Naqi looked to the rear, where the airship’s ceramic-jacketed sensor pod carved a twinkling furrow. Pinks and rubies and furious greens sparkled in the wake. Occasionally they darted from point to point with the nervous motion of kingfishers. As ever, she was alert to anything unusual in movements of the messenger sprites, anything that might merit a note in the latest circular, or even a full-blown article in one of the major journals of Juggler studies. But there was nothing odd happening tonight, no yet-to-be catalogued forms or behaviour patterns, nothing that might indicate more significant Pattern Juggler activity.
She walked around the airship’s balcony until she had reached the stern, where the submersible sensor pod was tethered by a long fibre-optic dragline. Naqi pulled a long hinged stick from her pocket, flicked it open in the manner of a courtesan’s fan and then waved it close to the winch assembly. The default watercoloured lilies and sea serpents melted away, replaced by tables of numbers, sinuous graphs and trembling histograms. A glance established that there was nothing surprising here either, but the data would still form a useful calibration set for other experiments.
As she closed the fan—delicately, for it was worth almost as much as the airship itself—Naqi reminded herself that it was a day since she had gathered the last batch of incoming messages. Rot had taken out the connection between the antenna and the gondola during the last expedition, and since then collecting the messages had become a chore, to be taken in turns or traded for less tedious tasks.
Naqi gripped a handrail and swung out behind the airship. Here the vacuum-bag overhung the gondola by only a metre, and a grilled ladder allowed her to climb around the overhang and scramble onto the flat top of the bag. She moved gingerly, bare feet against rusting rungs, doing her best not to disturb Mina. The airship rocked and creaked a little as she found her balance on the top and then was again silent and still. The churning of its motors was so quiet that Naqi had long ago filtered the sound from her experience.
All was calm, beautifully so.
In the moonlight the antenna was a single dark flower rising from the broad back of the bladder. Naqi started moving along the railed catwalk that led to it, steadying herself as she went but feeling much less vertigo than would have been the case in daylight.
Then she froze, certain that she was being watched.
Just within Naqi’s peripheral vision appeared a messenger sprite. It had flown to the height of the airship and was now shadowing it from a distance of ten or twelve metres. Naqi gasped, delighted and unnerved at the same time. Apart from dead specimens this was the first time Naqi had ever seen a sprite this close. The organism had the approximate size and morphology of a terrestrial hummingbird, yet it glowed like a lantern. Naqi recognised it immediately as a long-range packet carrier. Its belly would be stuffed with data coded into tightly packed wads of RNA, locked within microscopic protein capsomeres. The packet carrier’s head was a smooth teardrop, patterned with luminous pastel markings, but lacking any other detail save for two black eyes positioned above the midline. Inside the head was a cluster of neurones, which encoded the positions of the brightest circumpolar stars. Other than that, sprites had only the most rudimentary kind of intelligence. They existed to shift information between nodal points in the ocean when the usual chemical signalling pathways were deemed too slow or imprecise. The sprite would die when it reached its destination, consumed by microscopic organisms that would unravel and process the information stored in the capsomeres.
And yet Naqi had the acute impression that it was watching her: not just the airship, but her, with a kind of watchful curiosity that made the hairs on the back of her neck bristle. And then—just at the point when the feeling of scrutiny had become unsettling—the sprite whipped sharply away from the airship. Naqi watched it descend back towards the ocean and then coast above the surface, bobbing now and then like a skipping stone. She remained still for several more minutes, convinced that something of significance had happened, though aware too of how subjective the experience had been; how unimpressive it would seem if she tried to explain it to Mina tomorrow. Anyway, Mina was the one with the special bond with the ocean, wasn’t she? Mina was the one who scratched her arms at night; Mina was the one who had too high a conformal index to be allowed into the swimmer corps. It was always Mina.
It was never Naqi.
The antenna’s metre-wide dish was anchored to a squat plinth inset with weatherproofed controls and readouts. It was century-old Pelican technology, like the airship and the fan. Many of the controls and displays were dead, but the unit was still able to lock onto the functioning satellites. Naqi flicked open the fan and copied the latest feeds into the fan’s remaining memory. Then she knelt down next to the plinth, propped the fan on her knees and sifted through the messages and news summaries of the last day. A handful of reports had arrived from friends in Prachuap-Pangnirtung and Umingmaktok snowflake cities, another from an old boyfriend in the swimmer corps station on Narathiwat atoll. He had sent her a list of jokes that were already in wide circulation. She scrolled down the list, grimacing more than grinning, before finally managing a half-hearted chuckle at one that had previously escaped her. Then there were a dozen digests from various special interest groups related to the Jugglers, along with a request from a journal editor that she critique a paper. Naqi skimmed the paper’s abstract and thought that she was probably capable of reviewing it.
She checked through the remaining messages. There was a note from Dr. Sivaraksa saying that her formal application to work on the Moat project had been received and was now under consideration. There had been no official interview, but Naqi had met Sivaraksa a few weeks earlier when both of them happened to be in Umingmaktok. Sivaraksa had been in an encouraging mood during the meeting, though Naqi couldn’t say whether that was because she’d given a good impression or because Sivaraksa had just had his tapeworm swapped for a nice new one. But Sivaraksa’s message said she could expect to hear the result in a day or two. Naqi wondered idly how she would break the news to Mina if she was offered the job. Mina was critical of the whole idea of the Moat and would probably take a dim view of her sister having anything to do with it.
Scrolling down further, she read another message from a scientist in Qaanaaq requesting access to some calibration data she had obtained earlier in the summer. Then there were four or five automatic weather advisories, drafts of two papers she was contributing to, and an invitation to attend the amicable divorce of Kugluktuk and Gjoa, scheduled to take place in three weeks’ time. Following that there was a summary of the latest worldwide news—an unusually bulky file—and then there was nothing. No further messages had arrived for eight hours.
There was nothing particularly unusual about that—the ailing network was always going down—but for the second time that night the back of Naqi’s neck tingled. Something must have happened, she thought.
She opened the news summary and started reading. Five minutes later she was waking Mina.
“I don’t think I want to believe it,” Mina Okpik said.
Naqi scanned the heavens, dredging childhood knowledge of the stars. With some minor adjustment to allow for parallax, the old constellations were still more or less valid when seen from Turquoise.
“That’s it, I think.”
“What?” Mina said, still sleepy.
Naqi waved her hand at a vague area of the sky, pinned between Scorpius and Hercules. “Ophiuchus. If our eyes were sensitive enough, we’d be able to see it now: a little prick of blue light.”
“I’ve had enough of little pricks for one lifetime,” Mina said, tucking her arms around her knees. Her hair was the same pure black as Naqi’s, but trimmed into a severe, spiked crop which made her look younger or older depending on the light. She wore black shorts and a shirt that left her arms bare. Luminous tattoos in emerald and indigo spiralled around the piebald marks of random fungal invasion that covered her arms, thighs, neck and cheeks. The fullness of the moons caused the funga
l patterns to glow a little themselves, shimmering with the same emerald and indigo hues. Naqi had no tattoos and scarcely any fungal patterns of her own; she couldn’t help but feel slightly envious of her sister’s adornments.
Mina continued, “But seriously, you don’t think it might be a mistake?”
“I don’t think so, no. See what it says there? They detected it weeks ago, but they kept quiet until now so that they could make more measurements.”
“I’m surprised there wasn’t a rumour.”
Naqi nodded. “They kept the lid on it pretty well. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be a lot of trouble.”
“Mm. And they think this blackout is going to help?”
“My guess is official traffic’s still getting through. They just don’t want the rest of us clogging up the network with endless speculation.”
“Can’t blame us for that, can we? I mean, everyone’s going to be guessing, aren’t they?”
“Maybe they’ll announce themselves before very long,” Naqi said doubtfully.
While they had been speaking the airship had passed into a zone of the sea largely devoid of bioluminescent surface life. Such zones were almost as common as the nodal regions where the network was thickest, like the gaping voids between clusters of galaxies. The wake of the sensor pod was almost impossible to pick out, and the darkness around them was absolute, relieved only by the occasional mindless errand of a solitary messenger sprite.
Mina said: “And if they don’t?”
“Then I guess we’re all in a lot more trouble than we’d like.”
For the first time in a century a ship was approaching Turquoise, commencing its deceleration from interstellar cruise speed. The flare of the lighthugger’s exhaust was pointed straight at the Turquoise system. Measurement of the Doppler shift of the flame showed that the vessel was still two years out, but that was hardly any time at all on Turquoise. The ship had yet to announce itself, but even if it turned out to have nothing but benign intentions—a short trade stopover, perhaps—the effect on Turquoise society would be incalculable. Everyone knew of the troubles that had followed the arrival of Pelican in Impiety. When the Ultras moved into orbit there had been much unrest below. Spies had undermined lucrative trade deals. Cities had jockeyed for prestige, competing for technological tidbits. There had been hasty marriages and equally hasty separations. A century later, old enmities smouldered just beneath the surface of cordial intercity politics.
It wouldn’t be any better this time.
“Look,” Mina said, “it doesn’t have to be all that bad. They might not even want to talk to us. Didn’t a ship pass through the system about seventy years ago without so much as a by-your-leave?”
Naqi agreed; it was mentioned in a sidebar to one of the main articles. “They had engine trouble, or something. But the experts say there’s no sign of anything like that this time.”
“So they’ve come to trade. What have we got to offer them that we didn’t have last time?”
“Not much, I suppose.”
Mina nodded knowingly. “A few works of art that probably won’t travel very well. Ten-hour-long nose-flute symphonies, anyone?” She pulled a face. “That’s supposedly my culture, and even I can’t stand it. What else? A handful of discoveries about the Jugglers, which have more than likely been replicated elsewhere a dozen times. Technology, medicine? Forget it.”
“They must think we have something worth coming here for,” Naqi said. “Whatever it is, we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we? It’s only two years.”
“I expect you think that’s quite a long time,” Mina said.
“Actually—”
Mina froze.
“Look!”
Something whipped past in the night, far below, then a handful of them, then a dozen, and then a whole bright squadron. Messenger sprites, Naqi realised—but she had never seen so many of them moving at once, and on what was so evidently the same errand. Against the darkness of the ocean the lights were mesmerising: curling and weaving, swapping positions and occasionally veering far from the main pack before arcing back towards the swarm. Once again one of the sprites climbed to the altitude of the airship, loitering for a few moments on fanning wings before whipping off to rejoin the others. The swarm receded, becoming a tight ball of fireflies, and then only a pale globular smudge. Naqi watched until she was certain that the last sprite had vanished into the night.
“Wow,” Mina said quietly.
“Have you ever seen anything like that?”
“Never.”
“Bit funny that it should happen tonight, wouldn’t you say?”
“Don’t be silly,” Mina said. “The Jugglers can’t possibly know about the ship.”
“We don’t know that for sure. Most people heard about this ship hours ago. That’s more than enough time for someone to have swum.”
Mina conceded her younger sister’s point. “Still, information flow isn’t usually that clear-cut. The Jugglers store patterns, but they seldom show any sign of comprehending actual content. We’re dealing with a mindless biological archiving system, a museum without a curator.”
“That’s one view.”
Mina shrugged. “I’d love to be proved otherwise.” “Well, do you think we should try following them? I know we can’t track sprites over any distance, but we might be able to keep up for a few hours before we drain the batteries.”
“We wouldn’t learn much.”
“We won’t know until we’ve tried,” Naqi said, gritting her teeth. “Come on—it’s got to be worth a go, hasn’t it? I reckon that swarm moved a bit slower than a single sprite. We’d at least have enough for a report, wouldn’t we?”
Mina shook her head. “All we’d have is a single observation with a little bit of speculation thrown in. You know we can’t publish that sort of thing. And anyway, assuming that sprite swarm did have something to do with the ship, there are going to be hundreds of similar sightings tonight.”
“I just thought it might take our minds off the news.”
“Perhaps it would. But it would also make us unforgivably late for our target.” Mina dropped the tone of her voice, making an obvious effort to sound reasonable. “Look, I understand your curiosity. I feel it as well. But the chances are it was either a statistical fluke or part of a global event everyone else will have had a much better chance to study. Either way we can’t contribute anything useful, so we might as well just forget about it.” She rubbed at the marks on her forearm, tracing the Paisley-patterned barbs and whorls of glowing colouration. “And I’m tired, and we have several busy days ahead of us. I think we just need to put this one down to experience, all right?”
“Fine,” Naqi said.
“I’m sorry, but I just know we’d be wasting our time.”
“I said fine.” Naqi stood up and steadied herself on the railing that traversed the length of the airship’s back.
“Where are you going?”
“To sleep. Like you said, we’ve got a busy day coming up. We’d be fools to waste time chasing a fluke, wouldn’t we?”
An hour after dawn they crossed out of the dead zone. The sea below began to thicken with floating life, becoming soupy and torpid. A kilometre or so further in and the soup showed ominous signs of structure: a blue-green stew of ropy strands and wide, kelplike plates. They suggested the floating, half-digested entrails of embattled sea monsters.
Within another kilometre the floating life had become a dense vegetative raft, stinking of brine and rotting cabbage. Within another kilometre of that the raft had thickened to the point where the underlying sea was only intermittently visible. The air above the raft was humid, hot and pungent with microscopic irritants. The raft itself was possessed of a curiously beguiling motion, bobbing and writhing and gyring according to the ebb and flow of weirdly localised current systems. It was as if many invisible spoons were stirring a great bowl of spinach. Even the shadow of the airship, pushed far ahead of it by th
e low sun, had some influence on the movement of the material. The Pattern Juggler biomass scurried and squirmed to evade the track of the shadow, and the peculiar purposefulness of the motion reminded Naqi of an octopus she had seen in the terrestrial habitats aquarium on Umingmaktok, squeezing its way through impossibly small gaps in the glass prison of its tank.
Presently they arrived at the precise centre of the circular raft. It spread away from them in all directions, hemmed by a distant ribbon of sparkling sea. It felt as if the airship had come to rest above an island, as fixed and ancient as any geological feature. The island even had a sort of geography: humps and ridges and depressions sculpted into the cloying texture of layered biomass. But there were few islands on Turquoise, especially at this latitude, and the Juggler node was only a few days old. Satellites had detected its growth a week earlier, and Mina and Naqi had been sent to investigate. They were under strict instructions simply to hover above the island and deploy a handful of tethered sensors. If the node showed any signs of being unusual, a more experienced team would be sent out from Umingmaktok by high-speed dirigible. Most nodes dispersed within twenty to thirty days, so there was always a need for some urgency. They might even send trained swimmers, eager to dive into the sea and open their minds to alien communion. Ready—as they called it—to ken the ocean.
But first things first: chances were this node would turn out to be interesting rather than exceptional.
“Morning,” Mina said when Naqi approached her. Mina was swabbing the sensor pod she had reeled in earlier, collecting the green mucus that had adhered to its ceramic teardrop. All human artefacts eventually succumbed to biological attack from the ocean, although ceramics were the most resilient.