Something was happening.
The node had become vastly more active than a minute earlier. It resembled a green, steep-sided volcanic island that was undergoing some catastrophic seismic calamity. The entire mass of the node was trembling, rocking and throbbing with an eerie regularity. Concentric swells of disturbed water raced away from it, sickening troughs that made the speeding boat pitch and slide. Naqi slowed her boat, some instinct telling her that it was now largely futile to pursue Weir. Then she turned around so that she faced the node properly, and, cautiously, edged closer, ignoring the nausea she felt as the boat ducked and dived from crest to trough.
The node, like all nodes, had always shown a rich surface topology; fused hummocks and tendrils; fabulous domes and minarets and helter-skelters of organised biomass, linked and entangled by a telegraphic system of draping aerial tendrils. In any instant it resembled a human city—or, more properly, a fairy-tale human city—that had been efficiently smothered in green moss. The bright moving motes of sprites dodged through the interstices, the portholes and arches of the urban mass. The metropolitan structure only hinted at the node’s byzantine interior architecture, and much of that could only be glimpsed or implied.
But this node was like a city going insane. It was accelerating, running through cycles of urban renewal and redesign with indecent haste. Structures were evolving before Naqi’s eyes. She had seen change this rapid just before Mina was taken, but normally those kinds of changes happened too slowly to be seen at all, like the daily movement of shadows.
The throbbing had decreased, but the flickering change was now throwing out a steady, warm, malodorous breeze. And when she stopped the boat—she dared come no closer now—Naqi heard the node. It was like the whisper of a billion forest leaves presaging a summer storm.
Whatever was happening here, it was about to become catastrophic.
Some fundamental organisation had been lost. The changes were happening too quickly, with too little central coordination. Tendrils thrashed like whips, unable to connect to anything. They flailed against each other. Structures were forming and collapsing. The node was fracturing, so that there were three, four, perhaps five distinct cores of flickering growth. As soon as she had the measure of it, the process shifted it all. Meagre light flickered within the epileptic mass. Sprites swarmed in confused flight patterns, orbiting mindlessly between foci. The sound of the node had become a distant shriek.
“It’s dying ...” Naqi breathed.
Weir had done something to it. What, she couldn’t guess. But this could not be a coincidence.
The shrieking died down.
The breeze ceased.
The node had stopped its convulsions. She looked at it, hoping against hope that perhaps it had overcome whatever destabilising influence Weir had introduced. The structures were still misshapen, there was still an impression of incoherence, but the city was inert. The cycling motion of the sprites slowed, and a few of them dropped down into the mass, as if to roost.
A calm had descended.
Then Naqi heard another sound. It was lower than anything she had heard before—almost subsonic. It sounded less like thunder than like a very distant, very heated conversation.
It was coming from the approximate centre of the node.
She watched as a smooth green mound rose from the centre of the node, resembling a flattened hemisphere. It grew larger by the second, assimilating the malformed structures with quiet indifference. They disappeared into the surface of the mound as if into a wall of fog, but they did not emerge again. The mound only increased its size, rumbling toward Naqi. The entire mass of the node was changing into a single undifferentiated mass.
“Jotah ...” she said.
“We see it, Naqi. We see it but we don’t understand it.”
“Weir must have used some kind of ... weapon against it,” she said.
“We don’t know that he’s harmed it. ... He might just have precipitated a change to a state we haven’t documented.”
“That still makes it a weapon in my book. I’m scared, Jotah.”
“You think I’m not?”
Around her the sea was changing. She had forgotten about the submerged tendrils that connected the nodes. They were as thick as hawsers, and now they were writhing and thrashing just beneath the surface of the water. Green-tinged spume lifted into the air. It was as if unseen aquatic monsters were wrestling, locked in some dire, to-the-death contest.
“Naqi ... We’re seeing changes in the closest of the two remaining nodes.”
“No,” she said, as if denying it would make any difference.
“I’m sorry ...”
“Where is Weir?”
“We’ve lost him. There’s too much surface disturbance.”
She realised then what had to be done. The thought arrived in her head with a crashing urgency.
“Jotah ... You have to close the sea-doors. Now. Immediately. Before whatever Weir’s unleashed has a chance to reach open ocean. That also happens to be Weir’s only escape route.”
Sivaraksa, to his credit, did not argue. “Yes. You’re right. I’ll start closure. But it will take quite a few minutes. ...”
“I know, Jotah!”
She cursed herself for not having thought of this sooner, and cursed Sivaraksa for the same error. But she could hardly blame either of them. Closure had never been something to take lightly. A few hours ago it had been an event months in the future—an experiment to test the willingness of the Jugglers to cooperate with human plans. Now it had turned into an emergency amputation, something to be done with brutal haste.
She peered at the gap between the towers. At the very least it would take several minutes for Sivaraksa to initiate closure. It was not simply a matter of pressing a button on his desk, but of rousing two or three specialist technicians, who would have to be immediately convinced that this was not some elaborate hoax. And then the machinery would have to work. The mechanisms that forced the sea-doors together had been tested numerous times. ... But the machinery had never been driven to its limit; the doors had never moved more than a few metres together. Now they would have to work perfectly, closing with watchmaker precision.
And when had anything on Turquoise ever worked the first time?
There. The tiniest, least perceptible narrowing of the gap. It was all happening with agonising slowness.
She looked back to what remained of the node. The mound had consumed all the biomass available to it and had now ceased its growth. It was as if a child had sculpted in clay some fantastically intricate model of a city, which a callous adult had then squashed into a single blank mass, erasing all trace of its former complexity. The closest of the remaining nodes was showing something of the same transformation, Naqi saw: it was running through the frantic cycle that had presaged the emergence of the mound. She guessed now that the cycle had been the node’s attempt to nullify whatever Weir had used against it, like a computer trying to reallocate resources to compensate for some crippling viral attack.
She could do nothing for the Jugglers now.
Naqi turned the boat around and headed back toward the cut. The sea-doors had narrowed the gap by perhaps a quarter.
The changes taking place within the Moat had turned the water turbulent, even at the jetty. She hitched the boat to a mooring point and then took the elevator up the side of the wall, preferring to sprint the distance along the top rather than face the climb. By the time she reached the cut the doors were three quarters of the way to closure, and to Naqi’s immense relief the machinery had yet to falter.
She approached the tower. She had expected to see more people out on the top of the Moat, even if she knew that Sivaraksa would still be in his control centre. But no one was around. This was just beginning to register as a distinct wrongness when Sivaraksa emerged into daylight, stumbling from the door at the foot of the tower.
For an instant she was on the point of calling his name. Then she realised that he was st
umbling because he had been injured—his fingers were scarlet with blood—and that he was trying to get away from someone or something.
Naqi dropped to the ground behind a stack of construction slabs. Through gaps between the slabs she observed Sivaraksa. He was swatting at something, like a man being chased by a persistent wasp. Something tiny and silver harried him. More than one thing, in fact: a small swarm of them, streaming out the open door. Sivaraksa fell to his knees with a moan, brushing ineffectually at his tormentors. His face was turning red, smeared with his own blood. He slumped on one side.
Naqi remained frozen with fear.
A person stepped from the open door.
The figure was garbed in shades of fire. It was Amesha Crane. For an absurd moment Naqi assumed that the woman was about to spring to Sivaraksa’s assistance. It was something about her demeanour. Naqi found it hard to believe that someone so apparently serene could commit such a violent act.
But Crane did not step closer to Sivaraksa. She merely extended her arms before her, with her fingers outspread. She sustained the oddly theatrical gesture, the muscles in her neck standing proud and rigid.
The silver things departed Sivaraksa.
They swarmed through the air, slowing as they neared Crane. Then, with a startling degree of orchestrated obedience, they slid onto her fingers, locked themselves around her wrists, clasped onto the lobes of her ears.
Her jewellery had attacked Sivaraksa.
Crane glanced at the man one last time, spun on her heels and then retreated back into the tower.
Naqi waited until she was certain the woman was not coming back, then started to emerge from behind the pile of slabs. But Sivaraksa saw her. He said nothing, but his agonised eyes widened enough for Naqi to get the warning. She remained where she was, her heart hammering.
Nothing happened for another minute.
Then something moved above, changing the play of light across the surface of the Moat. The Voice of Evening’s shuttle was detaching from the tower, a flicker of white machinery beneath the manta curve of its hull.
The shuttle loitered above the cut, as if observing the final moment of closure. Naqi heard the huge doors grind shut. Then the shuttle banked, and headed over the circular sea, no more than two hundred metres above the waves. Some distance out it halted and executed a sharp right-angled turn. Then it resumed its flight, moving concentrically around the inner wall.
Sivaraksa closed his eyes. She thought he might have died, but then he opened them again and made the tiniest of nods. Naqi left her place of hiding. She crossed the open ground to Sivaraksa in a low, crablike stoop.
She knelt down by him, cradling his head in one hand and holding his own hand with the other. “Jotah ... What happened?”
He managed to answer her. “They turned on us. The nineteen other delegates. As soon as ...” He paused, summoning strength. “As soon as Weir made his move.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Join the club,” he said, managing a smile.
“I need to get you inside,” she said.
“Won’t help. Everyone else is dead. Or will be by now. They murdered us all.”
“No.”
“Kept me alive until the end. Wanted me to give the orders.” He coughed. Blood spattered her hand.
“I can still get you ...”
“Naqi. Save yourself. Get help.”
She realised that he was about to die.
“The shuttle?”
“Looking for Weir. I think.”
“They want Weir back?”
“No. Heard them talking. They want Weir dead. They have to be sure.”
Naqi frowned. She understood none of this, or, at least, her understanding was only now beginning to crystallise. She had labelled Weir as the villain because he had harmed her beloved Pattern Jugglers. But Crane and her entourage had murdered people, dozens if what Sivaraksa said was correct. They appeared to want Weir dead as well. So what did that make Weir, now?
“Jotah ... I have to find Weir. I have to find out why he did this.” She looked back toward the centre of the Moat. The shuttle was continuing its search. “Did your security people get a trace on him again?”
Sivaraksa was near the end. She thought he was never going to answer her. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, they found him again.”
“And? Any idea where he is? I might still be able to reach him before the shuttle does.”
“Wrong place.”
She leaned closer. “Jotah?”
“Wrong place. Amesha’s looking in the wrong place. Weir got through the cut. He’s in the open ocean.”
“I’m going after him. Perhaps I can stop him. ...”
“Try,” Sivaraksa said. “But I’m not sure what difference it will make. I have a feeling, Naqi. A very bad feeling. Things are ending. It was good, wasn’t it? While it lasted?”
“I haven’t given up just yet,” Naqi said.
He found one last nugget of strength. “I knew you wouldn’t. Right to trust you. One thing, Naqi. One thing that might make a difference ... if it comes to the worst, that is ...”
“Jotah?”
“Tak Thonburi told me this ... the highest secret known to the Snowflake Council. Arviat, Naqi.”
For a moment she thought she had misheard him, or that he was sliding into delirium. “Arviat? The city that sinned against the sea?”
“It was real,” Sivaraksa said.
There were a number of lifeboats and emergency service craft stored at the top of near-vertical slipways, a hundred metres above the external sea. She took a small but fast emergency craft with a sealed cockpit, her stomach knotting as the vessel commenced its slide toward the ocean. The boat submerged before resurfacing, boosted up to speed and then deployed ceramic hydrofoils to minimise the contact between the hull and the water. Naqi had no precise heading to follow, but she believed Weir would have followed a reasonably straight line away from the cut, aiming to get as far away from the Moat as possible before the other delegates realised their mistake. It would only require a small deviation from that course to take him to the nearest external node, which seemed as likely a destination as any.
When she was twenty kilometres from the Moat, Naqi allowed herself a moment to look back. The structure was a thin white line etched on the horizon, the towers and the now-sealed cut faintly visible as interruptions in the line’s smoothness. Quills of dark smoke climbed from a dozen spots along the length of the structure. It was too far for Naqi to be certain that she saw flames licking from the towers, but she considered it likely.
The closest external node appeared over the horizon fifteen minutes later. It was nowhere as impressive as the one that had taken Mina, but it was still a larger, more complex structure than any of the nodes that had formed within the Moat—a major urban megalopolis, perhaps, rather than a moderately sized city. Against the skyline Naqi saw spires and rotunda and coronets of green, bridged by a tracery of elevated tendrils. Sprites were rapidly moving silhouettes. There was motion, but it was largely confined to the flying creatures. The node was not yet showing the frenzied changes she had witnessed within the Moat.
Had Weir gone somewhere else?
She pressed onward, slowing the boat slightly now that the water was thickening with microorganisms and it was necessary to steer around the occasional larger floating structure. The boat’s sonar picked out dozens of submerged tendrils converging on the node, suspended just below the surface. The tendrils reached away in all directions, to the limits of the boat’s sonar range. Most would have reached over the horizon, to nodes many hundreds of kilometres away. But it was a topological certainty that some of them had been connected to the nodes inside the Moat. Evidently, Weir’s contagion had never escaped through the cut. Naqi doubted that the doors had closed in time to impede whatever chemical signals were transmitting the fatal message. It was more likely that some latent Juggler self-protection mechanism had cut in, the dying nodes sending emergency
termination-of-connection signals that forced the tendrils to sever without human assistance.
Naqi had just decided that she had guessed wrongly about Weir’s plan when she saw a rectilinear furrow gouged right through one of the largest subsidiary structures. The wound was healing itself as she watched—it would be gone in a matter of minutes—but enough remained for her to tell that Weir’s boat must have cleaved through the mass very recently. It made sense. Weir had already demonstrated that he had no interest in preserving the Pattern Jugglers.
With renewed determination, Naqi gunned the boat forward. She no longer worried about inflicting local damage on the floating masses. There was a great deal more at stake than the well-being of a single node.
She felt a warmth on the back of her neck.
At the same instant the sky, sea and floating structures ahead of her pulsed with a cruel brightness. Her own shadow stretched forward ominously. The brightness faded over the next few seconds, and then she dared to look back, half-knowing what she would see.
A mass of hot, roiling gas was climbing into the air from the centre of the node. It tugged a column of matter beneath it, like the knotted and gnarled spinal column of a horribly swollen brain. Against the mushroom cloud she saw the tiny moving speck of the delegates’ shuttle.
A minute later the sound of the explosion reached her, but although it was easily the loudest thing she had ever heard, it was not as deafening as she had expected. The boat lurched; the sea fumed and then was still again. She assumed that the Moat’s wall had absorbed much of the energy of the blast.
Suddenly fearful that there might be another explosion, Naqi turned back toward the node. At the same instant she saw Weir’s boat, racing perhaps three hundred metres ahead of her. He was beginning to curve and slow as he neared the impassable perimeter of the node. Naqi knew that she did not have time to delay.
That was when Weir saw her. His boat sped up again, arcing hard away. Naqi steered immediately, certain that her boat was faster and that it was now only a matter of time before she had him. A minute later Weir’s boat disappeared around the curve of the node’s perimeter. She might have stood a chance of getting an’ echo from his hull, but this close to the node all sonar returns were too garbled to be of any use. Naqi steered anyway, hoping that Weir would make the tactical mistake of striking for another node. In open water he stood no chance at all, but perhaps he understood that as well.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 106