, but only the chemical medium of the ocean. Sprites and other airborne organisms would still be able to cross the barrier. It was impossible to tell. The only way to know was to complete the experiment—to close the massive sea-doors—and see what happened.
She leaned back, taking her eyes from the binoculars.
Now Naqi saw something unexpected. It was a glint of hard white light, scudding across the water within the Moat.
Naqi squinted, but still she could not make out the object. She swung the binoculars hard around, got her eyes behind them and then zigzagged until something flashed through the field of view. She backed up and l
ocked onto it.
It was a boat, and there was someone in it.
She keyed in the image zoom/stabilise function and the craft swelled to clarity across a clear kilometre of sea. The craft was a ceramic-hulled vessel of the type that the swimmer teams used, five or six metres from bow to stern. The person sat behind a curved spray shield, their hands on the handlebars of the control pillar. An inboard thruster propelled the boat without ever touching water.
The figure was difficult to make out, but the billowing orange clothes left no room for doubt. It was one of the Vahishta delegates. And Naqi fully expected it to be Rafael Weir.
He was headed toward the closest node.
For an agonising few moments she did not know what to do. He was going to attempt to swim, she thought, just like she and Mina had done. And he would be no better prepared for the experience. She had to stop him, somehow. He would reach the node in only a few minutes.
Naqi sprinted back to the tower, breathless when she arrived. She reached a communications post and tried to find the right channel for the boat. But either she was doing it wrong or Weir had sabotaged the radio. What next? Technically, there was a security presence on the Moat, especially given the official visit. But what did the security goons know about chasing boats? All their training was aimed at dealing with internal crises, and none of them were competent to go anywhere near an active node.
She called them anyway, alerting them to what had happened. Then she called Sivaraksa, telling him the same news. “I think it’s Weir,” she said. “I’m going to try and stop him.”
“Naqi ...” he said warningly.
“This is my responsibility, Jotah. Let me handle it.”
Naqi ran back outside again. The closest elevator down to sea level was out of service; the next one was a kilometre farther around the ring. She didn’t have that much time. Instead she jogged along the line of railings until she reached a break that admitted entry to a staircase that descended the steep inner wall of the Moat. The steps and handrails had been helpfully greased with antirot, just to make her descent more treacherous. There were five hundred steps down to sea level but she took them two or three at a time, sliding down the handrails until she reached the grilled platforms where the stairways reversed direction. All the while she watched the tiny white speck of the boat, seemingly immobile now that it was so far away, but undoubtedly narrowing the distance to the node with each minute. As she worked her way down she had plenty of time to think about what was going through the delegate’s head. She was sure now that it was Weir. It did not really surprise her that he wanted to swim: it was what everyone who studied the Jugglers yearned for. But why make this unofficial attempt now when a little gentle persuasion would have made it possible anyway? Given Tak Thonburi’s eagerness to please the delegates, it would not have been beyond the bounds of possibility for a swimming expedition to be organised. ... The corps would have protested, but just like Naqi they would have been given a forceful lesson in the refined art of political compromise.
But evidently Weir hadn’t been prepared to wait. It all made sense, at any rate: the times when he had dodged away from the party before must have all been abortive attempts to reach the Jugglers. But only now had he seen his opportunity.
Naqi reached the water level, where jetties floated on ceramic-sheathed pontoons. Most of the boats were suspended out of the water on cradles, to save their hulls from unnecessary degradation. Fortunately there was an emergency rescue boat already afloat. Its formerly white hull had the flaking, pea-green scab patterning of advanced rot, but it still had a dozen or so hours of seaworthiness in it. Naqi jumped aboard, released the boat from its moorings and fired up the thruster. In a moment she was racing away from the jetty, away from the vast stained edifice of the Moat itself. She steered a course through the least viscous stretches of water, avoiding conspicuous rafts of green matter.
She peered ahead, through the boat’s spray-drenched shield. It had been easy to keep track of Weir’s boat when she had been a hundred metres higher, but now she kept losing him behind swells or miniature islands of Juggler matter. After a minute or so she gave up trying to follow the boat, and instead diverted her concentration to finding the quickest route to the node.
She flipped on the radio. “Jotah? This is Naqi. I’m in the water, closing on Weir.”
There was a pause, a crackle, then: “What’s the status?”
She had to shout over the abrasive thump, thump, thump of the boat, even though the thruster was nearly silent.
“I’ll reach the node in four or five minutes. Can’t see Weir, but I don’t think it matters.”
“We can see him. He’s still headed for the node.”
“Good. Can you spare some more boats, in case he decides to make a run for another node?”
“They’ll be leaving in a minute or so. I’m waking everyone I can.”
“What about the other delegates?”
Sivaraksa did not answer her immediately. “Most are still asleep. I have Amesha Crane and Simon Matsubara in my office, however.”
“Let me speak to them.”
“Just a moment,” he said, after the same brief hesitation.
“Crane here,” said the woman.
“I think I’m chasing Weir. Can you confirm that?”
“He isn’t accounted for,” she told Naqi. “But it’ll be a few minutes until we can be certain it’s him.”
“I’m not expecting a surprise. Weir already had a question mark over him, Amesha. We were waiting for him to try something.”
“Were you?” Perhaps it was her imagination, but Crane sounded genuinely surprised. “Why? What had he done?”
“You don’t know?”
“No ...” Crane trailed off.
“He was one of us,” Matsubara said. “A good ... delegate. We had no reason to distrust him.”
Perhaps Naqi was imagining this as well, but it almost sounded as if Matsubara had intended to say “disciple” rather than “delegate.”
Crane came back on the radio. “Please do your best to apprehend him, Naqi. This is a source of great embarrassment to us. He mustn’t do any harm.”
Naqi gunned the boat harder, no longer bothering to avoid the smaller patches of organic matter. “No,” she said. “He mustn’t.”
III
Something changed ahead.
“Naqi?” It was Jotah Sivaraksa’s voice.
“What?”
“Weir’s slowed his boat. From our vantage point it looks as if he’s reached the perimeter of the node. He seems to be circumnavigating it.”
“I can’t see him yet. He must be picking the best spot to dive in.”
“But it won’t work, will it?” Sivaraksa asked. “There has to be an element of cooperation with the Jugglers. They have to invite the swimmer to enter the sea, or nothing happens.”
“Maybe he doesn’t realise that,” Naqi said, under her breath. It was of no concern to her how closely Weir was adhering to the usual method of initiating Juggler communion. Even if the Jugglers did not cooperate—even if all Weir did was flounder in thick green water—there was no telling the hidden harm that might be done. She had already grudgingly accepted the acceleration of the closure operation. There was no way she was going to tolerate another upset, another unwanted perturbation of the experimental system. Not on her watch.
“He’s stopped,” Sivaraksa said excitedly. “Can you see him yet?”
Naqi stood up in her seat, even though she felt perilously out of balance. “Wait. Yes, I think so. I’ll be there in a minute or so.”
“What are you going to do?” Crane asked. “I hesitate to say it, but Weir may not respond to rational argument at this point. Simply requesting that he leave the water won’t necessarily work. Um, do you have a weapon?”
“Yes,” Naqi said. “I’m sitting in it.”
She did not allow herself to relax, but at least now she felt that the situation was slipping back into her control. She
would kill Weir rather than have him contaminate the node.
His boat was visible now only as a smudge of white, intermittently popping up between folds and hummocks of shifting green. Her imagination sketched in the details. Weir would be preparing to swim, stripping off until he was naked or nearly so. Perhaps he would feel some kind of erotic charge as he prepared for immersion. She did not doubt that he would be apprehensive, and perhaps he would hesitate on the threshold of the act, teetering on the edge of the boat before committing himself to the water. But a fanatic desire had driven him this far and she doubted that it would fail him.
“Naqi ...”
“Jotah?”
“Naqi, he’s moving again. He didn’t enter the water. He didn’t even look like he had any intention of swimming.”
“He saw I was coming. I take it he’s heading for the next closest node?”
“Perhaps ...” But Jotah Sivaraksa sounded far from certain.
She saw the boat again. It was moving fast—much faster than it had appeared before—but that was only because she was now seeing lateral motion.
The next node was a distant island framed by the background of the Moat’s encircling rim. If he headed that way she would be hard behind him all the way there as well. No matter his desire to swim, he must realise that she could thwart his every attempt.
Naqi looked back. The twin towers framing the cut were smothered in a haze of sea mist, their geometric details smeared into a vague suggestion of haphazard complexity. They suggested teetering, stratified sea-stacks, million-year-old towers of weathered and eroded rock guarding the narrow passage to the open ocean. Beneath them, winking in and out of clarity, she saw three or four other boats making their way into the Moat. The ponderous teardrop of a passenger dirigible was nosing away from the side of one of the towers, the low dawn sun throwing golden highlights along the fluted lines of its gondola. Naqi made out the sleek deltoid of the Voice of Evening’s shuttle, but it was still parked where it had landed.
She looked back to the node where Weir had hesitated.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 105