What could be done in two days? Nothing. Or at least nothing compared to what had always been planned. But if the new schedule was a fait accompli—and that was the message she was getting from Sivaraksa—then it was her responsibility to find a way to squeeze some scientific return from the event. She looked down at the cut, and at the many spindly gantries and catwalks that spanned the aperture or hung some way towards the centre of the Moat. Perhaps if she arranged for some standard-issue probes to be prepared today, the type dropped from dirigibles . . .
Naqi’s eyes darted around, surveying fixtures and telemetry conduits.
It would be hard work to get them in place in time, and even harder to get them patched into some kind of real-time acquisition system . . . But it was doable, just barely. The data quality would be laughable compared to the supersensitive instruments that were going to be installed over the next few months . . . But crude was a lot better than nothing at all.
She laughed, aloud. An hour ago she would have stuck pins into herself rather than collaborate in this kind of fiasco.
Naqi walked along the railing until she reached a pair of pillar-mounted binoculars. They were smeared with rot-protection. She wiped the lens and eyepieces clean with the rag that was tied to the pedestal, then swung the binoculars in a slow arc, panning across the dark circle of water trapped within the Moat. Only vague patches of what Naqi would have called open water were visible. The rest was either a verdant porridge of Juggler organisms, or fully grown masses of organised floating matter, linked together by trunks and veins of the same green biomass. The latest estimate was that there were three small noes within the ring. The smell was atrocious, but that was an excellent sign as well: it correlated strongly with the density of organisms in the nodes. She had experienced that smell many times, but it never failed to slam her back to that morning when Mina had died.
As much as the Pattern Jugglers “knew” anything, they were surely aware of what was planned here. They had drunk the minds of the swimmers who had already entered the sea near or within the Moat, and not one of those swimmers was ignorant of the project’s ultimate purpose. It was possible that that knowledge simply couldn’t be parsed into a form the aliens would understand, but Naqi considered that unlikely: the closure of the Moat would be about as stark a concept as one could imagine. If nothing else, geometry was the one thing the Jugglers did understand. And yet the aliens chose to remain within the closing Moat, hinting that they would tolerate the final closure that would seal them off from the rest of the ocean.
Perhaps they were not impressed. Perhaps they knew that the event would not rob them of every channel of communication, but only the chemical medium of the ocean. Sprites and other airborne organisms would still be able to cross the barrier. It was impossible to tell. The only way to know was to complete the experiment—to close the massive sea-doors—and see what happened.
She leaned back, taking her eyes from the binoculars.
Now Naqi saw something unexpected. It was a glint of hard white light, scudding across the water within the Moat.
Naqi squinted, but still she could not make out the object. She swung the binoculars hard around, got her eyes behind them and then zigzagged until something flashed through the field of view. She backed up and locked onto it.
It was a boat, and there was someone in it.
She keyed in the image zoom/stabilise function and the craft swelled to clarity across a clear kilometre of sea. The craft was a ceramic-hulled vessel of the type that the swimmer teams used, five or six metres long from bow to stern. The person sat behind a curved spray shield, their hands on the handlebars of the control pillar. An inboard thruster propelled the boat without ever touching water.
The figure was difficult to make out, but the billowing orange clothes left no room for doubt. It was one of the Vahishta delegates. And Naqi fully expected it to be Rafael Weir.
He was headed towards the closest node.
For an agonising few moments she did not know what to do. He was going to attempt to swim, she thought, just like she and Mina had done. And he would be no better prepared for the experience. She had to stop him, somehow. He would reach the node in only a few minutes.
Naqi sprinted back to the tower, breathless when she arrived. She reached a communications post and tried to find the right channel for the boat. But either she was doing it wrong or Weir had sabotaged the radio. What next? Technically, there was a security presence on the Moat, especially given the official visit. But what did the security goons know about chasing boats? All their training was aimed at dealing with internal crises, and none of them were competent to go anywhere near an active node.
She called them anyway, alerting them to what had happened. Then she called Sivaraksa, telling him the same news. “I think it’s Weir,” she said. “I’m going to try and stop him.”
“Naqi . . .” he said warningly.
“This is my responsibility, Jotah. Let me handle it.”
Naqi ran back outside again. The closest elevator down to sea level was out of service; the next one was a kilometre further around the ring. She didn’t have that much time. Instead she jogged along the line of railings until she reached a break that admitted entry to a staircase that descended the steep inner wall of the Moat. The steps and handrails had been helpfully greased with antirot, which made her descent that more treacherous. There were five hundred steps down to sea level but she took them two or three at a time, sliding down the handrails until she reached the grilled platforms where the stairways reversed direction. All the while she watched the tiny white speck of the boat, seemingly immobile now that it was so far away, but undoubtedly narrowing the distance to the node with each minute. As she worked her way down she had plenty of time to think about what was going through the delegate’s head. She was sure now that it was Weir. It did not really surprise her that he wanted to swim: it was what everyone who studied the Jugglers yearned for. But why make this unofficial attempt now when a little gentle persuasion would have made it possible anyway? Given Tak Thonburi’s eagerness to please the delegates, it would not have been beyond the bounds of possibility for a swimming expedition to be organised . . . The corps would have protested, but just like Naqi they would have been given a forceful lesson in the refined art of political compromise.
But evidently Weir hadn’t been prepared to wait. It all made sense, at any rate: the times when he had dodged away from the party before must have all been abortive attempts to reach the Jugglers. But only now had he been able to seize his opportunity.
Naqi reached the water level, where jetties floated on ceramic-sheathed pontoons. Most of the boats were suspended out of the water on cradles, to save their hulls from unnecessary degradation. Fortunately, there was an emergency rescue boat already afloat. Its formerly white hull had the flaking, pea-green scab patterning of advanced rot, but it still had a dozen or so hours of sea-worthiness in it. Naqi jumped aboard, released the boat from its moorings and fired up the thruster. In a moment she was racing away from the jetty, away from the vast, stained edifice of the Moat itself. She steered a course through the least viscous stretches of water, avoiding conspicuous rafts of green matter.
She peered ahead through the boat’s spray-drenched shield. It had been easy to keep track of Weir’s boat when she had been a hundred metres higher, but now she kept losing him behind swells or miniature islands of Juggler matter. After a minute or so she gave up trying to follow the boat, and instead diverted her concentration to finding the quickest route to the node.
She flipped on the radio. “Jotah? This is Naqi. I’m in the water, closing on Weir.”
There was a pause, a crackle, then: “What’s the status?”
She had to shout over the abrasive thump, thump, thump of the boat, even though the thruster was nearly silent.
“I’ll reach the node in four or five minutes. Can’t see Weir, but I don’t think it matters.”
“We can see him. He’s still headed
for the node.”
“Good. Can you spare some more boats, in case he decides to make a run for another node?”
“They’ll be leaving in a minute or so. I’m waking everyone I can.”
“What about the other delegates?”
Sivaraksa did not answer her immediately. “Most are still asleep. I have Amesha Crane and Simon Matsubara in my office, however.”
“Let me speak to them.”
“Just a moment,” he said, after the same brief hesitation.
“Crane here,” said the woman.
“I think I’m chasing Weir. Can you confirm that?”
“He isn’t accounted for,” she told Naqi. “But it’ll be a few minutes until we can be certain it’s him.”
“I’m not expecting a surprise. Weir already had a question mark over him, Amesha. We were waiting for him to try something.”
“Were you?” Perhaps it was her imagination, but Crane sounded genuinely surprised. “Why? What had he done?”
“You don’t know?”
“No . . .” Crane trailed off.
“He was one of us,” Matsubara said. “A good . . . delegate. We had no reason to distrust him.”
Perhaps Naqi was imagining this as well, but it almost sounded as if Matsubara had intended to say “disciple” rather than “delegate.”
Crane came back on the radio. “Please do your best to apprehend him, Naqi. This is a source of great embarrassment to us. He mustn’t do any harm.”
Naqi gunned the boat harder, no longer bothering to avoid the smaller patches of organic matter. “No,” she said. “He mustn’t.”
THREE
Something changed ahead.
“Naqi?” It was Jotah Sivaraksa’s voice.
“What?”
“Weir’s slowed his boat. From our vantage point it looks as if he’s reached the perimeter of the node. He seems to be circumnavigating it.”
“I can’t see him yet. He must be picking the best spot to dive in.”
“But it won’t work, will it?” Sivaraksa asked. “There has to be an element of cooperation with the Jugglers. They have to invite the swimmer to enter the sea, or nothing happens.”
“Maybe he doesn’t realise that,” Naqi said, under her breath. It was of no concern to her how closely Weir was adhering to the usual method of initiating Juggler communion. Even if the Jugglers did not cooperate—even if all Weir did was flounder in thick green water—there was no telling the hidden harm that might be done. She had already grudgingly accepted the acceleration of the closure operation. There was no way she was going to tolerate another upset, another unwanted perturbation of the experimental system. Not on her watch.
“He’s stopped,” Sivaraksa said excitedly. “Can you see him yet?”
Naqi stood up in her seat, even though she felt perilously unbalanced. “Wait. Yes, I think so. I’ll be there in a minute or so.”
“What are you going to do?” Crane asked. “I hesitate to say it, but Weir may not respond to rational argument at this point. Simply requesting that he leave the water won’t necessarily work. Um, do you have a weapon?”
“Yes,” Naqi said. “I’m sitting in it.”
She did not allow herself to relax, but at least now she felt that the situation was slipping back into her control. She would kill Weir rather than have him contaminate the node.
His boat was visible now only as a smudge of white, intermittently popping up between folds and hummocks of shifting green. Her imagination sketched in the details. Weir would be preparing to swim, stripping off until he was naked, or nearly so. Perhaps he would feel some kind of erotic charge as he prepared for immersion. She did not doubt that he would be apprehensive, and perhaps he would hesitate on the threshold of the act, teetering on the edge of the boat before committing himself to the water. But a fanatic desire had driven him this far and she doubted that it would fail him.
“Naqi—”
“Jotah?”
“Naqi, he’s moving again. He didn’t enter the water. He didn’t even look like he had any intention of swimming.”
“He saw I was coming. I take it he’s heading for the next closest node?”
“Perhaps . . .” But Jotah Sivaraksa sounded far from certain.
She saw the boat again. It was moving fast—much faster than it had appeared before—but that was only because she was now seeing lateral motion.
The next node was a distant island framed by the background of the Moat’s encircling rim. If he headed that way she would be hard behind him all the way there as well. No matter his desire to swim, he must realise that she could thwart his every attempt.
Naqi looked back. The twin towers framing the cut were smothered in a haze of sea mist, their geometric details smeared into a vague suggestion of haphazard complexity. They suggested teetering, stratified sea-stacks, million-year-old towers of weathered and eroded rock guarding the narrow passage to the open ocean. Beneath them, winking in and out of clarity, she saw three or four other boats making their way into the Moat. The ponderous teardrop of a passenger dirigible was nosing away from the side of one of the towers, the low dawn sun throwing golden highlights along the fluted lines of its gondola. Naqi made out the sleek deltoid of the Voice of Evening’s shuttle, but it was still parked where it had landed.
She looked back to the node where Weir had hesitated.
Something was happening.
The node had become vastly more active than a minute earlier. It resembled a green, steep-sided volcanic island that was undergoing some catastrophic seismic calamity. The entire mass of the node was trembling, rocking and throbbing with an eerie regularity. Concentric swells of disturbed water raced away from it, sickening troughs that made the speeding boat pitch and slide. Naqi slowed her boat, some instinct telling her that it was now largely futile to pursue Weir. Then she turned around so that she faced the node properly and, cautiously, edged closer, ignoring the nausea she felt as the boat ducked and dived from crest to trough.
The node, like all nodes, had always shown a rich surface topology: fused hummocks and tendrils; fabulous domes and minarets and helter-skelters of organised biomass, linked and entangled by a telegraphic system of draping aerial tendrils. In any instant it resembled a human city—or, more properly, a fairy-tale human city—that had been efficiently smothered in green moss. The bright moving motes of sprites dodged through the interstices, the portholes and arches of the urban mass. The metropolitan structure only hinted at the node’s Byzantine interior architecture, and much of that could only be glimpsed or implied.
But this node was like a city going insane. It was accelerating, running through cycles of urban renewal and redesign with indecent haste. Structures were evolving before Naqi’s eyes. She had seen change this rapid just before Mina was taken, but normally those kinds of changes happened too slowly to be seen at all, like the daily movement of shadows.
The throbbing had decreased, but the flickering change was now throwing out a steady, warm, malodorous breeze. And when she stopped the boat—she dared come no closer now—Naqi heard the node. It was like the whisper of a billion forest leaves presaging a summer storm.
Whatever was happening here, it was about to become catastrophic.
Some fundamental organisation had been lost. The changes were happening too quickly, with too little central coordination. Tendrils thrashed like whips, unable to connect to anything. They flailed against each other. Structures were forming and collapsing. The node was fracturing, so that there were three, four, perhaps five distinct cores of flickering growth. As soon as she had the measure of it, the process shifted it all. Meagre light flickered within the epileptic mass. Sprites swarmed in confused flight patterns, orbiting mindlessly between foci. The sound of the node had become a distant shriek.
“It’s dying . . .” Naqi breathed.
Weir had done something to it. What, she couldn’t guess. But this could not be a coincidence.
The shrieking died down. r />
The breeze ceased.
The node had stopped its convulsions. She looked at it, hoping against hope that perhaps it had overcome whatever destabilising influence Weir had introduced. The structures were still misshapen, there was still an impression of incoherence, but the city was inert. The cycling motion of the sprites slowed, and a few of them dropped down into the mass, as if to roost.
A calm had descended.
Then Naqi heard another sound. It was lower than anything she had heard before—almost subsonic. It sounded less like thunder than like a very distant, very heated conversation.
It was coming from the approximate centre of the node.
She watched as a smooth green mound rose from the centre, resembling a flattened hemisphere. It grew larger by the second, assimilating the malformed structures with quiet indifference. They disappeared into the surface of the mound as if into a wall of fog, but they did not emerge again. The mound only increased its size, rumbling towards Naqi. The entire mass of the node was changing into a single undifferentiated mass.
“Jotah . . .” she said.
“We see it, Naqi. We see it but we don’t understand it.”
“Weir must have used some kind of . . . weapon against it,” she said.
“We don’t know that he’s harmed it . . . He might just have precipitated a change to a state we haven’t documented.”
“That still makes it a weapon in my book. I’m scared, Jotah.”
“You think I’m not?”
Around her the sea was changing. She had forgotten about the submerged tendrils that connected the nodes. They were as thick as hawsers, and now they were writhing and thrashing just beneath the surface of the water. Green-tinged spume lifted into the air. It was as if unseen aquatic monsters were wrestling, locked in some dire, to-the-death contest.