She had circumnavigated a third of the node’s perimeter when she caught up with him again. He had not tried to run for it. Instead he had brought the boat to a halt within the comparative shelter of an inlet on the perimeter. He was standing up at the rear of the boat, with something small and dark in his hand.
Naqi slowed her boat as she approached him. She had popped back the canopy before it occurred to her that Weir might be equipped with the same weapons as Crane.
She stood up herself. “Weir?”
He smiled. “I’m sorry to have caused so much trouble. But I don’t think it could have happened any other way.”
She let this pass. “That thing in your hand?”
“Yes?”
“It’s a weapon, isn’t it?”
She could see it clearly now. It was merely a glass bauble, little larger than a child’s marble. There was something opaque inside it, but she could not tell if it contained fluid or dark crystals.
“I doubt that a denial would be very plausible at this point.” He nodded, and she sensed the lifting, partially at least, of some appalling burden. “Yes, it’s a weapon. A Juggler killer.”
“Until today, I’d have said no such thing was possible.”
“I doubt that it was very easy to synthesize. Countless biological entities have entered their oceans, and none of them have ever brought anything with them that the Juggler couldn’t assimilate in a harmless fashion. Doubtless some of those entities tried to inflict deliberate harm, if only out of morbid curiosity. None of them succeeded. Of course, you can kill Jugglers by brute force. ...” He glanced toward the Moat, where the mushroom cloud was dissipating. “But that isn’t the point. Not subtle. But this is. It exploits a logical flaw in the Jugglers’ own informational processing algorithms. It’s insidious. And no, humans most certainly didn’t invent it. We’re clever, but we’re not that clever.”
Naqi strove to keep him talking. “Who made it, Weir?”
“The Ultras sold it to us in a presynthesized form. I’ve heard rumours that it was found inside the topmost chamber of a heavily fortified alien structure. ... Another that it was synthesized by a rival group of Jugglers. Who knows? Who cares, even? It does what we ask of it. That’s all that matters.”
“Please don’t use it, Rafael.”
“I have to. It’s what I came here to do.”
“But I thought you all loved the Jugglers.”
His fingers caressed the glass globe. It looked terribly fragile. “We?”
“Crane ... Her delegates.”
“They do. But I’m not one of them.”
“Tell me what this is about, Rafael.”
“It would be better if you just accepted what I have to do.”
Naqi swallowed. “If you kill them, you kill more than just an alien life form. You erase the memory of every sentient creature that’s ever entered the ocean.”
“Unfortunately, that rather happens to be the point.”
Weir dropped the glass into the sea.
It hit the water, bobbed under and then popped back out again, floating on the surface. The small globe was already immersed in a brackish scum of gray-green microorganisms. They were beginning to lap higher up the sides of the globe, exploring it. A couple of millimetres of ordinary glass would succumb to Juggler erosion in perhaps thirty minutes. ... But Naqi guessed that this was not ordinary glass, that it was designed to degrade much more rapidly.
She jumped back down into her control seat and shot her boat forward. She came alongside Weir’s boat, trapping the globe between the two craft. Taking desperate care not to nudge the hulls together, she stopped her boat and leaned over as far as she could without falling in. Her fingertips brushed the glass. Maddeningly, she could not quite get a grip on it. She made one last valiant effort and it drifted beyond her reach. Now it was out of her range, no matter how hard she stretched. Weir watched impassively.
Naqi slipped into the water. The layer of Juggler organisms licked her chin and nose, the smell immediate and overwhelming now that she was in such close proximity. Her fear was absolute. It was the first time she had entered the water since Mina’s death.
She caught the globe, taking hold of it with the exquisite care she might have reserved for a rare bird’s egg.
Already the glass had the porous texture of pumice.
She held it up, for Weir to see.
“I won’t let you do this, Rafael.”
“I admire your concern.”
“It’s more than concern. My sister is here. She’s in the ocean. And I won’t let you take her away from me.”
Weir reached inside a pocket and removed another globe.
* * *
They sped away from the node in Naqi’s boat. The new globe rested in his hand like a gift. He had not yet dropped it in the sea, although the possibility was only ever an instant away. They were far from any node now, but the globe would be guaranteed to come into contact with Juggler matter sooner or later.
Naqi opened a watertight equipment locker, pushing aside the flare pistol and first-aid kit that lay within. Carefully she placed the globe inside, and then watched in horror as the glass immediately cracked and dissolved, releasing its poison: little black irregularly shaped grains like burnt sugar. If the boat sank, the locker would eventually be consumed into the ocean, along with its fatal contents. She considered using the flare pistol to incinerate the remains, but there seemed too much danger of dispersing it at the same time. Perhaps the toxin had a restricted life span once it came into contact with air, but that was nothing she could count on.
But Weir had not thrown the third globe into the sea. Not yet. Something she had said had made him hesitate.
“Your sister?”
“You know the story,” Naqi said. “Mina was a conformal. The ocean assimilated her entirely, rather than just recording her neural patterns. It took her as a prize.”
“And you believe that she’s still present, in some sentient sense?”
“That’s what I choose to believe, yes. And there’s enough anecdotal evidence from other swimmers that conformals do persist, in a more coherent form than other stored patterns.”
“I can’t let anecdotal evidence sway me, Naqi. Have the other swimmers specifically reported encounters with Mina?”
“No ...” Naqi said carefully. She was sure that he would see through any lie that she attempted. “But they wouldn’t necessarily recognise her if they did.”
“And you? Did you attempt to swim yourself?”
“The swimmer corps would never have allowed me.”
“Not my question. Did you ever swim?”
“Once,” Naqi said.
“And?”
“It didn’t count. It was the same time that Mina died.” She paused and then told him all that had happened. “We were seeing more sprite activity than we’d ever recorded. It seemed like coincidence. ...”
“I don’t think it was.”
Naqi said nothing. She waited for Weir to collect his own thoughts, concentrating on the steering of the boat. Open sea lay ahead, but she knew that almost any direction would bring them to a cluster of nodes within a few hours.
“It began with the Pelican in Impiety,” Weir said. “A century ago. There was a man from Zion on that ship. During the stopover he descended to the surface of Turquoise and swam in your ocean. He made contact with the Jugglers and then swam again. The second time the experience was even more affecting. On the third occasion, the sea swallowed him. He’d been a conformal, just like your sister. His name was Ormazd.”
“It means nothing to me.”
“I assure you that on his homeworld it means a great deal more. Ormazd was a failed tyrant, fleeing a political counter-revolution on Zion. He had murdered and cheated his way to power on Zion, burning his rivals in their houses while they slept. But there’d been a backlash. He got out just before the ring closed around him—him and a handful of his closest allies and devotees. They escaped aboard t
he Pelican in Impiety.”
“And Ormazd died here?”
“Yes—but his followers didn’t. They made it to Haven, our world. And once there they began to proliferate, spreading their word, recruiting new followers. It didn’t matter that Ormazd was gone. Quite the opposite. He’d martyred himself; given them a saint figure to worship. It evolved from a political movement into a religious cult. The Vahishta Foundation’s just a front for the Ormazd sect.”
Naqi absorbed that, then asked: “Where does Amesha come into it?”
“Amesha was his daughter. She wants her father back.”
Something lit the horizon, a pink-edged flash. Another followed a minute later, in nearly the same position.
“She wants to commune with him?”
“More than that,” said Weir. “They all want to become him; to accept his neural patterns on their own. They want the Jugglers to imprint Ormazd’s personality on all his followers, to remake them in his own image. The aliens will do that, if the right gifts are offered. And that’s what I can’t allow.”
Naqi chose her words carefully, sensing that the tiniest thing could push Weir into releasing the globe. She had prevented his last attempt, but he would not allow her a second chance. All he would have to do would be to crush the globe in his fist before spilling the contents into the ocean. Then it would all be over. Everything she had ever known; everything she had ever lived for.
“But we’re only talking about nineteen people,” she said.
Weir laughed hollowly. “I’m afraid it’s a little more than that. Why don’t you turn on the radio and see what I mean?”
Naqi did as he suggested, using the boat’s general communications console. The small, scuffed screen received television pictures beamed down from the comsat network. Naqi flicked through channels, finding static on most of them. The Snowflake Council’s official news service was off the air and no personal messages were getting through. There were some suggestions that the comsat network itself was damaged. Yet finally Naqi found a few weak broadcast signals from the nearest snowflake cities. There was a sense of desperation in the transmissions, as if they expected to fall silent at any time.
Weir nodded with weary acceptance, as if he had expected this.
In the last six hours at least a dozen more shuttles had come down from the Voice of Evening. They had been packed with armed Vahishta disciples. The shuttles had attacked the planet’s major snowflake cities and atoll settlements, strafing them into submission. Three cities had fallen into the sea, their vacuum bladders punctured by beam weapons. There could be no survivors. Others were still aloft, but had been set on fire. The pictures showed citizens leaping from the cities’ berthing arms, falling like sparks. More cities had been taken bloodlessly, and were now under control of the disciples.
None of those cities were transmitting now.
It was the end of the world. Naqi knew that she should be weeping, or at the very least feel some writhing sense of loss in her stomach. But all she felt was a sense of denial; a refusal to accept that events could have escalated so quickly. This morning the only hint of wrongness had been a single absent disciple.
“There are tens of thousands of them up there,” Weir said. “All that you’ve seen so far is the advance guard.”
Naqi scratched her forearm. It was itching, as if she had caught a dose of sunburn.
“Moreau was in on this?”
“Captain Moreau’s a puppet. Literally. The body you saw was just being tele-operated by orbital disciples. They murdered the Ultras; commandeered the ship.”
“Rafael ... Why didn’t you tell us this before?”
“My position was too vulnerable. I was the only anti-Ormazd agent my movement managed to put aboard the Voice of Evening. If I’d attempted to warn the Turquoise authorities ... Well, work it out for yourself. Almost certainly I wouldn’t have been believed, and the disciples would have found a way to silence me before I became an embarrassment. And it wouldn’t have made a difference to their takeover plans. My only hope was to destroy the ocean, to remove its usefulness to them. They might still have destroyed your cities out of spite, but at least they’d have lost the final thread that connected them to their martyr.” Weir leaned closer to her. “Don’t you understand? It wouldn’t have stopped with the disciples aboard the Voice. They’d have brought more ships from Haven. Your ocean would have become a production line for despots.”
“Why did they hesitate, if they had such a crushing advantage over us?”
“They didn’t know about me, so they lost nothing by dedicating a few weeks to intelligence gathering. They wanted to know as much as possible about Turquoise and the Jugglers before they made their move. They’re brutal, but they’re not inefficient. They wanted their takeover to be as precise and surgical as possible.”
“And now?”
“They’ve accepted that things won’t be quite that neat and tidy.” He flipped the globe from one palm to another, with a casual playfulness that Naqi found alarming. “They’re serious, Naqi. Crane will stop at nothing now. You’ve seen those blast flashes. Pinpoint antimatter devices. They’ve already sterilised the organic matter within the Moat, to stop the effect of my weapon from reaching farther. If they know where we are, they’ll drop a bomb on us as well.”
“Human evil doesn’t give us the excuse to wipe out the ocean.”
“It’s not an excuse, Naqi. It’s an imperative.”
At that moment something glinted on the horizon, something that was moving slowly from east to west.
“The shuttle,” Weir said. “It’s looking for us.”
Naqi scratched her arm again. It was discoloured, itching.
* * *
Near local noon they reached the next node. The shuttle had continued to dog them, nosing to and fro along the hazy band where sea met sky. Sometimes it appeared closer, sometimes it appeared farther away. But it did not leave them alone, and Naqi knew that it would only be a matter of time before it detected a positive homing trace, a chemical or physical trace in the water that would lead to its quarry. The shuttle would cover the remaining distance in a matter of seconds, a minute at the most, and then all that she and Weir would know would be a moment of cleansing whiteness, a fire of holy purity. Even if Weir released his toxin just before the shuttle arrived it would not have time to dissipate into a wide enough volume of water to survive the fireball.
So why was he hesitating? It was Mina, of course. Naqi’s sister had given a name to the faceless library of stored minds he was prepared to erase. She had removed the one-sidedness of the moral equation, and now Weir had to accept that his own actions could never be entirely blameless.
“I should just do this,” he said. “By hesitating even for a second, I’m betraying the trust of the people who sent me here, people who have probably been tormented to extinction by Ormazd’s followers.”
Naqi shook her head. “If you didn’t show doubt, you’d be as bad as the disciples.”
“You almost sound as if you want me to do it.”
She groped for something resembling the truth, as painful as that might be. “Perhaps I do.”
“Even though it would mean killing whatever part of Mina survived?”
“I’ve lived in her shadow my entire life. Even after she died ... I always felt she was still watching me, still observing my every mistake, still being faintly disappointed that I wasn’t living up to all she had imagined I could be.”
“You’re being harsh on yourself. Harsh on Mina too, by the likes of things.”
“I know,” Naqi said angrily. “I’m just telling you how I feel.”
The boat edged into a curving inlet that pushed deep into the node. Naqi felt less vulnerable now: there was a significant depth of organic matter to screen the boat from any sideways-looking sensors that the shuttle might have deployed, even though the evidence suggested that the shuttle’s sensors were mainly focussed down from its hull. The disadvantage was that it was no
longer possible to keep a constant vigil on the shuttle’s movements. It could be on its way already.
She brought the boat to a halt and stood up from her control seat.
“What’s happening?” Weir asked.
“I’ve come to a decision.”
“Isn’t that my job?”
Her anger—brief as it was, and directed less at Weir than the hopelessness of the situation—had evaporated. “I mean about swimming. It’s what we haven’t considered yet, Rafael. That there might be a third way; a choice between accepting the disciples and letting the ocean die.”
“I don’t see what that could be.”
“Nor do I. But the ocean might find a way. It just needs the knowledge of what’s at stake, one stroked her forearm again, marvelling at the sudden eruption of fungal patterns. They must have been latent for many years, but now something had caused them to flare up. Even in daylight, emeralds and blues shone against her skin. She suspected that the biochemical changes had been triggered when she entered the water to snatch the globe. Given that, she could not help but view it as a message. An invitation, perhaps. Or was it a warning, reminding her of the dangers of swimming?
She had no idea. For her peace of mind, however—and given the lack of alternatives—she chose to view it as an invitation.
But she did not dare wonder who was inviting her.
“You think the ocean can understand external events?” Weir asked.
“You said it yourself, Rafael. The night they told us the ship was coming? Somehow that information reached the sea. Via a swimmer’s memories, perhaps. And the Jugglers knew then that this was something significant. Perhaps it was Ormazd’s personality, rising to the fore.”
Or maybe it was merely the vast, choral mind of the ocean, apprehending only that something was going to happen.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 107