So for the time being, because there were other things to worry about, they ignored it. Nostalgia for Infinity fell into tight orbit around the watery world and probes were sent arcing into the atmosphere and the vast turquoise oceans that nearly enclosed the world from pole to pole. Creamy cloud patterns had been dabbed on it in messy, exuberant swirls. There were no large landmasses; the visible ocean was unmarred except for a few carelessly tossed archipelagos of islands, splashes of ochre paint against corneal blue-green. The closer they had come, the more nearly certain it became that this was a Juggler World, and the indications turned out to be correct. Continental rafts of living biomass stained swathes of the ocean grey-green. The atmosphere could be breathed by humans, and there were enough trace elements in the soils and bedrocks of the islands to support self-sustaining colonies.
It wasn’t perfect, by any means. Islands on Juggler worlds had a habit of vanishing under tsunamis mediated by the great semi-sentient biomass of the oceans themselves. But for twenty years, it would suffice. If the colonists wanted to stay, they’d have time to build pontoon cities floating on the sea itself.
A chain of islands — northerly, cold, but predicted to be tectonically stable — was selected.
‘Why there, in particular?’ Clavain asked. ‘There are other islands at the same latitude, and they can’t be any less stable.’
‘There’s something down there,’ Scorpio told him. ‘We keep getting a faint signal from it.’
Clavain frowned. ‘A signal? But no one’s ever supposed to have been here.’
‘It’s just a radio pulse, very weak,’ Felka said. ‘But the modulation is interesting. It’s Conjoiner code.’
‘We put a beacon down here?’
‘We must have, at some point. But there’s no record of any Conjoiner ship ever coming here. Except…’ She paused, unwilling to say what had to be said.
‘Well?’
‘It probably doesn’t mean anything, Clavain. But Galiana could have come here. It’s not impossible, and we know she would have investigated any Juggler worlds she came across. Of course, we don’t know where her ship went before the wolves found her, and by the time she made it back to the Mother Nest all on-board records were lost or corrupted. But who else could have left a Conjoiner beacon?’
‘Anyone who was operating covertly. We don’t know everything that the Closed Council got up to, even now.’
‘I thought it was worth mentioning, that’s all.’
He nodded. He had felt a great crescendo of hope, and then a wave of sadness that was made all the deeper by what had preceded it. Of course she had not been here. It was stupid of him even to entertain the thought. But there was something down below that merited investigation, and it was sensible to locate their settlement near the item of interest. He had no problem with that.
Detailed plans for settlement were quickly drawn up. Tentative surface camps were established a month after their arrival.
And that was when it happened. Slowly, unhurriedly, as if this were the most natural thing in the world for a four-kilometre-long space vessel, Nostalgia for Infinity began to lower its orbit, spiralling down into the thin upper reaches of the atmosphere. By then it had slowed itself, too, braking to sub-orbital velocity so that the friction of re-entry did not scald away the outer layer of its hull. There was panic aboard from some quarters, for the ship was acting outside of human control. But there was also a more general feeling of quiet, calm resignation about whatever was about to happen. Clavain and the Triumvirate did not understand their ship’s intentions, but it was unlikely that it meant them harm, not now.
And so it proved. As the great ship fell out of orbit it tilted, bringing its long axis into line with the vertical defined by the planet’s gravitational field. Nothing else was possible; the ship would have snapped its spine had it come in obliquely. But provided it did descend vertically, lowering down through the clouds like the detached spire of a cathedral, it would suffer no more structural stress than was imposed by normal one-gee starflight. Aboard, it even felt normal. There was only the dull roar of the motors, normally unheard, but now transmitted back through the hull via the surrounding medium of air, a ceaseless, distant thunder that became louder as the ship approached the ground.
But there was no ground below. Though the landing site it had selected was close to the target archipelago where the first camps had already been sited, the ship was lowering itself towards the sea.
My God, Clavain thought. Suddenly he understood why the ship had remade itself. It — or whatever part of the Captain remained in charge — must have had this descent in mind from the moment the nature of the watery planet became clear. It had flattened the spike of its tail to allow itself to rest on the seabed. Down below, the sea began to boil away under the assault of the drive flames. The ship descended through mountains of steam, billowing tens of kilometres into the stratosphere. The sea was a kilometre deep under the touchdown point, for the bed sloped sharply away from the archipelago’s edge. But that kilometre hardly mattered. When Clavain felt the ship keel, coming to rest with a tremendous deep groan, most of it was still above the surface of the roiling waves.
On a nameless waterlogged world on the ragged edge of human space, under dual suns, Nostalgia for Infinity had landed.
Epilogue
FOR DAYS AFTER the landing the hull creaked and echoed from the lower depths as it adjusted to the external pressure of the ocean. Now and then, without human bidding, servitors scurried into the bilges to repair hull leaks where the sea water was surging in. The ship rocked ominously from time to time, but gradually anchored itself until it began to feel less like a temporary addition to the landscape than a weirdly hollowed-out geological feature: a sliver-thin stack of morbidly weathered pumice or obsidian; an ancient natural sea-tower wormed with man-made tunnels and caverns. Overhead, silver-grey clouds only occasionally ripped apart to reveal pastel-blue skies.
It was a week before anyone left the ship. For days, shuttles wheeled around it, circling it like nervous seabirds. Although not all the docking bays had been submerged, no one was yet willing to attempt a landing. Contact was however re-established with the teams who had already landed on the Juggler world, and who had made the descent from the surface. Makeshift boats were sent across the water from the nearest island — a distance of fifteen kilometres only — until they kissed against the sheer-sided cliff of the ship. Depending on tidal conditions it was possible to reach a small human-only airlock.
Clavain and Felka were in the first boat to make it back to the island. They said nothing during the crossing as they slid through wet grey mist. Clavain felt cold and despondent as he watched the black wall of the ship fall back into the fog. The sea here was soup-thick with floating micro-organisms — they were on the very fringes of a major Juggler biomass focus — and the organisms had already begun to plaster themselves against the side of the ship above the waterline. There was a scabby green accretion, a little like verdigris, which made the ship look like it had been here for centuries. He wondered what would happen if they could not persuade Nostalgia for Infinity to take off again. They had twenty years to talk it into leaving, but if the ship had already made up its mind that it wanted to stay rooted here, he doubted very much that they would be able to persuade it otherwise. Perhaps it wanted a final resting place, where it could become a memorial to its crime and the redemptive act that had followed.
‘Clavain…’ Felka said.
He looked at her. ‘I’m all right.’
‘You look tired. But we need you, Clavain. We haven’t even begun the struggle yet. Don’t you understand? All that’s happened so far is only the beginning. We have the weapons now…’
‘A handful of them. And Skade still wants them.’
‘Then she’ll have to fight us for them, won’t she? She won’t find that as easy as she imagines.’
Clavain looked back, but the ship was hidden. ‘If we’re still here, there won’t be a l
ot we can do to stop her.’
‘We’ll have the weapons themselves. But Remontoire will have returned by then, I’m sure of it. And he’ll have Zodiacal Light with him. The damage wasn’t fatal; a ship like that can repair itself.’
Clavain tightened his lips and agreed. ‘I suppose so.’
She held his hand as if to warm it. ‘What’s wrong, Clavain? You brought us so far. We followed you. You can’t give up now.’
‘I’m not giving up,’ he said. ‘I’m just… tired. It’s time to let someone else carry on the fight. I’ve been a soldier too long, Felka.’
‘Then become something else.’
‘That’s not quite what I meant.’ He tried to force some cheer into his voice. ‘Look, I’m not going to die tomorrow, or next week. I owe it to everyone to get this settlement off the ground. I just don’t think I’ll necessarily be here when Remontoire makes it back. But who knows? Time has a nasty way of surprising me. God knows I’ve learned that often enough.’
They continued in silence. The crossing was choppy, and now and then the boat had to steer itself past huge seaweedlike concentrations of ropy biomass, which shifted and reacted to the boat’s presence in an unnervingly purposeful way. Presently Clavain sighted land, and shortly after that the boat skidded to a halt in a few feet of water, bottoming out on rock.
They had to get out and wade the rest of the way to dry land. Clavain was shivering by the time he squelched out of the last inch of water. The boat looked a long way away, and Nostalgia for Infinity was nowhere to be seen at all.
Antoinette Bax came to meet them, picking her way carefully across a field of rockpools that gleamed like a tessellation of perfect grey mirrors. Behind her, on a higher rising slope of land, was the first encampment: a hamlet of bubbletents stapled into rock.
Clavain wondered how it would look in twenty years.
More than one hundred and sixty thousand people were aboard Nostalgia for Infinity, far too many to place on one island. There would be a chain of settlements, instead — as many as fifty, with a few hubs on the larger, drier nubs of land. Once those settlements were established, work could begin on the floating colonies that would provide long-term shelter. There would be enough work here to keep anyone busy. He felt an obligation to be part of it, but no sense that it was anything he had been born to do.
He felt, in fact, that he had done what he was born to do.
‘Antoinette,’ he said, knowing that Felka would not have recognised the woman without his help, ‘how are things on dry land?’
There’s shit brewing already, Clavain.‘
He kept his eyes on the ground, for fear of tripping. ‘Do tell.’
‘A lot of people aren’t happy with the idea of staying here. They bought into Thorn’s exodus because they wanted to go home, back to Yellowstone. Being stuck on an uninhabited piss-ball for twenty years wasn’t quite what they had in mind.’
Clavain nodded patiently. He steadied himself against Felka, using her as a walking stick. ‘And did you impress on these people the fact that they’d be dead if they hadn’t come with us?’
‘Yes, but you know what it’s like. No pleasing some people, is there?’ She shrugged. ‘Well, just thought I’d cheer you up with that, in case you thought it was all going to be plain sailing from now on.’
‘For some reason, that thought never crossed my mind. Now, can someone show us around the island?’
Felka helped him pick his way on to smoother ground. ‘Antoinette, we’re cold and wet. Is there somewhere we can get warm and dry?’
‘Just follow me. We’ve even got tea on the go.’
‘Tea?’ Felka asked suspiciously.
‘Seaweed tea. Local. But don’t worry. No one’s died of it yet, and you do eventually get used to the taste.’
I suppose we’d better make a start,‘ Clavain said.
They followed Antoinette into the huddle of tents. People were at work outside, putting up new tents and plumbing-in snakelike power cables from turtle-shaped generators. She led them into one enclosure, sealing the flap behind them. It was warmer inside, and drier, but this served only to make Clavain feel more damp and cold than he had a moment before.
Twenty years in a place like this, he thought. They’d be busy staying alive, yes, but what kind of a life was one of pure struggle for existence? The Jugglers might prove endlessly fascinating, awash with eternally old mysteries of cosmic provenance, or they might not wish to communicate with the humans at all. Although lines of rapport had been established between humans and Pattern Jugglers on the other Juggler worlds, it had sometimes taken decades of study before the key was found to unlock the aliens. Until then, they were little more than sluggish vegetative masses, evidencing the work of intelligence without in any way revealing it themselves. What if this turned out to be the first group of Jugglers that did not wish to drink human neural patterns? It would be a lonely and bleak place to stay, shunned by the very things one had imagined might make it tolerable. Staying with Remontoire, Khouri and Thorn, plunging into the intricate structure of the living neutron star, might begin to seem like the more attractive option.
Well, in twenty years they’d find out whether that had been the case.
Antoinette pushed a mug of green-coloured tea in front of him. ‘Drink up, Clavain.’
He sipped at it, wrinkling his nose against the miasma of pungent, briny fumes that hovered above the drink. ‘What if I’m drinking a Pattern Juggler?’
‘Felka says you won’t be. She should know, I think — I gather she’s been itching to meet these bastards for quite a while, so she knows a thing or two about them.’
Clavain gave the tea another go. ‘Yes, that’s true, isn’t…’
But Felka had gone. She had been in the tent a moment ago, but now she wasn’t.
‘Why does she want to meet them so badly?’ Antoinette asked.
‘Because of what she hopes they’ll give her,’ Clavain said. ‘Once, when she lived on Mars, she was at the core of something very complex — a vast, living machine she had to keep alive with her own willpower and intellect. It was what gave her a reason to live. Then people — my people, as a matter of fact — took the machine away from her. She nearly died then, if she had ever truly been alive. And yet she didn’t. She made it back to something like normal life. But everything that has followed, everything that she has done since, has been a way to find something else that she can use and that will use her in the same way; something so intricate that she can’t understand all its secrets in a single intuitive flash, and something that, in its own way, might be able to exploit her as well.’
‘The Jugglers.’
Still clasping the tea — and it wasn’t so bad, really, he noted — he said, ‘Yes, the Jugglers. Well, I hope she finds what she’s looking for, that’s all.’
Antoinette reached beneath the table and hefted something up from the floor. She placed it between them: a corroded metal cylinder covered in a lacy froth of calcified micro-organisms.
‘This is the beacon. They found it yesterday, a mile down. There must have been a tsunami which washed it into the sea.’
He leaned over and examined the hunk of metal. It was squashed and dented, like an old rations tin that had been stepped on. ‘It could be Conjoiner,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sure. There aren’t any markings which have survived.’
‘I thought the code was Conjoiner?’
‘It was: it’s a simple in-system transponder beacon. It’s not meant to be detected over much more than a few hundred million kilometres. But that doesn’t mean it was put here by Conjoiners. Ultras could have stolen it from one of our ships, perhaps. We’ll know a little more when we dismantle it, but that has to be done carefully.’ He rapped the rough metal husk with his knuckles. ‘There is anti-matter in here, or it wouldn’t be transmitting. Not much, maybe, but enough to make a dent in this island if we don’t open it properly.’
‘Rather you than me.’
‘Clava
in…’
He looked around; Felka had returned. She looked even wetter than when they had arrived. Her hair was glued to her face in lank ribbons, and the black fabric of her dress was tight against one side of her body. She should have been pale and shivering, by Clavain’s estimation. But she was flushed red, and she looked excited.
‘Clavain,’ she repeated.
He put down the tea. ‘What is it?’
‘You have to come outside and see this.’
He stepped out of the tent. He had warmed up just enough to feel a sudden spike of cold as he did so, but something in Felka’s manner made him ignore it, just as he had long ago learned to selectively suppress pain or discomfort in the heat of battle. It did not matter for now; it could, like most things in life, be dealt with later, or not at all.
Felka was looking out to sea.
‘What is it?’ he asked again.
‘Look. Do you see?’ She stood by him and directed his gaze. ‘Look. Look hard, where the mist thins out.’
‘I’m not sure if—’
‘Now.’
And he did see it, if only fleetingly. The local wind direction must have changed since they had arrived in the tent, enough to push the fog around into a different configuration and allow brief openings that reached far out to sea. He saw the mosaic of sharp-edged rockpools, and beyond that the boat they had come in on, and beyond that a horizontal stroke of slate-grey water which turned fainter as his eye skidded toward the horizon, becoming the pale milky grey of the sky itself. And there, for an instant, was the upright spire of Nostalgia for Infinity, a tapering finger of slightly darker grey rising from just below the horizon line itself.