Did she trust the Pattern Jugglers not to harm her? Perhaps. After all, she had not encountered their minds at all - if they even had minds. They were merely the archiving system. Blaming them for that one poisoned mind was like blaming a library for one hateful book.
But still, it had unnerved her profoundly. She wondered why none of the other swimmers had ever communicated their encounters with such a mind. After all, she remembered it well enough now, and she was nearly out of the ocean. She might forget shortly - there were bound to be subsequent neurological effects - but under other circumstances there would have been nothing to prevent her relating her experiences to a witness or inviolable recording system.
She kept swimming, and began to wonder why Mina hadn’t emerged from the waters as well. Mina had been just as terrified. But Mina had also been more curious, and more willing to ignore her fears. Naqi had grasped the opportunity to leave the ocean once the Jugglers released their grip on her. But what if Mina had elected to remain?
What if Mina was still down there, still in communion with the Jugglers?
Naqi reached the raft and hauled herself aboard, being careful not to capsize it. She saw that the raft was still largely intact. It had been moved, but not damaged, and although the ceramic sheathing was showing signs of attack, peppered here and there with scabbed green accretions, it was certainly good for another few hours. The rot-hardened control systems were alive, and still in telemetric connection with the distant airship.
Naqi had crawled from the sea naked. Now she felt cold and vulnerable. She pulled an aluminised quilt from the raft’s supply box and wrapped it around herself. It did not stop her from shivering, did not make her feel any less nauseous, but at least it afforded some measure of symbolic barrier against the sea.
She looked around again, but there was still no sign of Mina.
Naqi folded aside the weatherproof control cover and tapped commands into the matrix of waterproofed keys. She waited for the response from the airship. The moment stretched. But there it was: a minute shift in the dull gleam on the silver back of the vacuum-bladder. The airship was turning, pivoting like a great slow weather vane. It was moving, responding to the raft’s homing command.
But where was Mina?
Now something moved in the water next to her, coiling in weak, enervated spasms. Naqi looked at it with horrified recognition. She reached over, still shivering, and with appalled gentleness fished the writhing thing from the sea. It lay in her fingers like a baby sea serpent. It was white and segmented, half a metre long. She knew exactly what it was.
It was Mina’s worm. It meant Mina had died.
TWO
Two years later Naqi watched a spark fall from the heavens.
Along with many hundreds of spectators, she was standing on the railed edge of one of Umingmaktok’s elegant cantilevered arms. It was afternoon. Every visible surface of the city had been scoured of rot and given a fresh coat of crimson or emerald paint. Amber bunting had been hung along the metal stay-lines that supported the tapering arms protruding from the city’s towering commercial core. Most of the berthing slots around the perimeter were occupied by passenger or cargo craft, while many smaller vessels were holding station in the immediate airspace around Umingmaktok. The effect, which Naqi had seen on her approach to the city a day earlier, had been to turn the snowflake into a glittering, delicately ornamented vision. By night they had fireworks displays. By day, as now, conjurors and confidence tricksters wound their way through the crowds. Nose-flute musicians and drum dancers performed impromptu atop improvised podia. Kick-boxers were being cheered on as they moved from one informal ring to another, pursued by whistle-blowing proctors. Hastily erected booths were marked with red and yellow pennants, selling refreshments, souvenirs or tattoo-work, while pretty costumed girls who wore backpacks equipped with tall flagstaffs sold drinks or ices. The children had balloons and rattles marked with the emblems of both Umingmaktok and the Snowflake Council, and many of them had had their faces painted to resemble stylised space travellers. Puppet theatres had been set up here and there, running through exactly the same small repertoire of stories that Naqi remembered from her childhood. The children were enthralled nonetheless; mouths agape at each miniature epic, whether it was a roughly accurate account of the world’s settlement - with the colony ship being stripped to the bone for every gram of metal it held - or something altogether more fantastic, like the drowning of Arviat. It didn’t matter to the children that one was based in fact and the other was pure mythology. To them the idea that every city they called home had been cannibalised from the belly of a four-kilometre-long ship was no more or less plausible than the idea that the living sea might occasionally snatch cities beneath the waves when they displeased it. At that age everything was both magical and mundane, and she supposed that the children were no more nor less excited by the prospect of the coming visitors than they were by the promised fireworks display, or the possibility of further treats if they were well behaved. Other than the children, there were animals: caged monkeys and birds, and the occasional expensive pet being shown off for the day. One or two servitors stalked through the crowd, and occasionally a golden float-cam would bob through the air, loitering over a scene of interest like a single detached eyeball. Turquoise had not seen this level of celebration since the last acrimonious divorce, and the networks were milking it remorselessly, over-analysing even the tiniest scrap of information.
This was, in truth, exactly the kind of thing Naqi would normally have gone to the other side of the planet to avoid. But something had drawn her this time, and made her wangle the trip out from the Moat at an otherwise critical time in the project. She could only suppose that it was a need to close a particular chapter in her life, one that had begun the night before Mina’s death. The detection of the Ultra ship - they now knew that it was named Voice of Evening - had been the event that triggered the blackout, and the blackout had been Mina’s justification for the two of them attempting to swim with the Jugglers. Indirectly, therefore, the Ultras were ‘responsible’ for whatever had happened to Mina. That was unfair, of course, but Naqi nonetheless felt the need to be here now, if only to witness the visitors’ emergence with her own eyes and see if they really were the monsters of her imagination. She had come to Umingmaktok with a stoic determination that she would not be swept up by the hysteria of the celebrations. Yet now that she had made the trip, now that she was amidst the crowd, drunk on the chemical buzz of human excitement, with a nice fresh worm hooked onto her gut wall, she found herself in the perverse position of actually enjoying the atmosphere.
And now everyone had noticed the falling spark.
The crowd turned their heads into the sky, ignoring the musicians, conjurors and confidence tricksters. The backpacked girls stopped and looked aloft along with the others, shielding their eyes against the midday glare. The spark was the shuttle of Voice of Evening, now parked in orbit around Turquoise.
Everyone had seen Captain Moreau’s ship by now, either with their own eyes as a moving star, or via the images captured by the orbiting cameras or ground-based telescopes. The ship was dark and sleek, outrageously elegant. Now and then its Conjoiner drives flickered on just enough to trim its orbit, those flashes like brief teasing windows into daylight for the hemisphere below.
A ship like that could do awful things to a world, and everyone knew it.
But if Captain Moreau and his crew meant ill for Turquoise, they’d had ample opportunity to do harm already. They had been silent at two years out, but at one year out the Voice of Evening had transmitted the usual approach signals, requesting permission to stop over for three or four months. It was a formality - no one argued with Ultras - but it was also a gladdening sign that they intended to play by the usual rules.
Over the next year there had been a steady stream of communications between the ship and the Snowflake Council. The official word was that the messages had been designed to establish a framework for negot
iation and person-to-person trade. The Ultras would need to update their linguistics software to avoid being confused by the subtleties of the Turquoise dialects, which, although based on Canasian, contained confusing elements of Inuit and Thai, relics of the peculiar social mix of the original settlement coalition.
The falling shuttle had slowed to merely supersonic speed now, shedding its plume of ionised air. Dropping speed with each loop, it executed a lazily contracting spiral above Umingmaktok. Naqi had rented cheap binoculars from one of the vendors. The lenses were scuffed, shimmering with the pink of fungal bloom. She visually locked onto the shuttle, its roughly delta shape wobbling in and out of sharpness. Only when it was two or three thousand metres above Umingmaktok could she see it clearly. It was very elegant, a pure brilliant white like something carved from cloud. Beneath the manta-like hull complex machines - fans and control surfaces - moved too rapidly to be seen as anything other than blurs of subliminal motion. She watched as the ship reduced speed until it hovered at the same altitude as the snowflake city. Above the roar of the crowd - an ecstatic, flag-waving mass - all Naqi heard was a shrill hum, almost too far into ultrasound to detect.
The ship approached slowly. It had been given instructions for docking with the arm adjacent to the one where Naqi and the other spectators gathered. Now that it was close it was apparent that the shuttle was larger than any of the dirigible craft normally moored to the city’s arms; by Naqi’s estimate it was at least half as wide as the city’s central core. But it slid into its designated mooring point with exquisite delicacy. Bright red symbols flashed onto the otherwise blank white hull, signifying airlocks, cargo ports and umbilical sockets. Gangways were swung out from the arm to align with the doors and ports. Dockers, supervised by proctors and city officials, scrambled along the precarious connecting ways and attempted to fix magnetic berthing stays onto the shuttle’s hull. The magnetics slid off the hull. They tried adhesive grips next, and these were no more successful. After that, the dockers shrugged their shoulders and made exasperated gestures in the direction of the shuttle.
The roar of the crowd had died down a little by now.
Naqi felt the anticipation as well. She watched as an entourage of VIPs moved to the berthing position, led by a smooth, faintly cherubic individual that Naqi recognised as Tak Thonburi, the mayor of Umingmaktok and presiding chair of the Snowflake Council. Tak Thonburi was happily overweight and had a permanent cowlick of black hair, like an inverted question mark tattooed upon his forehead. His cheeks and brow were mottled with pale green. Next to him was the altogether leaner frame of Jotah Sivaraksa. It was no surprise that Dr Sivaraksa should be here today, for the Moat project was one of the most significant activities of the entire Snowflake Council. His iron-grey eyes flashed this way and that as if constantly triangulating the positions of enemies and allies alike. The group was accompanied by armed, ceremonially dressed proctors and a triad of martial servitors. Their articulation points and sensor apertures were lathered in protective sterile grease, to guard against rot.
Though they tried to hide it, Naqi could tell that the VIPs were nervous. They moved a touch too confidently, making their trepidation all the more evident.
The red door symbol at the end of the gangway pulsed brighter and a section of the hull puckered open. Naqi squinted, but even through the binoculars it was difficult to make out anything other than red-lit gloom. Tak Thonburi and his officials stiffened. A sketchy figure emerged from the shuttle, lingered on the threshold and then stepped with immense slowness into full sunlight.
The crowd’s reaction - and to some extent Naqi’s own - was double-edged. There was a moment of relief that the messages from orbit had not been outright lies. Then there was an equally brief tang of shock at the actual appearance of Captain Moreau. The man was at least a third taller than anyone Naqi had ever seen in her life, yet commensurately thinner, his seemingly brittle frame contained within a jade-coloured mechanical exoskeleton of ornate design. The skeleton lent his movements something of the lethargic quality of a stick insect.
Tak Thonburi was the first to speak. His amplified voice boomed out across the six arms of Umingmaktok, echoing off the curved surfaces of the multiple vacuum-bladders that held the city aloft. Float-cams jostled for the best camera angle, swarming around him like pollen-crazed bees.
‘Captain Moreau . . . Let me introduce myself. I am Tak Thonburi, mayor of Umingmaktok Snowflake City and incumbent chairman of the Snowflake Council of All Turquoise. It is my pleasure to welcome you, your crew and passengers to Umingmaktok, and to Turquoise itself. You have my word that we will do all in our power to make your visit as pleasant as possible.’
The Ultra moved closer to the official. The door to the shuttle remained open behind him. Naqi’s binocs picked out red hologram serpents on the jade limbs of the skeleton.
The Ultra’s own voice boomed at least as loud, but emanated from the shuttle rather than Umingmaktok’s public address system. ‘People of greenish-blue . . .’ The captain hesitated, then tapped one of the stalks projecting from his helmet. ‘People of Turquoise . . . Chairman Thonburi . . . Thank you for your welcome, and for your kind permission to assume orbit. We have accepted it with gratitude. You have my word . . . as captain of the lighthugger Voice of Evening . . . that we will abide by the strict terms of your generous offer of hospitality.’ His mouth continued to move even during the pauses, Naqi noticed: the translation system was lagging. ‘You have my additional guarantee that no harm will be done to your world, and Turquoise law will be presumed to apply to the occupants . . . of all bodies and vessels in your atmosphere. All traffic between my ship and your world will be subject to the authorisation of the Snowflake Council, and any member of the council will - under the . . . auspices of the council - be permitted to visit Voice of Evening at any time, subject to the availability of a . . . suitable conveyance.’
The captain paused and looked at Tak Thonburi expectantly. The mayor wiped a nervous hand across his brow, smoothing his kiss-curl into obedience. ‘Thank you . . . Captain.’ Tak Thonburi’s eyes flashed to the other members of the reception party. ‘Your terms are of course more than acceptable. You have my word that we will do all in our power to assist you and your crew, and that we will do our utmost to ensure that the forthcoming negotiations of trade proceed in an equable manner . . . and in such a way that both parties will be satisfied upon their conclusion.’
The captain did not respond immediately, allowing an uncomfortable pause to draw itself out. Naqi wondered if it was really the fault of the software, or whether Moreau was just playing on Tak Thonburi’s evident nervousness.
‘Of course,’ the Ultra said, finally. ‘Of course. My sentiments entirely . . . Chairman Thonburi. Perhaps now wouldn’t be a bad time to introduce my guests?’
On his cue three new figures emerged from Voice of Evening’s shuttle. Unlike the Ultra, they could almost have passed for ordinary citizens of Turquoise. There were two men and one woman, all of approximately normal height and build, each with long hair, tied back in elaborate clasps. Their clothes were brightly coloured, fashioned from many separate fabrics of yellow, orange, red and russet, and various permutations of the same warm sunset shades. The clothes billowed around them, rippling in the light afternoon breeze. All three members of the party wore silver jewellery, far more than was customary on Turquoise. They wore it on their fingers, in their hair, hanging from their ears.
The woman was the first to speak, her voice booming out from the shuttle’s PA system.
‘Thank you, Captain Moreau. Thank you also, Chairman Thonburi. We are delighted to be here. I am Amesha Crane, and I speak for the Vahishta Foundation. Vahishta’s a modest scientific organisation with its origins in the cometary prefectures of the Haven Demarchy. Lately we have been expanding our realm of interest to encompass other solar systems, such as this one.’ Crane gestured at the two men who had accompanied her from the shuttle. ‘My associates are Simon Matsubara and Rafae
l Weir. There are another seventeen of us aboard the shuttle. Captain Moreau carried us here as paying passengers aboard Voice of Evening, and as such Vahishta gladly accepts all the terms already agreed upon.’
Tak Thonburi looked even less sure of himself. ‘Of course. We welcome your . . . interest. A scientific organisation, did you say?’
‘One with a special interest in the study of the Jugglers,’ Amesha Crane answered. She was the most strikingly attractive member of the trio, with fine cheekbones and a wide, sensual mouth that looked to be always on the point of smiling or laughing. Naqi felt that the woman was sharing something with her, something private and amusing. Doubtless everyone in the crowd felt the same vague sense of complicity.
Crane continued, ‘We have no Pattern Jugglers in our own system, but that hasn’t stopped us from focusing our research on them, collating the data available from the worlds where Juggler studies are ongoing. We’ve been doing this for decades, sifting inference and theory, guesswork and intuition. Haven’t we, Simon?’
The man nodded. He had sallow skin and a fixed, quizzical expression.
‘No two Juggler worlds are precisely alike,’ Simon Matsubara said, his voice as clear and confident as the woman’s. ‘And no two Juggler worlds have been studied by precisely the same mix of human socio-political factions. That means that we have a great many variables to take into consideration. Despite that, we believe we have identified similarities that may have been overlooked by the individual research teams. They may even be very important similarities, with repercussions for wider humanity. But in the absence of our own Jugglers, it is difficult to test our theories. That’s where Turquoise comes in.’
The other man - Naqi recalled his name was Rafael Weir - began to speak. ‘Turquoise has been largely isolated from the rest of human space for the better part of two centuries.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 327
