“Either way,” Naqi said. “It still makes me think that there might be a chance.”
“I only wish I shared your optimism.”
“Give me this chance, Rafael. That’s all I ask.”
Naqi removed her clothes, less concerned that Weir would see her naked now than that she should have something to wear when she emerged. But although Weir studied her with unconcealed fascination, there was nothing prurient about it. What commanded his attention, Naqi realised, was the elaborate and florid patterning of the fungal markings. They curled and twined about her chest and abdomen and thighs, shining with a hypnotic intensity.
“You’re changing,” he said.
“We all change,” Naqi answered.
Then she stepped from the side of the boat, into the water.
The process of descending into the ocean’s embrace was much as she remembered it. She willed her body to submit to biochemical invasion, forcing down her fear and apprehension, knowing that she had been through this once before and that it was something that she could survive again. She did her best not to think about what it would mean to survive beyond this day, when all else had been shattered, every certainty crumbled.
Mina came to her with merciful speed.
Naqi?
I’m here. Oh, Mina, I’m here. There was terror and there was joy, alloyed together. It’s been so long.
Naqi felt her sister’s presence edge in and out of proximity and focus. Sometimes she appeared to share the same physical space. At other times she was scarcely more than a vague feeling of attentiveness.
How long?
Two years, Mina.
Mina’s answer took an eternity to come. In that dreadful hiatus Naqi felt other minds crowd against her own, some of which were so far from human that she gasped at their oddity. Mina was only one of the conformal minds that had noticed her arrival, and not all were as benignly curious or glad.
It doesn’t feel like two years to me.
How long?
Days ... hours ... It changes.
What do you remember?
Mina’s presence danced around Naqi. I remember what I remember. That we swam, when we weren’t meant to. That something happened to me, and I never left the ocean.
You became part of it, Mina.
The triumphalism of her answer shocked Naqi to the marrow. Yes!
You wanted this?
You would want it, if you knew what it was like. You could have stayed, Naqi. You could have let it happen to you, the way it happened to me. We were so alike.
I was scared.
Yes, I remember.
Naqi knew that she had to get to the heart of things. Time was passing differently here—witness Mina’s confusion about how long she had been part of the ocean—and there was no telling how patient Weir would be. He might not wait until Naqi reemerged before deploying the Juggler killer.
There was another mind, Mina. We encountered it, and it scared me. Enough that I had to leave the ocean. Enough that I never wanted to go back.
You’ve come back now.
It’s because of that other mind. It belonged to a man called Ormazd. Something very bad is going to happen because of him. One way or the other.
There was a moment then that transcended anything Naqi had experienced before. She felt herself and Mina become inseparable. She could not say where one began and the other ended, but it was entirely pointless to even think in those terms. If only fleetingly, Mina had become her. Every thought, every memory, was open to equal scrutiny by both of them.
Naqi understood what it was like for Mina. Her sister’s memories were rapturous. She might only have sensed the passing of hours or days, but that belied the richness of her experience since merging with the ocean. She had exchanged experience with countless alien minds, drinking in entire histories beyond normal human comprehension. And in that moment of sharing, Naqi appreciated something of the reason for her sister having been taken in the first place. Conformals were the ocean’s way of managing itself. Now and then the maintenance of the vaster archive of static minds required stewardship—the drawing in of independent intelligences. Mina had been selected and utilised, and given rewards beyond imagining for her efforts. The ocean had tapped the structure of her intelligence at a subconscious level. Only now and then had she ever felt that she was being directly petitioned on a matter of importance.
But Ormazd’s mind ... ?
Mina had seen Naqi’s memories now. She would know exactly what was at stake, and she would know exactly what that mind represented.
I was always aware of him. He wasn’t always there—he liked to hide himself — but even when he was absent, he left a shadow of himself. I even think he might be the reason the ocean took me as a conformal. It sensed a coming crisis. It knew Ormazd had something to do with it. It had made a terrible mistake by swallowing him. So it reached out for new allies, minds it could trust.
Minds like Mina, Naqi thought. In that instant she did not know whether to admire the Pattern Jugglers or detest them for their heartlessness.
Ormazd was contaminating it?
His influence was strong. His force of personality was a kind of poison in its own right. The Pattern Jugglers knew that, I think.
Why couldn’t they just eject his patterns?
They couldn’t. It doesn’t work that way. The sea is a storage medium, but it has no self-censoring facility. If the individual minds detect a malign presence, they can resist it ... But Ormazd’s mind is human. There aren’t enough of us here to make a difference, Naqi. The other minds are too alien to recognise Ormazd for what he is. They just see a sentience.
Who made the Pattern Jugglers, Mina? Answer me that, will you?
She sensed Mina’s amusement.
Even the Jugglers don’t know that, Naqi. Or why.
You have to help us, Mina. You have to communicate the urgency of this to the rest of the ocean.
I’m one mind among many, Naqi. One voice in the chorus.
You still have to find a way. Please, Mina. Understand this, if nothing else. You could die. You all could die. I lost you once, but now I know you never really went away. I don’t want to have to lose you again, for good.
You didn’t lose me, Naqi. I lost you.
She hauled herself from the water. Weir was waiting where she had left him, with the intact globe still resting in his hand. The daylight shadows had moved a little, but not as much as she had feared. She made eye contact with Weir, wordlessly communicating a question.
“The shuttle’s come closer. It’s flown over the node twice while you were under. I think I need to do this, Naqi.”
He had the globe between thumb and forefinger, ready to drop it into the water.
She was shivering. Naqi pulled on her shorts and shirt, but she felt just as cold afterwards. The fungal marks were shimmering intensely, seeming to hover above her skin. If anything they were shining more furiously than before she had swum. Naqi did not doubt that if she had lingered—if she had stayed with Mina—she would have become a conformal as well. It had always been in her, but it was only now that her time had come.
“Please wait,” Naqi said, her own voice sounding pathetic and childlike. “Please wait, Rafael.”
“There it is again.”
The shuttle was a fleck of white sliding over the top of the nearest wall of Juggler biomass. It was five or six kilometres away, much closer than the last time Naqi had seen it. Now it came to a sudden sharp halt, hovering above the surface of the ocean as if it had found something of particular interest.
“Do you think it knows we’re here?”
“It suspects something,” Weir said. The globe rolled between his fingers.
“Look,” Naqi said.
The shuttle was still hovering. Naqi stood up to get a better view, nervous of making herself visible but desperately curious. Something was happening. She knew something was happening.
Kilometres away, the sea was bellying up beneath t
he shuttle. The water was the colour of moss, supersaturated with microorganisms. Naqi watched as a coil of solid green matter reached from the ocean, twisting and writhing. It was as thick as a building, spilling vast rivulets of water as it emerged. It extended upward with astonishing haste, bifurcating and flexing like a groping fist. For a brief moment it closed around the shuttle. Then it slithered back into the sea with a titanic splash; a prolonged roar of spent energy. The shuttle continued to hover above the same spot, as if oblivious to what had just happened. Yet the manta-shaped craft’s white hull was lathered with various hues of green. And Naqi understood: what had happened to the shuttle was what had happened to Arviat, the city that drowned. She could not begin to guess the crime that Arviat had committed against the sea, the crime that had merited its destruction, but she could believe, now, at least, that the Jugglers had been capable of dragging it beneath the waves, ripping the main mass of the city away from the bladders that held it aloft. And of course such a thing would have to be kept maximally secret, known only to a handful of individuals. Otherwise no city would ever feel safe when the sea roiled and groaned beneath it.
But a city was not a shuttle.
Even if the Juggler material started eating away the fabric of the shuttle, it would still take hours to do any serious damage. ... And that was assuming the Ultras had no better protection than the ceramic shielding used on Turquoise boats and machines. ...
But the shuttle was already tilting over.
Naqi watched it pitch, attempt to regain stability and then pitch again. She understood, belatedly. The organic matter was clogging the shuttle’s whisking propulsion systems, limiting its ability to hover. The shuttle was curving inexorably closer to the sea, spiralling steeply away from the node. It approached the surface, and then just before the moment of impact another misshapen fist of organised matter thrust from the sea, seizing the hull in its entirety. That was the last Naqi saw of it.
A troubled calm fell on the scene. The sky overhead was unmarred by questing machinery. Only the thin whisper of smoke rising from the horizon, in the direction of the Moat, hinted of the day’s events.
Minutes passed, and then tens of minutes. Then a rapid series of bright flashes strobed from beneath the surface of the sea itself.
“That was the shuttle,” Weir said, wonderingly.
Naqi nodded. “The Jugglers are fighting back. This is more or less what I hoped would happen.”
“You asked for this?”
“I think Mina understood what was needed. Evidently she managed to convince the rest of the ocean, or at least this part of it.”
“Let’s see.”
They searched the airwaves again. The comsat network was dead, or silent. Even fewer cities were transmitting now. But those that were—those that had not been overrun by Ormazd’s disciples—told a frightening story. The ocean was clawing at them, trying to drag them into the sea. Weather patterns were shifting, entire storms being conjured into existence by the orchestrated circulation of vast ocean currents. It was happening in concentric waves, racing away from the precise point in the ocean where Naqi had swum. Some cities had already fallen into the sea, though it was not clear whether this had been brought about by the Jugglers themselves or because of damage to their vacuum bladders. There were people in the water: hundreds, thousands of them. They were swimming, trying to stay afloat, trying not to drown.
But what exactly did it mean to drown on Turquoise?
“It’s happening all over the planet,” Naqi said. She was still shivering, but now it was as much a shiver of awe as one of cold. “It’s denying itself to us by smashing our cities.”
“Your cities never harmed it.”
“I don’t think it’s really that interested in making a distinction between one bunch of people and another, Rafael. It’s just getting rid of us all, disciples or not. You can’t really blame it for that, can you?”
“I’m sorry,” Weir said.
He cracked the globe, spilled its contents into the sea.
Naqi knew there was nothing she could do now; there was no prospect of recovering the tiny black grains. She would only have to miss one, and it would be as bad as missing them all.
The little black grains vanished beneath the olive surface of the water.
It was done.
Weir looked at her, his eyes desperate for forgiveness.
“You understand that I had to do this, don’t you? It isn’t something I do lightly.”
“I know. But it wasn’t necessary. The ocean’s already turned against us. Crane has lost. Ormazd has lost.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Weir said. “But I couldn’t take the chance that we might be wrong. At least this way I know for sure.”
“You’ve murdered a world.”
He nodded. “It’s exactly what I came here to do. Please don’t blame me for it.”
Naqi opened the equipment locker where she had stowed the broken vial of Juggler toxin. She removed the flare pistol, snatched away its safety pin and pointed it at Weir.
“I don’t blame you, no. Don’t even hate’ you for it.”
He started to say something, but Naqi cut him off.
“But it’s not something I can forgive.”
She sat in silence, alone, until the node became active. The organic structures around her were beginning to show the same kinds of frantic rearrangement Naqi had seen within the Moat. There was a cold sharp breeze from the node’s heart.
It was time to leave.
She steered the boat away from the node, cautiously, still not completely convinced that she was safe from the delegates even though the first shuttle had been destroyed. Undoubtedly the loss of that craft would have been communicated to the others, and before very long some of them would arrive, bristling with belligerence. The ocean might attempt to destroy the new arrivals, but this time the delegates would be profoundly suspicious.
She brought the boat to a halt when she was a kilometre from the fringe of the node. By then it was running through the same crazed alterations she had previously witnessed. She felt the same howling wind of change. In a moment the end would come. The toxin would seep into the node’s controlling core, instructing the entire biomass to degrade itself to a lump of dumb vegetable matter. The same killing instructions would already be travelling along the internode tendril connections, winging their way over the horizon. Allowing for the topology of the network, it would only take fifteen or twenty hours for the message to reach every node on the planet. Within a day it would be over. The Jugglers would be gone, the information they’d encoded erased beyond recall. And Turquoise itself would begin to die at the same time; its oxygen atmosphere no longer maintained by the oceanic organisms.
Another five minutes passed, then ten.
The node’s transformations were growing less hectic. She recalled this moment of false calm. It meant only that the node had given up trying to counteract the toxin, accepting the logical inevitability of its fate. A thousand times over this would be repeated around Turquoise. Toward the end, she guessed, there would be less resistance, for the sheer futility of it would have been obvious. The world would accept its fate.
Another five minutes passed.
The node remained. The structures were changing, but only gently. There was no sign of the emerging mound of undifferentiated matter she had seen before.
What was happening?
She waited another quarter of an hour and then steered the boat back toward the node, bumping past Weir’s floating corpse on the way. Tentatively, an idea was forming in her mind. It appeared that the node had absorbed the toxin without dying. Was it possible that Weir had made a mistake? Was it possible that the toxin’s effectiveness depended only on it being used once?
Perhaps.
There still had to be tendril connections between the Moat and the rest of the ocean at the time that the first wave of transformations had taken place. They had been severed later—either when the doors close
d, or by some autonomie process within the extended organism itself—but until that moment, there would still have been informational links with the wider network of nodes. Could the dying nodes have sent sufficient warning that the other nodes were now able to find a strategy for protecting themselves?
Again, perhaps.
It never paid to take anything for granted where the Jugglers were concerned.
She parked the boat by the node’s periphery. Naqi stood up and removed her clothes for the final time, certain that she would not need them again. She looked down at herself, astonished at the vivid tracery of green that now covered her body. On one level, the evidence of alien cellular invasion was quite horrific.
On another, it was startlingly beautiful.
Smoke licked from the horizon. Machines clawed through the sky, hunting nervously. She stepped to the edge of the boat, tensing herself at the moment of commitment. Her fear subsided, replaced by an intense, loving calm. She stood on the threshold of something alien, but in place of terror what she felt was only an imminent sense of homecoming. Mina was waiting for her below. Together, nothing could stop them.
Naqi smiled, spread her arms and returned to the sea.
Honorable Mentions 2002
Daniel Abraham, “Gandhi Box,” Asimov’s, January.
———, “Ghost Chocolate,” Asimov’s, August.
———, “The Mechanism of Grace,” Infinite Matrix, 8/26.
Karen L. Abrahamson, “Coyotes, Cats, and Other Creatures,” Strange Horizons, 9/30.
Brian W. Aldiss, “Near Earth Object,” Mars Probes.
Ray Aldridge, “Soul Pipes,” F&SF, December.
Tavis Allison, “In Father Christmas’s Court,” Asimov’s, December.
Eleanor Arnason, “Knapsack Poems,” Asimov’s, May.
Nigel Atkinson, “An Exhalation of Butterflies,” Interzone, May.
Kage Baker, “Hanuman,” Asimov’s, April.
———, “Her Father’s Eyes,” Asimov’s, December.
———, “The Likely Lad,” Asimov’s, September.
———, “Old Flat Top,” Black Projects, White Knights.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 108