‘Good. I’m very… pleased… to hear it. And might I ask just what it is about our ocean that we can offer you?’
‘Nothing except the ocean itself,’ said Amesha Crane. ‘We simply wish to join you in its study. If you will allow it, members of the Vahishta Foundation will collaborate with native Turquoise scientists and study teams. They will shadow them and offer interpretation or advice when requested. Nothing more than that.’
‘That’s all?’
Crane smiled. ‘That’s all. It’s not as if we’re asking for the world, is it?’
Naqi remained in Umingmaktok for three days after the arrival, visiting friends and taking care of business for the Moat. The newcomers had departed, taking their shuttle to one of the other snowflake cities — Prachuap or the recently married Qaanaaq-Pangnirtung, perhaps — where a smaller but no less worthy group of city dignitaries would welcome Captain Moreau and his passengers.
In Umingmaktok the booths and bunting were packed away and normal business resumed. Litter abounded. Worm dealers did brisk business, as they always did during times of mild gloom. There were far fewer transport craft moored to the arms, and no sign at all of the intense media presence of a few days before. Tourists had gone back to their home cities and the children were safely back in school. Between meetings Naqi sat in the midday shade of half-empty restaurants and bars, observing the same puzzled disappointment in every face she encountered. Deep down she felt it herself. For two years they had been free to imprint every possible fantasy on the approaching ship. Even if the newcomers had arrived with less than benign intent, there would still have been something interesting to talk about: the possibility, however remote, that one’s own life might be about to become drastically more exciting.
But now none of that was going to happen. Undoubtedly Naqi would be involved with the visitors at some point, allowing them to visit the Moat or one of the outlying research zones she managed, but there would be nothing life-changing.
She thought back to that night with Mina, when they had heard the news. Everything had changed then. Mina had died, and Naqi had found herself taking her sister’s role in the Moat. She had risen to the challenge and promotions had followed with gratifying swiftness, until she was in effective charge of the Moat’s entire scientific programme. But that sense of closure she had yearned for was still absent. The men she had slept with — men who were almost always swimmers — had never provided it, and by turns they had each lost patience with her, realising that they were less important to her as people than what they represented, as connections to the sea. It had been months since her last romance, and once Naqi had recognised the way her own subconscious was drawing her back to the sea, she had drawn away from contact with swimmers. She had been drifting since then, daring to hope that the newcomers would allow her some measure of tranquillity.
But the newcomers had not supplied it.
She supposed she would have to find it elsewhere.
On the fourth day Naqi returned to the Moat on a high-speed dirigible. She arrived near sunset, dropping down from high altitude to see the structure winking back at her, a foreshortened ellipse of grey-white ceramic lying against the sea like some vast discarded bracelet. From horizon to horizon there were several Juggler nodes visible, webbed together by the faintest of filaments — to Naqi they looked like motes of ink spreading into blotting paper — but there were also smaller dabs of green within the Moat itself.
The structure was twenty kilometres wide and now it was nearly finished. Only a narrow channel remained where the two ends of the bracelet did not quite meet: a hundred-metre-wide sheer-sided aperture flanked on either side by tall, ramshackle towers of accommodation modules, equipment sheds and construction cranes. To the north, strings of heavy cargo dirigibles ferried processed ore and ceramic cladding from Narathiwat atoll, lowering it down to the construction teams on the Moat.
They had been working here for nearly twenty years. The hundred metres of the Moat that projected above the water was only one-tenth of the full structure — a kilometre-high ring resting on the seabed. In a matter of months the gap — little more than a notch in the top of the Moat — would be sealed, closed off by immense hermetically tight sea-doors. The process would be necessarily slow and delicate, for what was being attempted here was not simply the closing-off of part of the sea. The Moat was an attempt to isolate a part of the living ocean, sealing off a community of Pattern Juggler organisms within its impervious ceramic walls.
The high-speed dirigible swung low over the aperture. The thick green waters streaming through the cut had the phlegmatic consistency of congealing blood. Thick, ropy tendrils permitted information transfer between the external sea and the cluster of small nodes within the Moat. Swimmers were constantly present, either inside or outside the Moat, kenning the state of the sea and establishing that the usual Juggler processes continued unabated.
The dirigible docked with one of the two flanking towers.
Naqi stepped out, back into the hectic corridors and office spaces of the project building. It felt distinctly odd to be back on absolutely firm ground. Although one was seldom aware of it, Umingmaktok was never quite still: no snowflake city or airship ever was. But she would get used to it; in a few hours she would be immersed in her work, having to think of a dozen different things at once, finessing solution pathways, balancing budgets against quality, dealing with personality clashes and minor turf wars, and perhaps — if she was very lucky — managing an hour or two of pure research. Aside from the science, none of it was particularly challenging, but it kept her mind off other things. And after a few days of that, the arrival of the visitors would begin to feel like a bizarre, irrelevant interlude in an otherwise monotonous dream. She supposed that two years ago she would have been grateful for that. Life could indeed continue much as she had always imagined it would.
But when she arrived at her office there was a message from Dr Sivaraksa. He needed to speak to her urgently.
Dr Jotah Sivaraksa’s office on the Moat was a good deal less spacious than his quarters in Umingmaktok, but the view was superb. His accommodation was perched halfway up one of the towers that flanked the cut through the Moat, buttressed out from the main mass of prefabricated modules like a partially opened desk drawer. Dr Sivaraksa was writing notes when she arrived. For a few moments Naqi lingered at the sloping window, watching the construction activity hundreds of metres below. Railed machines and helmeted workers toiled on the flat upper surface of the Moat, moving raw materials and equipment to the assembly sites. Above, the sky was a perfect cobalt-blue, marred now and then by the passing green-stained hull of a cargo dirigible. The sea beyond the Moat had the dimpled texture of expensive leather.
Dr Sivaraksa cleared his throat and, when Naqi turned, he gestured at the vacant seat on the opposite side of his desk.
‘Life treating you well?’
‘Can’t complain, sir.’
‘And work?’
‘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-grey 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 int
o the élite 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 symbiotic invasion by the ocean’s micro-organisms. 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 Voice of Evening. Examine it.’
Naqi peered into the milky-grey 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. Its 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 gaffe — could undermine our standing with the Snowflake Council.’ He nodded at the compad. ‘Our budgetary position is precarious. 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 very least, a chalice with the 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-Sanikiluaq 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, star-bursts 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 inter
est. ‘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 aeons-long 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 towards 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.
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