The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  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 only 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 sense 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 toward 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 and yet also aware 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 to 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 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, judging that she was probably capable of reviewing it.

  She scrolled 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 the two 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 due to her having given a good impression or the fact that 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. Idly, Naqi wondered 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 farther, 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 fungal 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, and could not help 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, only occasionally relieved by the 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 followed the arrival of the Pelican in Impiety. When the Ultras moved into orbit there had been much unrest below. Spies had undermined lucrative trade dea
ls. 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 next 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 nodded – 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 diagnosed. 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 toward the swarm. 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 with a delicate provisional nod of the head. “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 wouldn’t know until we 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 was just hoping 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 farther 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 stirred a great bowl of spinach. Even the shadow of the airship – pushed far ahead of it by the 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 sense of urgency. They might even send trained swimmers, eager to dive into the sea and open their minds to alien communion. Ready to – as they said – 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 green mucous that had adhered to its ceramic teardrop. All human artifacts eventually succumbed to biological attack from the ocean, although ceramics were the most resilient.

  “You’re cheerful,” Naqi said, trying to make the statement sound matter-of-fact rather than judgmental.

  “Aren’t you? It’s not everyone gets a chance to study a node up this close. Make the most of it, sis. The news we got last night doesn’t change what we have to do today.”

  Naqi scraped the back of her hand across her nose. Now that the airship was above the node she was breathing vast numbers of aerial organisms into her lungs with each breath. The smell was redolent
of ammonia and decomposing vegetation. It required an intense effort of will not to keep rubbing her eyes more raw than was already the case. “Do you see anything unusual?”

  “Bit early to say.”

  “So that’s a ‘no.’ then.”

  “You can’t learn much without probes, Naqi.” Mina dipped a swab into a collection bag, squeezing tight the plastic seal. Then she dropped the bag into a bucket between her feet. “Oh, wait. I saw another of those swarms, after you’d gone to sleep.”

  “I thought you were the one complaining about being tired.”

  Mina dug out a fresh swab and rubbed vigorously at a deep olive smear on the side of the sensor. “I picked up my messages, that’s all. Tried again this morning, but the blackout still hadn’t been lifted. I picked up a few shortwave radio signals from the closest cities, but they were just transmitting a recorded message from the Snowflake Council: stay tuned and don’t panic.”

  “So let’s hope we don’t find anything significant here,” Naqi said, “because we won’t be able to report it if we do.”

  “They’re bound to lift the blackout soon. In the meantime I think we have enough measurements to keep us busy. Did you find that spiral sweep program in the airship’s avionics box?”

  “I haven’t looked for it,” Naqi said, certain that Mina had never mentioned such a thing before. “But I’m sure I can program something from scratch in a few minutes.”

  “Well, let’s not waste any more time than necessary. Here.” Smiling, she offered Naqi the swab, its tip laden with green slime. “You take over this, and I’ll go and dig out the program.”

  Naqi took the swab after a moment’s delay.

  “Of course. Prioritise tasks according to ability, right?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Mina said soothingly. “Look. Let’s not argue, shall we? We were best friends until last night. I just thought it would be quicker . . .” She trailed off and shrugged. “You know what I mean. I know you blame me for not letting us follow the sprites, but we had no choice but to come here. Understand that, will you? Under any other circumstances . . .”